Names on the buses 351 Eva MacNaghten

Connections with Brighton and Hove : Eva MacNaghten was an activist who believed in non-violent resistance and political action. Born on 4th August 1864 in Ovingdean, the daughter of the Hon. Elliot MacNaghten and his wife Jane Maria (nee Vibart.) It was a distinguished family, her father having served as a member of the Supreme Court in Calcutta as Vice President of the India Council, and as Chairman of the East India Company. Eva could have chosen a life of ease, but instead chose to campaign for two very important issues in her lifetime: firstly, women’s suffrage, and secondly, world peace. She distinguished herself firstly in the 1910s in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, for example speaking at Rotherfield and Tunbridge Wells in 1911, and again at Tunbridge Wells on 17 January 1913. These engagements were advertised in Common Cause, the newspaper of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. When the Women’s Suffrage Movement divided on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Eva was involved in forming the Women’s International League (now known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), which campaigned against the war. In May 1919 she attended the International Congress of the Women’s International League in Zurich to campaign for a more constructive, less punitive peace settlement after the First World War. Eva MacNaghten died in London on 27 January 1936, having seen all women in the United Kingdom enfranchised in 1928. Sadly however, Fascism was on the march in Spain, Italy and Germany, and world peace would still have been her ambition.

351 Alexander Dennis Enviro - carried name since October 2020.