ON Christmas Day 1910, Mary Clarke suddenly collapsed at her brother’s home in London, just two days after being released from prison.
She was the first suffragette to die following police violence and forcible feeding in jail, and had suffered a brain haemorrhage.
Mary, who was the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) organiser for Brighton, had taken part in a demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament on November 18.
The day became notoriously known as Black Friday after 300 women were beaten and sexually assaulted by police officers.
Mary returned to London days later to protest against police brutality and was arrested and jailed for one month, in which she went on hunger strike and was forcibly fed.
Despite her bravery and influence on the cause for women’s suffrage, Mary’s death never received the same level of publicity as suffragette Emily Davison, who met a violent end after throwing herself under the King’s horse on Derby Day 1913.
As a result, campaigners have described Mary, the younger sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, as “the forgotten suffragette”.
To honour her, the Mary Clarke Statue Appeal was launched in Brighton to install a monument in her memory in the Pavilion Gardens.
The first phase of fundraising has now been completed and sculptor Denise Dutton has delivered her bronze maquette of Mary, which was received by the Mayor of Brighton and Hove, Councillor Alan Robins, at a socially distanced ceremony earlier this month at Brighton Town Hall.
The maquette shows Mary wearing a suffragette sash and carrying copies of Votes For Women, the suffragette newspaper she regularly sold in Brighton, with the front page of the November 1910 issue depicting the events of Black Friday.
Mary also wears the Hunger Strikers’ medal and walks over the implements used in forcible feeding, which are embedded in the surface of the plinth.
She gestures towards a lamp at her feet which she has placed there for others to pick up.
Words from her sister, Emmeline Pankhurst, are also etched into the bronze, curving around the line of the feeding tube. It reads: “She is the first to die. How many must follow…”
Jean Calder, chairwoman of the Mary Clarke Statue Appeal, said the next stage for the campaign is to raise £60,000 to install the statue itself.
She said: “Nationally, women who have achieved a great deal are not commemorated. Mary was this extraordinary woman who made this huge sacrifice and yet she’s been completely forgotten. I can’t believe this would have happened to a man.”
Jean said that Mary, who lived in Victoria Road in Seven Dials with fellow suffragette Minnie Turner, was “extremely influential” in the city and was the leader of the suffragette movement in the South East.
She said: “She held meetings every day down on the seafront and used to get a lot of heckling, but she was always self-controlled. What’s remarkable about her is I’ve not found out anything bad.
“People talk about her calmness and how she was constantly encouraging young people to take up the struggle and carry it on when older ones were imprisoned.
“She was an extremely brave woman and was prepared to be arrested. So often she would defend other women against hostile crowds but would only fight back with reason and calmness.”
Mary was greatly loved and admired by fellow suffragettes – including Joan Dugdale, who described her as having “superhuman strength of spirit” as well as “sweet sympathy and gentleness”.
Mary had come to Joan’s aid at an event in Bournemouth, where crowds were throwing rotten apples at them. As she rushed to help Joan, Mary suffered “blows and kicks and shoving”.
As soon as she was released from prison on December 23, 1910, Mary attended a meeting in London, where she is said to have made an inspirational speech, before travelling to another meeting in Brighton and back to London again for Christmas.
Jean said: “She must have been exhausted. Not a lot is known about her death, but it is thought the haemorrhage was a result of injuries from Black Friday.”
A Christmas Appeal has been launched to help raise funds for the Mary Clarke Statue Appeal.
Donations can be made at www.maryclarkestatue.com, or on the LocalGiving site, or the PayPal page.
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