Powerhouse A life of activism bringing change for many
Two hundred years ago, one of the most remarkable women of the Victorian age was born; not only was Frances Power Cobbe a formidable campaigner for women’s rights, but she pioneered animal rights, too. Jonathan Rowe looks at her life and connections to Br
WRITER, philanthropist, religious thinker, and campaigner for animal rights and women’s votes Frances Power Cobbe was born in Dublin on December 4, 1822, and died in Wales in 1904, but she had many West Country connections.
Her parents, Charles Cobbe and Frances Conway, had been married at St Swithin’s, Bath, and as an infant she lived at Bower Hill House in Melksham. As a child, she often stayed with her maternal grandmother at 29 Royal Crescent in Bath.
She first visited Bristol aged 14, on her way to a boarding school in Brighton, but it was in 1858, after having travelled the world, that she came to live and work here with Mary Carpenter at her girls’ reformatory at The Red Lodge on Park Row, and at the ragged school and boys’ Sunday school at St James Back, Lewin’s Mead.
Cobbe lodged with Mary Carpenter for a year, but found Carpenter’s complete lack of interest in creature comforts intolerable and she eventually moved to lodgings at Belgrave House, Pembroke Grove, Durdham Down. At Clifton, she enjoyed walking her grey Pomeranian dog Hajjin across the Downs, as far as Kingsweston House in Henbury.
In Bristol she became friends with Margaret Elliot, the spinster daughter of Rev Gilbert Elliot (Dean of Bristol for over 40 years), and with prison reformer, lawyer and MP Matthew Davenport Hill of Heath House, Stapleton (now a private psychiatric hospital).
The West of England Suffrage Society, part of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage was formed at his home in 1868, Cobbe being a founder member and first president of the National Society. Her other Bristol friends included noted surgeon Dr Henry Goodeve and his wife Isabel, of Cook’s Folly, Sneyd Park.
Cobbe never married and had intense feelings for a number of women during her life. Of the scientist and polymath Mary Somerville (42 years her senior), Cobbe wrote how she once “kissed me tenderly and gave me her photograph,” and of how she felt “such tender affection” for Somerville that “sitting beside her on the sofa … I could hardly keep myself from caressing her”.
From 1861 to 1862 Cobbe spent time in Italy, staying for a while with retired American actress Charlotte Saunders Cushman, who had created an expatriate community of lesbian artists and writers in Rome. Cushman had performed regularly at the Theatre Royal, Bristol in the 1840s and 1850s, usually in male roles. In 1848 she played Romeo in Bristol opposite Matilda Hays, her lover of ten years, as Juliet. Offstage, the pair were inseparable, dressed alike and called each other “Matthew” and “Max.”
Cobbe herself wore her hair cut short, and adopted fashions perceived as male. Botanist and explorer Joseph Dalton Hooker referred to her as “a disenchanting mountain of flesh”, but novelist Louisa May Alcott wrote of Cobbe “it was as if a great sunbeam had entered the room”.
While in Rome, Cobbe met Welsh sculptor Mary Lloyd, who would become her lifelong partner. They lived together as a couple from 1864 until Lloyd’s death in 1896. Mary Lloyd’s death affected Cobbe greatly. Cobbe referred to Mary as “my wife”, “my husband” or “dear friend”. They were buried together in St Illtyd’s church cemetery, Llanelltyd, Wales. They had moved from London to Hengwrt in Gwynned in 1884.
Their friends included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, the MP, philosopher and political economist,
poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, and the actress, writer and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, all of whom recognised Frances and Mary as a couple.
Mary was an executive of the Home for Lost Dogs founded in 1860, which became Battersea Dogs Home. The pair raised money for the home by remortgaging their house.
Cobbe was also a founder member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection which was formed on June 14, 1898, at a public meeting in Bristol. It is nowadays Cruelty Free International and campaigns mainly against the use of animals for testing cosmetics.
Cobbe also founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society in 1875, the first in the world to campaign against animal experiments. Her work led to the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876.
Frances Cobbe wrote a huge number of books, essays and popular journalism. She also fought for women to be allowed to attend university, take examinations, and to graduate with degrees on the same basis as men.
She wrote in praise of spinsterhood, but took up the cause of women victims of domestic violence. Her campaigning helped to bring about the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 which enabled abused women to leave violent husbands and obtain financial support.
A moving spirit in the moral and social progress of her time Tribute from friends of Frances Power Cobbe
In 1888 she championed the appointment of female police detectives saying, “Why should such a thing be unheard of in this land?”
In 1877 Frances Cobbe returned to Bristol to attend an anti-vivisection meeting and to address a meeting for women’s suffrage at the Victoria Rooms, where she shared a platform with Mary Carpenter.
In 1881 Cobbe gave six lectures in Clifton on the “Duties of Women”, and in February 1883 addressed an anti-vivisection meeting at “Pitch and Pay”, the Stoke Bishop home of Mrs Charles Thomas. In her autobiography The Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as Told by Herself, she recalled her time in Bristol, including a disappointing encounter: “There was a boy who was sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on ‘Thankfulness,’ wherein I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as subjects for praise, and interrogated him as to the pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of the year. He replied, candidly, “Cock fighting ma’m. There’s a pit up by the Black Boy, (pub) as is worth anythink in Brissel!”
The last time Cobbe spoke in public was at the opening of the Clifton Ladies Club at 45 Royal York Crescent, when she paid a last visit to the city on the occasion of her 80th birthday in December 1902. She also presided at a committee
meeting of the Bristol Branch of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.
For her 80th birthday she received a congratulatory address signed by a huge number of friends and admirers who recognised her as “a moving spirit in the moral and social progress of her time”. Those signing included Henry James, Florence Nightingale, Mark Twain and former US President Grover Cleveland.
She wrote: “I have just had an amusing experience – a journalist sent to gather my views as to the changes in Bristol in the last 40 years. Goodness knows what a hash he will make of it! … It is a city of the dead to me. So many that are gone, who were friends long ago.”
She died on April 4, 1904, aged 81. Fearing, as many did at the time, that she might not be truly dead and could revive in the coffin, she directed her executors to pay a doctor to completely sever the arteries of her neck and windpipe to make any revival impossible.
In his 1907 book, Bristol and Its Famous Associations, Stanley Hutton described Frances Power Cobbe as “one of the advanced, who by her fearless advocacy, both by tongue and pen, did much to in her life time to ameliorate the conditions of her sex”. In 2018 her name and image were included on the plinth of the statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London.