Billinghurst, Rosa May, 1875-1953

Rosa May Billinghurst (1875-1953) was born in Lewisham in 1875. As a child she became paralysed from the waist down, leaving her disabled throughout her adult life. However, this did not prevent her becoming active in social work in a Greenwich workhouse, teaching in a Sunday school and joining the Band of Hope. She was also politically active in the Women's Liberal Association before becoming a member of the Women's Social & Political Union (WSPU) in 1907. She took part in the WSPU's march to the Albert Hall in Jun 1908 and also helped run the group's action in the Haggerston by-election the following month. Two years later, she founded and was the first secretary of the Greenwich branch of the WSPU and that same year she took part in the 'Black Friday' demonstrations where she was thrown out of her adapted tricycle and arrested. She was arrested several more times in the next few years culminating in a sentence of eight months for damage to letterboxes ('pillar box arson') and imprisoned in Holloway Prison. She went on hunger strike and was force-fed with other suffragettes. The experience led her to be released two weeks later on grounds of ill health. She was able to speak at a public meeting in West Hampstead in Mar 1913 and took part in the funeral procession of Emily Wilding Davison two months later. She supported Christabel Pankhurst's campaign to be elected in Smethwick in 1918 and the friendship with the Pankhursts seems to have survived into the 1920s. However, she later joined the Women's Freedom League and became part of the Suffragette Fellowship. She spent the last years of her life in Sunbury on Thames. She died on the 4 Sep 1953.