Ethel Moorhead 1869 – 1955

Ethel has a double claim to fame - as the finest Dundee woman artist of her time and as, if not the leader, then certainly the 'most turbulent' of Dundee's suffragettes!

Her involvement in the suffragette movement began in 1910 when she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Her first recorded acts of dissent were in 1911 when she threw an egg at Winston Churchill at a political meeting in Dundee and then became Dundee's first tax resister (refusing to pay tax on the basis of “no taxation without representation”).

She worked with fellow suffragette Fanny Parker in most of her window smashing raids.

In 1912 she was charged with smashing the windows of Thomas Cook's but was acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. It didn't deter her. She broke a glass case at the Wallace Monument in Stirling in the autumn of 1912. The act was deliberately designed to invoke the symbolism of the struggle for freedom. This cost her a night in Stirling Jail and she also spent a week in Perth Prison later in the same year. Neither experience broke her spirit with one prison governor describing her as “insolent and defiant”.

By December of 1912, Ethel was obviously getting a taste for adventure. She threw a stone at a car she thought was carrying Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day. It missed but the police didn't miss Ethel and she was banged up again. Once inside she smashed several panes of glass in her cell windows, refused to leave the exercise yard and went on hunger strike.

In January of 1913, she was arrested again, this time in Cupar, Fife. The offence? She threw pepper into the face of a policeman. True to form she smashed the glass in the police cell, flooded the passageways of the prison by turning on all the water in the lavatories and chucked a bucket of water on the prison officers who came to subdue her.

By the autumn of 1913, suffragette tactics had become more radical and involved fire-raising. Ethel was arrested along with Dorothea Smith in possession of fire-lighting equipment. She was sentenced to eight months imprisonment. Predictably defiant, Ethel was removed from the court during proceedings for contempt.

She immediately went on hunger strike and was released under the Cat and Mouse Act and instructed to report back to prison in 7 days. She didn't.

She was on the run for several months during which time police attributed at least four arson attacks to her.

She was caught have been seen in the vicinity of Traquair house acting suspiciously. She became the first suffragette to be force fed in Scotland - in Calton Jail in Edinburgh and was released with double pneumonia – the result of food getting into her lungs.

In July 1914 Ethel was almost certainly the woman who escaped when Fanny Parker was arrested for attempting to burn down Burns’ Cottage at Alloway.

References:

First foot which now seems to be under John D Clare.

Photo (c) Martin Emmerson