Acland, Mrs Eleanor, Sprydoncote, Broadclyst
Eleanor Acland née Cropper (1878–1933) was born in 1878, near Kendal, Westmorland. After education at home, and by a governess whom she shared with cousins at the Vicarage, she went away to a boarding school, St Leonard’s, in St Andrews, Scotland. She obtained a first-class degree in history from the University of Oxford in 1900. She married Francis Acland, Liberal MP and nephew of Sir Thomas Acland of Killerton, in 1905.
During the early years of her marriage, Eleanor was occupied in bringing up her young family, but from at least 1908 she became politically active in her own right in the cause of Liberalism and particularly in support of women’s and adult suffrage. She campaigned the length and breadth of England for women’s suffrage, wrote in numerous national newspapers on the subject, and corresponded with a wide variety of politicians and activists on the question of the franchise including Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence of the Women’s Social and Political Union as well as with her many friends in the Liberal Party and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), as well as acting as vice-president of the South-West Federation of the NUWSS between 1910 and 1914.
Despite being a dedicated Liberal, she became exasperated with the Women’s Liberal Federation’s hesitant attitude to women’s suffrage and in 1913 helped to found the Liberal Women’s Suffrage Union, which campaigned to ensure that anti-suffrage parliamentary candidates were not selected for the Liberal Party. When war broke out in 1914 she reduced her campaigning for suffrage but continued to work with the NUWSS as well as being Committee Secretary of the Belgian Repatriation Fund.
During the war, Francis Acland lost his ministerial role when the Coalition Government was formed, and the Aclands moved from London to Devon in 1917, before his Uncle Charles’s death, ‘in order to familiarise himself with the estates.’[1] Eleanor and Francis lived at Sprydoncote on the Acland estates, finally moving into the Acland family seat of Killerton in 1923. Eleanor became Lady Acland in October 1926, on her husband’s succession to the baronetcy.
Eleanor was appointed a Devon magistrate in 1920 and remained heavily involved in Liberal politics, both nationally – as a member of the Central Executive of the Women’s National Liberal Federation from 1919 and president from 1929 to 1931 – and locally. She was elected president of the Devon Union of Women’s Liberal Associations in November 1919,[2] having become president of the Exeter Women’s Free Liberal Association earlier that year.[3] She also campaigned vigorously for peace and internationalism in the post-war period and stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Exeter in the 1931 general election.
She died in 1933 aged 55.
Entry created by Paul and Mitzi Auchterlonie, July 2018
[1] Acland, Anne, A Devon Family, 151.
[2] Western Times, 25 Nov 1919.
[3] Western Times, 26 Jun 1919.