LGBTQ+ History Month: Lettice Annie Floyd

Throughout LGBTQ+ History Month, Midlands Rainbow will be shining a light on some of the LGBTQIA+ figures from our history across the West and East Midlands, starting with Lettice Annie Floyd.

Lettice was born on 21st November 1865 in Berkswell, a village and civil parish, now in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, although historically in Warwickshire. She was a British Suffragette and is particularly remembered for her openly lesbian relationship with fellow Suffragette, Annie Williams (b.1860).

 Lettice Floyd (Museum of London)

Lettice – along with her sister – set up a Berkswell outpost for the Birmingham Women's Suffrage Society in 1907 but soon lost patience with their way of lobbying for women’s rights, and instead joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) which was a militant group set up in Manchester by famous sister Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.

Floyd became a full-time paid organiser for the WSPU, based between Bristol and Newcastle. It was in Bristol that she first met and became romantically involved with the Suffragette, Annie Williams who was campaigning for women's suffrage while on holiday from her job as a primary school headteacher in Newquay, Cornwall.

A book by Historian Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes, details their very open relationship. Atkinson explains that queer women were  accepted in the movement, writing: “They were all in same-sex relationships; they were all very actively involved; they were quite prominent; they weren’t hiding in any closet; they were out in doing it.”

D. Tempest, 1918 “Girls are doing all the fellows' jobs now," (accessed from The Suffrage Postcard Project) was a World War I anti-suffrage cartoon. However, in contemporary media the artwork has been shared as lesbian iconography.

Lettice’s first term of imprisonment as part of the 'votes for women' campaign was in October 1908 for “wilfully obstructing the police in the execution of their duty at Bridge Street, Westminster, during the 'rush' of the House of Commons,” for which she served one month in Holloway Prison. [1]

During this prison sentence, a notice was issued by the Governor of Holloway prison stating that Annie Williams could not write to her partner. The note was accompanied by the returned letter, which Lettice Floyd was reportedly not ‘entitled’ to receive.

In 1910, Floyd and Williams were among 300 WSPU protesters, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, involved in ‘Black Friday’, following Prime Minister Asquith’s decision to block the Conciliation Bill (which would have included the rights of women to vote) from its passage into parliament. Among the group, known names included Hertha Ayrton, Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Anne Cobden-Sanderson, and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. Arrested suffragettes, including Floyd, were manhandled and assaulted by the police but authorities refused to investigate, and no charges were brought against her on this occasion.

Then, in March 1912, Floyd and Williams were both arrested and sent to Holloway prison after joining militant activity in London in which the WSPU led a window-smashing campaign. Floyd carried a leather flail which is now housed at the Museum of London. While in prison, Floyd and Williams went on hunger strike; a suffragette tactic used to protest against not being treated as political prisoners. The pair were, as a result, force-fed by the prison authorities. Annie Williams and Lettice Floyd were among the 100 suffragettes who were honoured, and awarded the WSPU Hunger Strike Medal, "for Valour".

Cartoon of woman in suffragette colours smashing windows

At the start of World War One, when the WSPU agreed to a truce with the government, Williams and Lettice Floyd moved from Cardiff – where they had been living and conducting open air speeches on women’s rights – back to Lettice’s home town of Berkswell. In 1920 the couple helped start the Women's Institute in Berkswell, and Annie Williams was president of the institute 1926–30 and 1933–34.

In 1934, Lettice Floyd died in hospital after surgery; Annie Williams was by her side when she passed.

She was at Lettice Floyd's side when she died in hospital in Birmingham after surgery in 1934. Williams inherited £3000 and a £300 annunity following Floyd’s death. Money was also bequeathed from Floyd’s estate to create a nursing home, and left, what is now called ‘Floyd's Field’, to the city of Coventry to use as a sports facility. Annie Williams passed away nine years later in 1943.