Norah Smyth was brought up in Great Barrow, the small Cheshire village where I live. Her father was a wealthy corn merchant originally from Ireland & their home, Barrowmore Hall, destroyed by a stray German bomb in WW2 was one of the county's finest Victorian country houses.  She was an activist for social change and a close friend of (and chauffeur to) the Pankhursts, using most of her £30,000 inheritance from 1911 to fund the activities of Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of the Suffragettes, including the Woman's Dreadnought magazine. She was also a brilliant documentary photographer, artist and carver in stone and wood. The sandstone family grave in the churchyard features her carving skills in a beautiful Celtic cross and inscription. I walk and run regularly in the grounds of her former home, which is a bluebell wood, open to everyone and often think about how a young woman from this place became a (largely unsung) hero of the suffragette movement. The poem grew slowly from those walks. If you search Norah Smyth suffragette you can discover more about this remarkable woman and her work. 

 

The Dreadnought Suffragette 

 

Walk with me to Barrowmore

Where keening buzzards fly

And scan the distant glistening shore

Gold beneath the sky

 

The shimmering waters’ fill and fall

Square church towers west and south

Moss capped, sunlit sandstone walls

The river’s mud brown mouth

 

See the silt slipped river

Kiss the estuary 

As fields of barley quiver

And ripple like the sea

 

And high above the gilded land

The red Victorian keep

Where beech and oak and Scots pines stand

And bluebells stir from sleep

 

In Spring they push through dew lipped leaves

And will for ever more

Hear softly how the morning breathes

For the flowers of Barrowmore

 

The flowers of Barrowmore 

That hide in winter’s chill

And fill the michorrizal floor

With bowing purple still

 

On summer days I feel her here

Her steady gaze, ice blue

Who saw the path away from fear

In the shadow of the yew

 

She lies beneath the sycamore

Bluebell columns rise each year

And honeysuckle tangles

And buttercups appear

 

Coils carved below a sandstone cross

So no one may forget

The fierceness, beauty, love and loss

Of the dreadnought suffragette