| Description | Grace Cadell, doctor and suffrage campaigner, was born in Carriden, and became one of the first students at Sophia Jex-Blake's Edinburgh School of Medicine in 1887. She and her sister later studied under Elsie Inglis and, in 1904, she joined the staff of Dr Inglis's High Street Centre, the Hospice. By 1911, she was running the centre.
Grace Cadell was president of the Leith branch of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the summer of 1907. After a disagreement about campaigning tactics led to the setting up of a less militant group, she supported the breakaway group, the Women's Freedom League (WFL). She was a tax resister, refusing to pay inhabited house duty on a property she owned, so some of her furniture was sold in public at the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh in 1912. Grace Cadell and her friends turned this occasion into another suffrage protest. In 1913, she was also prosecuted and fined for refusing to pay National Insurance contributions for her staff.
During the Scottish campaign of attacks on buildings (1913-1914), Dr Cadell was one of the medical advisers to women hunger strikers in prison, who were frequently released into her care under the Cat and Mouse Act (the Prisoners [Temporary Discharge for Ill Health] Act). She not only provided a house of refuge but also helped the women to escape. In July 1914, she attended the trial at the Edinburgh Sheriff Court of Maude Edwards, who had slashed a portrait of King George V in the Royal Scottish Academy. When the suffragettes present applauded, the Sheriff, Lord Maconachie, ordered the court to be cleared. Grace Cadell was reported by the press to have resisted so strongly that it had required the efforts of three police officers to remove her.
[Source: A Gude Cause Maks a Strong Arm by City of Edinburgh Council: http://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/PDFs/WS-Biog.aspx]
Contents: Prize medals, 1887-1890 |