Suffragette Gertrude Metcalfe-Shaw

In 1913 Scotland Yard commissioned a photographer to take surveillance images of the most militant suffragettes. Many of the images were taken whilst the photographer hid in a van in the yard of Holloway prison with a long range lens poised to take grainy shots of the women as they came to exercise in the yard. The images, such as this, clearly depict the women as being weakened by hunger-strike. The photographs were widely distributed to public buildings such as museums and galleries to prevent the militants entering and causing damage to property.
Gertrude was in her late 40s, married and mother to three daughters and one son when she became involved with the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. In 1913 the family were living in Tansfield Road Sydenham, from where Gertrude undertook her first acts of Suffragette militancy to attract attention.
In April 1913 she was one of two suffragettes who climbed to the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London in the City of London to unfurl a WSPU flag and drop leaflets to the crowd below. On 27th June 1913 she received her first prison sentence for breaking a window in a passage way within Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police Headquarters. Refusing to pay the fine for committing wilful damage she was sent to Holloway prison for three weeks. Her youngest child, Gertrude was 13 years old at the time.
In the dock Mrs Shaw admitted that she was a rebel, and pleaded justification on thy the grounds of political and moral necessity. She had felt compelled to make her protest in order to express her hostility to the present legal system, and more particularly to the treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst by the Government, and the severe sentences passed on WSPU defendants in the recent conspiracy trial. She also referred to the taxation without representation argument by stating 'what right has the Government to rob as it has done of a sum of about £100 in income tax, and to send me to prison for breaking 2s. 6d. worth of glass?'
In Holloway, Gertrude joined the prisoners hunger strike. This surveillance image was likely to have been taken at this time. She was released on 4th July, after 7 days of hunger strike under the terms of the Cat & Mouse Act. The Suffragette newspaper announced her release with the comment 'A wardress accompanied her to her own home in Sydenham, shere she lives in a very weak condition, and is still suffering greatly from nervous shock. Her doctor says it will be at least two months before she is anything like normal again.'
Gertrude's hunger strike medal also indicates she was imprisoned for a second time late May 1914 (most likely 28th). While her arrest is not specifically referred to in the press it is known a number of Suffragettes were charged that month for various crimes, including window smashing, but refusing to give their names their arrests are listed as 'anonymous.' On 28th May an unnamed Suffragette was arrested for breaking 3 windows at the National Gallery and remanded in custody. It is quite likely this Suffragette was Gertrude.
By this time Gertrude was living in Nile Road, Highfield and Honorary Secretary of her local Southampton branch of the WSPU. Both Gertrude and her husband Edward are listed as Fellowship fund subscribers in the Votes for Women edition of 24th October 1913 and the following year Gertrude published a three part article in the paper entitled 'How German Law Protest Women and Children. During World War I Gertrude & Edward moved to Canada and in 1918 to Michigan USA to support their daughter and young grandchild whose marriage had ended. From here the family embarked on a 'caravanning' tour of the US mid-west recounted by Gertrude in her subsequent 1926 publication 'English Caravanners in the Wild West - The Old Pioneers' Trail' illustrated by her daughter Una.