Latimer, Miss Frances, Glen View, 1 Fernleigh Road, Mannamead, Plymouth
Selina Frances Latimer[1] (1846 – 1932), known as Frances, was born in the second quarter of 1846 according to the Plymouth registration records. Her birth year is sometimes cited as 1847, which fits better with her recorded age in future censuses, although this is not always accurately recorded: Latimer appears as 52 in 1901. She was the daughter of Isaac Latimer, editor of the Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal[2], and his wife Mary formerly Paddon, whom Isaac had met and married whilst working in the West Briton in Truro. Frances was the third child of six and the only girl. Precisely how she was educated is unknown, but she spoke in later life of the fact that her father gave all his family of six ‘a good education and start of life.’[3]
In 1860 Isaac Latimer launched a new daily paper, Western Daily Mercury, from offices in Frankfort Street. This paper reflected his Liberalism and his radical values of religious toleration and civil liberty. Until 1889 when he sold the business Latimer had been solely responsible for financing the paper and for trying to break even in an environment when he was always in competition with the better resourced and less politically orientated Western Morning News.[4]
Latimer reflected his values in his public life too. He was a member (and some time chairman) of the Plymouth Liberal Association; became a town councillor (and some time Mayor); a member of the Deputy Chamber of Commerce; of the Western Temperance League; and a town council member of the Plymouth Board of Guardians (and some time Governor).
The Latimers moved out of the town centre, first up to Mutley and then further, beyond the town boundary into Mannamead, to Glen View on Fernleigh Road. Mary Latimer died there in 1879. By that time the boys had all left home, though Alfred and his wife Edith remained in Plymouth where Alfred worked as a journalist and as a member of the printing business, Latimer, Trend & Co. Frances and her father were to remain companions and allies until his death twenty years later. Isaac enjoyed travelling and writing about his experiences, and Frances accompanied him. From their trip to the Grand Canaries in 1887 both of them produced reflective accounts.[5] Frances also acted as his companion in various public functions, for example serving on the committee organising entertainments for children at the Plymouth Workhouse.[6]
Their more ambitious projects, however, were political: the formation of a Women’s Liberal Association, and the enfranchisement of women. Helen Blackburn of the Bristol and West of England Society for Women’s Suffrage organised a Great Meeting in Plymouth Guildhall on 4 Dec 1882 to promote the cause. Isaac Latimer featured in the advertisement as one who ‘approved the object of the meeting’ and both he and Frances attended the event, at which the indomitable Lydia Becker from Manchester and Caroline Brine (q.v.) of Shaldon both spoke.[7] The meeting approved the resolution in favour of women’s suffrage and both Frances and her brother Alfred’s wife, Edith, became subscribers to the Bristol and West Society.[8] Edith indeed allowed her name to be published as the person with whom those interested in furthering the women’s suffrage movement should get in touch.
Frances, however, took action as a Liberal supporter. She and Florence Radford (q.v.) became secretaries to a Provisional Committee responsible for setting up a Women’s Liberal Association (WLA) for Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse.[9] The object was ‘to promote Liberal principles and diffuse knowledge on political questions of general and local interest’. An inaugural social gathering of those interested was arranged at the Borough Arms, and Isaac Latimer was asked to preside. He explained that the meeting was the direct result of the visit by the ladies from Bristol, and expressed his ‘heartiest sympathy’ for ‘the enfranchisement and political education of women’.[10] At the first regular meeting of what was called the ‘Three Towns Women’s Liberal Association’ a paper on John Hampden was read, the subscription was agreed as one shilling per annum, and plans for future meetings were made.[11]
Frances organised a meeting in February 1885, in support of the current Parliamentary Bill for extending the vote to women householders,[12] After this, however, the Association appears to have gone into abeyance, perhaps because Frances and Isaac had gone away on their travels to the Canaries. In 1888, however, a new WLA was formed, this time for the borough of Plymouth only.[13] The Association was more concerned about current events in Ireland and, as Latimer put it ‘the cruelty of the Coercion Acts’[14] that about woman suffrage at that particular point. Latimer did, however, write a forceful letter in response to a leader in the Western Daily Mercury, which had suggested that the time was not yet right for emancipation[15] She claimed that women felt like ‘shuttlecocks’, tossed from party to party, ‘hope raised high at one moment … lower in the rebound at the next’, and pointed out that the 21 years women had been pressing their claim was three times as long as an apprentice would spend in mastering a trade.
The Association recruited a membership of 130 in its first year and affiliated to the Devon Liberal Federation, where Latimer represented the GC on the general committee, and to the Women’s Liberal Federation, to whose 1888 conference Latimer was a delegate. At the first Annual Meeting she was elected President, an office she was to retain until she left Plymouth after her father’s death, and which led to her Presidency of the Devon Union of WLAs in 1897-8.[16] Though she continued to work on ‘The Irish Question’, and went for a fact finding tour of Ireland in the summer of 1890 with Alison Garland (q.v.), she also continued to speak on and organise meetings about women’s suffrage.[17] She invested time into organising women to contest elections for the School Boards and the Guardians, for which women were eligible to stand, was secretary to the Local Committee for Returning Women Guardians, and tried to engage the Primrose League in cross-party support for women standing.[18] Like all Liberal women she was disheartened by the letter written by Prime Minister Gladstone on Female Suffrage in 1892, in which he expressed his opposition to women’s enfranchisement without further public discussion and education, declining to plunge women ‘into the turmoil of masculine life’. She considered that he might have been influenced by a fear that women would ‘vote Tory’.[19]
Meanwhile Isaac Latimer was becoming older and frailer. He resigned his position on Plymouth Borough Council in 1892. He and Frances had moved down from Glen View to 3 Glen Side, College Road, a smaller property where they were living by 1895.[20]That year she was compelled to send apologies to a WLA meeting because of her father’s illness, and she herself underwent a ‘serious operation’ that November.[21] Isaac Latimer died in September 1898. Latimer then decided to move away from Plymouth. At the 1900 summer picnic for the Devon Union of Women’s Liberal Associations she is recorded as ‘Miss Latimer, Babbacombe’,[22] and the 1901 census shows that she was then living at 1 Warborough Road St Marychurch.
In Torquay she became a member of the Torquay WLA and was able to offer support to a local MP who was in favour of women’s enfranchisement. The election of the Liberal government in 1906 brought hope that women might at last be enfranchised, only to have it disappointed. Latimer began to think that perhaps the Women’s Social and Political Union were right to turn to militancy. She told the Torquay WLA that while the methods of the suffragettes ‘might not appeal to all of them’, she was ‘willing to accredit them with doing their best and showing courage and self-denial in the matter. It was not a pleasant thing to make oneself the target of sarcasm and go to prison’.[23] A few months later she told the Torquay Times:
Not being of the patient Griselda type I am of opinion that fifty years of polite and peaceable demand on the part of women for political enfranchisement is time enough to test the inefficacy of such methods. Pacific action having failed, it is common sense to try some other and stronger attitude. Therefore we should be thankful to the brave and sturdy women who stand forth in unpleasant notoriety and do not shirk contempt, reproach or imprisonment to obtain justice for their sex.[24]
She spoke again in support of ‘militant people’ at the Devon Union of WLAs in 1909.[25] After the prolonged Liberal government refusal to provide support for any measure for women suffrage, and particularly the failure of the Conciliation Bill in 1912, Liberal Associations noted with concern the ebbing away of their membership. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies were also concerned about the loss of support and started to condemn militancy. In response to such a condemnation by the President of a Cornish WSS branch Latimer wrote to the Western Daily Mercury:
What would she or the general public think of the miners’ chances if the strikers who did not agree with the methods of the more aggressive of their Unions spoke and wrote repudiating their doings? And how would the Unions treat such milk and water leaders? Oust them of course and replace them with men of grit. If the Women’s Societies stood shoulder to shoulder, as those of the miners are doing, they would – as Mrs Pankhurst stated to her brow-beating judge – have the Prime Minister going cap in hand to treat with the women as he does with the men. The matter would be settled once and for all in women’s favour, and the tragic demands upon the militant section to undertake these misunderstood self-sacrificing immolations would cease.[26]
That summer she took up her pen to enter the Western Daily Mercury’s regular prize competition in which readers were invited to send in a pithy comment on a topical issue. She sent in entries on The Suffragist Reverse, in April, the New Reform Bill, in June, Forcible Feeding in September and Mr Lansbury’s Resignation in November.[27] In November she won the first prize with her endorsement of Lansbury’s action in resigning his Parliamentary seat to seek re-election as a woman’s suffrage candidate. She said:
His election address rings clear. We have been caucus-driven too long; so low has the House sunk that principle counts for nothing. His action will have far-reaching results in forwarding women’s enfranchisement and arresting party policy that stifles honest conviction and converts members into irresponsible, manipulated voting machines. Well done, Lansbury!
In semi-retirement Latimer published a novel, A Life laid Bare – The Battle of the Suffrage,[28] and continued occasionally to act and speak on the topic of suffrage. When the Anti Suffrage League hosted a meeting in Torquay she attended and was one of those who handed in questions to be addressed by the platform party.[29] She failed to complete her 1911 census form but is recorded as living in 1914 in Rocombe Villa, Stokeinteignhead, and her last recorded speech on suffrage was to the Literary Debating Society in Teignmouth.[30]
After the Representation of the People Act she disappeared from public life. However, when in 1921 the merger of the Western Daily Mercury with the Western Morning News was announced, and the papers commented that the Western Daily Mercury had never turned a profit she wrote to the paper in a tribute to her father, saying that he had been ‘sole proprietor and financier’ from 1860 until 1889 (when he resigned editorship and control to a company) and in spite of this he not only kept ‘battling against the restrictions of the many against the privileges of the few’ but brought up his family of six, gave them a good education and start in life’.[31]
Latimer died at Rocombe Villa in May 1932, aged 86. She left an estate valued at £1805.
Entry created by Julia Neville, February 2019
[1] Census and family information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] For Isaac Latimer and his newspapers see Ian Maxted, Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History, https://bookhistory.blogspot.com/2014/07/devon-book-trades-plymouth-l-r.html. Accessed 4 Feb 2019.
[3] WMN, 4 Feb 1921.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Isaac Latimer, Notes of Travel in the Islands of Tenerife and Grand Canary, Plymouth, Western Daily Mercury Office, 1887; S. Frances Latimer, The English in the Canary Isles, being a Journal in Tenerife and Gran Canaria, Plymouth : Western Daily Mercury Office, 1888.
[6] Western Morning News (WMN), 8 Jan 1881.
[7] Women’s Suffrage Journal (WSJ), Jan 1883, 8
[8] WSJ, Jan 1883, 17.
[9] WSJ, Feb 1884, 26.
[10] WMN, 4 Apr 1884.
[11] WSJ, Dec 1884, 5.
[12] WMN, 5 Feb 1885.
[13] WMN, 20 & 28 Jan 1888.
[14] WDM, 7 Feb 1889.
[15] WDM, 8 Jan 1889.
[16] WDM, 25 Mar 1889; Devon and Exeter Gazette, 18 Jul 1898.
[17] Latimer’s talks are reported, for example, in WMN, 28 Feb 1890; WSJ, Feb 1890, 20; WMN, 10 Feb 1891, 17 Oct 1891.
[18] WMN, 19 Jan & 22 Oct 1892.
[19] WMN, 28 Apr &12 May 1892.The text of the letter is available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Female_suffrage._A_letter_from_the_Right_Hon._W.E._Gladstone,_M.P._to_Samuel_Smith,_M.P. Accessed 6 Feb 2019.
[20] Eyre’s Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse Street Directory, Plymouth, J.G. Hammond (1895) 100.
[21] WDM, 28 Mar 1895; WMN, 28 Nov 1895.
[22] WMN, 6 Jul 1900.
[23] Torquay Times (TT), 4 Jan 1907.
[24] TT, 5 Apr 1907.
[25] TT, 15 Oct 1909.
[26] WDM, 7 Mar 1912.
[27] WDM 6 Apr, 22 Jun, 28 Sep & 23 Nov 1912.
[28] A Life laid Bare, or The Battle of the Suffrage, Newton Abbot, The Standard and Current Library (1907).
[29] WMN, 23 Feb 1909.
[30] Devon and Exeter Gazette, 4 Dec 1912.
[31] WMN, 4 Feb 1921.