The Chiltern Club of Arts and Handicrafts

By Millie Winter

The Chiltern Club of Arts and Handicrafts was a society founded in 1919 by artist Louise Jopling-Rowe, which proved to be a hotbed for the local artistic community to come together to learn and socialise. In its membership were some notable families from the area, such as: the Wellers, the Richardsons and the Tyrwhitt Drakes. The purpose of the club (before it was disbanded in 2009) was to promote an interest in the arts. It had several subgroups over its ninety-year span including art, archaeology, literature, language, drama and horticulture.

Amersham Museum holds archival material from the club, including minutes from meetings, photographs, annual reports and members lists, and with the centenary of the Equal Franchise Act drawing closer (2028), we have begun working on a new project that brings together the artistic community and those who were a part of the suffragist movement (both for and against!) in the local area, with the club as our base for research. The aim of this project is to not only start the process of developing a future exhibition but to also identify and celebrate how crucial local artists were in advocating for women’s rights.

The club was founded in an era of major social change in Britain. The turn of the twentieth century saw the formation of major groups, including the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), that became the pinnacles of the suffrage movement, advocating both peacefully and militantly for female emancipation. By 1919, the Representation of the People Act had just been passed (a year before) which granted some women the right to vote, and in 1928 the Equal Franchise Act allowed all women over the age of 21 the ability to vote. When looking at such an important movement like this, it can be very easy to assume that big cities were where most of ‘action’ took place, but this was not the case! Amersham and the surrounding area were extremely active in advocating for suffragism, with several members of the Chiltern Club of Arts and Handicrafts being involved, for example its founder Louise Jopling-Rowe (celebrity artist and activist for feminist causes) and other founding member Mary Henrietta Dering Curtois. Curtois was a member of the Artists Suffrage League as well as the Mid Bucks Suffrage League, and helped raise awareness locally of the importance of women’s rights. The project aims to celebrate local artists like these for both their artwork and their commitment to suffragism.

I was kindly asked by Briony and Emma in July if I wanted to be a part of this project, having just completed my undergraduate degree in History and my dissertation on feminism in the 1920s. Since then, I have been digging into documents from the Chiltern Club that the museum holds and noting down members dating from the founding year of the club (1919) to 1939. Ideally in the long run I will do further research into later years of the club, as it ran until 2009, but for the moment and for the purpose of the project we have decided that this timeframe is best. Apart from attempting to decipher very old handwriting, I have mostly been noting down lists of members and what years they were part of the club, along with any other information I have found on them. A lot of the documents mostly focus on the very prominent members in the various subgroups and the handwritten minutes only account for the annual general meetings, so for some years it has been difficult to pinpoint all members. Regardless of this, I have now completed an excel spreadsheet of over 500 names of members from the first twenty years of the club.

We have also since narrowed down this list to a much smaller one of notable artists/women to focus on, ones in which we know were artists AND involved in the movement, thanks to Alison Bailey and her immense knowledge on the subject!

This project has been funded by the Western Loans Programme which helps smaller and regional museums borrow significant works from national and major institutions. There is therefore an opportunity to borrow artwork from other museums made by the women we have pinpointed, so we are currently now in the process of hunting down any existing pieces/material and where they are being held.

So far, the Artists Want the Vote! project has been great to work on, super interesting and it has definitely enhanced my already exciting interest in this area of history. It’s also been really fun to see just how active this area was in the suffrage movement and makes the research feel so much more personal. Although trying to decipher minutes and meeting notes from 105 years ago has been tedious, I’ve also found a lot of satisfaction in finally being able to figure it out first try! Having discovered so many names already, it’s also been great to imagine what type of person they were and what their lives would have been like during this time- it makes the some of the more boring bits much more bearable!

If you’re interested in this project or have any information that might be useful please do let us know! This is an ongoing project until June 2025.

Links to more information:

Louise Jopling-Rowe

https://amershammuseum.org/history/people/19th-century/louise-jopling/

Mary Henrietta Dering Curtois

https://amershammuseum.org/history/people/20th-century/mary-henrietta-dering-curtois/

Suffrage movement in the local area

https://amershammuseum.org/history/people/20th-century/local-suffrage-campaigners/