The grille incident had been spectacular, but the next stunt Muriel Matters was planning might be catastrophic—and it was definitely going to be cold. It was 16 February 1909, and the weather was predictably frigid. Even in a thick woollen coat, several layers of clothing, gloves and an aviator’s cap tied under her chin with a big white scarf, Muriel wouldn’t be snug at 3500 feet.
But she was undeterred from her brazen plan: to travel by air—in a hired dirigible—from the Welsh Harp Reservoir near Hendon down to central London and around Big Ben to Westminster, timing the flight so as to drop fifty-six pounds (twenty-five kilograms) of handbills on the state procession of the King to open the winter session of parliament. The powered airship wouldn’t attempt to land in London; rather, Muriel would shout down to the crowd through a megaphone as she passed, and then land in the downs near Epsom. A carload of WFL members led by Edith How-Martyn would follow the course of the airship by road and pick Muriel up at the other end of her journey. Strategic masterstroke or sheer madness?
The plan was devised to thwart the restrictions placed on the WFL’s activities after it claimed responsibility for the tumult in parliament the previous October. The WFL was barred from distributing leaflets in the streets, the public galleries of the House remained closed and security was on high alert, with police surveillance trailing the suffragettes’ every move. But no one was expecting an attack from the air. Only a handful of people, let alone women, had ever been up in a flying machine. (The risk was considerable, although perhaps not solely of plummeting to one’s doom. If medical men in the 1890s discouraged women from riding bicycles with warnings of bicycle face—a permanent distortion of the facial features due to the strain of pedalling—and reprised their concern with predictions of automobile face when women began driving cars in the early twentieth century, they might have had something to say about ‘airship face’.)
In any case, what could the police do when they did catch wind of the plan and saw the snowstorm of Votes for Women leaflets? Chase her? Even if their police horses could magically grow wings, their regulations do not extend up there, Muriel pointed out: You see, there are still some limitations to man’s authority.1
There was only room for one passenger in Henry Spencer’s airship, and Muriel had made sure it was reserved for her. She had been released from prison on 5 December, surviving the ordeal of Holloway in reasonable shape, even though she frequently gave sauce to the matron.2 The Heroine of the Grille was now free to become the Heroine of the Skies. It was just as novel a part, pleasingly showing her range. In the first performance, Muriel shackled herself to the obdurate bars of tradition. Today, she would unleash herself upon the great open promise of the future.
At least one man accepted that the winds of change favoured rather than froze women’s independence. Mr Spencer not only let the suffragettes paint a huge Votes for Women sign in black lettering on one side of his airship, and Women’s Freedom League on the other. He also allowed them to attach forty-foot streamers from the airship in the WFL colours, and volunteered to be Muriel’s aeronaut for the day. And all for £75 for the expected two-hour journey.
It was cold but fortunately it was not raining. The skies were clear and a small crowd had gathered in the field to watch the peculiar happenings: a cheerful lady in a green coat being lifted into the wicker basket of the airship; a pile of pamphlets being loaded in; the pilot trying to start the engine. Another try. And another. This was not a dress rehearsal. There could be no repeat performance. The King’s carriage would be making its way down the Mall. Other WFL members would be bobbing about on the Thames in a gondola, waiting for Muriel’s arrival to speak to the royal-watching crowds from a megaphone. It was 1.30 p.m. Time for lift off. How could she calm her nerves while Mr Spencer fiddled about with the thirty-five-horsepower engine that would somehow push this cigar-shaped balloon through the air? Perhaps she could recite the witty little poem that a fellow had composed after the grille incident.
They regard us at home as a lunatic crowd,
In Australia they know us as ‘hatters’
But let women-enfranchised Australians please note,
We’ve got with us Miss Muriel Matters
Some may regard us unequal to man;
Such folly a suffragette scatters,
While importunate widows continue to fan
The flame lit by Miss Muriel Matters.3
The engine sputtered, then sparked, then purred. At 2 p.m. they were off, soaring upward as a laughing Muriel waved to the ever-receding crowd.
The latest move of the militant suffragists was a balloon raid on St Stephen’s, reported the NORTHERN DAILY TELEGRAPH,4 but unfortunately for them, the elements were unpropitious.
It was true, Muriel’s airship had been heaven-bound, but the conditions were not heaven-sent. The winds gusted more sharply than expected, pushing the airship off course. It was a difficult beast to steer at the best of times. At one stage, Spencer climbed out of the basket and onto the wire-and-rope rigging. I was afraid that he would say at any moment, ‘Just climb out there and see to the ballast’, Muriel later recounted to an audience eager for thrilling details. Of course I should have gone had I been asked.5 They were now at 3500 feet (a thousand metres)—too high for her megaphone to be any use. And instead of tracking south towards Westminster, they were over Hyde Park: they had drifted too far west and would miss the parliament buildings altogether. They were floating over Chelsea now—somewhere down there fellow WFL member Dora Meeson Coates would be in her studio, painting—and with Big Ben falling away into the distance, there was no time like the present to unload the leaflets. Down they fluttered, hundreds of yellow, green and white fliers. The leaflets and the shrill cry of ‘Votes for women’ wasted themselves upon the desert air, wrote THE TIMES. All that was left was for Mr Spencer to get them safely to ground. The great balloon had now coasted beyond London’s southern suburbs, over soft green pastures such as South Australian farmers could only dream about. Never mind Epsom; Spencer brought his craft down in the borough of Croydon, landing somewhat inelegantly in a hedge. It would take another hour and ninety kilometres of helter-skelter driving along the trail of handbills for Muriel’s companions to reach her.6
The escapade wasn’t a waste, of course; far from it. The press went wild. London had never witnessed an extra-terrestrial political protest. Nowhere had. ALady Who Cannot Be Kept Down, shouted the headline in the DAILY MAIL the following day. Masterful, ingenious, were words used to describe the plan, if not the execution. It was a particularly modern act of resistance, harnessing a new technology to announce the topsy-turvy power of the New Woman, a detail which did not go unremarked by the press.
‘I think we can say now we are well up to date,’ she observed. ‘If we want to go in the air, neither the police nor anyone else can keep us down, and if we could throw handbills we could easily throw anything else.’ Miss Matters is Australian.
To be ‘up in the air’ no longer meant to be debatable or uncertain. It now meant to be ‘up to date’. Fresh, prevailing, enlightened and forward-looking, like the baby nation at the bottom of the globe. And there was a hint of menace in the knowledge and experience—the loss of innocence—that no longer being earth-bound entailed. The women could throw anything else. A new threat. Missiles from the sky. You can take it from me, Muriel told reporters when she returned to London that night, that after today’s experience we shall not do much on earth again.7
A new ditty now did the rounds, a five-verse paean to Muriel Matters, the pioneer of Woman’s rights, called ‘In the Air’. The last verse lyrically summed up all the anxieties of the lawmakers and inventiveness of the lawbreakers, as England approached the last year of the first decade of the new century.
What a lesson for each maid is
To be learnt from such a case,
Of the foolishness of ladies,
Who would fly in Nature’s face;
Who to such mad lengths are going,
By the winds of folly fann’d,
That there’s certainly no knowing,
Where they’ll land.8