Keys, Miss Gwyneth, 2 Freedom Park Villas, Lipson Road, Plymouth
Gwyneth Mary Keys[1] (1885 – 1964) was born on 22 July 1885, the daughter of James Higman Keys and Eliza, formerly Bloye. Her brother William was six years younger. James Keys was a letterpress printer, a member of a family long-established in the printing business. James’s grandfather Elias Keys had been a printer in Devonport[2]; his father, Isaiah Waterloo Nicholson Keys, had moved to Plymouth to set up his own business there. From the 1860s Isaiah had a business in Bedford Street as printer, bookseller, stationer and newsagent, and he ran a circulating library. By the mid 1870s he had taken on James as partner, but the printing side of the business came to predominate and in the late nineteenth century the family moved away from the central retail area of Bedford Street to premises in Whimple Street.[3]
Isaiah was noted as a poet, but above all as a botanist. He was the Curator of Botany at the Plymouth Institution of Devon and Cornwall’s Natural History Society, whose annual reports published his notes on The Flora of Devon and Cornwall in the 1860s. His son James inherited his father’s scientific interests as well as his printing business, although his own specialist interest was entomology. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, co-curator of entomology at the Plymouth Institution (Athenaeum) and many of his collections were bequeathed to Plymouth Museum, to which he also gave his father’s herbarium.[4] He regularly led walks for the Plymouth and District Field Club, of which he was a committee member.
When Gwyneth was a little girl in 1891 the family were living at Addison Road (close to the Museum), together with her Aunt Sarah, her father’s sister, described as a bookseller’s assistant. Later they moved, first to Seymour Terrace and then, by 1911, to 2 Freedom Park Villas, both on Lipson Road, close to Freedom Fields. In 1901 there is no indication that Gwyneth, aged 15, was continuing with her education. She was absent from the family home at the time of the 1911 census, presumably boycotting it, so again there is no indication then of how she was occupying her time. In 1916, however, she was awarded a BA degree by the University of London, which she had achieved by private study.[5] Her degree was in French and German, and she went on later to teach, being described in 1939 as an assistant teacher of French and German in a secondary school.
Gwyneth was an early member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and appears as the Plymouth local secretary from the beginning of 1908.[6] At this time Nell Kenney had been despatched by the WSPU to raise the profile of the society in the Plymouth area, and Keys mentioned that she was ‘with Miss Kenney at every meeting she had in Plymouth and neighbourhood in May’.[7] She also contributed financially that June to the cost of the banners for the mass WSPU rally in Hyde Park which she and some other Plymouth women attended.[8] She sent a letter of rebuttal, published in the Western Morning News, in response to one from Beatrice Derry, local secretary of the Society for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, following a letter Derry had written to the press that was critical of Kenney.[9]
That autumn Keys spoke at an event organised by the Plymouth YMCA Literary and Debating Society where both the positive and the negative positions for women’s suffrage were presented. Early the following year she presented a paper on ‘the position which women used to hold in England in early days’ to one of the ‘At Home’ sessions the WSPU hosted on a Friday evening and was involved in the arrangements for Mrs Pankhurst herself to come and speak, which she did in February 1909.[10] Her support for the branch continued, both financially and by speaking and presiding at meetings, until 1912.[11] She can also be found during this period achieving first class Royal Society of Arts certificates for shorthand and typing (possibly improving her office skills to support suffrage activity), and a certificate of merit for an examination following a Cambridge University local lecture course on Landmarks of Modern History, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[12]
In March 1912, just after the final defeat of the Conciliation Bill, Keys appeared for the first time on the platform of a National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ meeting, where she presided and Dr Mabel Ramsay (q.v.) spoke. The Three Towns branch of the NUWSS had been set up in 1909, more than a year later than the WSPU organisation in which Keys was already enrolled. It was not unheard of for women to become members of both organisations and Keys may have been one of those for several years. It is, however, striking that she began to play an active role in 1912, just at the time that she ceases to be active in the WSPU.
It seems likely that Keys determined to give her active support to the constitutional rather than the militant pro-suffrage organisation at this point because the WSPU had resumed, and with growing fervour, support for militant action. Two particular militant actions in Plymouth were attributed to the suffragettes in the listings in Votes for Women in 1913: one the enamelling of inscriptions intended to embarrass Mr Churchill whilst inspecting the dockyard, and the second the cutting of telephone wires at Lipson, the area of Plymouth where Keys lived.[13] Keys had defended militant tactics in 1908, writing in the Western Morning News that ‘until the WSPU started the present agitation … few persons were aware of the existence of [women’s suffrage] societies’.[14] Perhaps when militant actions came so close to home she felt she would prefer to support the NUWSS.
From March 1912 Keys became a key member of the Three Towns NUWSS branch. In addition to presiding at meetings, she represented the branch at a South West Federation meeting[15], and at the Annual Business Meeting in 1913 she was elected as Treasurer, a post she retained until the society was wound up after the war.[16]
Not all the NUWSS activity was serious, however. Gwyneth brought her younger brother William along to the fund-raising entertainments the branch held, where he proved a versatile entertainer, singing, organising concerts, and even on one occasion manipulating the marionettes.[17]
When war broke out and Dr Mabel and Mrs Annie Ramsay (qqv) became involved with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Gwyneth first covered the post of secretary for Mabel Ramsay, and then put through the branch accounts, all the many thousands of pounds they raised.[18] After the war she proved a staunch ally for Mabel Ramsay in the work of the new Plymouth Citizens’ Association, acting as treasurer and springing to the defence of the association’s independence of party politics in response to an allegation of radicalism by the Western Morning News.[19]
Keys’s mother died in 1926 and her father in 1941. She herself lived on till 1964, living at 54 Dale Gardens in 1939 and latterly at 34 Lynwood Avenue, Marsh Mills. She died on 18 January 1964 at Kilmars Nursing Home in Mutley.
Entry created by Julia Neville, January 2019
[1] Census and family information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] Ian Maxted, Exeter Working Papers in Book History, available at: https://bookhistory.blogspot.com/2014/07/devon-book-trades-devonport.html Accessed 19 Jan 2019.
[3] Maxted, Book History, https://bookhistory.blogspot.com/2014/07/devon-book-trades-plymouth-e-k.html Accessed 19 Jan 2019.
[4] For more information about James Higman Keys and his collections, see https://plymhearts.org/pcmag/collections/natural-history/insects/ . Accessed 20 Jan 2019.
[5] University of London, Register of Students, available at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-university-graduates/96-122. Accessed 19 Jan 2019
[6] Votes for Women (VfW), 2 Jan 1908, 57; 30 Apr 1908 (ii).
[7] Western Morning News (WMN), 7 Sep 1908.
[8] VfW, 2 Jul 1908, 288; Western Times, 23 Jun 1908’ WMN, 7 Feb 1908..
[9] WMN, 7 Sep 1908.
[10] WMN, 3 Oct 1908; VfW 21 Jan 1909, 282; 11 Feb 1909, 338.
[11] WMN, 15 May 1909; various donations recorded by Votes for Women up to 1 Mar 1912;
[12] Western Daily Mercury, 5 Feb 1912.
[13] VfW, 11 Apr 1913, 399.
[14] WMN, 7 Sep 1908.
[15] WDM, 30 Mar & 21 Nov 1912; WT 9 Sep 1912
[16] CC, 28 Mar 1913, 874.
[17] WDM, 12 Apr, 23 Nov & 5 Dec 1912.
[18] CC, 5 Feb 1915, 699; 14 Apr 1916, 23.
[19] WMN, 3 Nov 1919.