Launching The Misses Beck of Billingshurst
On a damp, blustery evening in November we welcomed around 60 people to the launch of our non-fiction work, The Misses Beck of Billingshurst, in the warmth of the Women’s Hall. There is no other place we could have held it - given that we were celebrating the very two women who gave the hall to the women of Billingshurst.
I co-authored this history with my lovely friend and historian Caroline Newell. Although I am now the author of more than 20 books this was, in fact, my very first book launch. Mostly because most of my books are ghostwritten and so I only lurk in the background, but also because the last time I planned one it was scheduled for the 20th March, 2020, the week before the pandemic. I haven’t dared to organise one since!
So it was doubly exciting to be doing this. And, although it is only a slim volume, one way or another an awful lot of work and research has gone into it over a long period of time.
So how did it all come about?
Caroline and I both spent many, many years intrigued by Ellen and Edith Beck, their fearsome portraits looming over many activities and events we attended in the Women’s Hall as children. I even wrote, in a school project when I was about 14, about these two women who were ‘involved in women’s lib’. Never mind that the Women’s Liberation Movement didn’t really get going until the late 1960s, decades after the Beck sisters had passed away.
But, in 2022, the trustees of the Women’s Hall were busy planning the centenary celebrations and the Misses Beck were back in the limelight. The trouble was, there wasn’t much around online or in print about them. If the Misses Beck are mentioned at all, they are most often connected with the Women’s Hall. They donated widely to good causes, but beyond that, there was nothing very remarkable about their lives. Finally, I came across an entry in a suffrage gazeteer that suggested that not only had they been tax resisters, but also census evaders. That led to a gradual unravelling of the history of Ellen and Edith Beck and the story, not only of their local impact, but of their relationship with Emmeline Pankhurst and their part in the national fight for suffrage. First came the play Beck & Calling, produced by the BDS in 2023. It was a drama which celebrated the lives of the sisters against the backdrop of women’s suffrage, while fictionalising events of the night of the 1911 census.
But there were still plenty of questions left unanswered.
Who were these two imposing and rather fearsome looking individuals? How did they end up in Billingshurst? Why did two single, clearly wealthy women, with no children of their own,, build the women’s hall and the mother’s garden, when they had no need for it themselves. And what else could these women tell us about the wider history of the suffrage movement?
The idea of a microhistory is to peel back the layers of the past through the lens of individual stories, to ask big questions in small spaces. That’s what Caroline and I hope we have done with The Misses Beck of Billingshurst.
It wasn’t easy. Finding out about people who appeared to deliberately avoid self-publication, who absolutely embodied the suffragette motto of ‘deeds not words’ presented a challenge. Without a doubt, if they had been men, there would have been volumes written on them. Indeed, the lives of their brothers are rather well-documented. Marcus Beck’s Wikipedia page makes a passing reference to them: Beck also had three sisters (accessed 5.12.25).
But as we delved deeper we began to uncover more photographs and documents from the past. Exploring the Becks’ earlier life in Isleworth, before they moved to Duncan’s Farm in Billingshurst, for example, revealed their shared passion for horticulture, which in turn led us to their involvement in the Women’s Exhibition at the Princes’ Skating Rink in Knightsbridge in May 1909. We were delighted to support the Museum of London in identifying Ellen and Edith Beck in a wonderful exhibition photograph — and to help tell their story as women who, through both word and deed, contributed to a national movement.
So now we hope now that we have at least begun to redress that balance and, with the help of another local historian, Rhian Silvester, the Beck sisters finally have their own Wikipedia page which we also unveiled at last night’s launch. This morning, when I googled ‘Ellen and Edith Beck’, even my univited AI response was aware of their existence when a year ago there was nothing!
We finished the launch with a reading each from the book, a toast to Ellen and Edith Beck and a poem.
Copies of The Misses Beck of Billingshurst are on sale at Rocking Horse and online and available from Billingshurst Library.