Pring Mrs Mary

Pring Mrs Mary, Spreytonway, Hoopern Place, Exeter

 Mary Lambert Pring née Lambert (1880-1973)[1] was born in Spreyton, on the fringe of Dartmoor, the daughter of George and Grace Lambert. George farmed at Coffins, described in 1881 as a 245-acre farm on which he employed three labourers. He died in 1885, when Mary was five and her elder brother George was just 18. Grace, who appears to have been a forceful and ambitious woman, had helped her husband expand the farm to 800 acres[2] and now helped her son to make a career in politics.[3] George Lambert became a Devon county councillor in 1888, and won a Parliamentary by-election for the South Molton constituency in 1891. He then had a long career as a Liberal MP, but always retained the farm at Coffins. George Lambert had been a supporter of women’s suffrage during the 1910 elections, but by 1913 his hostility to the militant action taken by the WSPU led him to change his mind.[4]

Mary is described on the 1891 census, aged 11, as ‘scholar’. The only reference to her schooling so far identified is an undated letter in the Lambert family papers from George to his mother describing how he had been to visit Mary at her school in Brighton and taken her out for lunch. The school appears to have been Miss Frewer’s School, 8 Sussex Square.[5] In 1891 the census shows there were 18 pupils there, aged between 12 and 18. Miss Frewer ran it supported by three of her nieces, and the staff also included a French and a German governess.

In June 1903 Mary married Walter Pring, son of Alderman Pring, JP, in Exeter Cathedral.[6] Walter was the third son of Walter senior, of Norman and Pring, the owners of St Ann’s Well Brewery and later, after a merger, of the City Brewery. Walter was a solicitor, specialising in licensing issues and property, often acting on behalf of the brewery’s tenants. It is not clear how Walter and Mary met, and their families were on opposite sides of the political spectrum as Alderman Pring was a staunch Conservative, President of the Exeter Constitutional Club and the Exeter Conservative Working Men’s Society, who had been Mayor of Exeter in 1880.[7]

The Prings lived first at 87 Magdalen Road but in 1908 they bought a house called Elliott Cottage on Hoopern Place. This was a gothic-style villa in Pennsylvania, shown in the 1911 census (when Mary’s mother Grace Lambert was visiting, as apparently she often did, coming in to Exeter for medical advice following a stroke[8]) as having 12 rooms. They employed a cook and a house-parlourmaid. The Prings changed the villa’s name to Spreytonway and made alterations to suit themselves. They appear to have shared an interest in gardening, and employed a gardener and a gardener’s boy to help.[9]: On one occasion they are both named as winning prizes at the Devon and Exeter Horticultural Society Annual Show,[10] and the table decorations at events hosted at Spreytonway sometimes receive special attention, such as the ‘baskets of bronze and gold chrysanthemums tied with pale blue ribbons’ on the table when Lady Selborne of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association visited.[11] Mary Pring won the Horticultural Society’s silver challenge cup, three times in a row in 1912, thus becoming its permanent owner; and at the 1912 meeting was also a judge for table decorations, baskets and sprays.[12]

Pring attended the At Home organised by Jessie Montgomery (q.v.) in the Barnfield Hall on 15 Feb 1909, effectively the initial meeting of the Exeter Branch of he National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).[13] She hosted a meeting of the branch at Spreytonway that July;[14] attended the August meeting and was a steward at the public meeting in December 1909 and in March 1910.[15]  Her support for women’s suffrage was shared by her husband, who appeared on the platform at the December 1909 meeting. Spreytonway was used several times in the summer for Exeter NUWSS events.[16]

In January 1910 Pring went with a small group of Exeter NUWSS women to a meeting in Topsham hosted by Mary Frood (q.v.) and spoke, advocating the need for women to have a vote on the same terms as men – women who owned property or paid £10 for their lodgings.’ ‘They simply asked for justice and nothing more’, she said.[17]

Pring, like her husband’s family, and unlike her brother George Lambert, MP, was a Conservative. As such she featured as a member of the deputation from the NUWSS who sought an interview with Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he was on a  visit to the Westcountry.[18] (Lloyd George refused to meet them.) The NUWSS had better luck with Lord Lytton, chair of the Conciliation Committee, and Pring was among those who attended the luncheon for him in the coffee room of the Rougemont Hotel. This preceded a public meeting at the Barnfield Hall in the evening, when Pring was one of the platform party.[19] When the establishment of a Devon and Exeter branch of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association was mooted she was one of those who met the Countess of Selborne, the national President, and entertained her at Spreytonway that afternoon.[20]

By early 1911 Pring is referred to as being ‘re-elected’ to the Committee and later that year she succeeded Dr E.J. Domville as President of the Exeter NUWSS branch[21], a position she remained until 1916 when she resigned because of her war-time nursing commitments.[22] She did not, however, take the chair at public meetings, a task normally performed on the branch’s behalf by Sir Robert Newman, a Vice-President.[23]

At the outbreak of war, Pring chaired the meeting of members of the branch to consider the practical help they could give in ‘the present national emergency’. While waiting for the local Relief Committee to identify possible opportunities, she urged members to support the Mayoress’s and the Red Cross Linen Depot by supplying clothing such as shirts and socks and, if they could afford it, to employ some of the ‘seamstresses and small private dressmakers’ who would otherwise be under-employed, to make them.[24]

Both Mary and Walter decided to commit their personal time during the war to support the Red Cross. Mary worked as a nurse with Devon VAD 16 at Exeter’s Temporary War Hospital No 2, sited in the Episcopal Modern School just down the road below Spreytonway, from the date it opened in October 1914 until its closure in 1919, with only a short break to help her mother during her final days in Spreyton.[25] Walter became Red Cross Transport Officer for the Exeter Hospitals.[26]

Other charitable causes supported by the Prings were the Exeter Lying-in Charity,[27] and the Exeter District Nursing Association (Mary was for a while joint honorary secretary).[28] They were involved in fund-raising on behalf of the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, particularly through the GHCH fund-raising dances in 1921, raising funds for Golf, Hospital, Cricket and Hunting.[29]

Pring does not appear to have played a part in the post-war movement for equal citizenship in Exeter. The Prings later moved to Wynnards Mead, Tiverton, probably in the early 1930s and this is where Mary was recorded in 1939. Walter died there in October 1951 and Mary moved to Quarryfield, Baker’s Hill, Tiverton where she died on 5 August 1973. She is buried in the churchyard at Spreyton.

 

 

Entry created by Julia Neville, October 2018


[1] Family and census information from www.ancestry.co.uk

[2] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Lambert, George, first Viscount Lambert. Available at https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34384  Accessed 6 Oct 2018.

[3] WT, 30 Apr 1915, obituary of Grace Lambert.

[4] WT, 4 Feb 1913.

[5] Devon Heritage Centre, 6683M (uncatalogued at June 2018), letter from George Lambert. Of the eight schools listed in Kelly’s Directory for Brighton, 1890, the only boarding school is Miss Frewer’s.

[6] Devon and Exeter Gazette, (DEG) 5 Jun 1903.

[7] DEG, 14 Feb 1911.

[8] WT, 30 Apr 1915.

[9] DEG, 17 Sep 1908; WT, 13 Sep 1912.

[10] Western Times (WT), 12 Nov 1909.

[11] WT, 1 Nov 1912.

[12] WT, 8 Nov 1912.

[13] DEG, 16 Feb 1909.

[14] DEG, 17 Jul 1909.

[15] WT, 10 Aug & 1 Dec 1909; 17 Mar 1910.

[16] WT, 1 Nov 1912; DEG, 10 Jul 1914.

[17] DEG, 13 Jan 1910.

[18] WT, 27 Oct 1910, letter from Jessie Montgomery to the editor.

[19] WT, 8 Nov 1910.

[20] DEG, 1 Nov 1912.

[21] DEGI, 4 Apr 1911.

[22] WT, 17 Apr 1916.

[23] DEG, 17 Jan & 5 Oct 1912.

[24] WT, 17 Aug 1914.

[25] https://vad.redcross.org.uk/Card?fname=Mary&sname=pring&id=243579&last=true Accessed 6 Oct 2018. WT, 30 Apr 1915.

[26] WT, 13 Oct 1919 published an open letter from him expressing thanks for the support given during the war.

[27] WT, 29 Jan 1915; DEG,13 Mar 1920; 19 Mar 1921.

[28] WT, 4 Mar 1915; 17 Apr 1916

[29] WT, 28 Feb & 21 Dec 1921.

 

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