No paid occupation

54

Widow

Chestnut Cottage, Hight Street, Wendover, Buckinghamshire

WFL

Evades

Florence Gertrude Hamilton (nee MacKenzie) had been born in Ireland in 1856 but with a father in the army the family moved around, and it was eventually in London that she met and married her husband in 1881. One child, Esme, was born to them in 1884 while they were in York but her husband’s job in the post office that meant he had different postings and by the 1890s they were based in Transvaal where William was Postmaster General. When he died in 1902, Gertrude seems to have changed her life quite radically. Based in Wendover from 1903 she gradually became involved in local charity work, and this may have drawn her into the society of women interested in the suffrage movement. She and her single sister, Maud, to whom she was very close, were contributing to Women’s Freedom League (WFL) ‘The Vote’ £50,000 Fund by 1908; Maud became secretary of an informal branch of the NUWSS; and they were both participating in the Church League for Women's Suffrage. By 1910 Chestnut Cottage where she lived was the centre of operations for organising meetings especially during the time Muriel Matters and her caravan were in the area campaigning for the WFL. By 1911 Florence had joined the Tax Resistance movement and four days after the census, which she seems to have evaded, her goods were distrained, and this also happened the following year. It was around this time that she became close friends with Muriel Matters who was later to write her obituary in The Vote. Florence seems to have left Buckinghamshire in 1912 moving back to her house in London, and then spending a few years in Findon, Sussex, where she and her sister established the Women's Village Council. To encourage women to influence the design of houses built by local authorities (so called state aided) it used the motto, later adopted by the Women’s Institute, ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s Green and Pleasant Land’. From 1917 onwards her time was spent in promoting this organisation locally and then nationally, and then linking herself to the National Housing and Town Planning Society where she became the only woman on the Executive. In this role she was able to give support to the Australian author Miles Franklin who was working for the NHTPC. For Florence, campaigning for women's suffrage was very much linked to encouraging women’s active involvement as citizens. When she died in 1932, she was buried in Brompton Cemetery where the inscription on her grave reads: 'Our citizenship is in heaven'. Sources: 'Burning to Get the Vote: the women's suffrage movement in central Buckinghamshire, 1904 - 1914' by Colin Cartwright; A range of local, national and suffragist newspapers including: 'Women's Village Councils by Maud R. R. MacKenzie in, The Church Militant, April 1918; 'The Village Council of Women: their contribution to housing reform' in The Manchester Guardian, Mar 11, 1919; 'Women's Village Councils' by G. Home in The Vote 24 Nov, 1922; 'Women's Village Councils Federation for State-Aided Housing and Rural Problems' by Mrs Hamilton, The Common Cause, July 19, 1918. Contributed by Lynne Dixon, local and women’s history researcher.