SHE had an audience with Lenin, fought with India’s first prime minister against imperialism and was jailed for a bomb blast in the battle for women’s rights.
Now the autobiography of one of the most pivotal figures to come out of Scotland in the past 150 years has been published for the first time as part of an exhibition dedicated to her life and work.
Born to a family of bakers in the Gorbals, Glasgow, in 1877, Helen Crawfurd was one of the leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in Scotland and served jail time on both sides of the Border while campaigning for suffrage.
One sentence was passed over her alleged involvement in an explosion damaging Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, with another handed down after she smashed the windows of the London home of the education minister.
Crawfurd also helped form the Women’s Peace Party at the onset of the First World War, campaigned against exploitation of the poor in the Glasgow rent strikes alongside Mary Barbour and aided the foundation of the League Against Imperialism, which counted Albert Einstein and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, among its backers.
She also served on the executive committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain, met Lenin in Moscow and became the first woman elected to Dunoon Council.
But despite a life full of adventure and legacy of life-changing activism, Crawfurd’s memoirs – held at the Marx Memorial Library in London – have never been published.
Today they will go on show at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) as part of an exhibition which has been created by her great-niece Fiona Jack.
The New Zealand artist received permitted to copy the papers and, with the help of her mother as a typist, has presented them in book form for those attending her show.
Titled Our Red Aunt, the collection includes ceramics and textiles bearing Crawfurd’s own words, including one recalling the “tipping point” at which, as the wife of a minister, she turned to militancy. Jack said: “Her husband had been giving a sermon, and she doesn’t record his words, but that was the moment when she was able to reconcile her religious faith and her need to take action. She said: ‘If Christ could be militant, so could I’.”
Jack, based in Auckland, says few tales of Crawfurd’s activities have been handed down through her family, though her father does remember arriving at her Dunoon home for lunch as a child in 1954 to discover she had died.
She said: “Her story being obscured in our family mirrors the obscuring of her achievements in Scottish history. She’s done so much, and achieved so much, that it’s surprising that she’s not more well known.”
The memoirs are available in two versions, with one provided to allow readers to help edit the tome by correcting mis-spelled names or other errors. However, fewer than five copies exist and none are available for readers to take home.
GWL says talks are under way to publish Crawfurd’s autobiography for a wider audience.
Jack said it reveals the internal conflict that marked her private thoughts.
The artist said: “She was anti-war in principal, but she said she was not a pacifist and believed in taking up arms. Her commitment to militant suffragism is a conflict for her with her religious perspectives.
“She went through so much in prison, where she was force-fed, but while there she wasn’t focused on that.
“I often wonder what causes she would be active in if she was around today.”
Auckland’s Artspace gallery has asked Jack to develop a new version of the show which includes inscribed rocks for viewers to take home for a New Zealand audience, but she said the project has been very personal: “It’s difficult to imagine what she went through. It makes me wonder at what point I’d reach that same tipping point at which I’d take up arms.”
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