“Doing good in Brighton”: honouring the educationalist and suffragette Mary Hare

(This item first appeared in the Brighton Argus on 27th March 2024)

When I was a councillor in the 1980s, I used to love door-knocking, both during election campaigns and throughout the year. But there was one exception, a street I never enjoyed visiting: St Michael’s Place in central Brighton. It was inevitably windy and raining. I was back in St Michael’s Place last Saturday. Not only was there a bitterly cold west wind, and not only did it rain, there was a most dramatic hailstorm the likes of which I have seldom experienced in England.

But Saturday was different. It was an uplifting and joyful celebration of the life of Mary Hare, a suffragette, the founder of an independent women’s police force in Brighton and, most importantly, a pioneering teacher of deaf children. The Mayor, Cllr. Jackie O’Quinn was there, the Brighton and Hove Bus that bears the name ‘Mary Hare’ was incongruously parked in this side street, and at least half those present were communicating through sign language. They were all there to witness the unveiling of a blue plaque to commemorate the life and work of Mary Hare.

17 St Michael’s Place was Mary’s home from 1895 to 1901, and was one of the sites of the school she had founded. According to the programme prepared for the unveiling, “Mary was ahead of her time in championing the rights and wellbeing of deaf children and women” and was “a revolutionary campaigner for the inclusion in society and education of deaf children who, at that time, were often abandoned in asylums, or considered by some as unworthy of education.”

Mary was a committed suffragette and a contemporary of Mary Clarke, the sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, Brighton resident and organiser, and the first suffragette to die for women’s right to vote. There is currently a campaign to have a statue of Mary Clarke erected in the gardens of the Royal Pavilion to commemorate her life and work. 

The Brighton Gazette of 1908 reports that Mary Hare chaired a Women’s Social and Political Union meeting on Queen’s Road where she said that suffragettes “were going to rouse Brighton”. In 1913 she became secretary of the Brighton Women’s Freedom League, which was prepared to break the law, but rejected violence.

In 1915 Mary Hare set up a volunteer uniformed women’s police force, much against the wishes of the local constabulary, to assist Brighton and Hove’s women and children. An article in the Brighton, Hove and South Sussex Graphic entitled  ‘Bobby – the Woman Policeman’ records her work and describes Mary as looking “particularly smart in her uniform and bowler hat”. Times have moved on and one of the speakers at the unveiling of the blue plaque in St Michael’s Place was Superintendent Petra Lazar from Sussex Police.

Her true passion, however, was as an educationalist for deaf children. She said that her efforts on behalf of these children “have been my greatest joy in life.” She established, originally in London, the Private Oral School for Deaf Children in 1895, taking mixed pupils of all ages from across the country. In 1916 the school moved to larger premises in Sussex, and then to Berkshire, where the Mary Hare Grammar School for the Deaf still operates.

A past student of the Mary Hare Grammar School is Brighton-born Margaret Stewart who lives with her husband John in Patcham. Margaret single-handedly set about fundraising for the blue plaque to recognise the pioneering work of the remarkable Mary Hare. ‘Remarkable’ can also be said of the formidable Margaret Stewart who herself should be seen as an inspiration to us all. She might be small in stature but she has displayed a steely determination to honour Mary Hare.

While Margaret was the driving force behind securing the blue plaque for Mary Hare, others have supported her including the influential Brighton Women’s History Group. Present, too, at the unveiling was the current Head of the Mary Hare School for the Deaf in Berkshire, Robin Askew, and the force of nature that is Victoria Garcia from Brighton and Hove Buses who does so much to ensure that the names of more of the daughters of the city are celebrated on our buses. 

About the independent police force, Mary Hare said that “we are out to do good work in Brighton, and we have had unsolicited testimonials to the effect that we have done good.” This could be said about all of her life’s work. It can also be said of Margaret Stewart, and those words should be a challenge to the rest of us “to do good in Brighton.”

My Political Predictions for 2023: The Return of Joker Johnson?

(This item first appeared in my Argus column on 4th January 2023)

Had I been writing this column a year ago, I could not have come close to predicting the year we have had: three prime ministers, and four chancellors. The passing of The Queen was not a surprise although it would have been unseemly to have predicted it.

I would have predicted a rather mundane year in politics. The previous few years had seen turmoil following the Brexit vote, the resignation of David Cameron, the promise of ‘strong and stable’ government by the ever-increasingly weak and feeble Theresa May, and the elevation of Joker Johnson to the office of prime minister. His 80 seat majority at the election in December 2019 should have ensured a period of relative calm and even stable government for the next five years.

Harold MacMillan, when asked by a journalist to identify the greatest challenge to his administration, sagely replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.” Had Johnson been asked what he saw as his greatest challenge, he might have waffled about learning from the conspiracy led by Gaius Cassius, Decimus and Brutus in 44 BC, before ruffling his hair and referencing the Ides of March.

What Johnson might have identified was ‘events’ and his tendency to self-implode. The event was the onset of Covid-19. While his remaining cheerleaders continue to say he got all the big decisions right, he did so (to paraphrase Churchill’s view of the Americans) having exhausted all the other possibilities. Through his delays and lack of focus, especially in the early months, many more people died than might have had we had a serious prime minister.

Boris Johnson’s greatest weakness was, and remains, Boris Johnson. As Prime Minister his ability to self-implode could no longer be covered up by his self-deprecating humour, his outright denials and his shameless lying.

He rapidly became such a liability that his own party, including so-called Red Wall MPs who owed their election to the Clown at Number 10, turned on him. His humiliating downfall was as rapid as his ascension to the top job.

His parting words at his last Prime Minister’s Questions was: “Hasta la vista, baby.” Oh, how everyone laughed. The joker to the end, baby. But it wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator 2 reference to ‘baby’ that we should note. It was what went before: Hasta la vista / See you later.

Johnson still has unfinished business. He has had a lifelong ambition to be prime minister, and to lose it, as he sees it, so unfairly and so prematurely, means that a return should not be written off. The fact that he seriously contemplated another run for the top job when Liz Truss resigned, shows the depth of his arrogance, even his delusion. 

So what will happen in 2023. The Conservatives are on course for a Poll Tax-scale defeat in May’s local elections. Parliamentary by-elections, even in the safest Conservative-held seats, will be lost. Rishi Sunak, who was chosen by the Conservative faithful because he isn’t Liz Truss and he isn’t Boris Johnson, will find his party divided against him. I predict that he will be gone by the end of 2023 or early 2024, to be replaced in the run-up to the general election by one Boris Johnson. Hasta la vista, baby, as he said.

And in the United States, don’t bet against the return of the other Blonde Bombshell, Donald J Trump. I wonder what odds you could get that in 2024 there will be, once again, a Prime Minister Johnson and a President Trump. What a nightmare scenario.

Locally, I predict that Labour will form the administration in Brighton and Hove following this May’s local elections. I would even suggest that the party will have an overall majority, even if it does have to rely on the casting vote of the Mayor-elect, Jackie O’Quinn.

It has happened before, in 1986, when another Jackie, Jackie Lythell, became the Mayor of the old Brighton Borough Council when Labour had overall control of the Council thanks to her casting vote. 

The scale of Labour’s win in the recent Wish Ward by-election defied most people’s expectations. While by-elections are not reliable pointers to what happens in normal elections, there were some worrying indicators for both the Conservatives and the Greens. Wish is a ward which has had two very active, high profile and respected Conservative councillors, but their candidate was well-and-truly hammered by Labour who polled double their votes. 

At any other point in the last twelve years, the Greens might have challenged for this seat, but they came a distant third. Some Green supporters may have ‘lent’ their votes to Labour, but such is its dominance in the polls, Labour will be looking to pick up many more votes, and seats, from the hapless Green administration in the city, and thereby gain control of the Council.