Saturday, 7 January 2012

Sylvia Pankhurst

Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst
120 Cheyne Walk
LONDON SW10
Erected by: Greater London Council in 1985
Lived Here:  ???
Me (Helen Ross)
Sylvia Pankhurst
Blue Plaque
Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882  – 27 September 1960) was an English campaigner for the Suffragist movement in the UK. She was for a time a prominent communist who then devoted herself to the cause of anti-facism.  
Sylvia Pankhurst






Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester, daughter of Dr. Richard Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst, both members of the Independent Labour Party and much concerned with women's rights. She and her sisters attended the Manchester High School for Girls. Her sister Christabel would also become an activist.Sylvia trained as an artist at the Manchester School of Art, and in 1900 won a scholarship to the Royal Colllege of Art in South Kensington.  In 1906 Sylvia gave up her art studies and worked full-time for the WSPU.  Later that year she suffered her first imprisonment after protesting in court at a trial in which women had not been allowed to speak in their own defence.

Sylvia Pankhurst
Released from Prison

During the 1st World War, Sylvia was horrified to see her mother and her sister Christabel become enthusiastic supporters of the war drive, and campaigning in favour of military conscription. She herself was opposed to the war. Her organization attempted to organize the defence of the interests of women in the poorer parts of London. They set up "cost-price" restaurants to feed the hungry, without the taint of charity. They also established a toy factory in order to give work to women who had become unemployed because of the war.   Sylvia worked incessantly to defend soldiers' wives rights to decent allowances while their partners were away, both practically by setting up legal advice centres, and politically by running campaigns to oblige the government to take into account the poverty of soldiers' wives.   She was an important figure in the communist movement at the time and attended meetings of the International in Russia and Amsterdam and also those of the Italian Socialist Party. She disagreed with Lenin on important points of Communist theory and strategy and was supportive of "left communists" such as Anton Pannekoek.  


Sylvia Pankhurst objected to entering into a marriage contract and taking a husband's name. At about the end of the First World War, she began living with Italian anarchist Silvo Corio and moved to London.  In 1927 she gave birth to a son, Richard. As she refused to marry the child's father.  Her own mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, broke with her and did not speak to her again.  


Sylvia Pankhurst Speaks at
Anti Nazi March - Circa 1936
In the early 1930s, Pankhurst drifted away from communist politics but remained involved in movements connected with anti-facism and anti-colonialism. In 1932 she was instrumental in the establishment of the Socialist Workers' National Health Council. She responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by publishing The New Times & Ethiopia News, and became a supporter of Haile Selassie. She raised funds for Ethiopia's first teaching hospital and wrote extensively on Ethiopian Art & Culture; her research was published as Ethiopia, a Cultural History (London: Lalibela House, 1955).  From 1936, MI5 kept a watch on Pankhurst's correspondence. In 1940, she wrote to Viscount Swinton as the chairman of a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, sending him a list of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of this letter on MI5's file carries a note in Swinton's hand, reading "I should think a most doubtful source of information."  


After the post-war liberation of Ethiopia, she became a strong supporter of union between Ethiopia and the former Italian Somaliland, and MI5's file continued to follow her activities. In 1948, MI5 considered strategies for "muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst".  
Sylvia Pankhurst & Haile Selassie
Pankhurst became a friend and adviser to the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and followed a consistently anti-British stance. She moved to Addis Ababa at Haile Selassie's invitation in 1956 with her son, Richard, (who continues to live there), and founded a monthly journal, Ethiopia Observer, which reported on many aspects of Ethiopian life and development.


She died in 1960, and was given a full state funeral at which Haile Selassie named her "an honorary Ethiopian". She is the only foreigner buried in front of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, in the area reserved for patriots of the Italian war.


Sylvia Pankhurst's Grave
Addis Ababa







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