EDWIN MIGHELL
1883-1937
Porter at Oxted Station
SUFFRAGIST BOMB IN STATION TOILET
A day after suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was jailed in 1913 Edwin found an improvised bomb
had gone off overnight
Born in Godstone in 1884 to a cattle dealer, Edwin worked initially as a milkman in Horley. By 1911 he was a railway porter
living on 2 Marsland Cottages, Station Road, New Oxted with his wife and a daughter, both called Maggie, and a lodger.
Emmeline Pankhurst, the political activist and chief campaigner for British women’s suffrage (the right to vote in public
elections), was found guilty on 3rd April 1913 of inciting arson and using bomb tactics, and sentenced to 3 years ‘penal servitude’.
The following morning, Friday 4th April 1913 Edwin Mighell went in to work at 6.30am. He found the gentleman’s lavatory badly
damaged, walls bulged out and the roof blown off. It was discovered that an improvised explosive device had gone off during the
night, but luckily had failed to work as intended and no-one was hurt.
Comprising a two-gallon can of fuel inside a travelling basket, attached to an alarm clock set to trigger a fuse at 3am. Additionally
there was a flask of cycle lamp oil, a slough hat, a firelighter and some saturated cottonwool. Outside a nickel-plated pistol was
found that accidentally went off in the postman’s hand, fortunately doing ‘no mischief’. The lavatory adjoined the station’s oil
store, so had a fire broken out that would’ve been quite an inferno.
No Suffragist pamphlets were left at the scene, as was often the case, but some brown wrapping paper that would’ve been
destroyed was found intact with a department store label and the name Mrs Watkins. Through store records the police tracked
down Mrs Watkins’ delivery address, it appeared that her jeweller husband had reused the paper to send a mended item to a Miss
Frida Kerry. Frida and her parents were suffrage sympathisers but confessed nothing. Only much later in 1950, after the death of
her husband Harold Laski (a professor at the LSE and Labour Party Chairman 1945-46), did Frida finally admit that it was Harold
that had planted the bomb.
In July 1932, Edwin’s wife Maggie, the mother of his five children, died of heart failure while hanging out the washing. Edwin
married again in 1934, to Martha Riddle, but he died in 1937, aged 53, having been stationed at Oxted for 32 years.
NOTES/LINKS
The Oxted Railway Station Suffragette Bomb, 1913
https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/womens-suffrage/the-womens-suffrage-movement-in-surrey-new/
activism-and-militant-suffragettes-in-surrey/the-oxted-suffragette-bombs-1913
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