Teresa Billington-Greig

Teresa Billington-Greig was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1877 and brought up in Blackburn in a family of drapers. Although from a Roman Catholic family, Billington-Greig annoyed her parents when she became an agnostic whilst still in her teens.[1] Having left school with no qualifications she was apprenticed to the millinery trade. However, she ran away from home and educated herself at night classes to become a teacher. She worked as a teacher at a Roman Catholic school in Manchester, studying at Manchester University in her spare time, until her own agnosticism made this impossible. From there Billington-Greig joined the Municipal Education School service where her religious beliefs brought her into conflict with her employers. However, through the Education Committee there she met Emmeline Pankhurst in 1903 who found her work in a Jewish school, while that same year she became a member and organiser of the Independent Labour Party.[1] In April 1904 she was the founder and honorary secretary of the Manchester branch of the Equal Pay League within the National Union of Teachers.[2]

In 1904, she was appointed by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) as one of their travelling speakers.[1] She was sent to London with Annie Kenney, whom she had inspired with her 'sledgehammer of logic and cold reason' as a speaker,[3] to foster the movement there and to create a London-based organisation, which eventually became the headquarters of the Union. This was done on a small financial budget. The following year she was asked to become the second full-time organiser by Keir Hardie in its work with the Labour Party[4] and in this capacity she organised publicity and demonstrations, including on 25 April 1906, unveiling a 'Votes for Women' banner from the Ladies Gallery during the debate in the House of Commons to jeers and shouts,[3] as well as working on building up the Labour group's new national headquarters in London. In June 1906, Billington-Greig was arrested in an affray outside of H. H. Asquith's home and later sentenced to a fine or two months in Holloway Prison. She was the first suffragette to be sent to Holloway Prison although an anonymous reader of the Daily Mirror paid the fine. Later in the same month, June 1906, she was sent to organise the WSPU in Scotland and she influenced Janie Allan [3] amongst many others, and it was here that she married Frederick Lewis Greig in 1907. They agreed to adopt a common surname of Billington-Greig.[1] Before that she had helped WSPU canvassing against the Liberal candidate in the Huddersfield byelection with Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, impressing local activist Hannah Mitchell.[3] However, growing differences with the Pankhursts led to her resignation as a paid WSPU organiser, though she remained in the group as a member until October 1907.

In October 1907, Mrs Pankhurst suspended the constitution and took over government of the WSPU with her daughter Christabel Pankhurst. Several prominent members left the WSPU, including Billington-Greig, Edith How-Martyn and Charlotte Despard who together with Alice Abadam, Marion Coates-Hansen, Irene Miller^{[citation needed]}, Bessie Drysdale, Maude Fitzherbert signed an open letter to Emmeline Pankhurst explaining their disquiet on 14 September 1907 with the way the organisation was run and went on to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL) whose motto was 'Dare to be Free',[5] governed on the basis of organisational democracy. Billington-Greig was initially appointed the National Honorary Organising Secretary for the League.

Women's Freedom League colours and motto 1908 Original in LSE Library

However, Billington-Greig once more resigned in 1910 when the WFL undertook a new campaign of militancy after the defeat of the Conciliation Bill.

Although she did not immediately join another organisation Billington-Greig continued to write and carry out public speaking engagements - activities she continued throughout her life. She also cared for her daughter Fiona, born in December 1915, and supported her husband's billiards table company.[6][3] Her only organisational work until 1937 was in the field of sport, including starting the Women's Billiards Association.[3] Then she once more joined the Woman's Freedom League working for its Women's Electoral Committee. After the Second World War this became the Women for Westminster group[3] with which she remained involved. Subsequently she took part in the Conference on the Feminine Point of View (1947–1951) and after 1958 she was a member of the Six Point Group while writing her account of the Suffrage Movement.

She had a keen interest in the history of the suffrage movement, as well as her writings on the subject she compiled many biographies. Some of these were created for obituaries for the Manchester Guardian. Her writings on behalf of the women's cause (but to some extent in criticism of it) included 'The Militant Suffrage Movement', published in 1911. Her articles critical of the policy of the suffrage movement include "Feminism and Politics," published in the Contemporary Review in 1911, in which she wrote, "there is no feminist organization and no feminist programme. And though the first is not essential, the second is."[7] She made similar criticisms in an unpublished document, "The Feminist Revolt: An Alternate Policy," claiming that "[t]he militant movement has kept to a straight narrow way and lest it should touch life it has cloaked itself with artifice and hypocrisy."[8] In place of the militant methods then common (attacks on property, for example), she recommended that suffragists try new tactics: "On one matter [a] protest could be made within the Police Court, on another outside, in public meetings and the public press ... Strikes and boycotts could be employed on new feminist lines."[9] She wrote innumerable articles for a variety of journals. Her interests were wide and she was involved in a large number of women's organisations. She held strong views on a variety of subjects of public interest, but especially equality between the sexes in education and in marriage. She died in 1964.

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, unveiled in 2018.[10][11][12]

• List of suffragists and suffragettes

The archives of Teresa Billington-Greig are held at The Women's Library at the Library of the London School of Economics, ref 7TBG

• Spartacus article on Teresa Billington-Greig