Jessie Kenney

Jessica "Jessie" Kenney (1887–1985) was an English suffragette who was jailed for assaulting the Prime Minister and Home Secretary in a protest to gain suffrage for women in the UK. Details of a bombing campaign to support their cause were discovered by the authorities in her flat when Kenney was sent abroad to convalesce. She later trained as a wireless operator but worked as a stewardess.

Life and activism Kenney was born in 1887 in Lees (now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham). She was the seventh daughter of twelve children (of whom eleven survived infancy) to Horatio Nelson Kenney (1849-1912) and Anne Wood (1852-1905); the family was poor and working class. Annie, eight years older than Jessie, promoted the study of literature among her colleagues, inspired by Robert Blatchford's publication, The Clarion.

Jessie Kenney worked in a cotton mill from the age of thirteen, along with her sisters Annie, Alice and Jennie becoming involved in the trades union there. Her mother died in 1905 at the age of fifty three speak at the Oldham Clarion Vocal Club.

On 5 September 1908, three of them, Kenney, Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth, chased and then struggled physically during a golf match and later that day threw stones in the window at their dinner at Lympne Castle. On 16 April 1909, Kenney was in an early morning delegation who met Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence on her release from Holloway prison and took her to a breakfast, with 500 WSPU members, at the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly Circus.

Kenney and Wentworth were eventually jailed for assaulting the Prime Minister. During the summer recess, they and Howey had pursued him near his holiday home in Clovelly, Devon, approaching him in the church, on the golf course asking why he was on holiday whilst women were imprisoned, and then secretly decorated his private garden with leaflets, banners in the three WSPU colours and discs saying 'Release Patricia Woodlock', but at that time were not arrested.

Jessie Kenney and her sister Annie were invited to Mary Blathwayt's home, Eagle House at Batheaston where the leading suffragettes met. Any significant visitor to Batheaston was asked to plant a tree to record their achievement on behalf of the cause, for example a prison sentence.

World War I Emmeline Pankhurst put the women's suffrage movement aside for the period of the war. Kenney, like many, followed her lead.

In June 1917 Kenney accompanied Emmeline Pankhurst on a trip to Russia aiming to encourage Russian women to the war effort, on behalf of the British Government, her writings of this journey and their experiences were never published. Edward Tupper of the National Sailors' and Firemen's Union had organised among the seamen of SS Vulture to refuse to accept Ramsay MacDonald and Fred Jowett as passengers on board the ship. However Tupper, made it clear that Kenney and Pankhurst would be acceptable.

Wireless After working for the WSPU she decided to work in a field related to her interest in radio and science in general. She took advice from Emmeline Pankhurst and Marie Curie and realised that with her resources she may be able to train as a wireless operator. This was not without ambition as all the forms assumed that operators would be male. In 1923 she attended the North Wales Wireless College and obtained a first class certificate in radio telegraphy. She worked with Furness and Orient Line.

Later life During the Second World War she lived for a time with her sister and brother-in-law, Annie and James Taylor, in Letchworth. She had followed her sister from Theosophy to the Rosicrucian faith. She returned to various temporary homes in London, working as a school secretary and welfare assistant at Battersea County School. From 1969 until her death in 1985, aged 97 or 98, she was in the care of the Missionary Franciscan Sisters at Braintree, Essex and became a Roman Catholic on Christmas Day 1973.