Olive Wharry

Olive Wharry (29 September 1886 – 2 October 1947) was an English artist, arsonist and suffragette, who in 1913 was imprisoned with Lilian Lenton for burning down the tea pavilion at Kew Gardens. This scrapbook was an exhibit in the British Library's Taking Liberties exhibition (2008–09). She was sentenced to five days in prison, but during that time she managed to smash her cell windows.

Kew Gardens arson

On 7 March 1913, aged 27, she and Lilian Lenton were sent to Holloway Prison for setting fire to the tea pavilion at Kew Gardens, causing £900 worth of damage. The pavilion's owners had only insured it for £500. During her trial at the Old Bailey Wharry was again charged under the assumed name "Joyce Locke" and regarded the proceedings as a "good joke". She stated that she and Lenton had checked that the tea pavilion was empty before setting fire to it. She added that she had believed that the pavilion belonged to the Crown, and that she wished for the two women who actually owned it to understand that she was fighting a war, and that in a war even non-combatants had to suffer. When Wharry was sentenced to eighteen months with costs, refusing to pay she cried out "I will refuse to do so. You can send me to prison, but I will never pay the costs".

In prison Wharry went on hunger strike for 32 days, passing her food to other prisoners, apparently unnoticed by the warders. Wharry said that during her time in prison her weight had plummeted from .

In May 1913, her father, Dr Richard Wharry, was prosecuted for assaulting the process server who came to Holsworthy to serve a writ for Olive Wharry to pay compensation for the fire damage at Kew.

Other prison sentences

Wharry was arrested and imprisoned eight times between 1910 and 1914 for her part in various WSPU window-smashing campaigns, sometimes under the name "Phyllis North", sometimes as "Joyce Locke". Each of her prison sentences were characterised by her going on hunger strike, being force-fed and then released under Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, known as the Cat and Mouse Act. and her scrapbook, which documents her time in this prison and in various other prisons around the country, suggests otherwise. It is full of drawings of prison life, satirical poems, autographs of other suffragettes and a photograph of herself and Lilian Lenton in the dock during their trial for the arson attack on Kew Gardens of 1913. Wharry was released into the care of Dr. Flora Murray on 10 August 1914 under the Government's amnesty of suffrage prisoners.

Death and legacy

Watercolour by Olive Wharry circa 1942 of St. Sidwell’s Church, Exeter, after the Blitz. From the Royal Albert Memorial Museum's collection (63/2004/4).

Later in life Wharry made her home at Dart Bank in Burridge Road in Torquay in Devon. She made fellow Suffragette Constance Bryer (1870–1952) an executor of her 1946 will, in which she requested that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered on "the high open spaces of the Moor between Exeter and Whitstone". In her will she left Bryer an annuity of £200, her hunger strike medal and some of her etchings and books. The remainder of her fortune of £41,635 15s 8d she left to Margaret Harriett Wright, a widow, and Norman Wharry, a medical student. Both Wharry and Byer's hunger strike medals remain together in a private collection.

Olive Wharry died at Heath Court Nursing Home in Torquay in 1947 at the age of 61. She never married and never had children.