These sisters were born in Montrose, daughters of Catherine Jane Erskine, teacher, and John Wilkie, draper. It was a poor family.  Annot went to Montrose Academy where she worked as a pupil teacher, then attended teacher training college before taking external classes at the University of St Andrews, being awarded the LLA in 1901. She taught in Dundee and then Lochgelly. She was a member of the Independent Labour Party and in 1906 and became the first secretary of the Dundee branch of the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU), a suffragist organisation. Her sister Helen (1882-?), who may also have been a teacher, organised women, many from the textile workers’ union, for a WSPU march in Edinburgh in 1907. Helen was part of the deputation that met Churchill in 1909 and in 1912 became secretary of another suffrage organization, Dundee Women’s Freedom League. She was also a prolific letter writer to the Dundee papers and a gifted orator.

Annot never quite decided whether the Labour Party or the suffrage movement was most important to her. In 1907 she moved to Manchester, joining the local branch ILP, and becoming a WSPU organiser. The following year she married Sam Robinson, a working-class clerk, party activist, propaganda secretary of the Central Manchester ILP and active supporter of the militant suffrage movement. But he was violent and an alcoholic; their marriage broke up within five years and Annot brought up their two children. In February 1908 she took part, with other WSPU members, in an attempt to force their way in to the House of Commons hidden in a furniture van.

She was sentenced to six months imprisonment but by June was back on a soap box in Hyde Park. In 1910 she became a part-time organiser for the Women’s Labour League (WLL) and that year put forward a conference resolution condemning the Labour Party leadership for its lack of support for the women’s franchise or the WLL. She also supported liberalised and equal divorce. The following year she publicly disagreed with the league’s position on suffrage and soon afterwards moved to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) as a full-time organiser and was active at the Midlothian by-election in September 1912. When war came Annot, a pacifist, resigned from the NUWSS and helped to found the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF), meanwhile working on behalf of young women munitions workers. In 1917 she was part of the Women’s Peace Crusade.

After the war she was employed as an organiser by the WILPF and travelled in Britain, USA and Holland on its behalf, until in 1922 there was no money to employ her full-time and she had to return to teaching. Back in Scotland, she taught in Newburgh, Fife.  She died suddenly during an operation in Perth Royal Infirmary. Her obituarist, her friend Ellen Wilkinson, described her as ‘a big woman and a big personality’ with ‘an exquisite sense of the ridiculous and a sharp tongue’