An easy puzzle cache to celebrate Lilian Lenton, Leicester’s forgotten suffragette, and International Women’s Day on 8 March 2019.
Leicester City Council rightly celebrates Alice Hawkins, but there is another Leicester woman who was arguably a more significant figure in the women’s suffrage movement: Lilian Lenton.
Alice Hawkins is well worth celebrating, of course. You can see her statue at the nominal location of this cache and read about her here . That web page refers to the WSPU Shop at 14 Bowling Green Street, Waypoint02. The building is still there, and quite recognisable from the attached photograph.
Alice Hawkins is evidently seen by modern-day authorities as the acceptable face of suffrage militancy. She was arrested several times, but for relatively harmless crimes such as chaining herself to railings, pouring ink through letter boxes and throwing stones at the Home Office (it is especially easy to relate to the last).
Lilian Lenton was a good deal more militant. Born in Leicester in 1891 to a working-class family she became attached to the cause of women’s suffrage as a teenager and joined the WSPU as soon as she was 21. Soon after, yet another opportunity to take some action on the suffrage question was missed by government and parliament (all men of course), and Lilian lost patience. In February 1913 she took to a campaign of arson, starting with a night-time attack on the tea room at Kew Gardens. She was several times arrested and imprisoned. She invariably went on hunger strike and was force-fed. On one occasion the force-feeding went so badly wrong that she was very nearly killed and her case became a cause-celebre, not least because the then Home Secretary lied about it (some things never change). It was as a result of Lilian’s and others' hunger strikes that the infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ was passed enabling the authorities to release prisoners into known accommodation and re-imprison them when they had recovered some strength.
Lilian made full use of the possibilities that this raised, absconding every time despite being in premises that were under constant police surveillance. In Harrogate a procession of veiled women left the building at once, scattering in different directions and the police were not able to follow them all. In Leeds Lilian, a slight woman of just 5’2”, dressed as an errand boy, passing the observers in a delivery van while insouciantly reading a comic and eating an apple. She became known as the ‘tiny, wily, elusive Pimpernel’.
Now arson is a terrible crime, your CO does not endorse it. Not only does it cause damage to property, but fires tend to get out of hand so that there is a great danger of loss of life. However, Lilian and her accomplices did take pains to ensure that the buildings they burned were unoccupied. On one occasion they met an elderly housekeeper, whom they had not known was present, and left without setting any fire after explaining why they were arsonists (and were duly arrested). It is hard not to have a soft spot for a young woman who, in pursuit of what was after all a good cause and at great pain to herself, ran such rings around the authorities of her day.
In 1914, at the outbreak of war, the WSPU temporarily put aside their demands and suspended their actions in order to support the war effort. Lilian served with the Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit and was given a medal by the French Red Cross. In later life she continued to campaign for women’s rights. She died in 1972.
The cache puzzle is easily solved from your desk:
The WSPU shop on Bowling Green Street opened in 19ab.
At Waypoint01 is the office of a female solicitor; G Wright. When Lilian was young this profession was also closed to women; the first women were admitted to the Law Society in 1922.
Lilian’s accomplice in the attack on Kew Gardens was O W.
In June 1913 Lilian was arrested in D and was charged under the pseudonym M Dennis. She of course absconded.
She was arrested in October 1913, absconded, and was rearrested in December charged with setting fire to a mansion in C. She again escaped and was at large until May 1914 when she was arrested in B.
Lilian later said: "Whenever I was out of prison my object was to burn x buildings a week … to prove it was impossible to govern without the consent of the governed”
Count the letters in the missing words; a, b and x are already numbers, don’t count their letters. You should have ten small numbers; a, b, B, C, D, G, M, O, W, x. The cache is at
N52 (W-M)(D-x).(C-a)(O-a)M W001 b(G+a).Dx(B-a)
You can check your solution at:
