Eager to spread their message of ‘Votes for
Women’, the Woman’s Social
& Political Union (WSPU) took prompt action after finding out
that it was possible to post ‘human letters’. It arranged with a Daily Mirror
photographer and reporter to wait outside 10 Downing Street on 23 February
1909. That day Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland were ‘posted’ for 3d from the
Strand Post Office to 10 Downing Street. A messenger boy called A S Palmer
accompanied them as they walked from the Strand to the front door of Number 10.
They were refused entrance to see Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, but the
messenger was allowed inside. The women waited on the pavement, saying ‘they
must be delivered as the postage had been paid’. The boy emerged, accompanied by
a government official who dismissed the ladies’ argument, saying that they
would be returned as ‘dead letters’, in other words they were undeliverable. Daisy
and Elspeth left, to walk to the WSPU head office in Clement’s Inn. When the
Daily Mirror front-page photograph was published it created enormous publicity.
 | |||||
| Daisy Solomon (left) and Elspeth McClelland outside No.10 | |
 |
| Daily Mirror, 24 March 1909 |
Later that day at a meeting of the ‘Women’s Parliament’ in Caxton Hall, Daisy and Elspeth were given rousing cheers. After the meeting, a delegation of women including Daisy, went to the House of Commons and asked to see Asquith. The police arrested twenty-seven of them on a charge of obstructing the police. Daisy was subsequently sentenced to a month in prison after refusing to be bound over and pay a fine of £10.
Elspeth Douglas McClelland was born in Keighley Yorkshire. In the 1901 census she was living in Pinner with her widowed mother Epsey McClelland, who was an artist. Elspeth was 21 and a furniture designer. Later Elspeth trained as an architect at the Polytechnic Architectural School, the only female student among 600 men. At the time of the ‘Human Letters’ she was living at 43 Colville Terrace Kensington. She married Albert William Spencer and died in 1920 in Whitechurch Lane Edgware.
Daisy Dorothea Solomon lived at 98 Sumatra Road in West Hampstead with her widowed mother Georgiana and her elaborately named brother William Ewart Gladstone Solomon, from at least 1908 to 1915. Georgiana was the widow of Saul Solomon, a renowned South African liberal, newspaper proprietor and MP. Both mother and daughter were suffragettes who had joined the WSPU in 1908. William was an artist who supported the movement and designed a banner for the Kilburn branch. Elizabeth Crawford, an expert on suffragette history, recently discovered that the banner was photographed by A. Dron. We know that Andrew William Dron was a professional photographer who lived at 2E and later 2F Dyne Road Kilburn from about 1899 until 1933.
In the 1911 census like many other suffragettes, Solomon family members refused to provide any information. The following year, Georgiana was jailed for a month for smashing windows in the office of Black Rod and refusing to be bound over and keep the peace.
By 1916 the family had moved to 64 Pattison Road, Child’s Hill and in 1929 they were at 7 Helensea Avenue Hendon, where Georgiana died in July 1933. After the War, Daisy and William returned to South Africa.
The WSPU was an important element in the campaign for woman’s suffrage. Formed in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, the headquarters moved from Manchester to London in 1906. Keir Hardie had encouraged Emmeline Pankhurst to call on Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence who he thought would be supportive. She and her husband Frederick provided office space for the WPSU in their large house in Clement’s Inn. Eventually the WSPU occupied 27 rooms within the building, before a split in 1912 saw them move around the corner to Kingsway.
There is an interesting LSE blog story about the Clement’s Inn HQ with lots of photos here:
The WPSU became skilled at arranging rallies and demonstrations, taking a militant stance in the fight to get votes for women; for example, their members opted to go to prison rather than pay fines or carried out acts of criminal damage that also resulted in being sent to gaol.
The long battle of the suffragettes finally brought about change. In 1918 the Representation of the People Act allowed women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification to vote. Although 8.5 million women met these criteria, it only represented 40 per cent of the total population of women in the UK.
In contrast, the same act abolished property and other restrictions for men and extended the vote to all men over the age of 21. The electorate increased from eight to 21 million, but there was still huge inequality between the number of male and female voters.
It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women over 21 were able to vote and women finally achieved the same voting rights as men. This Act increased the number of women eligible to vote to 15 million.
For more about local suffragettes see our previous blog story:
http://kilburnandwillesdenhistory.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-suffragettes-in-kilburn.html
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