HISTORIC ENGLAND


55 Cookridge Street, Leeds (now O2 Academy) © Historic England


Post box on Highbury Grove, Islington, London © Historic England


55 COOKRIDGE STREET (O2 ACADEMY), LEEDS When in use as the Coliseum Theatre this was a regular venue for political meetings, marking it as a target for protests by the WSPU. Several women were thrown out of the building for disrupting a speech by Liberal MP John Burns in December 1907. When Prime Minister Asquith visited Leeds in October 1908 local suffragettes and leaders of the local unemployed held a large protest meeting outside Coliseum. Jeanie Baines, a WSPU organiser, urged the crowd to ‘break down the doors’ of the building; she was arrested, and became the first woman to be tried by jury for a suffrage offence. When Asquith returned to speak at the Coliseum in November 1913, large numbers of mounted police kept suffragette demonstrators on the other side of the road, and several windows in nearby buildings were smashed by protestors.


102 Listed Heritage Magazine September/October 2018


POST BOX ON HIGHBURY GROVE, ISLINGTON, LONDON In 1913 this post box was damaged by militant suffragettes from the WSPU. In November 1911 Emily Wilding Davison became the first suffragette to attempt to set fire to a pillar box. Over the next three years suffragettes attacked boxes throughout Britain using paraffin- soaked rags, corrosive liquids, ink and incendiary bombs. Attacks were often carried out at night and the perpetrators were rarely caught. On 30 January 1913 a postman discovered this box on fire after such activity during the night.


Find out about the struggle for suffrage, and how Historic England are marking 100 years since the first women were granted the right to vote, at www.historicengland.org.uk/HerStories


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