Bringing an ‘out-of-print’ book back to life
Over the last few years, I have spent many bank holidays, weekends and evenings researching the life of Florence Lockwood (1861-1937), a suffragist, artist and pacifist who lived in the Colne Valley in West Yorkshire. Florence is best known for her stunning suffrage banner, with its eye-catching motif of smoking chimneys, mills, hills and the curve of a canal (pictured above). My fascination with her life began when I bought a rare out-of-print edition of Lockwood’s autobiography, An Ordinary Life 1861-1924 (1932). Florence’s autobiography and her artwork paints a vivid picture of the people, politics, communities and industry of the Colne Valley in the early twentieth century and is ripe for republication. In 2022 I approached the Huddersfield Local History Society who kindly agreed to fund a reissue. Then began the arduous job of scanning and checking the text created by Optical Character Recognition against the original pages, word-by word, line-by-line, writing a new introduction and compiling appendices. Such tasks were made much more enjoyable as they were shared with a good friend and former colleague, Dr Rebecca Gill at the University of Huddersfield.
Our revised edition contains additional images, artworks and scholarly research which contextualise many themes covered in the memoir. Some of this research used the rich suffrage, dyestuff and textile collections held at the John Rylands Library and drew upon the non-conformist collections and the expertise of my Rylands colleague, Paul Carlyle.
A Yorkshire Suffragist
Florence embraced political activism relatively late in life, when she was in her mid-40s, after hearing Emmeline Pankhurst of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) speak in Huddersfield at the 1907 Colne Valley by-election. Later Florence served as the President of the Huddersfield Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and threw herself into writing pamphlets, writing letters to local newspapers, attending, and speaking at meetings, and personally persuading anyone who crossed her path of the necessity of ‘Votes for Women’.
On the eve of the First World War, Florence visited Budapest, Hungary, to attend the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance congress (IWSA) held 15- 21 June 1913. A chapter is devoted to this event which was attended by a dazzling array of international suffragists including Millicent Fawcett and Julia Cobden-Sanderson (daughter of Richard Cobden). The vast archive of the IWSA is held at the John Rylands Library and is regularly used in a third-year special subject class led by Dr Laure Humbert. This year I can show the students a first-hand account of what it felt like to attend an IWSA conference, offering a personal story alongside the dry officialese of minutes and memoranda.
The most exciting finds are from the extensive suffrage periodical collection held in the Library. The Common Cause was the official journal of the non-militant NUWSS which kept its regional members informed and energised through detailed reports of meetings held in the localities. Through its pages I have been able to trace the history of Florence Lockwood’s most celebrated piece of artwork – the Huddersfield suffrage banner. A full page spread in Common Cause on 16 February 1911 reveals the backstory to this wonderful artefact (now housed in the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield). Florence talks eloquently about the thoughts that went through her head as she stitched the banner, likening the process of creation as akin to building the woman’s movement.
It is not clear whether Florence was an active participant of the Artist’s Suffrage League but she certainly admired their work and at her 1910 garden party (described below) she displayed some of their posters. It is entirely possible that the advice given by its President Mary Lowndes in her pamphlet ‘Banners and Banner Making’ encouraged Florence to try her hand as a textile artist. Mary Lowndes claimed it was no more difficult than ‘making a pair of curtains or a venetian blind’.
Image in the public domain. Reproduction rights held by London Metropolitan University.
The Common Cause gives a vivid description of a NUWSS summer tea party held in August 1910 at Black Rock House in Linthwaite, where Florence lived in a quaint cottage in the yard of Black Rock Mill. Invariably such parties were hostage to the weather and when the rain came the party decamped to the adjacent mill. From the pages of Common Cause we can conjure up an image of wool bales decorated with suffragist colours (green, white and red not the more famous purple, green and white of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union) and illustrations by the Artists’ Suffrage League, rousing talks, applause and votes of thanks.
The Common Cause, 1 September 1910
Black Rock Mill and the booming textile trade during the First World War
Florence and her manufacturer husband, Josiah, lived in the heart of the Yorkshire textile districts in a house located in the mill yard of Black Rock Mills. During the first world war the mills hummed day and night ‘making cloth by the mile – khaki for our own soldiers, horizon blue for the French, and other colours for the Greeks and Russians”. But all was not well. Her diary entry for 14 March 1915 records that the soldiers’ uniforms produced in Josiah’s mill were woefully inadequate as the ‘khaki tunics, trousers and overcoats [were] in different shades’. Such discrepancies were caused by a shortage of dyestuffs as synthetic German dyes were unavailable during the war. This problem was only resolved when the government established British Dyes Ltd in Huddersfield (created from the earlier firm of Read Holliday & Sons) to meet the demand for chemicals for use in textiles and munitions, which had previously been sourced from Germany. The fabric samples issued by British Dyes Ltd and held at the Rylands include detailed instructions for applying dyes – note the capitals – it will not work if you do not boil for ten minutes!
Florence was an ardent pacifist, a very difficult stance for the wife of a textile manufacturer in a close-knit valley community where trade was booming and patriotism ran high. Undoubtedly this caused strains in their marriage and yet her memoir is a touching tribute to their life together and it ends abruptly on Josiah’s death in 1924. Her memoir is especially precious as it is the only known autobiography of a Yorkshire suffragist. It has been a privilege to work with this memoir in my spare time and to bring this learning into my curatorial and teaching work at the Rylands.
An Ordinary Life will be launched at Brian Jackson House, Huddersfield at a day school on ‘Huddersfield Political Women’ on 9 November 2024. Copies can be bought via the Huddersfield Local History Society or Waterstones!
