HISTORIC ENGLAND


had blown out and the device did not ignite. These random attacks were carried out regularly by the WSPU in 1913 and 1914. Plymouth may have been targeted as Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested there on her return from a speaking tour of the USA the previous December.


MANCHESTER ART GALLERY Manchester Art Gallery was the site of the first attack on artworks by suffragettes. On 3 April 1913 Lillian Forrester, Annie Briggs and Evelyn Manesta were discovered smashing the glass of paintings in one of the galleries. 13 pictures by artists including Millais, Burne- Jones and Rossetti suffered damage estimated at over £100. In court they explained that they were acting in protest at a recent prison sentence given to Mrs Pankhurst. The jury acquitted Briggs but convicted Forrester and Manesta.


While in prison the women were photographed and their pictures circulated to art galleries across Britain to try and help prevent further attacks. Despite this, other women followed their example and there were a spate of similar suffragette strikes on art galleries and museums the following year.


DORSET HALL, MERTON, LONDON Dorset Hall was the home of Rose Lamartine Yates, a suffragette and social reformer, and her husband Thomas. Yates joined the Wimbledon branch of the WSPU and was arrested on a deputation to the House of Commons in 1909. As secretary of the


98 Listed Heritage Magazine September/October 2018


Wimbledon branch she addressed meetings across London including a large WSPU rally in Hyde Park in June 1910.


Dorset Hall was a favourite resting place for Yates’ close suffragette friends. Mary Gawthorpe, the WSPU’s main organiser in the North West, stayed there for prolonged periods in 1910 and 1911 when recovering from appendicitis and a subsequent later health breakdown. Thomas Lamartine Yates supported his wife’s activities and sometimes acted for suffragettes as their solicitor. He represented the Davison family at the inquest into the death of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette killed during a protest at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Emily’s papers


Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, Manchester © Historic England


Dorset Hall, Merton, London © Historic England


passed to Rose and formed the basis of the Suffragette Reading Room, the archive that later became the Suffragette Fellowship Collection, now held at the Museum of London.


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