Swavesey & District History Society – Report on April 2024 meeting

At short notice, the booked speaker unavoidably postponed his talk to the audience of 46, so two committee members gallantly provided excellent replacement talks. 

Roger Hetherington from Over spoke on “Understanding My German-Jewish Family Background”.  Until 5 years ago he knew little except that his mother was born in Germany in 1920, one of 4 sisters.  He discovered that his maternal grandfather was born in Germany in 1881 to a family of German Jews and that he too had brothers and sisters.  A cousin provided some information along with a German website “Stolpersteine” which, for 20 years, has acknowledged individual holocaust individuals.  He then searched the only surname he knew “Danenberg” and came up with family movements in Germany and in England.  He dwelt on 3 of his relatives, Bernhard, Frieda and Paula who moved to Wurzburg in 1936.  On November 9/10, 1938, they lost both their business and home in the “Kristallnacht” incident in which Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany were vandalised and torched.  Stolpersteine records Bernhard and Paula being deported to a concentration camp in April 1942 and they were recorded as dead by 3 June 1942.  Frieda was deported a few months later, dying in the ghetto/prison camp of Theresienstadt on 2 March 1944.  Roger will continue his research.

Swavesey resident, Carole Pook’s talk was on votes for Women.  In 1866 John Stuart Mill became the first in Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote.  The issue was debated there frequently from 1871 to 1898.  Millicent Fawcett, born in Aldeburgh, was a tactical and determined leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) from 1897 and made it a substantial and influential force in the campaign for women’s votes.  These were the Suffragists with around 50,000 members.  She was a founder of Newnham College, Cambridge.  The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was a leading militant organisation founded in 1903, known as the suffragettes.  Its membership and policies were tightly controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst and her 2 daughters.  Membership was less than 5,000.  Millicent was firmly against the militant actions of the Pankhurst group which used violent methods including posting almost 100 letter bombs to individuals and organisations.  On “Suffrage Saturday” in 1908, 10,000 women led by Millicent marched through central London, demonstrating the volume of women that supported their cause.  Women over the age of 21 finally received the vote on the same terms as men in 1928.

Next meeting-

21 May.  Cambridgeshire Customs and Folklore.  Eleonora Gardner.