Family and local history

One hundred years ago, on the 4th June 1913, the suffragette Emily Davison ran in front of King George V’s horse during the Derby at Epsom Racecourse to promote the ‘Votes for Women’ cause. She died four days later of her injuries. The suffragettes in Scotland were also making themselves heard and there are a number of books in the library that provide more details on this subject. The most comprehensive history is Leah Leneman’s ‘Guid Cause: the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland’ (1995) which covers the period 1867 until after World War 1 and includes a list of Scottish women who were active suffragettes.

The movement was most prominent in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee, but there were smaller groups of suffragettes in other parts of Scotland. Examples of relevant publications include Lynn M. Brewster’s ‘Suffrage in Stirling: the struggle for women’s votes’ (2002) and Marsali Taylor’s ‘Women’s Suffrage in Shetland’ (2010).

Forcible feeding of women who were jailed was also used in Scotland. An account of this practice is given in ‘Martyrs in our Midst: Dundee, Perth and the forcible feeding of suffragettes’ by Leah Leneman (1993). This book provides detailed reports of the experiences of several women including Ethel Moorhead, Arabella Scott and Frances Gordon.

The library’s schools resource A Guid Cause might also be of interest to researchers investigating the suffragettes in Scotland, with digitised original material from the library’s collections.

The National Library of Scotland has just released digital copies of British military lists from the First and Second World Wars. They list all the officers who served in the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force from 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. They can be viewed for free on the library website.

NLS has collections of photographs on a wide range of subjects. Some of these have been digitised and can be viewed on our Digital Gallery for free. Two collections which may be of particular interest to researchers are the photographs of the south side of Edinburgh, taken in 1929 by Alfred Henry Rushbrook, and the official photographs of the First World War, from the Earl Haig collection.

The National Library of Scotland has numerous published Rolls of Honour, which are lists of those killed in various wars. However, I found an unusual Roll of Honour in our collections recently. It is the Roll of honour, 1914-1919, Dean and St Cuthbert United Free Church. The album has a list of all the members from that particular church, both men and women, who were killed in the First World War. The rest of the volume contains black and white photographs of most of the people listed on the Roll of Honour.

Each photograph includes the name, rank and regiment of the deceased. There are British and overseas regiments represented. Most of the photographs are of men but there are two women pictured. These are Catherine Wilson, who was a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a field nursing unit, and Margaret McLean, who was in the Womens’ Army Auxiliary Corps.