ROCK THE VOTE
AN EPIC LOVE STORY AND A SUFFRAGETTE LEADER TURN UP IN MICHELLE’S FAMILY HISTORY…
The new series of Our Girl isn’t the only place you’ll be seeing Michelle this week. She’s also appearing in a Who Do You Think You Are? special as part of the Hear Her season, marking the centenary of women gaining the right to vote in the UK. As Michelle looks into her family history, she learns that the registrar who signed her great-grandmother’s Norah’s birth certificate was none other than suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst.
“I didn’t know that she was a registrar, so when I saw the name I didn’t connect it at first,” Michelle tells Inside TV. “It was just like, ‘I’ve seen that name before – why is it on the birth certificate?’ It wasn’t until the researcher told me who she was that it clicked, which made it even more shocking.”
Realising her greatgreat-grandmother Elizabeth knew Emmeline Pankhurst, Michelle looks for evidence she was active in the suffrage movement, and finds conclusive proof in the 1911 census.
“Her occupation on the census was
‘suffragist’,” reveals the star. “It just proved she was very proud of what she did and what she was trying to achieve – and her husband John, my greatgreat-grandfather, also signed the census, which means that he was in support of the movement as well. It makes me so happy.” The show also sees Michelle looking into her family history in Gibraltar, where she learns that her greatgrandmother Leonor broke social convention for love. “I only ever knew my great-grandma as an old lady who didn’t speak any English – she was loving, though,” she recalls. “She was a Roman Catholic in Gibraltar, and in the 1930s it was unheard of that you’d marry from different religions. She fell in love with my great-grandfather who wasn’t a Roman Catholic, and instead of marrying in my great-grandma’s parish, they went to another one and found a priest who would marry them. I just love that story as it’s like a fairy tale – they had to jump so many hurdles to be together.”