A SWINDON teacher who helped pave the road to winning women the right to vote will be brought to life by silver screen star Helena Bonham Carter this autumn.

Highworth-born Edith New will be one of the leading characters portrayed in director Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette this autumn, which features a host of the world’s most well-respected actors including Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai.

The film will chart the story of the foot soldiers of the early feminist movement when women who were forced underground by an increasingly brutal State.

The movement attracted women not primarily from the genteel educated classes, but working women who had seen peaceful protest achieve nothing.

Radicalised and turning to violence as the only route to change, they were willing to lose everything in their fight for equality – their jobs, their homes, their children and their lives.

Bonham Carter, famous for roles in Alice in Wonderland, Fight Club, Harry Potter, The King’s Speech and Planet of the Apes, will play the plucky Swindon heroine, born in 1877, who abandoned teaching in the 1900s to work as an organiser and campaigner for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).

Local historian Frances Bevan said: “Edith was born in Swindon, the daughter of railway clerk Frederick New and his wife Isabella.

“She worked first as a teacher at Queenstown Infant’s School before moving to London. By 1908 she was employed as a staff organiser for the Women’s Social and Political Union.

“Edith quickly became associated with the militant wing of the suffrage movement and served several terms of imprisonment. She is probably best known for breaking windows at 10 Downing Street with Mary Leigh in July 1908. Both women were sentenced to two months’ hard labour in Holloway Prison.

“Edith joined the WSPU and in March 1907 was sentenced to two weeks in Holloway Gaol for attempting to get into the House of Commons. In 1908 she left teaching and became a paid organiser for the WSPU. She organised by-election campaigns, addressed meetings and joined demonstrations all over the country.

“Edith died on January 2, 1951 in Polperro, Cornwall. Recognition in her home town for her achievements in the Votes for Women Campaign would take another 60 years to be put in place, thanks to an appeal made by Greendown Community School pupils.

"In 2011 a street on Nightingale Rise, Moredon was named Edith New Close.”

Suffragette will be released in the UK on October 7 during the London Film Festival.