Conwy Archives and the Welsh Women’s Peace Petition Project
As soon as I heard about the Welsh Women’s Peace Petition project I knew this as something Conwy Archives would want to be involved in. The Welsh Women’s Peace Petition of 1923-1924 was signed by nearly 400,000 women before being taken by a delegation to the United States (the petition asked that American women campaign for their country to join the League of Nations), where it laid forgotten about in a university library for many years. Rediscovered and returned to Wales, it has become the focus of a project to digitise and transcribe the petition, whilst making it the focus of research and activities exploring and celebrating these previously hidden women and their stories.
Our first partnership activity with the project and their North Wales outreach officer Lowri Kirkham was a talk on the project which was an opportunity to share some of the stories we had already discovered about local women, as well as a chance for Lowri to recruit transcribers. On a icy night in January we had a good attendance to hear Lowri and myself. I had found local women who had signed the peace petition after losing multiple menfolk in the war, for example Ellen Williams of Llanfairfechan who lost two sons within two weeks of each other right as the war was ending or Catherine Dunphy, who was from a well known family of Llandudno grocers and had lost her son Bernard when his ship was torpedoed in 1915. But the petition also revealed women other than grieving mothers, for example young women such as Doris Millerchip, who worked together at the Cambridge Café, Llandudno and signed the petition together with their boss, Elsie Payne.
We held a second more low key day time event in the archive searchroom in April, where people could drop in to find out more about getting involved with transcribing or researching, or just whether they could find a female ancestor who had signed the petition. Lowri signed a few transcribers up and archive staff concentrated on the family history side of things.
Alongside these events for adults Lowri had recruited an artist, Rachel Evans to work with two local primary schools to create an exhibition inspired by the peace petition women and to be entitled “Hidden Women”. The exhibition had a very well attended launch event at Conwy Culture Centre (where the archives is based) on June 20th and will be up until September. Archive staff have really enjoyed working with this project and look forward to seeing all the names transcribed as social history aside, will be a useful family/house history resource.
Images of artwork inspired by the peace petition ©Rachel Evans. You can follow Rachel on instagram: @rachelevans_celf
Conwy Archives Service
https://conwyculture.com/visit-culture/conwy-archives