FAMOUS inventors often get streets named after them, and in Swindon there’s one called Edith New Close. Edith was one of two women who invented smashing windows by throwing stones through them.

Edith Bessie New was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 1877. Her father, a railway clerk, died the following year (hit by a train while off duty) and at the age of 14 Edith was already working as a teacher at a primary school. By the turn of the century she had become a qualified teacher and moved to London.

She soon became involved in the campaign to win votes for women, having heard suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst and Labour politician Keir Hardie speak at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. She evidently hurled herself into the battle with few restraints, because her first arrest came a few months later, in March 1907. A peaceful lobbying of the House of Commons was met with police brutality and turned into a battle. Edith was one of 75 women arrested, and had her first taste of life as a prisoner. It was far from her last.

She gave up teaching in 1908 to work as a full-time organiser for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). On January 17 that year her task, along with a colleague named Olivia Smith, was to chain themselves to the railings outside 10 Downing Street and make a lot of noise, so as to distract the cops while their comrades tried to get inside the building where the Cabinet was in session.

In TV and films, women chaining themselves to railings is used as a kind of visual shorthand; the viewer sees the chains, the railings, and the big hats, and immediately knows that they’re watching suffragettes in action. But this was the first time the campaign had used what was to become one of its most familiar tactics.

Today, as Britain increasingly drifts towards being a police state, “locking on” is a criminal offence. It wasn’t then, but that didn’t stop New and Smith being arrested, convicted, and given three weeks in Holloway.

It was only a few weeks later, in June 1908, that an attempt by the WSPU to speak to the prime minister at Westminster was subjected to astonishing violence by the police. Outraged, Edith and fellow activist Mary Leigh took a taxi straight down to Downing Street and shattered two of the PM’s windows. The pair were arrested, of course, but their main concern was whether they would be told off by the campaign’s leadership for use of an unprecedented and unauthorised means of protest.

In the event, Pankhurst was all for it. She’d seen the resulting publicity, and knew that the window-breakers were onto something. Vandalism, like locking on, was added to the suffragette’s armoury. At her trial Edith told the court that “the autocrat of England” (presumably the Liberal prime minister) was to blame for the damage, since those pleading for democracy had run out of peaceful options.

Two months later, when they were released from Holloway, New and Leigh were processed through the streets in triumph by hundreds of supporters on their way to a celebratory breakfast banquet.

It’s no surprise to learn that Edith New was, later in her career, an early pioneer of the prison hunger strike. But in 1911 — possibly because her health was suffering — she retired from direct action and returned to the tools, teaching at a school in Lewisham until her retirement.

She certainly hadn’t given up, though, and campaigned through her trade union for equal pay in education. Retiring to Polperro in Cornwall, where she lived with her sister, Edith Bessie New was in later life an eager supporter of societies established to keep alive the memory of suffragism’s militant phase. She died in her seventies, in 1951.

Edith New Close was named in 2011, and a few years later her birthplace got a blue plaque. Which makes you wonder: which of today’s jailed direct actionists, vandals, stone-throwers and lockers-on will have streets and plaques dedicated to them by future generations? Some of them will, we can say that for certain, because that’s how history works.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.