A suffragette fights with a policeman in Westminster, 18 November 1910. On that ‘Black Friday’ 150 women were physically and sexually assaulted by police.
The WSPU’s ninth Women’s Parliament in Caxton Hall preceded Mrs Pankhurst’s deputation to the House of Commons on 18 November 1910. Banners were propped on poles behind the platform and festooned the balconies on both sides of the hall. The needlework and paint proclaimed the slogans: ‘Deeds Not Words’; ‘The Bill the Whole Bill and Nothing but the Bill’; ‘Through Thick and Thin We Ne’er Give In’; ‘Arise! Go Forth and Conquer’; ‘Women’s Will Beats Asquith’s Won’t’; ‘Go On Pestering’ and ‘Taxed But Voteless’. The platform was crammed with women who had volunteered to go to the House of Commons.
As they took their seats the leaders received a message saying that Herbert ‘Wait and See’ Asquith had made no reference to the Conciliation Bill and had announced that he was dissolving parliament on 28 November, ahead of another general election in December, to try to get a working majority to pass the People’s Budget. The remaining ten days of the session would be devoted solely to government business: the Conciliation Bill was well and truly dead.1 Annie Kenney remembered, ‘there was a great storm-burst. All the clouds that had been gathering for weeks suddenly broke, and the downpour was terrific.’ The sense of frustration and betrayal was total. Annie wrote: ‘There was not one of us who would not have gone to our death at that moment, had Christabel so willed it.’2 Mrs Pankhurst and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson were determined to enter the House of Commons to speak to the prime minister, and were prepared for arrest and imprisonment.3 Dr Anderson was seventy-four years old, a suffragist since the 1860s. In 1908 she left her sister Millicent Fawcett’s NUWSS, the same year she became the first woman to be elected a mayor, and joined the WSPU.4
Walking with Mrs Pankhurst and Dr Anderson and her daughter, Louisa, were Hertha Ayrton, the dauntless Mrs Elmy, Mrs Hilda Brackenbury, Mrs Saul Solomon and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, Indian suffragette and god-daughter to Queen Victoria. The princess lived in a grace and favour house at Hampton Court Palace and joined the WSPU after a meeting at Una Dugdale’s home in 1909.5 Constance Lytton was too frail to take part. Mrs Pankhurst carried a copy of the resolution to present to the prime minister: ‘This meeting of women protests against the policy of shuffling and delay with which the Agitation for Women’s Enfranchisement has been met by the Government’, and called on him to remove the government’s veto on the Conciliation Bill.6 Behind her were 300 women walking in groups of twelve, carrying banners and tricolour pennants on bamboo poles. Mrs Pankhurst’s deputation arrived in Parliament Square just after one o’clock and waited near St Stephen’s Entrance. When Mrs Pankhurst asked to see the prime minister she was told that he was busy and that his private secretary, Mr Vaughan Nash, would see three members of her deputation. She took Hertha Ayrton and Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson with her but ten minutes later the trio returned, their time wasted when Nash told them he had no authority. It was decided that Mrs Pankhurst’s deputation, and all the women and men who had accompanied them, should stay in Parliament Square and keep trying to enter the building until the House rose. Kindly MPs brought mats for Mrs Pankhurst and her companions to stand on on the cold, wet cobbles, and cake and sandwiches and teas were brought from Caxton Hall. The hinterland around the Houses of Parliament was filled with a ‘turbulent mass of men, women and police’. For the next four hours the ‘scolding viragoes’ tried to break the police cordon and met with fierce, violent treatment by the police.
Mrs Solomon suffered the worst injuries of the women who clustered round Mrs Pankhurst. She was so traumatised at being assaulted by the police that she was confined to bed for a month before she could write to Winston Churchill, ‘laying the facts before him of what she had personally suffered’. Her letter, which was later published in The Times, said, ‘the methods applied to us were those used by the police to conquer the pugilistic antagonist, to fell the burglar, to maim the hooligan’. She was sexually assaulted, ‘gripped by the breasts – by no means an exceptional act – I am informed that younger women, women of an age to be my daughters, were also assaulted in this and other repellent and equally cruel “ways”’. As she tried to leave the scene a policeman ‘violently shook me while his helpers twirled round my arms as if to drag them from sockets’. The injuries suffered by many of the women that day motivated them to put their embarrassment to one side and tell the world what they had endured.7
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Jessie Stephenson managed to wriggle her way to the front near to Mrs Pankhurst’s group and was manhandled more than once. ‘More roughs seized hold of me again. I struggled against them for my freedom and they flung me down bodily on the ground. I immediately sprang up in hot indignation … they seized me again and flung me down with increased violence.’8 When the crowd began to surge forward the police moved in to disperse it, and the women carrying banners who had managed to manoeuvre their way towards Mrs Pankhurst found themselves surrounded by a mob which pushed and shoved them backwards and forwards. ‘Their banners went down … snatched by members of the crowd and torn and smashed into shreds and fragments.’ The suffragettes noticed that the mood of the people they encountered in Parliament Square was different: ‘Instead of the rough, but mostly good-natured crowd, this one was sullen, hostile, violent with an overcurrent of bestiality.’9 All day the police seemed to have been instructed to ‘terrorise the women by forcing them back into the mostly male crowd, while the police on foot seized the women by the shoulders and flung them to the ground, plain clothes men, mingling with the crowd kicked them and added to the anguish by dragging them down the side streets where they suffered indecent assaults … and indescribable violence.’10 Pretending to be WSPU sympathisers, many of the attackers wore the pin badges of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.
One hundred and fifty women were assaulted:
For hours I was beaten about the body, thrown backwards and forwards from one to another until one felt dazed with the horror of it … I was seized by the coat, dragged out of the crowd, only to be pushed helplessly along in front of one’s tormentor into a side street … while he beat one up and down one’s spine until cramp seized one’s legs when he would then release one with a vicious shove, and with insulting speeches: ‘I will teach you a lesson. I will teach you not to come back any more. I will punish you, you —, you —.’ Once I was thrown against a lamp-post with such force that two of my front teeth were loosened … What I complain of on behalf of us all is the long-drawn-out agony of the delayed arrest, and the continuous beating and pinching.11
Twenty-nine suffragettes were sexually molested. One suffragette described how
several times constables and plain-clothes men who were in the crowd passed their arms round me from the back and clutched hold of my breasts in as public a manner as was possible, and the men in the crowd followed their example. I was also pummeled on the chest and my breast was clutched by one constable from the front … I was very badly treated by PC —. My skirt was lifted up as high as possible, and the constable attempted to lift me off the ground by raising his knee. This he could not do so he threw me into the crowd and incited the men to treat me as they wished.12
Despite being in a wheelchair May Billinghurst was not spared the police’s heavy-handed tactics, in fact she seems to have been singled out for vindictive treatment: ‘At first, the police threw me out of the machine on to the ground in a very brutal manner. Secondly, when in the machine again, they tried to push me along with my arms twisted behind me in a very painful position, with one of my fingers bent right back, which caused me great agony.’ Their third assault took place down a side street when they dumped her in the middle of ‘a hooligan crowd, first taking all the valves out of the wheels and pocketing them, so that I could not move the machine and left me to the crowd of roughs who, luckily, proved my friends’. Someone came to May’s assistance and fitted her tyres with a new set of valves but the police targeted her a fourth time. When they could not remove the new valves – and independent witnesses corroborated her account – the police twisted one of the wheels of her tricyle and told a member of the crowd to slash her tyres with a police knife which the man refused to do. The policeman was only prevented from hitting her again when the man made a note of his number. Mary Billinghurst was so badly bruised she could not leave her bed for several days.13
The next day The Times emphasised the suffragettes’ bad behaviour rather than the police’s frankly brutal and sexualised handling of the women, focusing on the number of helmets knocked off, and men’s cheeks and hats scratched by the ladies, saying that for the most part the men had ‘kept their tempers very well, but their method of shoving back any raiders lacked nothing in vigour’.14 Sylvia Pankhurst was appalled at what she had seen: ‘Two girls with linked arms were being dragged about by two uniformed policemen. One of a group of officers in plain clothes ran up and kicked one of the girls, while the others laughed and jeered at her … for six hours this continued.’15 The Daily Mirror noticed that the police seemed to enjoy the proceedings.
By the time the House rose at six o’clock, 119 arrests had been made. When the police withdrew from the battlefield the dishevelled women who remained trudged back to Caxton Hall, which had been turned into a field hospital where doctors and nurses dealt with black eyes, bleeding noses, sprains and dislocations. Mrs Pankhurst told the women she would return to Parliament on Monday 21 November, and every day until parliament was dissolved on 28 November. The scale of the violence was such that 18 November 1910 would be always be remembered as ‘Black Friday’.16
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh volunteered to be a member of Mrs Pankhurst’s deputation. It was an offer Mrs Pankhurst could not refuse: what stronger point could be made when someone from such a privileged background was prepared to risk the opprobrium of her royal patrons by deliberately placing herself at the heart of such a protest. The Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was born at Elveden Hall in Suffolk in 1876; her godmother, Queen Victoria, took a close interest in her sometimes chaotic childhood. Sophia was a daughter of the Indian Maharajah Duleep Singh; Sophia and her siblings led an English aristocratic life. In 1893 Sophia was orphaned when her father died and Sophia and her sisters were granted a grace and favour home on Hampton Court Green, where they were allowed to live for the rest of their lives. The princess was very much a ‘New Woman’, smoking twenty Turkish cigarettes a day, and often appeared in the pages of the cycling magazines on her Columbia 41 Ladies’ safety bicycle. Sophia Duleep Singh was also a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League. Members were warned that refusing to pay taxes could mean that their assets would be seized to the value of the tax bill and that persistent offenders would go to prison.17 Sophia had a diamond ring with seven stones seized for the non-payment of taxes for her servants, dogs and carriage: a friend bought it at auction for £10 and returned it to her.18
Henria Williams, a leading light of the Upminster suffragettes, was badly injured on 18 November. The thuggish manhandling of her by the police was widely reported in the press after the publication of the report made by Dr Jessie Murray and Henry Brailsford for the Conciliation Committee about the events of 18, 22 and 23 November. On 18 November 1910 Henria was assaulted by three policemen. After knocking her about for a considerable time, the third constable ‘finally took hold of me with his great strong hands like iron just over my heart. He hurt me so much that at first I did not have the voice to tell him what he was doing. But I knew that unless I made a strong effort to do so he would kill me.’ Eventually she summoned her strength to tell him to take his hand off her heart. In her evidence Henria Williams said she did not wear corsets, therefore her treatment was more painful than if she had been corseted. She thought she was going to be arrested but they took her to the edge of the crowd and ‘without mercy, forced me into the midst of it, and with the crowd pushing in the opposite direction for a few minutes of it’ she feared she would lose consciousness. Frank Whitty, a gentleman’s outfitter from Sidcup, came to Henria’s rescue. Whitty told Votes for Women that he saw sights that made him feel ashamed of his country. He failed to persuade Henria to leave the riot and stayed to help her as best he could by ‘warding off blows, kicks and insults from her fainting body’. Several times Frank Whitty put his arm around Henria to prevent her from falling under the police horses’ hooves, or being trampled by the crowd.19
Using the name ‘Laura Grey’, Lavender Guthrie was arrested for obstruction and released without charge. She joined the Union in 1908 when she was eighteen, but waited until she was twenty-one to become a full-time militant, by which time she no longer needed parental consent. Lavender was frustrated by her comfortable middle-class life in Kensington. She was an intense young woman; her mother pronounced her to be mentally unstable after her study of socialism and the lives of working-class women had led her to Number 4 Clement’s Inn. Lavender was a handsome, clever girl who had been well-educated, could read Latin and Greek, and was also a poet. She told her mother that she wanted to ‘give her life and her all to her more unfortunate sisters’. Lavender became an actress and adopted the stage name ‘Laura Grey’.20 In 1908 Mrs Guthrie presented her daughter at Court.21 Lavender’s friend Dorothea Rock from Essex was one of the few suffragettes to be named in the Daily Mirror’s coverage of 18 November.22 Lavender’s suffragette career flourished but in 1914 her life would take a tragic turn.
Hugh Franklin was one of four men to be arrested on 18 November for obstruction, but was discharged the following day. He was born into a community of Liberal Jewish families linked by birth and marriage, and joined the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society and, in 1909, the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. His mother, Caroline Franklin, was active in the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage. In 1910 Hugh Franklin joined the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement founded by Victor Duval, whose sister Elsie he would marry in 1915. Hugh was the uncle of Rosalind Franklin whose contribution to the discovery and understanding of DNA was only recognised long after her death in 1958.23
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On Saturday 19 November the front page of the Daily Mirror printed a photograph of Ada Wright, fifty years old, sprawled face down on the pavement outside the House of Commons. When she made a dash for the Strangers’ Entrance a policeman ‘struck her with all his force and she fell to the ground’. Ada was taken to Caxton Hall and told a Daily Mirror reporter she had been at seven suffragette demonstrations, but had ‘never known the police so violent’. One of the policemen who ‘pushed me as roughly as he would have done any man said: “I won’t give you the satisfaction of arresting you”’. There was a double-page spread of suffragettes wrestling with the police, and being marched off to Canon Row police station. The photograph was so bad for the reputation of the Home Office that the government ordered it to be suppressed and the negative to be destroyed.24
Mr Charles Mansell-Moullin, who helped treat the wounded at Caxton Hall on 18 November, expressed his dismay in a letter to the Daily Mirror about the use of ‘organised bands of well-dressed roughs who charged backwards and forwards through the deputations like a football team without any attempt being made to stop them by the police’. Mansell-Moullin asked who had issued the instructions that the women should be treated with ‘such brutality’, and who had ordered the ‘roughs who suddenly sprang up on all sides’ to use the forceful tactics. The belief was that these were plain-clothes policemen, and that Home Secretary Winston Churchill had issued the instructions for that day.25
The suffragettes were back in action on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the following week. Emily Davison was happy to have been arrested on 18 November, and furious not to have been sent to prison. She did not consult with the leadership about her intentions for 19 November and threw a hammer between the Chamber of the House of Commons and the Division Lobby, breaking a window. Attached to the hammer were labels warning the prime minister: ‘Be wise and promise the further facilities at once the women are demanding’ and ‘Do justice before the General Election or judgment will surely fall’. Emily was taken to Canon Row police station and appeared in court on 30 November; she was sent to Holloway for one month. A note on file in the Parliamentary Archives tells us of Davison’s standing with the Union: ‘They do not acknowledge her.’26
On Sunday 20 November Helen Craggs went to a concert at the Paragon Theatre, Whitechapel, to reconnoitre the building in preparation for her protest at Lloyd George’s meeting the following day. At two o’clock in the morning she returned with two more suffragettes and they broke into the building and climbed on to the roof where, ‘only sustained by a few pieces of chocolate they lay through the whole bitter freezing night’ until they heard the sound of cheering which told them that Lloyd George was speaking. Helen Craggs rushed down from the roof and dashed into the building and was surrounded by Liberal stewards, but ‘armed with a super-human strength she tore herself free’ and yelled her remarks at Lloyd George. The scene, reported in Votes for Women, was ‘absolutely appalling in its brutality. Miss Craggs was practically thrown head foremost down the stone steps.’ One man who reminded the chancellor that women paid taxes as well as men, had two teeth knocked out before he was ejected.27
On Monday 21 November 1910, Kitty Marion returned, bruised, to Caxton Hall with her comrades and waited to hear what Asquith said in the House of Commons about the fate of the Conciliation Bill. Christabel Pankhurst chaired the meeting. Also on the platform were Mrs Pankhurst, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and twelve women who had volunteered to go to the House of Commons to speak to the prime minister. When the meeting received word that Herbert Asquith had said nothing about the bill, Mrs Pankhurst led the deputation to the House. Some took camp-stools, ready for the inevitable wait at St Stephen’s Entrance. They were allowed to make their way to the House of Commons unhindered, although it was hard to get through the crowds waiting in Parliament Square who were hoping to see the suffragettes tussle with the police. Mrs Pankhurst spoke to Inspector Scantlebury requesting a meeting with the prime minister, but her request was refused.28
Three hundred members of the WSPU were at Caxton Hall on Tuesday 22 November to wait for Herbert Asquith’s answer to Keir Hardie’s question about his intentions for the bill. When the news came that he had dismissed the question with a non-committal answer, the women decided to confront him in Downing Street. Mrs Pankhurst walked at the head of a hundred women while others walked through St James’s Park, or via Whitehall. Mrs Pankhurst and her group took the Whitehall route, finding it easy to break through the thin line of policemen on duty at the end of Downing Street, confident they could have entered Number 10 if police reinforcements had not been rushed there from Whitehall. Herbert Asquith arrived unexpectedly, Mrs Pankhurst remembered: ‘Before he could have realised what was happening he found himself surrounded by angry suffragettes. He was well-hooted, and it is said, well-shaken, before he was rescued by the police.’ As the prime minister was whisked away from Downing Street in a taxicab a missile was thrown, smashing one of the windows.29
Mrs Evelina Haverfield was back in the thick of things on Tuesday 22 November, pushing her way through police lines and barking out orders to the other women, ‘Shove along girls.’ She hit a policeman in the mouth in Downing Street, and at Bow Street Court the next day was reported to have said: ‘That is one for Friday [18 November]. That is not quite hard enough. Next time I come I will bring a revolver and shoot you.’ She was happy to confirm that they were indeed her words, and told magistrate Sir Albert de Rutzen that she had previously been wrongfully accused and ‘this time I thought I would have a run for my money’. De Rutzen announced that all charges except wilful damage and assaulting the police would be dismissed, and told Mrs Haverfield he was familiar with her previous appearances in court, and that he was putting her case aside for further consideration. With that, he released her on bail. She was eventually sentenced to a month in Holloway which she did not serve as the fine was paid anonymously.30
Also on Tuesday 22 November Ethel Haslam threw a stone through the window of the Battersea home of John Burns, the President of the Local Government Board, and was sentenced to two weeks in Holloway. Ethel’s parents allowed her to use their Ilford home as the branch headquarters, which she did, filling the house with posters and hosting weekly ‘At Homes’. On 23 July Ethel had dressed as Boadicea for the WSPU’s procession through London to Hyde Park.31
Alice Hawkins broke the windows of the home of the colonial secretary ‘Loulou’ Harcourt in Berkeley Square, and was sentenced to two weeks in prison. On Tuesday Alice and the Misses Bowker and Pethick were in the thick of ‘the Battle of Downing Street’ and were arrested again. Alice wrote to her husband Alfred that by the time they reached Downing Street there was a large police presence, ‘and I can tell you it was awful. The police were simply horrid, and they banged and fought like a lot of tigers … they eventually got us out of the street into Whitehall. After about half an hour I was completely done up and decided to do something else.’ Alice volunteered to lead twelve women to ‘Loulou’ Harcourt’s house. ‘It was easier to break windows than have my body broken.’32
Maud Fussell came from Bristol to attend the meeting in Caxton Hall on 22 November. She walked through St James’s Park with Kitty Marion, who had been arrested on Friday and released without charge. Maud gave Kitty one of the weights in her pocket to break the windows of Number 10, but Kitty’s aim was poor and it bounced off the wall without doing any damage. The police who guarded Number 10 were unprepared, however, and there were few constables on duty. Reinforcements were rushed over and Kitty was caught up in the riot, saying that the street ‘raged like a seething cauldron’ as she and the other women who tried to get into Number 10 were forced back by the police. Eventually, ‘breathless and exhausted’, Kitty and Maud were arrested with 150 other suffragettes, but were released without charge. Kitty and Maud Fussell became friends for life.33
Despite being ‘shockingly maltreated’ in Parliament Square on 18 November, Mrs Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clarke, was in Downing Street on Tuesday 22 November,34 where she was arrested for breaking a window. She was sent to Holloway for one month. When she was released ‘it was plain to those who knew her best that her health had suffered seriously from the experience of Black Friday and prison’.35
On 22 November 115 women and three men were arrested in ‘the Battle of Downing Street’. The Times said that the women ‘fought much more viciously than on Friday’ because so many had wanted to go to prison but had been released without charge. Only those charged with wilful damage, or of assaulting the police, were sent to prison. The Times recorded, ‘the rioters appeared to have lost all control of themselves. Some shrieked and some laughed hysterically, and all fought with a dogged but aimless pertinacity.’ Its reporter noted that some of the suffragettes involved were young women, ‘who must have been the victims of hysteria rather than of deep conviction.’36 Many women carrying placards had them torn out of their hands and some used the bamboo poles ‘to belabour the constables’. The Times’ disparaging coverage clearly demonstrates the Victorian prejudice against women who dared to ask for more than a patriarchal society was prepared to concede.
Florence Spong was arrested for stone-throwing and sentenced to two months in Holloway. When she was released on 27 January 1911 she told Votes for Women, ‘I have come out of Holloway feeling even more keenly that we must have the vote … it is the only key to open the door behind which are numberless matters waiting for our united efforts to put right.’37 Florence likened the prison to a whirlpool which ‘drags ruthlessly, remorselessly old women and young girls down into its depths and drags the hearts out of them’.38
On Wednesday 23 November, Kitty Marion was one of eighteen women arrested trying to enter the House of Commons via the Strangers’ Entrance. The weather was dreadful, the rain pelted down, ‘the police tried their hardest to throw us in the mud’, and Kitty remembered clinging ‘to a bobby’s cape while he called me everything but a lady, and a decent woman, for me to let go of his cape, until in “self-defence” he arrested me’. Kitty was acquitted.39
Jessie Stephenson knocked on the door of Herbert Samuel’s house and was told by a maid that he was not at home. She wrote a note and rang the bell and told the maid, ‘We are the Suffragettes. The Suffragettes do not injure flesh and blood.’ An alarm rang inside the house and the police were expected at any moment, and most of the women melted away, leaving Jessie and Edith behind. Jessie’s stones bounced off the glass panel in the front door, so Edith took off her shoe ‘with a magnificently strong heel’ and just as the police arrived Jessie smashed the glass with three blows. At Bow Street Court Jessie Stephenson was sent to prison for a month for breaking a glass panel in the door of Herbert Samuel, the Liberal MP for Cleveland.40 Jessie went there with half a dozen women, including Edith Kerwood, who had travelled from Bromsgrove. Mrs Kerwood, who was married to a solicitor, had been arrested with Mrs Pankhurst in Westminster in February 1908, and shared a platform with her on ‘Women’s Sunday’.41
Jessie took a picnic basket as she waited at Bow Street Court surrounded by suffragettes, most with their charges dismissed. After her recent experience Jessie was pleasantly surprised to see how well the police treated her and the other women, showing great courtesy, stoking up the fires, getting chairs for them and making them comfortable as they waited. Her case was not heard until the end of the day, by which time she was feeling ‘mouldy green all over’, and her initial bravado had evaporated during the wait. She felt overwhelmed but when she entered court she felt ‘gay and bright again’ when she recognised comrades in the public seating area ‘all nodding and greeting me. I felt myself burst into smiles, I was myself once more and perfectly happy in that space.’ In the witness box she was faced by de Rutzen, an ‘elderly old wizard … who was very antique and fuddled’. With Jessie in the dock was Edith Kerwood whom Jessie called ‘the Rock’. The stone and Edith’s shoe were solemnly produced as evidence, and Edith told de Rutzen: ‘I wore it on my foot, I did not take it with me as a weapon.’ Jessie was taken with other suffragette prisoners to Holloway in a ‘very creaky, smelly old Black Maria’ where she was squeezed into a locked cupboard. She was five feet ten inches tall, and had to crouch on a wooden shelf. As they were ‘jolted along hither and thither’ on the cobbled streets the suffragettes broke into song.42
Hugh Franklin travelled to Bradford on 26 November to admonish Winston Churchill at a meeting of young Liberals at St George’s Hall. Franklin interrupted Churchill, called him a ‘scoundrel’ and was ejected. Alfred Hawkins arrived from Leicester and he in turn interrupted Churchill in full flow, was seized by stewards and ‘during the struggle which resulted from attempts to eject him his leg was broken’. It took Alfred a long time to recover: when the Census was taken six months later, he was still unable to work and described as an invalid by the Census Enumerator. This was not the first time Alfred Hawkins had got into trouble for supporting his suffragette wife: in September 1909 they were both charged with causing a breach of the peace and obstructing the police outside the Palace Theatre in Leicester, where Winston Churchill was addressing a meeting. Alfred Hawkins was bound over to keep the peace while his wife served five days in prison.43
Hugh Franklin discovered which train Churchill was taking to London and bought tickets to travel with Laura Ainsworth. Although two Special Branch officers were travelling with Churchill, Hugh Franklin ‘pulled a whip from his pocket, called out, “Winston Churchill, take that you dirty cur for the treatment of the suffragettes”’, but the Special Branch Detective-Sergeant, Joseph Sandercock, grabbed Franklin by the throat and arrested him. When the train arrived at King’s Cross, Franklin was taken to Somers Town police station, charged with assaulting the home secretary by attempting to hit him with a whip and was released on bail. Three suffragettes waiting for the train rushed at Churchill as he alighted and ‘hissing abusive words at him attempted to strike him in the face, and knocked off his hat’. The women were seized by the police but Churchill ordered them to be released. Hugh Franklin’s case was heard at Bow Street Court two days later. Archibald Bodkin prosecuted and Superintendent Quinn of Special Branch represented the police. Franklin insisted on conducting his own defence. Bodkin said that not only was Mr Churchill assaulted, but the high office of state was also attacked. Hugh Franklin was sentenced to six weeks in Pentonville Prison, and went on hunger strike.44
The WSPU had now heard from well-placed but anonymous sources (probably Henry Brailsford) that Winston Churchill had ordered that, in addition to uniformed police, constables in plain clothes were to be in the crowds on 18 November, ‘to throw the women around from one to the other’. Mrs Pethick-Lawrence learned that the demonstrations had not been policed by the ‘A Division’ which usually guarded the Houses of Parliament, but that policemen had been drafted in from the East End of London. ‘They knew nothing of the suffrage agitation and were accustomed to dealing with drunks and roughs … Large and well-nourished bullies had been imported into Westminster and may have been police in plain clothes.’45 Unsurprisingly Churchill was keen to avoid being the target of well-founded fury from the WSPU and wrote to the Commissioner of Police on 22 November: ‘I am hearing from every quarter that my strongly expressed wishes conveyed to you on Wednesday evening and repeated on Friday morning that the suffragettes were not to be allowed to exhaust themselves, but were to be arrested forthwith upon any defiance of the law, were not observed by the police … with the result that very regrettable scenes occurred.’ If this was the case Churchill’s memo is chilling: ‘It was my desire to avoid this … to arrest large numbers and then subsequently prosecute only where serious grounds were shown and I am sorry that, no doubt, through a misunderstanding, another course has been adopted.’46 If true, it is difficult to imagine who would have countermanded Churchill’s instructions to the Commissioner of Police. Three months later, in March 1911, when Black Friday was discussed in the House of Commons at the time of the publication of the Conciliation Committee’s report titled The Treatment of the Women’s Deputations of November 18th, 22nd and 23rd, 1910 By The Police, Churchill explained it differently, insisting that the police had acted under his predecessor Herbert Gladstone’s orders that they should avoid arresting the women solely for ‘technical obstruction’.47
On the same day that Hugh Franklin tried to whip Churchill, Sir Edward Grey wrote to Lord Lytton giving him an insider’s view. As the highest ranking cabinet minister of the Liberal government, he was uniquely placed to know how Asquith and his anti-women’s suffrage colleagues would react. He advised Lytton: ‘All this violence will put the question back and prejudice the chance of any Bill in the next Parliament. I do not say that it absolves the Government from the pledge already given, for I believe that the violent women are a small minority of the great mass interested in the question: but it does make it impossible for any member of the Government to say anything favourable which could be construed as a concession to gross personal attacks upon himself or his colleagues.’ Lord Grey went on to confirm a suspicion long held by the women’s suffrage movement that ‘the question was never taken seriously until a few years ago, but that now the question of electoral reform had created the situation’, nothing could change with regard to enfranchising the men who still did not have the vote without addressing the issue of women’s suffrage, and ‘giving the House of Commons an effective opportunity of putting Women’s Suffrage into it’.48
Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine attended several trials of WSPU members, and would later say that the years of violence had been necessary ‘because the day would not have been won without women with a passion that exceeded constitutional and legal binds’. Despite his wife’s support for women’s suffrage, Churchill would persist in his opinion that women were not ready for the vote. The Churchills’ differing views on women’s suffrage was symptomatic of a deeper tension: Clementine was jealous of his friendships with other women, especially the prime minister’s daughter Violet Asquith, who was infatuated with her husband.49
The violence used against the women on Black Friday and the days that followed had an immediate impact on suffragette militancy. Some women were no longer prepared to take part in deputations to Parliament and run such risks again. Others were prepared to throw stones, break windows or commit other acts which would get them arrested immediately. Deputations to Parliament were abandoned, and window-smashing would come to be the order of the day.
For those women who were serving time for their protest Jessie Stephenson’s memoir gives an idea of what it was like to be a suffragette in Holloway. Jessie described being inspected on arrival, how her hair was taken down and searched in case anything had been concealed within its elaborate structure. She had to remove her clothes except for her stockings which happened to be made of fine Italian silk, ‘so fascinating to touch … I always remember the wardress kneeling before me long after she had officially searched them, and went on striking my silken legs up and down, up and down, as she asked questions.’50 This amused Jessie who found the experience ‘quite homely’. Jessie benefited from Churchill’s introduction of Rule 243a which allowed her to wear her own clothes (her opera cloak with fur collar kept her warm). The weekly bath posed a challenge to someone as tall as Jessie: ‘I held up my towel the size of a handkerchief and asked the wardress how I was supposed to dry myself on something so small.’ Her comrades laughed and the ‘embarrassed wardress hastily gave me two more to meet my special case’.51
While Jessie was in Holloway the governor received a letter from her barrister employer, and allowed her to read it. It brought news that if she did not get out of Holloway soon – by paying her fine – she would lose her position, making her homeless and unemployed. But Jessie refused to have her fine paid and stayed in Holloway until she was released, two days before Christmas.52
Polling stations for the general election were open between 3 and 19 December, and the suffragettes told voters about the duplicitous behaviour of the prime minister and his Cabinet. In the run-up to the election, Winston Churchill, accompanied by Clementine, addressed two meetings in Sheffield. It was rumoured that the entire local constabulary, reinforced by a detachment of London detectives, were needed to police the home secretary’s visit. Barricades were erected within a hundred-yard radius of the venues. Votes for Women pointed out that the authorities ‘awaited with trepidation the terrible suffragette raid which Liberal fears and guilty consciences had imagined’.53 Security was focused on stopping women from getting into meetings – the only ones admitted were Clementine Churchill, her sister-in-law Lady Gwendoline and Mrs Cornwallis-West (whose son George was Churchill’s stepfather) – but as soon as proceedings started a male voice piped up, ‘You’ll ruin the women if you don’t give them the vote.’ He was dragged from his seat during ‘a great and prolonged … free fight’ and he was chucked out. At least ten men were ejected, including a clergyman, for their impertinent interruptions about votes for women.
On 3 December, the prime minister was pursued to the Drill Hall in Newcastle by members of the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, and was asked why he had vetoed the Conciliation Bill. The heckler was held down and gagged while Asquith changed the subject. Another MPUWE member sprang to his feet and waved a purple, white and green flag, and he managed to make a speech, although only fragments could be heard amid the chaos. Votes for Women reported that Herbert Asquith hurriedly finished to avoid more questions. On 5 December, Churchill went to Dundee hoping to retain his seat, and spoke at the King’s Theatre to a men-only audience. Precautions were taken to make sure that no women entered the building, and four ‘slaters’ spent the night on the roof; Churchill’s visit passed without incident.54
Three days later the prime minister was in Burnley, where ‘the most absurd precautions against the suffragettes were taken’. A suffragette posse went up to Asquith as he alighted from his train, took him by the arm and asked him why he would not revoke his veto at the House of Commons and give facilities for the Conciliation Bill to proceed. In his flustered efforts to get away ‘he collided with some railings and looked very foolish and gave no reply’. His detectives finally caught up with him and seized the suffragettes and ‘in the mêlée Mr Asquith caught hold of a Liberal woman who was trying to protect him and pushed her away calling, “Here’s another.”’ The prime minister was driven off with suffragettes shouting: ‘You are a disgrace to your country, sir … the women are ashamed of you … traitor … coward!’55
Before Dundee voters went to the polls, Winston Churchill returned to give his final speech. A local suffragette, Ethel Moorhead, managed to get a ticket to the meeting, and threw an egg at the home secretary, her first suffragette protest. She was removed from the meeting but not arrested.56 Churchill retained his seat but with a reduced majority: 2,640 fewer Dundonians voted for him, which the Daily Mirror noted was ‘a striking drop and one of the most pronounced since the election began’. The Labour candidate Alexander Wilkie had eaten into Churchill’s vote.57
On 20 December Hebert Asquith, their ‘avowed enemy’, was returned to power, but only just. There was a hung parliament: the Liberals had a majority of 1, having won 273 seats; the Conservatives had 272, and the Irish Nationalists were the third party with 74 seats. The Labour Party trailed with 42 MPs. Asquith could only remain in power with their support.58
Jessie Stephenson was in a group of fifteen suffragettes, including Mary Clarke, to be released from Holloway on 23 December: ‘Slowly, by driblets of twos and threes, we were let out of the big Holloway gates into the light of heaven and liberty.’ They were greeted by Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Tuke, and 300 WSPU members with purple, white and green flowers, and a brass band playing ‘The Marseillaise’. There was a welcome reception at noon at the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly. For each of the suffragettes remaining in Holloway over Christmas, hampers decorated in the colours, a Christmas card from Mrs Pankhurst and a signed postcard of Christabel were left at the prison by Mrs Kitty Marshall, recently released from Holloway for throwing a potato at Churchill’s front door. Mrs Pankhurst presided at the Criterion, and, referring to the horrors of Black Friday, observed that ‘women were prepared to face all kinds of suffering in order to win for themselves and their daughters that freedom which they claimed’.59
On her way to the reception Jessie Stephenson read a letter from Christabel offering her a job as a paid organiser. She ‘took the letter up and gave it a passionate hug’. She was seated next to Christabel who ‘was ever so jolly, laughing merrily at every little joke I told her’. But Jessie was terrified and when it came to her turn to speak all she could say was: ‘Mrs Pankhurst, Ladies and Gentlemen’, followed by a very long pause. ‘I, er, er, I have never been able to speak in public, and I can’t speak now.’ Mrs Pankhurst quickly stood up and said: ‘Thrice a prisoner! What an illustration of our motto – Deeds Not Words!’60
Mary Clarke was frail when she was released, and may have overexerted herself when she spoke at the welcome luncheon at the Criterion, before going to Brighton to speak to a welcome party given by local suffragettes. She then insisted on travelling back to London on Christmas Eve to spend Christmas at the home of her brother, Herbert Goulden, in Winchmore Hill, with his family and Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. On Christmas Day, she left the table and went to her room where Mrs Pankhurst found her in a coma. She died three hours later of a brain haemorrhage. Mary Clarke’s injuries suffered on Black Friday were blamed for her sudden death at the age of forty-eight on Christmas Day. On 27 December Emmeline Pankhurst wrote to C. P. Scott, proprietor and editor of the Manchester Guardian: ‘We who love her and know the beauty of her selfless life feel it very hard to restrain our human desire for vengeance … Violence has been done to us and I … have lost a dear sister in the course of this agitation … she would have been proud and glad to die for the cause of freedom.’ Emmeline wrote of the loss of her son, her mother and her sister in 1910, and asked, ‘can you wonder that today I want beyond all other things to end this fight quickly and get some rest’.61