DiscoverHistory's HeroesHistory's Toughest Heroes: Constance Bulwer-Lytton: Suffragette Rebel
History's Toughest Heroes: Constance Bulwer-Lytton: Suffragette Rebel

History's Toughest Heroes: Constance Bulwer-Lytton: Suffragette Rebel

Update: 2025-11-042
Share

Description

Constance Lytton was raised an aristocrat. But when she wakes up to women's suffrage, she goes undercover in solidarity, joining her working-class comrades in prison and staging a series of dangerous hunger strikes.

In History's Toughest Heroes, Ray Winstone tells ten true stories of adventurers, rebels and survivors who lived life on the edge.

As a lady, and part of the English upper-crust, when Constance Lytton was arrested for her involvement in the women's suffrage movement, she was given special treatment in prison. Desperate to be treated like everyone else, she disguised herself as the working-class ‘Jane Warton’. But when the time came to endure the horror of force feedings, it took everything she had to hold on to the mantra ‘no surrender’.

A BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Producer: Michael LaPointe
Development Producer: Georgina Leslie
Executive Producer: Paul Smith
Written by Imogen Robertson
Commissioning editor for Radio 4: Rhian Roberts

Comments 
loading
00:00
00:00
1.0x

0.5x

0.8x

1.0x

1.25x

1.5x

2.0x

3.0x

Sleep Timer

Off

End of Episode

5 Minutes

10 Minutes

15 Minutes

30 Minutes

45 Minutes

60 Minutes

120 Minutes

History's Toughest Heroes: Constance Bulwer-Lytton: Suffragette Rebel

History's Toughest Heroes: Constance Bulwer-Lytton: Suffragette Rebel

BBC Radio 4