Teresa Billington-Greig

Teresa Billington-Greig was born in Preston in 1877 and brought up in Blackburn in a family of catholic drapers. After leaving home and despite having no qualifications, she began work as a teacher at a Roman Catholic school in Manchester until her own agnosticism made this impossible. From there she joined the Municipal Education School service where her religious beliefs brought her into conflict with her employers. However, through the Education Committee there she met Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 who found her work in a Jewish school, and that same year she became a member of the Independent Labour Party.

In April 1904 she was the founder and honorary secretary of the local branch of the Equal Pay League within the National Union of Teachers. In either late 1903 or early 1904, she joined the Women's Social and Political Union and became one of their travelling speakers. The following year she was asked to become the second full-time organiser of the group in its work with the Labour Party and in this capacity she organised publicity and demonstrations as well as building up the group's new national headquarters in London. In June of 1906, Billington was arrested in an affray outside of Asquith's home and later sentenced to a fine or two months in Holloway. An anonymous reader of the Daily Mirror paid the fine. In June of that same year, she was sent to organise the WSPU in Scotland and it was here that she married Frederick Lewis Greig the following year. However, growing differences with the Pankhursts led to her resignation as a paid organiser, though she remained in the group as a member until October. It was then, on the occasion of the Pankhursts' unilateral rewriting of the body's constitution, that she left the group along with Charlotte Despard to form the Women's Freedom League on the basis of organisational democracy. However, she once more resigned in 1910 when the WFL undertook a new campaign of militancy after the defeat of the Conciliation Bill.

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