The year 1911 has come, wrote Emmeline Pankhurst in her New Year Manifesto, and with it there rises in the heart and mind of thousands of women an eager longing that this may be ‘the wonder year’.
For the leader of the militant wing of the British suffrage movement, after almost a decade of campaigning for franchise rights, 1911 was the year that shall witness the peaceful settlement of the long and weary struggle for the political freedom of womanhood.1 The revolution had required ceaseless toil and occasional outbursts of insurrection, and had withstood imprisonment, vilification and brutality. But the end was in sight. Liberation was at hand. It was a noble and optimistic message of hope, penned from the comfortable confines of the WSPU’s headquarters at Caxton Hall.
But the view from Stepney didn’t look so promising. In the heart of London’s East End, soldiers from the Scots Guards lay prone, rifles in hand, stretched out on wooden pallets to keep their starched uniforms off the muddy cobblestones. It was the 3rd of January: the Siege of Sidney Street was underway. And unlike the Siege of Hammersmith five years earlier—Dora Montefiore holed up in her commodious house by the Thames, with supportive sisters throwing jam and buns over the fence—the residents of 100 Sidney Street had reason to fear for their lives.
The police had cordoned off the neighbourhood and evacuated the residents just after midnight; now two hundred policemen surrounded the area along with the troops. Winston Churchill, conspicuous in a silk top hat, made the unusual move of arriving on the scene to witness the rapidly escalating incident. Despite the bitter winter weather, crowds had gathered—some to hiss at the home secretary, some to gawk at the spectacle of the armed soldiers lying on their stomachs in the street. Groups of children darted in and out of the crowd, as if a critical incident was a Sunday picnic.
And what was happening at 100 Sidney Street to warrant such commotion? The siege was the culmination of a series of crimes that took place in December 1910, when a gang of Latvian and Russian Jews attempted to rob a jewellery store and wound up murdering three police officers. A two-month investigation led to a tip-off that two of the gang members lived in Sidney Street. Five hours, a gun battle, the Royal Horse Artillery and two thirteen-pound field cannons later, 100 Sidney had gone up in flames and the gang members lay dead in the pyre. Also among the dead: three more police officers, and a fireman killed by flaming debris falling from the burning building. It was Churchill himself who gave the order to let the house burn to the ground. Photographs from the extraordinary day—the first time the army had been called in to assist London police—look more like the oppressive regimes from which the Latvian and Russian émigrés had fled, not the heart of the British Empire under a Liberal government.
If the British public was critical of Churchill, it was for his government’s perceived laxity in allowing the immigration of over a hundred thousand Jews from Tsarist Russia, the majority of whom lived in the East End. (Oo let’em in?a bystander shouted at Churchill.) Some of the émigrés fleeing pogroms and religious persecution were anarchists and international socialists. The members of the Sidney Street gang were assumed to be left-wing activists using the theft of private property to bankroll radical activities, though they may simply have been incompetent, impoverished gangsters. It made little difference. The Siege of Sidney Street was a sensational reminder—caught on film, no less, for all the world to see—that in London at the beginning of 1911, homeland security was a hot-button issue. It was the mood of crisis that persuaded the harried home secretary away from Westminster and into the ghettos of the East End on a frigid winter morning.
Revolution was in the air. And the enemy was within.
As the second decade of the twentieth century dawned, the Asquith government was holding on to power by the skin of its teeth. The general election of December 1910—the one called to thwart the Lords from blocking the People’s Budget—saw the Liberals returned by the slimmest of majorities and requiring a coalition with the Irish Nationalists to govern.
Surprisingly, the WSPU decided not to pour fuel on the flames of the parliamentary conflagration. It was unlike Emmeline Pankhurst, who so believed in the value of constant obstruction, to call a truce. But it may have been that she did not have the strength for a fight.2 Mary Clarke had been imprisoned five days after Black Friday for throwing a stone through a window, and had endured force-feeding in gaol. Released two days before Christmas, she could not last through the family meal, forsaking the turkey for a lie-down. When Emmeline went upstairs to check on her, she found Mary unconscious, dying of a brain haemorrhage.
Emmeline spent the night in bed with daughter Sylvia; they clung together…stunned by our sorrow.3 Bad luck had rained down in a bitter triad of grief. Last Christmas, Emmeline’s only son had died, followed by her mother in the spring. Now her cherished sister was gone. On 27 December, the ice matriarch of the women’s movement wrote to a sympathetic member of the Liberal Party, This year has seen the breaking for me of three of my closest bonds to this world…Can you wonder that today I want beyond all other things to end this fight quickly and get rest?4
Now, in this new year, the year she hoped to be a mountain peak of a year, Emmeline decided on a strategy of peace. Everywhere she looked, the movement appeared to be cracking under the strain. In mid-January Teresa Billington-Greig, the secretary of the WFL, resigned from the organisation she’d helped to found over the issue of strategy. Billington-Greig decried suffrage militancy generally, and specifically denounced the leadership of the WSPU for subjecting its members to a form of slavery, exploiting the earnest desires of young women for liberation and placing them at risk for the sake of advertisement. The WSPU was a cult. Emotionalism, personal tyranny, fanaticism, she said, made militancy a curse, not a cure. Billington-Greig, herself happily married now, was particularly disillusioned by the increasingly anti-male tone of the Pankhursts’ rhetoric. Pretensions of sex-superiority, she noted, are like bad coins; they are just as bad whichever face is turned up.5
The claim of virtuous victimhood by middle-class women behaving badly was a charade, she believed: a spectacular suffrage show staged by a coterie of drawing-room radicals who had successfully locked out the working-class women who were most in need of deliverance. The militant tactics of interruption and annoyance had only achieved retaliation and brutality. The call to rebellion had given way to shameless boasting and booming, and the public could see through the conceit. The WSPU had made militancy a fetish, a sham terrorism, and her own WFL was but a mere echo of its noisier, unabashed big sister. Apart from the grille protest—the one militant action which escaped all condemnation from within our own society—the WFL’s more democratic structure had been a recipe for mediocrity. Heads you lose; tails you lose.
Billington-Greig went public with her savage assessment of Emmeline’s trinitarian dictatorship in a series of published articles. But for Emmeline, there were also ructions closer to home, with evidence of tensions brewing between regional and central branches of the WSPU, as well as in-fighting between the daughters. Adela, the youngest (and the least favoured by her mother), tried to express her own concerns about the policy of militancy to Christabel, Emmeline’s favourite. Christabel smelled a rat in the ranks and accused Adela of plotting to start her own breakaway suffrage organisation.6 Adela was an avowed socialist, after all, closer in ideological tone to Mrs Montefiore than to her mother. Were Adela’s extra-curricular political allegiances getting in the way of her suffrage and family loyalty? Predictably, Emmeline took Christabel’s side. Eldest sister Sylvia also praised Christabel for her daring political genius and important role as the originator of the tactics.7 Adela, increasingly the black sheep, was herded away to the back paddock.
The beleaguered Emmeline was ready for some earthly tranquility. Oddly, the easiest front on which to dampen the flames was her staunchest enemy: Asquith. His new government had promised a second Conciliation Bill in the Spring session. The bill would contain an amendment conferring the parliamentary franchise on every woman possessed of a household qualification. It was a half-loafers’ bill, with the added restriction that a husband and wife could not be registered as voters in the same parliamentary division. One household, one vote. If it passed, the legislation—so much less democratic than the Commonwealth Franchise Act that gave every white adult a say and a potential seat in their government—would be called the Representation of the People Act, 1911. Despite Asquith’s past form—and the disquieting fact that there was no mention of women’s suffrage in the King’s Speech in this coronation year—Emmeline chose to extend goodwill towards the government. She would turn her sights to lobbying for the Conciliation Bill and shoring up the morale of local WSPU workers while she awaited the arrival of her secret weapon.
For Emmeline Pankhurst had issued a special invitation, and her guest had finally accepted.
By 1911, Dora Montefiore, Nellie Martel and Muriel Matters had all sampled the WSPU’s wares. Dora had been in the house early but had found the host too hot to handle. Nellie had settled in, made her mark and become part of the furniture but had eventually been shut out in the cold. Muriel had first tasted freedom at a WSPU meeting but had located a flavour of militancy that better suited her palate at the table of the WFL.
But there was one Australian who still had faith in the WSPU’s leadership and methods. Her imminent arrival might just be the tonic, the incentive and the inspiration to unite in the face of discord. A ray of light to puncture the gloom of a fractious London winter. This could be a year of hope after all; and with any luck, the year of wonders: the year when almost eight million British women would get the vote.