FAMOUS inventors often get streets named after them, and in Swindon there’s one called Edith New Close. Edith was one of two women who invented smashing windows by throwing stones through them.

Edith Bessie New was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 1877. Her father, a railway clerk, died the following year (hit by a train while off duty) and at the age of 14 Edith was already working as a teacher at a primary school. By the turn of the century she had become a qualified teacher and moved to London.

She soon became involved in the campaign to win votes for women, having heard suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst and Labour politician Keir Hardie speak at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. She evidently hurled herself into the battle with few restraints, because her first arrest came a few months later, in March 1907. A peaceful lobbying of the House of Commons was met with police brutality and turned into a battle. Edith was one of 75 women arrested, and had her first taste of life as a prisoner. It was far from her last.