Cards, playing cards

Pack of patience playing cards made in Holloway prison by the suffragette prisoner Mrs Kitty Marshall (full name Emily Katherine Willoughby Marshall)
In her autobiography Suffragette Escapes & Adventures, Kitty describes how she made this set of cards during her first period of imprisonment in Holloway in 1910 from four postcards found in a library book and the sides of a Thermogene box. The ink, she writes 'I got through writing to the Home Secretary and the red colour out of a red book from the prison library....With a little water and an old stick I found in the prison yard, I made the hearts and diamonds. I used as a table, my slate, which I hade in my nightdress case, so that when I heard the key being turned in the prison door, I could draw the flap of the nightdress case over the cards. I usually had my prayer book open so that I could escape detection. I also used toilet paper, with the help of a little milk, to cover the peephole in the door, where the wardresses looked through'.
The artist Kitty Marshall first attended a pro-suffrage meeting in 1906. Within a few years she became involved in the militant suffragette campaign. As a married suffragette, her involvement in the campaign was dependent on the support of her husband Arthur. Arthur, a solicitor, proved very useful to the militant Votes for Women campaign and regularly acted on behalf of arrested suffragettes.
Kitty was first imprisoned in November 1910 for throwing a potato at the fanlight over the front door of Home Secretary Winston Churchill. She was subsequently imprisoned a further three times.
A member of Emmeline Pankhurst's bodyguard Kitty was trained in Jujitsu and, in 1913, in her role as bodyguard she was arrested for assaulting a police officer during the rearrest of Emmeline Pankhurst.