None

37

Married

22 Church Hill, Leamington

CLWS

Complies

Mrs Edith Kate Catlin lived in Church Hill with her husband George Catlin and their son 14-year-old George. Edith’s husband was an ordained minister in the Church of England

Edith was honorary secretary of the Leamington branch of the Church League for Women’s Suffrage and may also have belonged to the Warwick and Leamington branch of the NUWSS. She believed in peaceful methods of campaigning for the vote. She attended a great number of suffrage meetings including one at Winter Hall, now Leamington Public Library, in November 1911. Earlier that year in June, she had also joined several other local men and women travelling down to London to take part in the Women’s Coronation Procession. The procession was organised 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.

In spring 1912, Edith left Leamington behind and with it her work for the local suffrage societies. In recognition of her enthusiasm and hard work for the women's suffrage cause, she was awarded a despatch box, fountain pen and card case as a parting gift from the Warwick and Leamington branch. Edith exclaimed her surprise at the award expressing her wish that she could have done more.

Edith’s husband George does not appear to have accompanied her to local suffrage meetings, and her public support for women’s suffrage may have put a strain on their marriage. George was 16 years her senior and some in the Anglican church would have frowned upon the clergyman’s ‘radical’ younger wife. Edith was also quite vocal about women's role within the church being recognised (see image below). The state of the marriage was such that by 1915, Edith left her husband and son to work in a charity settlement in the East End of London. She died two years later of uraemia after a failed operation. Her obituary (below) testifies to her hard work and to how well she was liked within the Leamington community.

Edith’s son George was just 22 years old when his mother died, but feminist causes continued to play a huge part in his life. George would go on to marry writer, feminist and pacifist Vera Britten whose autobiography of her traumatic experiences as a nurse in the First World War Testament of Youth, became a best seller. The couple had two children together, one a daughter.

Edith would never meet her granddaughter, but she is Shirley Williams, a pioneering female politician and academic who was a founder member of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and who amongst many other achievements, represented the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords until her retirement in 2016. A political legacy her grandmother Edith would have surely been proud. Contributor/researcher: Tara Morton. Research funded by Warwick University.