Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel founded the WSPU in their home town of Manchester in 1903. It became the leading militant organization in the UK campaigning for women’s suffrage. Its motto was a call to action: ‘Deeds not words’.
The Brighton branch was established in 1907, following a visit by Christobel Pankhurst to talk to a large gathering of women’s groups in the Dome. Suffragettes were becoming increasingly active in Brighton, interrupting political meetings and staging demonstrations on the seafront and the Level. The local press reported ‘the suffragettes have their designs on Brighton’. Later that year the Brighton Herald described a meeting during which twenty protesting women were ejectedas ‘a bellowing pandemonium’ and warned ‘the militant suffragettes have openly avowed their intention of making themselves a nuisance’.
The Brighton WSPU branch became one of the most active in the country, and played an important role in the struggle for women’s right to vote. There were other suffrage societies in Brighton and elsewhere, including militant and non-militant groups. The WSPU’s militant actions included civil disobedience, property damage and law-breaking in pursuit of raising awareness and suffrage change.
The WSPU offices were based on the first floor above shops on the northwest corner of the Quadrant, by the Clock Tower. With increasing numbers of professional and better off women joining, they could afford permanent premises and a library.
It was one of the first branches to have its own banner in 1908, embroidered by members with the dolphin coat of arms, and used at all meetings and marches in Brighton & Hove. The banner resides in Manchester’s People’s HistoryMuseum, and there have been representations – unsuccessful to date – by the Brighton & Hove Women’s History Group(BHWHG) to have it returned to Brighton for display.
The Brighton office had paid organisers who included Isabella Mckeown of Preston Drove and Mary Clarke, sister of Emmeline Pankhurst. The latter died on Christmas Day 1910, following her injury at the Black Friday demonstrations and time in Holloway Prison. Mary Hare, who received a blue plaque sponsored by BHWHG in 2024, was the secretary from 1910. (See separate bios for Mary Clarke and Mary Hare under the Notable Women section on this website).
The Brighton office at the Clock Tower was one of the most important regional WSPU offices, selling papers, organizing events and demonstrations locally on the Level, on the seafront and also in London, having close links with the national HQ at Lincoln’s Inn House in Kingsway. Many leading suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison and Annie Kenney, pursued under the Cat and Mouse Act, came to recuperate in Brighton in boarding houses such as Minnie Turner’s in Victoria Road (see separate bio). Another local suffragette, Ada Schofield, had a studio in Dyke Road where she took photographs of many members, including the Pankhursts. In January 1910, two activists, Mary Leigh and Eva Bourne hid in the Dome to disrupt an address by the resolutely anti-suffrage prime minister Asquith, but were apprehended by police.
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the suffragettes stopped their campaign, to focus on the war effort. In 1918 some women over thirty and with property qualifications got the vote – others over 21 had to wait a further ten years.
Erected in May 2019, the blue plaque marking the WSPU office site is one of four celebrating the centenary of the first extension of the franchise, all supported by BHWHG. It features on the Brighton Notable Woman’s Walk, which can be downloaded from our website.
by Sue Delafons