Queer Places:
17 Downing St, Westminster, London SW1A 2AA, UK
5 Robert St, London WC2N 6BN, UK
Golders Green Crematorium
Golders Green, London Borough of Barnet, Greater London, England
Elizabeth
Brister Banks (May 2, 1872 – July 18, 1938) was
an American journalist and author. Although she never renounced her American
citizenship, she remained in England throughout the last forty years of her
life. She took stunt-reporting to Britain in the early 1890s, becoming one of
London’s best-known journalists. Through the medium of her inventive
cross-class masquerades, Banks disclosed the underside of women’s industrial
labours; she published a photo gallery of her different investigative selves
in her Campaigns of curiosity: Journalistic adventures of an American girl in
London (1894).
Elizabeth was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the daughter of John Banks and
Sarah Ann Brister.[1] As
a young child, she was raised by her aunt Elizabeth Brister and uncle Joseph
Peck on "the experimental farm" north of Madison near Deansville, Wisconsin.
She attended Milwaukee Downer Female Seminary College in Milwaukee when it was
still located at Fox Lake, Wisconsin. She became a typewriter girl in a
grocery store, then worked society pages in Baltimore and Saint Paul,
Minnesota. She worked as secretary at the American Counsulate in Peru, later
becoming a stunt journalist when other women writers were relegated to society
and fashion pages. In London, she became a regular contributor to publications
such as The Daily News, Punch, St James' Gazette, London Illustrated,
and Referee. She created a sensation in London by recording her observations
on the plight of the lower classes, which she researched posing as a
housemaid, street sweeper, and Covent Garden flower girl. Her journalistic
writing under several pen names including pseudonyms of Mary Mortimer
Maxwell and Enid, unceasingly promoted women's right to vote and denounced
prison conditions for jailed suffragettes. Elizabeth lived in London at 17
Downing Street, close to the Prime Minister's residence. Her neighbors and
friends included George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy,
H.G. Wells and suffragette Henrietta Marston. She made major contributions to
British Intelligence in developing strategies to help protect London from
German aerial attacks and developing propaganda schemes that helped draw the
United States into the first world war. At the height of her career Banks
lived at 5 Robert Street in the Adelphi area between the Strand and the
Thames.
In 1914 she founded the Authors' Belgian Fund and Dirk's fund for the
Allies. She originated and also wrote a series of controversial essays
entitled "The Lady at the Round Table". She made a trip back to the United
States and became the author of an autobiographical work, The Remaking of an
American. She also wrote "Campaigns of Curiosity" and "Newspaper Girl".
Careful to protect her sources in both her letters and written works, the bulk
of her personal papers were destroyed upon her death. She died on Jul 18, 1938
of arteriosclerosis and then was cremated with her ashes deposited at Golders
Green Crematorium.
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