Postcard, portrait postcard

Postcard portrait of the Suffragette Helen Craggs. Craggs became a member of the Women's Social and Political Union whilst teaching at her old school Roedean. In 1908 she took an active role in the WSPU campaign at the Peckham and Manchester by-elections chalking pavements and ringing bells to announce meetings and selling postcards. By 1910 Helen had left teaching to become a full time salaried WSPU Organiser for Brixton and later Hampstead. Based at the WSPU Clement's Inn headquarters she lived in a rented room in Bloomsbury. Craggs was imprisoned twice in 1912, for taking part in the window smashing campaign and for attempting to burn down the Oxfordshire home of the politician Lewis Harcourt. Although the house was not set on fire Craggs had been arrested at the scene carrying incendiary material and sentenced to 9 months imprisonment. One of the earliest planned acts of Suffragette arson on a large property the WSPU leadership initially announced that Craggs was acting on her own initiative.
Craggs later trained as a midwife in Dublin and, in 1914, married a GP from Aberdeen who was working in London's East End. She trained as a pharmacist to act as her husband's dispenser but, on his early death, she supported her two young children by running a company manufacturing jigsaw puzzies. In 1957 Helen married the Suffragette leader and funder Frederick Pethick-Lawrence.