Mrs Hilda Eliza Brackenbury

Other sources: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4769024
Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866?1928 (1999)

Family information: Widow of an army general. Mother to Georgina and Marie Brackenbury, also suffrage campaigners.

Additional Information: Hilda joined the WSPU in 1907, and in 1912, aged 80 years old, she was arrested and served a 14-day prison sentence in Holloway. She had smashed windows at the United Service Institution at Whitehall with a hammer, and had chosen the building to highlight the disparity between her family's military involvement and sacrifice (her husband had been an army general and her two sons had died on active duty) and her lack of political voice without the vote. The family home in Campden Hill Square, Kensington, London, became known as 'Mouse Castle', because the Brackenbury family provided shelter there for suffragettes temporarily released under the 'Cat and Mouse Act' so that they could recover form hunger striking and/or forcible feeding. 'Mouse Castle' also became temporary headquarters for the WSPU in the summer of 1914, after their usual offices were raided. In 1911, as head of the household, Hilda took part in the illegal suffrage boycott of the government census survey. Her daughter Marie, writing on behalf of all the Brackenburys, stated that she was 'registering her protest against the votelessness of the women of Great Britain by refusing to fill in this form'.