Sarah Benett

Sarah Benett was born in St Pancras in London in 1850, one of nine children born to William Morgan Benett (1813–1891), a solicitor, and Barbara Sarah Waring (1819–1894). Before Sarah Benett became involved in fighting for women's suffrage she was active in social reform. She founded a co-operative society in the village she grew up in, in the New Forest in Hampshire. After the death of her mother in 1894 Benett moved to Burslem in Staffordshire where she started another co-operative society and a general store in nearby Hanley, which she managed. She campaigned in the Staffordshire Potteries to improve the health and working conditions of workers by trying to ban the use of lead in pottery glaze.^[1]

In 1907 after attending a meeting where the speaker was Flora Drummond Bennet immediately realised that this important cause was where she needed to put her efforts and at the age of 57 joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the newly formed Women's Freedom League (WFL).^[1] Later that year, she was arrested for joining a WSPU deputation to the House of Commons. She refused to pay a 20s fine for which she received 14 days' imprisonment. In July 1907 Christabel Pankhurst stayed with her while campaigning in the Potteries. Bennet was present at the founding of the Women's Tax Resistance League becoming a tax resister herself and in 1908 was a WFL delegate to the Amsterdam conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.^[2]

Benett joined the New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage (NCSWS) and was Treasurer of the Women's Freedom League from 1909 until her resignation in 1910 from which time she devoted her efforts to the more militant Women's Social and Political Union. She was one of 120 women arrested for demonstrating outside the House of Commons on 'Black Friday' in 1910 when many women were seriously assaulted by the police.

Benett took part in the WSPU's window smashing campaigns of 1911 and 1912 and was released early from her three-month jail sentence in Holloway Prison in 1912 after going on hunger strike,^[1] for which action she received the Hunger Strike Medal and Holloway brooch from the WSPU. The application by the elderly Benett (she was 62 in 1912) for skipping ropes and balls for the suffragette prisoners to keep fit in Holloway Prison caused some amusement in the Home Office.^[2] A fellow inmate at this time was Kate Williams Evans on whose release Benett wrote a note to her maid Jane which reads: 'Miss Evans will be my guest till she is a little stronger. She has been starving so treat her as an invalid...'^[3] Benett's pencilled signature is included in an autograph book collected by Evans in Holloway which also contains the signatures of suffragettes Emily Davison and Emmeline Pankhurst. Benett became a friend of Emily Davison for whom she arranged to smuggle a watch into HM Prison Holloway. In 1916 she organised the annual pilgrimage to Davison's grave in the churchyard of St. Mary's church at Morpeth.^[2]