It would be difficult to miss the fact that today, 6 February 2018, is the 100th anniversary of women being given the vote in England and Wales. Some women, that is. The 1918 Representation of the People Act awarded the vote to all men over the age of 21 and women aged over 30 who met a property qualification. There’s been a huge amount of media coverage of #Vote100, though women had to wait another 10 years, until 1928, to be allowed to vote on an equal basis with men.
I had a look for female ancestors on FindMyPast‘s voter registration records, in honesty not expecting to find anything. So far the ancestors I’ve found out about have been solidly working class – there are a lot of factory workers in Leeds and illiterate farm labourers in Cambridgeshire, so I’d assumed that the women in my family wouldn’t have met the requirements to be allowed to vote. However, as often happens in family history, the dead relatives have surprised me.
My mum’s grandma was called Fanny Garside, a miner’s daughter born in Beeston, Leeds in 1878. She was one of at least 8 children, all working as labourers in successive censuses – two older brothers were labourers in a chemical works in 1891. Fanny married Christopher Brayshaw at Holbeck Church on 1 January 1898. His occupation is listed as ‘Hawker’. On the 1891 census he and his older brother Tom are listed as ‘mussle hawkers’. Family lore has it that he sold fish door to door, which sounds plausible. Fanny and Christopher had four children between 1898 and 1909: my great-grandfather Ernest in April 1900, then George, Annie and Ada.
By 1911, however, Fanny was widowed at the age of 33 and the census shows her living in Hunslet with her four children who are aged between 2 and 12. The interesting thing about this is Fanny’s occupation, listed as ‘bookseller’. The census helpfully tells us that Fanny lives on her ‘own account’, meaning she is neither working for someone else nor employing others, and works at home.
I’m intrigued as to how the widow of a fish trader with four young children ends up running her own business selling books from home. I’m even more intrigued to find her on the voting register for Leeds in 1920, at 20 Dudley Street in Holbeck, with son Ernest. She’s there two years earlier, without Ernest, on the 1918 electoral register which was the first one in which women were listed.
Both times Fanny meets the occupancy requirement for both the parliamentary and local elections, meaning she lives in a qualifying property, though Ernest can vote in the parliamentary election on the basis of residency and is not eligible to vote in the local election. I need to do a bit more research to find out what that means.
Given Fanny’s background, and her husband’s occupation, I really didn’t expect to find her qualifying for a vote in 1920. I then had a look in the trade directories, also on FindMyPast, and there in 1917 is a Mrs Fanny Garside running a newsagent at 22 Dudley Street in Holbeck, close to where Fanny and Ernest are listed on the electoral register three years later.
This suggests an intriguing change in status for Fanny, from the daughter of a coal miner and wife of a hawker to an independent woman with her own newsagents who is one of the first women in the UK entitled to vote. I need to do more searching to make sense of this information – maybe local Leeds newspapers will turn up something – but it’s a surprising discovery and lovely to find a personal connection to the #Vote100 celebrations today.
In Search of Kings 