Crowle, Mrs Beatrice, Hemerdon House, Moor View Terrace, Mutley, Plymouth
Mary Beatrice Crowle[1] was born Mary Beatrice Finucane on 6 April 1874, the daughter of William Finucane and Johanna Evangelista, formerly Sheehan, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
If Beatrice had remained in Australia she would have been entitled to vote in Commonwealth of Australia and Queensland elections from 1902. She chose, however, to come to England (without her parents) and met and married Engineer-Commander Joseph Napton Crowle, RN in Devonport in 1902. Joseph was a Cornishman and a widower. He was deployed to Cork, where their daughter Eileen was born in 1903, and then towards the end of his career, back to Devonport, where their son Thomas Bedford was born in 1910. Joseph was engaged in the refit of the battleship HMS Caesar in 1912, following which he retired with the rank of Engineer-Captain.
The family had been living at 39 Portland Road, Devonport, at the time of the 1911 census, but with two young children they looked for somewhere more spacious to retire to. In the spring of 1912 Hemerdon House, Moor View Terrace, Mutley, was advertised to let.[2] This was described as a semi-detached house with a large garden. It is likely that this was the point at which the Crowles took the house.
In April 1913 Mrs M.B. Crowle appears for the first time as Hon. Secretary to the Plymouth branch of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association (C&UWFA), giving the address of Hemerdon House, Mutley.[3] The branch had been formed in February 1912, with a Mrs Williams and a Miss Rogers preceding Crowle as secretaries.[4] Crowle, perhaps because of her knowledge of the system in Australia, organised a major public meeting for the branch at the end of 1913 with speakers from Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate ‘the value of the Parliamentary vote being given to women and of the improvement in the social and economic laws of these two Dominions where woman’s position in politics is recognised.’[5]
When war broke out in August 1914 the National Executive Committee for the C&UWFA decided to give up ‘active political work’. They published letters in local newspapers encouraging branches to support the local branches of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association.[6]
Crowle’s report to the Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review in January 1915 shows that this was done in Plymouth, and that the branch also supported the Friendly Union of Sailors’ Wives, of particular relevance to Plymouth, and the Red Cross.[7] Although she claimed in the same report that she was waiting to be called upon to join the Red Cross staff at Millbay Hospital it is not clear how early her call-up took place. A photograph of her in her Red Cross uniform, preserved amongst her papers in the National Library of Australia, shows that she was on the staff of one of the temporary hospitals in Plymouth,[8] but her Red Cross volunteer card lists only service for a month in the VA Hospital at Millbay between May and June 1917.[9]
Unusually Crowle also mentioned in her report in January 1915 that she had formed a Ladies Rifle Club, which had become a section of the Plymouth and District Rifle Club and that ‘a large number of ladies have been enrolled’. A photograph of the Ladies’ Rifle Club exists among the Crowle papers in the National Library of Australia. This has been annotated on the verso to show that Crowle is the seated woman in the foreground on the right-hand side, with a boy in a sailor suit.[10]
Later in 1915 she reported the branch’s work in the Government’s War Service for Women scheme, encouraging women to register as part of a workforce to take the place of men in business and on the land so that they were free to go to the front. The branch provided an armlet for all women who found work through their agency with the initials C&UWFA and the words ‘War Service for Women’.[11] Crowle also referred to the fact that Mrs Waldorf (Nancy) Astor, a Vice-President of the branch, had started a Girls’ Club.[12]
Crowle also became involved in the movement to establish women police during the First World War. The Women’s Library holds a scrapbook she kept entitled ‘Women Pioneers’ which contains a photograph of a woman in a police-style uniform, thought to be her.[13] Another version of this photograph exists, which has been captioned in handwriting, ‘Mrs Mary Beatrice Crowle, wife of Captain J.N. Crowle, R.N’. Underneath it is a typed label which says, ‘One of the first members of the W.P.P, Mrs Crowle was also an active member of the suffragette movement’.[14] This description of Crowle’s role seems more likely than the reference on the Women’s Library scrapbook to her raising the first 2000 women police patrols, but further research is required to ascertain how extensively she was involved in this movement.
Towards the end of the war the Crowles moved away to Bath, where Mrs M.B. Crowle is noted as attending a meeting to discuss the formation of a Citizens’ Association in June 1918.[15] She later became a member of the Bath Board of Guardians. She travelled extensively, taking photographs, many of which are now in the National Library of Australia collecton. Her biography in the Women’s Library catalogue says that she became involved in the 1920s with broadcasting and became a Selborne Society lecturer and a member of the League of Nations Union.
In 1939 Beatrice Crowle, by this time a widow, was living in Bath and working as a manipulative healer. She died in March 1972 in Hounslow.
Entry created by Julia Neville, February 2019
[1] Census and family information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] Western Daily Mercury, 9 May 1912.
[3] Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review (C&UWFR), 1 Apr 1913, 295.
[4] Western Morning News, 16 Feb 1912; Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 1 Apr 1912, 208.
[5] Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 1 Oct 1913, 339.
[6] Western Morning News, 12 Aug 1914.
[7] Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 1 Jan 1915.
[8] National Library of Australia (NLA) record entry, available at https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3672102 Accessed 15 Feb 2019.
[9] Crowle, Beatrice, Red Cross volunteer card. Available at https://vad.redcross.org.uk/Card?sname=crowle&hosp=plymouth&id=53290&first=true&last=true Accessed 1 Feb 2019. The Millbay hospital was based at the Millbay Drill Hall, with tented wards and is not the same place outside which Crowle is pictured in her uniform. Red Cross cards were compiled at the end of the war, and early service is sometimes not noted.
[10] NLA record entry, available at https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3704230 Accessed 15 Feb 2019. The note on the verso suggests that the other seated woman with a child is Lady Astor.
[11] Western Morning News, 8 Jun 1915.
[12] Conservative & Unionist Women’s Franchise Review, 1 Jan 1916.
[13] Women’s Library Ref No 7MBC, Papers of Mary Beatrice Crowle. This archive requires more detailed research as it contains a number of other items relating to Crowle’s family and to her activities. The catalogue entry relating to the photograph in uniform, reference 7MBC, 28b, only states that it ‘may be’ Crowle, inferring this from the fact that the note on the page states that she helped to raise the first 2000 women police patrols and served with them in Plymouth, London and Bath’.
[14] Mary Evans Picture Library, Picture No 11007273.available at https://www.maryevans.com/search.php Accessed 1 Feb 2019.
[15] Bath Chronicle, 1 Jun 1918.