Linscott, Mrs Maud, 1-3 John Street, Exeter
Maud Linscott née Cole (1850-1936)[1] was born in Totnes in 1850, the daughter of George and Julia Cole. Soon after her birth the family moved to Exeter and in 1851 and 1861 they were living in Maddock’s Row. St Paul’s. George described himself as Sheriff’s Officer, but was also said to have been ‘associated with a large posting and jobbing business’.[2]
George died in the late 1860s and in 1871 Maud, her mother Julia and her younger brother Walter were living at 12 Castle Street. Maud has no occupation listed; her mother is described as an annuitant; and Walter as a landscape artist. In 1873 Maud married Tom Linscott, a pawnbroker whose family owned a substantial pawnbroker’s business at 1-3 John Street where they had been for many years.[3] Tom’s father John had died in 1867 (leaving effects valued at over £3000) and in 1871 Tom and his mother Abigail were both described as pawnbrokers. The business also was a watchmaker’s, jeweller’s and gun dealer’s.
After Tom’s marriage his mother and sisters moved out, up to Hillsborough Road. Maud’s mother Julia, however, moved in with the Linscotts to the premises at 1-3 John Street and lived with them until her death in 1891. Maud and Tom had two sons, John, born in 1875, who became an engineer, and Walter, born in 1877, who followed his father into the pawnbroker’s business. In 1911 the boys had left home; Tom’s sister Catherine was living with them; and they employed a servant, Elizabeth Coles, who had also been with them in 1901 as a cook.
The business and the Linscott home were behind St John’s Church, on John Street, a narrow street that led through, between Fore Street and Smythen Street into the West Quarter, a run-down and overcrowded area of the city where some of the poorest people lived. Many of the references to Maud Linscott in the 1900s are to her church and charitable activities in the area, such as the Diocesan Home for Friendless Girls, the Carnival in aid of the city’s charitable institutions; or the RSPCA.[4] She was particularly involved in the practical work of the Exeter Soup Kitchen, run from the Lower Market[5] and was a founder member of the Exeter District Nursing Association.[6]
Tom Linscott was a Radical (Liberal) in politics and a stalwart from the 1870s of the St Petrock’s Liberal Association. In 1882 he was elected as a councillor for St Petrock’s Ward. From then on Maud too would have been drawn into the rituals of civic life, increasing when Tom was elected sheriff in 1900 and mayor in 1905, a year that covered the General Election of 1906 when Exeter returned a Liberal MP for what was to become a Liberal Government. When ward boundaries changed he became councillor for St John’s Ward and later a city alderman.
In 1892 the Exeter Women’s Liberal Association, a branch of the Women’s Liberal Federation was formed. Tom Linscott spoke in support of the resolution for its formation, and Maud was elected to the Provisional Committee.[7] When the first meeting was held she was appointed Treasurer[8], a position she held until after the First World War. She was also a member of the Devon Union of Women’s Liberal Associations, for which she was Chairman of Committee in 1907 and President in 1909.[9]
When the Exeter branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was formed at the end of 1908 Linscott’s name does not appear amongst the early supporters. It seems to have drawn its early support primarily from amongst the Conservatives. By the end of 1909, however, she appears amongst the committee members making arrangements for the public meeting at which Lady Frances Balfour spoke.[10] Linscott formed part of the deputation hoping to lobby the Chancellor of the Exchequer on a visit to Devon; according to Jessie Montgomery (q.v.) she was selected as a Liberal representative.[11] (The Chancellor did not grant them an audience.) She was on the platform when the Earl of Lytton, Chair of the Conciliation Committee, addressed a public meeting organised by the NUWSS, and had been one of those who took luncheon with him beforehand.[12]
By the end of 1910 she presided at an NUWSS meeting addressed by the ‘lady supervisor’ of the Women and Children’s Labour Exchange[13] and in January 1911 she was elected as Chair of the Exeter Branch, a position she retained throughout until the branch disbanded.[14]
Tom Linscott continued to support the cause of women’s suffrage himself, trying (without success) in March 1911 to get the City Council to agree to a motion urging the Government to bring forward a bill to give the vote to women ratepayers.[15] ‘Applause from the gallery’ at a speech in support of the motion suggests that women suffrage activists were present.
Linscott regularly attended NUWSS events during 1912 and 1913 including public meetings and the meeting of the committee with the Countess of Selborne, president of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association.[16]. But her enthusiasm for Liberalism outweighed her interest in the NUWSS. She told the Exeter Women’s Liberal Association in 1913, when presented with a gift in appreciation of her 21 years’ service to them as Treasurer, that ‘her Liberalism was more ardent than every, and had not been lessened one iota because of her association with another Women’s Society’.[17]
During the First World War Tom Linscott, who was in his mid seventies, became frailer. From 1916 onwards the family experienced a stressful time. Tom was ill, and there was a long running question about the exemption from conscription granted to Maud and Tom’s son, Walter Linscott. Walter, a city councillor and special constable, who was 40 in 1917, was left to run the business with only the support of a boy and a girl once the other three shop assistants were called up. Discussions in the tribunal and on appeal, at which exemption continued to be granted, were widely reported in the papers and it was said that: ‘There was a great feeling in Exeter in regard to this case’. The tribunal maintained that the business was ‘one of the most important in the city’ and that ‘a pawnbroker was a poor man’s banker, and, therefore, a pawnbroker’s business was of national importance.’[18]
Tom died on Christmas Eve 1918, but Maud lived on in Exeter until 1936.
Entry created by Julia Neville, October 2018
[1] Family and census information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] In obituary of Tom Linscott, DEG, 27 Dec 1918.
[3] The masthead of their advertisements in the 1870s (e.g. FP, 5 Jan 1870) claimed that the business had been established in 1780, although Tom’s own parents had not been in Exeter themselves during the 1840s and 1850s.
[4] Devon & Exeter Gazette (DEG), 1 Nov 1907; 15 Oct 1908; Western Times (WT), 19 Sep 1907; 17 Dec 1908.
[5] WT, 13 Jul 1907; 2 Jan 1908; 22 & 29 Mar 1912; 22 Jan 1914.
[6] WT, 15 Feb 1910.
[7] WT, 20 Feb 1892.
[8] WT, 10 Mar 1892.
[9] WT, 26 Sep 07; 9 Mar 09.
[10] WT, 1 Dec 1909.
[11] WT 27 Oct 1910.
[12] WT, 8 Nov 1910.
[13] WT, 9 Dec 1910.
[14] DEG, 20 Jan 1911; WT 22 Mar 1912.
[15] DEG, 9 Mar 1911.
[16] DEG, 27 Jan 1912; 1 Nov 1912; 30 Nov 1912; 24 Oct 1913; 29 Nov 1913; 7 Apr 1914.
[17] WT 29 Apr 1913
[18] WT, 12 7 30 Jul 1918.