Maud Joachim


Maud Joachim was a British suffragette who was jailed several times for her protests.

Life

Joachim was born in 1869 and was educated at Girton College.
Joachim was arrested in February 1908 for demonstrating outside the House of Commons. She was militant and a member of the hard line Women's Social and Political Union which was led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She enjoyed the camaraderie and reflected that she was now with people with the same purpose. She was sentenced to six weeks imprisonment, but by June she was arrested again after an attempt to visit the Prime Minister, along with Mrs Pankhurst, Emmeline Pethick- Lawrence, Jessie Stephenson and Florence Haig. Maud Joachim was thwarted and a crowd rushed the police. Joachim was sentenced to three months in Holloway Prison.
In 1909 she was in Scotland working in Aberdeen. That November she joined a protest that disturbed a talk by Winston Churchill at his constituency in Dundee. She was arrested along with Helen Archdale, Catherine Corbett and Adela Pankhurst and sentenced to ten days in prison. During her sentence she went on hunger strike and became the first woman in Scotland to take this form of protest.
Eagle House near Bath in Somerset had become an important refuge for suffragettes who had been released from prison after hunger strikes. Mary Blathwayt's parents planted trees there between April 1909 and July 1911 to commemorate the achievements of suffragettes including Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, Annie Kenney, Charlotte Despard, Millicent Fawcett and Lady Lytton.
The trees were known as "Annie's Arboreatum" after Annie Kenney. There was also a "Pankhurst Pond" within the grounds.
In an imaginative protest organised with Katherine Douglas Smith Joachim held up traffic in the West End by the two riding black bay horses up the Strand, at the same time advertising a suffragette meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. On her death Joachim left Smith a legacy in her will. Joachim was invited to Eagle House in 1910. A plaque was made and her photograph was recorded by Colonel Linley Blathwayt.
Joachim had been given a Hunger Strike Medal 'for Valour' by WSPU.
Maud Joachim died in Steyning in 1947.