Doctor

77

Single

47 Rotherwick Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb

WFL

Evades

Alice Vickery (1834-1929) became, in 1873, the first woman in Britain to qualify as a Chemist and Druggist. In the same year she qualified as a midwife, and went to study at the University of Paris, as no British medical school at the time admitted women. In 1880 she was one of the first five women to qualify as a doctor at the London Medical School for Women. She practised among the poor of south London and was a pioneer adviser on contraception. Alice was sometimes referred to as Dr Alice Drysdale Vickery. Although they appear never to have married, Charles Robert Drysdale, Senior Physician at the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, was known as her husband. He became the first President of the Malthusian League, founded in 1877 to promote birth control, Alice succeeding him in this position on his death in 1907. In 1898 the National British Women’s Temperance Association’s Woman’s Signal published Alice’s translation of the 1790 essay The Political Rights of Women by Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, one of the leading thinkers of the French Revolution. Alice also wrote for the 1890s feminist periodical Shafts. She was an early subscriber to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, subsequently moving from the NUWSS to the WSPU, then to the WFL and the WTRL. In 1908 she was a WFL delegate to the Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam and became President of the Herne Hill and West Norwood WFL branch, lending her drawing room at 28 Carson Road, Dulwich, for weekly meetings. In 1911 Alice moved to 47 Rotherwick Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb, to live next door to her son, Dr Charles Vickery Drysdale, and Bessie Ingman, known as Mrs Drysdale. A meeting was held in her house to form the Hendon Women’s Franchise Society; speaking engagements elsewhere included a talk to the Actresses Franchise League on ‘The Injustices and Inequalities of Marriage Laws’ in company with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, President of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Alice evaded the 1911 Census and by 1913 had become a tax resister, having a gold and opal ring distrained after refusing to pay her rates. The Hendon Women’s Franchise Society was affiliated to the United Suffragists, formed in early 1914, and meetings at 47 Rotherwick Road were held in support of a successful woman District Council election candidate in March 1914 and, in September 1918, to protest about women being ineligible to stand for Parliament. Alice participated too in the suffragist demand to repeal Regulation 40D, introduced late in the War to allow for a woman to be remanded and imprisoned for the transmission of VD to a member of the forces. Moving to Brighton in 1923, Alice continued to be an active member of the WFL, speaking on the need to reform the laws concerning marriage and parenthood, and being elected President of the Brighton and Hove branch in 1925. Her death at the beginning of 1929 was marked by a full front-page obituary in Vote. Sources: NSWS reports (LSE WL online); The Woman’s Signal; Women’s Suffrage Journal; Women’s Franchise; Votes for Women; Common Cause; Kilburn Times; Hendon and Finchley Times; Woman Citizen; British Medical Journal. Contributed by Frances Stenlake, Independent writer & researcher.