The Remarkable Woman Behind CWHG

Francesca Tambling didn't set out to found a history group. She set out to ask a simple question — and didn't much like the answer.

It was during her time as a volunteer at Pallant House Gallery that she first noticed something was missing. There were virtually no female artists on the walls. When she asked how many women were represented in the collection, nobody could tell her. A little more digging revealed that fewer than 1% of works in the National Gallery's collection are by female artists. The absence, it turned out, wasn't accidental. It was structural — and it was everywhere.

Around the centenary of the partial women's suffrage in 2018, Francesca approached Chichester City Council with a proposal: a blue plaque for Muriel Matters, the Australian suffragist who had toured from Horsham to Chichester with the Women's Freedom League, speaking at the Butter Market and the Corn Exchange, and been pelted with rotten eggs for her trouble. The council said no.

It was, as Francesca puts it, the best thing they could have done. Spurred on, she compiled a list of 45 remarkable women connected to Chichester — among them Madge Turner, a Chichester-born suffragist who had been imprisoned in Holloway and whose story, painstakingly researched by author Nichola Court, was impossible to overlook. The council, this time, said yes.

What began as a blue plaque campaign became an exhibition, a talks programme, a registered charity, a flag project, a children's workshop series — and a statue appeal.

Francesca's path to all of this was, characteristically, her own. She grew up in Malaysia, trained at the Royal Academy of Dance, taught ballet in Khartoum and Athens, and eventually settled in Chichester via Bristol. Her mother's voice has stayed with her throughout: "You have to have a willy to get on." It's the kind of remark that could make a person quietly bitter — or quietly determined. Francesca chose determined.

The Chichester Women's History Group exists because one woman asked a question and refused to stop asking it. We think that's rather fitting.