Not all those fighting to givewomen the vote were female

Hugh was educated at Clifton College and on graduation in 1908, he moved to Gonville and Caius Collage, Cambridge to read engineering. After a year at university, however, he wrote his father a letter declaring his agnosticism and rejecting the Jewish faith. Then he attended a speech by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel on the topic of women’s suffrage and abandoned engineering to read economics and sociology instead.

He became an active member of the Young Purple, White & Green Club and Victor Duval’s Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement. Hugh left university to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in London and missed his examinations. By 1910 he had dropped out of university altogether. He started selling suffrage papers and chalking pavements with suffragette slogans in London. In Chesham he helped Emily Brandon (who founded Buckinghamshire’s only branch of the WSPU) to organise open-air meetings and sold WSPU papers there. He failed his final exams because he was too busy organising the “From Prison to Citizenship” march on 18 June 1910 for the Pankhurst’s.

Hugh’s uncle – Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel – used his influence to obtain a position for Hugh as a private secretary to Matthew Nathan, Secretary of the General Post Office but this did not last long. Hugh was one of the people present at the rally on Parliament on 18 November 1910 – the rally which became known as Black Friday. When the Conciliation Bill (which would have given limited suffrage to female property owners) failed to pass, around 300 suffragists marched on the Palace of Westminster. There were many reports of police brutality when they were driven back by the police.

Chartridge Lodge where the Franklins lived.

The Home Secretary at the time was Winston Churchill, who was widely blamed for the police excesses and Hugh Franklin began to follow him round the country in order to heckle him at public meetings. After one such meeting in Bradford, Franklin caught up with Churchill on a train and set about him with a dog whip shouting “Take this you cur for the treatment of the suffragists!”

Hugh was imprisoned for six weeks and dismissed from his secretarial post. In February 1911 he was sentenced to another month in prison for throwing rocks at Winston Churchill’s house. Hugh then decided to support the suffragettes’ hunger strikes and was repeatedly force fed during his imprisonment. This force feeding turned him into an activist for penal reform.

Hugh’s final militant act was setting fire to a railway carriage at Harrow in October 1912. He went on the run, spending two months hiding out in London before being caught and sentenced to six months in prison in February 1913. During this imprisonment he was force fed 114 times and was left so ill by his ordeal that as soon as the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act 1913 came into force, he was the first person released under it. (This Act made provision for prisoners to be released early if their condition (due to force feeding) became so weak that their lives were endangered. They then had a fixed period of time to recover, after which they were returned to prison to serve the remainder of their sentence. It was nicknamed “The Cat and Mouse Act” by the suffragettes).

Elsie Duval, Hugh's first wife, Source: Wikipedia.

His licence expired in May 1913 and so Hugh fled the country, living in Belgium under the assumed name of Henry Forster until the outbreak of the 1st World War, when he returned to England. He was not called up due to poor eyesight but worked in a clerical capacity in a munitions factory and although he kept in touch with Sylvia Pankhurst and other suffragettes, never resumed his militant activities.

Despite Hugh being disowned by his father, he was not the only member of the Franklin family to actively support female emancipation. Out of his five siblings, Alice (a staunch socialist) became a leader of the Townswomen’s Guild; Helen became a forewoman at the Royal Arsenal where she was forced to resign for supporting women workers and attempting to form a trade union and Ellis became Vice-Principal of the Working Men’s College.

In 1915, Hugh married Elsie Diederich Duval who was the second person released after him under the 1913 Act.

They stayed together until her untimely death in 1919, which was attributed to her being weakened so much by the amount of force feeding she had endured that she died of the Spanish Flu. Elsie was a militant suffragette who was responsible for planning many of the outrages which occurred in Buckinghamshire – and which were likely planned at Chartridge Lodge!

One of these was the burning down of Saunderton Railway Station which she did when Hugh was sentenced for the Harrow atrocity, leaving behind a poster which read “Burning to Get the Vote”. After her death, Hugh then married another Elsie – Elsie Constance Tuke – who unlike his first wife never converted to Judaism. This was the final straw for Hugh’s father who disinherited him.

Hugh joined the Labour Party in 1931 and attempted twice to become a Member of Parliament – in 1931 (Hornsey) and 1935 (St. Albans). Despite failing to win a seat on both occasions, he was prolific in local politics and eventually won a seat on Middlesex County Council in 1946, following which he was active in local politics for many years. He also served on the Labour Party National Executive Committee. Hugh died in October 1962.