Lynx Theatre and Poetry

In 1991, as part of Lynx's continuing research on Sylvia Pankhurst, Jacqueline Mulhallen acquired a copy of The London Magazine from 1908 which had an article in it both written and illustrated by Sylvia. In putting together the show for Lynx Theatre and Poetry, William Alderson had seen and photographed nearly all the original paintings by Sylvia Pankhurst, including most of those in the two main collections of her work at that time, the collections of Richard Pankhurst and Mollie Cook. As a result William and Jacqueline were in a good position to recognise how important this magazine was.

 

To their surprise, they discovered that only one of the seven illustrations was still extant, that of the Leicester boot factory. A different painting appears in Sylvia of another young woman working at the factory. The pictures of the pit-brow lassies had been mentioned by Sylvia in her book The Suffragette Movement, but no-one knew about these in 1989.

 

Most importantly, the painting of a chainmaker was reproduced in colour as the frontispiece of the magazine, and it provides a vivid record of the physical labour of these women and the circumstances in which they worked – the forges were not in a factory, but at the women's homes. From this picture we can get some idea of what the one of a nailmaker would have looked like.

 

Following this discovery, Lynx got a piece in The Times Diary and a spread in the East london Advertiser, while Jacqueline was interviewed on Women's Hour. Unfortunately, no paintings turned up from this coverage, and so Lynx accompanied all subsequent performances of Sylvia with a talk by Jacqueline Mulhallen on the missing paintings.