Rosa May Billinghurst (31 May 1875 – 29 July 1953) was a British suffragette and women's rights activist. She was known popularly as the "cripple suffragette" as she campaigned in a tricycle. Early life She was born in 1875 in Lewisham, London, the second of nine children of Rosa Ann (Brinsmead) Billinghurst and Henry Farncombe Billinghurst. Her mother came from a family who manufactured pianos and her father was a banker. As a child she survived polio, which left her unable to walk. She wore leg-irons and used either crutches or a modified tricycle. She became active in social work in a Greenwich workhouse, taught in a Sunday School, and joined the temperance Band of Hope. Politics She was an active member of a Women's Liberal Association (fifteen of which joined in 1887 to become the Women's Liberal Federation that ultimately grew to 942 affiliated associations) and later, in 1907, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She took part in the WSPU march to the Royal Albert Hall in June 1908. Billinghurst helped organise the WSPU response in the July 1908 Haggerston by-election; polling was on the day that twenty-four suffragettes were released from Holloway prison and came around the area canvassing to 'keep the Liberal out.' In 1909, she was presumed by Annie Barnes to be the wheelchair user seen distracting a police horse, who laughed as another woman seemed to tip the rider off to fall in a horse trough. The occupant of the wheelchair was the one arrested and rough-handled into a waiting police van. Two years later, she founded the Greenwich branch of the WSPU. As its first secretary she took part in the '1910 Black Friday' demonstrations, using an adapted tricycle for mobility. She was arrested after the police capsized her from the trike. Billinghurst knew that she was helpless when this happened, but she was quite prepared to take the added publicity to benefit the cause of suffrage. The police once exploited her disability leaving her in a side street after letting her tyres down and pocketing the valves. Billinghurst was able to get closer to the House of Commons on another occasion in 1911, when police thought the better of attacking her trike with 'Votes for Women' banner during the rush. She is thought to have been one of the suffragettes to evade the 1911 census on the night