The Elusive Pimpernel

Some suffragettes marched with banners, or printed and distributed propaganda pamphlets. Others took more direct action. DIANE ATKINSON tells the story of one activist who employed arson to spark awareness of the burning issue of women’s suffrage

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Recalling her career as a suffragette arsonist and Houdini-like escapologist in interviews later in her life, Lilian Lenton lit up as if a fire had been started in her heart.

“To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful,” she later admitted. “But it really was lovely to find that you’d been successful – that the thing really had burned down and that you hadn’t got caught. There it was blazing, and there we were in the glare of the lights…”

Lilian Ida Lenton was one of the youngest, yet most militant, of suffragettes in the three years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Her suffragette career was daring, dangerous and dramatic, reported in newspapers around the country. The new half-penny dailies, with their half-tone photographs and full spreads, often featured her pyrotechnic activities.

Lilian was 5ft 2ins tall in her stockinged feet, with brown hair and eyes – a “tiny, china-like figure, but wiry and… wily”. She soon gained a romantic nickname, ‘The Elusive Pimpernel’, for her effective disguises and her ability to elude the policemen and detectives who guarded the places where she was kept under house arrest while released from prison on licence. With her tiny stature, she easily passed as a child, a delivery boy or a little old lady.

Born in Leicester in 1891, Lilian was the eldest of the five children of Isaac, a carpenter and joiner, and Mahalah, who had worked in a hosiery factory before her mar- riage. Lilian trained as a dancer, but was then inspired by hearing Emmeline Pankhurst speak about women’s suffrage. As soon as she was “21 and my own boss”, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).