Phillips, Mrs and Miss Marion, 14 Tothill Avenue, Plymouth
It has not proved possible to identify with any certainty the family and background of Marion Phillips and her mother. Meetings were held at 14 Tothill Avenue; Marion wrote a letter with that as her address; and Mrs Phillips is listed as the occupant in Kelly’s Directory of Devonshire, 1914. A different family, however, lived there at the time of the census in 1911. Devon History Society would welcome any information that leads to the discovery of the background of the Phillipses.
Marion Phillips is first noted as a suffrage activist in Plymouth in October 1911 when she gave a lecture to the Monday Street Men’s Adult School on the topic of ‘The Bible and Woman Suffrage’.[1] Apparently this was a success, and she was ‘asked to return in a fortnight to answer questions’. In 1912 she supported the initiative taken by the Devonport Labour Party to hold a week’s open air campaign for the extension of the vote, culminating in a public meeting. Phillips’s role was to be present at the smaller open-air meetings held in the run up to the mass meeting, and to answer questions about women’s suffrage.[2] She also spoke at a Laira Ward meeting timed to coincide with the campaigning for local elections in 1912.
That year, she, like many of the other Devon Suffrage Activists, became increasingly concerned about the way in which the Government was treating suffragists serving prison sentences. Phillips explained in a letter published in the Western Daily Mercury at the end of June that the hunger strikes were being adopted as a protest against not being treated as political prisoners. But she also questioned why two of the suffragette leaders had been released after serving only one month of their nine months’ sentence while seventy of their followers were kept in prison. She suggested that the Government dare not do ‘people of eminence’ what they did to the ‘rank and file’.[3]
Phillips also attended a debate on suffrage held by the Three Towns Parliamentary Debating Society (the Mock Parliament) that same autumn.[4] A delegation consisting of members of the Three Towns’ Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Annie Ramsay, q.v., Gwyneth Keys, q.v. and Phillips had been invited to defend when a mock Suffrage Bill was under debate. Phillips apparently spoke fluently, pointing out the injustice of paying taxes and being required to obey laws without having a say in who made those laws. She also drew attention to the way in which movements of reform in the past had often employed violent methods, and pointed out that ten American states had decided to enfranchise women. She closed by saying ‘The women of England as well as the men of England today had determined that they would not stand repression … At present ‘[we] are not asked what we want for ourselves; we are told to take what is given, and be good’.
Phillips began this speech by saying that she was proud of having ‘belonged from the very first’ to the WSPU led by Mrs Pankhurst and her gifted daughter.’ A Miss Phillips of Plymouth is indeed noted as sending a financial contribution of £1 in April 1909 to the WSPU[5]. However, she appears principally thereafter as a member of the NUWSS. She joined in a fund-raising dramatic performance, for the Three Towns NUWSS branch in 1911,[6] and she and her mother hosted a drawing room meeting at 14 Tothill Avenue at which Mrs Merivale Mayer spoke on ‘How the Vote was Won in Australia’.[7]
Marion’s mother, Mrs Phillips, became a committee member of the Three Towns NYWSS branch in 1914,[8] but she seems to have been even more committed to the work of the Free Church League for Women’s Suffrage. This was founded at a Surprise Party at Clarence Chambers in January 1912 at which Mrs Phillips was elected President.. She subsequently chaired the meeting at which Mrs Fewins (q.v.) spoke on her experience of caravanning in the Suffrage cause, and she and Marion ran the Free Church League Stall at the NUWSS fundraising event in December 1912.[9]
No further records of suffrage activity have been noted for either of the Phillipses.
Entry created by Julia Neville, January 2019
[1] Common Cause (CC) 2 Nov 1911, reporting on an event on Sunday October 25.
[2] CC, 1 Aug 1912, 293.
[3] Western Daily Mercury i(WDM), 26 Jun 1912.
[4] CC, 29 Nov 1912, 592; WDM, 20 Nov 1912.
[5] Votes for Women, 23 Apr 1909, 581.
[6] Western Morning News (WMN), 14 Dec 1911.
[7] CC, 30 Nov 1911, 596..
[8] WMN, 5 Mar 1914.
[9] WDM, 15 Jan, 8 Feb, & 5 Dec 1912.