Janet Boyd

Janet Augusta Boyd (née Haig; 1850 – 22 September 1928) was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and militant suffragette who in 1912 went on hunger strike in prison for which action she was awarded the WSPU's Hunger Strike Medal. Early years Born as Janet Augusta Haig into an upper middle-class family in Marylebone in Middlesex in 1850, she was the daughter of George Augustus Haig (1820-1906), a merchant and landowner from Pen Ithon, Radnorshire, Wales, and his wife, Anne Eliza ( Fell; 1822-1894). Her father was of Scottish descent and was a cousin of Douglas Haig. Her sisters and fellow suffragettes were Charlotte and Sybil (later Viscountess Rhondda), while her niece was the feminist and suffragette Margaret Thomas, who herself became the second Viscountess Rhondda. In 1874, Janet Haig married solicitor George Fenwick Boyd (1849-1909), whose industrialist father Edward Fenwick Boyd built Moor House, a large family home in the village of Leamside just outside Durham. With him, she had four daughters: Sybil Mary Boyd (1875–1954); Annie Boyd (1878–1966); Hester Boyd (1879–1971), and Janet Haig Boyd (1883–1956). When George Boyd eventually inherited the house he and Janet Boyd and their four daughters took up residence. The death of George Boyd in 1909 allowed his widow the freedom to join the fight for women's suffrage. Activism The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette of 12 June 1911 recorded that Janet Boyd had refused to pay her rates of £21 and to raise the money she held an auction at her home during which a member of the WSPU came to speak to the assembled crowd and which resulted in Boyd selling a Spanish mantilla which was bought by her gardener; the money to pay for this probably came from Boyd herself. In the same year Boyd joined the protest against the 1911 Census return as her name is not recorded in it - the only people named being the gardener and his son. Underneath is written, '14 females passed the night here. As women are not counted as voters, neither should they be counted on this census'.