Mrs Flora McKinnon Drummond

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/activity/3203/what-were-the-suffrage-campaigners-fighting-for
https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/resource/3206/parliament-and-the-suffrage-campaign

Family information: Husband was an upholsterer and a member of the Independent Labour Party.

Additional Information: It seems likely that Flora joined the WSPU in 1905 and threw herself into publicity work after the high-profile news coverage afforded to the arrest of Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester that year. The poverty she had witnessed during her own factory work with women, who were often forced into part-time prostitution by low wages, encouraged her to join the suffrage movement. She left Manchester for London in 1906, when the WSPU relocated its headquarters there. Flora was arrested for the first time in 1906 outside the House of Commons and was sent to Holloway Prison. By 1908, she was in charge of the WSPU offices in London and had earned the nickname 'General' for riding a horse at the front of WSPU processions in a peaked cap and military-style uniform. She used a megaphone from a barge on the Thames to shout about votes for women to MPs on the House of Commons' riverside terrace. In October 1908, she was arrested and sentenced to three months in prison for inciting, with others, the WSPU 'rush' on the House of Commons. She was released after nine days, when it was dicovered that she was pregnant. She was arrested on numerous other occasions but, unlike other hunger strikers, she was never forcibly fed. This was probably because she was too 'famous' within the WSPU and wider suffrage movement to be so treated, because this would be bad publicity for the government. Flora spent a year between 1910 and 1911 as a paid organiser in Glasgow, before returning to London. There, she was given the enormous task of co-ordinating local WSPU unions throughout the country. In 1913, with Annie Kenney, she led a deputation of working women to see Liberal minister Lloyd George, who appears to have complimented her on the way the deputation was carried out. Her role as speaker for the WSPU increased after leader Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest in February that year. Flora's final arrest came in May 1914. She was a pallbearer at WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst's funeral in 1928. Flora's remarkable achievement and her role at the very forefront of the WSPU has meant that her humble beginnings as a factory worker, and as a working class woman, are often overlooked.

Other Suffrage Activities: Flora, like her husband, was an early member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), although she resigned from it, feeling (as the Pankhursts did) that the party only paid 'lip service' to the votes for women cause. Flora was also a keen member of the Clarion Club. When war broke out in 1914, she was a popular speaker in the WSPU industrial campaigns in South Wales and the north. She also founded a new society, the Women's Guild of Empire (WGE), which had over 30 branches in the 1920s, along with 40,000 members, and she organised various processions over industrial unrest. She was later described by a WGE member in the 1940s, perhaps condescendingly, as 'looking as she spoke', with a 'working class accent' and 'rather like a charwoman'. Flora also had connections with the Six Point Group, who championed women's equality, and was an executive committee member of Equal Rights International.