Alison Garland

Alison Vickers Garland (10 April 1862 – 26 September 1939), was a suffragist and British Liberal Party politician. Background Garland was born in Birkenhead in 1862. She was the second daughter of Alfred Stephen Garland, master silversmith and Isabella Priestley of Grovefield, Birkenhead. Political career Garland was involved in various political groups. She was a member of the executive committee of the Union of Practical Suffragists in 1897. In 1899, she was elected as the president of the Devon Union of the Women's Liberal Associations. Also in 1899, she was the delegate from the British Indian Parliamentary Committee that was sent to the Indian National Congress in Lucknow. She rose to prominence in the Liberal Party, firstly as President of Tavistock Women's Liberal Association. In 1904 she became a member of the executive of the Women's National Liberal Federation. She was also an active member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the leading mass organisation campaigning for Votes for Women. In 1908 she joined the Women's Liberals Forward Suffrage Union, a successor organisation to the Union of Practical Suffragists. In 1911, she was part of this group that met with Liberal Government leaders H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George to discuss the introduction of Votes for Women. Despite her prominence in the Liberal Party and in the Suffrage movement, she never secured a candidacy in Tavistock or any promising constituency for a Liberal candidate. She was Liberal candidate for the Portsmouth South Division of Hampshire at the 1918 General Election. She had the support of Liberal Party Leader H. H. Asquith but not that of the Coalition Prime Minister David Lloyd George who endorsed her Unionist opponent;