‘They faced death without flinching’ Diane Atkinson recounts the story of the suffragettes’ fight for votes for women that is told through the banner designed by the Scottish artist Ann Macbeth Ann Macbeth’s banner, which was originally designed as a friendship quilt, hangs in the suffragette display at the Museum of London. It is one of the most important artefacts of the militant campaign for the vote. The banner records the names of 80 women who had served prison sentences for various offences between 1908 and 1910, including obstructing the police, protesting outside the House of Commons, heckling at political meetings and smashing windows. Almost all of these women had been on hunger strike and ‘faced death without flinching’ , as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women declared. The quilt was donated to the Scottish Exhibition and Bazaar held by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) at St Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow, in April 1910, by Macbeth. She was head of the Needlework Department of the Glasgow School of Art and a member of the Glasgow School art movement, along with Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Despite being blind in one eye after contracting scarlet fever as a child, she designed and made intricate appliqué and embroidery, painted ceramics with a favourite motif of blowsy tea-roses, and also taught metalwork and bookbinding at the art school. ‘Annie’ Macbeth was born in Bolton in 1875; her father was a mechanical engineer and her grandfather was the portrait painter Norman Macbeth RA. Macbeth was herself a militant member of the WSPU and was sent to prison, where she went on hunger strike in 1912. She was a semi-invalid for several months after her release, writing to a colleague: ‘I am still very much less vigorous than I anticipated … after a fortnight’s solitary imprisonment with forcible feedings.’ 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Above Ann Macbeth’s WSPU banner, 1910, Museum of London. Image © Museum of London. The banner is currently on display in the museum’s People’s City gallery.
Opposite, clockwise from top left Emmeline Pankhurst; Christabel Pankhurst; Annie Kenney; Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. All private collection.
