THE Women’s Peace Crusade swept though industrial East Lancashire in the summer of 1917.

It was part of a series of women-led demonstrations across the country, urging the Government to negotiate a peace.

One hundred years on, an exhibition opens this afternoon (July 5) at Blackburn Museum, displaying artefacts, newspaper cuttings and stories of local activists - a hidden history recovered by volunteers.

Visitors will also be able to watch a short film, 'Crusading Women', made by from material uncovered from local libraries.

It's part of a wider community heritage project which began last year to look at the pacifist crusade which ran like wildfire across East Lancashire in 1917-1918, led by radical women from the mill towns of Blackburn, Burnley and Nelson, alongside mothers and wives of men at the Front or conscientious objectors.

Women, such as Ethel Snowden, wife of Blackburn MP Philip Snowden, 'fancy' weaver Lydia Leach and Quaker Kathleen Davies, who all went out into the streets to demand an end to the horror of the First World War.

They were even prepared to risk arrest, because the distribution of handbills contravened the draconian Defence of the Realm Act.

Among the others who rose up in anger, when the first peace meeting was staged in Blackburn in 1917, was weaver Miss Houlker - Caroline or May Houlker - from Accrington, whose brother Albert had enlisted in the Accrington Pals.

Then there was Mary Hopwood, of Holly Street, the wife of a cotton operative and mother of a conscientious objector, Edwin Hopwood and Eliza Brindle, a weaver of Lower Darwen, whose son John had been killed at the Somme.

Lydia Leach, whose sweetheart, Ernest Flint, was in prison as a conscientious objector, played a leading part in co-ordinating the crusades across Blackburn.

In Nelson, socialists Selina Cooper and Gertrude Ingham, a founder member of the town's Independent Labour Party, mobilised over 1500 women, planning their Peace Crusade meeting in a crowded Co-op Hall on Albert Street.

They were dedicated to weaver Nancy Shimbles, of Carleton Street, one of Nelson's socialists and pacifist agitators, who had died in the summer of 1917, at the age of 38.

The meeting was chaired by Deborah Smith, wife of a weaver, who talked of her sons on the Front, one wounded, and another, Rennie, who was a prisoner of war.

Poetess and socialist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, who worked on several committees organising relief work was present, as was a Mrs Aldersley, another weaver from Nelson, who declared that she was ‘prepared to march to London and appeal to parliament that the war should be stopped.’