Last weekend, I was invited to join Funny Women’s panel Women, Humour and Power at the Edinburgh Fringe following the recent publication of my book The Women Who Built Bristol, which shares the stories of more than 250 amazing but rarely told stories of fantastic women. Don’t let the ‘Bristol’ bit of the title put you off: plenty of the women in the book had a national impact as well as a regional one, and many are sheroes that women everywhere should be grateful to.
Below are a few shortened pieces about three of my favourite humorous and powerful women from the book, ones I’ve specifically chosen for Funny Women followers because these were women who weren’t afraid to be a little bit mischievous to get what they wanted.
VERA WENTWORTH, 1890-1957
Jessie Spinks was an ordinary shop girl who turned herself into the extraordinary suffragette ‘Vera Wentworth’ in 1908. As Vera, Jessie was arrested for the first time in February 1908 and sentenced to six weeks in Holloway for taking part in a raid on the House of Commons; after carving ‘Votes for Women’ into the wall of her cell, she had an extra day added to her sentence.
Following her release, Vera threw herself into things and joined a secret spin-off group called the Young Hot Bloods, pledging to undertake “danger duty” in the name of women’s suffrage. Of the older suffragettes, only Emmeline Pankhurst was permitted to sit in on their meetings at a tea shop on London’s Strand. Indeed, elder suffragist Emily Blathwayt found Vera so charming but wayward that she affectionately referred to her as “the young hooligan we know”.
On 27 November 1909, Vera was released from a spell in Horfield Gaol and recounted her experiences of being forced fed after four days of hunger strike: “At four o’clock on Tuesday they brought a nasal tube. They forced me onto my bed and six wardresses held me down. I resisted all I could but it was impossible to hold out against them. That was done twice a day until I came out.” Amazingly, she added: “The wardresses were really kind to me, as kind as they possibly could be.”
AMELIA EDWARDS, 1831-1892
Foreign travel was quite the fashionable thing for Victorians to do, so in 1873 Amelia Edwards embarked on a voyage down the Nile. Arriving at a tomb, she found a small opening in the sand and started digging with her bare hands while wearing her voluminous Victorian skirts. Her passion in life was found.
Amelia kept most of her collection of Egyptian antiquities in her home, and in an 1891 article for The Arena she describes how her hundreds of artefacts are kept out of sight in her library. While legend has it that Amelia kept an Egyptian mummy in her wardrobe, the truth is rather more gruesome: “There are stranger things… fragments of spiced and bituminized humanity to be shown to visitors who are not nervous, or given to midnight terrors. Here is a baby’s foot in the Japanese cabinet. There are three mummified hands behind Allibone’s Dictionary in the library. There are two arms with hands complete in a drawer in my dressing-room; and grimmest of all, I have the heads of two ancient Egyptians in a wardrobe in my bedroom, who, perhaps, talk to each other in the watches of the night, when I am sound asleep.”
PAT VT WEST, 1938-2008
“Tall and striking,” began performer Pat VT West’s obituary. “She dressed for effect in flowing clothes, adorned with vivid scarves and huge necklaces.” It is fair to say that everything Pat did, she did both for and with effect.
In 1970, Pat met Jackie Thrupp who was to become her partner in crime with Sistershow: a feminist theatre company that used humour, sketches and songs to get the message out. They were a disruptive force, often turning up at events, throwing leaflets into the crowd and questioning gender stereotypes. Tired of just talking about women’s liberation, Pat and Jackie decided to “move out of dull meetings and use art to show what we meant”.
On one occasion they gatecrashed a Women’s Institute lunch, by marching through the doors dressed in French maid outfits, dishing out spoons of alphabetti spaghetti onto the stunned guests’ plates and telling them to “eat their words”.
After the end of Sistershow, Pat continued to perform… in both conventional (eg at the Edinburgh Fringe) and less conventional forms (eg in court). Vehemently anti-nuclear, Pat gave evidence at the Hinkley Enquiry, which she billed as a “stand-up comic piece”. Dressed as an elderly lady, Pat’s character nervously delivered her evidence to the court, with the onlookers slowly realising that what was happening was a piece of theatre and bursting into laughter. Despite the chairman berating the crowd for laughing, Pat claims she left the stand to “riotous applause” and considered it a triumph.
The Women Who Built Bristol is written by Jane Duffus, published by Tangent Books and is a fundraiser for Bristol Women’s Voice. If you buy from this link then all the money goes straight to the charity. It is also available as an e-book.
