Olive Hockin (married name Olive Leared; 1881–1936) was a British suffragette, arsonist, author and artist.
Career
Between 1904 and 1911 Hockie studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work was shown at the
Royal Academy, by the Society of Women Artists and at the
Walker Gallery.
Activism
Hockin joined the suffragette movement and Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1912. In 1913, after arson attacks on the Roehampton Golf Club and on a house at
Walton Heath belonging to
Lloyd George, suspected to be suffragette-related, Hockin was arrested, convicted and handed a four-month
Prison sentence. Her flat was said to contain stones, kerosene and false car number plates. Hockin claimed she was not guilty of the charges and objected to the male dominated justice system, saying that: "a court composed entirely of men have no moral right to convict and sentence a woman, and until women have the power of voting I shall continue to defy the law, whether I am in prison or out of it."
Once imprisoned, unusually she agreed not to go on hunger strike if she was allowed to paint.
She was treated as a "Category One prisoner", and it was said by a fellow prisoner, Margaret Scott, that she carved the chair in her cell.
The National Portrait Gallery has a picture of her by the Criminal Record Office, and two pages of "Surveillance Photograph of Militant Suffragettes", also by the Criminal Record Office, which includes her.
Hockin was a Land Girl during the Great War, and later wrote Two Girls on the Land: Wartime on a Dartmoor Farm, which was published in 1918.
In 1922 she married John Leared who trained polo ponies in Cheltenham. They had two sons. She died in 1936.
