Tuesday, 8 March is International Women's Day. Anyone interested in the achievements of Marple Women should visit Marple Station.
The Friends Group has four large boards as part of a permanent display on the Manchester Platform that celebrates the lives of four women pioneers a hundred years ago.
- Mary Arletta Leonard from Marple Bridge was a key campaigner for Votes for Women. With her husband TA Leonard, she worked to establish the Holiday Fellowship to ensure that working people from the industrial centres of the North had access to holidays in the great outdoors.
- Lilla Brockway lived in Mellor and was a radical woman. She stood up for what she believed in and suffered real hardship as a result. She was a suffrage campaigner, a socialist and an opponent of war.
- Gertrude Powicke was an exceptional woman. Throughout her short life, she was brave and independent. She always stood up for what she believed in. She grew up between Marple and Romiley. She was one of the first women to attend Manchester University.
- Fanny Hudson (below with staff and patients in 1914) and her family shaped Marple. On the very day war was declared, Fanny Hudson offered her home, Brabyns Hall, as a hospital. It became the focus of the town’s response to the conflict.
