Olive Beamish

Olive Beamish was an Irish-born suffragette, who wore a Women's Social and Political Union badge whilst still at school, and became involved in the militant suffragette movement, including attacking postboxes and arson. Beamish was also known as "Phyllis Brady". Beamish was imprisoned and force-fed and was one of the first to be released under the "Cat and Mouse" Act and later sentenced to 18 months with hard labour.

Early life

Agnes Olive Beamish was born in Cork in Ireland. Her father was a Protestant farmer. She had brothers. Her parents supported their daughter joining Women's Social and Political Union in 1906 and she wore their badge to school, whilst living in Westbury-on-Trym, near Bristol, England, where they were had moved to by 1901. Beamish felt the inferior status of women when her brothers were able to engage in politics for the 1905 election, saying "I felt the position keenly, that I would never be equal to them in the political world, and I also realised the inferior position of women, everywhere." Beamish studied at Girton College Cambridge, mathematics and economics in 1912.

Suffrage activism

Beamish began to organise for the WSPU at Battersea London as well as in the East End where she attacked a pillarbox. On 19 March 1913, Trevethan, a mansion house in Egham, Surrey was ruined in an arson attack and fire, and messages were found in the garden referring to suffragette slogans, including "Stop torturing our comrades in prison" and "Votes for Women".
Beamish was said by a local policeman as one of the two women cycling very fast, without lights, at one a.m. She was identified under the pseudonym 'Phyllis Brady'. Less than a month later, she was setting fire to Sanderstead station but she was not caught. and which the doctor said "could only be harmful", and that as Beamish was preparing her defence for the trial, she may have tried to obtain an emetic to make herself vomit the hypnotic drugs.
A surveillance image of Olive Beamish in Holloway prison is in the Museum of London archive.

Later life

During the First World War, Beamish was a social organiser based in Hoxton. She then ran her own typing agency business for 21 years in the City of London to 1930, and was on the executive of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries.
Beamish was a member of the Communist Party from 1926-29, but then joined the Labour Party and became Secretary of the Chelmsford Labour Party. Beamish supported the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War. In 1926, Beamish was living in Billericay, Essex and then moved to Suffolk.
Beamish died in Stowmarket in 1978, aged 87.