Edith Pickersgill

Women's Suffrage Work

Joint branch secretary of Dewsbury NUWSS with Ruth Law. Both teachers at Dewsbury's Wheelwright Grammar School for Girls.

Biography

Born Edith Annie Pickersgill, in Dewsbury, 1882, to Charles Phillips Pickersgill, Assistant Clerk to the Poor law Guardians, and Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and Annie Marie Marriott.

Edith was one of three daughters. The family of five lived at Marlborough Terrace, Dewsbury with a domestic servant.

Local newspapers documented Edith's academic talents. She attended a Wheelwright school and in 1897 was reported as having passed the Junior Local Examination in French with First Class Honours with Distinction. It was also noted that she had been awarded a County Exam Scholarship at Yorkshire College worth £30 per annum but as she was only 15, was too young to attend University and had to remain at school for another year. Two years later, the Sheffield Independent reported that she had been awarded a County Major Scholarship from the West Yorkshire County Council worth £60 per annum.

In the 1911 census, Edith is recorded as Assistant Mistress at a Secondary School for the Dewsbury Endowed Schools Foundation. The family of five were still living at Marlborough Terrace with a domestic servant. We know by 1913 she was working at Dewsbury's Wheelwright Grammar School for Girls and this is the address she used whilst working as secretary of the Dewsbury branch of the NUWSS.

Unfortunately Edith disappears from records after 1913, although it is clear from her father's probate record that she was still alive in 1922.

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