Articles tagged with: magistrate

Votes for Women - and Men!

on Tuesday, 20 February 2018. Posted in Archives

There has been a lot in the media recently about the centenary on 6th February 2018 of the Representation of the People Act 1918 but a lot of this has focused on female suffrage and of course this Act represented a big landmark in suffrage reform for men as well as women. The focus as well, understandably, has been on the national picture and I hope in this blog to shed a bit of light on Wiltshire’s story.

Background: the suffrage movement in the 19th century

The 19th century saw a great deal of progress in the movement towards votes for men and women which is useful background to the 1918 Act. At the start of the 19th century only a small minority of people could vote, based on freehold property ownership – this did, however, include an even smaller minority of women! In Wiltshire in 1831 there were 2 county MPs and 32 borough MPs, voted for by around 1200 people i.e. 0.5% of the total population of around 240,000. Some people had more than one vote and the system was unfair – large boroughs had the same number of MPs as smaller ones with fewer voters. Some Wiltshire boroughs were ‘rotten boroughs’ ie having a tiny number of voters who were in the pockets of a landowner who effectively bribed them to vote a certain way – Old Sarum is a notorious example cited for this, being in the pocket of the Pitt family from the 17th century to 1802. These local issues are symptomatic of the wider lack of the genuine democracy which many people wanted to see, and the example of revolutionary France (1789) was a cautionary tale of what might happen if reforms didn’t take place. 

With the passing of the 1832 Great Reform Act Wiltshire lost 16 of its seats in Parliament, leaving 18 in total – 2 members for the northern division, 2 for the south; 1 each for Wilton, Westbury, Malmesbury, and Calne boroughs; and 2 each for Chippenham, Cricklade, Devizes, Marlborough, and Salisbury. The franchise was widened for men to include small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers for the county vote. For the borough vote the irregularities and disparities were sorted out by the creation of a uniform franchise giving the vote to all householders who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more, and some lodgers. (Source: www.parliament.uk/reformact1832/) For women the result was catastrophic - total exclusion from the parliamentary franchise. However, it is very important to remember, as Dr Sarah Richardson has shown (https://victoriancommons.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/the-victorian-female-franchise/), large numbers of women continued to vote for and hold office for a range of local bodies, including overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highway and constables, due to paying poor rates.

Disappointed by the limitations of the 1832 Act campaigners called the Chartists were pressing for (amongst other things) a vote for all men over 21 of sound mind and not in prison; for secret ballots; for payments for MPs to allow ordinary working people to become MPs; and a fairer distribution of numbers of voters in constituencies – all things which seem very reasonable by modern standards! In 1839 and 1840 the Chartists had torchlight processions, fiery speeches, and threats to resort to arms in Bradford on Avon, Trowbridge, Westbury, Holt and Salisbury, and outright rioting in Devizes. Though the magistrates were undoubtedly alarmed by this they acted with restraint and managed to avoid too much bloodshed in their deployment of troops. The local ringleaders based in Trowbridge and Westbury were arrested and indicted of conspiracy with intent to disturb the peace. Three of the local leaders were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, one with hard labour.  Apart from a militant flare-up in Swindon in 1848, this was the end of militant Chartism in Wiltshire.

Between 1832 and 1867 the large landowners continued to have huge political influence in Wiltshire. The more open forms of bribery had been banned but other more subtle forms continued to exist – paying election expenses, or using precarious tenancies where a tenant farmer was unable to vote independently of his landowner for fear of losing the farm. This wasn’t sorted out till the 1872 Secret Ballot Act. However relations between the landowning and other classes were improving due to things like improvements in housing, sanitation and education. The growth of literacy among working class people helped fuel a demand for local newspapers - 35 newspapers started in Wiltshire between 1830 and 1911. Some of these represented the Tories, some the Whigs (Liberals). This growth in education helped to give working class men both greater aspirations to get involved in politics and the means to achieve it.
1866 saw the first mass petition in favour of votes for women, which was presented to Parliament (available online at: https://www.parliament.uk/1866) Only three Wiltshire women signatories are listed: Anne Cunnington of Devizes, and Miss Lanham and Miss Turner who ran a ladies’ boarding seminary, Claremont House, Corsham. The petition was unsuccessful but both the Tories and the Whigs could see that further parliamentary reform was needed and the 1867 Second Reform Act (www.parliament.uk/furtherreformacts/) widened the franchise to all male householders in the boroughs, as well as lodgers, who paid rent of £10 a year or more. It also reduced the property threshold in the counties and gave the vote to agricultural landowners and tenants with very small amounts of land. It is estimated that before the Act nationally only 1 million men (of a population of 7 million adult males) could vote; after the Act that was doubled. In Wiltshire that figure was 12,500 men, representing 3.5% of the total population. (Women were still excluded from the parliamentary franchise.)

In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act had ended women’s right to vote for Guardians or in local elections. This right was returned to them in 1869 with the Municipal Franchise Act enabling female ratepayers to vote for local municipal councils and to elect, and stand as, Guardians of the Poor, although a court case of 1872 restricted this right to unmarried women or widows. The period 1869-1875 saw a lot of activity in Wiltshire relating to the campaign for female suffrage. 26 July 1869 saw a petition in favour of suffrage by Wiltshire women, led by the residents of Salisbury. A meeting about suffrage also took place in Salisbury in March 1871 but this was the last of its kind before 1909. Petitions in favour of suffrage also took place in 1870 and 1873 in Marlborough; in 1870 in Trowbridge and in Westbury (followed by a public meeting on the topic in 1874); and in Market Lavington in 1870 and campaigner Rhoda Garrett spoke at a meeting there in 1872. Suffrage speakers spoke at public meetings in Calne and Chippenham in the late 19th century, but no actual suffrage groups were formed in those towns.   Bills in favour of women’s suffrage were placed before Parliament on an almost annual basis from now onwards but were repeatedly defeated before 1918.

The 1884 Reform Act (https://www.parliament.uk/one-man-one-vote/) was a big step in the campaign to expand male suffrage. It established a uniform franchise throughout the country and brought the franchise in counties in line with the 1867 lodger and householder franchise for boroughs, in other words all men paying an annual rental of £10 and all men holding land valued at £10 now had the vote. In 1885 the Redistribution of Seats Act was a big step forward in redrawing boundaries to make electoral districts more equal. Wiltshire was left with just 6 seats, one each for the north, north-east, north-west, west, and southern divisions, plus one parliamentary borough, Salisbury. Under the 1884 Act the British electorate now totalled over 5 million but this still only represented about 60% of men, and women continued to be completely excluded from parliamentary elections. 

Ref 2776/22 poster re-extension of franchise 1884

Women’s and Working Class Men’s Suffrage Campaign 1880s-1918

In the 1880s a large number of women began getting very involved in politics and local government, taking part as local organisers, canvassers and speakers for the different political parties, and serving on school boards and Boards of Guardians. The 1888 County Council Act gave female rate-payers the right to vote in Council and Borough elections. Feeling that the Liberal party were not doing enough to represent working people the Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893. In 1900 the ILP played a key role in founding the Labour Representation Committee which became the Labour Party in 1906. The party actively encouraged women to join, linking the quest for universal male suffrage and rights for working class men with the cause of women’s suffrage.

Putting things very simply, there were two main bodies of women campaigning for the vote: the suffragists, who from the 19th century up to 1918 pursued peaceful means to acquire the right to vote, and the suffragettes, formed in 1903, who took a more militant approach. In 1897 the suffragists grouped together to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies under the leadership of Milicent Fawcett. The leadership was middle class but many working class women joined the movement and the Union was affiliated to Labour in 1912. The Women’s Social and Political Union was set up in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, who was impatient with the slow, gradual approach of the suffragists. Taking inspiration from the earlier Chartists, “deeds not words” was their motto and this escalated from occasional acts of vandalism and arson to the infamous instance of Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the King’s horse at the Derby in 1913. The suffragettes were punished in a draconian fashion by the government - when they went on hunger strike they were subjected to the terrible ‘cat and mouse’ regime of force-feeding, release and re-arrest which understandably won them a good deal of public sympathy. The suffragettes were led by the middle class Pankhursts but had many working class members. Sylvia Pankhurst, however, broke away from the WSPU in 1914 and formed a socialist splinter group.

This same mix of suffragists and suffragettes can be found in Wiltshire although it’s fair to say the former far outweigh the latter, at least as far as we can tell from the local newspapers which are one of the key sources. Of the suffragettes, we might think of Edith New, a school teacher born in Swindon, who became an activist for the WSPU. Edith chained herself to the railings at 10 Downing Street in Jan 1908, the first time that tactic had been employed by a suffragette. She resigned from teaching and devoted herself full time to the cause, ending up imprisoned and on hunger strike for her beliefs. (See Volume 1 of Swindon Heritage Magazine held at WSHC for an article about Edith by Frances Bevan.)  It is perhaps no surprise that Edith came from Swindon as this town held important meetings about women’s suffrage at the Mechanics’ Institute in March 1875 and again in 1882, featuring speakers from the Bristol Society.  Devizes had a branch of the WSPU, formed in 1911, with Katharine Abraham as Secretary, which organised a resistance to the 1911 census. In Trowbridge Lilian Dove-Willcox travelled from her home in Bristol to work as an organiser for the WSPU and was joint secretary with Miss B Gramlich of the West Wilts WSPU. Her entry in the 1911 census shows the use of it as a tool for protest by some suffragettes.

Dr Jane Howells has discussed the formation of the Salisbury Women’s Suffrage Society (SWSS) which began life in the summer of 1909 following an earlier meeting in February at the Godolphin School – the first meeting on the subject of female suffrage since 1871. “About 20 were present, all of whom were in favour of the object of the meeting though their opinions differed widely as to the best methods to pursue…” (Salisbury Journal 3 Jul 1909, reprinted in Sarum Chronicle volume 9) The Salisbury group was affiliated to the NUWSS, thus they were suffragists not suffragettes. By 1913 another NUWSS society had been formed in south Wiltshire, at Fovant, to serve the women in the south of Wiltshire outside the City.  Swindon was the home of the Swindon and North Wiltshire Suffrage Society.

It is important to recognise that not all women were in favour of suffrage. The Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was formed in 1907 and locally Edith Olivier is an example of a Wiltshire person who actively opposed suffrage. For example, on 4 July 1910 she writes in her diary:

“Monday 4th To see lots of ratepaying women asking them to write to Mr Bathurst [local MP] & tell him they are not in favour of women’s Suffrage. The bill comes on next week. He is said to be going to vote for it.” (982/44.)

Pauper and Private: Early Mental Health Care in Wiltshire

on Friday, 21 April 2017. Posted in Archives, Wiltshire Places

The care and provision for people with mental health issues is a current high-profile concern, but how have people been cared for historically in Wiltshire? The availability on Ancestry of the Lunacy Patients Admission registers from 1846-1912 (held at the National Archives MH 94) – an index giving the name of each patient, date of admission, discharge or death and name of institution - the census returns from 1841-1911 and death certificates –have led to numerous enquiries about ancestors in Wiltshire institutions. The County Asylum at Devizes ( Roundway ) opened in 1851 and we have extensive detailed patient case records; similarly for Fisherton House , later known as the Old Manor Hospital, Salisbury. Visitors can use these records to find out more about their ancestors’ treatment (although they are subject to a 100 year closure period), but what of mental health care before this time?

The term ‘lunatic’ is a pre-20th century word used to describe someone who was mentally ill or emotionally disturbed; it was a very broad term. Many so described were perhaps eccentric, very intelligent, physically or mentally handicapped in some way, senile ,or suffering from conditions that today would be treated with drugs and in the home such as epilepsy or post natal depression – few were ‘mad ‘ but their behaviour was such that they could not be cared for at home.

The earliest asylum, Bethlem or ‘Bedlam’ Hospital in London was established in the 13th cent but generally provision was not widespread until the 18th cent. Private asylums or madhouses were set up to cater for those who could afford to pay. Pauper lunatics were dealt with locally by their families or ended up in workhouses or prisons; however, if the parish agreed to pay the fees they could be treated in the private asylums. The first Act to regulate madhouses was in 1774 by which the institutions were licensed by the local magistrates; a further Act of 1828 appointed committees of visitors to inspect and report on the premises and the medical care provided. In Wiltshire 7 private asylums were licensed:- Laverstock House, Laverstock ; Fiddington House, Market Lavington ; Fisherton House, Fisherton Anger ; Kingsdown House , Box ; Belle Vue , Devizes ; Fonthill Gifford and Calne.

Image of Fonthill Gifford asylum A1/562/4 c.1832

The records that survive consist of admission registers, minutes of the visitors, annual reports and plans. The admission registers record the name, date of admission, parish, marital status, occupation, by whom sent, whether pauper or private and date of discharge or death. No treatment records survive. They do show how Wiltshire’s institutions attracted patients from a wide area of the south-west and London- whether this was because of the ‘facilties’ offered and reputation or simply because families did not want their ‘lunatic’ relatives close to home. 
 

Image of admission register for Laverstock House A1/560/9

An advertising prospectus survives for Laverstock House from the 1830’s which extols its virtues. ‘The situation of Laverstock House is peculiarly eligible. Surrounded by large Gardens and Pleasure Grounds in the midst of a fine and extended Country, it is at once retired and cheerful, and affords the most ample means for indulgence in those exercises which are so essential to the happiness and health of the Patients’… Male and female patients had separate apartments, subdivided by disease, habits and ‘station in life’  with superior accommodation for ‘Persons in the higher walks of Society’…’ Every possible kind of amusement was provided for them; billiards, backgammon, cards, books etc indoors; bowls, cricket, greyhounds, riding on horseback and in a carriage, out of doors; a Chapel on Sundays’

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