Description

[005069] [Suffragettes] Votes for Women Souvenir & Official Programme of the Great Demonstration. London: Mrs S. Burgess, 1908. First Edition. Folio. Unbound. Tissue. Good. Printed tissue, approximately 370mm square, n.d. but 1908

A couple of small closed tears, a couple of tiny holes, but without any loss of sense, spots of foxing, lightly creased, but generally in good order

Printed border, in the suffragette colours, with a central graphic giving the dates, times, and locations, with twenty platforms and eighty speakers being promised, with twenty of the most prominent speakers, including Pethick Lawrence and three of the Pankhursts, given portraits around the outside

This Hyde Park Demonstration on Sunday 21st June, 1908, the WSPU’s first ‘monster meeting’, (Atkinson, The Purple, White & Green, page 16), also known as ‘Women’s Sunday’, to ‘demand the enfranchisement of women’, was organised by Emmeline Pankhurst and Mrs Pethick Lawrence, with the Lawrences apparently spending £5000 organising and publicising the event (Mitchell, Queen Christabel, page 124)

There were some thirty thousand marchers, accompanied by bands, setting off from seven different locations, all of which converged on Hyde Park where an estimated half a million attendees eventually coalesced. It was the first time that the new colour scheme of purple (dignity), white (purity), and green (hope), devised by Mrs Lawrence, had been seen in public, and the women were asked to wear white so that the new colours would be shown to their best advantage

The tissue was printed by Mrs S.[arah] Burgess, with the borders pre-printed in Japan, and according to Kenneth Florey, the WSPU had mixed feelings about her producing such unauthorised ‘official’ programmes but ‘…they nevertheless pointed it out as an example of “how the movement interests the public”. Mrs Burgess’ products demonstrated quite clearly how important the concept of a suffrage ‘souvenir’ or collectable had become to suffrage sympathisers… a tangible memory of a major event…’ (Kenneth Florey, Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study, 2013, p.108)

Another copy of this tissue made £3840 in 2023 at Bonhams