Chapter Ten

Nauseating Brutality

If you hold power to send us to prison, not for six months, but for six years, or for our lives, the Government must not think they could stop this agitation

Emmeline Pankhurst

BY 1908, the Suffragette show was well and truly on the road. Sylvia, despite her differences, was drawn heart, soul and paintbrush into the parades, exhibitions and the razzmatazz. In February, the ‘Trojan Horse’, a furniture van, drove into Parliament Square, packed with twenty-one women who attempted to rush the Palace of Westminster. It was then that women adopted their most celebrated tactic of chaining themselves to the railings of Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and even the gallery in the House itself. The annual total of Suffragette prison sentences rose sharply from 191 weeks in 1906–07, to 350 weeks in 1907–08, and over 960 weeks in 1908–09. Mrs Pankhurst was among the prisoners sent to jail for six weeks. Respectable middle-class women found themselves standing in gutters (to remain on the pavement was counted as obstruction and meant possible arrest), selling Votes for Women, chalking on walls and parading with sandwich boards. For them, ‘bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’.⁵³

There were two more Women’s Parliaments and a massive meeting in the Albert Hall in March, at which a symbolic empty chair was placed on the platform for Mrs Pankhurst. For unaccountable reasons she was released from prison a day short of completing her sentence, and so, with the usually brilliant WSPU stage-management, she walked unexpectedly into the Hall amid uproar, to take her place.

Due to the excellence of the Pethick-Lawrences’ fund-raising and a week of self-denial, donations were now pouring in, and many famous names, such as John Galsworthy, Mrs Bernard Shaw and Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, were listed as supporters. Funds became available for ever more massive demonstrations.

Much as Sylvia had disliked what had happened during the split in September 1907, she was totally committed to her own ideological dreams, which she privately hoped could be achieved alongside what she judged to be the narrower goal of her mother. For the time being, she helped as much as she was able.

Behind the scenes, young Harry was still causing her great concern. He had turned up on her doorstep in January, having lost his job in Scotland when his employer went bankrupt. He had no money and nowhere to go; Sylvia, with some reservations, took him under her wing. Her own finances were precarious. ‘I counted my cash, dividing it to make it last for us both on short commons for nine days, hoping that before that time had expired a cheque would arrive.’ Harry was, as ever, affectionate and eager to please, but Sylvia was rightly worried about his future prospects: ‘I saw him as a skater on thin ice, who at any moment may descend into an anxious sea of discouragement.’

When Mrs Pankhurst arrived, Harry was clearly an unwanted problem. Christabel suggested, somewhat impractically, that he should qualify as a secretary, but since he had never been allowed glasses to correct his poor eyesight, or proper schooling, he was not equipped for such work. His mother, equally unrealistically, told Sylvia if he got a reader’s ticket to the British Museum, she would pay for some shorthand and typing classes. The minute Emmeline returned to the provinces, Sylvia and Christabel arranged for his much needed spectacles, so that for the first time in his life he could read without distress. But any plans for his education were thwarted by Harry’s own determination to play a part in the family crusade.

At Easter, when Campbell-Bannerman resigned, Asquith became Prime Minister and after a Cabinet reshuffle, a series of by-elections followed.

Christabel led the successful move to oust Winston Churchill from Manchester North West. There in 1908 on campaign, Harry met and fell in love with a 20-year-old Suffragette, Helen, daughter of Sir John Craggs. Many years later, Helen was to become the second Mrs Pethick-Lawrence. Harry drove the WSPU four-in-hand carriage, with Helen by his side. When the election was over, he wrote to her, and to his delight received a reply. He then followed her to Brighton and spent the night on the cliffs outside her school, hoping for a sight of her passing by. First love was a painful process for Harry, who, like his sister Sylvia, found a release for his emotions in poetry:

I saw thee, beloved,

And having seen, shall ever see,

I as a Greek and thou,

O, Helen within the walls of Troy.

Tell me, is there no weak spot

In this great wall by which

I should come to thee beloved.

Once back in London, Harry joined the women at whatever activity was the order of the day. Sylvia became more and more anxious about his lack of serious application and his long-term job prospects. It was unfortunate that his mother, having heard that Harry had been speaking at an ILP meeting on the virtues of a return to the land, decided he should gain agricultural experience, for which he was also totally unsuited.

Mrs Pankhurst had heard through Hardie of his friend, Joseph Fels. In 1900, this small, wiry, Jewish American had arrived in Britain and bought a mansion, where he proposed to pioneer a scheme of farm colonies to ease East End unemployment. When he and his wife lost their only child, Joseph Fels had turned to philanthropic work. He was introduced to George Lansbury, who had attempted a similar allotment scheme in the 1890s. He was to prove a generously unstinting, idealistic and practical source of support for many of their social and political projects. Fels financed many of Hardie’s foreign travels and supported his election campaigns. Emmeline saw the farming enterprise as a healthy prospect for the sickly Harry, and so the hapless boy was despatched to rural Essex. This was a disaster, for Harry endured, uncomplaining as ever, the harsh conditions in which he was expected to work and live. The family did not discover his suffering until it was too late.

On 5 April 1908, Keir Hardie returned triumphant from his world tour (largely financed by the ever-generous Fels, who had accompanied Hardie, Lillie and Nan on the first stage of the tour), and Bruce Glasier announced, ‘we are in for a big Hardie boom’. There is no record of Sylvia’s response to his return: she does not mention it in her book, yet significantly she had cut out and treasured all her press cuttings covering his long journey. Nor is there any evidence that she went to the massive ‘welcome home’ celebration organised by Frank Smith in the Albert Hall. Although Hardie had resigned the Labour Party leadership while he was away in order to ‘be free to speak out’, every seat was taken. When he rose to speak, he was unable to utter a word for fully ten minutes while the audience cheered, waved handkerchiefs and sang The Red Flag and For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.

He told his euphoric friends that he did not believe he had been a success as a political leader: he had indeed neglected his parliamentary duties and had found himself at odds with his Labour Party colleagues, but, he explained, ‘I am an agitator. My work has consisted of stirring up divine discontent with wrong. With what remains of my life I intend to follow the same course.’

These were words with which, had Sylvia been present, she would have identified, and despite the fact that Hardie then returned to Lillie in Scotland, it was not long before Sylvia and he were meeting and working together again.

Joseph Fels, the soap magnate and philanthropist.

Hardie, who had been distressed by Mrs Pankhurst’s behaviour in 1907, wrote to Glasier that her actions had been ‘folly … and will in time drive all the better spirits out of the WSPU’.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, like Sylvia, he decided to sit it out and to continue his fight for the women’s cause overall, which they both judged more important than the unbalanced behaviour of one particular group. Their friendship renewed and revived, they were seen more and more together, although the Suffragette banner provided a convenient cloak for their intensifying intimacy.

In June, there was a heatwave, and as temperatures soared, so did the women’s spirits as they planned the largest-ever meeting to be held in Hyde Park for Midsummer Day. The constitutional suffragists, not to be outshone, slipped in first, with a far smaller 13,000-strong rally on 13 June.

Perhaps for the first time, Sylvia came fully into her own. She had her official role to play as voluntary organiser of the Chelsea, Wandsworth and Fulham districts, where she had already been breaking new ground with open-air meetings. Now she was excited to be a part of the most ambitious demonstration so far and glad to be able, like the other volunteers, to pay her own expenses.

In May, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence had suggested the Union should adopt its own colours – purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope – and on 21 June those colours were emblazoned for the first time on the nation’s consciousness. For once, the entire Pankhurst family was working in unity. There were to be 30 special trains bringing demonstrators from 70 towns. For Sylvia the memory remained forever fresh:

There were 40 platforms and 140 speakers, nine chief marshals, seven group marshals, 30 group captains, 40 banner marshals as well as over three thousand standard bearers, all wearing badges and regalia in the colours. There were ten huge silk banners and five hundred smaller ones, thousands of flags and a large number of brass bands, each item paid for by some ardent donor, its price announced and appealed for in Votes for Women.

Sylvia was asked to produce designs and heraldic devices for the factory making banners, bunting and regalia: ‘There was no great artistry … it was mass-production at breakneck speed.’ Impact rather than perfection of detail was the order of the day. Decorated buses drove through the streets, and a launch, laden with banner-waving women, anchored off the House of Commons terrace where MPs were taking tea in the sunshine. The ladies shouted invitations to join the rally; ‘with police protection – there will be no arrests,’ they assured.

The pace was exhilarating and Sylvia was clearly enjoying the excitement, as crowds of young people, including Harry, went off at her direction, chalking and fly-posting. They worked continuously for four days and three nights as 21 June approached. Each of the main processions in the Park was headed by a four-in-hand, in which rode the rich and famous, such as Mr and Mrs H.G. Wells and Mrs Thomas Hardy. Keir Hardie marched in procession, carrying a banner proclaiming ‘The World for the Worker’, and George Bernard Shaw was present in flamboyant mood.

All the women had been asked to wear white decorated with the Union’s new colours. Sylvia’s own procession from Chelsea numbered 7,000 and by the time they reached the Park itself, she said, ‘the ground was already thronged with an unprecedented mass … as far as the eye could see was a sea of human beings … the predominating gay hues of the women’s clothes and the white straw hats of the men suggested a giant bed of flowers.’ The Times reported, ‘Its organisers had counted on an audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled; probably it was doubled; it would be difficult to contradict anyone who asserted it was trebled. Like the distance and numbers of the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception.’ The Daily Chronicle, patronising but courageously supportive, noted, ‘the beauty of the needlework should convince the most sceptical that it is possible for a woman to use a needle even when she is wanting the vote.’ According to Sylvia, the whole affair had cost £4,813, not including expenses, salaries or local costs. It is probably true that many of those who had attended were there in the spirit of spectators at a gladiatorial fight and eager for police action, but there was none.

The Suffragette’s colours: purple for dignity, white for purity and green for hope.

Immediately afterwards, Sylvia and Christabel rushed back to Clements Inn and sent a messenger to the Prime Minister, asking what he would do in response to such a powerful demonstration. The answer was ‘nothing’. Exhausted but undaunted, they immediately announced a public meeting to be held in Parliament Square on 30 June. Some 5,000 policemen were detailed to control the crowd and, in the furore that followed, Sylvia lost her keys and her purse as gangs of hooligans tried to whip up a frenzy. Women were abused, manhandled and thrown to the ground, and in fury, two protesters ran to Downing Street, where they threw the first-ever Suffragette stones, at the windows of the Prime Minister’s house. Twenty-seven women were charged that day and sent to Holloway. They were incarcerated in the sweltering heat of the unventilated, unsanitary prison cells, where conditions had become so unbearable that inmates were fainting even in the exercise yard.

From 1908, released prisoners who needed medical care were sent to a nursing establishment in Pembridge Gardens run by the redoubtable Nurse Catherine Pine, who was to become for so long a rock for the organisation. Nurse Pine (1864–1941) had trained in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. She remained there as a sister until 1907, when she opened her own nursing home.

Quietly, in the background, Sylvia’s meetings with Hardie were becoming more frequent, though still discreet. He wrote to her:

Little Sweetheart.
I find there is to be a Shop Assistants’ meeting in Hyde Park tomorrow, which I declined going to on the plea of another engagement. That closes the Park against me for lunch.

For other reasons, which I can explain when we meet, I want you to come here. The menu will be a light one but we can go out in the cool of the evening and have a decent meal somewhere. Come along Holborn and down Chancery Lane. That is the best way for you.

I shall wire you re this evening, probably about 6.50.

Affectionately K.

These intimate tea and toast evenings, focused as they certainly were on serious issues, provided for the couple a degree of much needed closeness and calm. To her great pleasure, Sylvia was encouraged to begin work on an unfinished chalk sketch and then a sensitive final watercolour of Hardie; one of the few portraits of the founder of the ILP, it hung for years in her study. Sometimes there were walks, sometimes a theatre visit, always there was politics.

In October that year Emmeline Pankhurst and ‘General’ Drummond were arrested for inciting the public to rush the House of Commons. Sylvia and a large contingent of women, some on horseback, distributed thousands of leaflets inviting people to join them, which drew a crowd of some 60,000 and 5,000 police to Parliament Square. The situation became potentially ugly and Sylvia was hysterical, while Chancellor Lloyd George and Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone, son of ‘the Grand Old Man’, William Ewart Gladstone, watched from safety.

Mrs Pankhurst, Christabel and Mrs Drummond were summoned to appear at Bow Street on 21 October, and Sylvia, with her old art school friend Amy Browning, went along to give support. Sylvia’s romantic reporting of events in The Suffragette was in tune with other journalistic hyperbole of the day: Christabel, she said:

… was dressed in a fresh white muslin dress, whose one note of colour was the broad band of purple, white and green stripes around her waist. Her soft brown hair was uncovered, the little silky curls with just a hint of gold in them clustering around her neck … her skin looked even more brilliantly white and those rose petal cheeks of hers even more exquisitely and vividly flushed with the purest pink than usual. She triumphed not by her grace and freshness but by the force and depth of her arguments.

Herbert Gladstone, the Home Secretary, watched a crowd of 60,000 protest for women’s rights. From an illustration by Spy in Vanity Fair.

In a brilliant publicity coup, Christabel conducted her own defence and subpoenaed a very reluctant Lloyd George and Herbert Gladstone to appear. Her sense of theatre and cross-examination were unassailable and both ministers were tied in knots, but the following day it was very different and she was a shadow of her earlier self. Amy confided many years later to her family that she and Sylvia knew that for Christabel this was ‘the wrong time of the month’ and they had been rushing backwards and forwards to the chemist for pills to help relieve her agonising stomach pains. According to the Evening News, sobs and tears interrupted her defence and ‘Portia [their name for Christabel] Breaks Down and was quite unable to continue.’ Emmeline Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond were sent to prison for three months and Christabel for ten weeks. For her, the time in prison proved altogether too great; she was frustrated at being removed from power and none too pleased that Sylvia was, for once, asked by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence to deputise for her.

Sylvia’s first major challenge arrived in the shape of Lloyd George, who decided to make a friendly gesture to the women’s movement, and wrote to the Women’s Liberal Federation, suggesting that he should address their Albert Hall meeting in December. The WSPU was implored not to rock the political vote by heckling: they refused unless Lloyd George was prepared to support government action on Votes for Women in the next parliamentary session.

Sylvia threw herself wholeheartedly into the public relations opportunities on offer and secured all the seats in the front of the arena. It was planned that the women, dressed in prison clothes under their coats, were to sit there. She knew that hecklers would be manhandled and told the women that after they had removed their coats, made their protests and were thrown out, they should return immediately to Clements Inn. There she arranged for journalists to wait wanting to see the results of this treatment.

While the rowdy meeting was taking place, Sylvia waited at Clements Inn for the return of the hecklers, bruised and bloody, their dresses ripped and even corsets torn. For once, the press appeared sympathetic and reported ‘unnecessary violence’ and ‘nauseating brutality’.

Not so the King. The Archives stored at Windsor Castle include a vivid record of royal responses to all manner of day-to-day events. On 3 December 1908, the King’s Private Secretary wrote to Mr Asquith:

My dear Asquith,

The King desires me to say that he is rather disgusted at seeing in today’s Times that Mr Lloyd George intends to preside at a meeting at the Albert Hall in favour of Women’s Franchise.

He considers it a most improper thing for him, holding the high and important office which he holds as Chancellor of the Exchequer to do and if he continues to show in the future as he has done in the past such an entire absence of good judgement and propriety he shall have no more to do with him than what is absolutely needed.

The reply was prompt and dismissive:⁵⁵

10 Downing St, 7 Dec 1908
I think your letter about Lloyd George’s meeting was written under some misconception of the facts.

He was invited months ago – not to preside but to speak at a meeting of the respectable and constitutional section of the supporters of women’s suffrage and agreed to do so. When he found that the Suffragettes were threatening to intervene and create disturbances he was anxious to get rid of the engagement and tried to do so but it was not found possible.

On the general question, I must point out that in this Cabinet (as would also be the case if the Unionists came to power) female suffrage is an open question. I myself am opposed to it but the great majority of my colleagues including some, such as E. Grey and Haldane whose opinion I greatly value are in its favour.

The Albert Hall meeting had, undeniably, stimulated public interest, and everyone was now drawn into the argument. Sylvia was to remain at the heart of affairs for some time while her mother and Christabel were in Holloway. The next major Suffragette project was a Women’s Exhibition to be held 13–26 May 1909 in the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge.

In the meantime, as the unofficial ‘official’ artist for the WSPU, Sylvia’s skills were greatly in demand. The hugely increased output of speciality items for sale in the Union’s shops meant that she was working flat-out on designs to be used on tea services, banners, badges and greetings cards. Probably best known were her Angel of Freedom and the portcullis badge that she designed as an award for members leaving prison. Much of her work still shows the influence of her early years in Manchester and of the art of William Morris and Walter Crane. She was distressed that, because of the pressure, she had not achieved her best and was dissatisfied with results.

Many of the London departmental stores were now taking half-page advertisements in Votes for Women, a sure sign of their recognition that many of the readers had spending power. Indeed they had. One Suffragette, returning from prison to Clements Inn, noticed the silks and furs worn by those now established there. Since the split with the Women’s Freedom League, Emmeline Pankhurst had campaigned for a less working-class membership. Parisian chic was becoming increasingly popular, and affluent Suffragettes were now as likely to be found in the new Trocadero or Café Royal as in the Coventry Street Corner House.

Sylvia, now deep into planning the exhibition, had scarcely time to eat or sleep. The Prince’s Rink measured a vast 250ft by 150ft and she had problems finding a suitable workshop in which to prepare the massive 20ft high canvases to decorate the walls.

Once again, Amy Browning, ‘my right hand’, came to her rescue, and they co-opted two other girls and four male friends from their student days. The girls allowed themselves 30 shillings a week in order not to rock the WSPU financial boat. The men were paid decorating rates of 10 pence an hour. It was a thrilling, Michelangelo-sized challenge for them all, for none of them had had to work on such a large scale, at such heights and at such speed before. They had three months to complete the task.

Sylvia’s talent came to the fore in her artwork for the Prince’s Rink exhibition and creating commercial goods to raise funds for the movement.

Sylvia was the mastermind behind the designs, which were then to be enlarged and painted, sometimes using ladders, sometimes kneeling on mats, and not always to her satisfaction. At the end she was exhausted, having worked relentlessly, often through the night. The finished work was breathtaking and she was thrilled with what they had achieved. Over one door was a 13ft-high figure of a woman sowing grain and at the far end, another bearing the harvested corn. The whole effect was a riot of symbolism and hope: angels, flowers, trees, doves and wildlife amongst the delicate tracery of the arches. Years later, when she was living in Ethiopia, she spoke of her enormous pleasure and pride in this project, even though her work was only on view to the public for two weeks. The original paintings were destroyed during a clear out at her studio while she was in prison.

Despite Suffragette pressures, family affairs were still very much on Sylvia’s mind. Harry was ill again. He had been sent from the Fels’ farm to Nurse Pine’s nursing home suffering from an acute bladder infection. Mrs Pankhurst was summoned and distressed to be advised that Harry should be examined under anaesthetic. But, when the results were reasonable and his symptoms abated, she took a tougher line and, overruling the doctor, decided to send him back to Essex. After all, he was tall and well proportioned and the outdoor life, she judged, must be good for him. He had to learn to cope, just as Keir Hardie had done as a boy, and look what he had achieved. Then off she went again on the campaign trail.

Sylvia designed the ‘Holloway brooch’ for members of the WSPU who had been imprisoned. It was reproduced as a plaque in the Pankhurst memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, London.

Sylvia, worn out and longing for country air, took a short holiday. She went first to Ightham in Kent and then to Penshurst, where she spent her days painting and writing in a rented cottage on Cinder Hill.

In July, the first Suffragette went on hunger strike.

_________

53.William Wordsworth, The French Revolution.

54.Glasier Papers.

55.The Royal Archives, Windsor, R29.