Eastbourne’s Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women

A movement is born

The organised campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain stretched back to the Victorian era, but it took on a new, militant character in 1903, when Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Manchester. Frustrated by decades of polite petitioning that had achieved nothing, the WSPU adopted the uncompromising motto “Deeds, not words.”

From around 1905, its members — the “suffragettes” — turned to ever more dramatic tactics: heckling politicians, chaining themselves to railings, smashing windows and, from 1912, a campaign of arson and bombing against property. Many were imprisoned, went on hunger strike, and were subjected to the brutal ordeal of force-feeding. It was a struggle waged the length of the country, and Sussex was no exception.

Suffragists and suffragettes

That distinction matters in a place like Eastbourne. Like much of Sussex, the town’s respectable Edwardian society was, on the whole, more inclined towards the peaceful suffragists than the militant suffragettes. Many people who genuinely supported votes for women were nonetheless uneasy about window-smashing and arson, fearing — as some campaigners themselves worried — that militancy was turning moderate opinion against the cause.

Yet the two wings of the movement were never entirely separate, and the WSPU’s reach extended right along the south coast. Eastbourne sat squarely within that reach, a comfortable resort town caught up, like everywhere else, in the great political question of the age.

The Sussex coast campaign

The Sussex coast was fertile ground for the suffrage movement. Brighton had one of the most active regional WSPU branches in the country, founded in 1907 and organised for a time by Mary Clarke — Emmeline Pankhurst’s own sister, who regularly addressed crowds on the seafront and who died in 1910 shortly after imprisonment, mourned by Emmeline as the movement’s “first woman martyr.”

The militant WSPU maintained a well-established presence along the whole stretch of coast running from Hove and Brighton through Eastbourne to St Leonards and Hastings. The seaside setting helped: suffragettes frequently took holidays in these coastal towns, a fact that could also aid discreet, anonymous activity. Eastbourne, then, was not an isolated backwater but part of a connected chain of suffrage activity strung along the Sussex shore.

Eastbourne and the cause

Eastbourne’s own suffrage story is a quieter one than Brighton’s, but the town was genuinely part of the campaign. It fell within the WSPU’s established south-coast territory, and its women were active supporters of votes for women, taking part in the wider Sussex movement rather than watching from the sidelines.

The town also has a personal link to one of the movement’s more militant figures. Florence Olivia Tunks, a WSPU suffragette who, with Hilda Burkitt, carried out an arson campaign in Suffolk in 1914 and was imprisoned for it, spent her later years in Eastbourne and died in the town in 1985, at the age of 93. It is a reminder that the women who fought these battles lived long lives afterwards, and that their stories thread quietly through ordinary towns like this one.

The 1913 pilgrimage

The single clearest glimpse of Eastbourne women in the campaign comes from the summer of 1913, when the peaceful NUWSS organised a great Suffrage Pilgrimage — a mass, law-abiding march on London from towns across the country, designed to show the breadth of respectable support for votes for women without any hint of militancy.

The Sussex contingent, around 100 strong, set out on foot from Brighton and gathered support as it went, walking towards a huge rally in Hyde Park. Along the route, women from Eastbourne joined the marchers, adding the town’s voice to the peaceful demand for the vote. It was suffrage at its most dignified and public — ordinary women walking mile after mile to make a constitutional case that could no longer be ignored.

War, victory and after

The militant campaign came to an abrupt halt in August 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War led the WSPU to suspend its activities and throw its energies behind the war effort. Women’s vital contribution to the wartime economy did much to shift public and political opinion in their favour.

Victory, when it came, was partial at first. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 finally gave the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification — a huge breakthrough, but far from equality. It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women won the vote on the same terms as men, at the age of 21. Eastbourne’s women, like women everywhere in Britain, had at last secured the right that campaigners along this coast and across the country had fought so hard to win.

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