The suffragettes were masters – or mistresses – of publicity. They knew the value of a headline-hitting stunt. In their campaigns for Votes for Women, they chained themselves to railings, blew up postboxes, bombed Lloyd George's home, smashed countless windows and got themselves arrested, imprisoned and force-fed.

Tragically, one of them, Emily Davison, threw herself under King George V's horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby and was trampled to death.

In Yorkshire, however, gentler approaches were sometimes used. A hundred years ago for instance, a Votes for Women caravan trundled its novel way around North Yorkshire, taking the campaigning message to the remote moors and dales, the market squares and seaside promenades.
This Great Yorkshire Suffrage Tour, as it might have been called, is among the lesser-known footnotes of suffragette history being celebrated this year, the 80th anniversary of women over 21 winning the right to vote.

The caravan – sturdy, shuttered against wind and rain, more radical than Romany – features in several of the 50 newly-unearthed vintage photographs in Rebel Girls, the previously untold story of the Yorkshire suffragettes (and more law-abiding suffragists) pieced together by Jill Liddington, a senior research fellow at the University of Leeds.

The book, vividly uncovering the lives of long-forgotten characters in a supposedly familiar drama, became an instant classic. Its stories of feminist derring-do (with plots and escapes worthy of a John Buchan novel) has propelled Liddington, who lives at Mytholmroyd in Calderdale, on a grand Yorkshire tour of her own, giving 60 talks on a subject that still captures people's imaginations.

The tour has taken her all over the county and beyond, and there are further talks scheduled, starting next Wednesday in Leeds, Halifax and Wakefield. "It's been absolutely fantastic, with audiences averaging 50 or 60, right across Yorkshire, everywhere from Middlesbrough down to Doncaster and from Todmorden across to Hull and Scarborough," she says.

The most recent leg of the tour started in Whitby, where Liddington, sometimes described as a "suffrage detective", stood on the quayside and was amazed to compare the modern view with one of the caravan photographs and see that it has hardly changed in a hundred years, apart from the smoking chimneys.

Back in August 1908, Whitby was where the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) launched its Yorkshire tour. As the photographs (quickly issued as postcards) show, their caravan attracted a sizeable crowd, most wearing straw boaters. One pram-pushing woman darts a look of patient exasperation at the camera, as though thinking: "Votes for Women! Well, I don't know what next!"

From Whitby, the caravan, staffed by three suffragists and a man who looked after the horse, set off for Goathland, where one of the women, in a fine, broad-brimmed hat, mounted a chair and delivered a speech. The scene was faithfully captured by the photographer, with a group of men hanging back and leaning on their walking sticks as they listen, uncommitted.

And then, over the North York Moors to the Vale of Pickering and back to the coast – to Scarborough and Bridlington, where the suffragists decorated the caravan with boards advertising their meetings, books, leaflets and badges. On to Beverley, and finally back to Driffield, Malton and Pickering. As Jill Liddington points out: "This voyage had succeeded in reaching fresh rural communities, previously untouched, with the suffrage demand."

From Bridlington, the youngest of the three women, Emilie Gardner, a recent Cambridge graduate, sent a postcard to a younger relative who had done well in her school exams.

"Jolly fine and I'm awfully glad," she wrote. "It's ripping you have passed in everything."

Her jolly-hockey-sticks language – part of her "effusive enthusiasm", as Liddington calls it – is fascinatingly out of kilter with the lives of many of the other women featured in the book, one of whose greatest achievements is to rescue the suffrage movement from the clutches of the middle class. As she traces the story through the lives of eight Yorkshire campaigners – "eight industrial rebel girls" – it soon emerges that not all suffragettes were as posh as the Pankhursts or involved in what Liddington calls London-centric "celebrity suffrage".

From a very different background came Dora Thewlis, a Huddersfield weaver pictured on the book's cover as a dishevelled 16 year-old ("Baby Suffragette" she was nicknamed), struggling as two policemen arrest her in a crowd of suffragettes storming the House of Commons. The photograph made the front page of the Daily Mirror, which reported the courtroom conversation between her and the magistrate.

"Who let you escape from Huddersfield?" he asked. She replied: "A lot did." The Mirror reporter added: "And the eyes danced merrier than ever as she turned to her friends at the back."

Dora's feistiness is matched by Lavena Saltonstall, a tailoress and weaver from Hebden Bridge, who left no personal papers or photographs.

Her memories went unrecorded as she disappeared off history's radar, but she had a gift for stirring invective, witnessed by her surviving letters and articles.

"As I am a tailoress many people think it is my bounden duty to make trousers and vests, and knit and crochet and sew, and thank God for my station in life," she wrote.

"I am supposed to make myself generally useless by ignoring things that matter – literature, music, art, history, economics, the lives of the people around me and the evils of my day. They think I ought to concern myself over clean doorsteps and side-board covers…"

"You can hear her voice coming through like a bell, as an eloquent, witty working class woman," says Liddington. "I almost feel I know her. I live just two miles away from where she lived and can walk around places she knew."

If Lavena campaigned on paper, Lilian Lenton, a dancer-turned-arsonist, campaigned very much in person. She declared she would set fire to two buildings a week until women got the vote and, sensationally, stood up in court to confess trying to set fire to a Doncaster house in cahoots with a young reporter on the town's Chronicle newspaper.

She was imprisoned in Armley jail, went on hunger strike, was secretly photographed by spy cameras, released and followed to the home of Frank Rutter, director of Leeds Art Gallery and a high-profile suffragette supporter. She disguised herself as a delivery boy, tricked the police, escaped to Scarborough and may have been smuggled to Holland in a private yacht.

With such vivid material, it's no surprise that Antonia Byatt has described the book as "giving long due recognition to forgotten women… capturing their passion and placing it in the larger social and political context of the time".

Or, as Liddington says, over a decidedly unmilitant coffee in a Leeds bookshop: "When they've read the book, people have said – with a hint of surprise in their voices – 'Gosh, Gill, this is a real page-turner!'" It's all due to dogged literary archaeology. She has trawled through newspapers (including the Yorkshire Post) and traced threads on internet census returns to reconstruct, with interviews and on-the-spot research, the lives of these lost suffragettes, ironically written out of history twice over after successfully campaigning for a voice – as well as votes – for women. One of them is a Pankhurst, but not a famous one: Adela, who based herself in Sheffield but disappeared from public view and emigrated to Australia.

Liddington's talks have attracted audiences ranging from Townswomen's Guild members to feminist reading groups: mainly women –" and in a sense rightly so, because it's women's history. It was their grandmothers or great grandmothers or great aunts who knew what it was to be disenfranchised, and who may have carried banners in processions."

Or who may have cheered the women (and the man who looked after the horse) trundling round in that North Yorkshire caravan.

Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote by Jill Liddington (Virago, £14.99). Details of the author's forthcoming Yorkshire talks on www.jliddington.org.uk. To order the book from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232 or go online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. P&P is £2.75.