 On 19 September 2023, I was delighted to speak at an English Heritage event at which its 1000th blue plaque was unveiled. The plaque was installed at 1 Robert Street, the former London headquarters of the Women's Freedom League, a suffragist organisation. Below is the transcript of the speech I gave, as well as some videos of the event. Suffrage historian and author Elizabeth Crawford headlined the event, and you can find out more about her research via this link. I was meant to be looking for theatre reviews. I was browsing The Vote, the newspaper published by the Women’s Freedom League and which frequently included information about the plays that the Actresses Franchise League put on in support of their work. But, instead, my eye was drawn to a photograph of a woman in her kitchen, filling jars with homemade jam. I suppose the domestic scene - with bold floral wallpaper and stark-white apron - made this image stand out against the usual photos of suffrage processions and demonstrations. It was accompanied by a short article written by Edith How-Martyn, cofounder and honorary secretary of the League. I was intrigued to discover that her article was, in fact, a defence of jam making. ‘What has that to do with the suffrage movement?’ is a natural question to ask. Well, in the article Edith writes about the negativity she encountered from one member of the League who, upon seeing the photograph of Edith in the kitchen, stated, ‘What a fraud!’ This member felt that jam making or, rather, all activities associated with women’s domestic duties were incompatible with the work of a secretary of a suffrage group. Edith, clearly irked, uses the article to defend her love of cooking and baking. Rejecting any incompatibility, she instead pointedly laments the fact that the refusal of men in power to grant women the vote has meant that women have had to give up so many of these domestic activities in order to prioritise the fight for suffrage. The last bastion is jam-making and, she writes, ‘not even the suffrage can induce me to give up making my own jam’. When we consider the extremely restrictive, incredibly narrow notions of femininity that women have been subjected to over the ages, and when we add to that the fact that cooking was, for a long time, not a choice for women but, instead, unpaid and mandatory domestic work, it is perhaps no wonder that the person who criticised Edith was confused by the idea that women might occupy more than one space, that they can have multiple identities and that these don’t have to be contradictory. Edith enjoyed making blackberry jam and she was also one of the first WSPU members to serve time in Holloway Gaol. It was a far more radical idea back then but I‘m sure that, even all these years later, we can think of times when we have seen the damaging impact of restrictive gender stereotypes on notions of what women can and can’t do. In this jam incident, I think that Edith and the Women’s Freedom League set an inspiring example, then and for us today, not only for how to deal with such criticism but also for how to continue the important work that they started. Firstly, I think it’s significant that the League was happy to publish Edith’s article: the WFL was not afraid of acknowledging that, just because their members broadly shared the same values, did not mean that they agreed on everything. The WFL itself had, after all, grown out of the divisions within the Pankhursts’ own suffrage group. As the publication of Edith’s article shows, the League valued democracy and giving voice to difference. Also democratic is the way that Edith shows us that everyone can have a valuable role to play in progressing the work of important causes. She decided to harness for the suffrage cause her talent for jam-making. Edith writes about how her damson jam - decorated with labels that declared ‘Votes for Women, Women’s Freedom League’ (cut off old handbills) - about how it ‘did propaganda work on many a tea table.’
Find out more about this event via these videos:
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 A kitchen of one's own. It is, of course, not what Virginia Woolf meant when she declared the importance - for each woman - of a room of her own. She famously ‘killed’ the Angel in the House, Coventry Patmore’s idealisation of women’s role within the Victorian home. For Woolf, those ‘difficult arts of family life’ - for which women sacrifice themselves daily - get in the way of writing; if she can find her own space, she can create.
I wonder if Woolf would have been sympathetic to what I mean, though. After all, she understood, intimately, the relationship between creativity and one’s living conditions. She wrote about the way that creative output is inevitably affected by ‘grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.’ Indeed, if she had remained under the patriarchal roof of 22 Hyde Park Gate, writing and books would have been ‘inconceivable’, she once stated. The ‘room’ that she prescribes to all women consists, I assume, of a desk, no doubt a lamp, some comfortable furnishings, and a ready supply of paper and ink. The room I have been thinking about is, conventionally speaking, the antithesis: a kitchen space. Unlike Woolf’s contemporaries, I was fortunate not to grow up enslaved to the domestic. Woolf’s descriptions of cooking (as opposed to her descriptions food itself) often evoke the drudgery of the mundane: chopping up suet, minding the stew, washing the dishes. From a childhood home supplied with seven servants, she understood these kitchen tasks as work which - if one could - one outsourced. While Woolf wanted women to ‘win‘ rooms from the men who had traditionally occupied them, she most definitely didn’t mean the kitchen, which has always been the domain of women, shackled and noosed to it. But Woolf famously also wrote that ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ When she married, she had her own cook: Nellie Boxall was with the Woolfs for 18 years. After a particularly good meal at Marcel Boulestin’s restaurant in Covent Garden, Woolf even sent Nellie for lessons with the celebrity chef. Food was important enough to Woolf that one of the first things she did when she moved to Monk’s House was to install a new range, and she was known to cook a mean omelette, so she must have used the kitchen herself, and enjoyed doing so. I've organised fourteen Bake Off competitions, so here I share everything I've learnt, as well as lots of handy tips! Ready, steady... 1. Find the right space: I was able to rent a marquee and get it set up close to a cooking classroom, so contestants could move freely and easily between marquee and the ovens. It would have been prohibitively expensive (not to mention logistically tricky) to rent lots of ovens, so this was my compromise. Depending on your space, you might be able to host inside a building or, depending on the weather, outside in a garden. Wherever you choose, make sure it's close to electricity and water supplies, as well as hand washing facilities.  composting to tackle household food waste In Emily Brontë’s poem ‘Hope’, hope is a timid bird. Even though it sees the speaker suffering, she does nothing to help. She is frozen by fear. This fear does not excuse her behaviour: Brontë makes it clear that her inaction is cruel and her ‘whispered’ support is ‘false’. In the end, she abandons the speaker entirely, stretching her wings and soaring to heaven: Hope escapes to her own tranquillity, leaving the speaker in ‘frenzied pain’. Hope is also imagined as a bird in Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’. While the bird in Brontë’s poem sits just outside the speaker’s prison of suffering, Dickinson’s bird perches inside the speaker’s soul. Both birds sing but Brontë’s stops as soon as the speaker starts to listen, whereas Dickinson’s ‘never stops – at all’. Dickinson’s bird doesn’t leave the speaker in distress like Brontë’s: in fact, her support intensifies during suffering. Brontë’s is selfish, escaping to her own peace, while Dickinson’s is selfless, giving all and never asking ‘a crumb’ of the speaker. I like the way both poets animate Hope: in externalising it, Brontë and Dickinson draw attention to hope’s potential power over us. It can sustain us or leave us stricken. Sometimes we may feel that hope has a perch inside ourselves – protecting and protective – and sometimes it might feel distant, like Brontë’s bird soaring away. I’ve been thinking about those two poems, with their opposing forces of hope, a lot. This year, it was my resolution to save as much compostable waste from the bin – at work and home – so that its nutrients and energy could empower the next generation of growth. I put small kitchen compost caddies next to the bins, with clear instructions about what should go in each and with reassurance that I would empty them myself each week, and would ensure that the waste is eventually made into compost.
 My suffrage-themed tea party When I was studying for my Masters in Women’s Studies, many people regarded my enjoyment of baking as jarring, ironic, or even hilarious. How could a feminist also like baking cakes? How could I maintain my credibility as a feminist while beating up a batter, or scattering sprinkles frivolously over buttercream?
This incredulity is not something that men have to deal with. In fact, if you’re a man and a baker, you’re lauded rather than criticised: by and large, the most famous and most successful bakers are men (think Albert Roux, Richard Bertinet, Paul Hollywood, James Martin, Amaury Guichon…). Even if you’ve not made it big, a man who bakes is celebrated as someone who has important domestic skills. Traditionally, top baking (‘real baking’) is almost exclusively masculine. Male baking takes place in high-tech labs with complex scales and digital ovens: their work is understood as precise and technical, pulling off great feats of engineering and architecture. Home baking is feminine, all pre-lib pastel domesticity - twee if done by women, endearing if by men. Male bakers are ‘sexy’, even: Hollywood’s piercing blue eyes, Guichon’s suave Frenchness. Women bakers are viewed either as domestic relics from the 50s or, if they dare to apply lipstick, they’re attention seekers (see the media treatment of Candice Brown). As with most other areas of life, women have to suffer over-simplistic stereotypes thrust upon them: they are vixens or angels, both simplistic ‘types’ divorced from any wonderful, complex reality. Men can choose the hobby of baking without any political assumptions being made about them. Women have no such luxury.  A loom on display at Flaxland, Stroud In George Eliot’s novel of the same name, Silas Marner is a linen weaver, one of the ‘wandering men’ who have no clear origin, traversing the land under a burden of flaxen thread, in search of work. Eliot writes during the Industrial Revolution, but sets her story before industrialisation had taken hold. There are shadows of change, however: by the second half of the story, we are informed that ‘the weaving was going down’ and that ‘there was less and less flax spun.’ The historical popularity of flax Flax used to be a very popular crop in Britain. Seeds found at Windmill Hill in Wiltshire show that flax was growing there around 2000BC, though it is believed to have been cultivated as far back as 8000BC in areas such as Syria, Iran and Turkey. Its Latin name, linum usitatissimum, means ‘linen most useful’. Indeed, it is an incredibly versatile crop, from which can be gleaned oil and fibre. Fibre flax is the taller variety, grown for its fibre; linseed is a shorter variety, grown for oil or seed. The Ancient Egyptians finely spun the fibres to make embalming fabric, and used the oil in the embalming process; the Greeks and Romans similarly cultivated flax. Its latin name means 'linen most useful'  My great-grandfather with Rosalind I have a photograph on my wall of my paternal great-grandfather standing proudly alongside his prize cow, a Red Poll named Rosalind. It is accompanied by a ‘Certificate of Merit’ issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Between 1928 and 1930, Rosalind yielded 33 178 ¼ pounds of milk (about 14,610 litres). My great-grandfather was a cowman, spending his days tending to and milking the cows. Despite his itinerant profession, I’m told that such was his fondness for Rosalind that he would frequently visit her long after he had moved on to a new farm.
 ‘Here you go: a genuine Preddy’s bread tin’, said Danny, emerging from his shed and dusting off a rusty piece of history. To the uninitiated eye, it was an unlikely thing to get so excited about. But I was in the midst of researching Preddy’s Bakery, the literal foundations of my childhood, and I had just been gifted one of the very tins in which those golden loaves, described by locals as ‘nectar’, were baked.  It was late May 2021, and I was visiting Danny Hicks, Wroughton’s resident historian. After a brief phone call during which I explained my interest, Danny invited me round and I sat at his kitchen table, poring over the village’s archives and listening eagerly to his many stories. He would later put me in touch with Wendy, daughter of Master Baker Dick, who I subsequently visited on several occasions over the course of my research. She gave me the address for her brother, David, to whom I wrote to ask if he might also like to share his own memories. Over the next few months, I received regular handwritten letters from David, in ‘blackboard script because if I try joined up writing neither I nor anyone else knows what I am saying. I am now in my 87th year and my memory is poor but I am looking forward to going back over the years at the bakery.’ It was exciting to return home from work to discover another letter had arrived, another piece of the puzzle fitting into place. A former English teacher, David’s letters had a Dickensian quality to them, his family history presented in dramatic installments, ending on cliffhangers like: ‘Next time: The fire and closure’ or ‘I will write next time about The Swindon Road Crash Christmas 1953’. As the letters came to an end, and I finished visiting other locals, I began to collate and sequence my research notes to write a history of a fondly remembered bakery that played such an important role in Wroughton village life for several decades of the twentieth century.  |
