Sunday 2nd February 2:00pm at Gateacre Unitarian Chapel
Christina Clark will be able to talk to us on February 2nd on the Glasgow Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh who amongst other things designed the Glasgow Art gallery. Charles Rennie Mackintosh as a major figure in the art nouveau movement. He is also famous for his strikingly modern interiors of his houses such as ‘The Hill House’ in Helensburgh, ‘The House for an Art Lover’ in Glasgow, together with his buildings, including the famous Glasgow tea rooms he executed for his greatest patron Miss Kate Cranston. He also designed the Glasgow School of Art Building which was severely damaged in 2014 and finally burnt down in 2018. Mackintosh collaborated in much of his interior design with his wife Margaret Macdonald who was a gifted artist.
Sunday 23rd March 2:00pm at Gateacre Unitarian Chapel
Joanna Williams will be presenting a talk on Lydia Ernestine Becker. Fifty years before women were enfranchised, a legal loophole allowed up to a thousand women to vote in the general election of 1868. This surprising event occurred due to the feisty and single-minded dedication of Lydia Becker, the acknowledged, though unofficial, leader of the British women’s suffrage movement in the later 19th century. Brought up near Manchester in a middleclass family as the eldest of fifteen children, she broke away from convention, remaining single and entering the sphere of men by engaging in politics. Although it was considered almost immoral for a woman to speak in public, Lydia addressed innumerable audiences, not only on women’s votes, but also on the position of wives, the abuse of women, and their rights at work. She battled grittily to gain academic education for poor girls, and kept countless supporters all over Britain and beyond abreast of the many campaigns for women’s rights through her publication, the Women’s Suffrage Journal.
Steamrollering her way to Parliament as chief lobbyist for women, she influenced MPs in a way that no woman, and few men, had done before. In the 1860s the idea of women’s suffrage was compared in the Commons to persuading dogs to dance; it was dismissed as ridiculous and unnatural. By the time of Lydia’s death in 1890 there was a wide acceptance that the enfranchisement of women would happen, sooner or later. The torch was picked up by Lydia’s younger colleague on the London committee, Millicent Fawcett, and by a woman she had inspired as a teenager, Emmeline Pankhurst; the rest is History.
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