Suffragettes Capture the Monument

Located in the City of London the Monument was built to mark the spot where the Great Fire of London started in 1666. At 10 o'clock on 18 April 1913, the suffragettes Miss Ethel Spark and Mrs Gertrude Shaw climbed the 341 steps to the top of the Monument. They managed to distract the attendants and trap them in their office.
The two women then attached the Women's Social and Political Union purple, white and green flag to the great pole carrying the City of London flag, and tied a banner that read 'Death or Victory' to the railings. Finally they released hundreds of handbills promoting the Votes for Women campaign that fluttered into the street below.
It took some time before the police broke down the barricade, removing the women and the W.S.P.U. insignia, and freeing the attendants from their office. No charges were brought against the suffragettes responsible for this publicity stunt.
Gertrude was in her late 40s, married and mother to three daughters and one son when she became involved with the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. In 1913 the family were living in Tansfield Road Sydenham, from where Gertrude undertook her first acts of Suffragette militancy to attract attention.
In April 1913 she was one of two suffragettes who climbed to the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London in the City of London to unfurl a WSPU flag and drop leaflets to the crowd below. On 27th June 1913 she received her first prison sentence for breaking a window in a passage way within Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. Refusing to pay the fine for committing wilful damage she was sent to Holloway prison for three weeks. Her youngest child, Gertrude was 13 years old at the time.
In the dock Mrs Shaw admitted that she was a rebel, and pleaded justification on thy the grounds of political and moral necessity. She had felt compelled to make her protest in order to express her hostility to the present legal system, and more particularly to the treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst by the Government, and the severe sentences passed on WSPU defendants in the recent conspiracy trial. She also referred to the taxation without representation argument by stating 'what right has the Government to rob as it has done of a sum of about £100 in income tax, and to send me to prison for breaking 2s. 6d. worth of glass?'
In Holloway, Gertrude joined the prisoners hunger strike and a surveillance image of her was taken by an undercover photographer in the prison yard. She was released on 4th July, after 7 days of hunger strike under the terms of the Cat & Mouse Act. The Suffragette newspaper announced her release with the comment 'A wardress accompanied her to her own home in Sydenham, shere she lives in a very weak condition, and is still suffering greatly from nervous shock. Her doctor says it will be at least two months before she is anything like normal again.' Gertrude's hunger strike medal also indicates she was imprisoned for a second time in late May 1914. While her arrest, probably on 28th May, is not specifically referred to in the press it is known a number of Suffragettes were charged that month for various crimes, including window smashing, but refusing to give their names their arrests are listed as 'anonymous.'
By this time Gertrude was living in Nile Road, Highfield and Honorary Secretary of her local Southampton branch of the WSPU.