Medway's Greatest Women

Who will you vote for?

Below you will find some videos and text about some of Medway's Greatest Women. During the Electric Medway Festival (Aug/Sept 2020), a vote was taken to find Medway's Greatest Woman.

The winner – with 45% of the vote – was Victorian botanist, artist, author and science communicator, Anne Pratt. The runner up was the world famouse fashion and textile designer, Dame Zandra Rhodes.

Find out more about Anne, Zandra, and the other candidates for Medway's Greatest Woman below.

Candidate 1 – Dame Sybil Thorndike

Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike grew up in Rochester where her father worked in the cathedral. She went to Rochester Grammar School for Girls, where she was considered quite the pianist. However, she suffered from piano cramp and so her brother, Russell – who became a famous writer – suggested she become an actress.

In 1904, at 21-years-old, Sybil toured the US playing 112 Shakespearian roles! She worked on Broadway and the London West End. George Bernard Shaw even wrote a play, Saint Joan, just for her! Her first movie was called Moth and Rust (1921) and she had role in approximately fifty movies and television shows, alongside greats such as Marilyn Monroe. Once she even played Queen Victoria in a movie called Melba. There have been films and plays where people – like Dame Judi Dench and Celia Imrie – played her!

Sybil was famously a pacifist, which meant that she opposed fighting. Despite this, during the war, I was on a special list of people the Nazi’s wanted to arrest if they ever invaded Britain.

Sybil was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1931, one of the highest honours you can get, and in 1970 was made Companion of Honour to Queen Elizabeth herself!

Not bad for a girl from Rochester, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Candidate 2 – Ellen Blight (Lion Queen)

Ellen Eliza Blight’s story is only short, because she died at 17! Her father was the bandleader in Wombwell’s Menagerie, which was kind of like a travelling zoo and circus in one. Ellen was a lion tamer and she was really good at it. So much so, they called her ‘The Lion Queen’. In fact, she was so good that, in 1849, she even played for Queen Victoria herself!

A few months later, the tour reached Chatham, an important port back then. The show was near where the Brook Theatre is now. After the show, a bunch of rowdy officers asked to see Ellen perform again, and into a cage with a lion and tiger she went, as normal. Only this time, it all went wrong. The tiger attacked Ellen and she did not survive and she was buried with her cousin, William Wombwell, who had been killed by an elephant the previous year.

Ellen’s death caused quite the fuss – it was all over the papers, pots and commemorations were made, and it even got talked about in parliament. It ended with girls and women being banned from being lion tamers.

And the tiger that killer her? He lived and was famously exhibited as the ‘the animal which killed The Lion Queen’.

Candidate 3 – Evelyn Dunbar

Evelyn Dunbar was an artist who grew up in the 1920s in Rochester, where her father had a tailors’ business. She was a Rochester Grammar School girl and went on to study at Rochester School of Art (now known as the University for the Creative Arts). She later won an exhibition to study at the Royal College of Art. She graduated as an Associate of the Royal College of Art in 1933 and, in 1940, the Tate Gallery purchased one of her early works, Study for Decoration: Flight. After some work painting murals, Evelyn went on to become an illustrator for various books and magazines. Later producing pictures that were used to teach people how to farm. In late 1938, she opened The Blue Gallery at 168 High Street, Rochester, but it did not last long.

In 1940, Evelyn started the work that made her famous. She was appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) as an official war artist – one of the most successful female artists to get the role. Her brief was to record civilian contributions to the war effort on the home front. She painted subjects such as the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) and, later in the war, the Women’s Land Army. By the end of the war, Evelyn had some forty paintings accepted by WAAC and many are now in the Imperial war museum!

Candidate 4 – Dame Zandra Rhodes

Dame Zandra Rhodes is an English fashion and textile designer. Born in Chatham, she attended Fort Pitt School and later studied at Medway College of Art. Her passion has always been for textile design, which she studied at the Royal College of Art and was awarded a degree in home furnishing textile design.

Zandra’s designs have always been bright and bold, and her work was even considered outrageous at first – even in the 60s! Eventually, she started a business with fashion designer, Sylvia Ayton, who used her designs in her work.

Zandra ended up starting her own business and was considered one of the new wave of British designers who put London at the forefront of the international fashion scene in the 1970s. She designed all sorts of things, including dresses with holes and beaded safety pins – ten years before Versace did it! She has designed clothes for lots of celebrities, including Brian May, Freddie Mercury and, most famously, Diana, Princess of Wales. She continues to design for royalty.

Zandra has won many awards, from Designer of the Year to the Hall of Fame Award by the British Fashion Council, to the Walpole British Luxury Legend Award. She is also a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one of the highest awards in the UK. In 2003, she founded the Fashion and Textile Museum in London.

Candidate 5 – Anne Pratt

Anne Pratt was born in Strood in 1819. Her father was a greengrocer, eventually owning a shop in Chatham. As a child, Anne had poor health and an impaired knee, so was unable to play sports with her sisters. Instead, she was encouraged to occupy herself by drawing and she was very talented. Anne was educated at Eastgate House, Rochester, where she also developed a love of botany. Combining these two passions, Anne became a well-known illustrator and what might today be called a science communicator.

Anne composed more than 20 books over her career and her accessible but accurate style was partly responsible for popularising botany in her day. Her most popular work, Wild Flowers, was published in 1852. It was aimed at school children and some illustrated sheets from the book were published as wall hangings too. Queen Victoria was a big fan of her work and she even gave Anne a grant from the civil list.

Sadly, men in those days didn’t like women being scientists, particularly non-wealthy women, and particularly popular, non-wealthy, women! So, after Anne died, a lot of people disregarded her important work, meaning that she is not well remembered today.