A military-style medal awarded to the first suffragette to go on hunger strike in Scotland is up for sale at a London auction house, and Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) has launched an urgent fundraising appeal to bid for the “humbling and important” artefact of the struggle for voting equality.
The medal, which hangs on a length of ribbon in the colours of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), was awarded to Maud Joachim, who was arrested in Dundee in October 1909 along with Adela Pankhurst, a daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, and four others for interrupting a meeting led by Winston Churchill. When interviewed later, he called them “a band of silly, neurotic, hysterical women”.
During her subsequent stay in prison she went on hunger strike – although she was not force fed as she would have been in an English prison – and this is commemorated by the date 19 October 1909 engraved on her medal.
“I have to say we don’t regularly go bidding at Bonhams,” said Sue John, co-founder of GWL, which is also the only accredited museum of women’s history in the UK.
“It’s very rare that we put out a public plea to raise money for something like this,” John said, “but it feels really appropriate to bring it to Glasgow Women’s Library and to keep it in Scotland.”
The library, which was established 32 years ago, doesn’t have an acquisitions budget and all of its archive material has been donated.
With bidding closing on 3 October, the library hopes to raise half the required amount through a funding drive, leaving an estimated £8,000 to be raised through individual donations. The medal is expected to sell for between £12,000 and £18,000.
Should the library be outbid, John said the donations would be ringfenced and used to buy suffrage-related items in the future.
The medal would be a significant addition to the library’s suffrage collection, which includes more than 200 campaigning postcards, anti-suffrage propaganda, ceramics and playing cards.
Joachim’s medal was one of many awarded by the radical suffrage organisation the WSPU, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, and John recalls seeing a similar one in another collection: “I held it and just felt so profoundly this experience that women went through. It is such a humbling and important aspect of the history.
“Having it in our collection would mean more people would know about Maud’s story,” she added.
Joachim, who was the niece of the Hungarian violinist and composer Joseph Joachim, allied herself with the radical wing of the suffrage movement by joining the WSPU in 1907. She was described as an “an enthusiastic window smasher” and was arrested multiple times.
Joachim’s medal comes in its original purple box with green velvet lining, and the wording on the inside lid, printed in gold on white silk, reads: “Presented to Maud Joachim by the Women’s Social and Political Union in recognition of a gallant action, whereby through endurance to the last extremity of hunger and hardship a great principle of political justice was vindicated”.
