The hero force-fed through a tube up her nose in Perth prison cell
Arabella Scott was born in Dunoon on May 7, 1886.
As a young woman she found herself in deep trouble with the authorities having dared, aged 23, to take a petition calling for women’s rights to Downing Street.
She got 21 days in Holloway Jail and she like many others decided to go on hunger strike so that she would have to be released.
It was a strategy called ‘cat and mouse’ where as soon as they got out, the Suffragettes went on to protest again.
This educated, unmarried woman was very focused on improving women’s lives, drawing attention to working class girls and how appallingly they were treated, particularly in prostitution and the sexual sphere of society.
She wanted change and the ballot box was just part of a wider mission for women’s rights.
Arabella got a nine month sentence in 1913 when she was convicted of burning down a stand at Kelso racecourse. She served the sentence only for a few weeks at a time because she was refusing food and the hunger strike tactic ensured she kept being released to recover.
But when she interrupted a bi-election meeting provoking the Liberal candidate with an insulting placard and shouting, Arabella burnt her last bridge and it was decided to send her to Perth where she could be forced to eat and early release would not happen again.
Arabella was unlucky in that the feeding method employed by Hugh Ferguson Watson, medical officer to the Scottish Prison Service at Perth Prison, worked. The food given to her through a tube up her nose entered her body successfully and instead of losing weight, she gained it.
The way women were force-fed was a hidden torture and it involved being held down by a group of female warders, pipe up nostrils, mouth clamped shut to avoid vomiting and being held this way for two hours, twice a day, every day.
Arabella’s sister Muriel took action to reveal what was happening to Arabella. She moved to Perth, put up a stall in the High Street by the river and spread the word about her sister’s horrible distress in the nearby prison.
Gradually women came to support Arabella.
In the summer of 1914 all the hotels were full in Perth with women intent on seeing Arabella freed and 3000 women marched on the jail.
They picketed the entrance. They sang songs at night, they tried to rally the spirits of Arabella in her lonely cell inside.
The women even interrupted a service at St Ninian’s Cathedral, standing up to remind the religious faithful that while they came to pray, a woman was suffering not a mile away.
Public buildings were shut on safety grounds. A cinema screening had to be abandoned.
Fifty extra police were brought to Perth. It was the most dramatic thing that anyone could remember.
Finally Arabella was released and she went to recover at a house in Charlotte Street by the North Inch.
After that she worked as a nurse in a field hospital as this was the time of the Great War.
She married and moved to Australia. Arabella lived into her 90s, a personality bent on change who only left the world in 1980.
But her early life and her unhappy time in Perth is what made this charismatic and spirited woman such an inspiration to the city that held her against her will.
• Ajay Close told Arabella’s story in her book on the Suffragette struggle and Perth, published in 2015, titled ‘A Petrol Scented Spring’.