“I’ve found her! I’ve found her! I’VE FOUND HER!”
“Who? What? What are you talking about?”
“Ida! Lillian! The sister! Hilda’s sister! The other aunt! I’VE FINALLY FOUND HER.”
I had just leapt out of my desk chair and actually jumped for joy. I had been working with the family anecdote told to Hilda Burkitt’s biographer Wayne Bennett that the two other Burkitt sisters had also spent time in prison. I had found evidence for Christobel, but Ida Lillian kept slipping through my fingers. I had had the lightbulb moment that, given that Lillian had worked as an actress since she left home at 18, she may have used a stage name. But how to find her?
I eventually thought of the (very scientific) method of taking the Home Office Amnesty document of all the suffragettes arrested, ctrl + f-ing all the Idas and Lillians, and cross-referencing the names on the British Newspaper Archive. After that, I would give up.
The universe was kind that evening. The first name I hit upon was ‘Ida Cunard’. The first hits on the BNA were articles from 1963. Local newspapers reported curiously of a bequest left to The Suffragette Fellowship by Lillian Burkitt, ‘former suffragette’, ‘in memory of my imprisonment in the name of Ida Cunard in 1908 in the cause of votes for women’. It felt like Lillian had finally revealed her true identity, half a century later, from the safety of the grave. And another fifty years later, there I was, finally finding her.
It then hit me that Ida Cunard had been one of the Birmingham women arrested in February 1908 in London. She had stood trial and gone to Holloway alongside her younger sibling Christobel Wood. True ‘sister suffragettes’.
After her release, Ida Cunard published a stirring, and stridently proto-feminist, ‘message of encouragement to women’ in the WSPU newspaper.
To have helped, even in ever so small a way, towards the common cause of womanhood is not to have lived in vain. Therefore, let us all, with the concentrated energy of our sex, rally round our beloved leaders, giving them first of all our undivided loyalty, and to the Union unbounded enthusiasm, and the help that lies each in her individual power.’ [Votes for Women, April 1908]
Ida Lillian Burkitt, known by her second name, was the second child of Reuben and Laura Burkitt, born in July 1872. The eldest daughter, she was four years older than Hilda. She attended the Summer Hill girls branch of the King Edwards Grammar School. When she was 15, she won the end of year class prizes for drawing, English Literature and botany. That Christmas, she appeared in a pantomime production of ‘Sindbad the Sailor’ at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Broad St Birmingham. The following year, ‘Ida Cunard’, a ‘Well-Educated Young Lady’ posted in the Seeking advertisements in acting magazines for ‘Engagement in Dramatic or Comedy Company. Experienced.’ Over the next two years, as she approached 18 years old, she was engaged in numerous productions and often given special mentions in local reviews. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Cunard appeared in a performance of It’s Never Too Late to Mend at the Grand Theatre in Birmingham, and was noted for her ‘pathetic rendering of Josephs’.
Lillian toured the country with music-hall and pantomime troupes for the next 15 years. In 1905, in her early thirties, she might have grown tired of a nomadic lifestyle. She had recently started a side-business running a photography studio out of her parents’ house in Perry Barr, Birmingham. Most of the portraits of the family taken around this time that have survived were produced at ‘The Warwick Art Company’. It was Lillian who took the original photograph that makes up The Face of Suffrage portrait.
As already mentioned, 3 years later Lillian had taken part and been imprisoned for her involvement in suffragette demonstrations. Shortly after her release from Holloway in 1908, she embarked on a completely different career path. Until 1911, she trained in nursing at Wolverhampton General Hospital. She then, in the early summer, left for Rome to instruct at the newly opened Queen Elena training hospital. She remained there for a year, and returned in July 1912 to take up a post at the Warneford in Leamington. In 1914, when the war began, she applied and was accepted to become part of the Queen Alexandra Imperial Nursing Reserve. She served throughout WW1 at Gallipoli, then Egypt and Greece.
Assumedly because of her vocation, Lillian was never re-arrested. She did, however, remain a member of the WSPU and also assisted Hilda in her work as an organiser. She assisted in giving street meetings at a week’s intense campaigning in Coventry, giving speeches to factory girls on their dinner hour in 1910.
Lillian is an enigmatic character. Although not as outwardly unconventional as her arsonist baby sister, she still astounds me. Taking to the stage at 15, to spend the next 15 years on it as a young woman in late Victorian England suggests nerves of steel. Both the 1891 and 1901 censuses list her away from home, occupation ‘actress’. Aged 35, Ida Cunard disappeared, months after having given her final ‘performance’ in the newspapers as an arrested suffragette. She was replaced by Nurse Lillian Burkitt, who subsequently moved, by herself, to Italy. She would later serve and take care of dying soldiers in appalling conditions at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli.
Lillian never married. After the war she was discharged for undisclosed medical reasons and lived with her father until his death in the late 1920s. In 1939, she shared a house in Erdington with three younger women, a lecturer, a nurse and a typist. She later moved to Morecambe in Lancashire (where Hilda joined her in the 1950s). The main surviving family anecdote of her is that she never missed a Remembrance Day Parade. Lillian died in 1963, and finally revealed her secret identity in her last will and testament.
Lillian, or as my grandfather wrote on the back of her photograph ‘Auntie Lil’, was not as involved in the WSPU as her younger sister. She nonetheless led a fascinating life and broke gender conventions in her own way. Whilst she abandoned the stage for the more traditionally feminine role of a nurse, she still did this independently. She braved hideous conditions during WW1 and returned declared physically unfit to continue nursing for the military.
The photographs of Lillian evolve as her biography does. A young woman, she stares firmly at the camera for a head-shot or plays dress-up. Later, she is the wise older sister leaning and smiling comfortably whilst her siblings stand or sit slightly awkwardly. She then morphs into the severe Nurse Burkitt, posing in Rome.
I have so many things I want to ask her. Did you speak Italian fluently? What was it like taking to the stage in your mid-teens? How did you survive the First World War? Where did you learn to do photography? I also want to thank her, for the possibly throwaway, likely intentional, choice to record her former stage name in her will. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to find all this out about her.
Sources:
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
findmypast.co.uk
Laugh a Defiance 