Blog | Lucienne Boyce

Ethel Smyth and The March of the Women

Music was very important to the women’s suffrage movement. Both the militant suffragettes and the law abiding suffragists enjoyed a repertoire of suffrage songs. Suffrage meetings often started with a …

Heroica, Alison Morton

Alison Morton’s twelve-book Roma Nova series is set in an imaginary European country where a remnant of the Roman Empire has survived into the twenty-first century. However, there have been …

Suffragettes and the Police

As me and my companions were going to Westminster We spied a big policeman, though for him we did not care; For we were in the right, my girls, and …

The Lady Secretary

I’ve written before about my interest in the history of women office workers, and how women came to dominate secretarial and clerical jobs. (See ‘Being A Secretary’ .) As part …

Theresa Garnett and the Whip That Struck Winston Churchill

I recently came across a photograph in the Birmingham Daily Gazette, 6 February 1947, which shows Theresa Garnett holding the whip with which she attacked Winston Churchill at Temple Meads …

Favourite Christmas Readings 2025

I was at the Hawkesbury Literary Festival Christmas special on 6 December 2025, for a day of Christmas-themed readings, stories and talks. Gerard Boyce selected and read some wonderful pieces: …

Hearth and Home: A Dan Foster Christmas Short Story

This year I’ve written a Dan Foster Mystery short story especially for Christmas and it’s available as a free download on the website. A man pulled out of the water. …

Madonna Mary, Mrs Oliphant, three volumes (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1867)

I’m not sure if many people read Scottish author Margaret Oliphant’s (1828-97) books these days. Persephone Books have republished two novellas, The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow and Queen Eleanor and …

The Human Interest Brothers: Dickens & Character

Even if you don’t read Charles Dickens, you’ve probably heard of some of his characters – Scrooge, for example. But who was his greatest creation? This was the theme of …

Gertrude Baillie-Weaver: anti-vivisectionist, suffrage campaigner, theosophist

If she is remembered at all Gertrude Baillie-Weaver is best known as the author G Colmore (George or Gertrude Colmore) whose 1911 novel Suffragette Sally was republished by Pandora Press …

How a terrier called Peg helped women get the vote

Today suffragette militancy is often equated with the Women’s Social and Political Union’s (WSPU) policy of attacking property by, for example, smashing windows or burning down buildings. However, there were …

Don’t call them Lympne-pets: the suffragettes at Lympne Castle

On Sunday 5 September 1909, suffragettes Vera Wentworth, Elsie Howey and Jessie Kenney assaulted prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith when he was staying at Lympne Castle in Kent. Lympne (pronounced …