Inez Bensusan (1871-1967) was daughter of mining agent, Samuel Levy Bensusan and was born in Sydney, Australia into a wealthy Jewish family. Sometime after 1893 she emigrated to Britain, where she worked as an actress. She became an active campaigner for women’s suffrage through the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage, the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters and, most centrally, made a vital contribution to the work of the Actresses Franchise League, developing and running the Play Department In 1913 Bensusan set up the Women’s Theatre, launched at the Coronet Theatre that December, which aimed to establish a permanent season of work dealing with women’s issues.  During the Great War she worked with the first Women’s Theatre Company) to the Army of Occupation in Cologne and then played with the British Rhine Army Dramatic Company for three and a half years. She later moved to Chiswick where she was joint founder, in 1946, of the House of Arts. She wrote several plays for the AFL, most famously The Apple, Perfect Ladies (1909), Nobody’s Sweetheart  (1911), The Prodigal Passes (1914), The Singer of the Veldt and the suffrage film True Womanhood (1911).

 

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Ellen Terry (1847-1928) was the third of eleven children of actors Ben and Sarah Terry and followed her parents and sister Kate. She received no formal education but aged 9 made her stage debut playing Mamillius in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Aged 16 in 1864, she modelled for and married the painter, George Frederick Watts, many years her senior. The marriage lasted only ten months. Terry returned to the stage but left again when she met the designer and architect Edward Godwin who was the father of her children Edward Gordon and Edith Craig . Returning to the stage after six years she established herself as Britain’s leading Shakespearean actress and in 1878, formed a partnership with Henry Irving at the Lyceum, where he became actor-manager, playing numerous leading roles opposite him. They dominated English theatre for over twenty years. In later years she moved to Small Hythe, Kent Her last stage appearance was in 1925, the year she was made a D.B.E. She also appeared in films and toured the USA as a lecturer and recitalist. She joined her daughter in becoming an active supporter of women’s suffrage and figurehead for the AFL, playing Nance Oldfield in A Pageant of Great Women.

See

A Strange Eventful History: the dramatic lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd
and

The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry vols 1 and 2

London: Pickering, 2010

and

http://www.ellenterryarchive.hull.ac.uk

 

 

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Decima Moore (1871-1914) daughter of Edmund Henry Moore and Emily Strachan, was one of a family of five sisters, including Jessie and Bertha all involved in theatre and active suffragists, most prominently Decima and her fellow actress-vocalist sister, Eva. Other sisters, elocutionist Emily Pertwee and Ada Moore, ran classes (at the Chelsea WSPU) to train suffrage speakers. The family gave “theatrical performances at home — comedies and operettas”. Decima won a scholarship to the Blackheath Conservatoire of Music and made her debut in London aged 17, at the Savoy Theatre in 1889, playing Casilda in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera,The Gondoliers, the first of many successes. She divorced her first husband in 1902 and retired from the stage in 1914. Her second husband was colonial governor for the Gold Coast and she acted as exhibition commissioner for the colony’s pavilion at several British Empire Exhibitions at Wembley. She was later involved in war work in France and Germany. In 1932 she appeared in the film Nine to Six

 

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Eva Moore (1870-1955) was one of the best-known of the Moore sisters who were all actresses or singers and suffrage supporters. Her husband H.V.Esmond (1869-1924) was a playwright whose suffrage play Her Vote was staged in 1910. Eva, like Decima, was a Vice- President of the AFL and served on their Executive Committee, lending their status to the campaign for women’s suffrage. She also appeared in early films. Her daughter Jill Esmond married Laurence Olivier.

See

Exits and Entrances by Eva Moore London Chapman & Hall ltd, 1923

 

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Irene Vanbrugh and her sister Violet were major names in the Edwardian theatre world

See

To Tell My Story by Irene Vanbrugh

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Kitty Marion (1871-1944) was born Katherina Schafer in Germany. Her mother died when she was two and at fifteen she moved to live with an aunt in England. She learnt English and took the name Kitty Marion and became an actress. She moved to Sussex becoming an active member of the Brighton WSPU branch. A supporter of direct action she was sent to Holloway Prison after being found guilty of throwing stones at a post office in Newcastle and later became actively involved in Christabel Pankhurst’s arson campaign that targeted railway stations and sports facilities among others, setting fire to Levetleigh House in Sussex (April 1913), the Grandstand at Hurst Park racecourse (June 1913) and several houses in Liverpool and Manchester. She received a series of further terms of imprisonment during which force-feeding occurred followed by release under the Cat and Mouse Act. She underwent 200 force-feedings in prison. In 1914 she opposed the War but was deported, due to her German origins. She settled in the US becoming active in the birth control movement, setting up Birth Control Review with Margaret Sanger and others and in 1921 they establishd America’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn though it was shortly closed by the police.  Her manuscript autobiography is in the Museum of London.

 

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Lillah McCarthy (1875-1960) was born in Cheltenham and studied elocution with Hermann Vezin who began her career with the Elizabethan Stage Society and Shakespeare Reading Society.  Bernard Shaw admired her but encouraged her to gain experience touring the provinces. She worked with Wilson Barrett at the Lyric Theatre and became a leading  lady, touring South Africa and Australia with his company. She then worked with Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s. In 1905 Shaw cast her as Ann Whitefield in Man and Superman (1905) opposite, as John Tanner, Harley Granville-Barker whom she married the following year. As a director her produced many new plays from the European repertoire and managed the Savoy from 1912, becoming associated with approaching Shakespeare productions as ensemble pieces. She became manager of the Little Theatre in 1911 and was closely associated as actress and director with Granville-Barker’s experiments at the Royal Court and the Savoy theatres. A suffragist, she played Justice in the AFL’s Pageant of Great Women.

See

Myself and My Friends by Lillah McCarthy 

 

Rose Mathews (dates not known) was an actress, activist, and writer. Mathews’ The Parasites was presented by the Play Actors as part of a joint bill with Cicely Hamilton’s The Sergeant of Hussars at the Scala in 1908 to help pay off the costs of establishing the Actors’ Association, the forerunner of Actors’ Equity. As well as a suffragist, Mathews was a prominent and activist member of the Association, publishing articles, making speeches and serving on the Council of its offshoot company, the Play Actors, alongside Inez Bensusan, Winifred Mayo, and Italia Conti (founder of the stage school of that name) all also active in the AFL. Mathews played artist Angelica Kauffman in the first production of the AFL’s A Pageant of Great Women. Her play The Parasites aimed to draw attention to the “steamy side of stage life” and the exploitation of actresses by unscrupulous agents. Her one-act play The Smack was performed in aid of the Suffrage Atelier (1910).

 

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Lillie Langtry (1853-1929) was born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton in Jersey and married Irish landowner Edward Langtry in 1874. A celebrated beauty in 1877 she met Edward, the Prince of Wales at a dinner and their three year-long affair began. Several more love affairs followed and in 1881 she had a daughter, Jeanne, either by Prince Louis of Battenburg or Arthur Jones. She went on to become an actress and toured America to sell-out audiences, due to her fame . From 1900-1903 she was lessee and manager of the Imperial Theatre. Langtry was a Vice-President of the AFL She remarried to baronet Hugo Gerald De Bathe in 1899. She published one novel, All At Sea (1909), her memoirs and collaborated on two plays with John Hartley Manners Virginia ( (1902) and The Crossways (1903) and on A Maid of Many Parts (with Graham Hill, 1906)

See

Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals by Laura Beatty

London: Chatto and Windus, 1999

 

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was an artist, illustrator, and writer. She is best known for designing the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of tarot cards. Born in Pimlico, London, her father was an American merchant from Brooklyn, Charles Edward Smith, and his wife, Corinne Colman, was Jamaican. Due to her father’s job with the West India Improvement Company, the family spent time in London, Kingston, Jamaica and Brooklyn, New York. Her mother died when she was 10 years old, and, often separated from her father due to his work, she was taken under the wing of the Lyceum Theatre group in London. Her early teens were spent travelling around the country with the theatre group, an  influence on her later art work. She studied art in Brooklyn before returning to Britain in 1899 and becoming a theatrical designer and illustrator. Smith wrote and illustrated several books about Jamaican folklore and also did a great deal of illustration work including the pictures for her friend Ellen Terry’s book The Russian Ballet. She was also friends with Edy Craig and Chris St John and a suffrage supporter. The set of tarot cards that she designed, remain the world’s most popular 78-card tarot deck.

See

Annancy Stories by Pamela Colman Smith. Darker Intentions Press, 2006

The Russian Ballet  by Ellen Alice Terry and Pamela Colman Smith

London:  Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, London, 1913

and

http://home.comcast.net/~pamela-c-smith/home.html

 

Sime Seruya (1875-1955) was part Portuguese by birth and an actress. She was one of the founders of the AFL with Adeline Bourne, Winifred Mayo and Gertrude Elliott. A committed suffragette she was a member of the WFL and organised their contribution to the great Women’s Suffrage Procession in 1910, working alongside Edith Craig. Their involvement underlines how the processions were conceived of as large scale performances. She was arrested and imprisoned and in 1911 fought successfully against a further conviction for selling Votes for Women on the steps of the Lyceum. She later ran a touring company with F.H. De Quincy including tours of The Red Lamp. She lived in West Lewisham.

 

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Winifred Mayo (dates not known) was one of the co-founders of the AFL with Sime Seruya. She had been involved in the movement since 1907. Adeline Bourne was also a key organisers and Gertrude Elliott, Chair. Mayo was also active in the Play Actors and in producing Bjornson’s A Gauntlet for the Women’s Theatre season,. She appeared in A Pageant of Great Women as Jane Austen. Apart from an appearance in Hauptmann’s Hannele, little is known of her professional career. In 1958 she recorded her recollections of Mrs Pankhurst and of smashing the windows of the Guards’ Club, for the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/suffragettes/8301.shtml?all=2&id=8301

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Jess Dorynne (dates not known) was an actress and

 

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Janette Steer (dates not known) was an American who moved to London in 1893, and became an actress (her roles included Hamlet at Birmingham, 1899) and manager (of the Comedy Theatre c1900 and of Terry’s). A militant feminist, she was a friend of the Pankhursts and on the Executive Committee of the AFL  playing Queen Elizabeth in the first production of Cicely Hamilton’s A Pageant of Great Women.  Steer produced Brieux’s A Woman On Her Own for Inez Bensusan’s Women’s Theatre them. Her own plays included an adaptation of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Cloven Foot (1890), an adaptation of Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1902),  Geraldine Wants to Know (1911) and the feminist play The Sphinx (1914). Kitty Marion the suffrage actress, activist and diarist and Frederick Mouillot, husband of suffragist actress and writer, Gertrude, played the leads.