Alan Pamphilon: Women who rocked the boat

Today we were joined online by Alan Pamphilon of Chelmsford History Walks. He called his talk “Women who rocked the boat”, focussing on notable Chelmsford women if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Anne Knight

Anne Knight was born in Chelmsford in 1786. Her family were Quakers and her father was instrumental in building the Friends’ Meeting House. It still stands opposite Chelmsford station but is now occupied by a restaurant.

Anne became a very active anti-slavery campaigner and an early champion of women’s rights.

Grace Chaplow

In the early part of the twentieth century Grace Chaplow was another prominent campaigner for women’s rights. At first she tried to promote women’s suffrage by peaceful means but soon turned to more aggressive activities. She was among a party of women who stormed the Houses of Parliament and later part of a group that demonstrated outside the Mansion House, the official residence of London’s Lord Mayor, breaking the windows.

Winifred Sayer

One of Dame Nellie Melba’s claims to fame is that she performed the first live music radio broadcast in 1922. But she didn’t. The first live music broadcast was by local girl Winifred Sayer in 1920.

Marconi had made experimental broadcasts of recorded music but wanted to try a live music broadcast. Winifred Sayer was known to one of their staff as a talented soprano in a local amateur music group. She was duly engaged to undertake three experimental live performances from Marconi’s factory in New Street. These broadcasts were heard as far afield as Galway.

Dame Nellie was hired for the later broadcast because of her fame. She was reluctant to travel out to Chelmsford to sing without an audience but agreed to do so for a fee of £1,000. Winifred had been paid ten shillings a night!

Alan mentioned that plans are already in place to celebrate the centenary of Dame Nellie’s broadcast on 15 June 2022.

Florence Attridge

Florence Attridge worked for Marconi and helped to build the equipment used by Winifred Sayer and Dame Nellie.

When World War II started she was in charge of the winding shop at Marconi. Throughout the war she supervised a team of women building precision winding coils which went into the radios used behind enemy lines by both British spies and local resistance workers. This was highly exacting work as the coils had to be very precisely made. After the war Florence was awarded the British Empire Medal for her services.

Hilda Grieve

Another Chelmsford woman awarded a British Empire Medal after the war was Hilda Grieve. She was born in Hampshire but moved to Chelmsford and worked for the Essex Record Office from 1939. She became Senior Assistant Archivist and retired in 1966.

She wrote two books of local history. The Great Tide dealt with the Essex floods of 1953. The Sleepers and the Shadows was the first book on the history of Chelmsford itself to be based on original sources. Alan described it as a great source of information.