Aldeburgh’s First Lady

On November 9th, 1908, Aldeburgh’s councillors gathered in the timber-framed Moot Hall, a few yards from the North Sea. They unanimously elected as their leader Mrs Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who duly became Britain’s first female mayor. Her first act was to send a telegram of congratulation to Edward VII, it being the king’s birthday.

So began a second pioneering career for a seventy-two-year-old, already famous as Britain’s first female doctor. Newson Garrett, Elizabeth’s father, had taken the enlightened step of educating his daughters. Elizabeth had proven a capable and enthusiastic student. At the age of twenty-two, unable to countenance a lifetime of embroidery and parasol-carrying, she set herself the goal of a medical career. It was an ambitious project. ‘It is indeed high time that this preposterous attempt ... to establish a race of feminine doctors should be exploded’ thundered the British Medical Journal. Elizabeth had ignored all criticism, working as a nurse at London’s Middlesex Hospital and studying doggedly in the evenings. Newson, himself three times mayor of Aldeburgh, funded private tuition and hammered loudly and publicly on doors which were slammed in her face. She achieved her goal in 1870, six days after her thirty-fourth birthday. Now retired to her childhood home, the mayoralty was  a natural culmination to an eminent career of practice and teaching.

Elizabeth was, of course, a strong supporter of women’s advancement in other fields and perfectly conscious of the wider import of her medical achievements. She chose, however, to lead by example rather than by beating the political drum, reflecting perhaps that one pioneering struggle at a time was quite sufficient. The life’s mission of this independent and pragmatic Suffolk lady was to heal the sick and to show that women professionals could complement, rather than challenge, the work of men.

She applied to her mayoralty the same common sense and brio that had characterized her medical work. The rusty pier head was demolished, and trees were planted. The water tower was enlarged. Roads were paved, but only after the necessary drains were installed. Public lavatories were erected. In freezing February weather, Elizabeth personally supervised the selection of locations for electric street lights. And, for the first time in some years, Aldeburgh’s dustbins were emptied efficiently.

Throughout her life Elizabeth had circumvented, rather than confronted, her opponents. Lately, however, she had allowed herself the luxury of openly campaigning for the women’s movement. On the evening of October 18th, 1908, she had joined a raid on Parliament. Police and demonstrators fought an open battle outside Westminster Abbey. With her son Alan at her side, Elizabeth had marched up and down Whitehall, rather disappointed not to have been arrested. She would have been outraged to discover that the police were, on the personal authority of the home secretary, under strict instructions not to detain the distinguished septuagenarian. Now, bolstered with the authority of Aldeburgh’s silver maces, she travelled nationwide to address suffragette meetings, and hosted a meeting at her home in Aldeburgh, attended by Emmeline Pankhurst.

Aldeburgh council rumbled in discontent. Elizabeth was re-elected for a second term in November 1909, but with only nine out of a possible fourteen votes. One of her opponents demanded that the mayor should not invite Mrs Pankhurst, or anyone of her sort, to Aldeburgh again. Elizabeth must have fumed, but she did so silently. She listened politely to the outburst, and then simply ignored it. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, ‘our first business is the election of aldermen.’

In any case, Elizabeth’s Indian summer of militancy was soon over. Her sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, disapproved of stone-throwing antics, arguing that destroying property was unlikely to convince anyone of women’s suitability for public life. When Christabel Pankhurst used a public meeting in the Albert Hall to incite hundreds of women to smash windows, Elizabeth finally disavowed violent protest.

Elizabeth’s second term as mayor was marked by the death of the king. The news reached her at 6.30 am on a Monday morning. Already awake and dressed, she immediately decided to do what no Englishwoman had done previously: to proclaim a new monarch. She roused the deputy mayor at his bedroom window, wrote out twenty notes of invitation and had the entire event organized by eight-thirty. Aldeburgh’s mace bearer led the procession up Church Hill. Mayor Garrett Anderson followed, resplendent in her black velvet tricorne, robes, and mayoral insignia, and clutching her umbrella. When she stopped and spoke, all 400 people present heard every word.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died in 1917, narrowly missing the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1918. In her time she had shouted slogans and shaken her fist at authority, but her greatest contribution to the women’s cause was the example she set. She calmly demonstrated that without its women in the forefront of professional and political life, England was only half a nation.