The Chorlton house and the Bolton suffragette .... unfinished stories

I am never surprised at how a story appears apparently out of nowhere.

Last week I was on Reynard Road, in  the house of Jaime writing about her cellar and the copper which was used to wash clothes.

It produced to a heap of pictures and comments from people who also had items in their cellars which were used to wash clothes.

And as you do I began looking for some of the residents of Jaime’s house and have been able to track quite a few.

But the one that caught my interest was Edward Blincoe and his wife Mary Ann, who may well have been the first to live there in 1903.

Two years earlier they were in Flixton and a decade later in Tabley Superior, just outside Knutsford.

Mr. Blincoe described himself as an artist and designer, but what drew me in was Mary Ann’s description of herself in the section under occupation, where she wrote “Suffragette”.

This was tactic employed by women engaged in the struggle for the vote and she was not alone.

But to make the connection between Reynard Road and Chorlton was exciting.

Just when they moved out to Knutsford, is unclear.  They were still here in 1909 but had gone by 1911, and some time after the death of Edward in 1914 Mary Ann settled in Bolton.

And here she was involved with the Bolton Women Citizen's Association, which was part of a national movement which aimed “to stimulate women's interest in social and political issues in order to prepare them for active citizenship”.*

I know that from 1912 she had been the organizing secretary of the  Bolton Women Citizen's Association, so it is possible that she was already in the town before the death of her husband, who died of a “paralysis of the brain” while an inmate of The Cheshire Lunatic Asylum.

As yet I haven’t found out any more about her activities, but in 2018 she was one of the eight Bolton women included on the list of 100 people chosen nationally to be celebrated for the work they did for the Suffrage movement. They were, “Mary Elizabeth Barnes (1864-1942), Sarah Reddish (1849-1928), Florence Blincoe (1874-1932), Alice Collinge (1873-1957), Bertha Lizzie Agnew (1869-1930), Mary Haslam (1851 -1922), Hannah Mitchell; Elizabeth Ann Anderson (1890-1983)”**

All of which means there will be a lot more about Mary Ann.  I have contacted the Bolton Archives, and await a reply.  In the meantime I know she was born in Cheshire in 1874 and died in 1932.

The rest as they say is just waiting to be uncovered.

Location; Chorlton and Bolton

Picture; Women marching with police escort. It is not known for definite but it is assumed these are suffragettes, undated, m08238, and "Suffragtettes, Manchester", 1905, m48441, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* National Women Citizen's Association, National Archives, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/9fb57391-f86b-482d-be37-1e31fcfe0d48

** Parliament Square suffragette statue: Women of Bolton honoured, By Saiqa Chaudhari  @saiqa2 Education Reporter The Bolton News, April 27th, 2018, https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/16188398.parliament-square-suffragette-statue-women-bolton-honoured/