East Lothian woman who led suffragette movement in Scotland
The great-granddaughter of an East Lothian suffragette is telling Forth News about the legacy she has left behind - 100 years after women were given the right to vote in the UK.
The Representation of the People Act was passed on 6 February 1918, allowing women over 30 and "of property" to vote.
The suffragette movement started in 1897 and featured well-known activists like Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett.
But Catherine Blair started founded the first Scottish Women's Institute in 1917 in Longniddry in East Lothian and was an essential part in the fight for the cause.
She is also thought to have hidden wanted activists in her home in East Lothian, offering them refuge.
Her great-granddaughter Catriona McDougall says: "As a very young child her father drilled her into the belief of the free will of man, and it kind of made her very interested in all things political, and equality for everybody. She was a very sort of compassionate, intelligent woman.
"At the time she couldn't really take part in any militant activity because she was a farmer’s wife, she had four children. But she did use her power of word by writing hundreds of letters to local and national newspapers about women's suffrage.
"She did harbour - for the want of a better word - women who had been released from prison, and there's one amusing story where she talks about one of the suffragettes sunning herself in the hammock in East Lothian rocking with laughter at the press - some story that this particular suffragette had escaped to France.
"In the 1911 census she refused to be recorded with her husband. She actually took herself off to the barn and registered herself with her two daughters and a maid servant there, and she put herself down as farmers wife, bracket suffragette and head of the household, which, of course, she wasn't allowed to be.
"I think we've been brought up with her legacy and I think, certainly myself and my two sisters, are pretty strong independent women and we've, you know, worked all our lives and both one of my sisters Mairead and myself belong to the Women's Institute in Leith."