Aunt Flo, The Women's Rights Fighter (8 July 1978)

RECENTLY there has been a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the inception of equal voting rights for women – equal with men, that is, not with each other.  Memories of the heroic days of the suffragettes have been recalled and it has generally been assumed that the final victory was due to their militancy.  But was it?

My wife had an aunt on her mother’s side who, up to her marriage fairly late in life rejoiced in the name of Euphrosyne Le Duc, though everybody called her Auntie Flo.  (Euphrosyne was one of the three Graces of Greek Mythology).  In her early years she was one of the then few women who held an Oxford degree.  She became a schoolmistress and eventually married a headmaster, but he died only a few years later.  She was a tall, stately woman and my wife told me that when she and her brothers and sister were children they held her in awe and had to be on their very best behaviour whenever she came from Surrey to visit them in Yorkshire.  But when I came to know her, which was in the last ten years or so of her long life, there was nothing left of the blue-stockinged battleaxe.  Her various nephews and nieces had grown very fond of her and she of them and I got on with her famously.

I had heard that she had been a suffragette and one day I broached the subject.  She then told me that she had certainly been involved in the women’s suffrage movement.  She had known Mrs. Pankhurst and had respected her, but she herself had not been a suffragette and sometimes she wondered whether their militancy had not done the cause more harm than good.

I thought no more of this until just a few years ago when a certain elderly Woburn Sands lady made a lone anti-vivisection protest at Walton Manor.  Interviewed afterwards, she said much the same thing as Auntie Flo. She, too, had been a suffragist but not a suffragette and thought the quieter influence of the suffragists had done most to further the cause.

While remembering the interest occasioned when Lady Astor became the first woman MP in 1919 – in a safe seat vacated by her husband – I remember nothing of the women’s voting age being reduced from 30 years to 21 in 1928.  Which may suggest that it was in the nature of a foregone conclusion.

North Bucks had a taste of the suffragettes in August 1909 when Prime Minister Asquith came to Bletchley Park, home of Sir Herbert and Lady Leon, to speak in support of the local Liberal candidate.

According to Sir Frank Markham, “…. Tremendous preparations were made to ensure that these `wild women’ did not molest him with their umbrellas or parasols.  But one determined lady managed to chain herself to a tree in the park whilst others with speaking trumpets shrilled out `Votes for women’ in the middle of the Prime Minister’s speech.  There was a stiff skirmish, several ladies were locked up for a few hours and the Prime Minister made a peaceful exit from Bletchley.”

Mr. James Cox was the cricket groundsman at the park at that time and when he and his wife celebrated their golden wedding after the last war he told me that it was he who unchained the woman from the tree.

But I wonder what Lady Leon was thinking while this incident was occurring – assuming that she was present?  I feel sure she could not have been entirely indifferent.  Could it have been that she, too, sympathised with the cause, but not with the methods of the suffragettes?  Later, she became the first woman member of the old Bletchley UDC and remained one for some years.

I will now leave women’s suffrage and the higher flights of government and come down to the grass roots of it all, namely, to the parish councils.  These were first set up in 1894 to replace the old vestry meetings which very often had the parish rector or vicar as chairman.  A local writer who took part in the changeover told the tale as follows:

“During the spring and summer of 1894 everyone was discussing the promised new Local Government Act which was to abolish the vestry system and give more power to the people.  It was talked about by men at their work, in the pubs and at the market, yet almost up to the time of it coming into force very few understood it.

“I was asked to present at a meeting in the village school, which was packed.  The audience listened attentively to what the speaker had to say.  The rector was present and smiled at certain criticism of parsons.  The speaker emphasised that the parson would have no prescriptive right to preside.  People would now be able to choose their own chairman and elect their own councillors.

When reference was made to the rector, a very prominent villager became very excited.  He was not satisfied with clapping his hands at this democratic change.  He stamped with his feet, rapped the floorboards with his stick and shouted.

The day, or rather the night, came for this election of village councillors and the strange thing was that they could not persuade anyone but the rector to preside over the first meeting.  The rector did not wish to push himself forward, but said that if it was their wish he would do it!

In all villages the administration of parochial charities has been a bone of contention, a cause of much discussion and sometimes of adverse criticism.  I was greatly amused at the meeting I attended.  There was a discussion on charity and one young member said there were cottages belonging to the charity and he was determined to find out what had happened to them.

Another member there told him: “They are in your farmyard; I carted them there!”

Oh yes.  We may laugh at the old timers.  But surely we know more than they did about their new parish councils when we are called upon to vote for the Parliament of Europe?