Hearts and Minds by Jane Robinson

Author:Jane Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

8

SUFFERAGE

The Pilgrimage continues

It is difficult to feel a holy pilgrim when one is called a brazen hussy.1

WHERE ON EARTH were those blessed keys? How stupid would it be if weeks of minute preparation and a whole day’s caravan-cleaning on Saturday should come to nought, just because someone had stashed the keys to the Ark somewhere safe and then forgotten where? On the morning of Monday, 7 July, Marjory Lees was feeling harassed and rather cross – not at all serene like a proper pilgrim. After a frenzied last-minute search the offending keys were eventually found in a corner of the caravan itself, and she was able to set off just about on time. Scholes reported for duty at Marjory’s Oldham house, Werneth Park; he then disappeared with Noah and the Ark towards Macclesfield – where his colleague Clapham was expected with Ham and the Sandwich – while Marjory bundled up some extra baggage and took the train, with her mother, to Stockport. There she met sixty-three pilgrims from the Manchester area who were planning to join the Watling Street route with her. Full of high spirits, she waved goodbye to Mrs Lees and strode out with the others, smart, neat and a little naive.

The Ark was a great luxury – but then, the Leeses were wealthy women. Marjory was born in the Werneth area of Oldham in 1878. She and her sister grew up there with their mother and father, both of whom were noted philanthropists. Charles Lees was the head of a family firm of cotton-mill engineers, and when he died in 1894 the little family was left extremely well off. Marjory doesn’t appear to have had very much formal education, but from 1902 she was involved with the Manchester University Settlement at Ancoats Hall. The Settlement was modelled on Toynbee Hall in London, where university staff and students worked for the social welfare and education of the working-class residents of the area. She was elected a Poor Law Guardian – as so many active suffragists were – in 1904 at the age of twenty-six.

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