entertainment Miss Cochran jumped up on a table ‘regardless of the crockery’ and delivered her closing speech ‘to the accompaniment of a lusty chorus of fellow-suffragists’. Perhaps the best-known event in the history of the Suffrage Club was the great London ‘Suffrage Procession’ of June 1908, when its members, marching alongside fellow suffragists from a sister Newnham society with ‘favours of light blue silk on their shoulders’, joined an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 supporters of the cause parading from Charing Cross to the Royal Albert Hall. The Girton and Newnham contingent were still, at this time, denied degrees and were therefore unable to wear the academic gowns proudly displayed by other ‘university and college women’. But the Cambridge cohort, at least 400-strong, carried another marker of identity. The famous blue and silver Cambridge Alumnae Banner, commissioned (and reputedly stitched) by their combined societies, was one of approximately sixty beautiful, handembroidered banners waving above that day’s marchers. At the head of the procession walked a redoubtable trio: Lady Frances Balfour, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Emily Davies. Many thought it remarkable that 78year-old Miss Davies, hailed by the press as ‘the oldest suffragist in England’, completed the course.
44
The Year
Dorothy Tarrant
From Girton Review, 1907 (Archive reference: GCCP 2/1/1 part)
From Girton Review, 1909 (Archive reference: GCCP 2/1/1 part)
Not everyone in Girton was a supporter of women’s suffrage. Some, including at an official level the College authorities, thought it best to keep ‘politics’ of this kind at a distance. Others showed outright opposition. In November 1908, a member of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League spoke in College, and a Girton branch of the same organisation was formed. At meetings of this rival society, members of the Suffrage Club sometimes attended, and were not afraid to subject speakers to energetic questioning. The Girton Anti-Suffrage League was in existence until Lent Term 1913, although it organised many fewer meetings in its later years. The College Suffrage Club continued to meet until Lent Term 1916. However, as with many national groups, from 1914 campaigning for the vote was replaced by support for women’s war work. Girtonians’ activism, however, was not confined to College. Many former students took up local and national roles as speakers and organisers; many joined their local suffrage associations, including the Cambridge Association for Women’s Suffrage, founded in 1884. That group also attracted members of Girton Staff, including (from at least 1907) E E Constance Jones, Mistress from 1903 to 1916, and (from early