Annie Kenney

Annie Kenney was born in Springhead, near Oldham, one of twelve children, and went to work half-time in a cotton mill at the age of ten while still attending school. She worked there for fifteen years and lost part of a finger when it was caught in a bobbin. In the evenings she read, joined a socialist cycling club and went to lectures, and in 1905 she heard Christabel Pankhurst speak and joined the Women's Social and Political Union.

That October she and Christabel went to a Liberal Party rally at Manchester's Free Trade Hall and repeatedly asked Sir Edward Grey whether the party would give women the vote. They were thrown out, arrested for obstruction and, refusing to pay the fine, sent to Strangeways for a few days. The press coverage was the first the militant campaign had received, and Kenney became its public face as the mill girl in clogs and shawl.

She was imprisoned thirteen times, went on hunger strike and was released under the Cat and Mouse Act more than once. When Christabel fled to Paris in 1912 to avoid arrest, Kenney ran the WSPU in Britain, travelling to Paris in disguise for instructions. She was intensely loyal to the Pankhursts, and some colleagues thought her uncritically so.

She left public life after the vote was won, married in 1920 and published a memoir, Memories of a Militant, in 1924. She died in 1953.