1907 April Footnotes

[1] Sir Ernest Albert Waterlow, RA ROI (1850 – 1919) was a British painter.

[2] Sir David Murray RA (1849 – 1933) was a Scottish landscape painter.

[3] Alfred William Parsons RA (1847 – 1920) was an English artist: illustrator, landscape painter and garden designer.

[4] “Votes for Women” by E Robin – The first suffragette play opened on April 9 1907 at the Royal Court, directed by Harley Granville Barker, who changed the title from its anodyne original The Friend of Women and added an exclamation mark. Not that its author, Elizabeth Robins, needed any encouragement. She was an American actress who emigrated after her actor husband committed suicide by jumping into Boston’s Charles River wearing full theatrical armour, and was nothing if not hardboiled.

When George Bernard Shaw made a pass at her, she pulled a gun on him. When Max Beerbohm lunched with her, he could not resist “peeping under the table to see if she really wore a skirt”. He found her “fearfully Ibsenish”; she had found fame and feminism playing the first British Hedda Gabler in 1891, and had been vilified for having “glorified an unwomanly woman”. But she thought Ibsen had not gone far enough and Votes for Women! was a revisionist rewrite of his play, “a dramatic tract in three acts”.