Mary Ann Hilliard

Mary Ann Hilliard (1860–1950) was an Irish nurse and suffragette. She was arrested for breaking windows in March 1912, and while imprisoned contributed to the Suffragette Handkerchief.

Biography Mary Ann Hilliard was born in Cork in 1860, to Dominick Hilliard, accountant and Margaret Duke and had two brothers and a sister.

Early Nursing Career Known as Minnie, she trained as a nurse in England from 1876 She later became the sister of the Outpatient Department at Guys Hospital and then sister at the Park Fever Hospital, Hither Green.

Hilliard and sixty-seven other Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) suffragettes who were imprisoned in Holloway Prison embroidered their names on a cloth which became known as The Suffragette Handkerchief. This was a brave act of defiance in a prison where the women were closely watched at all times, and it is thought that Hilliard started it, as she kept the souvenir of her fellow prisoners afterwards.

Signatories include Eileen Mary Casey, Alice Davies, Edith Downing, Katharine Gatty, Margaret Macfarlane, Helen MacRae, Fanny Pease, Alice Maud Shipley, Frances Williams and other leading women from WSPU mass window-smashing protests. she was said to have kept it until she died in 1950. and served at the front in Italy, nursing prisoners. Her health deteriorated in the 1920s and she retired from nursing to live in Wembley, London.

She died in 1950. Her funeral was at Park Lane Methodist Church and cremation at Golders Green.