THE glimpse of a c.1908 banner inscribed ‘Votes for Women - Kendal’ seen on our television screens during the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympic Games hinted at South Lakeland’s contribution to British Democracy.

Indeed David Clarke, in his excellent book The Labour Movement in Westmorland, asserts that our thinly populated area ‘punched above its weight’ in the campaign to extend electoral rights (known as the suffrage) to women and to the 40 per cent of men who also ‘lacked the vote’.

Some of the early campaigners were socialists like the Unitarian Minister The Rev H.V. Mills, who persuaded Labour MPs to address local suffragette meetings.

Other parties were divided on the issue. In Parliament the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, was ‘against’ while the Conservative Leader, Balfour, was ‘for’, although the Tory Speaker James Lowther, a relative of Westmorland’s grandest grandee the Earl of Lonsdale, banned a pro-suffrage debate.

At home because of her party's ‘indifference’ Theodora Wilson Wilson (she had the same name twice!) left the Liberals and joined Labour, while the Cropper family of Burneside was split between Mary Cropper, an anti-suffragist, and her suffragette sister Eleanor Acland.

Opposition to the female vote was led by Theodosia Bagot, wife of Westmorland’s Conservative MP. At the 1910 General Election she urged women to ‘tell your husbands, sons and brothers to vote for Bagot’.

But in Milnthorpe the leading suffragette was a Conservative, Mrs McNab, who had her white front door daubed with the Liberal colour of blue by anti-suffragettes.

Locally, however, there was little violence as most suffragettes belonged to the peaceable National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies chaired by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, of Kirkby Lonsdale.

Even so, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, was in 1911 loudly applauded by a Kendal audience when she proposed that women should be literally militant and join the army because ‘if you can fight - you can vote’.

In retaliation, the Honourable Mrs Cropper responded that ‘women would never be able to command the same wage as men as they were born to be mothers and do their bounden duty to their sons.

Even so, women over 30 got the vote in 1918 and the rest in 1928.

But, so far, Westmorland has only ever had one female parliamentary Candidate in Mrs Evelyn Short, who stood unsuccessfully for Labour in the 1936 General Election.