Elizabeth Webb NICHOLLS

NICHOLLS, ELIZABETH WEBB (NÉE BAKEWELL). (b. Adelaide, SA, 21 Feb 1850; d. Adelaide, SA, 3 Aug 1943). Methodist temperance reformer.

Elizabeth Nicholls grew up in a Methodist home associated with the Archer Street, North Adelaide Wesleyan church. As a young woman she said 'I long to have the will and the power to be very useful'. She became a Sunday school teacher and tract distributor. Married at the age of 20 she was to have five children.

In 1888 Mrs Nicholls had what a biographer calls 'a remarkable spiritual experience'. The nature of this is not clear but it was followed by her identification with the WCTU, a branch of which had been founded in Adelaide in 1886. It was through her life-long involvement in the temperance cause that she fulfilled her adolescent desire to be 'very useful'. Mrs Nicholls served as president of WCTU in SA from 1889 to 1897 and from 1906 to 1927. She was also national President for nine years. In 1906 and again in 1920 she represented the Australian WCTU at international meetings of temperance organisations held in Britain. In SA she took part in numerous local option campaigns, and in the 1915 referendum that resulted in the six o'clock closing of liquor bars.

Mrs Nicholls was partly responsible for aligning the WCTU with the movement for women's suffrage in SA. The WCTU was responsible for about 7000 of the 11 000 signatures on the petition in favour of enfranchisement presented to the House of Assembly: the Bill was passed soon after in 1894. Temperance advocates such as Mrs Nicholls believed the granting of the vote to women would result in the election of parliamentarians in favour of restraints on liquor and gambling. '

Mrs Nicholls was one of the first woman Justices of the Peace in SA. She was also a member for 26 years of the board of the Adelaide Hospital. A woman of conviction, energy and ability, Elizabeth Nicholls was inspired by her Methodism to uphold what she understood as the social claims of the Kingdom of God.

I McCorkindale (ed) Torch-Bearers: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union of South Australia (Adelaide, 1949)

ARNOLD D HUNT