Mr Mark Wilks

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999); Jill Liddington, Vanishing for the Vote (2014)

Database linked sources: https://www.suffrageresources.org.uk/resource/3228/men-in-the-suffrage-movement

Family information: Husband of Dr Elizabeth Wilks, a suffrage campaigner and tax resister.

Additional Information: Mark Wilks was married to Dr Elizabeth Wilks, who ran her own practices and who was supportive of several suffrage societies in different ways ? for example, subscribing to some and organising garden parties and meetings for others, including the WSPU. In 1910, when it formed, Elizabeth became honorary treasurer of the Women's Tax Resistance League (WTRL). She realised that, as a married woman, she was liable to taxation, but through her husband, so the two came up with a scheme where she passed taxation queries about herself from the authorities to him. He in turn refused to answer or to pay them because he said he was not privy to his wife's financial information. As a result, Mark Wilks was imprisoned for debt and the WTRL took up the case. This generated lots of publicity, which had always been the aim. In 1911, it also appears that Mark, with his wife Elizabeth, provided a refuge for suffragettes looking to illegally 'evade' the government census survey by being absent from their own homes when officials called on census night, 2 April, to collect their details. It is estimated that approximately 39 women hid out at their house at 57 Upper Clapton Road, Hackney, London.