Lillian Metge

Despite that, there was a view among many Ulstermen that women were not able to manage the complex politics of Ulster and Home Rule and so should not be allowed to vote, and that it was not a general demand, but just came from an active few.

[6] In April 1914, Metge left both IWSF and the Lisburn society over some 'administrative' issues, and made a speech stating her intent to be militant, as to do otherwise would be a dishonour to the vision in which she believed.

[8] On 31 July 1914,[2] Metge, carried out a plan to bomb the Anglican Lisburn Cathedral,[4] with a Miss D. Carson, Maud Wickham, and Dorothy Evans.

An Ulster Volunteer Force quartermaster's wife, Lillian Spender, initially thought it was a big gun,[9] later when she found out it was suffragettes she said 'suffragettes – the brutes!'

[3] The dynamite blew out the oldest stained glass chancel window in the Church of Ireland Cathedral, which outraged some local people.

[6] The police had initially gone to the gasworks, thinking that had blown up, but then at the cathedral they found the damage to the window, and suffragette leaflets lying about among the broken glass and rubble.

[4] Metge and her co-conspirators were arrested at 8 am the next day,[3] but had to have police protection as they were taken into custody,[6] as bottles, stones[3] and mud was thrown and the house windows were broken.

Metge was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal "for Valour" by the WSPU, with its green white and purple ribbon, and a date on the bar of 10 August 1914.

[3] A local shopkeeper gave evidence that Mrs Metge had asked to buy dynamite a few months previously saying it was 'to blow up a tree in her garden'.

[3] She led a Women's Freedom League campaign in the North East of England, launched at the Bigg Market in Newcastle, bringing Ada Broughton as keynote speaker, on the issue of Temperance, when the law (known as the Hartlepool restriction) stopped 'the sober sex' drinking in bars but would not consider total prohibition.

[13] Some women were granted the right to vote after the War in 1918, and Metge gave up her activism in 1920 (not long after her daughter Gwendoline committed suicide).

Lillian Metge mannequin at Lisburn
Lisburn Cathedral, site of the explosion
Lillian Metge's Hunger Strike Medal 1914