Margaret Skirving Gibb


Margaret Skirving Gibb was a Scottish suffragette and chess player. She was born in 1877. Her father was Peter Walker Gibb, a fish merchant, and her mother was Margaret Skirving. She was one of six siblings, one of whom was fellow suffragette Ellison Scotland Gibb. She died in Prestwick in 1954.

Involvement in the campaign for women's suffrage

In 1911 she refused to partake in the census, along with her mother and the rest of the family. In March 1914 Margaret or 'May' Gibb was found guilty of striking a constable outside Holloway prison with a dog whip and sentenced to two months in Holloway. After Emmeline Pankhurst's rearrest in 1914, Margaret Gibb entered the National Portrait Gallery and slashed the portrait of one of gallery's founders, Thomas Carlyle by John Everett Milais. She was sentenced to six months imprisonment. During the reporting of this arrest, she is referred to as Ann Hunt, which she used as an alias. She was one of a number of suffragettes photographed when Scotland Yard commissioned the undercover photography of militant suffragettes from 1913. The images were used to identify suffragettes attempting to enter public buildings such as museums and art galleries, where they might attempt to damage the objects.

Chess career

In 1923, she played, along with her sister, in the Glasgow Ladies' team that reached the final of the 1922-23 season's Spens Cup.