16

The March of the Women

Para Handy consulted the tin alarm clock which hung on a string from a nail driven into the fo’c’sle bulkhead. “Nearly six o’clock: Jeck iss late,” he announced. It was a Saturday afternoon in August and the Vital Spark was lying at Anderston Quay, loaded to the plimsoll line with steel plates for the shipyard at Campbeltown.

She was ready to sail and, indeed, Para Handy had planned to be half way to Greenock by this time. But Hurricane Jack, learning on their arrival in Glasgow the previous evening that his old command — the clipper Port Jackson — was docked at Leith, had taken the train to Edinburgh then and there to see his former colleagues, with the promise to return by early afternoon the following day.

“Ye cannae trust that man at all,” said Macphail with some asperity, “he’s a mountebank! We’ve missed the tide noo and we micht as weel wait till the morn’.”

Before the Captain could leap to the defence of his oldest friend there came the clatter of boots on the deck overhead and the man himself came bursting down into the fo’c’sle.

“Sorry, shipmates,” he said, “but it’s chust been wan o’ those days and my head’s aal spinnin’ wi’ the stramash of it aal.”

“Wass it a heavy night wi’ your friends, then, Jeck?” asked the Captain solicitously. “Jum will run up to the dairy and get a bottle o’ milk to settle you.”

“It iss not last night that is the problem,” replied Jack with great vehemence, “and my head iss fine, thank you.

“No, I got back to Glasgow as planned, just before dinner time. The trouble started when I came oot o’ Queen Street Station.”

“Trouble?” Dougie put in anxiously. “What trouble?”

“He’ll hae met a friend that owed him and they’ve been on the ran-dan for the last five hoors,” chipped in the Engineer with rancour.

“Pay no attention, Jeck,” soothed Para Handy. “Chust tak’ your time and tell us exactly what went wrong and where, and whether you want anything done about it.”

“George Square, my boys,” said Jack, “that’s where it’s aal happening: but nothing went wrong! Everything went right! When I came doon the steps from the Station, the Square was chust packed wi’ wummin: nothin’ but wummin and gyurls ass far ass the eye could see!

“There wass some sort of a wudden platform put up at the far end o’ the square, chust in front o’ the Toon Hall, and there wass a wheen o’ older wummin stood on it, wi’ wan o’ them aye rantin’ on aboot somethin’. I wisna’ much carin’, so I paid no attention to yon.

“But aal the pavements at the station end o’ the square wass chust choc-a-bloc wi’ gyurls: red-heads and brunettes and fair haired gyurls that would stop a tram in its trecks they wass that bonnie.” He sighed with pleasure at the memory. “Dozens o’ them! Hundreds o’ them! I have never in aal my life seen sich a tempting array o’ feminine beauty aal in the wan place at the wan time!”

Macphail the misogynist snorted: “And Ah’m sure you made their day too, and they wis jist speechless wi’ excitement at seein’ you,” he said dismissively, “bein’ the fine figure o’ a man you maybe used tae be — aboot 20 years ago. Your courtin’ days is done, Maclachlan, and it’s high time you admutted it and acted your age!”

“Pay no attention, Jeck,” said the Captain. “He is chust jealous. Go on! Who were they aal?”

“Suffry-jets,” said Jack. “Ye’ll have read aboot them. Gyurls and wummin wantin’ the vote.”

“Wantin’ the vote?” said Sunny Jim incredulously. “Whitever will they think o’ next. Votes for wummin? Fat chance!”

That dyed-in-the-wool anti-feminist, the Engineer, nodded in vigorous agreement.

“Well, I don’t know,” began the Mate, who was notoriously (and unceasingly) henpecked. “Maybe they have a point…”

“When are you goin’ tae hae the courage tae start wearin’ the breeks in your ain hoose?” demanded Macphail truculently and it was only the Captain’s timely intervention that prevented a trading of insults between the two.

“Go on Jeck,” he repeated firmly: “and tell us aal aboot these suffry-jets.”

The suffragette movement, till now largely directed towards the thinking women of the London area, had embarked on promoting a more national support, and Hurricane Jack had by chance debouched onto George Square in the midst of their first ever rally in Glasgow. There had been a considerable degree of local interest generated by the placing of a series of advertisements in local papers, bills posted everywhere proclaiming the place and time of the event, and a discreet but fervent word-of-mouth campaign.

Holding the rally on a Saturday had been something of a stroke of genius since it made it possible for the factory girls of Glasgow to attend in droves, alongside the middle-class women who had been the main target of much suffragette proselytising till then.

While most of the Glaswegian males who came upon the scene passed by, as it were, very firmly indeed on the other side, it was not in Jack’s character as a devoted ladies’ man of many decades devotion to pass up the opportunity to mingle with such a vast number of members of the opposite sex.

So, setting his cap at a jaunty angle, and regretting bitterly that he lacked a brass-mounted telescope tucked authoritatively under one arm, he had infiltrated the crowds of young girls on the square opposite the station.

After so many rebuffs, and frequent rudenesses, from the male sex, the young ladies surged eagerly and winningly around their new-found supporter and soon Jack was in his element.

He accepted the leaflets they thrust into his hands: “I have aalways had a very high opeenion o’ gyurls chenerally,” said he gallantly: “and I wush you every success in your endeavours. I chust wush I wass able to be of some help…” and he bowed and touched his cap to every side.

“We are planning to demonstrate forcibly, Mr MacLachlan,” cried one particularly stunning red-haired girl with a wide-brimmed white hat and an enormous parasol, “we will show our sisters in London that we are prepared to follow their example.”

There was a chorus of approval.

“We would be chaining ourselves to the very buffers of the trains,” she continued, “but they will not even let us into the station. Or to the railings of the City Chambers: but the Council has placed guards in front of them.”

Once they had established that Jack was a sea-faring man, they showed particular interest in his ship and the unfortunate Hurricane, carried away somewhat by the heady glamour of his surroundings, gave into the temptation of gilding the lily somewhat both in his description of the puffer: and in regard to his position on board her.

“The finest vessel on the Firth,” he said firmly, with a pride and enthusiasm of which Para Handy would have most thoroughly approved, “sailing tonight for distant seas and far horizons under the command of yours truly.”

And when, reluctantly, he dragged himself from their midst on the plea that he must return to his ship, the red-haired girl insisted on walking with him to Anderston Quay.

“Not as big as I would have wished,” she said mysteriously when they reached the Vital Spark at her berth. “But she will do.” And resisting Jack’s clumsy attempt to place a farewell kiss on her cheek she jumped nimbly aboard a city-bound tram and waved him goodbye from its upper, open deck.

“So there you have it, shipmates,” said Jack, beaming on the company. “Bonnie gyurls and a friendly atmosphere! D’ye think they wud have me for a suffry-jet for I would enlist tomorrow chust for the sake of the cheneral frivolity?”

“You’re some man for the high jinks,” said Para Handy enviously and the crew climbed on deck and started to prepare for their delayed departure.

Macphail scurried into his den to stoke up the boiler fires and Sunny Jim and Dougie lashed the puffer’s dinghy firmly across the hatch of the hold.

As Para Handy, Hurricane Jack just behind him, opened the door of the wheelhouse, they were all suddenly aware of the music of a brass band a few streets away — but coming rapidly nearer. It sounded too as if a crowd was singing along with the playing of the band, and there were periodic excited whoops and cries.

Then the clash and crash of the band and its followers became overwhelming, as the head of a substantial procession appeared round the corner of one of the warehouses and headed straight towards the Vital Spark.

There were several hundred women trailing the band, singing enthusiastically at the tops of their voices, and a handful, all bearing suffragette placards, heading it. In the very van was a tall, red-haired girl wearing a broad-brimmed white hat and twirling a parasol on her shoulder.

The song died away as the band came to a halt on the dockside immediately alongside the puffer. The marchers massed behind it in a semi-circle and a repeated staccato chant went up: “Votes For Women! Votes For Women! Votes For Women!”

With a smile and a wave to the perplexed Hurricane Jack, the red-haired girl and two others stepped forwards and suddenly producing sets of hand-cuffs from, it seemed, thin air, they attached themselves to the hawsers holding the puffer fore and aft onto the quayside and threw the keys into the water.

“Jum,” said Para Handy glumly, “wull ye go an’ tell Macphail he needna bother gettin’ up steam: and Jeck, seein’ you got us into aal this, wull you go and fetch a polisman? You know where I’ll be if you need me.”

And, turning his back on the triumphant, chanting crowd, he made his way slowly along the deck and vanished down into the fo’c’sle.

FACTNOTE

Glasgow’s George Square has for generations been ‘centre stage’ for rallies, protests and public meetings ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. It thankfully escaped the worst ravages of the city’s post-war architectural vandalism and is still overlooked by the magnificent Victorian facades of the City Chambers, the General Post Office, and other properties in keeping with its scale and character: but one doesn’t need to look further than the adjacent skyline to see the philistine treatment which parts of the city received in the fifties and sixties.

The Queen Street and Central Stations have survived more or less intact but long gone, and much lamented, are the more modest but characterful Buchanan Street: and the most imposing of them all, St Enoch’s, with its sweeping carriageway and the towering gothic frontage of its integral hotel.

A FORMIDABLE MATRIARCHY — The sole man in this family group looks appropriately worried about the encroaching feminism! Victorians were still getting used to the whole idea of photography and the only member of this particular group who looks at all happy about having a picture taken is the dog!

The Suffragette Movement was at its zenith in the first decade of the century, spurred on by the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. As well as political protest and pressure, it relied on less peaceful means of promoting the cause and what we would now call publicity stunts ranged from the relative innocence of protestors chaining themselves to railings at the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace or anywhere else where they felt attention would be focussed upon them: to the tragedy of the Derby of 1912, at which the Suffragette Emily Davidson threw herself under the hooves of King George V’s horse, brought it down, and was herself trampled to death.

Many historians feel that the public revulsion stimulated by such activities was counter-productive to the cause, and that what in a sense ‘saved’ the Movement was the First World War, in which women played an incalculably valuable role. Indeed some commentators see the easing of suffrage restrictions which followed that holocaust as the country’s way of recognising the service of the nation’s womanhood.

One of the more colourful, though less high-profile, supporters of the Movement was the composer Ethel Smyth, who joined the suffragettes in 1911 and in the same year composed for them what became their battle hymn — the splendidly up-beat and instantly memorable ‘March of the Women’.

It is one of the few of her compositions recorded and marketed today. But she merits a much wider audience for such stirring programme music as the overture to her opera The Wreckers and above all for her magnificent and moving mass, written in 1891 and first performed in 1893 — but not heard again for more than 30 years. Now available on CD it memorably deserves acclaim and recognition.