Helen Brooke only met her great-aunt Cynthia once, at a 1950s family get-together when she was just seven years old.
What she didn’t realise due to her tender years, was the extraordinary life of the woman in front of her, and just how much she shaped the world Helen was to grow up in.
Cynthia Maguire was a suffragette who joined the women’s rights movement aged 20, back in 1909.
This was also the same year that she started her autograph book, a priceless heirloom to Helen, 69, who appears on Wednesday night’s Repair Shop to get it mended after it was gnawed by a mouse while in a chest.
Helen, from Eynsham, Oxon, enlisted the help of the barn’s bookbinding expert Chris Shaw and embroidery specialist Sara Dennis.
Sara was particularly emotional about restitching the cover of the book made in the suffragette colours of purple and green, with the movement’s emblem as well as Cynthia’s full name.
She said: “It’s really humbling that somebody who fought for votes for women has stitched on this, and now I am being allowed to stitch on it.”
The suffragettes used civil disobedience to fight for the vote and Helen explains Cynthia once chained herself to the railing on Downing Street.
“The story was that they put the keys down their cleavage really which made it more difficult,” she said. “The police force was all-male.”
Cynthia started the album when she helped out at the Women’s Exhibition in 1909, which was run by the Women’s Social and Political Union, the more militant arm of the Suffragette movement.
“The idea of the exhibition was to sort of show people that they weren’t monsters and they were just like everybody’s wives, daughters and sisters,” said Helen.
“So they had stalls and they served people tea and my great-aunt was one of the tea girls. But of course, they then went straight back to their militant campaign.”
Cynthia, who died in 1966 aged 77, collected many signatures including that of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the movement. The book was passed down to Helen and her sister by their mum.
Helen was part of feminist groups herself while at university.
One of her daughters, Rebecca Brooke Bullard, 39, came along to see the autograph book restored to its former glory and the duo were amazed by Sara and Chris’s work.
The album can now be enjoyed by Helen’s daughters as well as her three young granddaughters in future.
She said: “It’s important for people not to take voting for granted.”
*Repair Shop, 8pm Wednesday, BBC1.
