page_title: Jessie Kenney
section_title: Life and activism
hierarchical_section_title: Jessie Kenney / Life and activism
caption_attribution_description: English: 7JCC/O/02/008 Photograph, printed, paper, monochrome, suffragettes Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan with a post boy, police and an official outside no.10 Downing Street, attempting to get themselves delivered as letters; printed inscription on reverse 'Copyright: World's Graphic Press Limited, 36-38 Whitefriars Street, Fleet Street, London. Please Acknowledge'
context_page_description: Jessica "Jessie" Kenney was an English suffragette who was jailed for assaulting the prime minister and home secretary in a protest to gain votes for women in Britain. Details of a bombing campaign to support their cause were discovered by the authorities in her flat when Kenney was sent abroad to convalesce.
  Kenney later trained as a wireless operator but worked as a stewardess.
context_section_description: Kenney was born in 1887 in Lees (now part of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham). She was the seventh daughter of twelve siblings (only eleven surviving infancy) to Horatio Nelson Kenney (1849-1912) and Anne Wood (1852-1905); the family was poor and working class. Her activist sisters were Caroline ("Kitty"), Ann (Annie), Sarah (Nell) and Jane (Jennie). Annie and Jessie took leading roles in the Women's Social and Political Union. Annie Kenney who was eight years older than her, promoted the study of literature among her colleagues – inspired by Robert Blatchford's publication, The Clarion.
  
  Jessie Kenney worked in a cotton mill from the age of thirteen, along with her sisters Annie, Alice and Jane (Jennie) becoming involved in the trades union there. Her mother died at the age of fifty three  and in the same year, Kenny became actively involved in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) after she and her sister, Annie, heard Teresa Billington-Greig and Christabel Pankhurst speak at the Oldham Clarion Vocal Club in 1905. Kenney did not have her elder sister's gift for public speaking but she was more organised. In 1906 she became the secretary of Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. She would organise members to interrupt meetings and to send deputations. 
  The WSPU were keen to use different ways to press the case for women's suffrage with the government. One method was as the law showed that the Post Office would allow people to send "human letters", on 23 February 1909 Kenney took advantage of this loophole to send two delegates, Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland, from Strand Post Office to the Prime Minister and alerted a news reporter.  On 16 April 1909, Kenney was in an early morning delegation who met Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence on her release from Holloway prison and took her to a breakfast, with 500 WSPU members, at the Criterion restaurant in Picadilly Circus. On 10 December 1909 Kenney disguised herself as a telegraph boy to obtain access to Prime Minister H. H. Asquith at a public meeting in Manchester. She was unsuccessful, but again the picture was used as publicity for the cause.
  Kenney and Vera Wentworth were eventually jailed for assaulting the Prime Minister. During the summer recess, she, Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth had pursued the Prime Minister Asquith near his holiday home in Clovelly, Devon, approaching him in the church, on the golf course asking why he was on holiday whilst women were imprisoned, and then secretly decorated his private garden with leaflets, banners in the WSPU three colour and discs saying 'Release Patricia Woodlock', but at that time were not arrested.  On 5 September 1908, the three (Kenney, Howey and Wentworth) chased and then struggled physically with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and his Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone during a golf match and later that day threw stones in the window at their dinner at Lympne Castle.
  Jessie Kenney, along with her sister Annie, was invited to Mary Blathwayt's home, Eagle House at Batheaston where the leading suffragettes met. Their significant visitors to Batheaston was asked to plant a tree to record their achievements on behalf of the cause e.g. a prison sentence. It was this attack on government ministers which led Mary's mother Emily Blathwayt to withdraw from WSPU due to its militant tactics. This event also led Gladstone to consider surveillance and forming a special branch of police to be able protect cabinet ministers  from militant action by advance information. 
  In  the WSPU's march of 10,000 suffragists and supporters on 18 June 1910, Kenney led the procession through London on horseback with 'General' Flora Drummond and other senior members of the movement. By 1913 Kenney was ill and was sent from the flat she shared with Annie to Switzerland to recover. It was described as "a breakdown" but Mary Blathwayt remembers it as a lung infection. Her illness prevented her from destroying papers in her flat and as a result incriminating evidence was found. The papers provided evidence to show that the WSPU's chemist Edwy Clayton had been i
caption: Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland with a post boy, police and an official outside 10 Downing Street, attempting to get themselves delivered as letters
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