Marie Naylor
Early Life
Marie Naylor was born in London in 1856. She was the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant in Barnes. She studied art in London and Paris and, in her thirties, exhibited in France as well as at the Royal Academy.
Activism
Marie joined the WSPU in 1907 and was arrested in 1908 trying to storm the House of Commons. She was arrested again in 1908 and imprisoned in Holloway. In June 1908, she was billed as a platform speaker at the Hyde Park rally. In 1909, she was working with Annie Kenney in the west of England, visiting Eagle House and planting her tree, a Spruce, on 9 April 1910.
She later spoke at an event in Yeovil which was disrupted by men shouting ‘Go Home and Mend Your Stockings!’ The press reported that the coolest people in the assembly were the suffragettes themselves. In 1911, Marie was reported in the press as back in London, speaking to a crowd on the corner of Messina Avenue and Kilburn High Road before a local shopkeeper leaned out of a window in his sporting goods store and disrupted the meeting with whistles.
Later Life
Marie was a pall bearer at Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral. She lived at 1 Stamford Bridge Studios, Fulham but was killed in an air raid in 1940, most likely on 30 October, which would make her the oldest UK casualty of the war that day.
Quote
[I will] 'follow these women to prison or to death.’