1. Gertrude Menzies Harding was a suffragette born on a farm in rural Canada.
15 Facts About Gertrude Harding
1. 2.
Gertrude Harding was born in 1889, the last of seven children on a farm in Welsford, New Brunswick, Canada.
3.
When Gertrude Harding was 18 years old, a doctor pronounced that she had a heart murmur, considered a serious condition at the time.
4.
Gertrude Harding was pleased to be invited to travel to Hawaii as companion to her older sister Nellie Waterhouse and family.
5.
In 1912 Gertrude Harding was invited to join the Waterhouse family in London, England, where Dr Ernest Waterhouse had business interests.
6.
Gertrude Harding moved out on her own for the first time.
7.
Gert Gertrude Harding started working on the newspaper, The Suffragette, when Headquarters at Lincoln's Inn was raided by Scotland Yard and the paper driven underground.
8.
When War broke out, Gertrude Harding remained as part of the skeletal staff of the WSPU, remaining loyal to the Pankhursts in their allegiance to the British Government during the war effort.
9.
Gertrude Harding was private secretary to Christabel Pankhurst when Christabel was exiled in Paris.
10.
The Suffragette newspaper was renamed Britannia, and Gertrude Harding edited this for five months into 1915.
11.
Gertrude Harding landed a job at the Gretna Munitions factory in Scotland, providing social assistance to the women who worked there under terrible conditions.
12.
Gertrude Harding moved back to Canada in 1920 to live in a cottage on a field of the William and May Gertrude Harding farm in Hammond River, New Brunswick.
13.
Gertrude Harding is portrayed in Ann Bertram's play The Good Fight, the story of suffragette Grace Roe performed by Theatre Unbound.
14.
Gertrude Harding partially inspired the fictional character Persephone Wright in the graphic novel trilogy Suffrajitsu: Mrs Pankhurst's Amazons and appears under her own name as a supporting character in the spin-off novellas The Second-Story Girl and The Isle of Dogs.
15.
Gertrude Harding is portrayed by Kat Dennings in an episode of Drunk History entitled "Civil Rights" and by Scottie Caldwell in the independent documentary No Man Shall Protect Us: The Hidden History of the Suffragette Bodyguards.