page_title: Emily Langton Massingberd
section_title: Activist years
hierarchical_section_title: Emily Langton Massingberd / Activist years
caption_attribution_description: English: Emily Langton Langton, née Emily Caroline Langton Massingberd 1847-1897 of Gunby Hall,spouse of her second-cousin, Edmund Langton.by Theodore Blake Wirgman (1848–1925)
context_page_description: Emily Caroline Langton Massingberd, known as Emily Langton Langton from 1867 to 1887, was a women's rights campaigner and temperance activist.
  After her husband Edmund Langton's 1875 death, in 1877 Emily built and lived in the Red House in Bournemouth; since the 1940s the house has often been erroneously associated with Lillie Langtry and Bertie, the Prince of Wales. Upon her father's death in 1887 she inherited Gunby Hall.
  In 1892 she founded the Pioneer Club, with the object of the political and moral advancement of women. It was one of the first, and one of the most powerful and well known, of progressive women's clubs in the UK, and was particularly influential while she remained alive.
  Her birth surname was Massingberd, and her married surname was Langton. After her father's death she re-assumed the surname Massingberd by royal licence on 20 May 1887, and went by "Mrs. Massingberd" rather than "Mrs. Langton".
context_section_description: After marriage in 1867 Emily and Edmund Langton lived mainly in Bournemouth. Edmund died in 1875 at the age of 34, leaving Emily with a son and three daughters.
  She turned to temperance work with the British Women's Temperance Association. She also built a new residence in Bournemouth, the Red House, at the junction of Knyveton Road and Derby Road, where she often lived, held meetings, and entertained. The foundation stone for the house, which includes a large assembly room, is inscribed "E.L.L. 1877".
  A portrait of Emily painted in 1878 by Theodore Blake Wirgman shows her with a violin, and in December 1880 she was one of the instrumentalists for the Congregational Band of Hope in the Richmond Hill Congregational School-room, Bournemouth. In January 1881 she held a notable fancy dress dance "at the Assembly Room of the Red House, Bournemouth". In September 1882 she held a "fashionable concert" at the Red House in aid of funds for the Bournemouth Dispensary.
  By 1881 she was staying in Kensington, London. An enthusiastic supporter of women's suffrage, she made her first speech in favour of it at Westminster Town Hall in 1882.
  In Bournemouth, on 15 December 1883, suffragettes Laura Ormiston Grant and Caroline Biggs "held a drawing-room meeting at the home of Mrs Langton (The Red House, Derby Road)". Emily Langton is listed at the Red House in Kelly's Directory of Hampshire for 1885.
  When her father died in 1887 she succeeded to Gunby Hall and resumed her maiden name by royal licence, and thenceforth went by "Mrs. Massingberd" rather than "Mrs. Langton". For the next four years she managed the estate herself, and then moved to London.
  In London she involved herself in the temperance, anti-vivisectionist, and women's movements. Becoming a vice-president of the United Kingdom Alliance, a Manchester-based temperance movement, she was also honorary treasurer to Lady Henry Somerset's Cottage Homes for Inebriates, a farm colony for women at Duxhurst, just south of Reigate.
caption: Emily Langton Langton in 1878
  by Theodore Blake Wirgman
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