By Dr Debbie Challis (LSE Library)

On the declaration of the First World War, suffrage work was ceased. Millicent Garrett Fawcett sent a message to the societies of the NUWSS: “Let us prove ourselves worth of citizenship, whether our claim be recognised or not”.

Members of the NUWSS did not whole heartedly support war work – many were pacifists and internationalists.  As the organisation was democratically run, there were fears of a split. In the event, organisations evolved from the suffrage societies as women applied the skills they had learnt or brought to suffrage campaigning to the war effort or, for more unpopular, movements for peace.

Philippa Strachey, the secretary of the London Society of Women’s Suffrage (LSWS), was herself partially responsible for creating the Women’s Service Bureau in the first week of the war. This organisation came out of the LSWS and immediately began to find accommodation for Belgian refugees, organise War Relief Committees, hospital stores and dozens of other activities. Later it assisted in the recruitment of women for government and military positions, as well as munition workers. The experience of organising numerous suffrage rallies, committees, petitions and etc. were put to use by women. 

Flinders Petrie was a prominent public figure and involved in political issues and commentary as well as archaeology. Soon after the war began Petrie wrote a letter ‘How to be useful in war time’ to The Times on 21 August 1914 about factory conditions and the support of out of work garment makers.

He suggested that the people put out of work in the clothes industry by the war were reemployed to make hospital clothes in readiness, such as was being done at University College Hospital, and that donations could be made to the Anti-Sweating League. Petrie provided "Miss Eckenstein"’s address at Greencroft Gardens for contributions. 

This was presumably Lina Eckenstein, an older friend of Hilda’s, who had been on excavations with her and was a campaigner for women’s suffrage. After the declaration of war there was an immediate slump in fashion, dress and clothes sales, with redundancies and considerable hardship amongst workers who, already existing on temporary contracts and low pay, had hand to mouth employment. Lina Eckenstein’s charity and Petrie’s publicising of it was one of a number of acts to assist redundant women from this industry.

In addition, Hilda Petrie placed the subscriptions to the British School of Archaeology in Egypt into a war loan – people bought bonds or loans to help pay for the war effort. Hilda soon put all her fundraising efforts into the war effort, or rather a section of it.

​The surgeon Dr Elsie Inglis was a prominent Suffragist who was based in Edinburgh. She was a highly qualified and regarded doctor who had set up hospitals and trained other female doctors in Scotland. Inglis wanted to set up female run hospital units behind the main areas of fighting so teams of medics could treat casualties quickly.

In September 1914 she approached both the NUWSS and the War Office to offer her services as a doctor and as an organiser. She was infamously ‘sent home’ by an official at the War Office and told ‘My good lady, go home and sit still’. Sitting still was not something Inglis did. She, fortunately, persuaded Millicent Fawcett and the NUWSS committee to assist her in setting up Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Home and Foreign Service, which was run from the former suffragist offices in Edinburgh.

In October 1914 Inglis spoke on the scheme in a lecture ‘What women can do to help the war’ at Kingsway Hall in London and a London Units of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals was founded by early 1915. Edith Palliser, an elderly Irish suffragist, was the Chair, Hilda Flinders Petrie the Honorary Secretary and Viscountess Cowdray the treasurer.

Inglis recruited and formed all women medical units. The Scottish Women’s Hospitals funded, assisted with recruitment, ordered and shipped supplies for these operations. The British War Office would have nothing to do with these units, but the Allies of France and Serbia gratefully accepted Inglis’ offer of help.

Soon women’s hospitals were established in France in November 1914 and Serbia in 1915. In April 1915 the chief medical officer of the Serbian unit fell ill and Inglis went out to replace her. She established two further units in Serbia before the area she was working in was occupied by the Germans in the autumn. After becoming a prisoner of war, she was allowed to return home in February 1916.  

​While in London and Edinburgh she organised awareness of the situation in Serbia, including a high profile lecture at the Criterion Theatre London the following day. 

Hilda Petrie was on the list of stewards for this lecture and display of support for the besieged Serbs – a handwritten list in the notes for this lecture records her being positioned in the dress circle. She was, however, also down to sit on the ‘platform’, i.e. on the stage as a high profile supporter and fundraiser. In a postcard note reply to the platform invitation, Hilda suggests that her husband Professor Flinders Petrie (she underlines professor!) takes her place.

 In the event, a seating diagram shows us that Flinders Petrie sat in stalls but as a platform ticket holder as there were so many on the platform already. Was Hilda in her role as war-time fundraiser and co-ordinator more important than her high profile husband?

Inglis wanted to raise money for units in Mesopotamia but her plans were ‘sabotaged by the war office’ and later in the year she led a hospital unit to Southern Russia and ended up in Romania. The Unit left Liverpool for Odessa (there is a blow by blow account in E. S. McLaren’s Scottish Women’s Hospitals) and was specifically sponsored by the London Units.

Hilda Petrie played a prominent role in reports and fundraising according to notes in the fundraising archives. Images of Elsie Inglis, presumably belonging to Hilda Petrie, were donated by her daughter Ann Petrie to the Imperial War Museum.

The photograph of Inglis in the field was reproduced in newspapers, e.g. The Daily Record and Mail on 15 January 1917, and sold as a postcard, such as the copy reproduced here, presumably to make money for the war effort. There is an intriguing letter from Inglis to Hilda Petrie dated 8 May 1917 that is reproduced in Frances Balfour’s biography of Inglis, the first paragraph is quoted in full:

It reveals Hilda had evidently brought the subscriptions of ‘the Egyptologists’ to the London Units and had even considered making the journey to southern Russia herself. There is potentially more evidence of Hilda’s involvement in Inglis’ letters. 

Inglis was gravely ill with stomach cancer in 1917 but, against the backdrop of the Russian revolution in 1917 and withdrawal of Russia from the war, she refused to leave battlefield until the Serbian units had safely left. Towards the end she directed others in carrying out surgical procedures as she was too weak to stand to do them herself.  She finally reached Newcastle with other members of her unit, where she died on 26 November 1917.

Hilda attended her funeral service on 30 November and the memorial service a week later at Westminster Abbey. According to the records of the London Units, Hilda continued with fundraising and co-ordinating work through the summer of 1918. She was presented to King George V and Queen Mary on 19 February 1918 with other members of her committee.

I have only peered into some of the files of the London Units that we have at LSE Library. There is potentially more research that could be done around Hilda Petrie’s war work. I would argue that not only has her archaeological work and administration been overshadowed by her husband until relatively recently but also her work in World War One had an importance that we underestimate today.

Lady Petrie’s obituary in The Times on 4 December 1956 was written by Margaret Murray, in which she mentions her ‘charm of words’ and how she ‘unaided raised the money’ for the excavations, and (crucially) by Lady Isabel Hutton. Hutton was a doctor who had served in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and commanded the unit accompanying the Serbian army in its advance in 1918. Hutton wrote an accompanying letter in The Times on Hilda's death that Hilda supported her during the war and then after fundraised for the founding of the Serbian Medical Women’s Scholarship Fund and mentioned that a hospital Hilda worked hard to raise money for is still in use:

References / Further Reading:
Balfour, F. 1920. Dr. Elsie Inglis. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Lawrence, M. 1971. Shadow of Swords. A Biography of Elsie Inglis, London: Michael Joseph.

Leneman, L. Inglis, Elsie Maud (1864-1917), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published 23 September 2004, Https://doi.org/10.1093/ref;odnb/34101.

Strachey, R. 1927. Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Service: The History of the London and National Society for Women’s Service, Westminster.

By Dr Debbie Challis (LSE Library)

After ten years working in public engagement at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology UCL I left for all things in political, social and economic science at LSE Library. LSE Library holds, among other archives, the Women’s Library, which has the largest collection of material relating to women’s history, particularly the campaign for female suffrage, in the UK. My former colleague Alice Stevenson wondered if there was anything relating to Hilda Petrie (nee Urlin) in The Women’s Library @ LSE archives.

I searched and duly found a letter from Flinders Petrie dated 20 June 1912 referring to his wife’s current illness and then her inability to take on any more work for the London Society for Women’s Suffrage (LSWS) as she would be too busy working for him.*

In his 1912 letter Flinders Petrie is writing to Philippa Strachey, the secretary of the LWSS, who was, like her mother Lady Jane Strachey and sister Ray Strachey, an ardent suffragist.** The London Society for Women’s Suffrage (LSWS) was affiliated to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the largest such society in the UK with 4,000 paying members by 1912.  It and other suffragist societies followed law abiding means of campaigning – petitions, speeches, processions – not the militant tactics used by suffragettes in the Women’s Social and Political Union (1903) or the Women’s Freedom League (1907). Women and some men in suffragist organisations had been formally campaigning for the vote since the 1860s but had become more formally organised in 1897.

In the summer of 1912 Flinders Petrie may not have approved of the NUWSS since their leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett was urging support for the Labour Party as the only political party supporting women’s suffrage, an action that divided suffragists. Many felt that the NUWSS should remain 'non-party' and kept out of partisan politics, let alone make links with socialists whom many feared were dangerous radicals.  Flinders Petrie was a member of the Anti-Socialist Society. However, it is likely that he needed all assistance with his exhibition at University College London of finds from the British School of Archaeology in Egypt’s season at Kafr Ammar and Heliopolis.  As Amara Thornton notes the exhibition was fundamental for Petrie's fundraising due to the system of 'partage' - dividing objects between subscribers - that was then in place.  This letter reveals how reliant Flinders Petrie was on his wife Hilda in this process.

From the time of her marriage to Flinders Petrie in 1897, Hilda worked as a fundraiser for the excavations in Egypt and later Palestine until the late 1930s, which has been well documented by Margaret Drower and Rachael Sparks. Her charm was legendary and she wrote to all subscribers personally as well as arranging public lectures and writing articles for popular magazines, as Sparks has shown. Whether she was fundraising for the suffragists is, as yet, unclear but Petrie’s pocket diaries occasionally records Hilda’s attendance at suffrage meetings, such as this entry from 25 July 1913.

It is an important entry as the next day was the large rally of suffragists in Hyde Park after their month of a Great Pilgrimage from all parts of the country. This was in an attempt to be heard by the Liberal government and to change public opinion of women campaigning for the vote; arguably militant suffragette violence, such as arson, had undermined the campaign and image of women seeking the vote.

More work digging in the archives (in meeting minutes during the 1910s, for example) is needed to fully ascertain the role of Hilda in the suffragist campaign. Her role may have been limited due to the time spent outside of the country on excavations.  Certainly many of her circle were involved in the campaign for female suffrage as well as writing in journals and giving lectures - public engagement for the cause that Hilda would later carry out for Egyptology and the BSAE.

​For example, Hilda’s friend Beatrice Orme was sister to Eliza, the first woman to obtain a LLB (law degree) from the University of London and an early member of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage (a forerunner of the LSWS). Eliza wrote on practical solutions to problems for women and argued for education and independence for women in popular journals. By the time Eliza and Beatrice were living together in Tulse Hill in the late 1890s, Beatrice was also attending excavations in Egypt with Hilda.  

Margaret Drower mentions that 'suffragette Philippa Fawcett' was one of Hilda’s neighbours and ‘idols’ when growing up. Philippa was daughter of NUWSS president Millicent Garrett Fawcett and became a senior wrangler in Mathematics at Cambridge, but could not be awarded the scholarship due to being a woman. She wrote once for a suffragette journal but, like her mother, was a suffragist.

We can surmise Hilda’s involvement and beliefs from those of her friends and acquaintances  but her involvement in the women's movement is more clear and well documented through her activities during the First World War.

To be continued...

References/Further Reading

Crawford, E. 1999. The Women’s Suffrage Movement. Reference Guide 1866 – 1928, London: Taylor & Francis / UCL Press.

Drower, M. 1985. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. London: Gollancz.

Howsam, L. ‘Orme, Eliza (1848–1937)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37825: Published in print: 23 September 2004, online: 23 September 2004.

Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, Letter to Philippa Strachey, dated 20 June 1912, The Women’s Library @ LSE, Autograph Letter Collection: 9/01/1002

Sparks, R.2013. PUBLICISING PETRIE: Financing Fieldwork in British Mandate Palestine (1926–1938). Present Pasts 5(1), p.Art. 2. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/pp.56

Thornton, A. 2015. Exhibition Season: Annual Archaeological Exhibitions in London, 1880s-1930s. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 25 (1)p.Art.2: DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/bha.252

*20 June 1912
Dear Madam,
I regret to say that Mrs Petrie is obliged to take entire rest at present as she has been unwell lately; and she has a very tiring month before her of daily attention to subscribers at the Exhibition of the British School of Archaeology, the whole personal detail of which is in her hands.
She will therefore be unable to undertake anything else until the end of July. I write as she is away for entire rest.
Yours truly,
Wm. F. Petrie

**Her brother was Lytton Strachey, member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of the caustic Eminent Victorians.
​