A Maldon women's rights campaigner and suffragette, who was force fed in prison and went on to be part of the international campaign for votes for women.
Born on 3 October 1872, Myra was the 10th of 11 children born to John Granger Sadd, part of the famous local building and timber family who had operated at Fullbridge since 1729. The family lived in a large mansion off West Chase, in Maldon, that later became a convent and then part of St Francis School.
A keen cyclist, Myra met and fell in love with Ernest Brown, who with his brother Albert Brown ran bicycle parts company Brown Brothers. The couple were married in 1896, in the Congregational Chapel (now the Maldon United Reformed Church) and in a radical move, both merged their surnames to become “Sadd Brown”.
Even before she married, Myra had been campaigning for women to be allowed to vote, and she continued to become more involved in the movement as part of Emily Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes. Campaigning led to direct action, and in 1912 she was arrested for throwing a brick through a window at the War Office and served two months in Holloway Prison with hard labour. During that time, along with other suffragettes, she went on hunger strike and was horrifically force-fed through rubber tubes. She remained undaunted however, writing cheerful letters to her young children, scribbled on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison.
The cause was won in the UK when women gained the vote in 1918, but Myra Sadd Brown went on to become a leading figure in the international women's suffrage movement. She became an active member of the International Suffrage Alliance and was at the forefront of setting up of the British Commonwealth League. After the death of her husband in 1930, Myra travelled to the far east to be present at the birth of a grandchild. Afterwards she visited Angkor Wat and Malaya before moving on to Hong Kong, planning to return home on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
However, before she could return, she suffered a stroke and died in Kowloon Hospital in April 1938. She was cremated in Hong Kong, but her life is remembered in a tree-shaped memorial in the churchyard of the United Reformed Church in Maldon and in a plaque on her former home in West Chase. Her name also lives on through the Myra Sadd Brown Memorial Library for women’s activism, founded in 1938 and now at the London School of Economics, where a large amount of her letters and works, including her notes to her children from prison, are preserved.
Search
