Hull served as
honorary secretary of the Letchworth branch of the
WSPU and hosted meetings of the branch at her family home. She was arrested for her part in a suffragette
demonstration in
London on 29 January 1913. She was charged with smashing windows at the
Colonial Office and sentenced at
Bow Street Police Court to 14 days in prison, in default of a 20s fine and £2 damages. Her response to the charge was "I mean to stop here, so don't want bail" and in reply to the
magistrate, she said "I did it as a protest against
the Liberal Government, and the sooner they give us the franchise the better it will be for them." She subsequently wrote about her experience of prison in
The Suffragette, the WSPU newspaper: "All through the night, at intervals of less than an hour, a warder would open the wooden windows and ask, 'Are you all right?'. If a wardress was in charge too, she was not in evidence. There is a plank fitted up in the cell; half is used for a bed, the other half for a lavatory, the plug being pulled by a warder outside when he deems fit." Hull's protest was part of a WSPU campaign to "make London absolutely unbearable to the average citizen". WSPU founder
Emmeline Pankhurst said that, with the sole exception of regard for human life, suffragettes should adopt any methods they liked, while Deputy
Annie Kenney urged women "never to leave home without a hammer" to smash windows or attack letter boxes. It was common for suffragettes at the time to use an alias, "either to protect their family from obloquy by association or, more commonly, in their attempts to evade the police". Hull went by Mary Gray and it is likely that she is noted twice on the Roll of Honour of Suffragette Prisoners. ==See also==