The suffragette movement may well have been moved from Lancashire to London in order to stage “demonstrations of the feminine bourgeoisie” (Letters, 12 September), but Lancashire was the setting for a significant act of defiance by the daughter of a Preston doctor. Edith Rigby had already been to prison several times for suffragette protests before, in July 1913, she persuaded her husband’s chauffeur to drive her, together with an Independent Labour Party sympathiser and a keg of paraffin, to Lord Leverhulme’s Rivington bungalow, which she duly torched. Though “bourgeois” may be an understatement – the bungalow’s owner was informed of the fire when dining as a guest of Lord Derby, who was entertaining King George V and Queen Mary at the time.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire
