Private means

41

Single

3 Archery Road, Leamington

NUWSS

Complies

Ada was probably a member of a local branch of the National Union for Women’s Suffrage (NUWSS). She acted as a steward for the NUWSS at a local fete and wrote to the suffrage press on their behalf emphasising the size and scope of the NUWSS across England as well as the societies commitment to peaceable means of campaigning.

In June 1911, she was among the women and men that travelled down to take part in the Women’s Coronation Procession in London. The procession was organised by suffrage societies to rival the official Coronation procession of George V from which women were excluded. Approximately 40,000 women from around 30 women’s suffrage societies participated, and the procession was seven miles long.

Politics played a large part in Ada’s family life. Her father Samuel Wackrill was Leamington’s first Mayor appointed in 1875/6. He was responsible for the town becoming a borough in 1875 and was hugely influential in the town for over forty years. He was given the Freedom of the Borough in 1899 and has a blue plaque on his former residence at 28 Portland Street.

Samuel had arrived in Leamington in 1861 and set up a very successful drapers business which he left to Ada and her siblings upon his death in 1907. Four years later in 1911, we find Ada living in Archery Road with her sister Alice Maria and brother Walter Thomas. Researcher: Tara Morton. Research funded by Warwick University. For more on Samuel Thomas Wackrill, see, Robin Taylor, http://www.leamingtonhistory.co.uk/samuel-thomas-wackrill-1828-1907-first-mayor-of-leamington/