Valerie Mainstone: a campaigner who remains a true colossus

(This item first appeared in the Brighton Argus on 1st May 2024)

It takes some courage, in one’s mid-40s, to go to university. It takes some attitude to then get involved in student politics. And it takes someone of extraordinary ability and personality to become the oldest person to be elected as President of the Students’ Union. But then Valerie Mainstone was, and still is, a one-off.

Valerie Mainstone (front) at the unveiling of a blue plaque in Montpelier Crescent for Elizabeth Robins and Octavia Wilberforce

Forty years later, Valerie continues to make her mark and be noticed. In our society, women, especially those who are retired, can become invisible. But not Valerie. At just under five feet tall, she stands out from the crowd, including at women’s events and public occasions such as the recent unveiling of the plaque in St Michael’s Place, Brighton, to commemorate the life of Mary Hare (the pioneering teacher of deaf children and campaigner for women’s right to vote). Valerie, as is her custom on such occasions, wore a suffragette outfit. 

Now in her mid-80s, she does not stop, campaigning for the NHS, in the peace movement through the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and as a founder member of the Brighton Women’s History Group. So who is this remarkable woman?

Born in Edinburgh in 1941, she and her family moved to Southwick when her father was posted overseas during the war. An early memory was of standing on the one part of the beach at Southwick that hadn’t been closed and fortified to hinder a German invasion. Looking out across the Channel, she said to herself that one day she would go to France.  The war itself was to have a lasting impact on her. Even today she can’t stand the sound of police or ambulance sirens. “It chills me to the bone”, she told me. 

Valerie, her youngest sister and her Mainstone cousins have inherited a mutation of the BRCA1 gene, a condition which affects more women than men in her family. The BRCA1 gene protects one from getting certain cancers, but some mutations prevents them from working properly. If you inherit one of these mutations, you are more likely to get breast, ovarian, and other cancers. She speaks of her huge relief that she did not pass on the mutations to her son and daughter, and so her four granddaughters and two great-grandsons are free from this particular risk.

Valerie did well at school but had her mind set on getting married, which she did at 19 much to her mother’s disgust. She worked as a shorthand typist for the Federation of British Industries where her fluency in French and German saw her working with the Oversees Director of the Federation. It was at the Federation that she met people who had been members of the French Resistance during the war, thus deepening her Francophile tendencies that started on that beach in Southwick.

She worked at a local dairy where, she says, sexual harassment was endemic. It reenforced her belief in union membership.  A Workers’ Education Association course was the start of her academic aspirations. 

When she divorced her husband in the early 1980s, she enrolled as a mature student at the University of Sussex studying European History with French. Her year abroad was in Marseilles where she researched and wrote her dissertation ‘Professional Equality of Women in the Sugar Refinery In Marseilles’ for which she won the prestigious Peggotty Freeman Memorial Prize for the Best Year Abroad Dissertation. And it was at Sussex University that she was elected as President of the Students’ Union which is where I first met her, even though I was not a student.

After graduation she worked for Women Against Sexual Harassment where she continued her advocacy work and gave talks at schools, universities and workplaces. She spoke at a conference in Paris on the fight against sexual harassment, surprising the organisers by delivering her speech in fluent French.

Today she remains as active as ever. Her diary is much busier than mine, as I discovered when we tried to find time to meet. After our meeting, she had to dash off to a demonstration outside Hove Town Hall. In the previous fortnight I had seen her at an event where she was dressed as a suffragette, and at the International Women’s Day event at the Corn Exchange where she spent time staffing three stalls, for Sussex Save the NHS, the Brighton Women’s History Group, and the Mary Clarke Statue Appeal.

Many people do their bit to make this world a better place. By comparison, Valerie’s activism is that of a colossus.  

“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.”