| Violet Key Jones | |
| Birth Date: | 17 June 1883 |
| Birth Place: | County Kildare, Ireland |
| Death Date: | 30 August 1958 (aged 75) |
| Death Place: | Bradford, Yorkshire, England |
| Burial Place: | Scholemoor Cemetery, Bradford, Yorkshire, England |
| Movement: | Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) |
Violet Frances Key Jones (17 June 1883 – 30 August 1958) was an Irish-born suffragette who was the treasurer of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) branch in York, England.[1]
Jones was born in County Kildare, Ireland in 1883.[2] Her parents were John Jones, an army surgeon, and his wife Harriet Jones née Key, who came from a Yorkshire gentry family. Her maternal uncle was Captain William Key, Lord of Water Fulford Hall, Yorkshire, and she had a brother who became a railway engineer.[3] After her father passed away, Jones and her family moved back to Yorkshire in 1900.[4]
Jones became involved in the suffrage movement and was the treasurer of the York branch of the WSPU, which had been founded by Annie Coultate in 1910.[5] A year later she was employed by the WSPU as their first paid York and Doncaster organiser and became prominent in the suffrage campaign.[6] Her home on Osbourne Road became a safe house for suffragettes, such as Lilian Lenton, Kathleen Brown and Augusta Mary Ann Winship.[7]
In February 1911, Jones was one of the performers in three plays put on at the York Assembly Rooms by the WSPU in association with the Actresses’ Franchise League.[8] One show was titled "How the vote was won". When the 1911 census was taken, Jones organised the suffragette boycott in York and herself evaded being enumerated.
In 1912,18-year-old journalist Harry Johnson, a supporter of women's enfranchisement and possible member of the Men's Political Union (MPU),[9] was sentenced to a year's imprisonment in Wakefield Gaol with hard labour for attempting to blow up a house near Doncaster for the cause.[10] He went on hunger strike and was released temporarily from prison under the Cat and Mouse Act, and Jones, along with Annie Seymour Pearson, helped him to evade rearrest. Jones was lucky to not have been implicated and arrested herself, as detectives searching the grounds of a suspect property found her name on a piece of paper with a copy of The Suffragette newspaper, two gallons of paraffin and a box of fire-lighters.[11]
Also in 1912, Jones jumped onto the running board of Sir Walter Worsley's car during the opening ceremony of the "Open Air School" in York and scattered Votes for Women pamphlets.[12] The same year the WSPU hosted an open-air meeting in Doncaster and a crowd of anti-suffragists attacked the event, heckling the speaker Barbara Wylie, snatching away leaflets and throwing rotten eggs and orange peel until the meeting was broken up. Jones was one of the organisers of the event who had to be escorted to safety by her bodyguards and the local police.[13] She later said about the event: "this sort of rowdyism can only help the cause... I would have spoken if I could make my voice heard above the noise".
In March 1913, Jones chained herself to a chair, heckled and disrupted a meeting held by the anti-suffrage politicians Phillip Snowden and Keir Hardie at the Exhibition Buildings in York. She was ejected from the meeting and arrested.
Jones died in 1958 in Bradford and was buried at Scholemoor Cemetery.
In 2019 a plaque was placed on Coney Street by the York Civic Trust in partnership with Pilot Theatre and the Theatre Royal to commemorate the office headquarters where York's suffragettes organised and campaigned.[14]