Notice

Notice issued to a suffragette prisoner released under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act 1913. Issued to the suffragette Gertrude Mary Ansell who was released under the act from Holloway on 6th August 1913. The notice specifies that the discharged prisoner should return to Holloway on 14th August 1913 to continue her sentence. This notice refers to Gertrude's arrest and imprisonment for smashing a window at the Home Office on 31st July 1913. For this offence she was sentenced to one month in Holloway where she immediately went on a hunger-and-thirst strike. Having been released on 6th August under the Cat and Mouse Act she failed to return to Holloway on 14th August and remained free until 30th October when she was spotted selling The Suffragette newspaper at Holborn Tube station. This pattern of arrest, hunger strike, release, escape and rearrest was repeated until January 1914. In May 1914 Gertrude smashed Herkomer's portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the Royal Academy and was sentenced to six months imprisonment. This time she was not released but forcibly fed. By the time she was released under the amnesty on 10th August she had been forcibly fed 236 times.