THE right to a pint was one of the campaigns taken up by the Women’s Freedom League during the first world war. Wartime saw an influx of female customers into Britain’s pubs.

Many women had spare money for the first time, as they had taken over higher-paid industrial jobs previously held by the men who were now away fighting.

Besides, a couple of hours in a warm, friendly pub must have been a lot more enticing than spending a lonely evening at home, worrying about or even mourning the missing husband, brother or son.

Lots of people were predictably horrified. Along with church leaders and temperance campaigners, misogynists and general purpose what’s-the-world-coming-to types, some police chiefs wanted legal restrictions on female pub customers, such as only being permitted entry during certain hours or being allowed, like children, to drink with a meal but not otherwise.

Even some feminists of the posher sort opposed women using licensed premises, but the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) took a straightforward line on this, as on other matters: they were for absolute equality between the sexes, always.

The Women’s Freedom League, with its slogan “Dare to be Free,” began in 1907 as a split from the Women’s Social and Political Union (the suffragettes) after Emmeline Pankhurst’s dictatorial running of the Women's Social and Political Union became too much for its more democratic-minded members.

Among the founders of the new group was the extraordinary Charlotte Despard, a romantic novelist, politician, Irish republican, social worker and political prisoner.

She was born Charlotte French in 1844 in Edinburgh and raised in Kent. Her Irish father was a retired commander of the Royal Navy.

Politics came late into Charlotte’s life after she’d been widowed in 1890. She’d married into the family of the rebel idol Colonel Edward Despard, who’d been executed in 1803 for his alleged leadership of a plot to assassinate the king as the signal for a popular revolution. (He’s the one who, when he saw the ceremonial preparations being made for him to be hanged, drawn and quartered, called out, “Ha ha! What nonsensical mummery is this?”).

Charlotte’s husband, Maximilian Carden Despard, was an international businessman and when he died at sea, leaving Charlotte very well off, friends encouraged her to take up social work as a way of distracting her from her grief.

As with so many of her time and class, this exposure to extreme poverty was the turning point which transformed her from a conventionally liberal Victorian lady into a red rebel.

She turned out to be very good at charitable activities, in the mostly Irish slum of Nine Elms in south London. Charlotte was exceptionally well-organised, efficient and hard-working, a natural at running committees and organisations such as soup kitchens, youth clubs and free clinics.

Campaigning for free school meals and health inspections for children led her to involvement in socialist groups such as the Independent Labour Party, and in the movement to win votes for women.

By 1907, when she was imprisoned twice for suffragette activities, Despard — this ageing, ascetic, thoroughly respectable but rather frightening-looking widow — was recognised as one of the national leaders of various radical causes.

When WWI started, Pankhurst’s organisation fell in loyally behind the imperialist government while Despard’s lot continued their campaign of “constitutional militancy” and passive resistance against the state.

Women were encouraged to refuse to pay taxes on the “no taxation without representation” basis. (Dog licences were included in the list of taxes to be boycotted, apparently so that women too poor to pay any other tax could still take a direct part in the protest).

Despard herself, meanwhile, spent the war campaigning against conscription and running a women’s pacifist network. War, she declared, “was the decisive damnation of a corrupt society.” (Which must’ve been slightly awkward at family gatherings since her brother, Field Marshal Sir John French, was at that time Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the British Army).

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and a later visit to the young USSR, made her a convinced communist. After the war, she stepped back from leadership of the WFL, but not because she was retiring.

She stood for Parliament in the 1918 general election and was as active as ever in children’s welfare, vegetarianism and Indian independence. She became deeply involved in Irish republican solidarity groups supporting Sinn Fein. (Which must’ve been slightly awkward at family gatherings since her brother, Field Marshal Sir John French, was at that time Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.)

In the 1920s, Despard moved to Ireland. She had converted to Catholicism during her Nine Elms years and was, according to her friend and housemate, Maud Gonne, “intensely Irish in feeling.”

That feeling was not universally reciprocated. In 1933, mobs of fascists and Catholic extremists rioted against left-wing targets. Despard’s home in Dublin, which doubled as a Marxist college for workers, was attacked, with Charlotte herself trapped inside for hours.

As her 90th birthday approached, she moved to Belfast — where a police car stationed outside her house followed her every time she went out. However old she was, both the Irish and British states still considered her a dangerous subversive.

And they were right to do so: Despard continued active involvement on all fronts into her nineties. She was declared bankrupt, having donated all her money and property to her causes. “I have always believed in discontent,” she once said, “a disinclination to sit idly, knowing things are wrong.”

Charlotte Despard died on November 10 1939, and was buried in Dublin with Republican honours. Today, she has a street named after her in south London — and in north London, a pub.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.