Names on the buses

315 Mary Hare

Connections with Brighton and Hove : Mary Hare was a suffragette who was also a pioneer in educating deaf children. She was born in 1866 and was one of nine children. Her father was an engineer. Hare moved to St Michael’s Place in Brighton and later went to Goldsmid Road, Hove, before finally settling in the Kingsway. She spoilt her census return in 1911 as her way of highlighting the campaign to give women the vote. Hare scrawled the words “Women don’t count therefore they will not be counted” on the form. In 1908 she chaired a meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union in Queen’s Road, and said suffragettes were going to rouse Brighton. Five years later she became secretary of the Brighton Women’s Freedom League which campaigned for sexual equality. She took the law into her own hands in 1915 by creating a uniformed women’s police force against the wishes of the official force. Hare felt it was needed to help vulnerable women and children in Brighton and Hove. She enjoyed some success with this. She also campaigned to educate deaf children rather than abandon them In 1895 she set up a school for deaf children in Hove. It moved into a larger building in the country and ended up in Berkshire where the Mary Hare grammar school for the deaf still exists. Hare died in 1945.

315 Alexander Dennis Enviro - carried name since September 2019.