Miss AJ Embleton, Miss O Royston, Miss C Wray, Miss M Fielden and Miss E Ford, photographed outside the offices of the Barnsley Chronicle, 20 January 1910.
Partner Celia Wray
Queer Places:
Fairfield House, Barnsley S70 2BH, UK
The Elms, Leiston Rd, Saxmundham IP17 3NS, UK
Alice Laura Embleton aka Alick J. Embleton (1876-1960) was for many years in a lesbian relationship with English suffragette and architect Celia Wray. Alice Embleton’s is one of the honours boards at Sutton High School; in 1900 she was the winner of the 1851 Exhibition Science Research Scholarship.
Miss AJ Embleton, Miss O Royston, Miss C Wray, Miss M Fielden and Miss E Ford, photographed outside the offices of the Barnsley Chronicle, 20 January 1910.
Alice Embleton left Sutton High early, at the age of 15, due to ‘pecuniary reasons’. Embleton was however a young woman of exceptional resolve, as well as exceptional talent. Somehow, she won scholarships enabling her to leave her four brothers and sisters at home in Ewell, Surrey, where her father was a relatively poorly paid stationery engraver, to study from 1895 to 1899 at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, the forerunner of Cardiff University. She was taking advantage of a college which, from its charter and opening in 1883, was second only to University College, London, in offering equal opportunities to both sexes. The college's first intake of students comprised 109 men and 49 women; its first hall of residence for women opened in 1885; and in 1904 it appointed the first female professor in Britain, Millicent McKenzie. On Embleton's course there were 5 women and 16 men.
Embleton graduated with a B.Sc. first class, on the strength of which she won a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851—she was the only woman to win such an award that year. The fellowships, worth £150 per annum, were normally tenable for two years although the Commission's records indicate that she was a fellow from 1900 to 1903. Perhaps she was slow to take up the fellowship. Papers she published in the Journal of the Linnean Society and in its Transactions show that at least in the Spring of 1900 she was working in the laboratory of Professor Thomas George Bond Howes at the Royal College of Science. In the years preceding the granting of fellowships to women both he and David Sharp, from Cambridge's Museum of Zoology, kindly read Embleton's entomological papers to meetings of the Linnean. When Howes died in 1905 she lost a key supporter.
The Royal Commission's fellowship enabled Embleton to move to the Balfour Laboratory in Cambridge to study The parasites of Coccidae [Scale Insects] and other researches in economic entomology. Two of her four sponsors for admission to the Linnean in 1904-1905 were entomologists; David Sharp and the unattached millionaire Nathaniel Rothschild—the latter's great family wealth freed him to develop expertise in entomology, and botany, and to become an early and leading conservationist. In 1904, Embleton won another prestigious award, a Mackinnon studentship of the Royal Society, for research on parasitism and hyperparasitism of Aphidac and Coccidae. To win the award was judged an unique distinction for a woman; there is also a reference at about this time to Embleton being a sub-editor of the Zoological Record.
For unexplained reasons, Embleton's career then took a sharp change in direction as she became a researcher in the Cancer Research Laboratories of the University of Liverpool. The outcome of her time in that city was two papers published in the highly regarded Proceedings of the Royal Society, the first having been communicated by John Bretland Farmer FRS, the second by one of the Royal's most distinguished fellows, Liverpool's Holt Professor of Physiology and future Nobel Prize winner, Charles Scott Sherrington. A further paper, in 1908, was published in volume one of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology, and was from the Laboratory of Cytology.
Embleton's career was flourishing by any standards, her connections impeccable, yet only one year later her mysterious descent into oblivion had begun. She was writing to Daydon Jackson, this time asking the Council to publish her paper on 'Spermatogenesis in rat', the work being condensed from two she had submitted a long time before to the University of London in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of a D.Sc. degree, her letter bearing an address in South Kensington and a sense of desperation.
The 1911 census showed that Embleton was a visitor at the home of Alderman Charles Wray and his daughter Cecilia "Celia" Wray, in Fairfield House, Barnsley. Embleton gave her occupation as working in cancer research, while Celia had described herself as ‘getting votes for women’. The two appeared again in the 1939 census, and the Barnsley Chronicle of July 31st 1909 recorded a meeting of the Barnsley Women’s Suffrage Society, in which secretary Celia Wray presided over the passing of a resolution moved by Embleton. Additionally, the L.S.E. has some correspondence between Celia Wray and Alice Embleton and Vera (Jack) Holme, the chauffeur of Emmeline Pankhurst.
Embleton and Wray were signatories to the constitution of the all-woman Foosack League when it was established in 1910. Membership was open only to suffragists and, by inference (since it had to be kept secret), lesbians. Embleton had other links to the radical politics of the day since her sister, Florence Embleton, was secretary to Rosalind Howard, Lady Carlisle—the so called 'Radical Countess'. Rosalind Howard was the daughter of Henrietta Stanley (Baroness Stanley of Alderley), a 'lady visitor' at Queen's College, and a founder of Girton College, along with Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies. The Radical Countess was President of the Women's Liberal Federation from 1894 to 1902 and 1906 to 1915.
Embleton died in 1960, aged 83, at Bradfield, Essex.
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