CHRIS FREMANTLE

A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, Leah Heneman, Aberdeen University Press, 1991.

This book covering the early connections between suffrage, education and slavery, and the subsequent development of suffrage in Scotland as a strong and distinctive movement, with its own characters and events, is well researched and thoroughly readable.

My starting point was discovering somewhere that Fanny Parker, the neice of Lord Kitchener, had in 1914 with another suffragette, attempted to blow up Burns Cottage, Alloway. Parker was an active and militant suffragette and spent more than one episode in prison as a result. Not only was she forcibly fed by tube, but she and others were given ‘nutritional enemas’. This book set her attempt to bomb Burns Cottage in a clear historical context.

I also discovered another interesting connection. Louisa Innes Lumsden, another suffrage campaigner and one of the first three women to graduate from Cambridge, must be one of the Lumsdens’ of Clova. In the short biographical sketch it mentions that she was chair of the Rhynie School Board.