This blog has been written by Dee Love, one of the volunteers on our maternity care project. Project volunteers are researching maternity care in Northumberland with particular focus on Castle Hills Maternity Home, Berwick, and Mona Taylor Maternity Home, Stannington. The project is supported by the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust Bright Charity and the Northumberland Archives Charitable Trust. We will be posting more blog content from the project over the coming months.
For a generation of women in Northumberland the name Mona Taylor was synonymous with maternity care.
If you were born in the Mona Taylor Maternity Home in Stannington did you ever wonder who Mona Taylor was?
The story begins in Anglesey where Maria Mona Waldie Griffith was born in 1852. She was the second child of Sir George Richard Waldie Griffith, the second Baron Munster Grillagh and his wife, Eliza Leader.
The title was created for Mona’s grandfather and became extinct when her brother died in 1933. Her brother, Richard studied at Cambridge with a certain Thomas Taylor and it’s likely that he introduced Mona and Thomas to each other. Thomas Taylor was a mine owner whose business interests were in County Durham. Mona and Thomas were married in 1880 in St George’s church in Hanover Square in London. In 1881 they are living in Hexham, Northumberland and were the proud parents of a son, Hugh, born on Christmas Eve 1880. They went on to have three more children Margery, Violet and Thomas George. Both daughters inherited their mother’s interest in politics and were active in local politics in Newcastle. Thomas George joined the family business and was a director of The Ryhope Coal Company. The older son, Hugh joined the army and was a Captain in the Scots Guards.
In 1900 Thomas inherited Chipchase Castle in Northumberland where their descendants still live.
Mona was much more than a wife and mother. She went on to become a champion of Women’s Suffrage. She attended her first suffrage meeting in London in 1872 aged 20 and joined the National Society for Women’s Suffrage. By 1890 Mona was active in the suffrage movement in Newcastle. She put her considerable organisational skills to good use organising a conference in Newcastle to appeal to MPs for women’s rights. At the end of the same year, also in Newcastle, she organised a conference for workers. When Millicent Fawcett toured the region on behalf of The National Society for Women’s Suffrage Mona chaired the meetings. In 1891 she was elected Vice President of the C.N.S.W.S. and around the same time she wrote a pamphlet “Why do Women want Suffrage?” Forty five thousand copies of the pamphlet were printed and distributed. In the pamphlet Mona summed up twenty- five years of agitation.
“ And what chance, I ask you , have we of getting women’s suffrage or having numbers of women at elections pressing M.P.s for suffrage when all that we have is many unconvinced or unconcerned? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? This is our problem today.”
Mona soon found some influential supporters who were tired of being treated as second class citizens. Among them were Lisbeth Simm who was married to an I.L.P. organiser, Florence Bell a school mistress, and two doctors, Ethel Bentham and Ethel Williams. Ethel Bentham went on to become a Labour M.P.
The group met in the Drawing Room Cafe on Northumberland Street in Newcastle. Many groups of suffragettes across the country met in tea rooms as they were the only places respectable women could meet outside their homes without their husbands. One such meeting at The Drawing Room was advertised in the Women’s Franchise on Thursday 21st January 1909.
The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society was originally dominated by Liberal women who didn’t want to embarrass the Liberal government in the early 20th century. Liberalism in the North East could not afford to alienate the working class as there many miners who supported the Liberals in the years leading up to World War One. Post war the Labour Party came to dominate North East politics. When In 1909 Winston Churchill, then a minister in the Liberal government, was invited to Newcastle he received a telegram from the Women’s Social Political Union saying “Lest we forget. Votes for women must be in the King’s Speech”
Jane Addams an American activist, reformer, Social Worker and Socialist was in London to speak at a conference of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance on May 11th 1915. Addams was advocating a Women’s Peace Crusade. Mona wrote to Addams saying that she believed that due to the current political situation and mood in England it was the wrong time to launch a peace crusade. She felt it should be a crusade against war. Mona wrote “ There are over 50 Peace Societies in England, all run by Quackers and Cranks, who have never made themselves felt.” Perhaps the death of her son Hugh in France in 1914 understandably jaundiced Mona’s view of peace campaigns.
She went on to tell Addams that, after 30 years at the fore- front of women’s suffrage, she knew every suffragist of any persuasion or value. She also knew the leaders of most of the large women’s organisations – Women’s Liberal Federation, Women’s Co-operative Guild and The Women’s Temperance Society and she had got them all to work together for a Suffrage Appeal in 1893. They had got a quarter of a million signatures in three months and she had been doing the same thing for the last three months to abolish war.
In 1918 The Representation of the People Act allowed women over the age of thirty who met a property qualification to vote. This allowed 8.5 million women to vote but this was only two thirds of the female population of the UK at that time. The act also gave the vote to all men over 21 to vote and serving soldiers could vote at 19 years old so there were still huge inequalities between men and women.
It wasn’t until the Equal Franchise Act in 1928 that all women over the age of 21 were given the vote. This increased the the number of women eligible to vote to fifteen million.
When Mona died in 1936 she had lived long enough to see universal suffrage for women and the fulfilment of a life of campaigning for Women’s Rights.
Mona’s husband Thomas died in 1938 and in 1942 Aldermen Paton proposed that the Woodhouse Homes be renamed in recognition of the work Alderman Taylor had done in the service of the people of Northumberland.
My older sister had her 2st child in Mona Taylor homes . From what I remember neither she nor my mother had a good word to say about the place . My nephew was and still has learning difficulties
I was born there in 1950.What was bad about the place?
I was born in the Mona Taylor Maternity Hospital in June 1948 just before the NHS came into being. I’d love to hear much more about it including a photograph and it’s exact location in Stannington.
Hello, please email us – archives@northumberland.gov.uk Thank you