PLAYWRIGHT AND SUFFRAGETTE, INEZ BENSUSAN, Bedford Park, Chiswick, W4

She was the daughter of a 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).