Did feminist militancy cease when the Pankhursts called a halt to the activities of the WSPU in 1914? Was the suffragette spirit quashed with the advent of the First World War, and due to the achievement of women’s partial (1918) and then equal (1928) suffrage thereafter, having to wait to be reclaimed by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the atmosphere of ‘flower power’ in the late 1960s? Indeed, there is some compelling evidence to suggest that during the 1930s this legacy was a living one, even among young women who were coming to terms with their political identities and resisting through direct action the keenly felt backlash against sexual equality. A rather unusual incident in Ilfracombe, an otherwise sleepy seaside town in North Devon, illustrates well the persistence of feminist consciousness and even of militancy. On 19 February 1937, an organised gang of local ‘spinsters’ in Ilfracombe ‘took war into the enemy camp’ and stormed a smoking concert being held at the Bachelors Club at the Royal Clarence Hotel. Wearing masks and armed with bags of flour and water pistols, they led the raid on the hotel at 9.30 in the evening, taking entirely off guard members who were seated comfortably smoking, drinking, and enjoying the performance of an artiste. The women, one of whom was reported to be carrying a banner, ‘flung their bags of flour right and left’ until many of the bachelors were covered head to foot, and then from atop tables and chairs they fired their water pistols at the flour-covered bachelors. Scuffles ensued when some of thebachelors caught hold of some of the spinsters but the men failed to maintain their grip, their hands pasty with the flour and water mixture. One of the women assailants eventually requested to be photographed with the men, and refused to leave until this was granted. The ring leader was identified as Miss Dinah Hewett, described in the local paper as an ‘Ilfracombe blonde’ (together with her photo portrait showing a young, attractive woman, fashionably attired with pearl earrings and a neck kerchief). She had organised it all with a friend, because ‘We were determined to force an entry, although the men said we should not. We showed them that we women can be really tough when put to the test.’1 Their actions to close down the Bachelors Club were relatively spontaneous but they also intended to solicit the support of Miss Marjorie Graves, ex-MP, to champion their cause once she was adopted as the Conservative candidate for the NorthWest Devon Division. There was an immediate ripple effect to the actions of the Ilfracombe spinsters,and both men and women armed for a copy-cat confrontation in near-by Plymouth. Clearly the local papers that reported these incidents did so tongue in cheek, the parodying narrative tone consistent with that evident in so much of the press coverage of feminist political mobilisation earlier in the century. There was an escalation in violence with the Plymouth incident when Miss Jessie Lugg mustered a force of spinsters, described as ‘25 Amazons’, to wreak the first meeting of the Plymouth and District Bachelors Club, formed by Stocker P. Moss of the Royal Naval Barracks. Lugg said:The Ilfracombe girls doused their beer with flour but we are prepared to use more drastic measures than that. Arrangements have been made for a stock of foreign eggs and over-ripe tomatoes. That’s the kind of artillery to turn loose on those fellows. We may use flour also, but if we do it will be liberally mixed with pepper.2