Suffragette worker

36

Widow

1 Richmond Terrace, Clifton, Bristol

WSPU

Evades

Lillian Dove-Willcox was born in Bedminster, Bristol in 1875. Her mother had been a suffragist and by 1908 (the year her first husband died) Dove-Willcox was a member of the West of England branch of the Women's Social and Political Union. On the 29th of June 1909, she was arrested for taking part in the WSPU deputation to the House of Commons and was sentenced to one month imprisonment. She went on hunger strike and was released. In 1910, Dove-Willcox was invited to Eagle House at Batheaston, where she planted a Picea Orientalis. After WSPU organiser Annie Kenney left Bristol in 1911, Dove-Willcox became honorary secretary of the Bristol branch of the WSPU. She had a country cottage on a hill overlooking the Wye and Tintern where many suffragettes, including Mary Richardson (who slashed the famous painting The Rokeby Venus), went to recuperate from imprisonment. In 1911, Dove-Willcox, Annie Kenney, and Mildred Mansel worked from a house called Ivanhoe, in Bradford Road. In March of 1911, Lillian Dove Willcox stayed in Trowbridge Wiltshire to host a reception for women interested in the suffrage movement at the local Town Hall. She canvassed for the reception throughout West Wiltshire. It was reported by Dove-Willcox to have been a great success with a new West Wilts branch of the WSPU being established. As part of the suffragette boycott of the 1911 census 'No Vote No Census', Dove-Willcox reported that arrangements for an evasion had been made in Trowbridge, which was reported by The Wiltshire Times: “On Sunday night the work of the
census was both passively and actively resisted in Trowbridge. Several ladies who are staunch supporters of the Votes for Women movement left their homes and spent the night out – who they were and where they spent the silent watches of the night, we refrain from mentioning.” Lillian Dove-Willcox is believed to have attempted to evade the census by heading out from Bristol into the Wiltshire countryside by caravan as noted on the census form. A census was completed for her at the local town hall on the 7th of April. On the 16th of February 1912, she heckled Bristol MP Charles Hobhouse at an anti-suffrage meeting in Colston Hall. She was a stalwart supporter of the Pankhursts and later became Mrs Pankhurst's bodyguard. On 9 March 1913, she was at St. Andrew's Hall in Glasgow when Pankhurst was arrested. In 1914, at St Pancras, London, Dove-Willcox married journalist Reginald Buckley. She gave birth to a daughter Diana, in 1915. That same year, she also became a member of the East London Federation of Suffragettes a break away society formed by Sylvia Pankhurst. Her husband passed, aged 37, in 1919. She lived at 15 Lyndhurst Road in London by 1947. In 1963, at this point living in The Park, Ealing, she subscribed to the Pethick-Lawrence Memorial Appeal Fund. She died in Ealing the same year. Key sources: E Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide (London 1999); L Boyce, A Suffrage Walk around Clifton Village; J Liddington, Caravanning for the Vote (http://www.jliddington.org.uk/1911b.html). Contributed by: Jack Thompson, Undergraduate History Researcher, University of Warwick.