A suffragette being dragged off the railings at Buckingham Palace, 21 May 1914, while on a deputation to see the King.
On 4 May Mrs Pankhurst was once again in hiding, resting before leading the deputation to see King George V seventeen days later. She wrote to Ethel Smyth, relishing the secrecy of her hideout (the location was never revealed):
I am in a country retreat so remote that it seems made for my purpose. You drive in a motor to a wood, which is on both sides of a country road, and there is a gap in the hedge. You get out of the car and then go through the wood … In a few yards you lose sight of the road, and after following the path for a time you plunge down a slope among the trees and come to a wooden paling … in which there is a gate padlocked. You unlock the padlock, go along a little path, and there is a house like no other you have ever seen. It commands the most wonderful view of three counties.1
The ladies who had built the house were fresh-air fanatics and had designed a shelter under the south gable where Mrs Pankhurst and Annie Kenney lay on camp beds, ‘taking an open-air cure’. After a few days Mrs Pankhurst felt ‘a different being’. The place was so well concealed that she felt they could ‘hold this fortress forever, I am certain they have not the remotest idea where we are’.2 By the time Ethel received the letter Mrs Pankhurst and Annie Kenney had returned to Nurse Pine and Nurse Townend’s place in Pembridge Gardens, London.
On 16 May a letter was sent to WSPU members on Mrs Pankhurst’s behalf reminding them of the risks of joining the deputation to see the King. Grace Roe explained the timing: ‘The afternoon rather than the evening has been chosen in order that any attempt on the part of the police to repeat the outrages of Black Friday may be more easily detected.’ Deputations to Parliament which risked assaults by the police had lately been abandoned. ‘It is only a handful of politicians who stand between us and victory.’ She called on the members to remember ‘the women who at this very moment are being tortured by forcible feeding which is more than enough to rouse us to action’.3 In fact the battle lines had been drawn since the end of February when the King refused to meet the deputation.
A photograph of Mrs Pankhurst on the front page of the Daily Mirror on 22 May showed her trying to present a petition to the King but being arrested at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She is being grabbed around the waist by Chief Inspector Francis Rolfe, losing her hat, her size two feet dangling in mid-air. She was bundled off to Holloway to continue serving her sentence.
One thousand five hundred policemen, and many more on horses, were on duty surrounding the Palace on 21 May 1914. Cordons were thrown round all the entrances and crowds, which started to gather at three o’clock, were mostly dispersed by the police, although gangs of medical students, regulars at suffragette meetings, proved difficult to move on. Traditionally conservative in their views, doctors had fiercely resisted the entry of women into their profession. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first woman doctor, had to overcome years of opposition and obstructionism. The suffragettes’ insistent campaign mobilised many trainee doctors into action. A suffragette on horseback reconnoitred the scene and at four o’clock a vanguard of women appeared. The Times reported:
The police had barely time to close their ranks before a shout went up and Mrs Pankhurst, looking very weak, was pushed forward by her supporters right into the arms of the police. She might have been roughly handled had not Chief Inspector Rolfe lifted her into his arms and carried her within the cordon guarding the front gates of the palace. She was helped into a waiting motor car and driven away.4
The suffragettes rushed at the police and one woman ‘felled an officer with a club’. The first women arrested were ‘elderly and all bedraggled’ and had to ‘run the gauntlet of an unsympathetic crowd as they were marched off’. Only one woman breached the inner cordon in front of the Palace and got to within twenty steps of the main gate but slipped and fell.5
This petition to King George V was the last time the suffragettes would go en masse to protest. Nellie Higginson came from Preston where she was running the branch while Edith Rigby was in hiding in Ireland. Nellie was one of the ‘wild women’ caught up at the Palace gates. All the working-class women who took part were advised to leave their homes spick and span and to cook enough food for their families before going on the deputation. Nellie’s friends helped out in her health food shop; one took in her son and daughter for a few days. On the morning many suffragettes waited in a house loaned to them in Grosvenor Place overlooking Buckingham Palace and organised themselves into groups. Just before three o’clock Nellie and her comrades left the house ten abreast, taking the police by surprise. They passed newspaper placards announcing ‘Bayonets to meet the Women!’ but they marched on. They intended that if one woman was knocked over they would push forward, but this proved impossible: ‘The Whitehall police maimed us, they knocked us about the shoulders and we were all of us black and blue the next day,’ said Nellie.6 Sixty-six women and two men were arrested that day. Nellie Higginson slipped away from the riot and went to a safe house. That evening she and others were handed stones and told to break the windows of a public house in Whitehall. Nellie was sentenced to four months in Holloway, went on hunger and thirst strike and was released on a Cat and Mouse licence after being on hunger strike for two weeks. She was rearrested, served three days, and, extremely unwell, was released again on licence; her return to prison was only prevented by the outbreak of war.
Mrs Daisy Parsons took up her position in front of the new statue of Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. She noticed many people looking out of the Palace’s open windows. There were detectives on the roof and everyone seemed to be waiting for the arrival of the deputation. Between Daisy and the Palace was a long line of policemen and a space – a no woman’s land – across which the suffragettes would dash and try to break through the cordon. Daisy saw women darting out, ‘the police would catch them and fling them back into the crowd. Then the young men in the crowd would turn on them, beat them, tear their clothes off, pull their hair and shout: “You ought to be burnt!”’ Eventually the mounted police ‘came at a gallop and drove the crowd away’.7 Daisy Parsons was pushed with the suffragettes down Birdcage Walk and saw ‘a young woman in the midst of a jeering mob facing her tormentors’. An on-duty soldier pushed her and when she said ‘How dare you’, he struck her in the face with his fist. Daisy heard an East End male supporter saying, ‘What we have to fear is the toffs in silk hats, not the poor people.’8
Charlotte Drake from Canning Town, wife of Tom, a labourer, and mother of two girls, aged four and two, volunteered to be on the deputation. Familiar with police handling in the East End, Charlotte was taken aback by their brutal conduct in broad daylight in front of the Palace. She saw lines of policemen charge the women outside Wellington Gate: ‘our women were splendid. The policemen got hold of them in dozens and threw them back amongst the crowd … the women came again, and each time they came back the police took greater liberties with them – twisting their arms, punching them and tearing at their hair.’9
Charlotte Drake and May Billinghurst were not arrested. Charlotte remembered May’s determination to take her place in her wheeled chair: ‘I was beside her. They threw us back but we returned. Two policemen picked up the tricycle with Miss Billinghurst in it, turned it over, and dropped her on the ground.’10 Charlotte had the strength to pick up May and lift her back in. ‘We straightened the machine as much as we could, rested a little to take breath, and struggled on again. The police would knock us about.’ Charlotte and May were separated, Charlotte went ‘flying one way she another. I tried to find her. It seemed as though the earth had swallowed her.’11
Ada Wright accompanied Mrs Pankhurst and her bodyguards and was one of the sixty-two women arrested that day, ‘after much buffeting and rough handling’. She spent the night at Canon Row police station and was sentenced to a month in Holloway. To her annoyance her fine had been paid and she was released. Afraid that Ada might die if she was force-fed again, her sister had paid the fine. Ada did not discover what her sister had done for ten years, but at the time she was furious, feeling guilty for betraying the Cause.
Earlier, on 21 May, a flat in Lauderdale Mansions, Maida Vale, had been raided by two Special Branch officers, who found a suffragette ‘arsenal’. Nellie Hall, who used the alias ‘Nellie Roberts’, was a WSPU organiser, her mother Martha (Pattie), father Leonard and younger sister Emmeline, and Julia Jameson and Helen Arnes, were arrested in the possession of half a hundredweight of pebbles that had been brought to London from Southend. Black bags for carrying the stones, three hammers, an axe and suffrage literature were also found.
The Hall family were old Manchester friends of the Pankhursts: Mrs Pattie Hall had joined the WSPU in 1903. In the days following the Black Friday riot she was sent to prison for two weeks for throwing stones and causing wilful damage.12 The year before, Nellie (then sixteen) had marched around Winson Green Prison singing songs to suffragette prisoners. Nellie worked for two years in the Union’s Birmingham branch, and in July 1913 she threw a brick through the window of the prime minister’s car during his visit to the city. She was sentenced to three weeks in Winson Green and after being on hunger strike for eight days was released on licence suffering from mumps. She vanished and was working as a prisoners’ secretary at WSPU headquarters when she was arrested.
Sylvia Pankhurst provides details about the weapons at Lauderdale Mansions: ‘twenty-two pieces of tubing containing gunpowder with fuses attached, a large number of hammers, and seventy-two black calico bags, with strings to tie round the waist, some of them filled with flints.’13 While the police were carrying out their search, Helen Arnes, a widow from Croydon, had turned up and was found to be carrying a basket of stones covered with lettuce leaves. It was suspected that the flat was the headquarters of a window-smashing raid in protest at the likely arrest of Mrs Pankhurst. The women were charged at Marylebone Police Court with ‘conspiracy to commit malicious damage and with injury to property’. In July Miss Jameson and Mrs Arnes were acquitted.
The next morning at Bow Street Court there was pandemonium as the prisoners and their friends filled the court: all the women who had been arrested refused to give their names and were referred to by numbers. Shouts drowned out the voice of the magistrate, Sir John Dickinson, and most of the charges were dropped. A woman addressed as ‘99’ admitted to breaking three panes of glass at the royal storekeeper’s premises in Buckingham Palace Road, and said defiantly: ‘If the King won’t hear voteless women, he must hear broken glass.’14 Women who refused to walk were dragged into court on their knees, number ‘3’ threw paper missiles and copies of The Suffragette at Sir John Dickinson, and ‘a little elderly woman wearing a nurse’s uniform also struggled into the dock’.15 One of the women, who had to be held in the dock by four constables, managed to wrench her arms free and tried to climb over the rails. When a bag of flour was thrown from the body of the court the magistrate cleared the place and eight women were arrested in the street outside. Sir John Dickinson even caught the boot thrown at him from the dock by prisoner number ‘11’. When two women were placed in the dock together they talked non-stop; one of them called the magistrate ‘a rusty tool of a corrupt government’ and the other a ‘wicked old man’. Three women were charged, the rest refused to be bound over and the charges were dropped.16
During Nellie Hall’s several appearances in court until she was eventually sent to Holloway to serve three months, her behaviour grew ever more defiant. She and her mother were carried into Marylebone Police Court on 29 May in a very weak state, but Nellie still disrupted proceedings by interrupting and shouting that she refused to be tried. On 2 June Nellie and Grace Roe were again in court. Nellie’s mother was too ill to attend, and the charges against Mrs Hall were dropped. As Nellie was being carried from court she called out: ‘It doesn’t matter, we shall go on fighting, fighting, fighting.’17 On 8 July Nellie and Grace were sent to Holloway for three months, convicted of ‘having unlawfully conspired with others to commit damage to windows’. Nellie Hall had been force-fed 137 times while on remand. When asked if she wanted to make any reply to the charge she said that every day they were in prison ‘more militancy would take place and more houses would be burnt’.18 With the outbreak of war on 4 August she was still in prison, and would not be released until the WSPU agreed to end militancy in return for the release of all their prisoners.
Outraged at reports of the riot at the Palace gates, the next day Grace Marcon, alias ‘Freda Graham’, went to the Venetian Room in the National Gallery and attacked five paintings by Bellini. Despite tight security, two plain-clothes detectives, two attendants and several students in the room could not prevent her from using the hammer hidden in her coat and making a ‘promiscuous attack on any picture that she could reach’. In court Grace ‘kept up a continual tirade from the prisoners’ enclosure and was held fast by two policemen throughout the proceedings’.19 When she was sentenced as ‘Freda Graham’ to six months in prison, Grace, referring to the sex industry, said: ‘What are five paintings compared with eighty thousand pictures by the greatest artist of all [God] which are being defaced, damaged and degraded by men each night.’20
Grace embarked on a secret hunger and thirst strike for fifteen days. She was released on 5 June on a Cat and Mouse licence and taken to Mouse Castle to recover. Grace had become delirious through starvation and dehydration and cut off all her hair, believing that it was growing into her head like ‘red hot wires and that if I could cut it off the pain would be somehow reduced. I remembered I had scissors in my case and crawled out of bed to the other side of the cell where the case lay and cut almost all of my hair off. I had not the strength to get back to bed and lay on the floor all night until someone came in the morning and lifted me into bed.’21
Sylvia Pankhurst said Grace Marcon was so weak that she was unable to make a statement for three weeks. The nurse who was caring for her told The Suffragette: ‘I cannot get a statement yet because she talks so very slowly that it would take three or four days, and that if she talks about prison at all she has a wretched night.’22
When the police arrived to rearrest Grace on 12 June, the day her licence expired, they found her too ill to be moved. She kept her real name from the press to avoid embarrassing her parents: her father, the Reverend Walter Marcon, the Rector of Edgefield, near Cromer, took over from his father as the vicar of St Peter and St Paul’s when he died. Grace’s father’s love of the village was so great that he moved the church stone by stone from its original location a mile away, where Edgefield had been abandoned when the village was depopulated by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. He raised the money and did much of the physical work himself.23
On 29 May 1914 The Suffragette escalated the propaganda war against the government and the police in its leading article ‘Women Savagely Attacked’. Christabel wrote: ‘The savage cruelty to which the deputation members were treated can best be summed up by saying that Black Friday was outdone.’24 Those who witnessed the events were ‘utterly revolted by the appalling attacks upon this peaceful deputation and affirm that they had not before believed such an outrage possible’, and descriptions followed of the women being attacked with police truncheons, kicked by police horses and being thrown to the ground. Janie Allan proudly reported: ‘Some of the women rushed through the gates [of the Palace] and railings and climbed onto the crossbars, while others attacked the police and tried to force them out of the way. There were a considerable number of police agents present in plain clothes, most of them being men of a very low and brutal type.’25 According to Janie the police violence continued inside Hyde Park police station. She heard that the police continued to pummel the women and throw them around in ‘a savage fashion’ and the women responded by breaking windows. The Daily Mirror reported that ‘the sound of breaking glass from inside the station was almost continuous’.26 When one of the women tried to leave the room, unsure if she was being arrested or not, a policeman told her: ‘I’ll have the nose off your face if you move another step.’27 Gladys Schütze, who was with Mrs Pankhurst on 21 May, made a sworn statement:
I was standing against the railings of Constitution Hill, a completely passive resister, when one of the constables who was mounted on a grey horse hit me on the head with his baton and deliberately proceeded to back his horse into me with the result that I received a violent kick in the lower abdomen which completely incapacitated me … I heard one constable advise another to take a woman by the breasts.28
On 23 May the police raided Lincoln’s Inn House for the second time that year and ‘took possession’ of the WSPU’s headquarters, arresting Grace Roe, who had replaced Annie Kenney as Christabel’s deputy. The police found ‘bludgeons’ similar to those used by the women at Buckingham Palace. While Grace Roe was on remand Arthur Marshall, who was on holiday, arranged to have apomorphine hydrochloride, an emetic drug, smuggled into Holloway in a letter from Arthur Barnett, his firm’s managing clerk. The hope was that it would make Grace violently sick when she was force-fed and she would be released early. However, the drug was discovered and when the case was heard in the middle of June Arthur Barnett was let off with a £10 fine and five guineas costs, but only if Hatchett-Jones, Bisgood, Marshall and Thomas, ‘a firm of the highest standing’, refused to act for the WSPU again.29
Dr Flora Murray wrote to editors of the Glasgow Herald explaining the difference between bromide and bromine which she classified as hypnotics, and the emetic apomorphine hydrochloride. She said that apomorphine caused vomiting and exhaustion, while bromides reduced muscular resistance and sensitivity in the pharynx and helped prevent vomiting. Apomorphine would depress higher brain function and cause dullness of the brain and helped create a drug habit. Dr Murray released the results of urine tests that had been carried out on Kitty Marion and Olive Beamish, showing high levels of bromide, and said it was unlikely to have been self-administered as it was ‘a bulky drug’ and difficult to smuggle into prison, and she did not believe it had ever been attempted. A hypnotic drug like bromide or bromine ‘could only be harmful’ if given to prisoners, whereas in her opinion an emetic ‘might be useful’. Murray believed any women being dosed with bromide in prison were being placed at ‘considerable risk and it is not surprising that a prisoner should have attempted to have escaped this by procuring an emetic’. She speculated: ‘This woman was on remand and had to prepare her defence, she needed to have all her faculties alert, and no doubt tried in this way to counteract the evil effects of the sedative by rejecting it.’30
Two new suffragettes went on a mission to the British Museum on 23 May: Nellie Hay, an older Scottish woman, and her accomplice, Annie Wheeler. Even though the women were kept under close observation one of them smashed a glass case containing a mummy. They were charged with malicious damage. Nellie Hay was also charged with obstructing the police and was sentenced to one month in prison. Annie Wheeler was to serve two months and went on hunger and thirst strike and was force-fed and released just a few days before the end of her sentence in July. Two days later the British Museum announced that in future women would only be admitted to the galleries by ticket on condition they produced a ‘satisfactory recommendation from a person willing to be responsible for their behaviour’.31 News of the attack on the mummy case prompted the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and the Tate Gallery to close their buildings until further notice. The Standard described how American women wishing to visit the National Gallery had to be accompanied by one of the American Embassy secretaries. The Tate Gallery and Wallace Collection insisted on a letter of recommendation from public officials such as ambassadors, MPs and judges, accepting ‘all responsibility for the acts of the bearer’.32
In Hyde Park members of the public vented their anger on suffragettes who tried to address a meeting from a wagon. An elderly male sympathiser who introduced the meeting made a speech and was not molested, but as soon as a woman tried to talk the crowd drowned out her voice by singing and shouting. As the women stepped down the wagon was overturned and smashed to pieces by the crowd. That evening a baying crowd of diners turned on suffragettes at Lyons’ Corner House in Piccadilly. When two suffragettes entered and started handing out WSPU leaflets, they were pelted with cutlery, crockery, bread and cake. The women were put in the lift for their own safety but diners and policemen were waiting for them. For fifteen minutes the women were stuck in the lift between floors while cutlery, crockery and glasses were thrown through the metal grilles.33
On 24 May 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of Suffragettes got into a fight with police when they tried to rearrest her as she led a procession to Victoria Park. She was chained to her bodyguard of twenty women and was walking to the park for their ‘Women’s May Day Rally’. As they approached the park gates a large group of mounted police cut them off and corralled them through the gates which were then locked. ‘In the fight which followed the police used their truncheons freely, and the women, who fought desperately with fists and staves to prevent the arrest, were aided by male sympathisers.’34 The fight continued until the chains were broken and Sylvia was taken to Holloway to continue her sentence, where she immediately went on hunger strike. She was released on 30 May.
Emmeline Pankhurst’s letter to Ethel Smyth of 29 May contained details of 21 May. Referring to a story in the Sunday press that said she was dead, Mrs Pankhurst wrote:
I don’t think McKenna would have been sorry if that had been the result of the horrible bear’s hug that huge policeman [Chief Inspector Rolfe] gave me when he seized me. Fortunately for me I have ‘younger bones’ or my ribs would have been fractured. After it I suffered from a form of nausea just like very bad sea-sickness; however, it’s all over now and I am getting back my strength slowly but surely … There has been less waste of tissue [weight loss] than on previous occasions and the blood poisoning was not quite so bad either.35
For many of the women arrested on 21 May it had been their first militant protest, and almost all of them went on hunger and thirst strike. Emmeline wrote: ‘Think what it means for a first experience of prison to do the whole thing, and be ready to do it again! O my splendid ones.’36
The month of June saw another eruption of violence, a frustrated response to the entrenched political position, the force-feeding of women, the reluctance of the church to condemn the way the government was treating suffragette prisoners and the government’s strategy to shut down the Union. The WSPU reminded the people of Emily Davison’s sacrifice at the Derby. In Epsom, security was tight for the six weeks leading up to the 1914 Derby. Fearing that the course might be attacked by suffragettes, it was guarded day and night, and more than a thousand uniformed and just as many plain-clothes policemen were on duty. There was a ‘close cordon’ of constables at Tattenham Corner and two more sets of railings were installed.
The Suffragette of 5 June ran Emily Davison’s article ‘The Price of Liberty’ – and on 12 June announced the thrashing of Dr Forward (for the second time) on his way to Holloway by two suffragettes; the destruction of Wargrave Church in Berkshire on 1 June; and the burning of All Saints’ Church Breadsall, Derbyshire, on 5 June. While some leading churchmen wrote to The Times and other newspapers condemning force-feeding, this did not prevent WSPU members burning down cherished historic churches. It was not official policy but the leadership did not try to stop suffragettes from engaging in perhaps the most shocking form of militant protest. Mrs Pankhurst could have stopped attacks on churches but chose not to.
The cartoonist Will Dyson’s drawing of ‘Miss Davison’ for the Daily Herald was shocking: a walking skeleton in a fashionable hat and shoes wearing a sandwich board saying ‘Votes for Women’, with the Houses of Parliament in the background. On 6 June a memorial service was held at St George’s, Bloomsbury. Her friend Mary Leigh started the Emily Wilding Davison Club (which existed until the 1960s) and from 1916 Sarah Benett would take annual pilgrimages to Morpeth for a service at the grave. A letter came from Emily’s mother thanking Rose Lamartine Yates for her ‘kind sympathy and appreciation of my dear daughter’s great sacrifice. It was not made in vain. That I feel and take great comfort in the thought.’37 It shows Margaret Davison coming to terms with her daughter’s protest. She tells Rose that she read a letter Tom Lamartine Yates had published in the Daily Sketch: ‘I have let several of my neighbours read it and they all say it is most touching and I felt it myself.’38
On 7 June worshippers celebrating the noon Mass at the Brompton Oratory ejected more than twenty suffragettes who interrupted the service. At the beginning of the service a woman ran up the aisle towards the altar shouting, ‘In the name of Christ stop torturing women’ and suffragette supporters sitting in the front two pews, and elsewhere in the church, stood up and chanted: ‘O, God, save Emmeline Pankhurst and all our noble prisoners. O rouse this church and its priests to put an end to torture in the name of the blessed Joan of Arc.’39 Indignant members of the congregation ‘promptly rose to expel the invaders’ who were labelled ‘furies’ and ‘wild women’ in the newspapers the next day, and a ‘free fight’ lasted ten minutes.40
One of the suffragettes had teeth knocked out, and a man who placed his gloved hand over the mouth of the woman chanting at the altar had his fingers bitten. Before one woman was arrested and bundled into a taxi, a female member of the congregation ran after her, pulled her back and hit her in the face. At Westminster Police Court ‘Christine Adams’ was charged with brawling, and ‘Mary Fousten’, a married woman from Bayswater, was charged with obstruction and disorderly conduct. At Westminster Cathedral that evening the service was interrupted by a woman entering one of the pulpits, waving her arms and shouting: ‘In the presence of the Blessed Sacrament I protest against the forcible feeding of women.’41 ‘Christine Adams’ denied she was responsible for any riotous behaviour, blaming the verger and the congregation who ‘bashed her face’, and she served a month in prison in the second division.42
Two Norman churches were burned out on either side of the first anniversary of Emily Davison’s protest, Wargrave Parish Church near Wokingham, and All Saints’ Church, Breadsall. Although no WSPU members were charged for either attack, three postcards were left at the scene: ‘To the Government Hirelings and Women Torturers’ on one side and on the reverse, ‘A resort to brutality and torture. Let the Church follow its own precepts before it is too late. No surrender’; on another, ‘A Reply To Torture’; and on the third, ‘Blessed are those that suffer persecution for justice sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’43 The destruction of the church at Breadsall with its medieval chained books was mourned. Although no suffragist literature was found in those ruins the police strongly suspected that Eileen Casey was involved, and Hilda Cross, a friend of Kitty Marion. A hatpin was found near a small window through which the arsonists had entered the church. Locals reported hearing a loud explosion but by the time firemen arrived the blaze had taken hold of the building. Eileen Casey, who we last saw with her sister setting fire to a pillar box in Bradford, was arrested in Nottingham on 24 June, the day of the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. When Eileen was searched, a Derbyshire guidebook which included All Saints’ Church, was found, suggesting to the police that she was one of the arsonists. Eileen had been travelling the country in disguise for eight months on an expired Cat and Mouse licence.44 She was spotted in Nottingham the night before with a local militant, Miss Wallis, by Detective Inspector Wright of Leeds, who knew Eileen was on the run from her three-month sentence in Armley Gaol in 1913. The next morning Wright saw her leave the Mansion House Temperance Commercial Hotel with a green dressing-case and a string bag, walking round the market square and inspecting the grandstand that had been installed for the royal visit. She was arrested. Eileen Casey admitted her identity and that she was on the run from Armley Gaol. She did not admit to burning down Breadsall Church but her case contained an arsonist’s paraphernalia: firelighters, two torches, a glass cutter, a small bottle of benzene, matches, a road map of Great Britain, pocket knives, scissors, rubber shoes and suffragist literature. In the string bag was chocolate, twenty feet of fuse, a detonator, sixteen ounces of explosive and a notebook with information about other buildings the suffragettes had tried to attack.
In Nottingham Police Court Eileen Casey was charged with ‘loitering with intent to commit a felony’. She refused to be tried and did not stop talking throughout the proceedings, twined her arms round the dock rails and repeated incessantly: ‘This will go on till women get the vote.’ She admonished the magistrate and said she would not keep quiet: ‘I am not going to listen and I am not going to let anyone else listen’, and warned, ‘The next time you will find something more important … I hope I shall be more dangerous before I finish.’45 When Eileen was remanded for eight days she fought with five policemen in the dock and Charlie Marsh, the organiser of Nottingham WSPU, and other members cheered and yelled and were carried out of court kicking and screaming. She went on hunger and thirst strike, and because of her low weight was not force-fed at Nottingham Prison, but was taken to London to serve her sentence in Holloway, where she was fed by nasal tube.46 On 2 July she was returned to Nottingham, remanded for eight days then sent back to London and fed three times a day. If the law’s intention was to grind Eileen down so that she would give up the hunger strike it was mistaken. On 8 July she was transferred from Holloway to Winson Green and continued to refuse to eat. For the first time in her suffragette prison career, her time at Winson Green revealed that she suffered from Raynaud’s disease (problems with the circulation which cause the fingers and toes to go numb in cold weather) and tuberculosis of the skin. One doctor wrote: ‘she is an extremely delicate woman, at present in a very poor state of health, and in an unfit state to stand forcible feeding, I consider she is running a great risk to her life and cannot continue long as matters are at present without great danger.’47 A doctor who had treated her as an outpatient at the London Hospital reported: ‘she has been suffering from lupus erythematosus, affecting the cheeks, ears, and feet. Her circulation is poor, and chilblains have occurred from time to time.’48 This evidence was disregarded, and on 27 July 1914 Eileen was sentenced at Nottingham to fifteen months with hard labour, for ‘feloniously and knowingly having in her possession certain explosives … under such circumstances as to give reasonable suspicion that she did not have the said explosives with a lawful object’.49 She only served a week, her long sentence cut short by the First World War.
On 8 June, a year to the day that Emily Davison died, ‘Laura Grey’ (the stage name of the suffragette Lavender Guthrie) was found on the floor of her rooms in Jermyn Street, St James’s, dying of an overdose of veronal, her drug of addiction. Despite the best efforts of the police surgeon Dr Percy Edmonds, Lavender died without regaining consciousness. When she was discovered by her charlady, Mrs Spicer, several empty bottles of veronal tablets – a sleeping draught – were found in the room. The coroner, Dr Ingleby Oddie, and the jury returned a verdict of ‘suicide during temporary insanity’.50
This was the final chapter in the story of a vulnerable young woman who had gone to the bad, a ‘fallen woman’. As the newspapers made the connection between ‘Laura Grey’ and suffragette Lavender Guthrie who had been arrested five times and convicted four, they blamed her involvement with the militants for her tragic end: ‘A Girl’s Downfall: From Militancy to Suicide’.51 A letter from Mabel Tuke with a hunger-strike medal and one silver bar was read out to underline the depth of Lavender’s involvement:
Dear Soldier in the Women’s Army, no words can possibly express the feelings of the Committee towards you and the other comrades who have so nobly and with utter disregard of the self, suffered pain of the hunger-strike and horrors of forcible feeding in prison, at the prompting of duty and loyalty to the cause you so passionately love, and which is the dearest of life to us all.52
Lavender’s chaotic private life was picked over at the inquest. She retired from a four-year career with the WSPU at the end of 1912, after serving a six-month sentence for breaking a window on 4 March, during which time she had been force-fed. On 19 June 1914, Antonia Moser, a suffragette and private detective, described meeting Lavender Guthrie in 1912:
While she was a member of the Union she led, according to her own statement to me, a perfectly moral and upright life. About eighteen months ago she sought my advice in reference to a certain man who had obtained an improper influence over her. Whilst in prison she had been force-fed and this had apparently a very bad effect upon her delicate system – and coupled with the man’s desertion had caused her to take drugs.53
Lavender Guthrie also drank absinthe, took veronal and became a prostitute. A photograph taken when she was presented at Court in 1907 appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror under the headline, ‘Mysterious Death of Actress-Suffragette’.54
The coroner Dr Ingleby Oddie did not spare her mother’s feelings when he gave details about Lavender leading ‘an immoral life’. He mentioned the many letters and telegrams addressed to her ‘by men seeking appointments with her’. Oddie thought it was regrettable that, despite her good home and education, she should have ‘associated with these law-breakers [the WSPU] … and [it] raises a very strong presumption as to her mental unsoundness’. He wondered if ‘the mental and physical excitement of breaking plate-glass windows, assaulting policemen, going to prison, being force-fed, did certainly increase the derangement of a mind that was already unbalanced’.55
During the past eighteen months Lavender Guthrie had frequented nightclubs. Mrs Baillie Guthrie reported that her daughter had left home at the end of 1912. The inquest heard that Lavender had written several letters on 28 May which were found on her mantelpiece. One was to her landlord – ‘I am sorry to have to leave the flat in this way, and to have given you so much trouble’ – and enclosed money for the rent. The last letter Lavender wrote on 5 June was addressed to her ‘dear little mother’: ‘I am hoping … this foolish epistle … will not be a great shock to you. I have given you so many… as far as I can remember I owe no money at all.’ Lavender predicted the coroner would blame her ‘temporary insanity’ for her act, but ‘as a matter of fact I think this is about the sanest thing I have yet done. I am simply very, very tired of things in general and cannot see that the world will progress any the worse for me being out of it.’56
Dr Edmonds told the court that Lavender had died of heart failure and veronal poisoning, and that the postmortem revealed that she had been ‘addicted to alcoholic drinks for some time’. Edmonds kept the bombshell until last: ‘She was expecting to become a mother, and in a woman of her kind of life he thought she must have known of her condition.’57
The WSPU came out fighting. At a meeting in Knightsbridge on 15 June, the link between Lavender’s downfall and militancy was repudiated. A letter to The Times was denounced as a ‘hypocritical sham’. The writer had blamed militancy as the critical stepping-stone leading to her downfall. At the meeting it was asked why the names of Lavender’s ‘gentlemen friends’ were not ‘dragged into the light of day’. The press were called ‘vampires’ and derided for using Lavender’s sad end to try and intimidate women from joining their organisation.58
On 9 June, the police raided the temporary headquarters of the WSPU at their Westminster office and shop at 17 Tothill Street. It was a sign of the government’s determination to end the militant campaign. Since the raid on Lincoln’s Inn House on 23 May, the police had been scouring the offices for names and addresses of subscribers to the funds. The women had learned to be more careful about such sensitive information and the police found nothing of interest at Tothill Street.59 Now the suffragette campaign was run from Mouse Castle, the home of the Brackenbury family – at least until the police raided them on 12 June. They found Grace Marcon being looked after by two nurses and seized documents but made no arrests. The WSPU announced they would be returning to their office in Tothill Street, where they would remain until the end of July.60
The campaign for women’s suffrage in the East End of London continued to be dynamic. Despite being arrested and rearrested eight times under her current sentence (and suffering the effects of hunger, thirst and sleep strikes and force-feeding during each imprisonment) Sylvia Pankhurst continued to push the East London Federation of Suffragettes’ agenda. She wrote to the prime minister asking him to meet her and a deputation of working women on the evening of 10 June. He refused. She sent a reply reminding Asquith that ‘a large proportion of the women of East London are living under terrible conditions … the women are impatient to take a constitutional part in moulding the conditions under which they have to live’. Sylvia told him she would undoubtedly be rearrested and returned to Holloway to resume her hunger strike, and that when she was released on the usual Cat and Mouse licence she would continue her protest ‘at the door of the Strangers’ Entrance to the House of Commons and shall not take either food or water until you agree to receive this deputation’. Then she raised the stakes: ‘I know very well from what has happened in the past that I am risking my life … because so far you have almost invariably refused the appeals which suffragists have made to you. But I feel it is my duty to take this course, and I shall not give way, although it may end in my death.’61 Asquith refused.
Looking ‘worn and ill’, Sylvia left the ELFS headquarters in Bow on the evening of 10 June determined to reach Westminster. After making a short speech she was carried on a bed on the shoulders of six men, preceded by a clergyman. They did not get far before she and her stretcher-bearers were separated and ambushed by the police in a side street. Sylvia was taken to Holloway and a clergyman re-formed the deputation of nine women and three men, and walked through the City, along Fleet Street and Somerset House. They made their way separately to St Stephen’s Entrance and asked to see the prime minister, to be told he would not meet them. The deputation ‘behaved quite peacefully’ and were eventually seen by Sir William Pollard Byles, the Liberal MP for Shipley, and were escorted to an outer lobby by Percy Illingworth, MP for Salford North. Mrs Scurr told Illingworth she thought it very unfair Mr Asquith ‘would never receive a deputation of working women’, and had to be content with Illingworth repeating the usual mantra that the prime minister could not ‘depart from his usual practice’.62
In the hungry, thirsty and sleepless eight days and nights leading up to her release on a Cat and Mouse licence on 18 June, Sylvia’s time ‘crawled by, weary and painful from illness, otherwise calm … My thoughts were occupied with the struggle before me … I had never believed myself so near the limit of my endurance as the doctors in prison, and out, had assured me to be the case’.63 She was taken by taxi to her home in Old Ford Road by two wardresses and was met by a crowd. True to her threat, as soon as Sylvia arrived in Bow she asked to be taken to the House of Commons where she was determined to lie down outside and make her protest. Shocked by her gaunt appearance, local women cried at the sight of her. Norah Smyth drove Sylvia to Westminster in her car. After much wrangling by Keir Hardie, George Lansbury and Henry Nevinson, they were able to tell her Asquith would receive six members of an East End women’s deputation on 20 June.
Sylvia did not go on the deputation but appointed Mrs Scurr to lead the women and prepared a statement for her to read: ‘I did not care to go. Let these working women speak for themselves; it was for this I had struggled.’64 Julia Scurr had been a Poor Law Guardian in Poplar since 1907 and was closely involved with the running of Poplar workhouse. She was the mother of three children, aged thirteen, eleven and ten. Her husband, John Scurr, was an accountant and trade union activist and a friend of George Lansbury.65 Two weeks before Julia led the deputation John Scurr stood as a socialist candidate at the Ipswich by-election, his fourth attempt to become a Member of Parliament, and was defeated.
Julia Scurr introduced the prime minister to her comrades and the broad political purpose of their visit: ‘We are members of the East London Federation of Suffragettes … We represent the general popular movement for Votes for Women in East London, which is of tremendous numerical strength and enthusiasm and consists of both men and women.’ She asked Asquith to consider the position of women wage-earners and the care and education of children, and housing. Mrs Scurr highlighted the calamitous consequences for women when: ‘Our husbands die on the average at a much earlier age than do men of other classes. Modern industrialism kills them off rapidly, both by accident and overwork … we know by bitter experience the terrible struggle with absolute want that our widowed sisters have to face from no fault of their own.’ She ended her speech: ‘We are here today to demand a vote for every woman over the age of twenty-one years. Miss Pankhurst is giving her life for the purpose of fighting for this vote.’66
The other five women were Daisy Parsons; Mrs Jane Savoy, a sweated homeworker who made brushes; Mrs Jessie Payne, a bootmaker; Mrs Bird, married to a transport worker who earned twenty-five shillings a week to support their family of six children; and Mrs Watkins, the first paid organiser of the East London Federation of the WSPU.67
Herbert Asquith’s response seemed to imply he was a convert. He told the women:
You have each given me special illustrations, drawn from your own experience, or from the experience of your leaders, to show that this is not a mere rhetorical statement, but does correspond to the actual facts of East End life … If the change has to come, we must face it boldly, and make it thoroughgoing and democratic in its basis.68
Asquith said he would ask the home secretary to consider the matter of hunger-striking prisoners: ‘I am sure there is not the faintest disposition in any quarter to be vindictive.’ When Asquith attempted to divide the militant suffragist movement by asking the deputation to repudiate militancy he was disappointed by Julia Scurr’s unequivocal response: ‘While our organisation has not at present committed arson, we do not want to criticise the other organisations, we know that in the past men have used all sorts of methods.’69
Despite ‘a general rejoicing’ – even Sylvia Pankhurst sensed an ‘atmosphere of tremendous hope’ at the news of Asquith’s positive remarks – events over the following six weeks would prove the prime minister’s encouraging words to be hollow. Nothing changed in prisons. The WSPU was reminded that there would be no let-up in the government’s attempt to undermine their activities and dismantle their organisation. In the House of Commons on 11 June, before Asquith’s meeting with the East End women, Home Secretary Reginald McKenna, informed by the ‘unlimited correspondence’ he had received on the subject, had debated the four ways of ‘dealing with the suffragettes’ that had been suggested to him: ‘The first was to let them die, the second was to deport them, the third was to treat them as lunatics and the fourth was to give them the franchise.’70 McKenna declined to pursue any of the options, citing the belief that several women were prepared to die in prison and this would further help their cause. He could not legally send them out of the country, and even if he did send them to the island of St Kilda (the Scilly Isles was also suggested) ‘it would have to be turned into a prison’ or the authorities faced the risk that ‘wealthy supporters of the movement would very quickly fit-out a yacht and take them away’, and if a special prison was built the suffragettes would go on hunger strike as they had in every prison in which they were incarcerated. As they were not lunatics, it would have been illegal to treat them as such. (The suggestion of William Pringle, the Liberal MP for North-West Lanarkshire since 1910, that the Home Office invoke the Mental Deficiency Act was greeted with applause.) As for the fourth idea, McKenna brushed off the idea of giving women the vote, saying he was ‘not responsible for the state of the franchise’. A letter to The Times published four days after the debate suggested St Helena would be a far better destination for the suffragettes: ‘St Helena is a dull place, and the prospect of being sent there would be more depressing to the militant temperament than any other form of punishment. Consequently, if some of the militant leaders were transported there no others would wish to follow, and our country would be rid of these mischievous semi-lunatics.’71
Reginald McKenna announced on 23 June that the police would prosecute subscribers to the WSPU for any ‘crimes and outrages’ which were the result of articles in The Suffragette inciting women to violence. Also, by hiring out facilities to the Union, the owners of places where ‘speeches inciting violence’ had taken place were threatened with prosecution. The dedicated arsonists escalated their attacks in the week following his announcement.72
In the early hours of the morning of 8 July Fanny Parker and another (thought to be Ethel Moorhead) were caught by a night watchman having planted two bombs at Robert Burns’s cottage in Alloway. The women also left canisters of gunpowder and oil. They had travelled there on bicycles. Calling herself ‘Janet Arthur’, Fanny allowed herself to be caught so that her comrade could escape.73 ‘Janet Arthur’ was charged at Ayr Sheriff’s Court where she was held on remand until her trial, refusing to take exercise in case ‘someone was about who wanted to shoot her’. After four days of hunger and thirst strike she was offered the opportunity of spending her time on remand in a nursing home but she refused and was taken to Perth Prison where suffragette prisoners were being force-fed. Fanny refused to get dressed for the journey and arrived wrapped in blankets and was carried to the motor car. She was force-fed by nasal and stomach tubes, and by the rectum, for three days, and once by the vagina, and was released on a Cat and Mouse licence and taken by her brother, Captain Alfred Parker, to Queen Mary’s Home, Chalmers Street, Edinburgh. Captain Parker told the Scottish prison authorities that neither he nor his mother had any sympathy with his sister’s views, ‘and no very strong hopes of being able to influence her’. He believed ‘the suffragist leaders were treating his sister as a cat’s paw’.74
On arrival in the Edinburgh nursing home, Fanny was found to be suffering extreme pain and injuries to her genital area as a result of torture masquerading as ‘feeding’. The matron, Miss Shaw, and the sister, Miss Bennett, examined Fanny. Miss Bennett, who had obstetrical and gynaecological training, told Dr Chalmers Watson that the prisoner’s injuries were caused by the ‘rough and faulty introduction of instruments’, possibly the nozzle of an enema syringe, which had been used on several occasions.
The prisoner states that in the course of her treatment there was a discharge of thick brown material from the vagina, such a discharge being unusual with her. Local inspection of the front passage revealed distinct swelling of the vulva in its posterior part and also the presence of a raw wound on the mucus membrane of the inner and outer folds on both sides.75
On the morning of 18 July, Fanny Parker, having requested a full medical, was given a general anaesthetic and examined by a gynaecologist, and Dr Mabel Jones, a WSPU sympathiser. The headline appeared in Votes for Women, ‘Inhuman Treatment of an Unconvicted Prisoner in Perth. Rectum Feeding Again Employed’.76 On 28 July Fanny was missing, having walked ‘unobserved by anybody’, and vanished into thin air.
Frances Mary ‘Fanny’ Parker had been a member of the WSPU since 1908. Born in New Zealand, she was the niece of the future Lord Kitchener. He paid for Fanny’s education at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1896 to 1899, but was ‘disgusted’ by her career as a suffragette. She was arrested in Westminster on a demonstration on 14 February 1908 and served six weeks in Holloway for obstruction. Fanny and Edith Lacheur, a friend from Newnham, ran a ‘suffragette dairy’ in Sussex to raise money for the suffragettes’ war chest. In 1911 she was a delegate at the International Suffrage Convention in Stockholm in 1911. Fanny served four months in Holloway for breaking windows in March 1912 where she met Ethel Moorhead, who liked her ‘exquisite madness’. In 1913 Fanny was the WSPU organiser in Dundee and then Edinburgh.77
In the first week of July 1914, police finally moved out of Lincoln’s Inn House, having caused maximum disruption to the day-to-day running of the WSPU. On 9 July, Mrs Pankhurst was arrested and taken to Holloway, and started her ninth hunger strike. Two days later she was released, extremely weak and nauseous.78 On the evening of 16 July, Mrs Pankhurst was rearrested while trying to attend the WSPU’s fundraising meeting at Holland Park Skating Rink, and was returned to prison, and released two days later.
*
Although she was a ‘mouse’ out on an expired licence, Annie Kenney was advertised as the main speaker at the morale- and fund-boosting meeting. Elaborate steps were taken to smuggle her out of the flat where she was staying in Maida Vale.
The disguise decided on was rather unique. I decided to be a fair-haired, gay, flashy East End coster type … My wig was a rich gold with curls over the eyes and ears. I had beads, rings, ear-rings, a feather in my hat, a silk dress, a fancy coat, a feather boa and two inches added to a pair of patent leather shoes. It always took me two or three taxi-cabs to take us to a meeting when in disguise, so that no taxi-cab driver could be traced. News came just before we started for the hall that all detectives, excepting one, were at the main entrance.79
When Annie and a friend arrived they went to the side door, ‘chatting animatedly all the way which was part of the act. The escort always had to start a voluminous conversation just as I was getting out of the taxi.’80 They got inside the hall of the skating rink and were taken to a changing room and ‘a suffragette, my height, changed into my Cockney clothes, and with profuse apologies was taken back to the seat I had been missed from. This was done so that if any spies were about it would be the one in disguise that would be scented and followed.’81
As soon as the meeting started Annie marched boldly on to the platform.
Storms of cheering took place and enthusiasm was at fever height. Scotland Yard outwitted once more did much to help towards the success of any meeting. We raised about sixteen thousand pounds. Just before the last speaker had finished her speech I left the stage and another disguise awaited me. It was very, very ordinary, the chief features being furs and eye-glasses, and I left with the audience, surrounded by bodyguards. I left by the front entrance and I walked under the noses of the detectives, the fair-haired damsel not far behind me being scrutinised and watched by those who were waiting to seize me and take me back to Holloway Prison. I arrived home quite safely and we laughed heartily about the scenes and began planning my next move.82
*
At midnight on 3 August the ultimatum the British had given to the German government to respect Belgian neutrality and withdraw their troops from Belgian soil was rejected. Britain and Germany were at war. The Times reported that when news of the declaration of war was made, ‘the crowd [in Downing Street] expressed its feelings in loud cheering … and gathered in front of the War Office, where patriotic demonstrations continued until the early hours of the morning’.83 Twenty thousand people gathered around Buckingham Place in a mood of growing excitement, and when the King and Queen went down the Mall ‘there was a rush for the royal carriage as it left the Palace gates … men waved their hats and walking sticks and women fluttered their handkerchiefs’.84 The crowds stayed until midnight, delighted when the King and Queen and Princess Mary appeared on the balcony during the evening. Hundreds milled about at Downing Street waiting for news. Three thousand men paraded in the West End singing the National Anthem and ‘Rule, Britannia’.
On 13 August Mrs Pankhurst wrote to WSPU members:
It has been possible to consider what should be the course adopted by the WSPU in view of the war crisis. It is obvious that the most vigorous militancy is for the time being rendered less effective by contrast with the infinitely greater violence done in the present war not to mere property and economic prosperity alone, but to human life.85
She announced that it had been decided to temporarily suspend the campaign for the vote for the duration of the war which would allow the members ‘to recuperate after the tremendous strain and suffering of the past two years’. For those who feared the loss of momentum Mrs Pankhurst reassured them that as soon as the conflict ended the ‘WSPU will at the first possible moment step forward in to the political arena in order to compel the enactment of a measure giving votes to women on the same terms as men’.86
Within ten days of the declaration of war all the suffragette prisoners had been released in an amnesty, having agreed to end all militancy.