But the Suffragettes were to provide an even more sensational story in Liverpool, as a member of the top English aristocracy, Lady Constance Lytton, came up with a plan to be arrested and taken to Walton to experience and write about the kind of treatment that was being given to her fellow protesters for women’s rights. Her father had been Viceroy of India, and her mother was at one time lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. Now here was Constance, a militant for the feminist cause, and she took on the identity of ‘Jane Warton’ when arrested in Liverpool. It was, from one point of view, an undercover job, an investigation, with herself as the subject of the ‘atrocities’ claimed.

Liverpool had not experienced a great deal of militancy over the period of activist campaigns; there would be only ten incidents in the city at one of the most energetic periods of unrest: 1913–14. Although Edith Rigby, a secretary of a branch of the WSPU, did place a pipe bomb at the Liverpool Exchange Building in 1913. The bomb actually exploded. It didn’t do the general debate any good at all that Rigby’s husband approved of what she was doing. Such events helped to cause more division and mistrust, but on the positive side it made the men with more entrenched conservative view sit up and take notice.

Real militancy in the campaign had started in October 1905, when Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst heckled the MP Sir Edward Grey. They went to prison for a week, after refusing to pay a fine. From then onwards, the WSPU would have a militant ‘wing.’ Women in the regions were asked to participate more actively in local campaigns. Deputations to the House of Commons followed, and after 1909 the government began the ‘force feeding’ of women who were being held in Holloway. Then hundreds of women in all areas, were held and force-fed.

‘Jane Warton’ was born. There is a photograph of her, showing a tallish, thin women wearing a long black coat (with badges on the collar) and a large-brimmed hat to put a dark shade over face. It would have been hard to see the famous Lady Lytton under all that. Lytton went to Walton Gaol where there was a crowd, and with the intention of being arrested, she committed her ‘crime’, as she describes it in her memoirs: ‘I took to running and urging on the crowd … I began discharging my stones, not throwing them but limply dropping them over the hedge into the governor’s garden. Two policemen then held me fast by the arms and marched me off to the police station.’ Lytton explained the reason for going to Liverpool: ‘I was sent … to join in working an antigovernment campaign during a general election in 1910. Just before I went, there came the news of the barbarous ill treatment of Miss Selina Martin and Miss Leslie Hall … I heard too of another prisoner in Liverpool, Miss Bertha Brewster who had been re-arrested after her release from prison, which she had done as a protest at being fed by force.’