17 trailblazing Bristol women

Over the years, Bristol has been home to some incredible women. On International Women’s Day, we celebrate some of the people, past and present, who have and still are paving the way for others to follow in their footsteps – from designing visionary engineering projects, to revolutionising the music industry.

Elizabeth Blackwell

Blackwell (1821-1910) grew up in a house off Portland Square in St Paul’s before moving to the USA and deciding she wanted to attend medical school. She worked as a teacher to save the $3,000 necessary for the fees and applied to 12 schools but faced huge resistance, with many of her (male) contemporaries suggesting she either apply to study in Paris, or disguise herself as a man to be admitted. She was finally accepted to a college in upstate New York after the other 150 male students on the course voted unanimously for her to be allowed to study with them.

Blackwell graduated in 1849, becoming the first woman to earn a modern medical degree. She travelled between the UK and USA working as a doctor, and had a falling-out with Florence Nightingale over the merits of training women to become physicians, rather than nurses. She died at home in Sussex and her obituary was published in The Lancet and British Medical Journal.

Peaches Golding

Between 2010-11, Golding was appointed to the position of High Sheriff of Bristol. The role, which is over 1000 years old, having been created before the Norman Conquest, involves being the representative of the sovereign in the region. She was the first black woman to ever hold the post.

In 2017 she added to her list of local accolades by taking up the honorary position of Her Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant of the County and City of Bristol, again becoming the first black woman to do so. Golding has also been awarded the OBE for services to people from minority ethnicities living in the South West, thanks to time spent sitting on boards for a number of charities and organisations including ITV West and SS Great Britain.

Laura Lewis-Paul

After working with young people in the creative arts, Lewis-Paul founded female-only record label Saffron Records in September 2015. Her aim was to help young women looking to break into an industry that remains male-dominated, and to create a supportive community and positive role models in Bristol.

In the handful of years that Saffron Records has been running, Lewis-Paul and her team of dedicated staff have created a co-working space for creatives in the city, set up music programmes in school and supported one of their first apprentices to the accolade of UK Apprentice of the Year – not to mention launching the careers of local musicians including China Bowls.

Hibaq Jama

The Labour councillor for Lawrence Hill Ward was elected to office in May 2012, becoming the city’s first Somali councillor. Her family fled civil war and came to the UK as refugees when Jama was just two years old. She has been a vocal advocate of Bristol welcoming refugees as a Sanctuary City, and in 2015 made an impassioned speech criticising local UKIP and Conservative Party members for their language regarding the refugee crisis. She has also clashed with Labour MP Thangam Debonnaire over comments about refugees.

In 2016 she was suspended by the Labour Party ahead of the leadership contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith but has since been reinstated and is a proud supporter of mayor Marvin Rees, the UK’s first elected black mayor.

Sarah Guppy

From Rennie collection

An inventor of all sorts of useful things during her lifetime, including a bed with built-in exercise equipment and a tea urn that also boiled eggs and kept toast warm, Guppy (1770-1852) lived at 7 Richmond Hill in Clifton, a house that now bears a plaque in her name.

She held several patents, including one in 1811 for a suspension bridge across the Avon Gorge, and advised family friend Isambard Kingdom Brunel while he made plans to build the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Her input into the piling foundations is said to have been crucial to the success of the design. Her eldest son, Thomas, went on to work with Kingdom Brunel on engineering projects including the SS Great Britain, while Guppy continued to invent, filing her final patent for waterproofing ships at the age of 74.

Angela Berners-Wilson

After deciding that she wanted to be a priest, despite the fact that it wasn’t possible for women at the time, Berners-Wilson trained for ministry in Durham and then served as a deaconess before joining the University of Bristol as chaplain in 1991.

A year later, the General Synod of the Church of England passed a controversial vote to ordain women, and in 1994 Berners-Wilson became the first woman to be ordained as a Church of England priest. The service took place at Bristol Cathedral, officiated by the Bishop at the time, Barry Rogerson. Berners-Wilson took her first job as a priest in a parish in Wiltshire – “Some members of the British Legion were slightly reactionary to it,” was how she described the experience in a Guardian interview many years later.

Hannah More

Painting by Henry William Pickersgill, oil on canvas, 1821

More (1745-1833) was born in Fishponds, the daughter of a schoolmaster who taught her and her four sisters subjects including mathematics and Latin. By 1758, More’s father had set up two schools in Bristol, including a boarding school for girls, the Academy for Young Ladies on Park Street, and More attended first as a pupil and then as a teacher.

After an engagement to William Turner of Tyntesfield fell through, she was granted an annuity and used the money to move to London and establish herself as a playwright. She began to set up Sunday schools within the Evangelical Christian community and wrote moral works for the poor. In old age she returned to the West Country, settling in the Mendips with her sisters, and, despite mistrust from locals, worked to educate miners and agricultural workers.

Lady Viola Apsley

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/3402411528

The first female candidate in a Bristol election was fielded by the Conservative Party in 1943, after the MP Allen Algernon Bathurst was killed in Malta in an air crash. When it came for the by-election for his Bristol Central seat, his widow Lady Apsley won the by election on February 18 1943 with 52 per cent of the vote.

Lady Apsley made her maiden speech in the House of Commons in her wheelchair, which she had to use after a fall from a horse. She therefore became not only Bristol’s first woman MP but also its first and so far only disabled MP.

Liv Little

The University of Bristol graduate is the editor-in-chief of Gal Dem, an online platform and print magazine created for and by women of colour. Little was frustrated with the lack of representation in the mainstream media, and decided to turn this negativity into a positive step, setting up her own platform to publish things she would want to read.

Initially reaching out on social media to friends who might want to contribute, the platform has grown into a huge enterprise with more than 70 contributors. Liv herself has risen to prominence as a voice for young entrepreneurial women of colour, and was featured on the front cover of Vogue in January 2018 as one of the ‘New Suffragettes’.

Dorothy Hodgkin

The pioneering British chemist (1910-1994) worked on advancing the technique of x-ray crystallography, which she used to confirm the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. For her years of research, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 and to date is still one of only four women – and the only British woman – to gain the accolade.

Following her successes, including being awarded the Order of Merit in 1965, Hodgkin held the role of chancellor of the University of Bristol between 1970-1988. In 2004, a £19m university research centre near Bristol bus station was named after Hodgkin, housing state-of-the-art laboratories and up to 120 researchers looking into the treatment of stress-related illness, psychiatric disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.

QEH Sixth Form students

Issy Pendleton and Joss Lumby

In September 2017, 17 girls were admitted to join existing male students in Year 12 at the private school on Jacob’s Wells Road for the first time in over 425 years. “At first it was quite intimidating, I didn’t know what to expect and we were very much the guinea pigs in the situation,” says 17-year-old Joss Lumby. “I think the school have approached it in a way that makes it very equal, especially with the leadership positions this year; it’s very much done on the best person for the role, and that really demonstrates that we are receiving the same opportunities.”

“They’ve really stressed that it’s a meritocracy, and it’s not that you’ll get a prefect position because you’re a girl,” adds 16-year-old Issy Pendleton. “All the girls that have come here are all really strong women who speak their mind. The school wants to make this work and to show that you can do what you set your mind to, and that the only limitations are the ones you put on yourself.”

Clara Butt

The contralto (1872-1936) was once one of the most famous musicians in Britain, having been made an honorary Dame in 1920 following a career as a concert singer. Having secured sponsorship from Queen Victoria herself, Butt studied in Paris for three months, followed by time in Berlin and Italy, making her debut at the Royal Albert Hall in 1892. Elgar’s song cycle Sea Pictures was written especially for her in 1899.

She married baritone Robert Kennerley Rumford at Bristol Cathedral in 1900 and lived in Totterdown with two sons while continuing to perform on stage and then to make gramophone recordings – even when cancer of the spine left her confined to a wheelchair.

Princess Campbell

Arriving in Bristol in 1962 from Kingston in Jamaica, Campbell’s first job was at Wills Tobacco Factory, becoming the first black person to work there. After two years she left to train as a nurse, and was the first black ward sister in Bristol, working at Glenside Hospital in Fishponds. She paved the way for countless other women of colour in her field.

She also became an important member of the United Housing Association, which was set up in response to difficulties faced by black people when it came to finding affordable accommodation. Campell’s funeral in Easton in 2015 was attended by hundreds of well-wishers, who lined the streets as her coffin passed.

Natalie Fee

The environmental campaigner runs the anti plastic bottle campaign City to Sea, which has gathered momentum over the years following renewed calls for action and European directives that could see single-use plastics being banned or taxed.

Moved to action by the levels of plastic pollution in the waterways around Bristol, Fee has been instrumental in campaigning for change at local level. A project to allow people to refill their own bottles in Bristol city centre, rather than buying bottled water, launched in 2015 and is now a nationwide initiative. There are more than 200 Refill points in Bristol alone, including free drinking water fountains in Queen Square and Millennium Square and a network of bars and cafes.

Jessie Stephen

Born on the cusp of the twentieth century, Stephen (1893-1979) came of age in an era of great political change in the lives of women. As the eldest of 11 children, she had to leave a teacher training scholarship in order to become a domestic worker at the age of 15 and support her family. As a teenager she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and was vocal in her views about national labour issues and women’s suffrage, often speaking out in public.

After moving to Chessel Street in Bedminster, Stephen became a trade unionist and was elected as a local councillor. She became the first woman president of Bristol Trades Council and was awarded an MBE in 1977 for her tireless services to trade union work. She died at Bristol General Hospital and her life is commemorated in a blue plaque on the house in which she lived for many years.

Ailsa Campbell

As one of just four choral scholars at Bristol Cathedral, and the first ever full-time female alto choral scholar in the cathedral choir in 500 years, Campbell bucks an age-old tradition. “When I was appointed in March 2016, everyone was very supportive of the idea of having females in what was the ‘Gentlemen of the Cathedral Choir’ and turning it into the ‘Back Row’,” Campell says.

“Obviously there is a lot to be said for keeping traditions but it is great to see that all across the country cathedral choirs are breaking this tradition and letting females sing in the lower voice section of the choir. The cathedral as a whole is very aware of these issues and is very good in addressing them and being inclusive and considerate to all, making the cathedral accessible and welcoming.”