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The Scottish Suffragette Agnes Henderson Brown was born on April 12th 1866 in Edinburgh. The term ‘

The Scottish Suffragette Agnes Henderson Brown was born on April 12th 1866 in Edinburgh.

The term ‘suffragette’ was invented in 1906 by that bastion of everything bad, the Daily Mail, as meant to be a belittling epithet, but the women turned it around and adopted it as a badge of honour.

Nannie Brown, as she later became known as was born at 125 Princes Street, which is slap bang opposite the Castle. The street in those days would have been mainly a residential one, as it was meant to be in the plans for the New Town, George Street was meant to be the main shopping area.

Their father was interested in social and political reform and the house became a centre of cultural activity. The Dad ran a number of fruit shops under the title of William Brown & Sons he trained his daughters, Agnes and Jessie, well and refused to submit to laws that he objected to, he was an activist for women’s rights. His opposition to taxes that differentiated between genders caused him to end up in the notorious Calton Gaol in Edinburgh.

Agnes and her sister Jessie were among the first women to be seen on bicycles in Scotland. The safety bicycle was the direct ancestor of today’s machines. With a slight adaptation they attracted thousands of women to cycling and some historians point to the safety bicycle as the beginnings of suffrage, women’s rights and feminism.

Nannie and Jessie were known to heckle parliamentary candidates at meetings, Nannie was also a writer of stories, lectures, plays and articles. She was a member of The Scottish Women’s Rural Institute, as she grew older and unable to participate as much in demonstrations, her house in Castle Street became a haven for the SWRI who would seek out advice from her. They would hold ‘Scots evenings’ or ‘Dickens evenings’, at which stories, songs, and sketches were performed.

She also participated in societies such as the Edinburgh Dickens Fellowship, learned to type, this might seem trivial, but women were marginalised back then, hence the suffrage movement sprung up to right these things, it was said in an obituary the Nannie was the first woman to learn to type in all of Scotland.

Nannie Brown died on 1st December 1943 at 3 Blackford Road, Edinburgh and is buried beside her parents at The Dean Cemetery, sadly Wiki reports that the grave has been vandalised and is not the easiest to locate, I must try and seek it out the next time I am on a wander down that way.

The first two pics are from a newspaper reporting on their march to Selby, they also marched to John O’Groats to spread the word about women’s rights.

The third pic is from Ste[hen Dickson at Chaos Project who seek to remember unsung or undersung heroes and especially heroines whose graves are lost or forgotten. Go have a look at the page, it’s not been updated for a while, but has some interesting posts, they don’t go into detail, but one that caught my eye was “ Remembering the 115,000 unmarked graves in St Cuthbert’s Churchyard “