Marie Corbett

Marie, the daughter of George and Eliza Gray, was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1859. George Gray was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune from importing fruit and producing confectionery. Both George and Eliza were ardent Liberals who supported many progressive causes.

In 1881 Marie married the radical lawyer, Charles Corbett (1853-1935), who had an 840-acre estate at Woodgate in the village of Danehill in Sussex. The couple believed they had a responsibility to help the less fortunate members of the community and for many years the couple provided free legal advice for people living in the area.

After the passing of the Municipal Franchise Act Marie became a member of the Uckfield Board of Guardians. Later she was the first woman to serve on the Uckfield District Council. Marie also took an active role in national politics and was one of the three women who founded the Liberal Women's Suffrage Society. When attempts to persuade the Liberal Government to introduce measures to give women the vote ended in failure, Marie became active in the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies.

In 1906 Charles Corbett became the first Liberal to be elected to represent East Grinstead in the House of Commons. Unlike the Liberal leadership, Charles Corbett strongly supported votes for women and in 1913 helped form the East Grinstead branch of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage.

For many years Marie and her two daughters, Margery Ashby and Cicely Fisher, made public speeches on the subject of women's rights in East Grinstead High Street. East Grinstead was a safe Conservative seat and the crowds were usually very hostile. A survey carried out in 1911 suggested that less than 20% of the women in East Grinstead supported women having the vote in parliamentary elections.

In 1911 Marie Corbett joined with Muriel, Countess de la Warr and Lila Durham to form the East Grinstead Suffrage Society. Membership was always small and meetings rarely attracted more than ten members.

On the 23rd July 1913, Marie Corbett organised a public meeting in East Grinstead High Street in preparation for the mass rally at Hyde Park on 26th July. The local newspaper claims that over 1,500 people turned up to hear the three main speakers: Edward Steer, a local politician in favour of women's rights, Laurence Housman, a writer and campaigner for the Suffrage Union, and Marie Corbett. A group of youths started throwing tomatoes and eggs at the speakers. When the mob began hurling stones at them they were forced to seek sanctuary in a local house. It was only when the mob broke into the building that the watching police intervened.

Marie and Charles Corbett in retirement

After the vote was won Marie Corbett concentrated her efforts on reforming the workhouse system and finding homes for orphans. After successfully emptying the Uckfield Workhouse of children, Marie turned her attention to other workhouses in the area. Marie Corbett died in 1932.

(1) Margery Corbett Ashby wrote about her childhood in the 1970s. Her account was included in her Memoirs published after her death in 1997.

No one can have had a happier childhood than myself, brought up, with a younger brother and sister, in a large, old-fashioned, country house. In my youth I shared every advantage with my brother equally – from love and affection to the best possible education and opportunities, and the critical but unstinted encouragement which to the young is like sunshine to a plant.

My mother became an energetic cyclist, rebuked by her neighbours for showing inches of extremely pretty feet and ankles; regarded as highly indecorous. It was not only to the ankles that the neighbours objected. My parents were Liberals… at that period as much hated and distrusted by the gentry as Communists are today, and regarded as traitors to their class. In consequence they boycotted them… I suspect this boycott threw my energetic mother even more fervently into good works amongst the villagers, where, in the days before the welfare state, poverty was widespread.

(2) When Mary Hamilton was at Newnham College she used to stay with her fellow student, Margery Corbett (Ashby) at her home at Danehill, Sussex. Mary Hamilton wrote about these experiences in her book Remembering Good Friends.

Margery’s mother, Marie Corbett, was an ardent Feminist, one small external sign being the fact that she regularly wore the breeches she had taken to when bicycling came in, at least a decade before war-time made them permissible. She was a woman of great drive, active in local affairs and local government and all good causes. The house was apt to swarm with people. The Corbett’s hospitality was in the best English tradition. Friends of Margery, of her younger sister Cicely – extravagantly pretty, and at the time we were at Cambridge, preparing to go Oxford and of her elder brother Adrian, then at Oxford, assembled for dances and week-end parties…. At college Margery was intensely keen on civil liberties, free trade, international good will, democracy… She spends time and energy without stint or personal ambition… She has an immense sense of duty, and must have spent a very large part of her entire life on committees and at meetings. Not to like her is and always has been impossible; she has charm and complete sincerity, and has made a success of life, in its essential relationships. She was a good daughter: she is a good wife and mother. The one boy, born during the 1914 war, when his father was in France with the B.E.F., was, as a baby, so delicate that it did not seem possible he should live; Margery insisted that he should; he has grown up a superb physical specimen.

(3) Marie Corbett was one of the first women in Britain to be elected as a Poor Law Guardian. Her daughter Margery described her mother’s work as a Poor Law Guardian in her book Memoirs.

My mother visited the local Uckfield Workhouse and was appalled by the conditions in which orphaned and abandoned children were living in wards with the old and mentally afflicted. She stood for election as Poor Law Guardian, and became one of the first women in the country to be Guardian and Rural District Councillor. She reformed conditions in the workhouse, and gradually removed all the children, whom she boarded out with village families… When she had emptied Uckfield Workhouse, she took children from Eastbourne Workhouse and from a London borough. When she died, many of these former inhabitants of the workhouse wrote to me… and they all used the same phrase: "She was my best friend."