At 12 p.m. on Friday 12 May, 1905, the afternoon session of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster was about to begin when it was noticed that there were not enough members in the House of Commons to commence public business. No one could blame the weather for the members’ sudden truancy. It was neither unseasonably hot nor unbearably cold; rather a mild spring day in London. Light north wind; 61 degrees Fahrenheit. Cloudy in the morning clearing to bright sunshine. But inside the House, there were two bills on the agenda for debate before today’s 5.30 p.m. adjournment and not forty members present. After a further seven minutes, a scouring of the House brought in thirty-nine more members, whereby the deputy speaker counted himself as one and business proceeded.1 Mr Bignell moved the second reading of the Vehicles Lights Bill.
Three hundred women had gathered in the Strangers’ Lobby outside the Commons that day and, for them, the flagrant no-show was a most dispiriting sign. Many of them were from the Women’s Co-operative Guild: working women who had sacrificed a day’s pay and courted retribution to be here. A fortunate few had received a ticket to watch proceedings from the Ladies Gallery and would at least have a seat, if not a clear view of the wearisome proceedings.
Many of these women had, over the years, spent night after night behind the metal mesh bars that enclosed the high, narrow windows of the gallery so that they could see into the Commons but not be seen. Most of the time they came to listen to debates of legislation like the Contagious Diseases Act, which, as Dora Montefiore now reflected from her seat in the gallery with Emmeline Pankhurst, raised questions that concerned their sex as much, if not more, than they did that of the men who were discussing them.2
The Vehicles Lights Bill was not in that category. It was a ruse to delay debate on a bill that concerned women more than any other: the third reading of the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill.
It would be the eighteenth time in thirty-seven years that a private member’s bill had been presented to parliament for the enfranchisement of women. For much of the previous twenty years, the United Kingdom had been governed by a coalition of the Conservative and Unionist parties. This women’s suffrage bill was the first to be read in eight long years.3 Since 1902, the Tories had been led by Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, whose government held a massive majority. It fell to Liberal Party men like Bamford Slack, a brickmaker’s son and Methodist lay preacher who had been elected to the House only the previous year, to introduce bills for women’s suffrage. Slack’s sister, Agnes, was a high-profile temperance activist, the British secretary for the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Agnes believed in political equality for women. Slack believed in supporting his sister and, by extension, her ‘sisters’ in the movement. The suffragists themselves had long maintained as an article of faith that men and women will advance with equal steps towards their common destiny.4 The conviction was pragmatic as much as pious. Only men had the vote, and only men were MPs, therefore only men could change the laws.
Each parliamentary session the suffragists lobbied potential allies to convince one who had been successful in the ballot for a private member’s bill to devote that place to women’s suffrage. In February this year, Bamford Slack had won a ballot place and the tiny white-haired suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy had persuaded him to give his place to the suffrage bill.5 The bill was duly drafted by Keir Hardie, the Independent Labour Party member, and approved by Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union.
Could the time now be ripe for a victory? In 1897, when the last bill went up, Christabel Pankhurst was aged seventeen. Now she had a law degree, if not the legal capacity to be admitted to the bar. Last time, Australia was not even a nation, much less a nation where universal adult suffrage was a cornerstone of the constitution. New Zealand’s women had been voting for over a decade by 1905. Surely times had changed.
Over and over again, the suffragists had mounted the stairs to the gallery with high hopes, only to slump back down again having watched their bill crushed by ridicule, contempt and parliamentary game-playing. One of the favourite tricks of the government was to refuse to give the bill ‘facilities’—that is, a slot in the session in which it could be debated. Sometimes facilities would be granted, but other business left no time in the parliamentary session to get to the suffrage bill. Or the bill might be ‘talked out’—filibustering, the Americans called it—in which case opponents would stretch out debate for so long that there was no time left to call for a division.
On seventeen previous occasions, such obstructionist tactics had prevented British women from receiving their rights, or even getting their arguments across. Last year, however, on the second reading of Slack’s bill, a division had been taken—and carried by a large majority.6 To avoid going to a division was the object of the opponents who had bothered to turn up today.
Which was why the men were now droning on about how, in some English counties, every moving vehicle needed to carry a light, while in other counties a slow moving cart, or a cart standing by the roadside, need not carry a light at all. Did Mr Bigwell intend to extend his bill to sheep? What of bicycles? Parents were afraid to let their children on the street…The Tory MP Mr Labouchere rose to say he supposed he would be accused of talking on this bill in order to keep off the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill, but totally dissociated himself from this charge, although he had strong views, both on the ladies and the lights. On it went, member after member. For four hours. A division was called; the Vehicles Lights Bill was narrowly defeated.
It was 4 p.m. by the time Bamford Slack was called to introduce his bill. In doing so, he regretted the extraordinary abuse of the House which had been indulged in. But he would waste no further time. His bill was a modest one. It proposed no new-fangled franchise. It merely called for an extension of the existing franchise of this country to women. It would give a vote to every woman, he explained, who under the present register would have had one if she had been a man. He proposed nothing so outlandish as adult suffrage, which, of course, was not yet available to British men, let alone women. His bill was simple, fair and workable.7 The enfranchisement of women was a necessary factor in our modern social progress.8 It was unconstitutional, inexpedient, mischievous and unjust to continue to deny women the British liberty for which the parliament surely stood.9
The motion was seconded by Sir J. Rolleston. Then Mr Labouchere stood. He had voted for women’s suffrage when John Stuart Mill raised the issue thirty-seven years ago, he began, and regretted it ever since. With every passing year he had realised how constitutionally unfit women were for political rights. After all, he reasoned, there was a difference between men and women, physically and intellectually. (Laughter). She could not be a soldier. She could not be a policeman. Women had little sense of proportion. And when you try to argue with them, well, everybody knows. As the STANDARD reported, this he said shrugging his shoulders, and sending members into a whirl of laughter.10
Let them think what would happen if they turned this Parliament into a promiscuity of the sexes. It would not be safe…the intelligent Ulysses closed his ears not to hear the song of the sirens…I am an old man, but even I refuse to see ladies who come to the lobbies of the House of Commons to cajole members to vote for Female Suffrage, for fear I would succumb. (Laughter) But there are younger members than myself…there will be political flirtations in the lobby.
On went the pantomime, with Mr Labouchere entertaining the House while some of the women stood at the little peep hole by the side of the folding doors whence in turn they could watch Mr Labouchere, with tongue almost obviously in his cheek.11
Just before half past five, a blushing Bamford Slack moved to extend the session so as to take a division. The deputy speaker denied the motion and allowed the bill to be talked out. Mr Slack stalked the floor, an outraged man. The House adjourned at 5.35.
With Slack prowling like an angry tiger, the women in the gallery were more akin to a tribe of irate monkeys. They were offended, humiliated and indignant. They had seen it all before—Labouchere’s worn-out platitudes had been refuted over and over—but there was no doubt that this government was getting worse. More retrograde, more reactionary. Why did women have to prove themselves worthy of the franchise when men like Labouchere were so patently unworthy of running the affairs of the nation?12 And how could the Imperial Parliament be so conducted as to devote four hours to such a slight proposal as the Vehicles Lights Bill?13 Yesterday at least the order of the day had been a matter of importance: imperial defence. But whether a cart needed to carry a light on a dark night on a country road…?
These shenanigans—the talking out, the keepings off, Mr Labouchere’s feeble jibes and obscurantist prejudice—would get a fair run in the London papers. But what happened next went unreported. One woman saw the fury and disgust on the faces of those leaping down from the Ladies Gallery and, knowing there were hundreds more waiting in the Strangers’ Lobby to hear the fate of the bill, she decided that something must be done.
Let us protest, the woman determined. She proposed an impromptu demonstration and led the infuriated suffragists outside to the statue of Richard Coeur de Lion. The police moved them on. A sympathetic Commons clerk led them to the ‘Sanctuary’, along Parliament Square. And there, under the woman’s guidance, they drafted a declaration of no confidence in the government.
Your petitioners view with indignation and alarm the exacting procedure of the House of Commons, which reduces legislation to a mere game of chance, and permits the repeated and insulting postponement of the first claims of women to citizenship.
Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that your honourable House will so reform your procedure as to secure in future fair consideration of public questions with some regard to their relative importance.
The woman was requested to read it, which I did, and it was carried unanimously. Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy signed the declaration and pledged to give it to Keir Hardie, who was her contemporary and friend. He would table it in the Commons the next day. Satisfied, the group retired to the tea room and wrote other resolutions, and they have been broadcast over the land. The woman later wrote to her friend in Australia:
It would have done your heart good to have seen the old workers, the wronged workers, the independent and the dependent workers, the strong and the weak, the learned and the less advanced, all joining together, irrespective of position, asking for justice for their sex…The women are not cold when wronged in England any more than in Australia.
And she signed off her letter to her old mate Louisa Lawson: With hope for our future work in Sydney…NELLIE A. MARTEL.14
The aftermath of Nellie’s election loss had been grim. Where respect for Vida Goldstein’s intelligence and integrity was elevated by her campaign and result, Nellie’s reputation copped a beating. Not only did she forfeit her £25 deposit, but she lost the high moral ground of sex superiority. Who is THIS MARTEL WOMAN who prates about personal purity in politics? asked the TRUTH a few months after the election, when Nellie tried to engage in a heated public debate about the falling birth numbers in New South Wales.
Is she herself such a model of marital and maternal propriety and perfection that she should pose as a paragon prophetess on personal and political purity?
…The irresponsible wagging of the tongue of this Martel woman as to the personal ‘purity’ of one of our most highly esteemed public men led to an action for libel very properly taken against the wild, wanton ‘Watchdog’ by Miss Annie Golding, a highly competent school-teacher.15
The Australian press was playing favourites, and Nellie was decidedly not the flavour of the month. She threatened to launch a libel action of her own, but did not follow through. Instead, she wrote letters to the editor trying to express her opinion (including that Australian women were remarkable amongst the women of the world for practising prevention and abortion to limit their family size16) only to be slapped down in counter-letters. She continued to work as president of the Women’s Liberal and Reform Association and the press continued to parody her. One journal reported Nellie addressing a meeting of working-class women and punctuating her political promises and premises with a glittering forefinger the diamonds on which would have meant warmth and nourishment…for many months.17
By midwinter 1904, Nellie had found a reason to retreat from the front line. Mrs Nellie Martel has left Australia, announced TRUTH on 21 August, my informant says she has taken her husband, who is a very aged man, to his people in England. The exact date of Mrs Martel’s return is not known.18
Like much of what TRUTH passed off as news, only parts of the story were true. Charles, who was fifty-six, had left for England in February that year, six months before his forty-nine-year-old wife. The exact date of Nellie’s return was unclear, but she happily told anyone who asked that she planned to return next summer to continue her suffrage work in Sydney.
Nellie travelled to London via South Africa, where the NATAL MERCURY published an extensive interview with the inveterate and ruthless talker, details of which were freely published in newspapers across Australia.19 The Sydney EVENING NEWS feared that this feminine bearer of evil tidings will repeat her story of misfortune, losing nothing by repetition as she pursues her wordy way.20
Nellie’s reputation as a crank and a whinger was not entirely misplaced. In her NATAL MERCURY interview, she criticised Australia for the political chaos that reigned, though she claimed the bedlam had nothing to do with female voters. Instead, the labour party are really at the root of the whole matter. Nellie was an enigma: a lady agitator abroad who decried the socialistic laws that, for many, were part of the progressive spirit that had ushered in womanhood suffrage. Contradicting the message that Vida Goldstein was sending to the world, Nellie was adamant that the women of Australia are not supporters of the labor party.21 The Australian press had its answer to this puzzle: No sensible person ever took Mrs Martel seriously.22
If the Australian press continued to make Nellie a pariah, in South Africa she found a new audience. In 1904, South Africa had just seen its first organised women’s suffrage association, but there were many women advocating women’s rights, even during the Boer War. One of the most vocal of these, English South African Olive Schreiner, in fact linked the two causes. Many a one [woman] hadtaken her place in the trenches during the late war, argued Schreiner, proving their fitness for citizenship.23 Schreiner was not only pro-Boer, but a republican who argued for a federation of the South African colonies along Australian lines. Many South African suffragists believed that, following the Australian precedent, if women helped bring about federation they should be given the suffrage. Australian women’s agency in nation-building had been observed from afar, and now Nellie was on hand to offer her advice and experience. Far from rushing to be with her husband and his people, Nellie stayed in South Africa for three months.
She arrived in London in November 1904, just as Emmeline Pankhurst was considering starting up a London branch of her Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU had been founded in the Pankhursts’ home in Manchester in late 1903 by a small group of women who were aligned to the Independent Labour Party. The WSPU was a half-loaf organisation: resigned to the property qualification, never aiming to achieve the franchise for all women. If at least some women had the vote, Pankhurst believed, then social reform could be achieved for all women. The initial strategy of the WSPU was to convince the ILP to include women’s suffrage in its party platform, just as Mary Lee had convinced South Australian Labor over ten years earlier.
Though the Manchester-based WSPU had some success in raising the profile of the cause, Nellie couldn’t help but notice on her arrival that its membership was small: only thirty people.24 So far, convincing Bamford Slack to devote his ballot place to a women’s suffrage bill was Emmeline Pankhurst’s greatest political achievement.
Dora Montefiore had also become attached to Emmeline’s small retinue, despite the differences in their view of the franchise. Dora was a voracious whole-loafer, but you had to admit that Emmeline Pankhurst had something Mrs Fawcett, her rival at the NUWSS, lacked: gentleness and charm, as her daughter Sylvia noted, but also steel strength in her determination to fight to the end.25 The glint in her eye was magnetic.
In London, Nellie lost no time in making her presence felt. By April, the Sydney SUNDAY SUN noted in its gossip column that Mrs C. Martel, of Sydney, has been lecturing and addressing meetings in London.26 Dozens of them, by Nellie’s reckoning, particularly the Women’s Co-operative Guild. The dresses, the fine linen, the pretty knick-knacks, Nellie told them,
all these little luxuries that make the home pretty, often have been made with the life-blood of our sisters. I am thankful that I have made my home under the Southern Cross [where] we give them the interest of the labour which made the wealth of the country.27
Nellie criticised the disgraceful poorhouses which were a blot on English society. Such conditions as the people are living under here, she argued, can never happen in the country where women have the vote.
The London press began tracking her, and on 3 April she was afforded an interview by the DAILY NEWS, one of London’s most highly circulated papers. How We Won the Vote: Australian Lesson to English Women screamed the headline, followed by a lengthy interview that was circulated throughout Britain. Nellie had evidently learnt from her South African experience that pulling some of her punches, or at least redirecting them, might be in her long-term interests. Instead of criticising Australia, she decided to claim it as the feminist utopia the world clearly wanted it to be. The Woman’s Suffrage Bill is coming before your Parliament in a few weeks, noted Nellie. What surprises me—pains me, in fact—is to find here much division of opinion on the subject. Did you expect to find all classes of women in agreement about the vote in England? asked the journalist.
I expected to find at least something of the spirit that guided us in Australia. We fought for eleven years through one society alone—a society of which I was recording secretary before we won the vote in New South Wales.
Nellie’s answer was equal parts sanctimonious and self-aggrandising. But she had found her groove, and she stuck with it.
I am inclined to attribute the indifference of the Parliament [to womanhood suffrage] to the deplorable lack of agreement among Englishwomen on the subject. In Australia we were united as one in our agitation for the franchise. Conservatives and Liberals, Protestants and Catholics, Socialists and Labour people, or whatever else women called ourselves individually, made not the slightest difference to our movement for the vote… What on earth is the use of women belonging to this political party or that until they have a vote?28
Nellie admitted she was politically aligned as a Free Trader, but insisted that such battles as tariff reform could only be fought once the vote was secured. The same went for adult suffrage.
Let Englishwomen get the vote, Nellie concluded. They will then cease to be simply voices crying in the wilderness. Her advice was not a suggestion. It was a challenge.
Christabel Pankhurst would later write about the fateful 12 May, claiming that Mother called the protest meeting outside the House of Commons, ably supported in her defiant action by Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, the aged pioneer, and Mrs Martel, the woman voter from Australia.29
But Emmeline herself—never one to hide her light under a bushel—didn’t make herself the heroine of the story. She later called the events of 12 May 1905 the first militant act of the WSPU but claimed no personal credit.30 Sylvia Pankhurst split the difference. In her account, when the police insisted that the women move from the Richard the Lionheart statue, Emmeline, with tremulant voice and blazing eyes, cried out where could we meet then; where could poor women voice their indignation? It was to Nellie that Emmeline looked for the answer. Mrs Pankhurst called on Mrs Martel, as an Australian woman voter, to lead us and, joined by a single MP, Mr Keir Hardie, we marched with the police to Broad Sanctuary.31
It was there they drafted the resolution that Nellie read to the crowd. It was also Nellie who brought the Women’s Co-operative Guild workers, a fact not disclosed in her own account to Louisa Lawson. Sylvia wrote that the co-op women had been brought thither by Nellie Alma Martel…in high spirits, believing that they were to witness a brilliant victory.32 That triumph was not to be. But it was significant that the potential passage of the first Woman’s Suffrage Bill in eight years had attracted not only members of the various middle-class suffrage societies, including the WSPU, but working women as well. This day began the fusion of classes, stated Mrs Elmy, for women [who] have left the wash-tub to come to the House walked hand in hand, side by side with fashionably dressed ladies.33
It is Sylvia Pankhurst who gives Nellie the credit for first crossing class lines.
Amongst the rest was a large contingent of women Co-operators, accompanied by Mrs Nellie Alma Martel, of Australia, who had helped to win votes for women there, and had afterwards run as a candidate for the Commonwealth Parliament, having polled more than 20,000 votes.34
A newcomer to the London suffrage scene, Nellie claimed an authority based on her prior experience, prominence and presumed success in the Australian movement. (In England, twenty thousand votes were enough to return half a dozen men to the British House of Commons, as Louisa Lawson pointed out.35) She had something new to offer, something that had already been road-tested, and when Christabel Pankhurst called her ‘our Australian friend’, it must have been nice for Nellie to know she had some.36
Up until now, the campaign strategy of the suffrage societies had been entirely ‘constitutional’: raising petitions, lobbying members, sending deputations, holding meetings, publishing and disseminating written propaganda. The approach had been a softly-softly one, suitably genteel and ladylike. Win the support of Liberal members. In turn, help them win their election campaigns. Educate the general public, and women themselves, in how to argue for female enfranchisement and refute the dire predictions of its antagonists. The suffragists had been trenchant, but not transgressive. Argumentative, but not agitators. They worked to raise consciousness, but never Cain.
But this compliance hadn’t got the suffragists anywhere in close to forty years, had it? With these militant tactics commenced on May 12, 1905, outside the House of Commons, reckoned Nellie, we have hit on a magnificent plan of campaign.37
Women were awake at last, rejoiced Emmeline.
They were prepared to do something that women had never done before—fight for themselves. Women had always fought for men and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights.38
There was not only anger in the air that pleasant spring evening, but excitement too. Something had shifted, something was changing. It was as the editor of the women’s page of the DAILY NEWS wrote that May: everyone is trying just now…to live ‘half a hundred different lives’…at a sort of motor-speed.39 And there were suddenly new drivers behind the wheel.
If Dora Montefiore—who had left the New South Wales Womanhood Suffrage League before Nellie joined but had kept a watching brief on antipodean affairs since her departure from Sydney over a decade ago—was suspicious of ‘the Australian woman’s’ integrity or intent, she was smart enough to keep it to herself.