Helen Crawfurd

Helen Crawfurd Anderson (9 November 1877 – 18 April 1954) was a Scottish suffragette, Rent Strike organiser, Communist activist, and politician.

Born Helen Jack, at 175 Cumberland Street in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Helen's parents were Helen L Kyle and William Crawfurd. Her family moved to Ipswich while she was young, and she later went to school in London and Ipswich beford moving back to Glasgow as a teenager. Her father, a Master Baker, was a Catholic but converted to the Church of Scotland and was a conservative trade unionist.

Initially religious herself, she married widower Alexander Montgomerie Crawfurd (29 August 1828 - 31 May 1914), a Church of Scotland Minister, at 9 Park Avenue in Stirling on 19 September 1898, but became increasingly radical. Alexander died aged 85 at 17 Sutherland Street in Partick, Glasgow.

In 1944 Helen remarried, to widower George Anderson, Blacksmith and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He died on 2 February 1952 and Helen died at Mahson Cottage, Kilbride Avenue, Dunoon, Argyll, aged 76.

Crawfurd first became active in the women's suffrage movement around 1900, then in 1910 during a meeting in Rutherglen, she switched her support to the more radical Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) of the Pankhursts. In 1912, she smashed the windows of Jack Pease, Minister for Education, and received a one-month prison sentence. In March 1914, Helen was arrested in Glasgow when Emmeline Pankhurst was speaking, received another month in prison, and went on an eight-day hunger strike. Following one more arrest, she left the WSPU in protest at its support of World War I and joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

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