The ‘Petticoat Council’ and a slice of Midland history...
IF, as an aspiring academic, you want to become famous for making ‘great discoveries’, you choose the natural or applied sciences, not history.
So, when an historian discovers maybe not penicillin or genomeediting, but still something apparently unique, you take note.
Some time ago I caught by chance a BBC Sounds broadcast describing the discovery of documentary evidence of at least some West Midlands women casting votes in local elections decades before history books tell us the 1869 Municipal Franchise Act legalised it.
I guess you’re pretty gobsmacked too. Even if not, though, please hang around – I must briefly describe the historic discovery, but the story’s point is totally 2021.
Before the otherwise franchiseextending 1832 Reform Act specified ‘male persons’ only, a few propertyowning women had been entitled to vote in both parliamentary and town council elections.
But, with no contradicting documentary evidence, it was widely believed, and taught, that even those few lost their voting rights completely in the 1830s, until unmarried women ratepayers regained them for municipal elections in 1869.
The BBC programme, however, described the recent discovery in Lichfield Record Office of an 1843 Poll Book.
Compiled apparently for local Conservative Party campaigning purposes, it detailed all voters in that year’s St Chad’s Parish election of an Assistant Overseer of the Poor – the bloke (naturally) with responsibility for outdoor (cash) or indoor (workhouse) poor relief.
And of the 371 voters in that 1843 election... 30 were women, including one, an evidently very well-heeled Grace Brown, with no fewer than four votes.
It was a genuine, history-rewriting discovery. If, however, you’re understandably curious to know more, then try ‘BBC Sounds: Votes for Victorian Women’.
Because we must turn to the programme’s presenter: Sarah Richardson, nowadays Professor of History at Warwick University, and author of the then recently published The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain.
A glance at her academic staff profile will immediately confirm her status as an eminent – and, I’d guess, inspirational – academic.
Again, though, we must press quickly on, because Richardson’s even more pertinent role here must surely be one unmentioned in her university profile: longstanding governor and currently chair of governors at Bishop’s Itchington Primary School.
Bishop’s Itchington? If asked even quite recently, the best I’d have managed would have been a ward on
Stratford-on-Avon District Council – because I know abstruse stuff about local elections – and take a left at J12 driving south on the M4.
It is in fact a South Warwickshire village/parish south-east of Royal Leamington Spa and about 18 miles from Coventry, which, as we’ll see, is more immediately relevant.
It has a lengthy history too, its name combining references to the passing River Itchen and the Bishop of the aforementioned Lichfield Cathedral.
In many European countries, and unquestionably in France with its 35,000 communes, even its reduced present-day population of around 2,000 would make Bishop’s Itchington what we would call a principal local authority in its own right, with an elected mayor, a full range of local powers and responsibilities, and significant control of its own funding.
But in a middle England parish council, without even these basics, where, you might ask, is there the potential even for much passing interest, never mind drama?
To which the answer is: in its elected councillors, and, more precisely, those elected in 1949 to form what became the first female majority council in the UK.
It’s a hefty claim, but, in respect of a village/parish whose primary school chair of governors just happens to be a national authority on such matters, pretty authoritative.
Professor Richardson herself summarises... Edith Chapple-Hyam, chair of the village Women’s Institute, was fed up with the all-male parish council’s lack of action on issues such as accessible electricity and running water, social housing, policing and speed restrictions, the sewage works, and public spaces, particularly for children.
In short, she and her WI members saw areas like Coventry being built up after the war and wanted a piece of the action. So, when an election was announced, she and five WI committee members submitted their nominations.
Most of the sitting councillors assumed that, as no doubt regularly happened, the election would go uncontested and they would be
...he was duly elected, but alongside all six women, who effectively took over
re-elected by default.
Only one, therefore, bothered to submit his papers before nominations closed.
He was duly elected – but alongside all six women, who effectively – in both senses – took over.
And now, just the 72 years on, the Bishop’s Itchington story has been both informatively and highly entertainingly dramatised as a ‘folk musical’ and one of Coventry’s UK City of Culture 2021 events.
Entitled Petticoat Council, I saw it myself recently at the Warwickspace Community Centre, and the mix of storytelling, song, dance and puppetry melded together by playwright Frankie Meredith – herself the great-niece of Ivy Payne, one of the six victorious councillors – is a delight, unquestionably worth catching if you can.
My sole initial reservation had been the slightly cheesy title, for which I was prepared to blame the Americans, who had instantly labelled a very similar women’s power grab in Umatilla, Oregon back in 1916 a ‘Petticoat Revolution.’
But I was wrong. It apparently came from a local newspaper – and you know what they’re like – reporting in 1952 how the men on the council were plotting to “overthrow petticoat rule”, as “the women have been getting too bossy”.
Material for a sequel perhaps? I’d certainly see it.