Second world war spies, suffrage organisations and one of the most important British artists of the 20th century are to get blue plaques in a push to correct a historical gender imbalance.
The London scheme has been running since 1866 but only 14% of about 950 blue plaques celebrate women. In 2018 English Heritage called on the public for more nominations, saying the figure was “far too low”.
On Wednesday it announced details of six new blue plaques for 2020: secret agents Christine Granville and Noor Inayat Khan, the artist Barbara Hepworth, the first world war leader and botanist Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, and the headquarters of two suffrage organisations.
Anna Eavis, the curatorial director and secretary of the blue plaques panel, said efforts to address the gender imbalance were starting to yield results.
“It is a long road but we are well on our way to receiving equal number of public nominations for men and women. There are now more women shortlisted than men, and 2020 will see more plaques to women than we have unveiled in 20 years.”
Gwynne-Vaughan will be the first to get her plaque, which will be placed on her home of 50 years in Bedford Avenue in Bloomsbury on Wednesday.
She was much admired for her leadership during the first world war helping to form the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and lay the foundations and set standards for all women’s air services. Gwynne-Vaughan was also an important figure in the fields of botany and mycology and has a number of fungal species named in her honour.
Hepworth, an internationally renowned sculptor, is mostly associated with St Ives in Cornwall and West Yorkshire but she also lived and worked in a basement flat in St John’s Wood with her first husband, John Skeaping.
It was there that she created one of her earliest mother and child sculptures, a motif that was to recur frequently in her work. The plaque will mark both Hepworth and Skeaping.
Granville, a Polish countess born Krystyna Skarbek, was the first and longest-serving female special agent working for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the second world war.
Her many acts of heroism included skiing out of Nazi-occupied Poland with the first evidence of Operation Barbarossa – the Nazi plans to invade Soviet Russia. The plaque will be placed on the west London hotel where she lived for three years until her death in 1952.
Khan was also renowned for her service with the SOE and has been called Britain’s only female Muslim war heroine. The first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France, she was shot by the Gestapo in 1944 and awarded a posthumous George Cross in 1949.
Blue plaques will also be erected on London buildings that were the headquarters of the two main suffrage organisations: the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, formed in 1897 and led by Millicent Fawcett, and the more militant Women’s Social and Political Union, co-founded in Manchester in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst.
Increasing the number of blue plaques for women has been a slow process. The first female recipient was the actor Sarah Siddons in 1876, a plaque that no longer survives.
By the time English Heritage took over the scheme in 1986 there were only 45 celebrating women. Since then, there have been more than 80, or 60%, including plaques for the MP Nancy Astor, the computing innovator Ada Lovelace and the DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin.
