WHILE A LARGE part of Branch resources was devoted to personal protection and to monitoring the activities of revolutionary anarchists and Fenians, it was another group of militant activists that was to prove an unexpected and formidable adversary for Special Branch in the final decade of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Increasing support for women’s rights was symptomatic of the late-Victorian emergence of a new feminist ideal, the ‘New Woman’, and nowhere was this revolution more marked than in women’s clamour for suffrage. Successive Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884 failed to give women the vote and the struggle for women’s enfranchisement became increasingly bitter and, at times, bloody. Moreover, the battle was fought not only by women, for John Stuart Mill was a vociferous supporter of women’s rights and put their case in the Commons, though with little success.

Then, in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst formed the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which restricted membership to women. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela were influential leaders. Up until this time, women generally pursued their aims within the restrictions imposed by law, but from 1905 the WSPU adopted a policy of civil disobedience and by 1910, antagonised further by the delaying tactics of the government, they embarked on a policy of direct action. Its members smashed windows, did widespread damage to public property and were frequently in physical confrontations with the police.

Special Branch officers were employed to cover meetings and demonstrations in order to pre-empt offences, provide public order intelligence for their uniformed colleagues and, where possible, to record inflammatory speeches. As the campaign escalated, meetings became increasingly rowdy and many arrests were made. At first the women did not resist when taken into custody, but many refused to pay fines and were sentenced to imprisonment. The Commissioner, Edward Henry, prompted by the head of Special Branch, Superintendent Quinn, appealed to the Home Secretary for an augmentation to the hard-pressed Branch, slyly pointing out that ‘the question of preventing annoyance to Cabinet ministers by Suffragettes has been engaging the attention of the Commissioner’. His letter went on to suggest that ‘the Special Branch of the CID be assigned the duty [of protecting ministers] as members of this Branch have already been engaged in making enquiries regarding members of several Suffragette organisations’. The Commissioner concluded by requesting an augmentation of sixteen officers to undertake work, in the Provinces if necessary, and to obtain intelligence about their leaders’ designs. The application was approved.1

In 1910 the government attempted to cool the situation by introducing the Conciliation Bill, which granted women very limited enfranchisement; but the Bill failed to get through Parliament.2 This provoked reaction from Mrs Pankhurst and her cohorts and a meeting of the WSPU was held at Caxton Hall on Friday 18 November 1910, which unanimously agreed to send a message to the Prime Minister protesting at ‘the policy of shuffling and delay with which the agitation for women’s enfranchisement has been met by the government’.

A deputation about 300-strong took it to the House of Commons. The first twenty ladies were allowed to stand at the entrance to the House but as more and more suffragettes arrived the police forced them back to Bridge Street. A number of women broke through the police cordon, rushed at the wall of Palace Yard, and tried to climb over; they were restrained and forced back. In the ensuing skirmishes, some officers lost their helmets and others sustained minor injuries but, despite this, according to The Times, the police remained good tempered, although ‘their method of shoving back the raiders lacked nothing in vigour. They were at any rate kept warm by the exercise, and so were the ladies who flung themselves at the defending lines.’3

On being told that the Prime Minister was engaged, Mrs Pankhurst reluctantly agreed to go in with two companions to see his private secretary, Mr Nash. When she returned to the waiting ladies stating that the situation was unchanged, they all sat down on the pavement until the House rose. Meanwhile, the police in front of the entrance to Palace Yard continued to be kept busy repelling women trying to break through the cordon –

some of whom came up smiling every time to the attack, while a few scolded like viragoes and most were simply stolid. They were in every case seized and pushed, sometimes carried, to the other side of Bridge Street. The horse and motor traffic there was not stopped, but was somewhat hindered.4

By the time the House rose, at about 6 p.m., 119 arrests had been made. At that point the police were withdrawn and those women who had not been arrested returned to Caxton Hall, where Mrs Pankhurst announced that demonstrations would be repeated on Monday at 2 p.m., and every day until the Dissolution of Parliament.

Ralph Kitchener, who, in 1910, was a newly appointed uniformed constable in the Metropolitan Police, described the situation as he experienced it at that time:

The following day, The Times reported that Caxton Hall was filled once again with suffragettes who were awaiting Mr Asquith‘s statement in answer to Mr Keir Hardie’s question as to ‘what action the government proposed to take in connection with a measure for the enfranchisement of women’. When it was received, Mr Asquith’s answer was considered so unsatisfactory that hostilities were resumed and a column of militant suffragettes, over 100-strong, left Caxton Hall for Downing Street. They reached Downing Street untroubled by the police; the single line of police there could not withstand the impact of the attacking force, and there was soon a seething mass of spectators, struggling police and suffragettes. Police reinforcements arrived, and the process of clearing the street began. The fight lasted only ten minutes.

When the Prime Minister left the Palace of Westminster he was mobbed by the suffragettes in Parliament Square and escaped in a motorcar, the window of which was broken before he got away. The homes of other ministers were attacked. The women broke windows at the Home Office with metal weights and other missiles; several were charged with malicious damage. The police were said by The Times correspondent to have behaved with self-control and good humour under the greatest provocation. It was evident, he said, that ‘the women’s conduct alienated the sympathy of the crowd’.6

The government found itself faced with another problem when women prisoners went on hunger strike and had to be forcibly fed, which caused a public outcry. Women’s suffrage had become a national issue. New legislation meant that women had to be released on licence as soon as they went on hunger strike. The licences were generally for fourteen days, and the suffragette, after spending the greater part of that period at home, would leave unobtrusively and move to another address where she could not be found. Special Branch officers then had to trace and re-arrest her to complete her sentence. In a few cases where they could not get away from their address, owing to police observation, they remained indoors, for although the Act gave police power of arrest, it gave no right of entry. The Act soon became known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’.

Twelve months after the scenes of mayhem in and around Whitehall, the situation remained unresolved. On 21 November 1911, the WSPU held another meeting at Caxton Hall. A resolution was passed condemning the Manhood Suffrage Bill and demanding that new legislation be passed giving equal franchise rights to men and women. The meeting was followed by rioting in the vicinity of Parliament Square, with window-smashing and other incidents of malicious damage. Some 220 arrests were made, including a number of well-known ladies and some men; they were released on bail after the House had risen.7

There followed a period when the WSPU held packed meetings in the Pavilion Theatre, Piccadilly every Monday afternoon. A handful of male supporters was allowed in, which made it possible for one or two Special Branch officers to infiltrate and take shorthand notes of the speeches. As a result, Mrs Pankhurst was arrested and charged, and at the Central Criminal Court sentenced to three years’ imprisonment; she immediately went on hunger strike and was soon released on licence.

On 5 March 1912, Mr and Mrs Pethwick Lawrence, Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Tike were arrested for conspiracy to incite persons to commit malicious damage to property. Christabel Pankhurst avoided arrest by escaping to France, where she remained, organising the campaign from Paris. The others each received nine months’ imprisonment.

Kitchener, by now a Special Branch officer, described events in March 1912 when the WSPU called on supporters to assemble in Parliament Square on 4 March. The suffragettes defeated police plans to forestall trouble when on 1 March they went on a window-smashing rampage in the West End of London.

In her memoirs, Sylvia Pankhurst reflected on the methodology. ‘There is nothing like a hammer for smashing plate glass; stones, even flints, are apt to glance off harmlessly.’ Damage amounting to thousands of pounds occurred. She recalled that police stations were inundated with complaints, museums and picture galleries in central London were closed and shop windows covered with hoardings or wire screens.9

Sentences on the offenders ranged from seven days to two months, but those committed to the sessions received sentences from four to eight months. Mrs Pankhurst went on hunger strike and soon had to be released for health reasons. On her release, she was taken by her friends to a flat in Great Smith Street, Westminster, on which Special Branch officers kept constant surveillance. One evening two officers noticed numbers of women entering the flat; suddenly the door of the building burst open and some forty or fifty women surrounded the officers, preventing them from moving. Meanwhile, Mrs Pankhurst slipped out and drove off in a taxi. Some days later she was located at an address in Notting Hill Square, where observation was resumed. This was continued for several days, when the suffragettes announced that their leader was going to speak from the balcony of the house. A crowd of several hundred women was briefly addressed by Mrs Pankhurst, who announced that she would shortly leave the house under the protection of her ‘bodyguard’. A strong contingent of uniformed police, as well as a number of detectives, was present. Kitchener described the scene:

The ‘Bodyguard’ … had been formed from among the younger and athletic members of the suffragettes to protect their leader, and for a time they had been meeting indoors to practise Indian club swinging and other exercises; whenever it was thought that their services might be called for they carried their clubs suspended and hidden under their skirts, ready to be produced if the need arose. On this occasion when the time came for Mrs Pankhurst to leave, the assembled suffragettes gathered thickly in front of the house to act as a screen against the police and the bodyguard rushed out from the building with a veiled woman in their midst. The crowd of supporters outside at once commenced a fight to prevent the police from getting at the woman and there was considerable disorder, during which several arrests were made for assault and obstruction. Eventually the veiled woman was reached, and in spite of the efforts of her escort, was arrested and taken to the nearby police station of Notting Hill. Here, however, in a better lighted place than had been that of the street, there was soon consternation, for it was found that the arrested woman, although of the same physical appearance as Mrs Pankhurst and wearing similar – if not the same – clothes as Mrs Pankhurst had worn, was not, in fact, that lady. In the meantime Mrs Pankhurst, taking advantage of the disorder in the Square had quietly, like the Arabs, ‘folded her tent and slipped away’.

Mrs Pankhurst was traced to a house in Glebe Place, Chelsea, and another siege began. When a veiled woman left the house, another fight with the police began, and some of the ‘bodyguard’ were soon using their Indian clubs. Unfortunately they were not expert in the management of their weapons and one of the women was accidentally hit on the head by a fellow bodyguard’s truncheon; she later had to receive medical attention. This time the subterfuge of the veiled woman had been expected, and after it was made certain that she was not Mrs Pankhurst, she was not arrested, and her leader remained indoors.10

The violent actions of the WSPU were becoming counter-productive. Fighting with the police, setting fire to houses, destroying golf courses and sports pavilions, breaking windows and street lamps, setting fire to the contents of letter boxes, cutting telephone wires and destroying valuable, publicly owned art works did their cause little good. The more militant the WSPU’s actions, the less inclined Parliament was to meet its demands.

Kitchener described an amusing incident following the discovery of a suffragette incendiary bomb at Piccadilly Circus. Superintendent Quinn called him into the corridor outside his office:

‘Now,’ said the Superintendent to me. ‘I want you to go with Sergeant Lenehan, and walk beside him to see that no one bumps into him,’ then turning to the sergeant added, ‘Very well sergeant you can go,’ and he then returned to his office outside which the incident had taken place, and Lenehan and I turned away. ‘It’s alright, boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve only got a bomb in my pocket, to take over to the duck pond in the Park,’ where at the time, there was a small office used by bomb experts.

He then went on to explain matters in this way:

The old man sent for me a while ago, and told me to go to Piccadilly Circus Underground Station, where a bomb had been found in a lavatory. I have been there, and sure enough, there was one and I took possession of it. Then I came back here and knocked on the Super’s door and opened it. ‘Oh, Sergeant Lenehan,’ he said. ‘Come in. And was it a bomb?’ ‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘Oh, was it?’ he asked. ‘And where is it now?’ ‘I’ve got it here in my pocket,’ I said, ‘if you want to see it.’ ‘No, no, no, take it out of my office,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it here.’ And then he dashed off for you. And now we’ll take it across the road – I expect it’s only an incendiary after all.

And that is what it turned out to be. The Superintendent was rather proud of a photograph that was hanging in his office, showing the damage that had been caused in an earlier office at the Yard by a Fenian bomb, but he obviously had no desire to experience at first hand any in his own office.11

Meanwhile, the Women’s Freedom League, led by Charlotte Despard, the sister of General French, found a less destructive means of demonstration. A detective sergeant called at its office in Adelphi to make an enquiry. The women present accused him of being an impostor, and prevented him from leaving their premises ‘til someone comes from Scotland Yard to vouch for you – if you are as you claim to be a police officer’. They telephoned to Scotland Yard. The sergeant felt his humiliation very keenly when a colleague called to rescue him.12

By 1912, the activities of the suffragettes had escalated beyond mere militancy and had assumed a far more serious aspect. In December 1911 two members of the movement, Emily Davison and Nurse Pitfield, carried out arson attacks and were imprisoned. In July 1912, a well-organised series of secretly planned arson attacks took place under the direction of Christabel Pankhurst, in which churches and historic buildings were targeted. In 1913 Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse, ‘Anmer’, at the Derby and was fatally injured. On 10 March 1914, the famous Rokeby Venus painting by Diego Velásquez, on display in the National Gallery, was mutilated by a prominent suffragist, Mary Richardson, who said that she had tried to destroy the picture as a protest against the government destroying Mrs Pankhurst.13

But worse was to come. In 1913, a number of bomb outrages were perpetrated. On 19 February a bomb seriously damaged a cottage being constructed for David Lloyd George at Walton-on-the-Hill, near Dorking. It was thought to have contained 5 lbs of gunpowder, as a similar device which had not exploded was found nearby. On 7 May, a dynamite bomb was planted near the Bishop’s throne in the Chancel of St Paul’s Cathedral, but failed to detonate. On 14 April, a bomb was found attached to railings outside the Bank of England. One final act of defiance in this mini bombing campaign took place on 11 June 1914, during a House of Commons debate on the suffrage issue. A loud explosion was heard when a bomb hidden behind the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey erupted, causing minor damage.14

Superintendent Quinn had taken personal control of the suffragette investigations; his intentions were made clear in a report appearing in The Times on 1 May 1913:

Shortly after eleven o’clock yesterday morning the police entered the offices of the Women’s Social and Political Union in Kingsway and made six arrests. The defendants, who are charged with conspiracy, were afterwards brought up before Mr Curtis Bennett at Bow Street Police Court and remanded in custody, bail being refused. Mr Bodkin, who appeared for the prosecution, made an important statement. He said that the Suffragette newspaper must be put a stop to, and he gave public warning that if any printer after that warning printed and published the literature of the union he might find himself in a very awkward position. Proceedings would be taken immediately against any person who made a speech in encouragement of the union’s course of conduct, and any persons who subscribed to the union’s funds might also find themselves in a very awkward position … He said that the proceedings were taken with a view to putting down what had become a danger to the civilised community. The defendants were among the ringleaders of the organisation, which had continued to carry on its nefarious practices notwithstanding repeated warnings.15

Early in 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst broke away from the WSPU and formed the East London Federation of Suffragettes, which combined suffragette militancy with left-wing socialism, and it was not long before she appeared in court. She was given a term of imprisonment and went on hunger strike. Given the usual short period of freedom on licence, she made no effort to escape but at the end of the period she announced she would attend a mass demonstration in Victoria Park. The authorities regarded this threat as open defiance, and said that if she was able to attend open-air meetings she was sufficiently recovered to go back to prison. Kitchener described what happened:

Shortly after the outbreak of war in August 1914, information was received in

Special Branch that many women were assembling outside 10 Downing Street. All available officers were hurriedly sent there and about thirty demonstrators were arrested. A truce was called in this long-running battle of attrition on the understanding that after the ‘real’ war was over the question of votes for women would be resolved. ‘It was, and for all practical purposes, that was the end of the suffragette movement.’17

The patriotism and war-work of women during the First World War may have had more to do with them achieving the franchise than the criminal conduct in which many of them took part at the height of their campaign. The Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised women over the age of thirty years whose names were on the Local Government Register, or who were married to men on that register. Women over twenty-one years of age were eventually allowed to vote on the same terms as men, as a result of the Representation of the People Act of 1928.

1 Letter from Henry to Home Secretary dated 15 September 1909. TNA MEPO 2/1310

2 The Parliamentary Franchise (Women) Bill was given a second reading by the large majority of 299 to 190 on 12 July 1910. Before the Bill could be given a third reading, the government refused to allow time and when a general election was called the Bill was dropped.

3 The Times, 19 November 1910

4 Ibid.

5 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, p. 27

6 The Times, 23 November 1910

7 Ibid., 22 November 1911

8 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, p. 27–8

9 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Virago, 1977), pp. 372–4

10 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, p. 32

11 Ibid., pp. 28–9

12 Ibid., p. 34

13 The Times, 11 March 1914

14 Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 569

15 The Times, 1 May 1913

16 Kitchener, The Memoirs of an Old Detective, p. 35

17 Ibid., p. 37