14 Facts About Daisy Solomon

Daisy Dorothea Solomon was posted as a human letter in the British suffragette campaign using a quirk in the postal system to approach the Prime Minister who would not receive a delegation of women demanding the right to vote.

Daisy Dorothea Solomon was born in 1882 in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, one of six children, of Saul Solomon and Georgiana Margaret Solomon.

Daisy Solomon's father was a newspaper proprietor and a liberal politician in the first Cape Parliament and her mother was an educator and suffragette.

Daisy Solomon grew up in a household with reforming views, her father was known as a radical due to his support for multi-racial government contrary to the political views of many in power at the time.

Daisy Solomon's father was a supporter of women's rights, known for defending freedom of speech in the parliament and in the Cape Argus paper he owned, and had an original copy of Mary Wollestonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women in his library.

Daisy Solomon had an elder brother, Saul, who became a judge in the Supreme Court of South Africa; sister Margaret; brother George and brother William Ewart Gladstone Daisy Solomon, an artist who followed their mother into education as principal of Bombay School of Art, and designed a WSPU banner.

The Daisy Solomon family returned to Britain in 1888 due to father Saul's poor health; he died in Scotland in 1892.

Daisy Solomon lived in Bedford, then Sidcup, before the family moved to West Hampstead.

Constance Lytton quoted Daisy Solomon writing about the sparseness of the furniture in prison: 'a thin hard mattress, and an even thinner pillow' and conveyed in a brief statement the joy of finding a brush and comb in her book Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences.

In 1906, Daisy Solomon was joint branch secretary of the WSPU Hampstead branch but resigned in 1913.

In 1918, Daisy Solomon became literature secretary of the British Dominions' Women's Citizens Union, attending an international conference in Paris in 1923.

Daisy Solomon continued to campaign for the extension of voting rights to be equal to men, including in 1926 as honorary secretary to the Equal Political Rights Campaign Committee.

Daisy Solomon was in Britain in 1948, but returned to South Africa and was there in 1963, and died there in 1978.

Daisy Solomon was brought up in a family who believed in women's rights, and she donated to the Women's Service Library including her father Saul Daisy Solomon's original copy of Mary Wollestonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.