Class 7 - Letters by Lady Pethick-Lawrence, and papers relating to her

1 box

The contents of this class fall into the following main groups:

A memorial pamphlet to Francis Noel Pethick, 1904 (1).

Biographical notices of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, 1912-35 (2-15).
Articles, notes for speeches, and other writings by (Lady) Emmeline Pethick-(Lawrence), 1901-47 (16-41).

Letters from Emmeline Pethick to F. W. Lawrence, 1900-1 (41a-146).

Circular letters by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, written during a visit to Egypt, 1904-5 (147-56).

Letters by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, written during a visit to Egypt, 1904 (157-64).

Letters from Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to F. W. Pethick-Lawrence, and other papers, 1909-13 (165-71).

The letters in the fifth and sixth groups (147-64) were written by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1904-5 in the company of her sister Marie and her cousin Hetty Lawes, who had worked with Flinders and Hilda Petrie in 1896 during their excavations near Cairo. The letters form a connected account of the party’s travels in Egypt and of their journeys there and back. A brief description of the journey will also be found in the ninth chapter of My Part in a Changing World.—The following is a brief itinerary of the journey: The three women set off from London on Thursday, 4 November, crossed the Channel, and arrived at Marseilles by seven o’clock the following morning. There they boarded the P. & O. ship Victoria, which arrived at Port Said at 2 p.m. on Tuesday the 8th. They made a brief tour of the town, and then took at train to Cairo, where they spent the night at Shepheard’s Hotel. The following morning they visited the bazaars of Cairo and removed to the Mena House Hotel, in the shadow of the pyramids of Giza. There they met with some of Hetty’s Arab friends, including a bedouin named Abdul Enani Khattab, who accompanied them for the rest of their time in Egypt. They also met Hetty’s sister Josephine Plunkett and her family. After visits to the pyramids and the Sphinx, the women became enchanted with the country, and they devised a plan to travel down the Nile in a dahabeeyah, or houseboat, and return in a caravan. After a few days making preparations, they left the Mena House Hotel on Thursday the 17th, and boarded the dahabeeyah Bolbol; but they were prevented by a lack of wind from leaving Cairo till the 22nd. Thence they progressed down the Nile as far as Luxor, Fred Pethick-Lawrence joining the party at Sohag on the 15th. At Luxor on the 23rd they left the boat and pitched camp by the Temple of Karnak; and on Christmas Day they went by train to Aswan, where they stayed at the Cataract Hotel. They visited the Temple at Philae and the Barrage, then returned to Luxor on the 28th, where they met Fred’s sister Carrie and her friend. The party travelled from Luxor to Ouasta overnight on 30-31 December, and then began their journey across the desert by caravan. This journey took them by way of the Medum Pyramid and the Fayoum, back to Giza, where they arrived about 20 January. The dates of the events in this latter part of the journey are unclear.

The last group (165-71) comprises two letters written by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence while imprisoned at Holloway in 1909; a letter from the same place in 1912, and another written shortly after her release, while her husband was still in prison; and two documents relating to the civil action brought against them in 1913 by firms whose windows had been damaged by suffragettes.

This class, like the others, represents the contents of one of the archival boxes into which the papers were put on their arrival in the Library.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.