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Note: Press cuttings are invaluable for identifying contemporary comment and opinions. The Scottish Press covered the votes-for-women campaign from its Victorian origins with reports of events, meetings, speakers and analysis of the debate. Coverage rapidly expanded after the WSPU’s declaration of militancy in 1905. The following year it was a newspaper, the Daily Mail, which coined the term ‘suffragette.’
The principal Scottish daily papers then were much as they are today: The Scotsman, The (Glasgow) Herald, the Press and Journal and Daily Record. All featured the activities of suffrage campaigners in great detail, with Milicent Fawcett in 1913 praising the Aberdeen newspaper for its fair coverage. The Liberal-leaning Dundee Advertiser and the conservative Dundee Courier, which merged in 1926 to become today’s Courier & Advertiser, were, in Edwardian times, among the largest and most influential provincial morning papers in Britain. These papers, supported by the Dundee editions of the Weekly News, Evening Telegraph and People’s Journal, all from the D. C. Thomson/John Leng stable in the city, covered the emancipation struggle in exceptional depth.
Additionally, Forward, the socialism paper founded in Glasgow and edited by Tom Johnston, was sympathetic to women’s suffrage and is a valuable source of material. On that subject, the University of Stirling Library holds important ‘socialist’ and ‘left wing’ papers; including The Anarchist (Glasgow) 1912-13, The Socialist (Glasgow) 1911-13, Forward 1914, Industrial Unionist (Rutherglen) 1914, The Labour Chronicle (Edinburgh) 1894-95, and Voice of Labour (Glasgow) 1904.
Major newspapers excelled when local events threw the suffrage cause into sharp focus. For example, the Scotsman had extensive coverage of the 1909 procession in the capital and Ethel Moorhead’s imprisonment and forcible feeding in 1914. The Glasgow Herald, naturally, covered the dramatic events leading to Mrs Pankhurst’s arrest in the city the same year. The Press and Journal described the rumpus in Aberdeen Music Hall in 1912 in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George was to speak, and the subsequent imprisonment of the leading WSPU firebrands Emily Wilding Davison, Ethel Moorhead and Fanny Parker (as did the Aberdeen Free Press newspaper). The two Dundee morning dailies were arguably first out of the stalls with extensive coverage of protests and imprisonments in the city in 1908 and 1909.
Smaller provincial or local papers can also provide invaluable information on women’s history. For example the Perthshire Advertiser of 1914 includes articles and photographs of the imprisonment and forcible feeding of four women in Perth Prison. It also covered extensively the destruction of Perthshire Cricket Club pavilion in April, 1913 and the suspicious “suffragette” fires at three Perthshire mansions the following February. Similarly, the Banffshire Advertiser is a useful source of information on the attacks on Mr Asquith in Lossiemouth in 1913. Provincial papers are also useful for obituaries of women involved in the suffrage movement. The Paisley and Renfrewshire Gazette of 1906, for example, contains the obituary and legacy of Mrs Jane Arthur, a leading member of the movement in that area. Many library holdings of local papers have been indexed, and details of these can be found on local authority websites.
A useful reference guide to newspaper holdings in Scottish libraries is Joan Ferguson's Directory of Scottish Newspapers (National Libraries of Scotland, 1984). Additionally, Newsplan Scotland is an online guide which provides details of papers which have been indexed. There are currently over 180 titles listed and the database records the type of index, the dates covered, and the libraries that have a copy. (www.nls.uk/collections/newspapers/indexes)
Institutions with significant holdings of suffrage-related news cuttings include:
Aberdeen. Aberdeenshire Library & Information Service: 130 articles in two folders. Dundee. Dundee Local Studies Library: news cuttings gathered for Voteless not Voiceless exhibition, 2005. Additionally the local studies department has two scrapbooks of political cuttings from 1908, which include suffrage cuttings and photographs and a range of suffrage-related books. Edinburgh. The National Library of Scotland collection includes A Collection of Cuttings from Scots Newspapers on Women's Suffrage, 1911-1914. This book contains a random selection of cuttings, mostly from east coast newspapers. Glasgow. The Mitchell Library holds records of suffrage articles in the Glasgow Herald, Evening Times, Daily Record, People’s Journal, Forward and the suffrage journals Common Cause and The Vote. Strength in 1913-1914 period. Moray. Moray Council Local Heritage Centre: index of articles, 1871-1924. (SB008254) Orkney. Orkney Islands Library & Archives department contains an index of Orkney Women’s Suffrage Society reports from the Orkney Herald, 1909-1917. Stirling. Stirling Libraries & Archives has over 200 items in its Women’s Suffrage Collection. |
