None given

53

Single

Red House, Muster Green, Haywards Heath, Sussex.

NUWSS

Complies

Mary Spooner was the second of ten children of an interesting family. A sister, Kate Lee, a founder member of the English Folk Song Society, recorded the Sussex folk singing family, the Coppers, as early as the 1890s. Mary first came to notice as a suffrage campaigner in Sussex in 1909 with ‘an eloquent speech’ at the Cuckfield Debating Society. This had been formed earlier that year with, on its committee, Edith Bevan and Edith Payne, who shortly afterwards founded the Cuckfield Women’s Suffrage Society. Mary was a practised and accomplished speaker: as secretary of the Southern Section of Women’s Co-operative Guilds, she had spent almost 20 years addressing meetings in London and the South-East that resulted in the formation of local branches of the WCG. Mary had subscribed to both the London Women’s Suffrage Society and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) but having taken up residence in Haywards Heath with her mother and sister Edith, she contributed her skills to the fledgling Cuckfield Women’s Suffrage Society, launching its series of monthly ‘At Homes’ in Cuckfield’s Queen’s Hall with ‘a capital address’. In early 1910 she chaired a meeting at the Co-op Hall in Haywards Heath to form a Haywards Heath NUWSS branch, becoming its secretary then chair. Also, in 1910, Mary succeeded the Dowager Countess of Chichester as the only woman on the Haywards Heath Board of Council School Managers, and, despite, as she said ‘being a comparative stranger in the Parish’, joined Edith Payne on the Haywards Heath Board of Poor Law Guardians replacing the only other woman Guardian who was resigning. Throughout 1910 and 1911 Mary continued to speak at meetings to do with forming local NUWSS branches. At Horsted Keynes she spoke on one occasion with Louisa Martindale and Marie and Charles Corbett; and on a second with Brighton’s Flora de Gaudrion Merrifield. With the Surrey, Sussex and Hamps NUWSS Federation organiser, Barbara Duncan, she held a successful meeting to form a Burgess Hill branch and spoke at Lindfield with Lady Betty Balfour in the hope of establishing a branch there. With Rose Chute Ellis, she addressed the first public women’s suffrage meeting in Danehill. On Monday 21 July 1913, Mary was among supporters waiting at Muster Green, Haywards Heath, to join the Suffrage Pilgrims marching up from Burgess Hill to Cuckfield, and she set off with them from Cuckfield the following morning. She was at the Hyde Park rally at the end of that week with Edith Bevan, Edith Payne, Rose Chute Ellis, Susan Armitage, Flora de Gaudrion Merrifield, and Alys Russell. During the War, Mary continued to demonstrate her abilities as an organiser. She and Kate Miller, whose husband Douglas had photographed the Suffrage Pilgrims, were Haywards Heath contacts for the NUWSS appeal for women forage workers. Mary worked with Rose Chute Ellis and others to inaugurate the Cuckfield Children’s Welfare Society, an Infant Welfare Centre and a Haywards Heath Council of Social Welfare and she chaired the committee of the Haywards Heath War Work Guild. Sources: Queen Co-operative News, Woman’s Signal London, Home Counties local weekly newspapers, Women’s Franchise, Common Cause, Mid Sussex Times, West Sussex County Times, Bognor Regis Observer, Kent, and Sussex Courier. Contributed by independent researcher & writer Frances Stenlake.