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. At the time, there were very few female artists represented on the walls. When she asked how many women were 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. Matters had spoken at Eastgate Square — causing such a riot that police had to escort her party to safety — before the meeting moved to the Corn Exchange. The council's response to the blue plaque proposal was rather less dramatic. They simply 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 has since become so much more: a talks + events programme, a touring exhibition that has already visited six venues, a children's workshop series, a flag project, a published book, and — at the heart of it all — the Madge Turner Statue Appeal. Research is already under way for a second and third book, and the list of Chichester women whose stories deserve to be told keeps growing.

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.