Your most welcome report on Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming production about Margaret Haig Thomas – Lady Rhondda – much exaggerates her obscurity (Welsh opera company celebrates suffragette, 14 May). This fine Welsh woman (whom I met) is in fact the subject of an excellent recent biography by my colleague Angela John, on which WNO will no doubt draw heavily. She was a lifelong feminist who went to jail for her beliefs, and, as your report says, waged a determined campaign to take her place in the upper house after her famous father died. At the time, she was rebuffed by reactionaries like Lord Birkenhead. However, her portrait now hangs in the peers’ dining room, gazing down on dozens of female members of the upper house. So Margaret got there in the end.
Kenneth O Morgan
Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire
• I was interested to read your piece on Lady Rhondda. During the 1950s, my family holidayed on a farm near Lady Rhondda’s country home, Pen Ithon Hall. My mother, the daughter of an imprisoned suffragette, Charlotte Howard Shaw, was invited to tea at the hall. My brother and I accompanied her. They talked for a long time about the suffragette movement and Lady Rhondda’s journal Time and Tide. However, I was most interested when she talked about the sinking of the Lusitania. She told us that one of the sailors had tied her to a float, which had saved her life. Her father then advertised widely for the sailor to come forward to be rewarded, but no one did.
Simon Hurdley
Bridport, Dorset
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