ONE was a feisty suffragette who’d spent time behind bars for arson and vandalism, whose hunger strike was met by brutal and almost fatal force-feeding.

Lilian Lenton was a 5ft 2in powerhouse of feminism when women’s rights divided homes, as well as the nation. Notorious for her mischievous acts, she was equally known for her ability to don disguises and slip through the fingers of the authorities.

Margaret McCann was 18 years her junior, a working-class girl from Clydebank. Her father was a John Brown’s shipyard riveter and she was a star pupil who yearned to teach – on the surface, a fairly unlikely rebel.

Yet during the Glasgow Fair of 1930, the so-called “tiny, wiley elusive Pimpernel” Lenton, and studious daughter of a woman who had refused to join the rent strikes, came together in a passionate yet largely forgotten campaign for female equality played out in, of all places, Rothesay.

Fascinating details of how infamous suffragette “Madam” Lenton and her followers – including young Miss McCann – drove home their women’s equal rights messages to bewildered Glasgow Fair holidaymakers have now been recalled in public for the first time, shining a spotlight on a slice of social history that had mostly faded from memory.

The Herald:

Recordings of Miss McCann recalling campaigning with Lenton and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) – a breakaway group once linked to Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – were captured decades ago by her daughter, Bernadette Cahill, an author specializing in suffragette history.

Now digitised, they were recently incorporated in a series of talks she presented at Cambridge University, Rothesay and Stirling to mark the 100th anniversary of some women receiving the right to vote, and they have now reignited interest in the little known Clyde-based campaign for votes and equal rights – perhaps the longest-running of any such campaign in the British Isles.

In them, Miss McCann recalls exchanges between flat-capped Glaswegian hecklers and the fierce Lenton, as she tried to deliver campaigning speeches on women’s rights, and how WFL members would call to passing holidaymakers to encourage them to listen.

The WFL broke away from the WSPU in 1907, and was active in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It continued to campaign well after votes for some women had been achieved in the 1918 act.

From their summer base in Rothesay, the group took its message across the coast to Helensburgh, Largs, Millport, Greenock, Gourock, Wemyss Bay, Innellen and Tighnabruaich.

In Dunoon, they gathered below the statue of Highland Mary – one of the few statues in the country commemorating a woman – while in Rothesay they set up temporary headquarters on the Pier Head, where they became familiar to Fair visitors who, says Ms Cahilll, began to regard WFL speakers as holiday entertainment.

She said: “They would chalk the pavements and tack up ads in the different places they would speak. They would put up their green, white and yellow flag to advertise their presence.”

The Herald:

Leicester-born Lenton joined the movement in 1924 after having worked with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia during the war. She went on to organise the annual Rothesay summer campaign, targeting city holidaymakers with their equality message.

Miss McCann was still a student at the University of Glasgow when she arrived for a holiday job arranged by a staff member with suffragette sympathies. She was immediately thrown into the midst of the WFL’s campaign.

In recordings made in 1984, two years before her death, Miss McCann tells how Lenton would counter hecklers’ cries of “A wummin’s place is in the hame”.

She said: “She would pull herself up to her full height, gather her coat around her and say: ‘There are two million surplus women. How can these women have homes if the only home a woman is supposed to have is her husband’s and there are two million men short?’”

Her response was a reference to the population’s female majority, after the horrendous casualties of the First World War and the exclusion from the vote of single women without their own property.

Ms Cahill said: “Hecklers were usually short wee Glasgow men in a flat cap. Lenton had stage presence. These wee men didn’t have a chance. When Lenton challenged them, they would shuffle around sheepishly and often slink away.”

The WFL Clyde Coast Campaign ran from 1908 until 1933. Lilian Lenton later worked in animal welfare before becoming financial secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers. She died in 1972.

She added: “It’s sad and frustrating so much women’s history has been forgotten, while documents and photos have just been discarded when the women have died because people didn’t know how valuable they were – especially when the women were single, as was so often the case.”