Emily Davies, the campaigner for women’s education, suffragette and founder of Girton College, Cambridge, was born in Carlton Crescent on April 22nd 1830. Her father, the Rev. John Davies, originally from Wales moved to Southampton in the 1820s to open a school. Emily remained in Southampton for just a few months before the family moved to Chichester, and then to Gateshead, where she spent most of her youth. She moved to London in 1862 after the death of her father in 1861. She died in July 1921.
In 1994 Southampton council mistakenly affixed a blue plaque to 8 Carlton Crescent to commemorate her birth place. It was moved to 6 Carlton Crescent after local historian Alan Leonard pointed out their mistake.
Emily Davies House, a Solent University hall of residence on Western Esplanade, was named to commemorate her.
Emily Davies
Photograph, c.1885
Newspaper clippings (available online or accessible through the Local Studies Library):
Wessex Notebook - (Southern Daily Echo 16/01/1952)
Article about commemoration of Davies (Southern Evening Echo 06/01/1994). Discusses Southampton's "appalling record where women's heritage is concerned".
Further reading:
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, Volume 15
‘Emily Davies was born at No. 8, says the City Council plaque’, by A. G. K. Leonard in Hampshire, volume 34, number 10 August 1994, p25-26, 30. (H/y)
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