HISTORIC MALDON: The story of the town's very own suffragette, Myra Sadd-Brown

By Ben Shahrabi

21st Feb 2023 | Local News

Myra Sadd, a Maldon-born activist, championed women's rights at a time when women were seen to be best-placed working behind the scenes to support their husbands.

Born on 3 October 1872, Myra was one of eleven children born to John Granger Sadd, whose family was a major employer in the building and timber trade, starting with a small business at Fullbridge in 1729.

She lived at Mount View, in West Chase, Maldon for the first 24 years of her life, before she married Ernest Brown and moved to London in 1896. Even then, Myra was already a passionate campaigner for Votes for Women.

The couple married in Maldon's Congregational Chapel (now the United Reformed Church) and decorated the venue in purple, white and green, the colours of the Women's Social and Political Union. They also merged their surnames to become 'Sadd-Brown', a century before this practice became fashionable.

A blue plaque was unveiled outside Myra Sadd-Brown's former home in West Chase, Maldon, in November. (Photo: Maldon Society)

Wealthy women were permitted to vote in Parliamentary elections, until they were banned in the 1832 Reform Act. Then, they were prevented from voting in local government elections after a similar Act in 1835, though this was relaxed from 1869.

Myra Sadd Brown, supported by her husband, set off on the long and painful journey which led to the Representation of the People Act in 1918. This gave the vote to women householders, or the wives of householders, aged 30 and over.

As part of Emmeline Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes, Myra hosted busloads of women from the East End in her house near Maldon. She was arrested in 1912 for throwing a brick through a window at the War Office and did two months' hard labour in Holloway Prison together with prominent activists, including Pankhurst.

Like them, Myra went on hunger strike and was force-fed through rubber tubes.

Letters to her family, scribbled on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison, are still available, and make poignant reading.

To her young children she wrote, "I have such a funny little bed, which I can turn right up to the wall when I don't use it. I am learning French & German so you must work well, or mummy will know lots more than you." She never showed the slightest sign of flinching from the cause.

World War 1 saw the suffrage movements suspend their actions and support the war effort. Women's contributions to jobs traditionally done by men made the old arguments against women's suffrage very difficult to support, and women gained the vote in 1918.

Myra Sadd Brown went on to become a leading figure in the international women's suffrage movement, until her death in 1938.

Last November, she was commemorated with a blue plaque at her former home in Maldon, in a ceremony attended by Lady Diana Dollery (Myra's granddaughter), the Town Mayor, and the Lord Lieutenant of Essex.

Speaking at the unveiling, Lady Diana Dollery said: "There are still injustices to correct, battles to be fought, as well as making the most of the opportunities that she and others won for us."