00:00 My name is Sue John, I'm the co-director at Glasgow Women's Library. We're here really
00:12 just to hear the story of how Glasgow Women's Library came to be in the possession of a
00:16 wonderful newly added artefact, a Hunger Strike medal awarded to the suffragette Maude Joachim.
00:24 We became aware of the medal in September and we had an email from Bonhams, the auction
00:31 house, to alert us to an upcoming online auction of 111 different lots and they were all related
00:40 to suffrage memorabilia in the possession of a private collector who was ready to get
00:45 rid of her collection. And Bonhams contacted us because amongst these 111 lots were two
00:52 Scottish specific related artefacts. The most important one was this Hunger Strike medal.
00:59 Now Maude Joachim wasn't a Scot, she was born in Paddington in London, however she was part
01:06 of a really important action that saw her and some other suffragettes arrested in 1909.
01:12 And Maude Joachim worked in Aberdeen and she worked up in Dundee as well as part of her
01:18 suffragette activism. And one day on the 19th of October 1909 she was arrested with some
01:24 other suffragettes including Adela Pankhurst for disrupting a speech by Winston Churchill.
01:32 He was the MP for Dundee and he was making a speech so they interrupted his speech with
01:38 the plea for votes for women and causing a breach of the peace and so on. They were arrested,
01:45 she went to court and she was imprisoned and they went on Hunger Strike. And Hunger Strike
01:50 as a tactic was relatively new, in fact it was brand new, only weeks before it had been
01:56 employed for the first time by suffragettes in prison. So she was one of the very earliest
02:01 Hunger Strikers. So she served time in Dundee prison and was then released. And because
02:08 she was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, the WSPU, they gave medals
02:14 to all their activists who were imprisoned and went on Hunger Strike. So this medal came
02:21 on the market, it had a valuation of an anticipated hammer price of about £18,000 so we knew
02:28 that we would have to raise a lot of money to be able to afford this. This was new territory
02:33 for us, everything at Glasgow Women's Library, our museum collection, all our archives and
02:39 all our books have all been donated, so 30 plus years, three decades of donated materials
02:45 and we've never had an acquisitions budget. So new territory for us, so it was exciting
02:51 but we knew it would be a challenge. And fortunately we were able to launch a public appeal to
02:57 be able to purchase this medal and the response was absolutely astounding. We had in the end
03:05 544 individuals contributing money to buy the medal and the hammer price of the medal
03:12 was £32,500 so we did really well to raise that money. We were fortunate enough to be
03:20 given a grant from the Scottish Government National Fund for Acquisitions who were very
03:24 generous as well and very quick in turning over that grant application to enable us to
03:30 secure this medal. And it was a knife edge, we had a rival bidder, we still don't know
03:35 who that was, we did check with all the museums in our network to make sure they weren't interested
03:39 in the medal but thankfully we secured it and we're so happy that the medal is here
03:47 in Glasgow Women's Library. It's very apt because Glasgow Women's Library is the only
03:51 accredited museum in the whole of the UK that's dedicated to women's history and we're also
03:56 a designated recognised collection of national significance so to have it here is a privilege
04:01 for us, it makes sure that this medal is safe. In a public collection it's accessible, it'll
04:08 be on public display from January here in an exhibition that we'll be having so people
04:14 will be able to see it and be able to read and hear more about it as well. Maude Joachim
04:21 was an amazing activist and she went on to be imprisoned several other times including
04:26 when she was force fed later in her activism so on the medal there's an added bar that
04:32 was given to people that were force fed in prison, it was added by the WSPU and we can
04:38 see from the medal that she was force fed on the 1st of March 1912 and that was a stint
04:43 in Holloway prison so a later time frame in her activism but it just adds to the poignancy
04:52 I think of this very small, humble, beautiful artefact that as I say is a privilege to have
04:58 in our collection now.
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