The Many Lives of Mrs Mackworth
I've been working on a project at Winding Snake Productions about an amazing and influential but little-known Welsh heroine called Margaret Mackworth, or Lady Rhondda.
Back in spring 2013, Amy Morris and I started researching Lady Rhondda and fell in love with her and her story. She was an important women’s rights campaigner throughout the first half of the 20th century - she was instrumental in the establishment of the Newport WSPU, founded one of the most influential political magazines of her day, and was imprisoned for attempting to blow up a post box in Newport for the cause of women’s suffrage. Her work made a significant contribution to the women’s rights movement, and had a lasting impact on the democratic landscape of Great Britain. She was also an acomplished jounalist, a successful businesswoman, and one of the survivors of the Lusitania shipwreck in 1915.
The A Bird in a Cage project about Lady Rhondda is now underway - we're building a website full of information and resources about Lady Rhondda and the Welsh suffrage movement, and I'll be making an animated film with around a hundred young people involved in the project about her life and work in Newport.
On 17th February (a week today) we will be launching the project. We're holding two FREE talks in Newport and Caerleon about Lady Rhondda, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, open to anyone who wants to come along and learn more about her. The speaker is another amazing woman, Professor Angela John, an expert on Lady Rhondda and author of her recent biography Turning the Tide.
