By Madeleine Byatt and Anneliese Woodhouse

For Women’s History Month, we share a blogpost, by Madeleine Byatt and Anneliese Woodhouse, who took part in a Maison Dieu work placement in summer 2022 with Folkestone School for Girls. Their fascinating research into the suffrage history of the building is now to be used in new interpretation for the building, and as content in a school visits programme when it re-opens next year.

When you hear the words ‘work experience’ your mind usually drifts to a week of monotonous filing, awkwardly making small talk as you shadow someone, or perhaps if you’re lucky enough a chance to flex your haphazard barista skills. Thankfully for us our school revealed our placement would be at the Maison Dieu and embarked on a week very different to that of our peers.

We started the week with a tour of the many, many rooms and corridors of the Maison Dieu. As A- Level history students, the eras we’re focused on at school are Revolutionary Russia and Tudor England, and so it’s been fascinating to work at a building with such a long and rich history. From its humble beginnings as a medieval pilgrim hospital, to its use as a victualling yard making ship’s biscuit for the Royal Navy, to its reinvention as Dover’s Town Hall and restoration by William Burges. We stared in wonder at the stunning, multi-era architecture, with its grinning grotesques and stunning stained-glass as Martin, Engagement Officer and our supervisor for the week, guided us around the building.

Finally, after teas, coffees and biscuits had been handed out, we set to work on our first task of the week: documenting the names of journalists that had graffitied their names onto the old courtroom benches, ranging from easy to decipher fonts with full dates and newspapers inscribed, to the scrawl of initials (it’s almost like they didn’t know two seventeen-year-olds would be trying to copy out their names 50+ years down the line).

For many of these names, we were successful in locating the real journalists, including Phil Young, George Pepper and Terry Sutton, who at the age of 91 came down to the Maison Dieu on our final day for an interview! With the names spanning over 50 years, from the 1920s to the 1980s, we decided we’d have to significantly narrow down our research margins, as we had only had five days to complete our research.

Another significant area of research was the Dover Suffrage Movement, in which many significant events took place at the Maison Dieu. For example, in 1909, Cicely Hamilton’s play ‘How the Vote Was Won’ was performed here, for only the second time (as far as we can find).

First performed in London in April 1909 and set in the home of a married couple in Brixton, ‘How the Vote Was Won’ follows Horace and Ethel Cole on the day of a suffragette-inspired women worker’s strike. Originally both are against the suffrage movement, but as more and more women quit their jobs, relatives of Horace begin to insist upon living with them as they will remain out of work until it’s “recognised” by the government via their right to vote. As the women of the family arrive, Horace and Ethel realise the suffrage movement isn’t for nothing and the importance of the female right to vote.

‘How the Vote Was Won’ was performed at the Maison Dieu on the 16 July 1909, nine years before the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which finally gave women the right to vote, although it wasn’t until the 1928 Equal Franchise Act that the right to vote became entirely equal.

If you read ‘Suffragettes of Kent’, and we very much recommend you do, then you come across the Dover cast for this performance, as follows:

Horace Cole: Mr. E. Chitty

Ethel Cole: Miss Adams

Winifred (Ethel’s sister): Mrs Jellicoe

Agatha Cole (Horace’s sister): Miss Crookewit

Molly (his niece): Miss Bishop

Madame Christine (distant relative): Miss Marchant

Maudie Spark (his first cousin): Miss Fry

Miss Lizzie Wilkins (his aunt): Mrs. Carson

Lily (the maid): Miss Villiers

Gerald Williams (a neighbour): Mr Wigley

Hamilton was a feminist writer, play wright and actress. Like Virginia Woolf, Hamilton believed sexual stereotyping and economic discrimination were more basic issues than disenfranchisement. However, unlike Woolf, Hamilton was active in the suffragette movement and co-founded the Women's Writers’ Suffrage League. Additionally, Hamilton was persuaded by Edy Craig to write the script for ‘The Pageant of Great Women’ which is considered one of the most important pieces of suffrage propaganda, as well as writing the lyrics to Ethel Smyth’s suffrage anthem ‘The March of the Women’.

The Maison Dieu was a hub for suffrage meetings at a time when the campaign for women’s rights was just gaining traction, after Emmeline Pankhurst’s founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the motto ‘Deeds not Words’. Participants included Lady Frances Balfour, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. Frances was at the forefront of women making changes to political roles within government.

Whilst at the Maison Dieu we also investigated a folding Victorian polling booth and some late 19^th century ballot boxes, which some of Dover district’s first women voters would almost certainly have used, such as the Vice President of Dover Women’s Suffrage Society, Alice Barlow. Her letter, written with two other local suffragists, was published in the Dover Express in 1909 arguing the ridiculuous nature of disqualifying women from voting on the grounds of sex. You can find her name on a plaque in the Stone Hall at the Maison Dieu, alongside Annie Brunyate and Lorna Bomford.

Our time at the Maison Dieu has taught us more than experience in a work environment, but how close the fight for suffrage was to home. We now appreciate the right to vote, knowing the names of some of the women who fought in Dover and one of the building’s this fight took place in.

Photo caption: Folkestone School for Girls students, including Madeleine and Anneliese, are pictured with the Maison Dieu’s late 19^th century ballot boxes. Copyright Maison Dieu/Dover District Council.