Nellie Cressall
Nellie Frances Cressall , nee Nellie Frances Wilson (born November 23, 1882 in Willesden , Middlesex ; died October 31, 1973 in Poplar , London ) was a British suffragette, local politician for the Independent Labor Party and brief mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar .
Life
Nellie Wilson was the eldest of four children of carpenter John George Wilson and Julia Jennings. Her father died early and she went to work as a laundress and tiller in Whitechapel . She married the worker George Joseph Cressal (1880–1951) in Stepney in 1904 , they had eight children. In 1907 they both joined the Independent Labor Party , and they continued to be active in the party and in the Labor Party .
From 1912 onwards, Cressal became involved in the Women's Social and Political Union , founded in 1903 , which campaigned for women's suffrage with radical means. She herself was arrested six times during demonstrations. Together with Sylvia Pankhurst , Keir Hardie , Julia Scurr , Millie Lansbury and George Lansbury, she was one of the founders of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), which published the weekly newspaper The Women's Dreadnought . During the dock strike in 1912, she campaigned for children in need in the kitchen. In 1914 she remained a pacifist in contrast to the bourgeois suffragettes. During the war she was a member of the community's Food Control Committee.
Due to the reform of the electoral law in 1919, all men and many women were actively and passively eligible to vote. In November 1919, Cressall was elected to the local council in the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar . Poplar had 160,000 inhabitants at that time and was the poorest district in London. In 1921 there was the "Poplar Council Rebellion", in which the municipal council restricted the statutory duties to the superordinate London bodies, since in their view the burdens of poor relief were unjustly distributed between the municipalities under poor law . On March 31, 1921, the local council reduced the per capita tax from 6s 10d to 4s 4d. Together with 29 other councilors, Cressal was imprisoned on September 1, 1921, the men in Brixton Prison , the five women in Holloway Prison . As she was six months pregnant, she was released on September 21, the other detainees were released on October 12 after the Stanley Baldwin and London County Council government recalculated the tax code for the communities and reorganized poor welfare had to promise.
Cressall continued to work in the Labor Party and was a councilor until 1965. In 1943/44 she was briefly mayor of Poplar. In 1951 she spoke at the Labor Party's annual conference in Scarborough and pointed to the social achievements of the labor movement in England since the First World War. In the 1950s, Cressall was again active in the international peace movement. In 1959 she was honored as a freeman of the borough in London .
literature
- John Davis: Nellie Cressall , in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , section in article Poplar councillors , 2015. doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 77194
- Nellie Cressall , in: Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States . London: Viking, 1997 ISBN 0-670-87420-5 , p. 593
- Janine Booth: Guilty and Proud of It! Poplar's Rebel Councilors and Guardians 1919-25 . Pontypool, Wales: Merlin Press, 2009 ISBN 9780850366945
Web links
- Nellie Cressall: Suffragette, rebel councillor, and Mayor of Poplar , at East End Women's Museum, June 27, 2016
- John Simpkin: Nellie Cressall , at spartacus-educational
Individual evidence
- ↑ The biographical information is different, here according to ODNB
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cressall, Nellie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cressall, Nellie Frances (full name); Wilson, Nellie Frances (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British suffragette and local politician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 23, 1882 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Willesden , Middlesex |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 31, 1973 |
| Place of death | Poplar , London |