BOWEN,BOWER & BOWKER

Emma Bowen was arrested in March 1912 charged with breaking a window at Hudsons Bros, Provision Merchants, located in New Bond Street, valued at £15. She was sentenced to four months in prison.

According to the official records, Bowen was an alias for Bower or Bodell. Despite the addition of a birth year, 1867, noted in another official document, it has not been possible to trace Emma with any certainty.

Charlotte Bower was arrested on 27 November 1911.

She was charged with throwing stones and breaking a lamp, hanging outside the Clock Tower at the Houses of Parliament. When arrested, Charlotte said: “I was afraid I should not be able to do so well.” At court, she stated that male suffrage was an outrage on the women of the country who had campaigned for years for the vote. She was fined, or, alternatively, sentenced to seven days although another official record states it was fourteen days. Charlotte elected to go to prison.

An official record states that Charlotte was an alias; her actual name was Agnes V Bower. The year of birth, given in the official records, matches that of an Agnes Veronica Byrne born, in 1869 in Manchester, to Edward and Julia. Edward’s occupation is unclear from the census return but,later, Agnes stated he was a rough riding sergeant, a non-commissioned soldier who trained horses. Julia worked as a tailoress. Agnes had, in 1871, two brothers Ignatious and Alphonsus and an older sister, May. There are no further census returns recording either her parents, brothers or sister.

By 1881, Agnes was working, aged fourteen, as a nursemaid living in West Derby, Lancashire. Nothing more has been found until 1901 when Agnes married Thomas Edward Bower in Chorley, Lancashire. Thomas had been previously married, and his occupation was a merchant/chemist. 

​Ten years later Agnes, living in Hendon, North London, filed for divorce on the grounds of Thomas’s adultery and desertion. The couple had one child; Julia Veronica born in January 1902. Perhaps Agnes’s marital difficulties propelled here towards the vote for women movement a few months later.

​Agnes died in 1952. 

​Dorothy Agnes Bowker was born, in 1886 in Bedford, to Charles and Elizabeth, who was from Canada, a country several of the family went on to live in. Charles, who died in 1892, is noted on one census return as a wine merchant but otherwise is recorded as living off his own means. Dorothy attended Bedford Kindergarten College, followed by St Winifred’s School in Bangor, Wales where tuition was described as holistic: ‘to provide, upon a sound and accurate system, a religious and useful education for the daughters of clergymen and professional men of limited means, and the agricultural and commercial classes generally.’ An advertisement for the school stated that girls could be prepared for university entrance. Despite an open-minded approach to a girl’s education, it was an establishment, like many of its time, strict on appropriate ladylike behaviour, something that young women, often, railed against.

© Museum of London November 18 1910 Deputation attempting to meet with the Prime Minister. Shortly after the events of Black Friday occurred. Emmeline Pankhurst is central with Dorothy in the background.

,Dorothy joined the WSPU in 1909. Initially, she moved around the country, establishing branches in Cornwall, Leicester and Loughborough. In Votes for Women, 2 July 1909, Dorothy explained that she had originally been against militant action, but, having heard Emmeline Pankhurst speak and read suffragette literature, ‘the conversion already begun’ was finished. In late June 1909, Dorothy was arrested, along with 114 others, for offences arising from an attempt to meet with Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, at the House of Commons to present a petition.

The majority were charged with obstructing the police, but 17 protesters faced other charges. One was Dorothy, who was charged alongside Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, with assaulting the police. Emmeline Pankhurst’s barrister, Robert Cecil, ran the defence that it was a lawful right to petition the Crown and preventing this from happening was, therefore, not a legal exercise of a policeman’s duties. The court held, that while the lawful right of petition existed, once it had been ascertained that Asquith was not available the protestors should have withdrawn and, in any event, any such petition should have been given to the Home Secretary. Emmeline Pankhurst and her co-defendant, who had been similarly charged, appealed unsuccessfully on the point of law, arising from the court’s decision. All the other trials were delayed until the appeal had been heard. While the protestors who broke windows were imprisoned, it is unclear what, if any, sentence Dorothy received as Emmeline Pankhurst's appeal took so long, many of the other charges were dropped.

​Early in August 1909, Dorothy travelled to Hull to participate in a meeting to be held at the same time as a gathering of the Liberals. The women were jostled by the crowd and pushed by a deployment of mounted police; six women were arrested for disorderly conduct.  In court, all of the women complained at the use of mounted police. Dorothy stated, in court, that she had, during the melee, called the police cowards for riding horses on the pavement. The magistrate lectured the women on their parlous behaviour but discharged them from the charges.

Weeks later, Dorothy took part in a similar protest in Bradford. This time, she lodged a complaint with the police, claiming that she had been struck on the nose. In discussions, with the Chief of Police, Dorothy admitted, that at the time of the incident, she had been trying to knock off a constable’s hat but, unintentionally, struck him in the face. The officer had lost his temper striking her. Dorothy provided the policeman’s number, but the Chief Constable insisted that number was incorrect as the officer in question had been on holiday.
 
In 1910, Dorothy was appointed the organiser for the Eastbourne, Hastings, Bexhill and St Leonards on Sea district - a post she held for two years, resigning in February 1912. She was also arrested and released without charge that November, the day which became known as Black Friday. Like others, Dorothy filed a report of her treatment at the hands of the police. A constable put his knee in the middle of her back, forcing her shoulders back as far as they would go. He only released his grasp when someone knocked his helmet to the ground. Another officer, then, grabbed her by the neck, dragging her along the road, before forcibly pushing her into a lamppost. Dorothy was unable to take a note of his number as she was seeing stars.
 
Dorothy worked closely with Dorothy Pethick, sister of Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. Votes for Women names both as the organisers of the campaign in Leicester. The 1911 census was taken on 2 April 1911. Dorothy, who was lodging in a room at the top of a house in York Road, Marylebone, decided, along with many other campaigners for the vote for women, not to complete the return. The enumerator for her address informed the registrar that Dorothy was absent from her home. The registrar duly visited the address and noted that he, as the enumerator before him had, found Dorothy absent. The registrar wrote that Dorothy returned after the census was taken, in the earlier hours of 3 April, and, presumably, to avoid any repercussions left with her luggage, leaving no forwarding address. On the form Dorothy wrote “No vote no census. I am dumb politically. Blind to the census. Deaf to enumerators. Being classed with criminals, lunatics and paupers I prefer to give no further particulars.” 

Dorothy was arrested in 1912 and sentenced to four months imprisonment for breaking 13 windows at Swan and Edgar, a department store in the West End of London, alongside Edith Lane and Helen Creiggs, to the value of £210. Due to the quantity of prisoners, not all could be incarcerated in Holloway Prison, so some, including Dorothy, were taken to Aylesbury Gaol. She went on hunger strike.

Dorothy was released on 27 June. She was awarded the Hunger Strike medal, the box is inscribed “Presented to Dorothy Bowker by the Women’s Social and Political Union in recognition of a gallant action whereby through endurance to the last extremity of hunger and hardship, a great principle of political justice was vindicated.” The medal is part of the Lindseth Women Suffrage Collection housed at Cornell University.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Dorothy joined the Women’s Land Army. In 1921, she emigrated to Canada, where she had family. An emigration funded by the government established body, the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, whose aim was to help women find jobs abroad, who could not find them in England after the end of the war.

In 1934, Dorothy returned to England, settling in Lymington, Hampshire, where she served as a councillor for nineteen years. The International Suffrage News, 2 July 1943, published a letter from Dorothy, in which she observes that many are concerned at the slow progress women were making in local politics. However, a local election had recently seen a woman garner 21 votes trouncing the two male candidates who had received five or less votes. Dorothy concludes ‘May this be an example to others to go and do likewise.’

​Dorothy died in 1973.

Dorothy's hunger strike medal © Cornell