Annie Walker Craig

Annie Walker Craig (1864–1948) was a British socialist, political activist and suffragette active in England and Scotland. She participated in many direct action campaigns and often gave a false name - notably Rhoda Robinson, Annie Walker Greig, and Annie Rhoda Walker - to the police to thwart further investigation or criminal charges. She was described in The Suffrage Annual, and Women's Who's Who of 1913 as "the first militant Suffragette in Scotland".

Early life Annie Rhoda Walker was born at Gravesend Kent, in 1864 to Henry and Anne Jane Walker. She had something of an itinerant childhood as her schoolmaster father moved around the country from one teaching post to another. In the 1871 census the family were living in Yorkshire. In 1881 Annie was a pupil teacher living with her family, now in Birmingham where they settled. In 1899 Annie married Frank McCulloch Craig, a Scottish widower with children, whose family ran a stevedoring business on the Clyde. In 1909, now a member of the Old Kilpatrick School Board, she became the WSPU organiser in Scotland.

In 1911, participating in a ‘broken windows’ demonstration, she was arrested in London and appeared at Bow Street Magistrates' Court. On another occasion she served ten days in Holloway Prison for smashing windows at the War Office. in 1912 she was identified in a newspaper report as a “well dressed woman” who smashed the windscreen of a car belonging to Glasgow councillor and businessman Sir Thomas Mason, with a rock she concealed in her muff, mistaking him for Winston Churchill. She was arrested, gave her name as Annie Rhoda Walker or Greig and her address as the WSPU offices, and on conviction, served seven days imprisonment.

She is listed in 1913 as the first Independent Labour Party member in Dunbartonshire, and resident at Warwick Villas, Mill Road, Yoker. before being transferred to prison in Perth, where police attempted to verify her identify. Whilst in prison she entered into a hunger strike, but was dissuaded from continuing it by suffragettes in Glasgow who advised her that the tactic tended to be restricted to those convicted and imprisoned, rather than held in remand. She was released on £800 bail on 12 February 1914. In May 1914, charges against Craig were dropped. Her co-accused, Ethel Moorhead, was less fortunate; she was held in Calton Jail in Edinburgh where she went on hunger strike and became the first woman in Scotland to be force fed.

Later in 1914 Craig appeared in Dumbarton charged with fire raising, but was again released due to a lack of identification evidence. She died in 1948.