Suffrage Saturday, as 13 June became known, was an unmitigated coup. Glorious weather. A huge turnout. Jubilant participants. Captivated crowds. A converted press. The NUWSS had proved that the organisation was still relevant and could be influential, despite the more eye-catching escapades of the militants. Could the WSPU’s Women’s Sunday a week later live up to the success of the NUWSS procession, as well as its own propaganda?
For weeks, WSPU volunteers had been handing out leaflets, bill-posting, house-to-house canvassing, sandwich-boarding, pavement-chalking, advertising in VOTES FOR WOMEN and otherwise promoting Sunday 21 June as the breakout event of the militant campaign. Emmeline Pankhurst had taken British Liberal stalwart and statesman William Gladstone’s force majeure theory of political reform very seriously. Change, advised Gladstone, could only occur when crowds of tens of thousands gathered to demonstrate the will of the people. He also held that of course, it is not to be expected that women can assemble in such masses; Pankhurst was determined to prove him wrong.1
Hyde Park was the chosen venue for the WSPU’s monster meeting. The largest demonstration in Hyde Park for the Reform Bills extending the male franchise in 1832, 1867 and 1885 had attracted seventy-two thousand people. The suffragettes expected to get thirty thousand in the march, but hoped that hundreds of thousands would come to Hyde Park: that was many, many more than had attended the NUWSS event. But the difference between the two events was that the WSPU rally would draw its participants from all parts of England, not just London. Thirty trains would bring suffrage campaigners in from seventy towns. It would also ensure that not only upper and middle-class elements predominated, as the papers had reported of Suffrage Saturday.2 As the London TIMES noted, the gathering was advertised as one in which the masses as distinguished from the classes will demonstrate in favour of ‘votes for women’.3
Women had been asked to wear white. It was a colour appropriate to the season, effective from a spectacular point of view, able to be purchased inexpensively, and, importantly, a ready means of enabling the procession to present a uniform appearance symbolical of their united demand.4 And as an innovation for Women’s Sunday, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence had devised a colour scheme for the WSPU of white, purple and green. It was by ‘the colours’ that each suffrage society would be recognised. (The NUWSS had adopted red and white in 1906.) By giving the organisation its own colours—white for purity, purple for courage, green for hope—the WSPU had devised an ingenious way to both brand its members and market its message. Selling WSPU merchandise, realised the publicity-minded and financially canny Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, would be good for the coffers. The idea of the colours was born in the middle of May, noted Sylvia Pankhurst, and by June they were known throughout the length and breadth of the land.
Suitably attired and easily identifiable, the marchers would be organised into seven columns, each proceeding from a different direction in the city, all carrying banners (over seven hundred in total) with a band at the head of each section. Each column would set out from its starting point (Paddington Station, Regent’s Park, Trafalgar Square and so on) and parade through the major thoroughfares of London, converging on Hyde Park via designated gates, where a meeting would be held from 3.30 to 4.45 p.m. At the end of the meeting, a bugle would sound, indicating the time for a united shout by the assembled multitude of ‘One, two, three. Votes for women, votes for women, votes for women!’
For the meeting section of the event, the WSPU organisers—chief among them Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who planned the logistics of the day down to the last footfall—had invited twenty of its finest speakers to occupy a platform in Hyde Park. From their platform, each speaker would simultaneously address the crowd. Photographs of the speakers were distributed on postcards and handbills, and immense posters of thirteen by ten feet (four metres by three) were pasted on hoardings in London and the regions, making the speakers instant celebrities.5 Emmeline, Christabel and Adela Pankhurst were among the speakers, as were Annie Kenney, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Jennie Baines and Mrs Flora Drummond, known as the General.
So too was Nellie Martel, our Australian friend: one of the WSPU’s deadliest weapons. The propaganda power of Nellie’s message of hope and success—that the Australian example proved the Antis wrong—could not be underestimated. Moreover, having Nellie at the rally underscored the WSPU’s credibility. They were not just a domestic insurgent rabble, but the principled extension of an international movement for change. As Mrs Snowden had written in her book THE WOMAN SOCIALIST in 1907, neither liberty nor equality, for men or women, would be possible until the establishment of a great co-operative commonwealth in which the good gifts of the earth shall be enjoyed by all the sons and daughters of humanity.6 Nellie was the living, breathing embodiment of both that little-c and the big-C commonwealth.
Nellie’s allotted position on platform seven—next to Christabel at eight—was A-list territory and an opportunity too good for any prima donna to refuse. But Nellie also knew from first-hand experience the dangers of speaking in front of large public crowds. The knowledge was not gleaned from her election campaign in Australia—where audiences were as polite as the press was vitriolic—but from her tour of rural England with Emmeline Pankhurst earlier in the year.
Following the election of the turncoat Liberal government, the WSPU had begun a strategy of targeting parliamentary candidates at by-elections. The plan was simple: publicly pester the Liberal hopeful on his position regarding votes for women. Would he support a government bill—yes or no? The tactic was modelled on Parnell’s Irish home rule campaign: no support for any government candidate, no matter which party formed government, until victory for the cause had been won.
For the WSPU, the benefits of the by-election manoeuvre were two-fold. Not only did it test the commitment of the candidate to the liberal values of freedom and equality he supposedly held dear, but it gave the suffragists the opportunity to take their message to localities outside London and the major industrial centres. Emmeline Pankhurst believed that although the government was all-powerful and consistently hostile, with its rank and file MPs impotent, the problem also lay with the countryside, where voters were apathetic and women divided in their interests.7 The WSPU’s by-election policy was therefore both educational and insurgent.
After the split with the WFL, it was Emmeline Pankhurst herself who undertook the majority of the by-election campaign work. Though still consulted on policy issues, Emmeline was content to leave the day-to-day organisation of the WSPU to others: Christabel ran operations, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was in charge of finances and Fred Pethick-Lawrence managed the logistics of outdoor demonstrations. They were known as the triumvirate.8 Emmeline had justified the fact that the WSPU had no constitution or rules by claiming her workers were simply a suffrage army in the field.9 At fifty, Emmeline was proud to be the field marshal and content to live the life of a gypsy, travelling by train from town to town with only a suitcase and an address book crammed with the names of friends and supporters with whom she could billet. With her haughty charm, quick wit and personal magnetism, Emmeline—like the pied piper—was a most effective recruiter.
In January 1908, Emmeline was bound for the Newton Abbot by-election in Devon, where the sitting Liberal member had resigned to take up a judgeship. True to its policy, the WSPU was campaigning for the Conservative challenger over the favoured Liberal candidate, even though the Tory was an opponent of women’s suffrage. The government had a comfortable majority in the seat, which it expected to retain. Emmeline chose as her companion for the uphill battle Nellie Martel, who was also without fixed address at this time. According to Annie Kenney, Nellie had a habit, having no settled abode, of taking her luggage wherever she went, which meant that hotel porters had always to go to the station for her belongings.10 Unlike Vida Goldstein, Nellie did not travel light.
The winter of 1907–08 had been a bitterly cold one, making the duo’s reception in Newton Abbot even chillier than it might have been given that they were there to wake up the country with a merciless heckling campaign.11 For days, Emmeline and Nellie woke up the public with the ringing of bells, public speeches delivered on rickety chairs in the open air and constant interrupting of the Liberal candidate’s campaign meetings—hurling questions at him calculated to spoil his arguments.12 The women’s meetings were invariably smashed up, as Sylvia Panhkurst described.13 Emmeline and Nellie were pelted with vegetables, stones and snowballs. Dried peas hurt, as Emmeline observed stoically.
On the morning of 18 January, polling day, Emmeline and Nellie woke to severe frosts. It was a foul day, yet a joyous one. Their campaign had worked. At the declaration of the poll, the Conservative candidate was announced the winner, recording some five hundred more votes than the Liberal incumbent.
The Liberal voters of Newton Abbot were apoplectic. A mob of vanquished Liberals besieged the Constitutional Club, headquarters of the local Tories, and broke every window in it.14 It was an extraordinary scene of riot, as the press duly noted. But the venom of the mob was not confined to the conquering Tories. Word was conveyed to Emmeline that she and Nellie should hurry away and leave the town at once. Emmeline laughed off the warning. I have never yet been afraid to trust myself in a crowd, she reassured her anxious suffragist informant.
Then, on their way back to their lodgings, Emmeline and Nellie were confronted by a procession of young men and boys wearing the Liberal colours. The lads had just come from work in the nearby clay pits and heard the election results. One of them pointed at Emmeline and Nellie, and shouted: Those women have done it, and the pit workers set upon the two blockaded women. The attack must have been a premeditated ambush, for the boys proceeded to pelt Emmeline and Nellie with a shower of rotten eggs, clay and snowballs laced with rocks.
The women ducked into a grocer’s shop, while a burly drayman, who had witnessed the scene, stood in the doorway and fought their assailants off until they were safe. Emmeline and Nellie escaped out the back door of the shop into a narrow lane, only to be run down by some of the lads who had anticipated the dodge. Nellie was caught by one, who grabbed her by the throat and began to beat her about the head. The shopkeeper’s wife and Emmeline managed to drag Nellie away from the boy and into the shop’s yard. Just as they were bolting the gate, Emmeline copped a heavy blow on the back of the head and fell. The boys set upon her, grabbing her coat and wrists and flinging her onto the muddy ground. She lost consciousness for a time, waking to feel the wet mud soaking through her clothes. A ring of puny half-grown youths surrounded her. Are there no men here? Emmeline hissed, with what was left of her strength.
Just as she was sure the taunt would be her final words, a policeman entered the laneway and the youths scattered. Two hours later, when the rubberneckers and press surrounding the shop had cleared, Emmeline and Nellie were escorted out of town in a police car.
The attack left Nellie with a permanent scar on her neck. With a severely injured ankle, Emmeline was unable to walk for some considerable time, and limped through the pain as she went about her subsequent by-election work. No arrests were made, despite multiple witnesses to the attack, and, as Sylvia Pankhurst pointed out, scarcely a word of regret for the violence which had been done to these two women ever appeared in the Liberal newspapers. The Conservatives took full credit for their upset win in the by-election, with only one paper, the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, admitting that the Suffragettes did influence votes.15
As a souvenir of the Newton Abbot triumph, a win that could easily have turned to tragedy, Nellie kept a blood-stained motor veil.16 So yes: she knew that accepting a platform at the Hyde Park rally would not be without potential risk to life and limb. But she was a brilliant speaker and keen debater, as the newspapers readily testified, smart and most convincing…a vigorous and clever champion of the cause. Nellie possessed a happy way of putting her points and riveting the attention of her hearers.17 How could the Australian suffragist, as she was routinely called, fail to take her place in this historic event? Would she ever have a more prominent stage from which to publicise the cause that had now consumed the best part of the last fifteen years of her life?
If we must fight, Nellie determined, we are all ready, we will stand with our backs to the wall and fight to the finish!18
The largest political demonstration ever held in the history of the world. That’s how Fred Pethick-Lawrence described Women’s Sunday, the event he’d lovingly orchestrated.19 It was a mighty claim, but even the conservative press put the number that gathered at Hyde Park that afternoon, under radiant sunshine, at a whopping five hundred thousand. Half a million in Hyde-Park. Remarkable scenes. Processions through the streets. These were some of the headlines that trumpeted the appeal of the event. Its organisers had counted on an audience of 250,000, noted THE TIMES, never one to give the suffrage campaign a leg up. That expectation was certainly fulfilled and probably it was doubled, and it would be difficult to contradict anyone who asserted it was trebled.20 All of London, it seemed, had come out to watch as London’s streets became a bustle of curiosity. What was truly remarkable was that scarcely a jeer was heard.21 People leaned out of balconies, windows and the tops of buses, cheering and waving as if at an army returned from a war, not a legion of women going into battle against a belligerent government.
Journalists noted that the procession had nothing of the high dignity of the Suffrage Saturday march the week before, and yet there was a certain splendour in watching plain working women from Lewisham, Woolwich and Plumstead walk together with women in academic gown and hood, the scarlet Labour banner (the world for the worker) beside hundreds of women in the uniform of the cause—a white frock with a Votes for Women sash in the WSPU colours. So mesmerising was the scene that thousands of onlookers followed the columns of marchers down to Hyde Park, where they were greeted by the sight of thousands more who had come from other directions. There were also coffee stands, costermongers (fruit stalls) and hawkers selling badges and programs in the purple, white and green. It was a gay and beautiful as well as an awe-inspiring spectacle, sighed Emmeline Panhkurst.22 It is probable, wrote the DAILY EXPRESS, that so many people never before stood in one square mass anywhere in England. Every inch of Hyde Park was shadowed by people. You couldn’t see a blade of grass. The assembled mass was not black, as crowds usually are, noted Sylvia Pankhurst, but coloured, like a great bed of flowers.23
*
Was this a dream? Standing on her platform at this great historic demonstration, looking out across an ocean of spectators, the sea of hats unending, Nellie had to agree with the journalist who remarked that it was a wonderful sight. Banners had been furled. A hot sun shone down on hundreds of thousands of straw hats and summery millinery.24 Nellie summoned all her elocution training to steady her nerves and project her words above the din.25
In my own country, she began, I am a voter and, therefore, as a British subject, the peer of any man present. She knew her lines. She had rehearsed them at many an open-air meeting before this one.
Before the Australian women had the franchise the minimum wage for women was 5s a week. Now it is 16s a week, and labour is regulated so that if they work longer than eight hours a day they are paid an extra wage in proportion. This has been done by the power behind the vote, the key to all reforms.26
Women asked for nothing more than their due. But they needed assistance in getting it. We ask for help in the great effort we are making to win constitutional liberty for women of the nation. There was nothing to fear, no calamity to forestall. Did men really think that women would use the power of the vote to do harm to their men folk? Most men were good and kind, better than the laws would have them to be, but when a man was unjust the woman could be made to suffer the most outrageous wrongs. (Was Nellie speaking from experience or observation? Had Charles hurt her, or was she perhaps referring to the editor of the WATCHMAN, and all the journalists of Sydney who hauled her good name through the mud just as the clay-pit boys dragged at her body?)
She would not get personal. She knew that John Bull likes Truth and Justice,27 and even more than abstract concepts, the British liked facts. Evidence, not argument. Well, she had plenty of proof to give them.
In Australia, as soon as the women received the vote, old age pensions became law, and every aged man and woman was entitled to 10s a week, without losing the rights of citizenship…Women’s votes in New Zealand and Australia were…the lever which removed the sweated home labour, the voice which wiped out opium traffic, the power which made it easier to be more moral, more temperate, more progressive…the experience of women’s suffrage in Australia has convinced me that it makes for better mothers, the children are better fed, better housed, and better educated. In fact, the country is taking a higher spiritual as well as a higher moral standard. That would be the effect when the women obtained the vote in this country.
Nellie told the crowd that together we are killing prejudice and winning support…Men and women are awakening to the injustice done to the mothers of men…John Bull’s daughters are not lacking in the noble qualities any more than John Bull’s sons. All it would take was more pressure on the government, more messages from the electorate to Westminster, more interference and influence at by-elections and then votes for women will not be ‘talked out’. She was now orchestrating her crescendo:
We do not want protection, we want justice; nothing else will satisfy us. We fear your protection. It may be, indeed is, the kind of protection wolves give to lambs, covering and devouring them. No! like the Chartists of old, we will take no promises of reforms—we will have the vote, and work out reforms and salvation for ourselves.
Hallelujah.
It is quite possible that no one but those closest to the platform heard a word Nellie said. It would require a Nellie Melba, not a Nellie Martel, to pitch her voice across the din of five hundred thousand people. Such was the hullabaloo of the massive crowd that it is very doubtful if her words were heard half a dozen yards away.28 Over at platform six, Mrs Masey was trying to speak over the noisy element…a crowd of young fellows trying to drown the voices of the speaker by singing music hall songs and other ways.29
Fortunately, the purpose of Women’s Sunday was to create a spectacle, not compete for elocution prizes. The event passed off peaceably enough. Mrs Pankhurst was jeered and pelted with little bombs full of unpleasant smelling stuff and a few fights broke out between men in the crush of the crowd. A policeman copped a gash in the head from a stick. The roughs had had their fun, but there were no arrests. Nellie had stuck her neck right out in the fray, but she would have no new scars to add today.
And the press, for once, was noticeably impressed. Journalists had gone along expecting to find hooligans and fooligans and unsexed women but instead were surprised by the sophistication and eloquence of the speakers. I am sure a great many people never realized until yesterday, reported the DAILY MAIL the day after Women’s Sunday, how young and dainty and elegant and charming most leaders of the movement are.
And how well they spoke—with what free and graceful gestures; never at a loss for a word or an apt reply to an interruption; calm and collected; forcible, yet, so far as I heard, not violent; earnest, but happily humourous as well!30
The combined effect of the NUWSS procession and the WSPU’s Hyde Park rally had been a PR masterstroke, attracting mainstream attention and massive public support. And an Australian woman had been central to both: one allegorical, one actual. Nellie Martel exhorting John Bull’s daughters to rise up and claim their rightful inheritance, demonstrating that only good could come of it. Minerva, Daughter Australia, goading Mother England to follow the righteous path laid out for her by her youthful offspring. Both told a duplicitous government, whose party’s guiding principle was to trust the people, that to keep faith in a changing world it needed to trust the women.
Would Asquith listen? Would he be persuaded by argument? Impressed by evidence? Stimulated by strength of numbers or provoked by colonial precedent?
Or would he simply turn his back on the overwhelming crowds, the vaulting public opinion, the passing parade of silk and sentiment, and row merrily against the tide?
As the DAILY MIRROR asked—perhaps naively, perhaps scornfully—It has been a day of sunshine, of thunderous cheering, of music, of colour and of immense good will. But what has it done for the women’s cause?31