The Continuing Story… (Cecilia Peartree)

In response to popular demand (thanks, Griselda!) I’ve decided this month’s post will be a sequel to the one published here last month, when I was wrestling with various ideas for presenting something about my suffragette great-aunt, Janet McCallum (‘Auntie Jenny’) at an International Women’s Day event.

Extract from a Daily Mirror report (1908)

First of all, my session didn’t go entirely as planned. Not that I had planned it exactly, since I wasn’t at all sure how many people would turn up or what the technological facilities might consist of on the day. Or perhaps I might be kinder to myself and claim I had planned for all eventualities!

One thing I hadn’t anticipated was that people didn’t really understand the programme for the event, which lasted just over half a day in all. There were some things such as ‘crafts and coffee’ that ran throughout the whole event, and some things that theoretically only lasted half an hour or so. What really happened was that people wandered from one activity to another without realising that in some cases there was a specific start and finish time. In practice we were able to cope with this up to a point. Because of an influx of latecomers my own session overran quite a bit, but fortunately there was a half-hour gap before the next session on the programme so I just carried on. This and the lack of suitable equipment meant it was just as well I had created handouts from my PowerPoint file. What happened in the end was that I talked through the handout for a group of women who had arrived at the advertised start time or soon after, and we played the card game after a few of them had left but a few more had arrived. Then I talked through the handout again for the very late arrivals. The card game was hilarious as none of us was fully on board with the rules!

All that is hard to explain but it more or less worked in real life, and it was really encouraging to see we had about 20-30 attendees for the session and that they were all extremely engaged.

Since then, there have been further developments in the whole school-naming thing as well. On International Women’s Day the tourist people in Dunfermline, where Jenny lived at the time when she took part in the Women’s Freedom League demonstration in London, published a lengthy account of that and of her other related activities online. Following her imprisonment in 1908, she was blacklisted from employment in the textile mills where she had worked before, and took up various labour movement activities instead, moving to Glasgow for a while and then back to Dunfermline to live with others in the McCallum family. At the time of her marriage in 1915 to an engine fitter at Rosyth naval dockyard, her occupation was shown as ‘Secretary of the Textile Workers Union’. After the war, she helped to organise a rent strike in the Admiralty accommodation in Rosyth, and during the later 1920s  she emigrated to South Africa with her family.

One really nice thing about the renewed burst of research is that I have made contact with two of Jenny’s descendants who still live in South Africa, and only a week or two ago one of them sent me photographs of a suffragette medal / badge that is still in their possession.  Last weekend, the Protests and Suffragettes research team, the ones who created the playing cards, persuaded a reporter from The Herald to write an article about Jenny and about the school-naming campaign, The reporter interviewed me for the article, as well as a sympathetic local councillor and some of the local school pupils who had originally suggested the name for a new school that is being built in Rosyth, following interaction with the Protests and Suffragettes team. Apparently the medal, also depicted in the article, is possibly one of the earliest ones to be given to a Scottish suffragette.

When I first started to research my family history, about 30 years ago, I only knew a little about my great-aunt, who was my grandmother’s older sister and close to her in age, though I have always known she was a suffragette and that she emigrated to South Africa a long time ago.  My mother contributed the fact that her aunt had red hair, a detail that found its way into the article in The Herald! I think the Scottish suffragettes and particularly the working-class ones, were largely ignored by historians until relatively recently, so few people outside the family knew her name or anything about her. In fact the newspapers that reported on the 1908 demonstration mostly got her name wrong, and when I looked at the prison records in the National Archives I found her recorded there as ‘Jane McCullum’.  Evidently having a Scottish name was enough to make her unmemorable.