Race to save clippings from trees planted by suffragettes

A UNIVERSITY is in a race against time to save several tree clippings from a “lost” suffragette retreat discovered 60 years after the site was destroyed.

The retreat, known as Annie’s Arboretum, was home to campaigners including Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst from 1909 to 1911 as they recuperated from their prison sentences by planting trees and gardening.

Located just outside Bath, the plantation’s 47 trees were destroyed in the Sixties to make way for a council estate. Last summer, five clippings were found in storage boxes in the University of East Anglia’s archives by the writer in residence.

Justine Mann, a literary archivist at