Page 105 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 9

And that provides a clue: it is possible to discern Averil’s
sympathies when you look closely at the archive. Two events in
January 1911 appear innocuous but are significant. Firstly, an
amateur production of ‘How the Vote Was Won’ a play in which
Averil and her life-long friend (Alice) Muriel Bewley appeared
with friends and neighbours including William Stewart Ross’s
family at Clonsilla. Secondly, a two-page suffragette poem
‘Woman This and Woman That’ by Laurence Housman written
by Muriel into the autograph book. Averil went to plays in London
in which members of the cast were active in the suffrage
movement - including one Mary Elise Deverell, a member of the
Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), relationship as yet
unknown!

Marion Duggan, who also went to Trinity and was to follow
Averil to the Bar in 1925, shared a similar background and social
circle. The local Duggan family in Greystones included Marion’s
first cousin the civil servant George Chester Duggan (1887-
1967) of Ferney East (now Carrig Eden). But she was a member
of the Irishwomen’s Reform League (IWRL), an outspoken and
openly active suffrage campaigner, penning regular columns for
the Irish Citizen, writing court reports highlighting contentious
issues such as child abuse and sexual assault and delivering
speeches and pamphlets on the need for women lawyers. She
made clear her disagreement with the confrontational methods
favoured by Mrs Pankhurst and her colleagues and one
imagines Averil felt similarly.

Averil, perhaps motivated by a combination of family politics
and personality, preferred to persuade by performance. ‘How the
Vote Was Won’, was a suffragette one act piece about an all-
woman general strike. Written by Cicely Hamilton, and originally
directed by Edith Craig, the daughter of the well-known English
actress Ellen Terry, they were all colleagues of Housman’s and

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