Mary Ann Aldham

On 10 June 1912 the three imprisoned grandmothers - Gertrude Wilkinson (aka Jessie Howard), Janet Boyd and Aldham sang together.

[9] On another occasion some of the women performed a scene from The Merchant of Venice with Evaline Hilda Burkitt as Shylock and the role of Narissa played by Doreen Allen.

[5][6] When the Summer Exhibition opened at the Royal Academy on 4 May 1914, Aldham attended among the great crowds and attacked the portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent by breaking the glass and slashing the canvas three times with a meat cleaver while crying "Votes for Women".

The Daily Telegraph reported that "About half-past one, when the attendance was thinning for lunch, the crash of glass was heard, and an elderly white-haired woman was seen to be hacking at the Sargent portrait with a butcher's cleaver."

This man, according to The Daily Telegraph, was immediately regarded by the crowd as a suffragette supporter and "was seized, amid cheers and groans, and his silk hat was sent flying".

A report in The Daily Graphic added that "the Woman with the Butcher's Chopper had startled a fashionable Royal Academy crowd out of its decorum."

On again being imprisoned in Holloway Prison awaiting trial, Aldham was again released under the 'Cat and Mouse Act' and sent for treatment in a nursing home.

Mary Ann Aldham in a Home Office surveillance photograph ( c. 1914)
Mary Ann Aldham signed the Suffragette Handkerchief , Holloway 1912.
This portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent was slashed by Aldham at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1914
A newspaper cutting from 1914 concerning Aldham's attack at the Royal Academy