Teresa Billington-Greig

British suffragette

Teresa Billington Greig (15 October 1876 – 21 October 1964) was a British suffragette who was one of the founders of the Women's Freedom League in 1907. She had left the Women's Social and Political Union also known as the WSPU – as she considered the leadership led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters too autocratic. In 1904, she was appointed by the WSPU as a travelling speaker for the organisation. In Autumn 1906, Billington Greig was tasked with drumming up support for branches of WSPU in Scotland. On 25 April 1906, she unveiled a 'Votes for Women' banner from the Ladies Gallery during the debate in the House of Commons. Her mother, Helen Wilson, ran a small shop, with two other partners, that was subsidised by her own father, who managed Preston's first department store. At her own father's behest, Wilson married William Billington, who became involved with the running of the shop. After the business failed, the family moved to Blackburn where William Billington joined a boiler making company. Teresa and her elder sister attended the Convent of Notre Dame School, where the education was limited. She was a keen reader and writer of poetry and essays, selling stories to a Roman Catholic magazine. After leaving school at 13, Billington was apprenticed in the millinery trade. However, she realised that at home she would not have the opportunity to study, owing to the expectations upon her to contribute to the work of the household, and at 17 she ran away. She approached her grandfather for a job at his department store, which he refused, and it was agreed in the family that she would stay with her uncle, George Wilson, and his family in Manchester. She took night classes there, and qualified to become a teacher. She taught at a Roman Catholic school in Manchester, studying at the University of Manchester (Ancoats) Settlement in her spare time. Billington's parents were Roman Catholic, however she became an agnostic whilst a teenager. She went to London as a speaker, together with Annie Kenney, whom she had inspired with her "sledgehammer of logic and cold reason". Together they worked on increasing support for the movement. In 1905, Keir Hardie asked to her become the second full time organiser for the WSPU's activities with the Labour Party. Billington organised publicity and took part in demonstrations. One of the first was at the Royal Albert Hall on 21 December 1905 which she attended alongside Annie Kenney & Minnie Baldock. While Annie hung a ‘Votes for Women’ over their private box, and called out the words “Will the Liberal Government give women the vote?’, Billington unfurled a nine foot long banner reading ‘Will the liberal Government give justice to working women?’. They were thrown out of the hall. On 25 April 1906, she once again teamed up with Annie Kenney, unveiling a 'Votes for Women' banner from the Ladies Gallery of the House of Commons during a debate on women’s enfranchisement, which had been introduced by Keir Hardie. The response was a chorus of jeers and shouts. The women were dragged from the building and forbidden from entering the gallery for the rest of the parliamentary session. A Daily Mirror article the next day reported ‘striking proofs of the vigour of the leaders of the movement’, describing Sylvia Pankhurst painting banners, and discussing the reasons for their activism. The Daily Mirror interviewed her, where she explained she had been engaged for several years, but ‘refuses to be led to the altar until her war cry of “Votes for Women” passes into law. Later in June 1906, Billington helped the WSPU in their canvassing against the Liberal Party candidate in the 1906 Huddersfield by election with Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, impressing local activist Hannah Mitchell. She then travelled to Scotland, in order to organise the WSPU's activism there. It was here that her oratory impressed and influenced Helen Fraser and Janie Allan. The speaker to who brought me to the militant movement was Theresa Billington Greig. I can see her still, with the heavy plaits round her head, making it look like one carved in Ancient Greece , expounding logically, factually, forcefully and with telling illustrations of the need for women to vote. She persuaded me to take the chair at her next open air meeting to the surprise, and amusement, of our suburbanites. Helen Fraser

She met Frederick Lewis Greig (1875/76–1961) in Scotland, and married him on 8 February 1907, in Glasgow. They agreed to adopt a common surname of Billington Greig and to be equals in the marriage. In 1907, she became unhappy that her suggestions for the direction of the WSPU were being dismissed, and disputes with the Pankhursts precipitated her parting ways with the organisation.

In September 1907, Emmeline Pankhurst suspended the WSPU constitution and took direct control of the Union alongside her daughter Christabel Pankhurst. On 14 September, Billington Greig, Edith How Martyn, Charlotte Despard, Alice Abadam, Marion Coates Hansen, Irene Miller, Bessie Drysdale, and Maude Fitzherbert signed an open letter to Emmeline Pankhurst, explaining their disquiet with the way the organisation was run. Billington Greig resigned from the WFL in December 1910 as she felt that the membership was overly influenced by militant tactics, such as "raids" on Parliament organised by the Pankhursts. Billington Greig believed the Pankhursts were focused on suffrage at the expense of securing wider freedoms for women. In place of the militant methods then common, such as attacks on property, she recommended that suffragists try new tactics: "On one matter [a] protest could be made within the Police Court, on another outside, in public meetings, and in the public Press Strikes and boycotts could be employed on new feminist lines." and organising a number of events for the British Sportsmen's Ambulance Fund in 1916. She re joined the Woman's Freedom League in 1937, and continued to be involved when after World War II it became known as Women for Westminster. She was also a member of the Six Point Group, and was meanwhile working on a history of the suffrage movement. In 1915, and again in 1923, Billington Greig substituted for her husband at the billiard company where he was a manager, and in 1936 she worked briefly as an organiser for the Business and Professional Women's Club. She died of cancer on 21 October 1964 in London. Her archives are held at the Women's Library (previously known as the Fawcett Library) at the Library of the London School of Economics. Papers were donated to Fawcett Library following her death, and these were complemented by further documents from her daughter Fiona Billington Greig in 1997. The collection also contains 3 oral history interviews about Billington Greig, two with her daughter Fiona, recorded in August 1974 and September 1984, and one with her niece, Mrs Beatrice Blackman, recorded in September 1974. The interviews are part of Brian Harrison's Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews. Teresa Billington Greig regularly signed, referred to herself, and was referred to using the abbreviation, T. B. G.

Harrison wrote that Billington Greig "achieved rather little in relation to [her] talents", and, like Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald, suggests that her lack of ability to compromise and co operate may have limited her ability to effect change. Billington Greig herself felt that she had failed in her work, Billington Greig herself was disappointed with the scale of her accomplishments. In the introduction to The Non Violent Militant: Selected Writings of Teresa Billington Greig (1987) McPhee and Fitzgerald wrote of how Billington Greig "lived to see her work forgotten, the organizations she had founded abandoned, a new generation indifferent, and the feminist revolution that she had devoted her life to still in the future", and express their hope that the book will "deny her claim to personal failure". Prior to that book, there had been scant coverage of both Billington Greig's life and works. Her name and picture, with those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters, are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.