Sunday, July 10, 2011

J.W. Logan's daughter Nora was an imprisoned suffragette

Later. In fact it seems that it was Isobel Logan, Nora's sister, who was imprisoned. Nora was arrested for suffragette activities but was probably not imprisoned. See this note from Nina Boyd.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my hero J.W. Logan - or Paddy Logan - who was the Liberal MP for Harborough  from 1891 to 1904 and from 1910 to 1916.

I have known for years that one of Logan's daughters, Nora, was a campaigner for women's suffrage. I recently discovered an exchange in Hansard that suggests that went to prison for her beliefs.

The exchange came on 15 July 1908 - a time when Logan had temporarily retired from politics owing to poor health. J.G. Swift MacNeil (MP for South Donegal and, interestingly, a Protestant Irish Nationalist) asked a question of Herbert Gladstone, who was Secretary of State at the Home Office:
I beg to ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention has been directed to the statements of Mr. J. W. Logan, who was for many years a Member of this House, that the ladies, of whom his daughter is one, who were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment in connection with the agitation for woman suffrage, are placed in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, have prison dress, have coarse prison food to eat, are not allowed to have letters or books or newspapers, except one book a week from the prison library, which they are not allowed to read until after 5 p.m., and that the one hour out of the twenty-four in which they are not in solitary confinement is spent half in chapel and the remaining half at exercise in a yard where they are not allowed to speak to any person; in what respects, if any, does this punishment differ from the prison discipline enforced on prisoners guilty of heinous crimes; how many 848 ladies are at present subject to this treatment for offences of a political character which has been inflicted on them in the discretion of a magistrate; and whether he will in these cases advise the exercise of the prerogative of the Crown for the removal or reduction of the cruel and humiliating incidents of such an imprisonment.
The more you learn, the more there is to find out.

2 comments:

dreamingspire said...

And the consequence was?

Jonathan Calder said...

You can read Herbert Gladstone's answer if you follow the link. I don't know how Nora Logan turned out.