Charlotte Despard

Charlotte French was born on 15 June 1844 in Edinburgh[4] and lived as a child in Edinburgh, Campbeltown [6]and from around 1850 in [[Ripple, Kent][7]], the daughter of Irish Captain John Tracy William French of the Royal Navy (who died in 1855) and Margaret French, née Eccles (who died suffering from insanity in 1865[8]).[9] She was educated by a series of governesses and intermittently at private school, but complained in later life that her schooling was 'slipshod' and 'inferior'. Despard was always dubious of authority and ran away from home at the age of 10 getting a train to London 'to become a servant.'[4] The family left Ripple after her father died settling in Edinburgh and later York. Despard's brother Sir John French became both a leading military commander during World War I and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, putting them on opposing political sides in later life. She also had five sisters sisters, one Katherine Harley who served in the Scottish Women's Hospital during the war in France.[10]

Despard regretted her lack of education, although she did attend a finishing school in London. With two of her sisters, she travelled to in Germany and Paris (there at the start of the Franco-Prussian war;[4] the same year, 1870, she married businessman Maximilian Carden Despard, and travelled with him across his business interests in Asia and India,[11] but he then died at sea in 1890;[12] and they had no children.[13][14] Despard wore black for most of the rest of her days.[15]

Despard's first novel, Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow was published in 1874. Over the next sixteen years, she wrote ten novels, three of which were never published.[16] Outlawed: a Novel on the Women's Suffrage Question was written jointly with her friend, Mabel Collins and published in 1908.

Following her husband's death when she was 46, Despard was encouraged by friends to take up charitable work. She was shocked and radicalised by the levels of poverty in London and devoted her time and money to helping poor people in Battersea, including a health clinic, soup kitchen for the unemployed, and youth and working men's clubs in this slum area.[15] Despard lived above one of her welfare shops in one of poorest areas of Nine Elms during the week and converted to Roman Catholicism.[13]^:12 She also worked with women and girls clubs.[4] In 1894, she stood and was elected as a Poor Law Guardian for Lambeth poor law union, and remained until she retired from the board in 1903.[17]

Despard became good friends with Eleanor Marx and was a delegate to the Second International, including to the fourth congress in London in 1896.[18] She actively campaigned against the Boer War as a "wicked war of this Capitalistic government" and she toured the United Kingdom speaking against the use of conscription in the First World War, forming a pacifist organisation called the Women's Peace Crusade to oppose all war.

Despard and Anne Cobden-Sanderson outside No. 10 Downing St prior to being arrested on 19 August 1909

Unlike other suffragists, Despard refused as a pacifist to become involved in the British Army's recruitment campaign during World War I, a stance different from that of her family: her brother, Field Marshal John French, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the British Army and commander of the British Expeditionary Force sent to Europe in August 1914, and their sister Catherine Harley served in the Scottish Women's Hospital in France.[10]

She was an active member of the Battersea Labour Party during the early decades of the 20th century. She was selected as the Labour candidate for Battersea North in the 1918 General Election when then aged 74; however, her anti-war views were unpopular with the public and she was defeated.[16]

She was a vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist.[26] She was associated with London Vegetarian Society, becoming vice-president in 1931,[11] She supported the Save the Children charity, Indian independence movement. Despard was a board member of the World Congress of Faiths in the 1930s.[11]

She remained actively political well into her 80s and 90s, giving anti-fascist speeches in the likes of Trafalgar Square[27] in the 1930s,[15] and touring the Soviet Union to look at workers conditions there[4] and later joining the Communist Party of Great Britain.[16]

In 1908 Despard joined Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Margaret Cousins and other feminists to form the Irish Women's Franchise League. She urged members to boycott the 1911 Census and withhold taxes and provided financial support to workers during the 1913 Dublin Lock Out.[16] In 1909 she met Mahatma Gandhi and was influenced by his theory of passive resistance.

She settled in Dublin after World War I and was a supporter of de Valera,[4] remaining bitterly critical of her brother, now Field Marshal the Earl of Ypres,[28] but they were later reconciled.[4]

During the Irish War of Independence, together with Maud Gonne and others, she formed the Women's Prisoners' Defence League to support republican prisoners.[29] She was classed as a dangerous subversive under the 1927 Public Safety Act by the Irish Free State government for her opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and her house was occasionally raided by the authorities.[4]

In 1930, Despard toured the Soviet Union. Impressed with what she saw she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and became secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia organisation. In 1933 her house in Dublin was burned down by an anti-communist mob.[30]

She died, aged 95, after a fall at her new house, Nead-na-Gaoithe, Whitehead, County Antrim, near Belfast in November 1939. She was buried in the Republican Plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.[2]

On death, she was described as someone who 'brought home to English people an understanding of what womenhood could be capable of when inspired by fiery ardour for what it truly believed to be a great cause for humanity.'[4] Sylvia Pankhurst remembered her 'fine spirit' and said of Despard 'She was one of our most courageous and devoted social workers.'[5]

In London, two streets are named after her, one in Battersea SW11, and another in Archway, Islington. At the end of the latter is the Charlotte Despard pub, named in her honour.

Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London.[31][32][33]

• Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1874)
• Economic Aspects of Woman's Suffrage (London: King, 1908)
• Jonas Sylvester (London: Sonnenschein and Co., 1886)
• Collins, Mabel and Despard, Charlotte, Outlawed: A Novel on the Suffrage Question (London: Drame, 1908)
• The Rajah's Heir. A Novel (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1890)
• Theosophy and the Women's Movement (London: Theosophical Society, 1913)[11]

• Brown Dog affair
• List of suffragists and suffragettes
• Lizzy Lind af Hageby

• An Unhusbanded Life: Charlotte Despard: suffragette, socialist, and Sinn Feiner by Andro Linklater, Hutchinson, London, 1980.
• Charlotte Despard: A Biography by Margaret Mulvihill, Pandora, London, 1989. ISBN 978-0-04-440446-0
• To End All Wars: a story of loyalty and rebellion 1914–1918 by Adam Hochschild, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston New York 2011. ISBN 978-0-547-75031-6
• The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press, by Sarah Pederson, Palgrave, Aberdeen, 2017. ISBN 978-1-137-53833-8
• The archives of Charlotte Despard are held at The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, ref 7CFD
• Her entry on the Orlando Project of Cambridge University Press