HISTORY OF
WANDSWORTH COMMON
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The Duval Family
(Click on image to enlarge)
— Emily Diederichs Duval (nee Hayes) (1861-1924) [mother]
— Ernest Diederichs Duval [husband]
— Elsie Diederichs Duval (1892-1919) and Hugh? Franklin(dates?) [daughter and son-in-law]
— Victor Diederichs Duval (dates?) and Una Dugdale [son and daughter-in-law]
— Gurney Diederichs Duval (1897-?) [son]
— Barbara? Winifred? [daughter]
— Suffrage open air meetings on Wandsworth Common (some probably organised by Emily Duval, at which she and Elsie speak)
DUVAL FAMILY
1901 Census
Address? Lavender Sweep?
Ernest C A D Duval, 42
Emily D Duval, 40
Ernest E D Duval, 18
Victor D Duval, 16
Barbara D Duval, 12
Norah D Duval, 10
Elsie D Duval 8
Winnifred D Duval 5
Gurney D Duval 3
Notice all have a middle name "D", presumably all Diederichs
[Source: Link. ]
Did they refuse to fill in the 1911 Census?
The EM FORSTER connection
[VG BLOG ABOUT FORSTER/WOOLF/NOVELS]
Forster had befriended Thoby Stephen, Virginia's brother, while at Cambridge several years earlier, and some scholars - Wilfred Stone and Andrew McNeillie among them - have even suggested that the Schlegel sisters in Howards End were "based to some degree on Vanessa and Virginia."
Forster himself maintained that the Schlegel sisters were based on the three sisters of his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Giving the two Schlegel sisters an Oxbridge brother named Tibby when the two Stephen sisters had an Oxbridge brother named Thoby suggests a certain disingenuousness on Forster's part, but even if the Stephen family played no conscious part in the creation of the Schlegels, Virginia would certainly have seen elements of herself, Vanessa and Thoby in Forster's Helen, Margaret, and Tibby.
Even Leonard Bast's first name would have resonated, given that two years after Howards End was published Virginia Woolf married the "penniless Jew" Leonard Woolf. With such associations between her life and Forster's novel, including Howards End in To the Lighthouse can be seen as an act of playful re-appropriation.
[Source: Link.]
[Source: Link.]
PB: Surely the Duval girls are also contenders - perhaps even more than the above. Their father was German, they had an affluent mother [PB: NO!], and when in Battersea they lived only a few hundred yards from Marianne Thornton, Forster's aunt. They seem to have inhabited the same intellectual milieu, so may well have met. EXPAND.
Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes [brief extracts]
On 17 October Victor Duval, the honorary secretary of the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement, which he had founded in January 1910, was charged with using threatening and insulting language when Lloyd George arrived at the City Temple to address a meeting of the Liberal Christian League. The police alleged that Duval had rushed from the crowd, and grabbed the chancellor's coat lapels as he got out of his motor car, shouting, 'Traitor! Lloyd George, you're a scoundrel, and a traitor to the women's cause.' A seventy-year-old businessman, George Jacobs, shocked at the police behaviour, came to Duval's assistance and was also arrested. Both men denied that Victor Duval had used the words the police cited in court. Both Duval and Jacobs refused the option of paying a fine and were sent to Pentonville Prison for seven days in the second division cells.105 Victor Duval's behaviour was typical of the protests that would characterise the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement, so different from the measured Men's League for Women's Suffrage.
Duval, twenty-five, was a clerk when he pounced on Lloyd George, for the third time, in solidarity with the militant women. Seeing a woman being thrown out of a Liberal meeting in 1907, he resigned his membership of the Clapham League of Young Liberals. In the summer of 1909 Duval was charged with 'aiding and abetting' Marion Wallace-Dunlop in stencilling an advertisement for the suffragettes' Bill of Rights procession on the walls of St Stephen's Hall. Duval paid a £10 fine. For the Duvals women's suffrage was a family affair: Victor's mother, Emily, set the trend by joining the WSPU in 1906, and left for the Women's Freedom League in 1907, becoming chair of the Battersea branch. By the spring of 1909 Emily Duval had served two prison sentences for her part in WFL protests. In October 1908, Emily and her seventeen-year-old daughter, Barbara, were arrested when Muriel Matters chained herself to the grille in the House of Commons. Emily Duval paid her fine and Barbara was released after promising to refrain from further militancy until she was twenty-one. Mrs Duval was accused in court of being 'a lady agitator who was bringing up her daughter to be a lady agitator'. In February 1909 she served six weeks in Holloway, almost all in the hospital wing suffering from acute neuritis. Elsie Duval, now eighteen, had joined the WSPU in 1907 at the age of sixteen, and helped Victor in the offices of the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement from 1910 to 1913. She was arrested for the first time in 1911.100 Emily Duval, born in 1861, worked with Sylvia Pankhurst's ELFS during the war. She served for three years on Battersea Borough Council from 1918 to 1921. She died in Wandsworth in 1924.
Una Harriet Stratford Duval, born in 1880, bore two daughters, in 1916 and 1920. During the war she ran her husband Victor Duval's export business and played a leading role in the Suffragette Fellowship and the Suffragette Record Room in Cromwell Road. She died in London in 1975.
Victor Diederichs Duval, born in 1885, served with the Royal Engineers in Salonika from 1914 to 1916. He tried and failed three times to become an MP for the Liberal Party. In 1929 he joined the Labour Party; at that time he was the managing director of an export company. He died in Morecambe in 1945.
Four members of the Duval family went on the deputation to Parliament: Mrs Emily Duval, two of her daughters, Emily and Barbara, and son Victor. Emily Duval, who had recently rejoined the WSPU, ending her four-year membership of the WFL because they were not militant enough, broke windows at the Local Government Board and was sent to prison for two weeks. Victor ended up in Pentonville for five days.27
[Source: Link.]