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174 (WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE.) Pank-a-Squith. [Suffragette board game.] Germany: [c.1909] Complete in eight parts. Colour-illustrated folding playing board (45 × 45 cm) featuring fifty squares arranged in a spiral, the background striped in the WSPU. colours of purple, white, and green, the reverse backed in im- itation snakeskin leather paper with the game’s name blocked in gilt and the imprint “Made in Germany”; six painted flat lead playing pieces, each a suffragette figure wearing a sash in the WSPU colours and carrying a rolled petition; one sheet of printed game rules. With one blue die. Edges of board worn with a few spots of dampstain to the reverse, central hinge tender but firm, white margin a little soiled but else the colours bright and unfaded; some tiny patches of chipping to colour lacquer on playing pieces; rules sheet creased from folding, neat tape repair of single horizontal tear to ver- so. Overall in very good condition. a complete and well-preserved example of this rare suf- fragette board game, some of the earliest political merchan- dise relating to suffrage, which playfully conflates the names of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU, and her adversary, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. First advertised in Votes for Women on 22 October 1909 (see item 113), the game was intended both to enter- tain supporters of the movement and to help generate funds for the same, and was sold through a series of high-street shops run by the WSPU along with other promotional merchandise. The aim of Pank-a-Squith is to achieve full female suffrage—this goal represented by an image of the Houses of Parliament at the centre—by progressing from the first square, which depicts a wom- an taking care of her children and home, through squares featuring a number of political events, prejudices, and injustices, such as the forced feeding of hunger strikers, the smashing of the windows of the Home Office, and trials at a Bow Street magistrate’s court, all while avoiding arrest. With a nod to the intent behind the game, the instruction for square 16 states that “Any player landing on this space must send a penny to Suffragette Funds”. Pank-a-Squith is one
of the games and toys listed in Crawford’s reference guide to the women’s suffrage movement, in which she recounts that the suffra- gettes Mary Blathwayt and Annie Kenney played the game to pass an anxious time while Jennie Kenney was being operated on at Ea- gle House in July 1910. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866–1928 , UCL Press, 1999. £7,500 [126849] 175 WOODWARD, Kathleen. Jipping Street. With a Woodcut by John Nash. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1928 Octavo. Original orange cloth-backed black textured paper-covered boards, black spine label lettered in orange, top edge orange. With the pictorial dust jacket. Woodcut frontispiece by John Nash. Spine ends and corners lightly rubbed and bumped, endpapers browned from jacket, else a bright, clean
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