After Dora Meeson left Melbourne with her family in 1897, agreeing to meet George Coates on the other side of the world, she kept her promise and so did he. They met up in Paris, where they both enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian, a private art school favoured by international students for its fine tutors, progressive values and willingness to enrol women in an environment of amiable collegiality. Coates was unwell that first year in Paris, the result, thought ‘Trousers’, of too much drinking—for bad French wines were cheap—and not enough eating. But Paris itself was at its zenith, with Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas all still living, still pushing the boundaries with the animated power of their impressionism.
Dora and George agreed, however, that the Parisian art world was particularly cruel to women. They both watched in horror as their fellow French students threw over their mistresses and left them penniless and stranded, these girls who had given them their all. Dora admired that Coates had the greatest pity and tenderness for these women, and for the prostitutes who so often served as artists’ models.
In Paris, the couple competed at the Salon. Trousers won a prize. They studied the great masters at the Louvre. They worked constantly, and soon realised that each had a very different relationship to light. George preferred to work with the blinds half-down, but Dora’s Australian childhood had instilled in her a love of sunshine. That which is fair light to one, she mused, is a glare to another.1 But they both favoured a full brush and by 1900, when the Meeson family moved to London and took their eldest daughter with them, Coates and Trousers were secretly engaged.2 They suited each other.
John Meeson was apprehensive about a prospective son-in-law who was not making a steady income but eventually the couple wed, with the patriarch’s grudging consent, in a modest ceremony in July 1903 with only Dora’s parents for witnesses. They honeymooned in Rye, where they gave painting lessons in exchange for room and board. They were both thirty-four years old.
With the £100 a year stipend from Meeson that was customary for middle-class Victorian-era parents, they were able to live frugally on herring, bread and oatmeal in their Wimbledon studio, and paint.3 They posed for each other to save money—the cost of a nude model was out of the question—and pawned Coates’ gold medal from the National Gallery competition regularly. The couple had long decided that our pictures were to be our children. It was a moral as much as pragmatic choice. I had no sympathy, Dora explained, with people who brought children into the world to starve or to be kept by other people.4 There was a less high-minded reason for their deliberate childlessness too. Dora’s grandfather was an alcoholic, and she took the concept of racial fitness seriously.5
Despite small commissions and local exhibitions for each of them, these first few years in London were a string of endless disappointments, particularly for Coates, who took rejection harder than his phlegmatic wife. He was forever striving. He could never paint anything insincere or cheap, and, with his high ideals, nothing came easily. He hated the Jew in art: the flaunting and extolling of your own goods, in order to sell them well. So loath to play the art-world game was Coates that he even eschewed titles on his paintings. He believed the art should announce itself. Sometimes Dora had to admit that her husband was too much of a stickler, a perfectionist who lost commissions because he took too long over them. Her pet name for her husband was Boy.
As a couple, they were well matched, complementary: one crisp and tight, the other looser, more able to go with the flow. But as artists, their habits clashed. For one thing, there was George’s preference for painting in the half-light. Dora longed for a huge sky. He didn’t understand my struggle to express light and colour, she worried, but always wanted me to lower my work in tone, whereas I would urge him to lighten his. Sometimes Dora would have to flee to the river or the docks: the crampedness [sic] of painting and living in a studio drove me out to study the river and the multitudinous forms of water.6 And it was troublesome when art dealers came around. They almost invariably preferred Dora’s work, even the Thames landscapes that challenged the feminine ideal of domestic art.7
If ever the couple were able to leave their family compound in Ealing, they would head to Romney Marsh, the sparsely populated wetlands of Kent and East Sussex. Coates loved it there. It was there, he would say to his wife, that he escaped from the sense the English country always gave him of being enclosed in a tidy garden. Or they would visit Rye Harbour, where he felt the openness of big distances as in Australia. They both, at times, longed for the vastness of the Australian country… the land of light!…the free unbroken Bush…where Time is not.
In the Wimbledon studio, time and history closed in on them. Coates was congenial, but didn’t enjoy social gatherings. As far as his wife could tell, he was not like the other Australian men in London, noisy, blatant fellows. After three years of penury and isolation, they needed a change.
A spare room opened up in Chelsea, at number 9 Trafalgar Studios, just off the King’s Road and close to the river, where a number of Australian artists were already in residence—Charles Conder was just down the hall at number 6. The rent for the unfurnished studio was a fairly hefty £50 per annum and it wasn’t fancy: nothing but a pink muslin curtain across the bedroom window, the floors scattered with dirty socks and everything covered in dust and grime. But the space was up to date and pleasingly bohemian;8 above all, thought Dora, it had splendid light. They snapped it up. George made furniture out of some old doors and, like all George did, beamed his wife, they were solid and strong.
It was not so much that their material or artistic lives changed with the move to Chelsea, but the social setting could not have been more different. Coates joined the Chelsea Arts Club, where Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and George Lambert were already members. Dora was teetotal, but she gave George a two-shilling drinking allowance to go to CAC meetings. In Melbourne, the Victorian Artists’ Society was co-ed, but here women were not allowed as members.9 It irked her. The inequality was particularly galling given that the Chelsea Arts Club was practically an Australian Club10—and weren’t the Australians supposed to be more enlightened than the English on such matters? It is the women artists, not the men, who welcomed us as new-comers to Chelsea, noted Dora.11
Then Florence Haig invited her in for tea at number 4.
Florence was the well-heeled daughter of a barrister, eleven years Dora’s senior. She had hair down to her ankles and could paint a better portrait than a great many men, according to Coates. Dora found her hospitable and sincere, like the true Scotswoman she is.12 But Haig had not invited Dora in to discuss portraiture. She was hosting a meeting of the WSPU. Emmeline Pankhurst was to be the speaker. Another prominent suffragist, the playwright Cicely Hamilton, was already in Haig’s studio. Hamilton, a fair-haired, Celtic-looking woman with a strong, handsome face, was arranging chairs. Dora offered to help her and while the two women were organising the furniture, the novice expressed her private fear that if women got the vote in England, it would only strengthen the Conservative Party. Hamilton turned to Dora impatiently. I’m a Socialist myself, she replied with restraint, but even if they did all vote Tory, I would give them the vote in common justice. It was at this point that Dora intuited what later she would know for certain: that Cecily Hamilton, and other suffrage women she would come to know, were rare people with a big heart as well as a big brain.
From that moment, Coates and Trousers were hooked: We both threw ourselves heart and soul into the suffrage movement. Coates cared little for politics but he was keen on fair play. It suited his democratic temperament to support a campaign that worked to grant the same facilities to women as to men, as well as to improve the condition of the masses. He even joined the newly formed Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, as a show of support. This could not be said of all husbands.
At thirty-seven years of age, Dora was finally in a place where she could begin to separate herself, psychologically and politically, from her conservative upbringing and her sometimes suffocating marriage. She longed to stretch her wings—to throw open the window and let in the light—and here, here at Trafalgar Studios, she had the chance.
So now it was 1907 and already her life had become so full, so rich, so…she had to admit it…so exciting.
In January, she had helped found the Artists’ Suffrage League with the extraordinary Mary Lowndes. Mary was twenty years older than Dora but with so much energy it was hard to keep up. She was a painter who had been exhibiting at galleries and at the Royal Society since the early 1880s. Since 1897 she’d been running her own business, Lowndes and Drury, a firm making stained glass. She lived with her companion, Barbara Forbes, who was now the secretary of the ASL.13 Lowndes was the chairman. Other artists joined the committee, including Violet Garrard and Bertha Newcombe. They met at the ASL’s headquarters in the stained glass studios at Lowndes and Drury, just a stone’s throw from the Coates atelier. In fact, it was a feature of the ASL: all the women lived within walking distance of HQ.14
New friends, drawn together in this, the first of the societies of professional women that would pop up like mushrooms in spring rains. The intransigence of the Liberal government had provided fertile ground for activism. Soon there was the Actresses’ Franchise League, with Cicely Hamilton at the helm, and the Writers’ Suffrage League. The WSPU said that what was needed to wake up the nation was propaganda. Information and posters and badges, banners and essays and plays. A speech was one thing, and lord knows the suffrage leaders made hundreds of those. But something to hold in your hand, or wear at your breast, was another. They needed merch.
The members of the ASL could illustrate the speeches, leaflets and pamphlets and sell them both to educate and to raise funds. They could come up with new designs and motifs that would capture the spirit of the age: construct their own meanings and make sense of their own circumstances. They didn’t need the always-intransigent press to tell the public what to make of the sudden insurrection of women: the open-air meetings, the demonstrations, the interruptions of parliament. They could contest the representations of women—flighty, frivolous, too emotional, too sensitive, too unworldly—that were used to keep them out of public life and deny them the franchise.15
There was so much work to do, and suddenly, after all the dragging years, the waiting years, so little time in which to do it.
Dora soon learned that many of those drawn to the ASL had been politicised by the attitudinal or institutional obstructions they’d faced as female artists.16 For whatever reasons—Coates’ support, or the co-ed camaraderie of the gallery school in Melbourne—she had never felt the sting of overt discrimination. Still this feeling of solidarity, belonging and sisterliness had given her a whole new outlook.17
In our unromantic age, our unromantic land, wrote one social commentator, a great popular movement has at last arisen, a movement of revolt, not less heroic than those of more distant times and nations.18 Dora was eager to be part of that movement, that great romance of the times. She tended to agree with Annie Kenney, who said that no companionship can ever surpass the companionship of the militants.19 There was a kind of mateship there, among these new women passing in and out of her studio, with whom she was discussing ideas, talking politics, planning events and making art. She even began to dress differently, throwing out the corsets and long skirts of her girlhood and adopting more tailored, roomier garments.20
And there were suddenly so many things to do. The NUWSS (Mrs Garrett’s organisation still had its adherents, over fifty thousand of them, although the WSPU was getting all the new recruits) was planning a big demonstration for February. It was a protest march to coincide with the opening of parliament for the winter session, and the ASL had agreed to help make it a visual masterpiece. The NUWSS had another novel idea too: an original poster competition. There would be a six-guinea prize for the best poster in favour of women’s suffrage, for use at Parliamentary Elections.
Dora Meeson Coates hadn’t decided which of the two big organisations she wanted to join—the NUWSS, with which Mary Lowndes was affiliated, or the WSPU, which had Florence Haig’s loyalty. What she did know was: she wanted to win this competition.
If the NUWSS had had Nellie Martel in its ranks while planning its February march, it might have asked her advice on the organisation—for Nellie had become something of an antipodean oracle.
In late 1906 she had published a pamphlet under the auspices of the WSPU and its imprint, The Women’s Press. THE WOMEN’S VOTE IN AUSTRALIA sold for a penny, and became so popular it ran into multiple printings. Nellie’s advice came to be prized as much as her actions, her message strong and abiding:
It is because I am sure of the great good Votes for Women will bring about that I shall devote the remainder of my life to this work. Come and help, you British women, to work out your own salvation. May God speed the day when you shall be truly free.21
On 9 February 1907, British women turned out in droves to come and help by joining the NUWSS’s march. Led by Lady Frances Balfour, Lady Strachey and Mrs Fawcett, three thousand women trudged their way from Hyde Park Corner to the Exeter Hall in the first mass demonstration of suffragists London had witnessed. (High-profile members of the WSPU including Mrs Pethick-Lawrence and Annie Kenney marched, but in an unofficial capacity. It was the NUWSS’s day.)
One journalist, who put the number of marchers at five thousand, described the procession as the first really great women’s franchise demonstration.22 It was also the first public open-air meeting of the non-militant suffragists, an indication that the times had changed. By early 1907, 140 militant suffragettes had been sent to prison, including a collection of Australian agitators.23 (This, in free England, spat Nellie Martel.) Now those pledged to moral suasion had veered towards the militants with a strategy that was more dynamic, more visible and more inclined to attract publicity.24
And indeed, the procession was a spectacle. There were massed bands, a red and white colour theme, and the white silk banner of the NUWSS with its motto stitched in scarlet: The Franchise is the Keystone to Our Liberty. Other banners were raised by affiliated suffrage unions with mottos reflecting the carefully calibrated tone—purposeful but not strident—of the constitutionalists: Gentle but Resolute; Failure is Impossible; Justice not Privilege; For Hearth and Home. (Emmeline Pankhurst had adopted the more strident Deeds Not Words for the WSPU, to convey the militant message that the time for talking was over.) Thousands of onlookers lined the route. Some cheered. Others hurled insults at the women. Most commentators, including the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, agreed that it required real courage for a woman to step out of her drawing room into the street to take her place in a mixed throng for a cause…and to see herself pilloried in the newspapers next morning.25 Cartoon depictions of the day did indeed satirise the marchers as well mannered and well bannered, including an image of two women trying valiantly to right their flailing banner against a stiff wind. Oh Maude, read the caption, be careful and do hold it up.26
But respectable women’s supposed distaste for notoriety was only one of the obstacles that the high-born dames, factory hands, writers and artists who turned out for the demonstration had to overcome. As it happened, it rained cats and dogs on 9 February. The women had to slog through fog, slush and sleet. Photos from the day show them rugged up in long black overcoats, fur stoles and warm hats tied to their heads with scarves. The spectators had to hide under awnings or be drenched in the storms. Passing under bare-branched trees and past policemen in sturdy rainwear, the procession looks more like a funeral cortege than a fete for freedom.
The event soon became known as the Mud March. The term alliterated nicely, and, given the overall success of the day, was an affectionate appellation. But mostly the name stood as a warning. If you’ve got an axe to grind in London, don’t hold your procession in winter.
At the opening of parliament three days later, on 12 February, it became clear that the King had not been swayed by the marchers’ sodden fortitude and that his speech would contain no reference to the granting of the vote. The WSPU held a crisis meeting. How would they respond to the King’s insult? One of the WSPU organisers had a plan.
Mrs Nellie Martel, an Australian lady, urged the meeting to ‘go to the House of Commons. Defy every one. Never mind the police, not even the mounted police. Never mind anybody or anything. Electrify the House, so they will be obliged to grant women’s suffrage in the coming week’.
Three hundred suffragettes followed Nellie and the other leaders down to Westminster, where a tumult closely approaching a riot broke out in the lobby. It took an hour, a deployment of mounted police and fifty-seven arrests to quell the feminine assault and battery. But wave after wave kept arriving at the House throughout the afternoon, only to face the same scene. One paper noted that the more warlike of the suffragettes staged a five-hour disturbance. The women all take themselves terribly in earnest, wrote the London correspondent for the ADELAIDE OBSERVER,27 and he was not wrong: London’s women were wide awake, and the fight was on.