Though Disaster Was Freely Prophesied
Australia, spring 1910; London, autumn 1910
If you were an Australian living through the spring of 1910, you could have been forgiven for blinking and missing something important, as law upon law, innovation upon innovation, rolled out from the Federal Parliament like tumbleweeds down a windswept beach.
In September, the Federal Treasury was given the authority to issue its own currency. The new Australian pound was still fixed to the British pound sterling—literally, the gold standard—but it represented a new national currency with the £1 note sporting the Australian coat of arms, granted by King Edward VII in 1908. Within the next two months, control of the Northern Territory was passed from South Australia to the Commonwealth, the Royal Australian Navy was named (although Australia had possessed a naval defence force for ten years) and the passage of the Seat of Government Act paved the way for the construction of the federal capital in Canberra. There were changes to the tariff system, the postal system, the arbitration system, the welfare system.
There had never been anything like the mass of business transacted at the time, wrote observer H. G. Turner, astonished at the quantity and frequency of legislation passed in the spring session of parliament, almost without pause, by day or night.1 Andrew Fisher forced his fellow parliamentarians to sit for five months straight. At one point in late November, parliament convened for two consecutive all-night sittings. Watching bleary-eyed from the gallery, Turner noted that members were slugging it out in a state of tension, very adverse to calm deliberation. Labor was, in Turner’s view, tired of accepting what they regarded as only palliative legislation. The ALP believed in the power of government to cure the ills of society and, what’s more, its organisational prowess at the April election gave them the right to expect success. Deakin, himself caught in the whirlwind of Fisher’s legislative agenda, realised that nothing outside the Caucus can prevent it from carrying all its measures, no matter how drastic, revolutionary or novel they may be!2 With absolute majorities in both houses, Fisher had a thumping mandate and he intended to use it.
In the throw-all-the-cards-in-the-air atmosphere of the world’s first elected Labor government, a few novel ideas didn’t land. One MP moved to adopt the decimal system for currency, weights and measures but, although a resolution in favour was carried, the measure didn’t progress beyond the region of talk. Neither, unsurprisingly, did the motion of a Queensland MP to have the sale of intoxicating liquor banned within the precincts of Parliament House.3
Vida Goldstein had a tumbleweed of her own to roll down the beach: the resolution in support of the British suffragettes promised by the prime minister. H. G. Turner considered it yet another crackpot notion, but Vida was not discouraged. She had the public support of the postmaster-general, Josiah Thomas, and Muriel Matters had Prime Minister Fisher’s promise that Australia would send its message of support to the English women’s suffrage movement. The question was how to nudge this extra-curricular activity into such a crowded parliamentary syllabus.
Opportunity knocked on Thursday 17 November 1910, the same day American aviator Ralph Johnstone died when his wingtip folded, plunging him five hundred metres to earth. Two weeks earlier Johnstone had broken the world record for highest altitude achieved in an airplane: 9714 feet, or roughly three times as high as Muriel Matters had elevated the Votes for Women message above London.
Now Labor MP Arthur Rae stood before the Australian Senate, hoping he would not come a cropper like Johnstone. Fifty-year-old Rae had captured a New South Wales Senate seat in the landslide Labor victory of 1910, after a long career as a militant unionist and serial political campaigner. Early on, he had been persuaded by Rose Scott to consider women in his radical socialist ideas about justice and equality—under her influence, it was Rae who had ensured that women’s suffrage became a plank of New South Wales Labor’s platform. More recently, he’d seen Muriel Matters when she delivered her ‘Inside Holloway Gaol’ lecture in Sydney. I so much enjoyed your lecture, he later wrote to Muriel, and was so deeply impressed by your graphic pictures of some of the inmates and the causes that brought them there.4
Now Rae had the chance to implement his long-frustrated desires to effect change from the top and bring a measure of fair play to the women Muriel had so evocatively channelled.5 At 6.30 p.m. that Thursday, Rae used his allotted place in proceedings to ask an unexpected ‘question’ in the form of a resolution:
1. That this Senate is of the opinion that the extension of the suffrage to the women of Australia for States and Commonwealth Parliaments, on the same terms as to men, has had the most beneficial results. It has led to the more orderly conduct of elections, and, at the last Federal elections, the women’s vote in a majority of the States showed a greater proportionate increase than that cast by men. It has given a greater prominence to legislation particularly affecting women and children, although the women have not taken up such questions to the exclusion of others of wider significance. In matters of Defence and Imperial concern they have proved themselves as far-seeing and discriminating as men. Because the reform has brought nothing but good, though disaster was freely prophesied, we respectfully urge that all nations enjoying representative government would be well advised in granting votes to women.
2. That a copy of the foregoing resolution be cabled to the British Prime Minister.6
The resolution was judiciously worded. As Senator Rae took care to explain to Muriel Matters, the form of this resolution was finally drawn up by Miss Vida Goldstein.7 At first Rae had given Vida a draft for her approval, but then he changed tack. I thought it better, he told Muriel, that the women’s point of view should be expressed. He therefore left the formulation of the text to Vida, only changing a single word. Rae deleted patriotic and substituted far-seeing. Vida was proud to call herself an Australian patriot, but Rae was squeamish. The word patriotism, he explained, is put to so many base uses that I hate to use it.
Rae also took the liberty of adding the second clause. It was the senator’s idea to cable the resolution directly to Asquith—Vida was anxious about it. She was not worried about whether the resolution would receive support in principle. As one British suffragist had recently noted of the Australian Parliament: There is not one Anti-Suffrage member in either chamber nowadays; most of those who were formerly opponents are now quite hurt if reminded of the fact.8 She did not believe that the members would quibble about the sentiment.
But she had carefully phrased the resolution to respectfully urge all nations enjoying representative government to follow her nation’s lead. In this context, the United Kingdom could be counted as but one bad apple in a basket of deplorable governments. Rae’s clause, however, brought the entire basket down on Asquith’s pig head and Vida feared this impertinence would skewer the whole deal.9
Whether warned by Vida or sensing the potential for opposition himself, Rae opened his speech with the stickiest point first:
Some honorable senators felt rather touchy on the question of doing anything which might be thought to be in the nature of giving advice on an internal matter to the British Government.
Rae had his defence to this accusation. It was one that Vida had prepared for him.
It would ill become any honorable senator to seriously urge that position, seeing that on many occasions the Federal Parliament has expressed its opinion on very much more controversial matters.
Anticipating the opposition to clause 2 of the resolution, Vida had pointed out to Rae, who was not half the political junkie that she was, that the Commonwealth of Australia had ‘interfered’ to some purpose in the past with regard to British foreign policy. She dredged up the times that the Australian Parliament had passed resolutions on Britain’s employment of Chinese workers in South African mines, on Irish home rule and on the Dogger Bank incident of 1904 which almost led to war between Britain and Russia.10
Immediately after Rae introduced the motion, the Senate broke for dinner. When it resumed at 8 p.m. the senators were refreshed and ready to wax loquacious. There is a very homely proverb about youths teaching their grandmothers to suck eggs, grumbled Senator Lt-Col Sir Albert Gould, one of the oldest members of the Senate and an unreconstructed Anglophile. Gould argued that a cable message was not in the ordinary way of doing business and was unlikely to go down well with Asquith who, as everybody knew, would dare not play a game of golf without having two or three policemen to protect him against the energetic assaults of these ladies. Gould felt obliged to ask of his colleagues:
This motion asks the Senate to pose as a body which is to advise the nations of the world. In other words, the youngest nation is to undertake the teaching of the most venerable nations…Is it advisable that we should take upon ourselves the duties of a mentor to the British Parliament in the regulation of its own affairs?…We who are the juniors are pointing out to them what they should do.
Rae countered: We are not juniors; that is a fallacy. We belong to the same race.
Gould insisted:
Surely honorable senators see what a ridiculous position we shall place ourselves in…we are attempting to go to the very root of the institutions of Great Britain…[we should] mind our own business.
Gould was fired up, but Rae was not to be flustered. He knew that some members would be critical of a measure which seeks to dictate to the Imperial Parliament upon a matter of domestic legislation. But this was not a matter of parochial concern, such as taxation, he argued, it was a matter affecting human rights in their largest and most important aspect. Not women’s rights. Human rights.
James Stewart, Labor senator for Queensland, did not shrink from the parochial: women’s suffrage had, he argued, been the means of placing the Labor Party in power—surely we should be failing in our duty if we did not carry the good tidings to the uttermost ends of the Empire. And, he added, this matter was very much ‘our own business’, for the good government of the Empire concerns every citizen of the Empire. Australia having discovered that women’s suffrage was such an advantage to good government, we are duty bound to tell the world.
I regard Australia as a sort of social laboratory where social, industrial and political experiments are carried on for the benefit of humanity. Having found that some of our experiments have brought excellent results, surely we should be failing in our duty if we did not communicate those results to our fellow-citizens throughout the Empire?
Warming to his topic, Stewart made a case for why the experiment in women’s suffrage mattered more than the trial and testing of flight:
Discoveries in social and political science are of greater importance than discoveries of any other kind, because upon them may depend the happiness and welfare of the human family.
Stewart expressed his gratitude to Senator Rae for introducing the resolution, and a conga line of senators now assembled to support Rae’s motion. Senator David O’Keefe of Tasmania felt it was not impudence but imperial duty to give advice to the mother country and (supporting Vida’s backgrounding on the matter of precedents), reminded the senators that Deakin had sent a resolution to the prime minister of Great Britain regarding the importation of hordes of Chinese to work in the South African mines. We may have been a little in advance of our time then, he argued, but the Rand decision was ultimately reversed. In this matter, also, we may be in advance of our time; but nevertheless, we are justified in passing it. Western Australian senator George Henderson didn’t expect the resolution to make a jot of difference, given the density of Conservatism of the Old Land, but still he supported Australia’s right to send it and assist in getting Great Britain out of that political mist and darkness in which she is living today. Fellow Western Australian senator Hugh de Largie agreed. Australia was vindicated in respectfully offering its advice to Westminster because we are, in politics, the pacemakers of the world.
Only the inscrutable veteran Senator James Walker of New South Wales, almost seventy, who supported equal pay for women and opposed the Immigration Restriction Act, gave a nod to Colonel Gould’s logic. Walker said he was not opposed to women’s suffrage but objected to the downright piece of impertinence which is contained in this motion. How would we like the Imperial Parliament, he asked his fellow senators in his rich Scots brogue, to send us a message, asking us why we refuse to receive people into Australia unless they can pass a certain examination? (He also reminded senators that at the federal convention of 1897, there were forty-nine so-called Conservatives, and only one Labor representative, and yet that body adopted the principle of adult suffrage. Old warhorses have long memories and short fuses.)
Stewart had baulked at teaching Britannia to suck eggs. Now Walker hauled out another poultry-related maxim: What is sauce for the goose is equally sauce for the gander. If gosling Australia was to interfere in British domestic politics, she should be prepared to have her own legislation vetted for Mother Goose’s approval (a situation that was already, of course, constitutionally mandatory). Rae suggested the best metaphor to test a nation’s qualification for giving advice was not hens but haulage. The Commonwealth is the up-to-date motor car, he argued, setting the pace for the old-fashioned stagecoach.
Late that night, the senators finally decided to stop rattling on about grandmothers and geese. Rae wanted his resolution to go to a vote. Gould insisted that the two clauses be voted on separately. The first paragraph—the resolution itself—was unanimously resolved in the affirmative. On the question of whether the resolution be cabled to the British prime minister, the Senate divided.
The controversial clause was passed: fifteen ayes to four noes. This latter victory was of utmost importance to Rae, who believed that it was far from impudent to bring Great Britain in sympathy and close touch with our ideals and aspirations. It was, he argued, self-protective. The King’s veto could demolish any colonial legislation therefore it was a matter of real live importance to us that England understand the nature and purpose of Australian democracy. To Rae, the Senate resolution was a significant act of colonial self-assertion.
True to its word, the Senate cabled the Womanhood Suffrage Resolution to Prime Minister Asquith. On 22 November, the President of the Senate announced the receipt of a cable in reply.
I have to thank you for your telegram conveying the expression of opinion of the Senate on the results of the enfranchisement of women in Australia.11
Asquith kept his response short and to the point. He offered no argument nor made any promises. He simply acknowledged receipt of the cable, as one might register a dry-cleaning receipt in an accounting ledger.
Following Rae’s success in the Senate, Dr Maloney moved an almost identical resolution in the House of Representatives on 25 November. Maloney was more circumspect about claiming Australia’s right to democratic pre-eminence, citing Finland’s achievement in having recently elected twenty-six female members to the unicameral parliament, representing over ten per cent of the House. Australia, feared Maloney, lagged behind. Maloney’s resolution was also resolved in the affirmative. Both houses of the Australian Parliament had now sent a message to the world generally, and Asquith specifically, to support the actions of the English suffrage campaigners.
The British prime minister was the primary recipient of the cable. But a jubilant Senator Rae also compiled an almighty cc list. He sent a copy of the resolution and accompanying debates in HANSARD to Muriel Matters and, at Vida Goldstein’s request, copies to Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Garrett Fawcett as well as suffrage leaders in Chicago, Boston, New York, the Netherlands and Denmark.12 It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the movement here, wrote Mrs Fawcett, of the example of Australia and New Zealand. She reproduced the Senate resolution word for word in the book she was currently drafting, WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE: A SHORT HISTORY OF A GREAT MOVEMENT.13
Receiving the news in America, Carrie Chapman Catt also recognised the leadership Australia was taking in global political affairs. All the world knows, she announced to the IWSA, that an obstinate and recalcitrant government alone stood between the women of Great Britain and the vote. That government was now under attack not only from its own frustrated and aggrieved people, but from what Nellie Martel called outside forces. Thanks to the vigorous suffrage grapevine, and Vida’s very deliberate publicity campaign, the news of the audacious resolution was everywhere. The parliament of Australia has cabled its endorsement to the British Parliament, Catt told her networks, and now Australian and New Zealand women are organising to aid their English sisters. But Catt made a brasher prediction, based on Australia’s track record for bold thinking and courageous action. Asia had once been the cradle of civilisation, argued Catt, but in time, Europe had become the teacher and guide.
As Europe supplanted Asia, so it is not only possible, but quite probable, that Australia with its new democracy, its equality of rights, its youthful virility, its willingness to experiment, may yet supplant Europe as the leader of civilisation.14
Jessie Ackermann, who was undertaking a twenty-two-month tour of the Southlands and Scandinavia—places where women enjoy citizenship—was not quite so convinced that Australia was the next Jerusalem. Ackermann was in Australia to gather facts first hand at short range. She still saw Australia as a citadel of masculine power and monopoly.
But there was no doubt that, in 1910, Australia produced so many innovations that commentators speculated that in this far-away queer country...all things are possible.15
While the Australian legislature was preening its democratic feathers, the British Parliament was facing a constitutional crisis.
At the 1910 general election, Asquith had pledged to abolish the veto powers of the House of Lords, which had voted down Lloyd George’s so-called People’s Budget—legislation that the chancellor of the exchequer said would remove the national degradation of slums and widespread poverty and destitution in a land glittering with wealth—and which included a reform of land taxes that would hit the gentry where it hurt.
By the unwritten rules of the British constitution, the Lords could frustrate but not openly defy the will of the people. Moreover, there was a convention that the Lords would not obstruct a bill on financial matters if it passed the Commons. In the case of the People’s Budget, however, the landowners had gone rogue, trashing centuries-old political niceties in an effort to cling to social and fiscal advantage.
But the Liberals’ fingernail hold on power made reform of the second chamber almost impossible. In April, Asquith introduced a Parliament Bill, threatening to go directly to Edward VII to ask for the creation of hundreds of new Liberal peers if the existing Lords clung to their hereditary privilege. When Edward died unexpectedly in May, there was, in Emmeline Pankhurst’s words, a temporary softening of animosities and a general disposition to compromise on all troubled issues: a truce which held equally for suffrage militancy and parliamentary conflict. Reluctant to throw the new king in hot water so early in his reign, the government convened a constitutional conference in June to broker cooperation between the warring political parties.
The struggle over the Lords’ veto power would continue to be thrashed out over the coming months, but one immediate outcome of the conference was the Conciliation Bill introduced into the House of Commons on 14 June 1910. If passed, the bill would extend the right to vote to over a million British women: those over the age of thirty who owned sufficient assets to qualify for the limited property franchise. Asquith promised to give facilities for the bill to be debated and voted upon before the end of the year. The bill did not satisfy Dora Montefiore and her fellow whole-loafers in the Adult Suffrage Society, but the WFL, the NUWSS and the WSPU all agreed to support it.
The mood of cooperation and collegiality was infectious. The WCTU staged an open-air demonstration in celebration of the Conciliation Bill: a national, indeed an inter-national affair, in which all the suffrage groups took part, purred Emmeline Pankhurst in her new role as peacemaker.16 Thousands of women paraded through London’s streets to the Albert Hall, all dressed in summery, conciliatory white. At the head of the march were 617 women white clad and holding long staves tipped with the broad arrow, representing the 617 women who had been imprisoned in the struggle for their rights. Lord Lytton, whose sister Constance had been force-fed when incarcerated as Jane Warton, addressed the packed auditorium, assuring the white-clad warriors that success was at hand.
The Conciliation Bill made it to a second reading. By November, however, it was apparent that the constitutional conference had failed to reach an agreement on the issue of the Lords veto. Lloyd George explained the problem.
Having in vain used every endeavour through conciliatory methods to win equal rights for all Britons, we are now driven to fight for fair play in our native land. We repudiate the claim put forward by 600 Tory Peers that they were born to control the destinies of 45,000,000 of their fellow-citizens, and to trample upon their wishes for the good government of their country.17
The chancellor made this statement on 12 November. What happened next revealed that equal rights for all Britons was a phrase with a very limited meaning.
Parliament reconvened for the year’s final session on Friday 18 November (the day after the Australian Senate voted unanimously to send its Womanhood Suffrage Resolution to the embattled Asquith). It would be the last chance for the prime minister to make good his promise to put the Conciliation Bill to a vote. But when Asquith appeared in the House that day, it was to announce that he had advised the King to dissolve parliament. There would be another general election on 10 December to put the matter of the People’s Budget and the Lords veto back in the hands of the people. It was not yet a year since Asquith had last gone to the polls and nearly lost government.
In the final days before the dissolution, only government business would be attended to. He made no mention of the Conciliation Bill, but the suffragists knew his silence meant one thing: there would not be enough time in the remaining parliamentary session to put the bill to a third and final reading. Results of the second reading indicated that the House was divided 299 to 190 in support of the Conciliation Bill. It was the largest majority on any measure yet put to that parliament. But without further facilities, there would be no vote on whether women too would be admitted to the franchise. Asquith had killed the bill. The destinies of British women would continue to be out of their own control, just as Lloyd George was accusing the Lords of making mischief with the will of ‘the people’.
Emmeline Pankhurst immediately gathered the troops and called an end to the truce. Without delay, she led a deputation of over three hundred women to the Commons, marching in battalions of twelve. Emmeline’s contingent, which included many elder stateswomen of the suffrage campaign including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Annie Cobden-Sanderson, as well as Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, arrived first. They made their way to the Strangers’ Entrance where crowds had started to gather on news of the dissolution of parliament. There was some jostling and shouting, a sense of confusion and anticipation. But nobody was prepared for what was about to occur. How to describe what happened to English women at the behest of an English Government is a difficult task, Emmeline Pankhurst would later write, the plain facts, baldly stated, I am aware will strain credulity.18
The plain facts, baldly stated.
Not long after Emmeline’s dozen reached the public entrance, just after 1 p.m., Home Secretary Winston Churchill decreed that no one was to be allowed to approach Westminster. Parliament Square, the open space opposite the Houses of Parliament on the other side of St Margaret Street, was as far as the approaching legations of suffragettes could get before they were stopped by the policemen Churchill had sent to control the crowd. Churchill had told police there were to be no arrests.
Emmeline watched in horror as officers of the law took Churchill’s decree as licence to assault the hundreds of female protesters who were trying to get to the steps of the House to join their leader and present their petition to Asquith. For five hours, police hustled and beat the women. The suffragettes were punched in the face, thrown from policeman to policeman, dragged to the ground, kicked and stomped on in a grotesque show of, in Emmeline’s words, unanimous and wholesale brutality. Sylvia Pankhurst claimed that some were dragged down dark streets and indecently assaulted.19 Victims and eyewitnesses attested that the most frequent type of abuse was the twisting round, pinching, screwing, nipping, or wringing the breast…often done in the most public way so as to inflict the utmost humiliation.20 One officer was seen grabbing a militant’s breasts and hissing at her you’ve been wanting this for a long time, haven’t you?21 One elderly suffragist later testified that a policeman gripped me by my thigh. When she demanded he release her, the bobby leered, oh my old dear, I can grip you wherever I like today.22
With her sister Mary among the women being mauled by police, Emmeline—after two hours of standing helplessly by as wave after wave of militants crashed on the wall of violence—asked to see the prime minister. News of what was happening outside had filtered into the House, and Keir Hardie, along with some of the saner and more justice-loving members, called on Asquith to meet with the deputation. He refused, instead defaulting to his characteristic stalling tactics. He promised facilities for the Conciliation Bill in the next parliament, should his government retain office. Lord Castlereagh moved that facilities be granted immediately to resolve the bill at the present sitting. But all save fifty-two [members] put their party loyalty before their manhood, wept Emmeline.23
As Big Ben chimed seven, the mop-up began of what became known as Black Friday.
Almost one hundred and twenty arrests were made, including four men who tried to defend the brutalised suffragettes. Churchill, realising that the events of the day were already shaping up as a public relations disaster, dropped all charges. Wild Scenes Outside the House, read the headlines, though most early reports downplayed the violence and suggested only that the police had been too strong for the women.24 No disciplinary action was taken over the officers who had left hundreds of women of all ages bruised, battered, traumatised and in some cases seriously injured.
On the night of 18 December, the WSPU resumed its stone-throwing campaign, smashing the windows of MPs including Churchill. Mary Clarke, Emmeline’s favourite sister, was among the women imprisoned in the days of property destruction and violent skirmishes that followed. When it became clear that Asquith had no intention of reviving the Conciliation Bill this session, Christabel explained to a meeting of delegates at the WSPU’s London headquarters, Caxton Hall:
The promise for next parliament is an absurd mockery of a pledge.
They have been talking of declarations of war. We also declare war from this moment.25
On Christmas Day Mary Clarke died of a brain haemorrhage from the injuries sustained on, and exacerbated in the aftermath of, Black Friday.
She is the first to die, lamented a devastated Emmeline. How many must follow…?26