1

CHALLENGE, CONFORMITY AND CASEWORK IN INTERWAR

ENGLAND:

the First Women Councillors in Devon1

Julia Neville

Edith Splatt and Juanita Phillips, both former suffragettes, were the first women

councillors on, respectively, Exeter City Council and Devon County Council. This article

explores how these two very different women approached their task, the issues they

tackled, both on welfare generally and specifically on some topics high on women’s

post-suffrage agendas. It considers the local support on which they drew and contrasts

the different reception they were accorded, their representation of their constituents’

interests, and their progress on committees and in the full council. The article

contributes to an understanding of the diversity of women’s contributions to public

service after the achievement of women’s suffrage.

Julia Neville had a long career in public service and subsequently completed a

PhD in Politics. She is now an honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical

History at Exeter University. She works on interwar English local government and has

recently published ‘“Putting on the Top Hat”: Labour Mayors and the Press in Inter-war

Plymouth’, Southern History (2010) 31, pp. 100-126, and ‘Explaining Patterns of

Personal Public Health Services in inter-war England: a Public Policy Hypothesis’ in

Medical History.(2012) 56, pp. 48-71. Correspondence to Dr Julia Neville, 412 Pinhoe

Road, Exeter, EX4 8EH, UK. Email:J.Neville@exeter.ac.uk

INTRODUCTION

Although much has been written about the lives and work of the small cohort of

women MPs who entered the UK Parliament between the twentieth century’s two world

wars, there are far fewer studies of the role and influence of women in English local

government during the same period. Yet Ruth Dalton, a London County Councillor who

briefly became an MP, had no doubt which was the more interesting environment in

which to work. At the end of her brief stint in the House of Commons she was pleased

to return to local government. ‘There we do things’, she said. ‘Here it seems to be all

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talk’.2 This article seeks to make a contribution to redressing the balance. It provides a

case study of the interwar careers of two of the small group of seventeen women who

were elected as councillors for the county council and county boroughs in Devon

between 1919 and 1939: Juanita Maxwell Phillips and Edith Mary Splatt. It describes

the background of Phillips and Splatt, and the path each followed to secure election; it

considers the causes that each supported as local councillors and the influence they

were able to bring to bear on their councils. Analysis of the findings grounds their

motivation in universal rather than gender-specific experience and demonstrates the

difficulties they experienced in securing election and afterwards, particularly since they

chose to stand as independents. The article details their diligent service and the issues

on which they chose to take a stand, contrasting their different personal styles and the

way in which this affected their achievement, and identifies the support they were able

to draw from other local women engaged in public service. The article concludes by

comparing their achievements with those of earlier women and with their

contemporaries, male and female, and suggests that further such studies need to be

undertaken, in different geographical settings, in order to create a nuanced picture of

women in local government between the wars.

CONTEXT FOR THE STUDY

This discussion of Devon’s early women councillors draws on contemporary

local sources and is informed by work undertaken on women in public life and on an

understanding of the role of councillors and of local government in the 1920s and

1930s.

The study is based on three principal sets of sources. The first of these is the

minutes and papers of the relevant local government bodies, Honiton Borough Council,

Devon County Council and Exeter City Council. They provide the formal account of the

participation by Phillips and Splatt in council business: the committees to which they

were elected and the agendas that the councils were tackling. They do not record

individual contributions except on the extremely rare occasions when names were

recorded at a vote. The second source is accounts published in local newspapers,

primarily the Devon and Exeter Gazette and the Express and Echo. Councillors were

prominent figures in their local communities and local papers devoted considerable

space to council meetings and other appearances of councillors. Newspapers in Devon

had by this date muted the partisan tone of the Victorian press and, although prone at

election time to raise concerns about socialism being the path to Bolshevism, appear to

provide a reliable account of the proceedings their journalists observed.3 The final

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source is a set of scrapbooks kept by Phillips between 1928 and 1941. In these she

stuck letters and invitations she received and press cuttings about her activities, both

locally and nationally. This rich resource allows us to recreate the complex picture of

her public life in the mid-phase of her career.4

Opportunities for women to take a more active part in public life were increased

at the end of the First World War by legislation which removed some of the barriers to

full participation.5 Equally, the scope and powers of local government increased,

particularly in the field of health and welfare, with the creation of the Ministry of Health

and the passing of legislation on health topics such as tuberculosis, and on

arrangements for public welfare such as the responsibility for Poor Law administration6.

General overviews of women’s roles between the wars, such as Pugh’s Women

and the Women’s Movement in Britain and Law’s Women: a modern political dictionary,

often undervalue women’s experience in local government.7 There is no equivalent of

Hollis’s masterly study of the earlier contributions women made at local level, Ladies

Elect.8 Pugh covered the topic in five pages, much of which was devoted to the,

admittedly significant, issue of women and party politics. Law’s biographies of women

active between the wars included only 15 who were elected to local authorities, eight of

whom were members of the LCC. Juanita Phillips is included, one of only three for

whom ‘local government’ appears as an interest but there is no indication of the

contribution she made in this field. Classic studies of twentieth-century local

government such as G.W. Jones’s Borough Politics, have paid little attention to the

contribution of the small number of women involved.9

Over the past decade, the position has not changed radically. The focus of

research continues to be on national action, dominated by the belief that ‘developments

in welfare provision then [after the First World War] shifted from the local to the national

stage’ as Helen Jones has claimed10, with a consequent emphasis on the national

political scene, in Parliament or in the nationwide women’s movements.11 This is,

however, to deny the essential complementarity of local and national action in a pattern

of government where the interface was dominated between the wars by Neville

Chamberlain, a national Minister of Health and Chancellor who had begun his public

service in local government and valued both settings. National agencies, statutory or

voluntary, may have been defining objectives and enabling action, but pace and style

of change were often determined at local level. As Thane noted, ‘presence in

parliament is only one possible measure of women’s roles in British political culture’.12

Cowman has suggested that there was a fundamental division amongst women

active in public life in the interwar era between those who (like Eleanor Rathbone)

advocated a ‘new’ feminism with an emphasis on motherhood and protective legislation

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and those who (like Vera Brittain) sought to promote ‘equality’ feminism, and equated

protective legislation with the imprisonment of women in their traditional roles.13 Such a

distinction appears unnecessarily rigid. A more complex set of aims is suggested by

Hannam and Hunt’s work on ‘socialist women’. They note that ‘it is difficult to discern a

common pattern in women’s politicisation’ and suggest such politicisation derived from

the desire for ‘greater equality … personal fulfilment as well as an end to the poverty,

injustice and suffering faced by all working people’ and that even after partial

enfranchisement there was ‘an emphasis both on the shared needs and grievances of

men and women as well as a recognition that women still had specific problems ...’14

Whether women councillors, socialist or not, can be safely be divided into two schools

of feminism or were linked by other factors will only become evident when there are

further cases on which to draw, such as that provided by Hunt in her study of Alice

Arnold in Coventry and those Newman has found in Wales.15 The study of these two

Devon individuals makes a contribution to that understanding.

The local authority scene on which Splatt and Phillips and their contemporaries

sought to make their mark was defined by a national framework set by legislation and

shaped by specific local circumstances. By 1919 the administrative arrangements of

late Victorian legislation were well established. The county of Devon was one of the

largest of the county councils created in 1888, with some of its communities more than

sixty miles from county headquarters. Within its boundaries lay two county boroughs,

Exeter and Plymouth, which had powers to administer the complete range of welfare

and educational services independently from the county council. The county council

administered welfare and educational services for the rest of the county.

The interwar period is popularly seen as the ‘heyday of local government’.

Victorian and Edwardian efforts had transformed local government entities from

organizations concerned primarily with safety and regulation into direct service

providers. Citizens had become used to being able to ‘walk along the municipal

pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal

water’, in Sidney Webb’s phrase.16 In the welfare field there were increasing numbers

of municipal clinics, sanatoriums and hospitals encroaching on the landscape of care

which had once been provided exclusively by charitable organisations, poor law

agencies and the private sector. However, far from feeling empowered by the

opportunities before them, local authorities in Devon tended to view with alarm the

increasing demands made on them by central government, whose ‘command and

control’ tendencies had been strengthened by the exigencies of wartime emergency

powers. In particular, from 1919 the Ministry of Health had a positive remit to improve

the nation’s health. Although criticised as ineffective, it had a range of powers and

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sanctions to pursue that remit, of which local authorities were only too aware. Even

county councillors were wary of the Ministry, and Exeter councillors were vocal in their

resentment of Ministry interference, Splatt, it may be observed, was suspicious that

sometimes ‘the Ministry’ and its requirements were used as a reason to avoid

innovation:

… councillors making suggestions … were often being sat upon, with

the assertion that … the Ministry, wouldn't allow this, that, or the other.

That happened when she suggested … that the Council should build

houses for sale to working people. She was told that the Ministry

wouldn't hear of this being done. Junior councillors had, however, since

forced the issue, and these houses were shortly to be an accomplished

fact.17

Chamberlain’s Local Government Act (1929) increased local authority

accountability to the centre by moving many services from grant-funding to block

funding, initiating surveys of health and welfare services by Ministry inspectors and

transferring the functions of Boards of Guardians to local authorities. This tended to

decrease the opportunities for women to become involved in public services, as

membership of the new committees tended to be smaller than that of the Boards of

Guardians had been. It did, nevertheless, place a premium within local authorities on

the experience of those women councillors who, like Phillips, were or had been

Guardians themselves.

Once elected, there were three principal ways of making a reputation as a

councillor. First, a councillor could ensure that everyday life for local citizens was

improved. As Herbert Morrison, who had been both a councillor and an MP, is reported

to have said: ‘A man could spend his lifetime at Westminster and have nothing to show

for his labour, but it would have to be a very poor councillor who couldn’t point to a

lamp-post he’d been able to get moved from one side of the road to the other’.18 The

second way of creating a reputation was through contributions to the full meetings of

the council. A gift for a well-turned phrase would ensure full reports in the newspaper.

The work of the council’s committees provided the third way in which individuals could

make a mark. Much authority was delegated by the councils to their committees where

a councillor could accumulate experience, particularly since professional staff numbers

were small, and be identified with achievements made in that domain. The study

identifies how Phillips and Splatt performed in each of these three arenas.

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CASE STUDY

The two women who are the subjects of this study came from very different

backgrounds. Juanita Maxwell Phillips was a wealthy, middle-class woman. Her father,

Thomas Comber, had made a fortune with Gibbs and Co in the exploitation of South

American minerals, and Juanita herself was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1880,

although by the time she was eleven the family had returned to live in London where

she and her twin sister were educated by a governess. In 1906 she had married Tom

Phillips, a solicitor in Honiton, a small (3,000 population) market town about seventeen

miles from Exeter. In February 1920 she stood at a by-election for Honiton Borough

Council and was elected unopposed as Honiton’s first woman councillor. She remained

continuously on the council, first as a councillor and then as an alderman, until she and

her husband moved away from Honiton in 1953. Her election to Devon County Council

as its first woman councillor came more than ten years later, in 1931, although she had

contested the seat unsuccessfully in 1928. She was made a county alderman in 1946

and remained a member of the council until 1965, when she was eighty-five.

Edith Mary Splatt, by contrast, like many of her fellow citizens, had been born

into a farming community a few miles outside Exeter and moved into the city as an

adult to earn her living. In the 1901 census she is shown living in an apartment above a

shop in the city centre, together with her widowed mother (described as a

housekeeper) and her sister Ethel. Edith was a dressmaker and Ethel a milliner,

undertaking on a self-employed basis jobs that required neat fingers but little capital

outlay. By the time Splatt came to be selected as a candidate for local elections she

described herself as a ‘journalist’, having at some point made the transition from

manual to white-collar work.19 In November 1921 Splatt became the first woman to fight

and win a seat on Exeter City Council.20 She was elected as the city councillor for

Belmont, the ward where she lived, receiving 137 more votes than the Conservative

candidate. She remained a city councillor in Belmont Ward until her death in 1945.

THE ROAD TO ELECTORAL SUCCESS

Neither Phillips nor Splatt, as far as is known, had experience of public office

before the war. In this they were unlike the first woman councillor on Plymouth City

Council, Clara Daymond, who had spent many years as a Poor Law Guardian, or

Florence Browne, who became an Exeter councillor at the same time as Splatt, and

had been a co-opted member of Exeter’s Infant Welfare Committee. Both Phillips and

Splatt chose to stand as independent of any political party. Other local women were

also elected as independents in the early 1920s. In Plymouth Clara Daymond first

stood as an independent, although she later transferred her allegiance to the

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Conservatives, and so did Mary Bayly. Florence Browne was first asked to stand by the

Ratepayers’ Association but the local Conservative party, whom her husband had

represented before his death, then approached her and she stood as a Conservative.

The tactic of political independence became increasingly unlikely to succeed in city

council elections either in Exeter or in Plymouth. Two of Plymouth’s earliest women

councillors, Jacquetta Marshall and Kitty O’Shea, were elected as part of Labour’s

political surge in Plymouth in the 1920s, and once Mary Bayly had lost her seat to a

woman Conservative, Jessie Pook, in 1928, no new independent candidates

succeeded in securing election. Splatt remained the only independent woman

councillor in Exeter.

Although the history of the suffrage movement in Devon is under-researched,21

it is clear that both Phillips and Splatt had supported the campaign for votes for women.

Splatt’s suffragist history is not well documented, but she is named as addressing the

July 1913 suffrage march to London on its way out of Exeter.22 She was also present at

the open meeting held by the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in

March 1914 which resulted in a vote in favour of women’s suffrage by a narrow

majority. It seems, however, to have been the economic conditions of the period after

the First World War rather than the specific injustices that women experienced that

determined her to seek election. She was elected as one of a slate of candidates put

forward in 1921 by the newly-formed Exeter Ratepayers’ Association which proposed

to challenge the waste and profligacy for which they considered the City Council

responsible.

Juanita Phillips also had a suffragist past. Of her activity as a suffragette, a

reporter recounted:

Every week for months Mrs Phillips sold a suffragist paper in the streets

of Exeter. She was chairman of the Exeter and District branch of Mrs

Pankhurst’s movement and presided at the first suffragist meeting in

Honiton. She also figured in abortive deputations to the House of

Commons and took her part in the last procession held in London in

support of the suffragettes’ cause.23

She had also been involved in the episode in December 1913 when Mrs Pankhurst,

returning to England after a visit to the United States, was arrested by police off the

coast of Devon and taken to Exeter prison where she was held overnight. As the news

emerged local women gathered outside the prison, demanding her release. Phillips …

… actually assisted in the picketing of the gaol, and was among those

who hurried to St David’s [the railway station] with Mrs Pankhurst on

her release. With another well-known suffragist, Miss Montague, she

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found herself stranded in the city on that dreary Sunday night, but the

pair knocked up a kindly citizen and his wife, and were given shelter

until the morning.24

Although resident in Honiton Phillips kept up her pre-war links with friends in

London, people from the Actresses’ Franchise League, for example, as the theatre was

on of her interests. What seems to have decided her to become a more active citizen,

however, was her experience during the war. Looking back in 1937, she remembered

that:

When she came to Honiton she looked on it as a very nice playground.

Then came 1914 and all their lives changed. She went to the War

Office … there she learned that work was better than play. She learnt

to rub shoulders with men and women with whom she had never come

into contact before, and made many friendships … When she came

back to Honiton she could not come back to play. The playground was

just as nice, but the zest for play was gone.25

Many hoped that there would be ‘homes for heroes’: Phillips determined to work for

them. The many contributions she made, as councillor, as Guardian, as JP, as leading

figure in the voluntary sector, stemmed from her burning desire to secure

environmental and social improvement in her adopted town. She did not lose touch

with national and international policy debates on issues important to women, where she

supported equal opportunities rather than the new feminism, She served on the

Executive Committee of the Open Door Council, for example, and was co-signatory of

a letter to The Times, seeking government support for removing barriers to women

undertaking night work.26 The Open Door Council appreciated the opportunity her

public offices gave her to press their agendas. As the General Secretary once wrote to

her: ‘I always feel the cause of equality is well looked after in the west of England with

you not only so convinced but so prominent in public work.’27 In this paper, however,

the focus is on her activity as a councillor.

GETTING IN: ELECTIONS LOST AND WON

To serve as a councillor involved standing for and winning an election and, in

local government elections in the early 1920s, this meant securing election on the basis

of a less-than-universal franchise. Both Phillips and Splatt secured their victories in

places where they were well-known to the local electorate, but even so they had to

meet and overcome prejudice. The prejudice they experienced, however, was voiced in

terms of the perception of their views as ‘socialist’ rather than on the basis of their

gender.

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Phillips would already have been a well-known figure in the small community of

Honiton when she stood for election to the borough council in 1920, and she referred to

the ‘ten brave men’ who on that occasion signed her nomination papers and thus, since

her candidacy was uncontested, secured her election. When, in 1928, however, she

came to contest the county council seat, support proved more complicated to secure.

She had the support of her friends on the borough council, such as Alderman E.W.

Matthews, whose election as county alderman had precipitated the by-election, and

his wife Ellenor, who signed her nomination papers. Her spread of nominations

included both female and male supporters. Conscious that she might have gained a

reputation for extravagance with public funds as a result of her work as a Poor Law

Guardian she crafted a careful election address which emphasised her interest in ‘all

questions affecting Public Health, Housing, Roads, Education and Child Welfare’, but

concluded that: ‘At the same time I recognize the necessity for a strict economy in the

expenditure of public monies.’28 She also obtained the endorsement of Councillor

Batting, a long-serving county councillor whose written testimonial stated that ‘though I

am sometimes branded as the most ardent economist on the County Council I have no

fear, judging you by your actions in the past, and your public declarations, that you will

do other than act on strict lines of economy in the widest terms.’29 She stood as an

‘independent’, a political position she was to retain throughout her public service

career. This gave her opponents the opportunity to brand her a socialist, and she was

compelled to write to the local paper to refute this.30

Her principal difficulty electorally was that the county division called ‘Honiton’

included not only the area of the borough but its rural hinterland. Her opponent, Major

Weldon, was a countryman, a local landowner and Master of the Otter Hounds. In

addition he had served in the war, was a strong Conservative supporter, and could

match Phillips’s record as a Guardian and as a JP. ‘He fought for you. Now fight for

him’, was his slogan, whilst Phillips’s read ‘A Honitonian for Honitonians’, a note that

perhaps jarred on the rural population. Phillips had endeavoured to appeal to the rural

community by stating in her election address that she supported the Farmers’ Union

and the suspension of rates on agricultural land, but on polling day she lost to Weldon

by seventy-four votes on a total poll of 1812.

The electors were to be disappointed in their choice. After serving a single term

Major Weldon decided that county council work was not for him. In 1931 Phillips stood

in the February elections. She was elected unopposed and thereafter returned

unopposed at each election until she became a county alderman in 1946.

Exeter’s municipal politics at the end of the First World War were in the process

of hardening along party lines and in 1919 Splatt, at a meeting held by the National

10

Union of Women Workers to encourage women’s participation in the electoral process,

was critical of the fact that although ‘parties in the city had been at their wits’ end to find

candidates, yet apparently it had not occurred to either of them to run a woman

candidate’.31 She herself chose in 1919 and in 1920 to stand in Rougemont Ward as

an independent. It is not clear why she chose this seat for her first fights. It broke the

Exeter convention that retiring councillors who wished to serve again were allowed to

stand unchallenged, although this tradition was also being breached by the Labour

Party, which was beginning to field candidates in any seat they thought winnable.

Possibly at that stage she wanted to make a demonstration of the fact that women

were willing to stand and serve, but was not yet ready to devote time to a councillor’s

duties. Belmont, her choice in 1921, had been held by a councillor who wished to retire

and was thus a truly open field. It was also the ward in which she herself lived. In 1920

she had been overtly supported by the Exeter Women’s Citizenship Association, but

the emergence in 1921 of a Ratepayers’ Association as an anti-waste association

unaffiliated to any political party was evidently an attractive source of support and

Splatt became one of the candidates on the first slate they presented for election.32

Splatt described the aims of the Ratepayers’ Association in her election address:

The present serious financial position of the country calls for very

careful reflection ... Not only does it make it imperative that local

authorities should cut down their spending to the minimum, but it also

necessitates that whatever spending is inevitable should be done

wisely and carefully so as to get the best possible value for the money.

The programme of the Ratepayers’ Association … does not consist of

vague talk of ‘economy with efficiency’; it proposes instead a definite

line of action to prevent any further increase in the rates and to secure

a reduction of the same as soon as possible.33

Their intention was to secure council resolutions to limit rates to thirteen shillings in the

pound, and to require committees not to exceed their budgets. ‘The elimination of all

waste and extravagance without the sacrifice of anything essential to the well-being

and even improvement of our city’, a phrase also from Splatt’s election address,

remained her guiding principle throughout her council career.

Her political ‘independence’ led her, like Phillips, to be attacked as a covert

socialist. Splatt, standing at a time when fear of revolution was at its height, was,

according to the Express and Echo columnist, branded as ‘a Bolshevist, a Communist

and a Revolutionary’ in the committee rooms of the Conservative candidate who was

opposing her. He assured his readers that this was not the case. He knew Splatt

(perhaps as a fellow journalist). She came of ‘good Devon stock’ and always thought

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‘constitutionally’.34 This example of localised anti-socialist discourse did not succeed.

On a day of mixed fortunes for Ratepayers’ Association candidates Splatt was elected

with a clear majority and she retained her seat unopposed for the rest of her life.

THE CAUSES THEY SUPPORTED

Whilst it is difficult to trace the work of individual councillors other than through

council and committee papers, both Splatt and Phillips appear to have worked diligently

for the communities they served. Much of the detailed ephemera of council business

such as the resolution of individual housing problems or local environmental problems,

has disappeared from the surviving written records. This detailed work was an area in

which Splatt excelled, even though her time must have been limited by the need to

earn her living. First, she was accessible. Many of Exeter’s councillors lived in large

houses with imposing drives; she lived in a Victorian red-brick terrace with a front door

on the street. She herself attributed the volume of her work to the fact that she was a

woman. ‘Because there are so few of us women on the Council, people naturally come

to us from the thirteen wards all over the city which have only men councillors, as well

as from our own, for advice or help on their domestic needs’.35 There are traces of this

work sometimes when she used her experience as illustrations when speaking in

council. In a debate on council housing she was ready with an example: ‘When they

had people coming to them as she had – such as a fireman on the railway with a wife

and four children living in two rooms, and the man’s name had been on the list waiting

for a house for five years – they could quite understand how feeling was in the

matter’.36 She raised a query in the council about the timing of summonses for non-

payment of rates: ‘Most working-men in Exeter were paid on Thursday evenings, and

many harassed wives, frightened at the treasurer’s threats, were only waiting for their

husbands’ wages to take the rates in on Friday. Before they could do so, summonses

arrived’.37 She highlighted the bias in council proposals when the Estates Committee

came forward with a proposal to build a pavilion for the bowling club on her local park:

[Pavilions] were asked for merely by the bowling clubs, whose audacity

took away her breath … She could not support these proposals while

there were needs more urgently required for the welfare of the

community, such as a footpath on the south side of Blackboy Road.

She … was astonished that gentlemen should ask for bowling greens

and pavilions at the expense of those who could not afford it. The

children of Belmont were more in need of a shelter in the playing

ground there than were the bowlers.38

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For Phillips as a county councillor the position was slightly different. Much of the

‘moving of lamp-posts’ was work to which she was accustomed as a borough

councillor. There were indeed instances where she sought to respond to local needs on

county issues, meeting with the county surveyor and local representatives over High

Street safety issues, for example, as she did in January 1937.39 At times, though, she

had to interpret county policy at local level, not always to the satisfaction of

Honitonians. The Chamber of Commerce in Honiton formally protested against the rise

in the county rates in 1939 and called on the county to establish an Economy

Committee, a move promoted by Phillips’s neighbouring councillor, Halse of Sidmouth.

Phillips voted against the proposal in the county council.40 When the county council

sought to economise on Poor Law administration by merging local Guardians’

Committees, the Honiton and Axminster Committees were two selected for merger.

The Honiton Guardians’ Committee was predictably opposed to the merger, with the

Rector of Honiton accusing the county committee of ‘taking the heart out of things’. ‘Did

the Public Assistance Committee think they were coming there to deal with cases

about which they know nothing?’ he asked. Phillips, however, supported the move

exclaiming that ‘[t]he care of the poor of Axminster mean[s] just as much to us as the

poor of Honiton’.41 Even more difficult was the situation she was placed in by her own

proposal to use land owned by the county council to build a new hostel for ‘casuals’,

those who lived on the tramp from workhouse to workhouse. Honiton Borough Council

instructed her to call a public meeting ‘to protest against the erection of casual wards in

the field opposite Rosemount’ and when the meeting date arrived she was asked to

chair the meeting in spite of her offer to step down, as her views were known.42 Phillips

took her decisions on the basis of a broad strategic view of the issues involved, never

dissembled, and thus earned local respect.

There was an expectation, widely shared by both women and men, that the

specific value of having women on the councils would be for the different perspective

they would bring to the decisions about women and children, and of those groups for

whom women had traditionally cared, the poor and the sick. This expectation informed

the way in which the senior male councillors, who selected committee membership,

determined where women councillors should serve. The availability of women could

come as a great relief. As Splatt once said, when membership of the Maternity and

Child Welfare Committee was discussed ‘there were giggles in the Council Chamber

and the nominees withdrew.’43

Most of Devon’s women councillors acquiesced in this pigeonholing, and Splatt

was initially appointed to the Maternity and Child Welfare, the Public Health, Local

Pensions and Electricity Committees. Even though Browne, the other ‘first’ woman

13

councillor covered the Watch, Mental Hospital and Housing Committees (as well as

Maternity and Child Welfare and Public Health) there were still by 1925 several

committees with no woman members at all. Browne told the Exeter branch of the

Nation Equal Citizenship Society (NUSEC) that she considered women were

particularly necessary on ‘Streets, Estates (which looked after public parks and

pleasure-grounds and the city’s house property) and the Markets and General

Purposes Committee which controlled public baths and wash-houses’, none of which at

that point had a woman member.’44

Splatt had a particular interest in public housing but nomination to the

committee she really wanted to sit on, the Estates Committee, eluded her for many

years. She requested that a woman be appointed when the nominations were

discussed in 1926, saying that ‘the presence of someone to express the woman’s point

of view was imperative. She had asked to be allowed to be on that Committee, and

was prepared to give up her seat on one of the other Committees. Surely the Estates

Committee were not afraid of her?’ Thompson, an ally from Ratepayers’ Association

days, supported her, but in vain.45 Whilst she was appointed to the committee charged

with the clearance and redevelopment of Exeter’s principal slum area in 1928, it was

not until 1931, ten years after her first election to the council, that she was rewarded

with a seat on the Estates Committee. This ‘waiting time’ was not unusual: first call on

committee places went usually to retiring committee members and Chilcott, arguing for

Labour Party representation on the Streets Committee, once asked whether ‘the

Labour members [must] wait for Anno Domini to create vacancies for them?’46

Splatt remained on her cluster of committees until her death just after the end of

the Second World War, but not without one attempt by her fellow councillors to interrupt

her term. In 1937 after a period of illness she returned to the council to find that the all-

powerful Selection Committee had omitted her name from the Housing Committee.

When this item in the report was brought forward, Miss E. Splatt

interposed, saying it had come as a surprise to her to find that her

name had been omitted from the list, and she wished to know the

reason for the committee’s attitude. It was generally known, she said,

that she had not been well for many months past, and as she had her

professional duties to carry out she had found it impossible to attend

the Housing Committee meetings as often as she would have wished.

But she did a great deal of work in connection with Council housing

matters outside the committee meetings, and a large number of people

looked to her for guidance and assistance in that respect.47

14

A solution was found which enabled her to regain her place, but the episode

illustrates how difficult the position of an ‘independent’ could be, without a party caucus

to support her.

Phillips was an entirely different character. Her affluent background and the

market town setting in which she lived gave her the time to become a co-ordinator for

community action, as deeply involved in the voluntary sector as she was in statutory

services. As a Guardian two of her early actions had been to vote for residents of the

institution to wear their own clothes and to propose the opening of the institution’s

infirmary for paying patients for whom there was no hospital provision closer than

Exeter.48 As a JP she had become personally involved in probation services and in

establishing a magistrates’ poor box to help out offenders in financial difficulty. As a

charitable woman she organised fund-raising in Honiton for many good causes, from

the British Legion to Alexandra Rose Day. She also invested time and effort into

voluntary sector initiatives such as the Honiton Infant Welfare Clinic and the Honiton

Orthopaedic Clinic, for both of which she chaired the organising committees. This had

given her a good grounding in the health and welfare needs of a local population.

When Phillips became a county councillor most of her initial work seems to

have been undertaken through the Maternity and Child Welfare (M&CW) and the Public

Assistance Committees although she also sat, as she had initially done as a co-opted

member, on the Committee for the Care of the Mentally Defective. In 1931 the Ministry

of Health had clearly identified their expectations of the county council over

improvement of maternity and child welfare services: to improve the frequency of

health visitor visits to children aged 1-5, and to tackle the emerging problems of

maternal mortality, including obtaining comprehensive midwifery cover for every parish

in Devon.49 Nor did the committee dissent. Their problem was that achieving these

improvements would cost money and the county council was in the throes of a major

scrutiny by its specially-created ‘Economy Committee’ which enthusiastically advocated

savings on health visiting.50 Slowly the M&CW Committee did manage to achieve

comprehensive midwifery cover in collaboration with Devon’s voluntary nursing

associations and increased access to maternity care by adopting the mechanism

Phillips had used in Honiton and agreeing that any woman recommended by the

Medical Officer of Health (MoH) might be admitted for obstetric care to a county

institution.51 Phillips had ensured that she served on the financial and staffing sub-

committees of the council and it was over health visiting that she achieved a notable

success. Although the Economy Committee had been prevented from reducing health

visitor services the next few years had seen a stalemate, with every proposal made by

the M&CW committee for improving health visitor services blocked by the Finance

15

Committee. In December 1937 the Finance Committee advised the full council that the

M&CW committee’s recommendation to increase health visitor salaries should be

turned down. Phillips had done her research. She was able to demonstrate that

Devon’s lower salaries were causing recruitment problems. She had carefully

explained the issue in advance to selected fellow councillors. When she spoke out

against the Finance Committee’s recommendation at the full council meeting she

carried the vote. The chair of the M&CW Committee wrote to her afterwards to

congratulate her on her advocacy. ‘If I may say so’, he wrote, ‘I thought you were

extremely good’.52

Making progress on the Public Assistance Committee demanded just as much

patience. The Ministry pressed the county for a plan to reorganise workhouse

accommodation. The Medical Officer of Health produced suggestions for rationalisation

but found opposition emerging from a whole series of critics: members of local Boards

of Guardians wary of losing a resource; the Board of Control, concerned at the

inadequacies of proposals for accommodation for people with learning disabilities; and

the entire population of Totnes, who did not want to have a community of tuberculous

patients foisted on them. Phillips was involved in many discussions in the committee, at

Guardians’ conferences and with her own Guardians, as changes were agreed

piecemeal. As a local Guardian she helped ease the transfer of some of the residents

from Axminster to Honiton, taking a personal interest in their welfare.53 She was a

member of the committee that produced a comprehensive plan agreed at last by the

county in 1938. 54 Although the plan was aborted by the need for emergency hospital

services during the war, it was the war itself which enabled Phillips to draw on all she

had learned during her time as a councillor and in the voluntary sector. In 1939 she

became Director of the County WVS and in 1940 chair of the M&CW committee.

The cosy picture of women councillors engaged in fulfilling the Ministry’s

agenda on domestic and welfare issues was, however, as far as the women councillors

themselves were concerned, not to be the whole story. There was a more

uncomfortable agenda which, prompted by their concern for women’s issues, they

intended to pursue. Amongst the many issues with which Phillips and Splatt were

involved during their council careers were some relating to local government that were

high on the ‘women’s agenda’. Two of these were the issues of the appointment of

women police and of the availability of contraceptive services. On the first of these

neither of them were successful in achieving the appointment of women, but their

engagement illustrates their very different approaches. Neither the county nor Exeter

city had ever appointed women police. Since 1924 when the Exeter branch of the

NUSEC had convened a meeting to discuss the appointment of women, chaired by

16

Exeter’s pro-equality MP, Robert Newman, Phillips and members of other women’s

organisations had campaigned for the appointment of women.55 The proposal for their

appointment had been discussed in the County Standing Joint Committee, where it

was only lost by a single vote. In 1928, through the Devon Council of Women on Public

Authorities (discussed further below) a briefing for all interested councillors was

arranged, involving a leading woman councillor from Gloucestershire County Council

where women police had been appointed. Phillips followed that briefing immediately by

arranging a similar event in Honiton, to which local magistrates and councillors and a

police superintendent were invited, and by the organisation of a formal deputation to

the Standing Joint Committee. Although the proposal foundered again on Finance

Committee opposition, one of the opponents did acknowledge that the speaker at the

Honiton event had persuaded him to withdraw his opposition.56 No further action by

Phillips on the issue can be identified, but it is possible that this was the issue which

determined her to stand for election for the county council when a vacancy occurred in

1928. As a first-class networker she must have considered that more could be done

from within the county council than from outside.

Women police had also been discussed by the Exeter Watch Committee, and

Splatt’s woman colleague, Browne, tartly reminded its chair that members were not

‘unanimously’ against it, as he had claimed at the briefing. Splatt continued (without

success) to raise questions on Watch Committee minutes that drew attention to this

perceived deficiency and to women’s concern locally for the appointment of women

police instead of merely the retention of a local woman who could be called upon to act

as an occasional chaperone.57 She was a persistent gadfly.

On publicly-funded contraceptive service provision Phillips and Splatt were

more successful. Both were members of the Exeter and District Women’s Welfare

Association which succeeded in establishing a clinic offering contraceptive advice in

Exeter in January 1930. Splatt, together with Rachel Allen, a nurse and by then a

Labour city councillor, had tried in 1928 to get the city council to overrule the M&CW’s

decision to take no action to promote access to contraceptive advice. Splatt had

argued that there were two reasons for taking such action:

One was the impossibility of bettering the housing conditions while poor

people, because they had such large families of tiny children, could not

pay their rents in Council houses. The other was the high rate of

maternal mortality, which every social worker knew was largely due to

the frequent births, or ignorant attempts to avert them.58

17

Although this attempt was unsuccessful, once the Women’s Welfare Association had

paved the way by founding a clinic Allen and Splatt secured the agreement of the city

council to allow the council’s medical staff to refer women there for advice.59

Phillips promoted a similar agreement for women living outside the city when

the topic was discussed at the full meeting of the county council. When the

recommendation was challenged by a leading councillor who referred to birth control as

leading to ‘the death of the nation’, Phillips replied that:

Far from it being the case that birth control would the death of the

nation it means a far fitter nation …There are people who are so prolific

and have so many children that it injures the health of both the mothers

and the children. Women feel very strongly on this point, and they think

it is time that what advice the rich woman can have the poor woman

should be able to have also.60

Both Splatt and Phillips may have been influenced by eugenicist ideas in their

promotion of birth control. There is a hint of it in the quotation from Phillips above, and

Splatt was later to argue when pressing for home nursing that ‘[t]hey spent millions a

year upon imbeciles, who could never hope to be any good to the community or

themselves; and yet allowed useful and valuable citizens, the fathers and mothers of

families, to die through being removed to hospital or infirmary when seriously ill with

pneumonia, because they could not afford skilled private nursing at home.61

Nevertheless the arguments they deployed are based on the understanding that poor

women were not be able to take steps which would improve their health and their ability

to cope in the same way that better-off women could.

THE INFLUENCE THEY WIELDED

The work of the women councillors in achieving specific outcomes for

individuals has already been identified. Their impact on policy development and the

implementation of broader policy objectives is more difficulty to identify, partly because

committee papers tend to anonymize the detail of the way in which policy emerged. It is

clear, however, that they approached their task in different ways. Splatt’s forte was her

investigative abilities, the same talent that no doubt had led her into her chosen career

of journalism. Phillips, on the other hand, was a master networker: her ubiquity on local

and countywide organisations put her in a prime position to exercise influence

particularly at the interface of public and voluntary sector provision. This section

describes their different routes for creating change and then considers specifically the

tool they helped to create for local women in public positions, the Devon Council of

18

Women, and the progress they were able to achieve (and fail to achieve) on issues

considered important by women.

Pugh has analysed the difficulties faced by the first women members of

Parliament in the interwar years: the uncomfortable and unwelcoming environment; the

assertive and adversarial style of debate; the prizing of conformity above individualism;

colleagues who were patronizing and hostile to feminism.62 Although the council

chambers were not as vast as the House of Commons, the first women councillors

were also entering new territories. They met with rather different receptions.

For Phillips in 1931 the county council in some ways would have been the

borough council writ large. She was used to being the only woman among men at

meetings, and used to speaking authoritatively and being heard. She had been mayor

for five years in the 1920s and held offices in a number of other national and local

women’s organisations. The tone of the county council was set by its leaders, Devon’s

largest landowners. such as Fortescue of Castle Filleigh, Lopes of Maristow and

Acland of Killerton. The atmosphere of the debate had something gentlemanly about it

and disagreement tended to be courteously expressed.

Phillips certainly does not appear to have experienced any difficulty in putting

across her point of view. The county council’s able and long-serving chair, Lopes,

ensured the orderly conduct of business at the quarterly meetings. On his retirement

Phillips chose in making her tribute to record ‘the kind and sympathetic way in which

Sir Henry had always treated women members’63, and, whilst there might have been an

element of patronage in this, it may have been no different from that applied to any

newcomers to the ‘gentlemen’s club’ of the county council. Phillips’s contributions to

debate in the 1930s on the health and welfare topics in which she was particularly

interested, as recorded in the newspapers, place her amongst the most frequent of

speakers. Her career was one of slow but assured progress. In 1931 she had been

appointed to a handful of committees primarily concerned with social welfare. To these

was added almost at once the Public Assistance Committee, on whose Honiton

Guardians’ Committee she had already been a borough council nominee. She was

‘apprenticed’ to the Public Health Committee by being asked to serve on the

Tuberculosis Sub-Committee and appointed to the main committee in 1935. In 1936

she was elected chair of the Axminster-Honiton Guardians’ Committee and, in a mark

of particular confidence, invited by the chair to serve on the new Air Raids Precautions

Committee. In 1938 became a member of the Education Committee and finally, in

1941, became chair of the Maternity and Child Welfare Committee, carrying with it the

prestigious membership of the Committee of Chairmen through which much of the

19

cross-cutting business of the county council was undertaken. At the end of the war she

was elected the first woman county alderman.

For Splatt the position was rather different. The city council’s monthly meetings

were often the scene of acrimonious debate. The many solicitors on the council had, in

professional practice in the magistrates’ courts, developed a mastery of the put-down,

to which a general air of political antagonism in the chamber added spice and venom.

However much councillors pretended that party politics had no place in the chamber, it

increasingly did. Splatt was often tempted to answer the sneers some councillors made

at the idea of ‘independent’ councillors, as when Guest remarked that ‘he understood

that a man who was independent was one not generally to be relied on’ and she

responded haughtily that ‘for Mr Guest’s information “independent” in this Council

means independent of party politics, which it is quite obvious some members are not’.64

Any councillor could be disparaged as Splatt was by Thompson saying she was ‘a fool

rushing in where angels fear to tread’, but only a single woman would have had it

suggested that the mayor should find her a husband, as once was done by Alderman

McGahey.65

There were protocols for the conduct of business which Splatt frequently tried to

ignore, provoking a reproof from the mayor, who presided, or advice from the Town

Clerk that her intervention was out of order. ‘I see nothing in the report that gives Miss

Splatt a text for her sermon’, said the mayor, when Splatt tried to raise a question on

pay rises for officials under the Finance Committee report, and when she sought to

propose that the Rentals Sub-Committee of the Estates Committee should include a

woman member the Town Clerk said that the form of her resolution was

unacceptable.66 Splatt was often critical of the conduct of council business, saying that

‘it took a terrible time to get necessary and moderately priced improvements effected’.67

She had no time for the ceremonial dear to some councillors’ hearts, protesting over

the discussion on whether councillors should wear robes and hats in ceremonial

processions that ‘it savoured of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning’68, and was

horrified at the ‘clubby’ network that influenced decision-making. She once told the

Exeter branch of NUSEC that:

She had recently challenged a fellow member of his attitude in this

respect, only to be told, ‘Well, when you meet so-and-so on committee,

and know he’s a jolly good fellow, what can you do?’ … She thought

the incident proved the truth of what was often said – that most men

had far less moral courage than women.69

She herself continued to speak up for what she felt most strongly about,

criticising decisions she felt would have an adverse impact on ‘the men in the street

20

and the women in the home’ and reminding fellow councillors of the facts of lives other

than their own, for example that ‘workers’ transport alone was over 50% higher than

before the war’.70 She maintained that ‘criticism was a jolly good thing; it stirred them

and “gingered them up”.’71 She was not afraid to draw attention to hypocrisy and

inconsistency. One of her techniques was to ask the naive question, such as why, with

a tramways track of only five miles, they required four inspectors.72 By her diligent

enquiries she identified, much to the discomfiture of the Estates Committee, that a

number of the tenants on one of the new housing estates were continuing to pay

standard rents instead of enhanced rents when their incomes had risen.73

A significant role that Splatt played in shaping policy was based on her ability to

use information effectively to critique proposals, as well as her forthrightness in

expressing her views and her doggedness in pursuing ideas. She was able to draw

examples from practice elsewhere to make positive or negative contributions. She

spoke, for example, about the provision of housing and flats in Sheffield and in London,

on problems that had arisen elsewhere over the management of swimming pools, the

link between poverty and tuberculosis and the difficulty of making a profit on

conference accommodation.74 She drew pen-pictures for the council of some of the

groups of people their policies might affect: ‘34 families [who] would have to go on

living in houses that gradually got worse and worse, since no owner would do any

repairs while the order of destruction hung over the place’; ‘respectable husbands and

wives, fathers and mothers of families, who kept their own council houses spotlessly

clean, and resented having … to clean up after less scrupulous predecessors of

neighbours’.75

Both Splatt and Phillips drew on their own local networks to create a base for

action, but they also were founder members of the Devon Council for Women on Public

Authorities, a society affiliated to the National Council of Women, which met twice or

three times a year to hear speakers on topics such as women police, children’s

services under the Poor Law, the new Local Government Act, maternal mortality, new

legislation relating to soliciting, town and country planning, unemployment benefit and

legal advice to the poor. Although early meetings seem to have been chaired by a

variety of women, Phillips was chair of the Devon Council for Women from 1930 and

when Browne resigned the secretaryship, she arranged for it to be taken on by one of

the few women senior public officers, Lilian Hellyer, Public Assistance Chief Clerk. The

network had originally been a substantial one, but its membership base faltered in 1930

when the sixteen Boards of Guardians on which women had been well represented

were replaced by a single Public Assistance Committee and Guardians’ Committees

with fewer members. Nonetheless it was supported not only by women on local

21

authorities, both elected and co-opted, and also by women magistrates .It provided

high-quality briefings at a local level for women who did not wish or were not able to

travel to sessions arranged by national bodies.76 There is evidence that the cross-party

nature of this group helped forge alliances which could then flourish in other settings.

The episode of a lobbying alliance over the issue of women police has already been

mentioned. As an example of other alliances Clara Daymond, Plymouth’s senior

Conservative woman councillor and a member of the Devon Council of Women may be

selected. She was an ally of Phillips on the Devon and Cornwall Electrical Association

for Women and they also served together on the Joint Management Committee for the

Royal Western Counties’ Hospital which provided care for people with learning

disabilities on behalf of all the local authorities in Devon. A telegram from her sending

‘Congratulations and love on your seventh election as mayor’ suggests their ten-year

association had turned into a real friendship.77 The activities and networks of the Devon

Council of Women would repay further investigation.

MEASURING THEIR SUCCESS

It is not easy to develop a robust assessment of the success that Phillips and

Splatt made of their council careers. It was in its own right an achievement to be

elected as the ‘first women’ on the councils they served, and their electors were

satisfied enough to re-elect them unopposed on further occasions. Once that is

acknowledged, however, there is no universally accepted model of the excellence of

councillor performance. Undoubtedly both were diligent workers, with attendance

records that put many colleagues to shame. Phillips confessed to the ‘many hours of

anxious thought’ the work had given her, and Splatt to its ‘very strenuous’ nature.78 But

how should their success be measured? In this section an attempt is made to compare

them with their female peers, first with the ‘Ladies Elect’ of a previous generation

described by Hollis, then with their contemporaries, women councillors who sat on their

own and other local authorities, and finally with the general body of councillors on the

local authorities on which they served.

Hollis herself acknowledges the difference between the setting in which the

early pioneers performed and that of the twentieth century. ‘The scope for any one

individual to pioneer … had long passed’, she suggested, and a greater premium was

placed on ‘co-ordination of policy across many fronts.’79 This was particularly true after

the transfer of poor law responsibilities to local authorities in 1930. There was a greater

complexity about the work of local government, hedged and fenced around by national

legislation and regulation. Although the need to improve services for those

22

disadvantaged by age or disability that fired so many of the ‘Ladies Elect’ continued,

proposals for change were received in a climate of greater recognition that the

recipients were ‘entitled to as much consideration as other people’, as Councillor Snow

once put it to Devon County Council.80 To create radical change required the skills of a

political entrepreneur: vision; the ability to articulate it and persuade others to adopt it;

and the indefinable sense of knowing when there is a window of opportunity to press

for change and seizing the moment. This was not Splatt’s way; she acted more often to

criticise and to oppose than with a coherent plan in mind. Nor was entrepreneurialism

Phillips’s forte. Her successes, particularly in her wartime work as M&CW chair and

County WVS Director, came from her skills at brokering solutions across different

agencies.

As already indicated, there is little evidence available on a national basis about

the performance of individual women councillors in the interwar years. Bessie

Braddock, like Phillips, became chair of Liverpool’s M&CW committee, and Davies

notes the progressive ideas she promoted there.81 There are echoes of Coventry’s

Alice Arnold, who ‘repeatedly embarrassed and annoyed Coalition members by

reminding them of their responsibilities towards Coventry’s less privileged citizens’ in

Splatt’s performance in the council chamber.82 One obvious contrast, both with

Braddock and Arnold and with female peers on Exeter and Plymouth city councils, was

Phillips’ and Splatt’s ‘independence’, their lack of party allegiance. This was less of a

problem for Phillips since the county council chair operated a broad consensual

arrangement, involving both Liberal and Conservative councillors in positions of

influence. Splatt’s position might, however, be contrasted particularly with Plymouth

councillors. The most successful of Plymouth’s women councillors (in terms of status

on committees) were those who accepted the party whip, whether as Conservative,

Labour or Liberal. If Splatt had had a party grouping backing her on the council she

might have made more of an impact. Her co-eval on the council, Florence Browne, was

a Conservative, and also a less confrontational politician, prepared to perform in a

‘womanly’ way in the council chamber, on one occasion ‘throwing herself on the mercy

of the Council’.83 Her reward was her election as chair of the M&CW committee in

1925, only four years after she first became a councillor.

A final question that should also be asked is how Splatt and Phillips compared

with their fellow councillors, male and female, the more than 200 individuals who

served, for periods long or short, alongside them during their tenure of office between

the wars. For this a model does exist. Jones essayed a formal appraisal for his cohorts

of Wolverhampton councillors, ranking councillors as Grades A to D, as shown in Table

1, and ‘marking’ their performance based on evidence from council papers and

23

newspaper reports, letters to the press and, for recent councillors, the opinions of

colleagues collected in interview.

[Insert here Table 1]

On this schema Phillips would probably score A and Splatt B, placing them both within

what Jones identified as the top third of council performers.84 They were certainly

neither of them in the class of the Exeter councillor known to local people as ‘the silent

councillor’ because he never expressed an opinion, and the ratepayers had much to be

grateful for in their willingness to take on the role of active citizens.

CONCLUSION

This study has had as its focus the local government careers of two women of

contrasting temperaments, skills and social status. The common ground they shared

lay in the value they placed on the improvement of social conditions, particularly for

women; the diligence they displayed in performing their role; and their willingness to

make a stand for what they believed in settings where they were pioneers. The work on

which Phillips and Splatt were engaged as councillors was frequently tedious, complex,

and always subject to the protocols and delays of interwar local government

bureaucracy. It provided a considerable contrast to the excitements and risks inherent

in the campaigns for women’s suffrage.

The ‘great causes’ of the interwar years, for better health and world peace, for

example, were probably still more effectively furthered from a voluntary sector platform

than within local government, even though the period saw the zenith of local authority

powers. Nonetheless Phillips and Splatt amongst a few other women managed to use

local government platforms to ‘nudge’ councils to make progress towards welfare

improvement. This study has shown how, in the ‘gentlemanly’ atmosphere of Devon

County Council, where party politics were as yet of no importance, Phillips, with her

excellent social and networking skills, was able to flourish. It took her no longer than it

would have taken a man to rise to be a committee chair (ten years) and alderman

(fifteen years). Splatt, in the more boisterous and party political atmosphere of the city

council, made more of a mark than her women colleagues since she was undaunted by

argument. Without party colleagues behind her, however, she never gained office

within a committee or became an alderman.

Their avoidance of party political allegiance makes the two of them unusual in

the small canon that so far exists of studies of women in local government between the

wars. The contrasting experience of city and county council work prompts a particular

need to understand more about women’s involvement in work on the big rural county

24

councils. The identification of the Devon Council of Women as a local means of

information and support for women in public positions suggests a possible route into

understanding the mechanisms by which women sought to fit themselves for their task.

Only by tracing the history of more of the individual women who chose this method of

fulfilling their full potential as active citizens will we be able to understand how unusual

or how typical Splatt and Phillips were.

25

References

1 An early version of this paper was presented to the conference, ‘The Aftermath of Suffrage;

What Happened After the Vote was Won’, University of Sheffield, 2011. The author extends her

thanks to the two anonymous referees for their subsequent apposite and helpful comments.

2 Hugh Dalton (1953) Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs, 1887-1931, (London, Frederick Muller Ltd)

p. 210.

3 Michael Dawson, ‘Party Politics and the Provincial Press in Early Twentieth Century England:

The Case of the South West’, Twentieth Century British History, 9, 2 (1998), pp. 301-18; see

also my earlier discussion of the Devon press, Julia Neville, ‘Putting on the Top Hat: Labour

Mayors and the Local Press in Plymouth’, Southern History, 31, (2009), pp. 105-7.

4 The scrapbooks of Juanita Maxwell Phillips are held partly at the Westcountry Studies Library,

Exeter (Scrapbooks 1, 4-15) and partly at the Allhallows Museum, Honiton (Scrapbooks News

Cuttings, 2 & 3). They are referred to in subsequent footnotes as ‘Scrapbook’ with a number

and page reference.

5 Women secured greater opportunities through the Representation of the People Act, (1918)

and the Parliamentary Qualification of Women Act and Sex Disqualification Removal Act (1919).

6 Relevant acts include Education Act (1918), Ministry of Health Act, Maternity and Child

Welfare Act (1919) Public Health (Tuberculosis) Act 1921, and Local Government Act (1929)

7 Martin Pugh (1992) Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914-1959 (Basingstoke,

Macmillan); Cheryl Law (2000) Women: a Modern Political Dictionary (London, I.B. Tauris).

8 Patricia Hollis (1987) Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865-1914 (Oxford,

Clarendon).

9 G.W. Jones (1969) Borough Politics (London, Macmillan).

10 Helen Jones (2000) Women in British Public Life, 1914-1950: Gender, Power and Social

Policy (Harlow, Pearson Educational) p.5.

11 See, for example, Krista Cowman (2010) Women in British Politics, c.1689-1979

(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan), where women in local government between the wars are

exclusively referred to in the context of women’s organisations, pp.156-7.

12 Pat Thane (2003) ‘What difference did the vote make?’, Historical Research, Vol.76 (192) pp.

268-285.

13 Cowman, Women in British Politics, pp.150-153.

14 June Hannam and Karen Hunt (2002) Socialist Women, (London, Routledge) p.45, p.72.

15 Cathy Hunt (2007) ‘“Everyone’s Poor Relation” : the poverty and isolation of a working‐class

woman local politician in interwar Britain’, Women’s History Review (16) 3, pp.417-430; Lowri

Newman (2010) ‘”Providing an opportunity to exercise their energies”: the role of the Labour

Women’s Sections in shaping political identities, South Wales, 1918-1939’, in Esther

Bretenbach and Pat Thane (eds), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth

Century: What Difference did the Vote Make? (London, Continuum).

26

16

Sidney Webb, quoted in John Davis (2000) ‘Central Government and the Towns’ in M.

Daunton, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. III, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)

p.261.

17 E&E, 24 Jan. 1934.

18 Lady Morrison of Lambeth (1977) Memories of a Marriage, (London, Frederick Muller) p.132.

19 Express and Echo (E&E), 24 Oct. 1921. Page numbers are not given for local newspaper

references as they varied from edition to edition.

20 A second woman, Mrs Florence Browne, was elected on the same occasion, but her election

was uncontested.

21 See Elizabeth Crawford (2006) The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A

Regional Survey (London, Routledge) pp. 141-159. The general impression left by the

discussion of activity in Devon, which does not include reference to local newspapers, is of

fitfully flickering activity. Neither Phillips nor Splatt are referred to.

22 Western Times, 8 Jul.1913.

23 Scrapbook 12, p.36a.

24 Scrapbook 12, p.36a.

25 Scrapbook 10, p.47a, East Devon County Press, 12 Feb. 1938.

26 Scrapbooks News Cuttings, p.61a, 11 Apr 1929; 1, p.05c, 11 Apr 1930, p.42a, 6 Mar 1932;

The Times, ‘Night Work in Factories’, 11 Dec 1930, p.12.

27 Scrapbook 11, p.28, Letter from Winifred Le Sueur, 16 May 1938.

28 Scrapbook News Cuttings, p.8a.

29 Scrapbook News Cuttings, p.12d, 23 Mar 1928.

30 Scrapbook News Cuttings, p.12a, Pulman’s Weekly News, 31 Mar. 1928.

31 E&E, 28 Nov. 1919.

32 E&E, 1 Oct. 1921.

33 E&E, 22 Oct. 1921.

34 E&E, 5 Nov. 1921.

35 E&E, 24 Oct 1936.

36 E&E, Sep 23 1925.

37 E&E, 3 Feb 1926.

38 E&E, 21 Apr 1926.

39 Devon Records Office (DRO) R7/1/C8. Honiton Borough Council minutes, 7 Jul. 1937.

40 Scrapbook 12, pp.38 & 39, Letters from Secretary of Chamber of Commerce, 21 Mar. 1939;

DCC minutes, Jun. 1939.

41 E&E, 4 May, 1931.

42 DRO R7/1/C8 Honiton Borough Council minutes, 24 Mar 1937; Scrapbook 8, p.19b, Apr 19

1937.

43 E&E, 21 Jan 1931.

27

44

E&E, 23 Sep. 1925. The evolution of Exeter’s Society for Equal Citizenship from the earlier

Society for Women’s Citizenship remains to be traced in detail.

45 E&E, 13 Nov. 1926.

46 E&E, 14 Nov. 1933.

47 E&E, 13 Nov. 1937.

48 DRO 107P/M3 Honiton Poor Law Guardians’ Committee Minutes, 16 Apr 1921, 6 Aug 1921.

49 MH 66-65 31 May 1931.

50 Western Morning News, 17 Dec 1931 and 7 Jan 1932.

51 DRO, 155/1/1/1, DCC M&CW Minutes, 24 Jun. 1935.

52 Scrapbook 10, p.11a, 9 Dec 1937.

53 For her concern to see the birthday of Mrs Sprague of Axminster recognised in Honiton

Workhouse see Scrapbook 10, pp.57b, 58. 59. 60a. 61. 54

DRO 155/1/1/1, DCC PAC Minutes, 21 Feb. 1938.

55 A loose note in the News Cuttings scrapbook identifies the other members of the deputation

as Lady Florence Cecil (Rescue and Preventive Work for Devon), Lady Clinton (Devon

Federation of Women’s Institutes), Miss Bazeley, (Devon Women Poor Law Guardians), Mrs

Millman (Devon Central Co-operative Guild), Miss Skinner, JP, (Devon Council of Women and

affiliated societies), Miss Stothard (Girls’ Friendly Society).

56 Scrapbook News Cuttings, pp.2b, 3, 4 and loose.

57 E&E, 23 Feb. 1927; 26 Sep. 1935.

58 E&E, 7 Mar. 1928.

59 Some issues relating to the development of birth control services in Exeter have recently

been explored by Pamela Dale and Kate Fisher. Their interest is, however, primarily in issues

relating to professional advice and professional staff rather than in the question of the

involvement of the elected councillors. See Dale, Pamela and Fisher, Kate (2010) ‘Contrasting

Municipal Responses to the provision of birth control services in Halifax and Exeter before

1948’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 23 (3) pp.567-585.

60 Devon & Exeter Gazette, 24 Mar. 1932.

61 E&E, 29 Jun 1933.

62 Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement, pp.190-201.

63 E&E, 6 Jan. 1938.

64 E&E, 12 Nov. 1932.

65 E&E 29 May 1935; 21 Jul. 1937.

66 E&E, 3 Feb. 1926, 13 Nov. 1926.

67 E&E, 7 Oct. 1930.

68 E&E, 19 Dec. 1934.

69 E&E, 10 Oct. 1925.

70 E&E, 5 Feb. 1936, 9 Mar. 1932.

71 E&E, 23 Oct. 1928.

28

72

Devon & Exeter Gazette, 10 Mar. 1926.

73 E&E, 23 Sep. 1925.

74 E&E, 24 Jan. 1934, 26 Oct. 1932, 1 May 1935, 24 Jun. 1936, 22 Mar. 1939.

75 E&E, 27 Apr. 1932; 22 Sep. 1937.

76 The history of the Devon Council of Women would repay further research. The account here

has been primarily sourced from Phillips’s Scrapbooks, with references in News Cuttings (5,

pp.50, 63c and loose), and at 1.p.25c, 5 p.06, 7 p.51, 9 p.38b. A further reference was also

identified in E&E, 28 Nov. 1924.

77 Scrapbook 9 p.32, 8 Nov 1937.

78 E&E, 9 Nov. 1937; 24 Oct. 1936.

79 Hollis, Ladies Elect, p.423.

80 E&E, 27 Apr. 1931.

81 Sam Davies (1996) Liverpool Labour, (Keele, Keele University Press) p.180.

82 Hunt (2007) ‘Everyone’s Poor Relation’, pp. 426/7.

83 E&E, 23 Mar. 1932.

84 Jones, Borough Politics, pp.160/1, 382.