Clerkenwell Green

• IT came as a real shock to read that there are objectors to the proposed statue of Sylvia Pankhurst at Clerkenwell Green, (What would Sylvia have wanted? January 27).

Sylvia Pankhurst was the most jet-fuelled, visionary activist of the three Pankhurst women.

Not content to appeal just to middle-class women to get the right to vote and standing up to multiple torture episodes in Holloway Prison, she campaigned tirelessly for the rights of working-class women, fought poverty on their behalf, set up factories for women workers which paid living wages and launched working-class dining rooms so that mothers and children never went hungry.

She was active on the international socialist scene, including in revolutionary Russia, battled for free national maternity services at home and conceived the NHS, the seeds of which were sown in Finsbury in 1935-38.

Then she worked energetically with the emperor Haile Selassie on maternity services for Ethiopian women until her last days in Addis Ababa. What more proof is needed that a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst must be erected on Clerkenwell Green?

Rachel Holmes’s 2020 biography Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel tells the whole compelling story.

DAVID SULKIN OBE
Wharton Street, WC1