Name/TitlePrint: To the Dear Love of Comrades: in Memory of Flora Murray
About this objectFramed digital pigment fine art print on paper titled 'To the Dear Love of Comrades: in Memory of Flora Murray'.
MakerDean, Fiona
Maker RoleArtist
Date Made2012
Period2010s
Medium and MaterialsOrganic, paper
Place MadeScotland, Glasgow
TechniqueDigital pigment print
MeasurementsH: 325 x W: 465mm
Subject and Association KeywordsWomen's suffrage
Subject and Association KeywordsWSPU
Subject and Association Keywords21 Revolutions
Subject and Association KeywordsHospitals
Subject and Association DescriptionFlora Murray was born in the former parish of Cummertrees, in Dumfries and Galloway in 1869. She was a medical doctor, an active and prominent member of the WSPU and fought a brave and public campaign against forcible feeding, looking after a succession of WSPU hunger-striking prisoners, including Mary Richardson, Olive Wharry, Kitty Marion and Emmeline Pankhurst to name only a few. With her colleague and long term companion Louisa Garrett Anderson, she established the Women’s Hospital Corps in Paris in 1914 under the auspices of the French Red Cross and then the Endell Street Military Hospital, London from 1915-1919, run and staffed by women – recognised militant suffragists.
A woman of such remarkable achievements, yet so much of Flora’s history is ‘hidden’, tucked away in archives, newspapers, periodicals – sometimes tenuous and fragmentary – which, along with searches for family members, have all played a part in trying to build up a ‘lost’ picture of Flora and her life and achievements. To the dear love of comrades is taken from part of the inscription on Flora’s grave stone, and is an attempt to locate Flora somehow back home in Scotland; presented as a kind of open sketch book, the form of the print reflects the pencil, watercolor, gouache and gesso drawings made directly of the sometimes concrete, sometimes sketchy imagery and objects of her life.
Framed by the WSPU colours (accounts suggest that Flora was rarely seen without her WSPU badge), objects such as her CBE; and the Women’s Hospital Corps medal and uniform that she and Louisa commissioned, are all present and set alongside some of the landscape and connections that Flora would have grown up with and known; Dalton kirk; Repentance tower; her home, Murraythwaite; the leaf of a tulip tree from the garden of the house where Flora was born; a fragment from her book; a poem quoted by Flora to remember lost comrades; her signature, traced from a visit home in 1910; and alongside, the constant presence and suggestion of her ‘comrade’ Louisa.
Named CollectionGlasgow Women's Library
Object TypePrint
Object numberGWL-2015-49-9
Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved