WSPU Holloway Prisoners

This banner was originally designed as a traditional friendship quilt by the embroiderer Ann Macbeth. Ann was head ot the embroidery department at the Glasgow School of Art. On completing the quilt she donated it to the WSPU Scottish Exhibition and Bazaar held at St Andrew Hall, Charing Cross, Glasgow in April 1910 to raise funds for the Suffragette campaign. The Votes for Women newspaper described the donation as 'A suffrage linen quilt, with a beautiful design in the colours by the well known artist, Ann Macbeth, and containing the embroidered names of hunger strikers, forms an interesting memento, and will be sold for £10'. A following entry notes that '...the quilt embroidered with the names - in their own handwriting - of all the hunger strikers...has been bought by one of the leaders, Mrs Pethick Lawrence'.
The banner was first seen in public at the 'From Prison to Citizenship' procession of June 1910 and was carried as part of the Prisoners Pageant. This event, also known as the Great Procession of Women was organised by the WSPU and Women's Freedom League to encourage MPs to vote in favour of the Conciliation Bill being debated in Parliament that would have given a limited number of women the right to vote. Up to 15,000 women marched from the Embankment to the Albert Hall to hear speeches from suffragette leaders including Christabel Pankhurst.
At the head of the prisoner's pageant, on horseback was the Suffragette leader General Flora Drummond followed by the colour bearer Charlotte Marsh and the WSPU Drum and Fife Band. Behind followed 617 women who had served terms of imprisonment for Suffragette militancy dressed in white, wearing their prisoners' medals and carrying 'a glittering host of steely broad arrows' representing their imprisonment. The banner carried by some of the women symbolisd the spirit of comradeship that gave suffragette prisoners the strength and courage to endure imprisonment, hunger strike and force feeding and 'face death without flinching'.
In 1912 Ann Macbeth served a term of imprisonment for Suffragette militancy. She participated in the prisoners hunger strike and was force-fed by the authorities. She appears to have used an alias when arrested but received the support of her colleagues at the Glasgow School of Art.