ROBERT WAINWRIGHT Miss Muriel Matters: The Australian actress who became one of London’s most famous suffragists. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
Robert Wainwright’s life of Muriel Matters follows her from success on the Australian stage to becoming a leading suffragist in the UK campaign for votes for women.
On 22 August 1905, a few hours after her last successful performance in Adelaide, Miss Muriel Matters boarded the SS Persic intending to further her talents and ambitions on the London stage.
Within a month of arriving, Matters was performing in the West End as an elocutionist with the acclaimed pianist Adela Verne, who had famously accompanied Dame Nellie Melba. British audiences loved her and the opportunities kept coming: performances at Wigmore Hall and the Royal Court Theatre; invitations to shooting weekends on country estates and select ‘at homes’ in the mansions and clubs of Sloane Square and Mayfair; invitations to do voice coaching with leading Shakespearean actors and actresses at the Garrick Theatre and connections to such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and Henry James. Matters was well on the way to fame and wealth.
And yet by 1908 she had turned her back on all this to become a leading – and effective – activist in the intensifying British suffrage movements of the early 20th century, reduced to living on the meagre resources the movement could afford. She was one of five Australian women who played leading roles in these campaigns, their feminist consciousness, forged in the singularly successful Australian suffrage movement of the late 19th century, culminating in women gaining full voting rights and the right to stand for parliament in the Australian Constitution enacted in 1901. (The notable exception was Indigenous Australians, not granted the right to vote in Federal elections until 1962.)
These five women are the subject of Clare Wright’s latest history You Daughters of Freedom. Penny Russell, in a review, while giving full measure to Wright’s achievement, opines that the book would have benefitted from telling their stories separately, rather than jumping from one narrative to the next. ‘Engaging as the stories often are,’ she writes, ‘it’s easy to get lost.’
In bringing us Matters’s story, Wainwright has more than filled this particular gap. In plotting her trajectory from her Australian lower-middle-class family origins, to acclaimed stage performer, to leading UK suffragist, he not only provides insight and depth regarding Matters’s history, character and motives, but lends much to our understanding of the social and political context which drove the British suffragist campaign.
Particularly revealing is why Matters chose to throw herself into this ultra-demanding and at times dangerous role at the expense of fame and fortune.
Here Wainwright steps back and allows Muriel to speak for herself:
My chances of success on the stage seemed assured and yet daily the conviction grew that it was not for this that I had been drawn 16,000 miles from home and friends. I became aware of the meaning of that clash and conflict which had characterised my short career on the Australian stage. I realised why I had been up against conventional pillars of society throughout my life. I was a born agitator – a shocking fact it may seem to some but true.
I don’t expect to make people moral by legislature, but we can remove stumbling blocks which lie across the path of women and grant them facility of development denied them today by their economic dependence on men.
Wainwright comments:
Muriel had peeked behind the curtains, the applause and the bouquets of Covent Garden, and the heady intellectual discussions of the salons of Bloomsbury, to find a city of damp cold, gathering winter shadows, poverty and inequality that were impossible for her to ignore.
If there was a single object that was symbolic of the fight for female suffrage, it was the brass latticework known as ‘the Grille’ that shielded women visitors from Members of Parliament as they sat in the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons:
Set high above the Speaker’s Chair, reached via two flights of stairs and a lift, there was room for just 30. Only those in the front row could actually see the activity in the Chamber. Proponents for retaining the Grille argued that ‘women would interfere with running of the House and cow the MPs from free, unfettered discussion about the affairs of state. If they were to be tolerated, then the Grille was required to at least prevent the women being seen.’
Muriel’s gift for theatrical dramatics served the cause well in drawing public attention to its objectives. This is wonderfully demonstrated in one of her most outrageous, arresting – and hence successful – productions staged in the House of Commons on 28 October 1908 in protest against the Grille.
Despite tight security specifically designed to block suffragist protesters from entering, with military precision Matters and her colleagues secretly inveigled their way into the House with the aim of creating a sensational public protest against the infamous ‘Grille’. With chains secreted beneath their cloaks, Muriel and Helen Fox locked themselves onto the Grille, simultaneously delivering a speech demanding votes for women. This is reputed to be the first speech ever made in the House of Commons by a woman. Prolonged pandemonium broke out and the scene soon reached comical proportions as a crowd of frantic men in tailcoats struggled to break the locks that secured the women to the Grille panels. Armed with tools they resorted to unscrewing the panels, which ‘suddenly gave way and the men collapsed backward in a heap, eliciting more mirth from Muriel who couldn’t help but cry out ‘Hurrah, hurrah‘. The women were led from the gallery, still attached by their chains to the panel being carried by one of the attendants. Needless to say the cartoonists and the London press had a field day.
Finally removed in 1917, today the Grille panels adorn the windows of the central lobby of the House of Commons with a small brass plaque recording what they are.
In telling the story of Muriel Matters, Wainwright does not shy from presenting the divisions within the women’s suffrage movement and how ultimately it split along the old lines of the British class system. His account stands as a reminder of how difficult it is to achieve sex/gender solidarity when vested interests and class status are also in play. Matters’s chosen direction in this regard clearly reveals the values and ideals that underlay her passion and preparedness to commit her life to the cause of all women’s equality.
Matters lived out her latter years in the English seaside town of Hastings. It is worth reading through to Wainwright’s final chapter where, based on a few surviving letters and newspaper articles, he reflects on how Matters would have handled the transition from the tempestuousness of her earlier life of activism to her later life lived in relative quiet and obscurity, dying aged 92 in 1969.
Wainwright has met the challenge he has set himself of recreating a ‘lost story’ of a rich life ‘ignored or forgotten’, as much of the documented material of the time, through ignorance of its value and its physical deterioration, is gone.
He has served history well in resurrecting an extraordinarily gifted and passionate woman who unquestionably left her mark.
Robert Wainwright Miss Muriel Matters: The Australian actress who became one of London’s most famous suffragists ABC Books 2017 PB 384pp $32.99
SuzanneMarks is a member of the Board of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library and the Sydney University Chancellor’s Committee. Her professional life has been in equity, human rights and conflict resolution.
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