The name of Muriel Matters, surmised WFL member Stella Newsome, may not go down to future ages, but her deed will never be forgotten.
Certainly, the grille incident was not soon forgotten and there is no doubt it made Muriel’s name in London. The Suffragette Scene in the Commons was the publicity stunt of the year, outstripping Suffrage Saturday and Women’s Sunday for press coverage. Muriel, the Heroine of the Grille as she was now known, had managed to turn heads in a way that half a million people gathered in Hyde Park had not. Amazing Women. Riotous Scenes In and Out of the House. Padlocked Women’s Vain Protests. The Suffragette Nuisance.
The more sensational the headlines, the more copies sold. Muriel’s speech from the Ladies Gallery was characterised as the first time a woman had spoken in the House of Commons, a history-making moment. Not only was Muriel’s pleasingly alliterative name splashed across newspapers the length and breadth of Britain, but so was her striking, pretty face. Newspapers were largely illustrated at this time, press photography being rare, and papers revelled in producing lavishly detailed pictures of Muriel chained to the grille, like a damsel in distress tethered to the railway tracks (although not, since the noisy creature was herself driving the train).
What followed Muriel’s arrest was not as historic, nor as histrionic, but equally fascinating to a rapt British public. The Police Court Sequel was how the SHEFFIELD EVENING TELEGRAPH titled its coverage of the subsequent trial of the fourteen WFL members and one man who were arrested on the night of the 28 October. (Helen Fox was not among them.1) Charlotte Despard, Edith How-Martyn and Teresa Billington-Greig were all in court to watch the proceedings, wearing the colours of the League—yellow, white and green. The police magistrate said it was one of the most disgraceful and disorderly scenes that had occurred during the votes for women campaign. He then proceeded to fine the one man on trial, Alfred Cutler, twenty shillings. Cutler’s offence was telling the police to Leave the women alone when they were being dragged off the plinth of Richard I.
Then it was Muriel’s turn. The SHEFFIELD EVENING TELEGRAPH reported thus:
Miss Muriel Matters, an Australian lady, one of the two who chained themselves the ladies’ grille, and who was afterwards arrested for disturbance in the street, asked for an adjournment. The Magistrate said he would be willing to grant the request if the evidence were to be produced, but not if the defendant desired only to prepare a speech. He said that he would be glad to have an expression of regret from the lady and the assurance that she would go back to Australia, where she could vote.
Miss Matters: No; while I am here I must do my absolute best to improve the condition of the women in this country.
The Magistrate: Pay £5.
Miss Matters: What—no option?
A month’s imprisonment was then stated as the alternative.2
The magistrate told Muriel she should go back to where she came from; Muriel told the magistrate where he could stick that helpful suggestion. (She would have enjoyed the banter—she was always complaining that the English had no sense of humour.) And then she gladly accepted the stated alternative. A sketch in the NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST shows Muriel being escorted by two moustachioed policemen to the Cannon Row station. She is wearing a long white coat and a beatific smile. There is no depiction of her being taken to Holloway to join the thirty other suffrage prisoners presently housed there.
Back in Australia, Muriel’s headline-grabbing antics didn’t go unnoticed. Most South Australians who read daily of the eccentric and athletic behaviour of the Suffragettes in London, proposed the Adelaide GADFLY, will be surprised to learn that an Adelaide maiden is among the most strenuous clamorers for the cause.3 It was with a measure of both pride and bemusement that GADFLY reported Muriel had gone beyond chalking pavements and now draws crowds like the most hardened of veterans. And why wouldn’t the suffragettes be eager to recruit the gifted Muriel, chuckled the journalist—she possessed a quantity of charm, besides what is known in high and culchawed circles as ‘the gift of the gab’.
The Perth papers were also happy to claim Muriel as their own. Under the headline Miss Muriel Matters to the Front,4 the WESTERN MAIL praised Muriel for pouring her heart and soul into what seems to be becoming a burning question in England. Listening to the stories of her marvellous courage in the face of hostile crowds, where she risked life and limb touring the regions, it was difficult to realise that one is living in the prosaic and commercially inclined 20th century. England was patently stuck in the dark ages: as far as the WESTERN MAIL was concerned, those against the suffrage movement are simply in the position of stopping a clock in the vain hope that the passage of time will thus be delayed in its flight. Womanhood suffrage had been positive for the state; Western Australia had remained on the right side of modern history—and the English would surely realise that the franchise for women is bound to come in time. Muriel could be forgiven for helping to convince the knuckle-draggers to get with the program.
In the eastern states, the press was less kind. The AGE pointed out that Muriel Matters, the Australian girl who has been a prominent agitator among the suffragettes in London, displayed no interest in politics here.5 (The editor, having failed to crunch the numbers, did not concede that Muriel had indeed been only a girl when South Australian women won the vote, and barely over voting age at the granting of the federal franchise; or that, at thirty-one, she was now entitled to be called an Australian woman.) According to the AGE, Muriel’s attention-seeking—her love of notice—had gone largely unheeded in her homeland, but she had now found a way to bring down the house in England. If the English editors admit that Muriel matters, the Age was not going to return the favour.
The Melbourne ADVOCATE published a letter from a Victorian living in London, written on 1 November, who lamented that the militant ‘Suffragettes’ of London are verily becoming more and more rowdy and repellent in their manners and methods. They are in real danger of completely unsexing themselves.6 The correspondent, who claimed he had thrice voted for female suffrage, confirmed the common perception that most of the English agitators were feather-headed young women, actuated more by the craze for notoriety…than by any burning zeal in the cause of female enfranchisement. The gentleman concluded his letter with a report of the grille incident in which Miss Matters, who described herself as an enfranchised Australian lady…and a lecturer by profession had elected to go to prison rather than pay her fine. With the help of Miss Matters, he concluded, our would-be lady voters have certainly been making matters lively.
Apprised, perhaps, of the way the press was making light of her actions, Muriel wrote a long and graphic account of the grille incident and forwarded it to the Perth MORNING HERALD. It was subsequently republished in papers around the nation. Muriel stressed the violence done to her—ruthlessly was my head jerked back upon a chair—and concluded that with so much attention drawn to the cause, the grille has at last been used to some good purpose.7 Perth’s
TRUTH newspaper, a gutter rag not known for its progressive tendencies, asserted that Muriel Matters was a worthy Westralian and a martyr in the cause of votes for women.
Miss Matters has earned fame for herself and women’s cause as the gallant young Australienne who addressed the members of the House of Commons from the grille, for which offence against the sacred laws of that august assembly she was sent to Holloway prison.8
The sarcasm was, for once, directed not at the protestor but towards the object of protest. It was the politicians and their bluecoated minions who deserved scorn, not the Westralian woman who addressed the House coolly, calmly and collectedly. Winning over Australia’s conservative press was conceivably Muriel’s finest achievement yet.
It was a feat Nellie Martel certainly hadn’t accomplished.
The MOLONG ARGUS seized the opportunity to take a swipe at ex-Australian agitator…Mrs Nellie Martel—a bouncing blonde, who was the chief rival of Miss Rose Scott when the movement was in full-swing in this State, even though Nellie had nothing to do with the incident they were reporting on their front page. (The piece was on the incarceration of Constance Clyde, an Australian journalist working in London, for her part in a suffragette protest in 1907.) To the ARGUS, the suffragettes were busy-bodies, frenzied females and raving lunatics seeking martyrdom.9
Of the riotous scenes at Newton Abbot, the ADELAIDE OBSERVER noted that, following the defeat of the Liberal candidate, Emmeline Pankhurst and Nellie Martel (sister of the Hon. D. M. Charleston of South Australia) were rolled in the mud by a party of roughs.10 TABLE TALK similarly hurled mud at our old friend Nellie Martel after the Newton Abbot affair. 11
Nellie of the peroxidised locks must be a proud woman to-day. She has been arrested in the street for rioting, she has waved the scarlet flag through the ‘grille’ in the House, and been carried out kicking in the arms of a stalwart policeman, she has, when attired in a fashionable yellow, satin blouse (per cable) through the streets of London at the behest of 5000 women, shouting for freedom and equal rights with man…and now she has rolled in a slushy gutter, where the mud was 10 inches deep: Could devotion go any further? We felt like cabling Bravo.12
Had the journalist done so, Nellie might have retorted that she and Emmeline had not started the riot but had nearly been killed in it.
After the grille incident, the Adelaide REGISTER bundled Muriel’s unseemly antics together with Nellie’s lawbreaking to make a case for the way the intervention of Australian activists in British domestic politics had rais[ed] doubts in the slow-moving Anglo-Saxon mind regarding the superior wisdom and meekness of the fair sex in South Australia. British progressives looked to Australia as politically superior, the pace-setters, but women like Nellie and Muriel were kicking own goals, knocking Australia off its carefully constructed pedestal. The REGISTER was scathing of the suffragettes’ exceedingly foolish methods, yet equally critical of the response of authorities.
The idea of sending women to gaol because they are endeavouring to obtain a share of democratic powers is as repugnant to British ideals as the unfeminine demonstrations which are thus punished.13
Regardless of Nellie’s keynote on the platform at Hyde Park in front of half a million people, TRUTH was still obsessing about her peroxide straw-colored hair and three layers of perle blanc—despite which vanities the British sheilas still appeared to have taken to her.14 It seemed that no matter how much favour Nellie gained in London, becoming quite a personage among the English suffragettes as TRUTH conceded, her reputation in the Australian press would remain tarnished.
But the TRUTH article, published on 10 January 1909, turned out to be the last time Nellie was mentioned in the Australian press—or, for that matter, the British press. Some time in late 1908, and certainly by early 1909, Nellie followed Dora Montefiore’s example and split with the WSPU. Unlike Dora, she did not divert her activist energies elsewhere: she simply disappeared from public life.
What happened? Was there an incident that forced her exit from the organisation she had helped to establish in London five years earlier? Or did relations slowly go pear-shaped, as they had with Rose Scott and the Womanhood Suffrage League in Sydney, or with the Golding sisters in their breakaway organisation? Did Nellie jump ship just when the WSPU was reaching full sail; or was she pushed? There are no clear answers, but a few clues.
After the success of the Hyde Park rally, Nellie continued with the WSPU’s propaganda work around the country. In September, she was in Liverpool, where scores of women listened to the brilliant address of the ‘invader’ as Mrs Martel was called on the Liverpool posters the day following.15 The event was so successful that a band of women followed Nellie on her tour of New Brighton and surrounding districts, shouting Shame on a British Government who imprison women at her meetings. Some time in September Nellie either was ditched from, or stepped down from, the WSPU Committee, meaning she probably ceased to be a paid organiser too.16 In October, despite her demotion, Nellie toured Yorkshire, often speaking at two meetings per day. In November, her addresses to audiences in the north of England were favourably reported in the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. There were thirteen men hanged before the men present were entitled to a vote, she told one meeting. Was the Government going to demand from women the same price as men paid for their liberty? (Applause).17 And with that ovation, Nellie dropped off the radar of the British press too. Her last appearance in the WSPU’s journal VOTES FOR WOMEN is 6 January 1909.18 Her penny pamphlet, THE WOMEN’S VOTE IN AUSTRALIA, ceased to be listed on the WSPU’s Women’s Press publications list soon after. 19
Was there an insurmountable personality clash that led to Nellie’s departure not only from the WSPU but from public life? Evidence about how Nellie’s fellow campaigners regarded her suggests so. In 1907, Elizabeth Robins wrote a novel called THE CONVERT, about a rich society beauty who becomes caught up in the militant suffrage cause. The characters in the book were based on women Robins had met in the movement, the dialogue based on their actual speeches. Robins gave a draft of the book to Emmeline Pankhurst to read. I like it all immensely, Emmeline told her, the only thing that jars is Mrs Martel.
She is such a good soul really, and I fear she will recognise the portrait. I would not have her hurt for worlds. She is horribly sensitive under that surface that repels you. Is it too late to cut her out or alter her beyond recognition? I’d rather see her cut out. She is a good fighter and came to our side when we had so few friends. In spite of her little ways which sometimes made me squirm, I am very fond of her and I don’t like to think of her being wounded.20
It is possible that Robins followed Pankhurst’s advice and cut Nellie’s character out, given that the novel was published in 1907 and there doesn’t seem to have been a reaction from Nellie. Another suffragist comrade, Rebecca West, gives a clue to Nellie’s reputation: I was agreeably surprised with Mrs Martel, she wrote to her sister. She’s a dear old soul in spite of her hair, and takes the crowd tremendously.21
Nellie was clearly a divisive figure: brash, flamboyant, outwardly confident but ultimately insecure. She repelled people (who apparently responded with freely exercised condescension). Her little ways could jar with even her closest allies. Nellie’s personality was a useful weapon in a guerrilla war of irritation and pestering, but perhaps she exasperated and infuriated her allies as well as her enemies.
Or perhaps the years of campaigning had taken a toll. She’d suffered a spell of exhaustion before leaving Sydney, and after five intense years of public speaking, outdoor demonstrations, by-election campaigns, propaganda meetings, writing essays and pamphlets, fund-raising and hell-raising, she could have been in poor health, mentally and physically spent. Possibly she needed to care for Charles.
In any case, she doesn’t appear to have made a philosophical break with the movement. Some time in 1909, Nellie wrote a letter to suffragette Mary Ann Rawles, scribbled on leftover WSPU letterhead. Rawles was one of the four hundred textile workers who had travelled to London to speak at the deputation to the prime minister in May 1906, where Nellie was speaking. Sorry to learn you are still suffering from the rough handling you received, Nellie wrote, but my heart leapt when I read your spirit was not damped. Bravo! With such women to help on the Cause, we must win.22 Nellie had also applied, unsuccessfully, to visit three prisoners in Holloway. We shall go on asking, she told Rawles, and give them [the visiting committee] extra work to reply to us.
From the sound of it, Nellie had lost none of her fight, and she still identified with the movement that had given her life in England purpose and solidarity since 1904. She also—and perhaps this was one of her little ways that could rile—took implicit credit for the current strength of the campaign. England will not go to the walls, she wrote, whilst her women are so brave and loyal as we have proved you to be. It took Australian women (we) to push English women (you) to the limits of their courage and perseverance. Perhaps the WSPU leadership were sick of having Nellie rub their noses in her sweet-smelling, pearl-encrusted, upstart Australian ascendancy.
In early 1909, as Nellie bowed out of public life, Ethel Hill published a book called GREAT SUFFRAGISTS AND WHY: MODERN MAKERS OF HISTORY. Her entry on Nellie Martel concludes: No woman has played a more prominent part in this great and vital question.23
When she wrote the manuscript, Hill could not have known that her words would be Nellie’s valedictory epitaph.
On 20 August 1908, two months after 500,000 people crammed into Hyde Park to witness a full-throttle Nellie and the spectacle that was Women’s Sunday, the same number of Sydneysiders turned out to watch a very different event. The US Navy’s ‘Great White Fleet’ was sailing into Sydney Harbour. It was the largest crowd ever seen in Australia, far larger than the one that came to celebrate the birth of the nation seven years earlier. The sixteen-strong fleet would take its show of maritime strength to ports around the globe, but no other country would welcome the Americans as jubilantly as Australia.
It was a triumphant moment for Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, who had defied the British Foreign Office in making a unilateral invitation to President Roosevelt to host his navy. When Roosevelt had met Vida Goldstein six years earlier, he told her that he had his eye on Australia; Deakin clearly had his sights set on America too.24 Britannia no longer ruled the waves as she once had. Why not court the Americans?
Vida was a patriotic proponent of an Australian navy and an admirer of both Deakin and Roosevelt. But she was not focused on the visit of the shiny American troopships. There was a hand-to-hand land battle going on in Victoria in the last four months of 1908, one that required all her strategic capacities. Victorians would go to the polls in December, and Vida was determined that this would be the year that those two recalcitrant Legislative Council votes for women’s suffrage would finally be snared.
She had always believed that education was the key to political reform: change minds, and those minds would organise to change laws. But the continued delay of Victoria in gaining suffrage—the sheer political drudgery required to keep up the pressure—was starting to test her faith. With Tommy Bent behaving much like a bovine version of the pig-headed Asquith, she was no longer so sure that peaceful propaganda was the way through the logjam of prejudice. In 1908, she reported to the IWSA conference in Amsterdam, we find ourselves crushed between our straight-out opponents and our professed friends. None of them likes the practical working of women’s suffrage; each Party thinks that it lessens its party influence.25 She would take a leaf out of the suffragettes’ book if she had to. Sensationalism is everything, Vida wrote in her diary in 1908, and so the suffragists have had to make sensationalism the chief motif of their educational work.
In the spring of 1908, a member of the Labor opposition introduced yet another Adult Suffrage Bill to parliament. Vida tried to lure Bent into a public meeting where he would be forced to answer questions from the audience. Why would the premier not make adult suffrage a government policy? He agreed to a meeting, but banned questions.26 Inspired by the twin summer suffrage processions in London, Vida considered holding a public march through Melbourne’s streets. They must be made to feel that women are in earnest, she wrote, and English women have shown the world how that can be done.27 Instead, she convinced male supporters to form a Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, another English innovation. And she tried speaking to Bent again. To Vida’s surprise, he agreed to talk to one of the two uncooperative MPs. By September, the corrupt old curmudgeon started to drop sly hints that the women might have his support. On 7 October, three weeks before Muriel Matters fastened her reputation to the grille, Bent renounced his former position and, without a hint of contrition or irony, announced that he would introduce a government bill to replace the Labor bill. The Bent bill was introduced a week later, though Vida wasn’t there to see the historic moment when Victorian women’s forty-four-year struggle to win the state franchise neared its end: Bent had closed the public galleries to women.
On 18 November, however, Vida was looking on from the gallery (another Bent flip-flop), as the bill passed its second reading in what she termed the House of Obstruction, constitutionally known as the Legislative Council.28 As a division was not called, Vida defied the parliamentary rules that forbade visitors taking notes in the gallery and wrote down the names of the noes. She considered it an opportune moment to do some mild ‘suffragetting’ on my own account. Victoria, the first colony to demand political freedom in 1869, was the last state to see it realized. 29
That December, Vida sent a card to the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
This is the Christmas mail to the United States, so you can imagine I have lots of cards to send off. I have only time to let you know that on November 18 our suffrage bill passed the Council by 23 to 5, and was a glorious victory. We never expected such a tremendous success. I can scarcely believe yet that the struggle of years is absolutely over…I want you and the good suffrage friends in the State to know how happy we are.30
When it came time to register to vote, Vida Goldstein was literally the first in line.
The glorious victory meant more to Vida than simply the end of an exhausting era of intellectual and organisational brawling. Her newfound political emancipation at home was matched in other, more personal ways. Vida was now unshackled from her domestic obligations, able to take wing and stretch the limits of her statecraft. We are thankful to be free, she wrote to both the NUWSS and WSPU leadership, because of our own self-respect, because of the power it gives us to help in making Australia a great nation, and because we shall be freer to help our sisters in other lands to win their political liberty.
Failure is Impossible.