| Biography | Sarah Jane Baines was a British-Australian feminist, suffragette and social reformer. She was the first suffragette to be tried by jury,and one of the first hunger strikers.
At age fourteen, Sarah joined her parents in working with the Salvation Army. Upon attaining the rank of lieutenant, now aged twenty, she was sent to work as an evangelist in an independent working men's mission in Bolton. In this role, she was also called upon to act as a police court missionary caring for women who had been arrested.
In 1905, Baines read about the arrest of suffragists Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst for assault and this motivated her to join the Women's Social and Political Union. Initially this was as a voluntary basis but in 1908, Baines was made a paid organiser on a wage of £2 a week, organising open-air rallies, disrupting meetings and establishing new branches of the WSPU in the North of England and the Midlands. Later this same year, Baines was to be tried of unlawful assembly at the Coliseum in Leeds, the first ever member of the WSPU to be tried by jury. Refusing to be bound over, she was convicted to six weeks imprisonment in Armley Goal, Leeds.
One of the first to advocate militant methods, Baines was imprisoned some fifteen times for her part in protests. In 1909 she and twelve others were jailed for obstruction for trying to stop Lloyd George's public budget meeting in Limehouse. In 1912, Baines was part of an attempt, under the name 'Lizzie Baker' along with Gladys Evans and Mary Leigh and Mabel Capper, to burn down the Theatre Royal in Dublin the night before a scheduled visit from then Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, to speak on Home Rule. The next year, with her husband George and son Wilfred, Baines was accused of attempting to bomb first-class railway carriages at a Lancashire and Yorkshire railway siding. As a result, her husband and son were charged with malicious damage and not imprisoned, but Baines was re-arrested under the 'Cat and Mouse act' and imprisoned at Holloway Prison. She went on hunger strike, refusing food and water, and was released in a 'very serious condition'. In 1913 another arrest for obstruction during a meeting in Hyde Park, and a month sentence led WSPU leaders to determine that her health could not endure another stint in prison, so Baines and her family were smuggled into Wales as the 'Evans' family and set sail aboard The Ballarat, bound for Australia, before their trial. The trial went ahead and acquitted George and Wilfred Baines.
Upon settling in the Melbourne, the Baines family joined the Victorian Socialist Party and the Labour Party while Sarah busied herself working with the Women's Political Association and co-founded the Women's Peace Army. With Adele Pankhurst, Baines campaigned against World War I conscription in 1916-1917 and against the spiralling cost of living, as profiteering. Both were sentenced to nine months imprisonment but both were freed on appeal on a legal technicality. |