It was not quite the view from the Octagon, but Dora Montefiore, standing at the second-floor window of her Hammersmith home, could see directly to the river. Perhaps it didn’t sparkle like Sydney Harbour; nonetheless the Thames, with its endless, mesmeric passage of barges and water traffic, pulsed with a life of its own. And now that it was May and the interminable London fogs had started to lift, there was promise in the air.
Imagine. A landslide victory to the Liberals at the recent election—the Conservatives losing more than half their seats, including Balfour’s own seat in East Manchester—with the biggest swing in the history of British elections. An unbelievable 125-seat absolute majority for the Liberals, and the Tories so reviled that even the Labour Party had picked up twenty-nine seats.
Dora wished she could share the buoyant spring mood of England’s populace. But it had not taken long for the high hopes that Dora and her compatriots held for Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s government to fade. The prime minister had turned a deaf ear when a deputation, including Dora and her friend and fellow socialist Selina Cooper, waited on him at Number 10 a week ago. They represented over a quarter of a million voteless women, including fifty thousand textile workers like herself, Selina had told him: women who produce the wealth of Lancashire.1
Campbell-Bannerman was sympathetic to the women’s cause, he said, but his cabinet, particularly Mr Asquith, the chancellor of the exchequer, was opposed to introducing a suffrage bill as a government measure. He could make no pledge. His advice was threefold: go on pestering, cultivate the virtue of patience and educate Parliament a little more. Nag. Wait. Educate. Good grief! As if the politicians had not heard every claim for and counter-claim against women’s suffrage rehearsed ad infinitum. Poor Mrs Elmy. At seventy-three, she had witnessed fourteen parliaments, but has never seen a Cabinet so inimical to Woman’s Suffrage as the present.2
Campbell-Bannerman’s condescension was all Dora needed to cement the course she had set herself on here today. Patience was not an option. Resistance was the only route possible. And pestering? That she could do. She would make the weak-willed prime minister rue the day he issued those foolish words.
On 24 May 1906, with the bailiffs who had come to either effect an entrance or starve her out surrounding her home, Dora stood at her bedroom window. Holding the railing of her balconette with one hand and her little terrier with the other, she regally addressed the crowd gathered outside.
The women who are refusing to pay their taxes are taking this course in order to advance the education of the cabinet ministers. Those of us who are conducting this campaign are determined to obtain our indisputable rights. The cabinet ministers who oppose the movement are marked men. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is an assassin. He stands in the way of the advance of the women’s movement. Ladies, I suggest you break the windows of Mr Asquith’s house. I would do so myself, if it were not for the fact that I am engaged in defending my residence against the tax collectors.3
This was a ‘harangue’, according to the WASHINGTON POST’S London correspondent: Leader of Woman Suffragists in London Harangues Crowd. But Dora knew she was neither berating nor lecturing the hundred-strong body of women who had rallied outside. She had their complete support. Many had come with food and were now throwing it over the high front wall, upon which they had draped a banner: We Demand the Vote this Session. One woman had even brought a pot of marmalade which she passed over the wall to a maid: to succour the garrison, she said.4
Dora called for a megaphone but none was forthcoming. Instead she shook the marmalade and raised her voice. My action is against the injustice that in New South Wales I am a voter, she explained to her friends, here I am a political nonentity. (Mrs Martel, who had recently been appointed as a paid organiser for the WSPU, was standing on a chair also haranguing the crowd, as one of the twenty-two reporters present noted with a certain lack of originality.5)
Dora had come a long way from her Sydney days as a vulnerable young mother and widow, aghast at the threat posed by her legal subordination. Now, she was a mature woman, independent financially and intellectually. She was employed as a columnist for the radical journal NEW AGE; she owned her home and drew an income from properties in Australia, where her grown son Gilbert was once again living.
She had what the Lancashire mill workers did not: options, security and citizenship. She could join Gilbert in Australia at any time. Indeed, she frequently encouraged young British women to emigrate to the land where the woman Uitlander has ceased to exist… for there only and in the neighbouring colony of New Zealand are women really free citizens; and there only can a mother boast of being the free mother of free sons and daughters.6 In that land that knew no fog, Dora had family connections and friends in Labor circles. But right now, Britain needed her. She would stay and fight.
Feeling a tickle in her throat, Dora tucked a cocaine lozenge under her tongue and continued her ‘harangue’. The Siege of Hammersmith had begun.
The perfidy of the new Liberal government might have been the trigger for Dora’s present action, but her tax resistance was a tactic she’d been experimenting with over the past two years. In July 1904, she’d made headlines for her ‘Widow’s Heroic Stand’, in which she had refused to pay her tax bill, because she has not a parliamentary vote, and waited to see what would happen.
What happened was that an unsympathetic collector thereupon put in an equally unsympathetic bailiff. The bailiff barged into the Hammersmith house, seized a sideboard, six chairs, a dressing table and a lady’s bicycle and handed them over to an auctioneer. The sale was well advertised—mostly by Mrs Montefiore and her friends, noted the Brisbane TELEGRAPH as Australia watched the proceedings from afar—and by the time the sale of her distrained goods proceeded, the auction room was crowded not only with furniture but also with unrestrained suffragists and advocates of female rights. Dora’s principled stand had turned out to be a brilliant publicity stunt.
The auctioneer, flustered by the sudden popularity of his rooms, decided to express his regret at seeing that anyone bearing the honoured name of Montefiore had refused to pay the King’s taxes. Dora could sense that his speech was somewhat resented by those present, and seized the opportunity to take the high ground. Since the auctioneer had thought to mention her name, she would hasten to remind the crowd that the name belonged to a family which had always fought for liberty on behalf of the race to which it belonged.7 A reference to her dead husband’s Jewish heritage was the perfect segue to her own oppression.
When the time came to sell Dora’s goods, the auctioneer permitted her to make a speech. It’s not clear he had any other choice. I stand here on liberty, Dora began.
The government has a large majority…but we women can be neither in the majority or the minority. We are outsiders—we are Outlanders. We ought not to be forced to obey laws we did not help to make. Therefore I feel it incumbent on me to show in every way that I stand for liberty.8
The auctioneer, keen to move on and clear his rooms of goods, chattels and suffragists, led the applause and declared that female enfranchisement was only a matter of time. But Dora wasn’t finished. In Australia, she went on, a woman can give her vote, but here in England, voting is denied her. I am ranked with convicts, children and lunatics. That is the difference between England and Australia.
Perhaps the colonial ‘blow’ didn’t go over so well with Dora’s supporters. Her possessions were knocked down at prices that covered the tax bill of just over £12—but they weren’t bought back for her by her friends, as she expected. In fact, her friends didn’t place a bid at all.9
If Dora was irked by the pinchpenny response of her wealthier supporters—there were present in the room women from the Primrose Society, drawn from the same ruling class in which she’d been raised in Surrey, as well as the socialist organisations to which she’d been drawn since becoming politicised in her forties—she didn’t express it. She had learnt through bitter experience that it was imprudent to make enemies in high or low places. For though the plump, matronly widow did not look like a femme fatale, she had in fact been embroiled in a high-profile sex scandal.
In 1899, Dora began a relationship with George Belt, a former brickie’s labourer thirteen years her junior, who was working as a paid organiser for the Independent Labour Party. They met while travelling together in the Clarion Van, a touring party of socialist propagandists funded by the left-wing CLARION newspaper. George, described by solicitors in the ensuing court case as a well built, good looking man of the artisan class, active, energetic, keen, was married to a factory worker, with whom he had four children, when he fell for Dora.10 Their attraction appears to have been based on a mutual interest in economic theory, class struggle and social justice, ideas they shared with others in their circle: William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie and Eleanor Marx among them.
But there was a clear romantic connection also. ‘Satyriasis’—uncontrollable sexual desire in a man—was the term used to describe George’s attachment to Dora.11 Dora herself called it a muscular bond and saw the relationship as consistent with her wider political principles, including her commitment to free will and free thinking. I do care for liberty, she wrote to Keir Hardie when the scandal first broke, my private friendships no one has a right to control or question. But her socialist peers did not see it that way. When the affair became public, Belt lost his job and Dora was forced to take a back seat in her role in various socialist organisations.
The court case was in fact initiated by Belt, who sued the wife of ILP leader Ramsay MacDonald for libel. At the centre of the case was a letter written by Dora, described by defence lawyers as a remarkable letter for a lady of good social position to write to a bricklayer’s labourer. The case revealed the complex, socially conservative sexual politics of the labour movement, as well as the need for the women’s movement to be seen to be beyond moral reproach. It also gives an idea of the extent of Dora’s resources and her nerve: though Belt was technically the plaintiff, there is no doubt that Dora bankrolled the litigation. A thoroughly peeved MacDonald eventually settled out of court for the not-insubstantial sum of £120, but Dora may have been the real loser. She not only feared reprisal from Labour cronies but also worried that the respectable matriarchs of the women’s movement would not take kindly to her indiscretion.12 Purity—of body, mind and purpose—was critical to the sex superiority claimed by suffragists.
So Dora knew that she was, as one WSPU member noted, not everywhere well received, there having been heterodox passages in her private life which people resent.13 Dora played by the rules of social convention, taking care not to openly criticise any but her sworn political enemies. But political precepts were another matter. When tax time rolled around in 1905, Dora (who was still involved with Belt, despite the public disgrace) once again refused to pay her bill. In an article written for the NEW AGE to explain her stand, she made it apparent that having her goods confiscated was not her ideal punishment for non-compliance. If the choice were possible, she wrote, I should prefer going to prison to purge my offence of rebellion against an unjust law, rather than suffer a financial loss which I can ill afford.14 Dora was evidently not so comfortably well off that she was happy to keep replacing the furniture.
This time around, the bailiffs took the silver. Perhaps because there were, by late 1905, many more suffragette skirmishes to tempt the press or perhaps because the auction occurred on a Friday night three days before Christmas, only one newspaper reported the sale. Again, Dora made a speech in front of a small but devoted crowd. Some men who were present in the auction rooms uttered cries of Shame and Hear, hear at appropriate moments in her address. When her silverware was knocked down for £13, more than the amount of her tax bill, Dora queried the auctioneer. He told her not to be concerned. The buyer, he informed her, was someone representing her.15 Dora would eat her plum pudding with her own cutlery. But it would not be the last time she failed to receive a Christmas card from the Crown.
The residents of Hammersmith all seemed to be walking in the same direction on the afternoon of 27 May 1906: towards the plain red brick house at number 22 Upper Mall. There was nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbours, noted the OBSERVER, save a banner stretched across a little summerhouse in the corner of the raised garden. Dora’s hand-stitched banner was bright crimson with white lettering upon it, bearing the motto:
Women should vote for the taxes they pay and the laws they obey.
Otherwise, the house was a simple three-storey villa tucked behind a high brick wall. The window above the front door had a small semi-circular railing enclosing its panes. And it was to this balconette, big enough to fit a stout woman and a small dog, that the gathering crowd now looked. It was clear that there was to be no quick fix for the trouble at Fort Montefiore, as the WSPU had taken to calling the otherwise unassuming house where the Siege of the Suffragette was entering its third day.16 But so far there had been no sight of the intractable landlady or her wire-haired terrier.
It had been rumoured that Miss Kenney and Miss Billington would be arriving today with a contingent of women from Canning Vale and Bow to hold a demonstration in the garden. Dora had shared her plan—to barricade herself in her home when the bailiffs arrived, knowing that, by law, they were only allowed to enter via the front door during daylight hours—with Kenney and Billington. They agreed that the publicity such an action would generate would be a boon for the WSPU. Sure enough, a procession of women was now approaching, banners flying. A pair of steps was fetched for the leaders to scale the wall. Annie Kenney, wearing a green tam o’shanter cap and a dark blue cape, tripped when landing in the flowerbed on the other side of the wall, causing some titters among the casual onlookers. The rest of the women stayed back and sang ‘Keep the Red Flag Flying’, no doubt to warm the cockles of Dora’s socialist heart and as a pointed reference to the crimson banner hanging over the summer house.
Teresa Billington (in a light brown ulster and green velvet picture hat, for there was no context too earnest for the annotation of women’s fashion) opened the outdoor meeting. Whatever weapons we are obliged to use, she said, we shall use them and continue to use them without stop or stay until the government…But the rest of her sentence was drowned out by a passing coal wagon which wedged its way through the crowd. Billington eulogised Mrs Montefiore for her protest, and urged every woman to refuse to pay taxes until she got her vote.
A group of boys from St Paul’s School, directly across the river, had swelled the throng after their 3 p.m. dismissal. One looked up to the house and noticed that the old lady and her dog were sitting at the open window. When Miss Billington had finished eulogising, Mrs Montefiore stood up to speak (white blouse, black tie) and was received with a round of hearty cheers from her supporters in the garden and on the roadway. Dora explained that her present action was a direct response to the prime minister’s advice a week ago to educate the parliament. So here she was, giving them an object lesson. She had tried quieter methods of getting her message across, but the time for reasonable means was over. We women don’t like publicity [but] we are obliged to go against the deepest tradition of our nature, Dora exhorted, somewhat disingenuously, and go down and fight as men fight for our rights. The cabinet members had had enough abstract teaching, she continued, now a little concrete teaching may do them good.17 Dora was candid about her circumstances, telling the press:
My income is derived mainly from property in Australia where for many years I resided. It is taxed over there, and taxed again in this country. I never objected to paying taxes in Australia, because there women have votes both for the State Parliament and for the Commonwealth. There women are not disqualified from sitting in the Commonwealth Parliament. One lady at the last election, although unsuccessful, polled over 20,000 votes.18
Nellie Martel, take a bow.
More cheers, followed by more speeches from other suffragists present, followed by a resolution denouncing taxation without representation as tyranny and calling upon the government to enfranchise women, followed by a show of hands for the motion. All raised their hands except the schoolboys. Finally, Miss Billington called on those gathered to make a monetary contribution to the cause and stood back from the wall as people flung their small change into the garden. Miss Billington closed the proceedings by announcing there would be a meeting every Wednesday and Saturday, unless, she added ominously, the siege is raised in the meantime. For the meantime, the WSPU would make Fort Montefiore the centre of its London operations. The crowd dispersed. Those taking an evening stroll by the river in the cool spring air would see only an uninteresting house front, a dozing policeman and the odd spectacle of a parcel of household goods being piffed over the wall.19
And so it went day after day, week after week, as May turned into June, spring into summer. All over England, suffragettes were invading Liberal Party meetings, disrupting proceedings with their questions, unfurling banners, and being forcibly ejected by annoyed politicians. David Lloyd George, the victim of one such action in Liverpool in June, declared he had always been a supporter of women’s suffrage and would continue to be whatever some silly women might do.20 Some of those suffragists who had been working for the franchise for decades through the auspices of Mrs Fawcett’s NUWSS began to worry that political reform might be actually handicapped rather than assisted by the conduct of the extreme suffragists. To these anxious onlookers, Dora Montefiore’s action was seen as but the latest exhibition of eccentricity.
One Australian journalist covering the London proceedings for the Adelaide ADVERTISER noted with some consternation the change in Dora’s tactics. He had been present in her drawing room in Sydney at the very first meeting she convened of the WSL in 1891. I could not help contrasting the methods then adopted, he wrote, with those now being pursued by the militant section of the woman suffragists in England.
The programme we formulated on that occasion was based on moral suasion and was purely educational in its scope. It aimed at convincing the male electorate of New South Wales by argument that equal electoral rights at the ballot-box belonged equitably to women as much as to men.
It had taken time to achieve that aim, but after the vote was eventually won, the journalist noted, all men agreed with the women’s claim that the agitation had been conducted throughout with ability, honor and dignity. It was a matter of profound astonishment to the journalist that with Australia’s experience to guide them, the suffrage advocates in England had resorted to such indiscreet methods, an approach sure to fail in its object, just as militancy would have failed in Australia had it been tried.21
It was of no concern to Dora that fellow suffragists, and the Australian press for that matter, disproved of her methods. People had asked her, was she mad? Yes, she was mad, was her sharp reply, in the sense that Americans used the expression to mean thoroughly stirred and angry.22 But she wasn’t crazy. Sane people kept their distance from crazy people, but look what was happening here in Hammersmith. Each day, at about noon, a contingent of supporters would arrive, joined by assorted street waifs and riverside loungers. There was always a solitary constable on duty to guard the house and keep the peace, but his services were never required.
Dora would sit at her bedroom window, stroking her Irish terrier. Women would bring her a basket of strawberries, a jar of cream, a bunch of flowers, two cottage loaves. Tradespeople made deliveries, including her freshly laundered white shirts. Her mail was delivered—shoals of letters…a few sadly vulgar and revolting, but the majority helpful and encouraging.23 Each day she would address those present from her window, noting that her object was to demonstrate how a woman feels when she has to pay taxes without the right to vote.24 (A Lancashire mill worker, who also had to pay tax, might have quipped that it appeared to feel quite restful, thanks all the same.)
One Australian paper noted that in the state of open war between the suffragists and the government now at play in England, the Siege of Hammersmith was the most picturesque incident of the struggle so far.25 Dora’s wellbeing was never threatened, but she refused to have her action trivialised.
I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.
There was no doubting her sincerity. It was Dora who had marched a thousand destitute women from the East End slums to Westminster to lobby Balfour over the Unemployed Bill. (Balfour had notoriously protected himself with a scent spray from the smell of their poverty.)26 And it was Dora who had introduced Annie Kenney to the East End women she was now recruiting to the WSPU. Adult suffrage was as important to Dora now as it had been in Australia; in this much her outlook had not changed since Sydney. And in this way her ideology differed from the WSPU.
By the beginning of July, the authorities had had enough of the performance. It was time to move the circus on. The mad widow had been a self-made prisoner for six weeks now. With all the strawberries and cottage loaves going over the wall, there was no starving her out. The police obtained a warrant empowering them to forcibly break into the house. The great oak gate, set into the brick wall, would prove a rather formidable obstacle for the bailiffs, but they would break it down if need be.
The OBSERVER predicted a showdown in its coverage on 1 July—Mrs Montefiore’s house to be taken by storm—but when the bailiffs eventually broke through her blockaded front door two days later, it was more like a sun shower than a tornado. Dora wasn’t even there. She had slipped out to go to a demonstration protesting the arrest of Annie Kenney. She simply requested that they leave the furniture and take the silverware, as much as may be required to settle the debt,27 and left it to her maid and her dog to greet the bailiffs. They stayed true to their mistress’s aim of passive, non-violent protest and let the bailiffs take the spoons.28
Unlike the previous two occasions when Dora’s goods had gone up for sale, the Crown supplied twenty-two police officers to guard the auctioneer. But all the king’s men were not required because again we agreed that it was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities. A young Indian lawyer who was in London at the time studied this instance of non-violent civil disobedience closely. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; he was later more commonly known as Mahatma.
The stand-off at Fort Montefiore had proved that passive resistance to unjust laws could attract considerable attention, fulfilling at least one of the prime minister’s exhortations: to go on pestering.29 The press was still scurrilous in its bias and misrepresentations, but public opinion might start to side with the suffragists if the justice of their case became more visible, especially if their ‘rational’ male antagonists became more flustered. But would that sway the judgment of those in power? Would the Liberal government’s cabinet ministers agree to introduce a suffrage bill at the next sitting?
In the autumn of 1906 the WSPU, which had recently moved its headquarters from Manchester to London, requested a meeting with the prime minister ahead of the opening of parliament for the autumn session on 23 October. Campbell-Bannerman refused to see them, on the grounds that he’d already informed the WSPU leadership (and the public) that as long as the cabinet was divided on the issue he could not introduce a Women’s Suffrage Bill. On 3 October, twenty suffragettes, including Nellie Martel, Dora Montefiore, Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, led a ‘raid’ on the House of Commons, determined to seek an audience with the prime minister. They rushed the lobby of the Commons, stood on chairs, heckled and shouted ‘Votes for Women’, refusing to leave the building when police tried to eject them. Nellie and nine others were arrested for using violent and abusive language but not charged.30
On 23 October, the importunate women repeated the whole scenario.31 Thirty suffragettes, including Nellie and Dora, assembled in the lobby of the House of Commons. Women were daring to voice their wrongs in the very sanctuary of male exclusiveness, declared Dora.32 In violently worded speeches, they declared that women were entitled to the franchise and would no longer be slaves. They waved flags and banners, and when police intervened, the women linked arms and formed a cordon around the leaders, who, mounted on a bench, continued their harangue.33 Emmeline Pankhurst was dragged off the bench by police and thrown to the floor. More police were summoned and a scuffle broke out. Dora was caught in the centre of the action: My arm was twisted up against my back by a very strong-muscled policeman. The women scratched and fought until they were overpowered. Dora was thrown down the steps of Westminster Hall. Some were carried out into the street kicking and screaming hysterically ‘Cowards! Do you call this freedom?’
Once outside, the women refused to go home quietly and started another meeting instead. Ten suffragettes, including Nellie, were arrested on the charge of using threatening and abusive language. Take Mrs Montefiore [too], bellowed Inspector Jarvis, she is one of the ringleaders.34 As Dora was led away to Cannon Row police station, her hair down and her clothes torn, Nellie told police that as an enfranchised woman of Sydney, she had the right to enter the lobby of the parliament. Nellie reminded those who had gathered to watch the fracas that she had polled twenty thousand votes as a candidate for the Commonwealth Senate and warned that if she were not admitted to the lobby, she would dispatch a cablegram to Australia, intimating that she had been excluded, and then ‘the Ministry will soon see that Australia supports me’. 35 So far, being an Australian had worked as a propaganda tool. Her status as an enfranchised woman gave her authority and credibility. But would it keep her from ending up behind bars?
In court the following day, the fair-complexioned, middle-aged Australian made a scene widely reported in the British and Australian press under headlines like A Sydney Suffragette Arrested and An Australian Implicated.36 Nellie shouted and gesticulated, and repeated her claims of the previous day. The court magistrate was not intimidated by her claim that her conviction would be a diplomatic disaster. The suffragettes were each fined £10 and bound over to keep the peace for six months.
As a group they decided on the strategy of refusing to pay the fine, electing to go to prison for two months. Dora explained that the charge was farcical; they had not used any abusive language, only proclaimed ‘Votes for Women’. A shameful outrage by a Liberal Government, shouted supporters from the court. Teresa Billington, who was among those arrested, made the point that as well as these women rebels, we gathered about us also a great number of working women, earnest, unlettered and poor, having nothing to give but personal service and sacrifice and giving these willingly.37
Bolstered by the incendiary mood of the courtroom, the convicted suffragettes, who included Sylvia Pankhurst, her younger sister Adela, Annie Kenney and Billington, refused to leave the dock. We have come to the conclusion, announced Sylvia, that it is a question of harassing and persecuting the Government until they will, for the sake of peace, concede women the franchise.38 Mrs Cobden-Sanderson, daughter of a famous British statesman and neighbour of Dora in Hammersmith, claimed she was at war with the State as at present constituted.39 Eventually, when it was clear that there would be no end to the verbal barrage, the women were forcibly dragged out and removed to the cells.40 Among those so delivered to Holloway Prison was Dora Montefiore, who had finally received the gaol term that her tax resistance had failed to deliver. When asked her religion by the wardess on her admission to prison, Dora replied Freethinker.41
*
Emmeline Pankhurst now had two daughters in prison. She called a meeting at the WSPU’s headquarters at Caxton Hall, requesting funds for a war chest. Mr Cobden-Sanderson immediately pitched in £100 and Fred Pethick-Lawrence promised £10 a day for every day his wife was in prison.42 He didn’t need to dig deep. On 28 October, after four days in Holloway, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence was released due to illness.
The following day, Dora too petitioned for her freedom. According to Sylvia Pankhurst, Dora was horrified to discover her head infested by lice, owing to the lack of precautions against the spread of vermin in prison.43 Tensions had been brewing between Dora and Emmeline Pankhurst—two powerful, commanding women, one of whom would infamously broach no rivals—and the Pankhurst daughters fell in behind their cutthroat mother. Dora accused Sylvia of deliberately misrepresenting her: she claimed her early release was due to illness. Whatever the truth, Dora was released with an undertaking to keep the peace for six months. She didn’t remain in prison long enough to enjoy Emmeline’s moral victory over the authorities: her successful petition to have the suffragettes transferred from second division, where the common offenders were housed, to the more comfortable first division, where political prisoners traditionally were sent. We are at last recognised as a political party, Emmeline proclaimed, we are now in the swim of politics, and are a political force.44
If the incarcerated Nellie expected a sympathetic response from the country whose high democratic standards she claimed to uphold, she would be disappointed. The Australian press continued its longstanding attitude of demeaning the lady (?) and questioning her sudden interest in the world of politics…where ladies fight policemen, scratch them and leave their hair behind. The Brisbane TELEGRAPH claimed that poor Miss Rose Scott entirely rejected the absurd fusses of the suffragettes and was exceedingly upset at the commotion in England, in which her former associate was now playing such a prominent part.45 Nellie’s old nemesis, TRUTH, reminded its readers that the ‘lady’, who had posed as an elocutionist, had straw-coloured hair and a very artificial complexion, and showed her neck. But what was revealed by the English trouble (a common description of the suffragette outbreak) was something more sinister than Nellie’s refusal to wear collars. Nellie was not only masquerading as a respectable professional, but she was also impersonating an Australian.
We in Sydney who know Nellie and her pearl-cream hide and dyed herbage, smart violently when she poses as a distinguished Australian, and tries to shelter herself behind our brand-new Southern Cross flag…she isn’t Australian, and her haw-haw speech betrayed her.46
For her part, Nellie was unfazed by yet more bad publicity in Australia. In fact, the events of 1906 nailed her colours all the more firmly to the imperial mast. In a letter to a friend (probably Louisa Lawson) written from prison and reported in the Australian press in September, Nellie revealed that she had decided to extend her temporary stay in England indefinitely.
There is so much work to be done in London, so many evils to remove, so many weak to defend, we shall never do anything in England till women have votes, so I give my all to that aim.47
Nellie’s request for diplomatic assistance from the Australian government had fallen on deaf ears, but it didn’t stop her appealing to the women of Australia for support. Nor would the TRUTH’S denunciation of her claim to belong to the tight white family under the Southern Cross deter her affiliation. In December, she penned ‘An Appeal to Australasia’, which was subsequently published in Australian dailies.
I appeal to you, my free sisters of Australia, to do all you can to back up the women of the Mother Country in their terrible struggle for political freedom. You cannot realise the awful position of the English women workers; many have to toil seventeen to nineteen hours a day for the sum of one shilling per day, and a penny an hour is looked on as a fair wage in this country, which boasts of being the freest country of the world.
Nellie claimed that the women with whom she was currently imprisoned were all there to prevent a continuance of sweating, a problem with which Australian women did not have to contend due to the country’s more enlightened industrial and social conditions. I therefore appeal to you all, she wrote, to do all in your power to awaken Australian sympathy in the justice of the women’s demand.48 Nellie remained in prison until all her compatriots were released, ahead of their two-month sentence, in early December.
By this time, Dora had broken off her affiliation with the WSPU and the Pankhursts. She could no longer tolerate the organisation’s undemocratic structure under Emmeline’s tyrannical rule, nor its hostility to full adult suffrage. And she had no stomach for the increasingly pugnacious turn of the WSPU’s activities. We should always be able to control our voices and our actions and behave as ladies, Dora shouted into the gale of an increasingly militant movement. She did not lack courage, but she couldn’t abide violence.
The British press dubbed the action in the lobby of the House of Commons as hysterical hooliganism. But as far as public opinion was concerned, remarked Teresa Billington, the suffragettes went into prison as freaks and came out as heroes.49 The government had gone too far. Through its pompous obstinacy and aggressive use of force, it had allowed a new vocabulary to slip into the public discourse. We should, Billington noted, by our revolt, be awakening women to see, rousing them to rebel, undermining the superstructure of servitude by sapping at the roots of women’s acquiescence in her own subjection.50 The imagery of slavery—unshackling chains—had always been part of suffragist rhetoric. Now, added to resistance, were two new Rs. Rebels. Revolt.
If there was a turning point in the British campaign, 23 October 1906 was it.