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Documentaries: Suffragette City

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Paul Sargeant Paul Sargeant | 10:42 UK time, Tuesday, 11 May 2010

So, as I said in my previous post, I've been sent a few of these local A History of the World documentaries that are going out on Monday on 91Èȱ¬ One and I was really looking forward to one in particular. Sheila Hancock has made a documentary for 91Èȱ¬ London looking at the objects that commemorate the and I will happily watch anything with Sheila Hancock in it. (Well almost anything - I'm not going to spend my Saturdays watching people sing about rainbows, not even for Sheila.)

However, when I found a few minutes to dip into Suffragette City - their pun not mine - I discovered that I actually only needed around ninety seconds as, teasingly, they'd just sent me the trailer. So, I figure, might as well share it with you in full.


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As you can see, there are clearly plenty of objects that mark the violence of the struggle, such as hammers and force-feeding tubes, and I'm sure there will be too.

I'd never really thought about idea that this is the only political movement in British history to acheived its aims through violence. Is that true? I seem to remember that the Civil War wasn't exactly bloodless but I guess that is excluded from Roy Hattersley's category of Great Britain. (Act of Union in seventeen-o-something-or other, right?)Ìý But nothing since then while France, the United States, Russia and much of Europe had various types of revolutions?Ìý

Yet the suffragette item that I've always wanted is some distance from hammers and marching banners. It's the . Ever since I heard about it, I've loved the image of stuffy, buttoned-up husbands spluttering into their tea as they realise what their wife has served it up in. I like to think of it as embodying a secret groundswell of revolution in parlours around the country that supported all those marches and chanting.

Sadly, as a service sold a few years ago at auction for around £6,000, I think I'll still be drinking out of my range of mismatched, charity shop mugs for a while yet.

  • Suffragette City will be show on 91Èȱ¬ One in London at 7:30pm on Monday but you will be able to watch it, and all the other 12 local documentaries, for seven days afterwards on the iPlayer. (I'll post links to them here on Monday.)
  • The documentary was made with the help of the Museum of London, which has also added some of their objects on this site.

** UPDATE - You can now watch all the documentaries on iPlayer until Mon 24 May. **

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