35

An Inconvenient Period of Domestic Cleaning

London, June 1911

The English summer of 1911 was the hottest on record.¹

Stifling, sleepless nights and humid days tested the famed British civility. All over the country, weary workers adjusted their routines to accommodate the heat. In Lancashire, quarrymen began to rise at dawn and knock off by midday to avoid the most searing hours. Scorched pastures forced dairy farmers to raise the price of milk; asphalt melted on newly macadamised roads; food spoilt and sewage spewed out of foetid drains. THE TIMES began running a Deaths by Heat column—a change from endless reports about preparations for the coronation on 22 June, but not a pleasant one.

England felt different—torpid, dreamy, like a nation dragging its feet—and it looked different too. One journalist noted that the crannies and rifts in walled Sussex hedgerows where one looks for rare ferns and other treasures hold only handfuls of dry dust.² And then there were outbreaks of unexpected joy. City boys, blissfully unaware of the desiccated state of the Sussex hedgerows, swam naked in Regents Canal and Hyde Park Lake. Women lucky enough to escape to the seaside were reminded that bathing dresses must extend from the neck to the knees. Newspapers ran ads for lotions and creams that would prevent inadvertent suntans.

*

If Margaret Fisher peered out the window of her suite at the Hotel Cecil, she could watch the couples promenading along the Thames Embankment, trying to catch a hint of breeze. It was all a bit of a fuss about nothing, this constant moaning about the heat. On the sultriest days the temperature peaked at thirty-three degrees Celsius; most days it hovered around twenty-seven. For a girl from Gympie, this heatwave was a storm in a pretty bone-china teacup. It had hardly put a knot in the long string of engagements and amusements she and Andrew had managed to pack in. And at the Cecil, Europe’s biggest hotel, the Fishers’ rosewood suite with its sitting room overlooking the river and Westminster made a fine headquarters in which to greet the cavalcade of visitors Andrew received daily.

Margaret knew the British press called her the yes no lady: she was considered a difficult person to interview. It wasn’t that she was trying to be evasive. Her prevarication was simply because she could in no way discuss political news that had not already been made public unless Dad suggested to her to do so.3 It’s true that the typical Australian woman was characterised by her fearlessness, her grit and her entire absence of artificiality and diffidence, as the social commentators liked to remark,⁴ but there were certain things a prime minister’s wife couldn’t say or do, Australian or not.

She certainly couldn’t be a public figure in her own right, like Catherine Helen Spence or Vida Goldstein.⁵ She needed to be gracious and charming at all the gigantic luncheon parties and welcome dinners and to all the visitors who popped by to get Andrew’s ear. No wonder Alfred Deakin’s delicate wife Pattie had noted after her 1907 trip to London, it is one long whirl of dressing, motoring, dining and talking and I am weary and homesick. Pattie would drop into bed in tears overtired and feeling it quite impossible to do the list of the next day’s engagements. She had been surprised to find herself a person of great prominence, hailed and feted. She hadn’t anticipated meeting such a number of Sir and Lady this and that besides a few lords and their much diamonded wives.⁶

Fortunately, Margaret Fisher was made of sturdy stuff, for in this coronation year, with the heads of empire gathered for the Imperial Conference, there was no end to the sirs and ladies. And at least, pregnant as she was, this baby would be her sixth: she knew what to expect and she knew absolutely that there was no rest to be expected.

Not that all the functions were a bore. The British Labour Party banquet at the Holborn Restaurant on 25 May had been a vortex of admiration and adulation. As the REVIEW OF REVIEWS noted, Fisher was the spokesman of the first Democracy that has arrived, not only in Power, but in office.7 It was a great responsibility, as well as a mark of honour. Both the party and the unions were looking to Australia to determine whether, as one union official put it, the working classes were able to govern.⁸ Tonight’s dinner was chaired by Ramsay McDonald, leader of the parliamentary Labour Party, and also attended by Mr McGowen, the Premier of New South Wales. And Andrew, not given to despondency, had gone onto the front foot after the referendum result, eager to reassert his authority. Don’t dwell on the nation’s setbacks; focus on its triumphs!

His speech that night was designed to flatter his own government while diplomatically pointing out his hosts’ flaws. The Australian democracy is not a one-sided affair, Fisher reminded his audience, for it includes the women. (Cheers). We in Australia, include the women not merely in our industrial movement but also in our democracy (hear, hear). Margaret’s husband had always espoused the virtues of women’s suffrage. Not all of his colleagues could say the same, but even so,

I am happy to be able to say that not a single representative of any political party in Australia would dare to suggest that giving the franchise to women has been anything but good for the Commonwealth. They have helped us in many ways and they will help you in many ways when they have the vote in your country.⁹

Vida Goldstein was also a guest that night. It was only a pity that Muriel Matters could not be there to join them in the mother country, less than a year after they’d conspired to send an audacious message to her by way of the Senate resolution.

Muriel was still lying low in Lambeth. Perhaps her new fiancé, Mr Treharne, did not want her associating with her old suffrage cronies—the new director of the Adelaide Conservatorium had never been a fan of the votes for women caper. When the Adelaide press announced the engagement of the city’s esteemed maestro and its infamous daughter, they were clear that Muriel’s brilliant career was over. The spinster days of little suffragette, Miss Muriel Matters, are numbered, reported the KALGOORLIE SUN, as her betrothal to Mr Bryceson Treharne…is announced. Mr Treharne…is of a very unassuming and retiring nature, and the women’s vote will interest him but little.10

At any rate, she was not at the Labour Party dinner, nor was she among the delegations that soon began to arrive at the Cecil.

The first was the NUWSS, whose deputation of sixteen upstanding members was headed by none other than Mrs Fawcett herself. The purpose of their visit on 3 June (a fine, warm day) was to obtain information about the workings of woman suffrage in the Commonwealth.¹¹ Mrs Fawcett couldn’t help but notice that since his arrival in England, Mr Fisher had been speaking constantly about his entire satisfaction with the results of woman suffrage and she was eager to hear the good news directly from the source.¹² Mrs Fawcett desired cordially to welcome Mr Fisher to England as the official representative not only of the men, but of the women of Australia, but her next line was surely for the benefit of the journalists in the room: What our Prime Minister only talked about, she intoned, Australia had done.¹³

A good politician knows his audience, and Fisher quickly confirmed to the constitutionalists that he did not intend to come violently into conflict with the people who managed this country.¹⁴ The deputation assured him that their methods of agitation were quite sound. Mrs Fawcett then asked whether he could confirm the rumours of naysayers that in Australia the extension of the franchise had led to domestic unhappiness and had deteriorated women in general. Fisher chuckled. Of course he could not speak for all women, but speaking for the one he knew best, he thought it had slightly improved Mrs Fisher. (Laughter). After dismissing a number of other false reports, Fisher answered Mrs Fawcett’s final question. What was it like for Australian women to come to the mother country? He had no doubt, was the reply, that they would feel degraded at losing their citizen rights, and most of them, if they were true Australians, would make a few remarks about it. (Laughter).

Fisher’s sentiment was light-hearted, but not frivolous. Indeed, within a few days, Margaret was welcoming a deputation of her countrywomen into their lively Hotel Cecil suites. The ANZWVCs were here. Shortly after forming the committee, a subcommittee, which included Vida and Anna Stout, had drafted a letter to Asquith. It asked the prime minister to receive a small deputation of Australian and New Zealand women so they could lay before you our point of view concerning our loss of political status on coming to live in England. The letter was polite—even deferential, with an acknowledgment that your time is very fully occupied—but the request was either ignored or denied, which now led the ANZWVCs to Fisher’s door.

Anna Stout represented New Zealand; Vida, Lady Cockburn and Miss Murphy did the honours for Australia. Vida did the talking. She knew that Fisher’s Labor ministry had lobbied him to make woman suffrage an agenda item at the Imperial Conference. He had declined.15 Vida was not impressed by his logic: Australians, he says, would resent an impeachment at the Imperial Conference of the White Australia Policy.

She drew Fisher’s attention to the loss of political status when a woman came from the Antipodes to this unenlightened country. A draft Naturalisation Bill was to be discussed at the Imperial Conference: could this bill not be brought into harmony with the Australian and New Zealand Acts? Australian men coming to England were able to vote, but Australian women could not. Could the prime minster do anything about this iniquitous anomaly?

The straight Scot equivocated. Various details in the Australasian and UK acts did not presently align. He was sure that eventually the incongruities would be amended. For the men, perhaps, countered Vida; but will it be applied to women?

Fisher had only two hobbies: chess and taking photographs on his box brownie. Now was not the time for happy snaps.

Mr Fisher: We shall see when it comes. The statute is not yet passed.

Miss Goldstein: Well, so long as it is raised.

Mr Fisher: It has been raised.

Miss Goldstein: Does that refer to women as well as men?

Mr Fisher: We hope so, at all events.

Vida continued to press. Fisher continued to avoid the question. The fundamental principle of legislative independence was at stake, he argued. Australia could no more tell the mother parliament how to write its laws than the other way around. Indeed, they would not have got woman suffrage in Australia in the first place if not for legislative independence. It was only because of free self-government that the Australian Government and other Dominion Governments had been able to make progress, argued Fisher. Vida would not be argued down. We only want our own rights which we have possessed in Australia and New Zealand safeguarded here.

She’d asked Asquith for an audience and he’d refused. She’d asked Fisher for an undertaking to make Australian women’s rights an agenda item at the Imperial Conference, and he’d refused. The only win Vida managed was to get the last word. She didn’t want the minor ANZWVC victory to end on a sour note, a dissension in the national ranks that would no doubt be reported in the press.

Miss Goldstein asked if he’d ever got through a deputation of men in 15 minutes, reported VOTES FOR WOMEN, and Mr Fisher agreed he never had.16

All over London, observed the MORNING POST, the finishing touches were being given alike to the most elaborate as to the most humble manifestations of loyalty. Flags and bunting were being sewn in scarlet, purple and gold, ready to drape over buildings, statues and the triumphal arches that were emerging to span London’s streets like ligneous rainbows. Not in the memory of the modern Londoner, noted one correspondent, has there been such an array of outdoor entertainment: concerts, exhibitions, pageants—the peerless weather aiding the conspicuous display of fealty to the Crown.17

As the papers liked to remind readers, the monarch ruled over the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as well as dominions and dependencies that covered a quarter of the habitable globe and embraced nearly one third of the human race.¹⁸ The very purpose of the coronation was to seal the compact between sovereign and nation. The impending coronation certainly had people in a holiday mood, gay and festive. According to the press, which did its best to conceal the stench of poverty and the whiff of dissent with its honeyed descriptions of civic pride and royal fidelity, nothing could dent the universal public rejoicing.¹⁹ Not even the recent memory of Black Friday and Sidney Street, or the rolling strikes and the looming constitutional crisis.

If there was a fair amount of denial, the Imperial Conference was having another interesting psychological effect on the nation. The MORNING POST likened the arrival of the parliamentarians from overseas to a reunion between parents and their adult children. This month of June was like the steamy upset of washing day,

when the lady of the house is visibly embarrassed at their coming, and is divided between the pleasure of seeing them and the painful thought that they might come at a time when she was better prepared to do justice both to herself and to them.

Britain had been going through an inconvenient period of domestic cleaning. The industrial strife throughout the nation, the xenophobic tensions in the East End, the neverending woman problem, the standoff with the Lords. The mother country had hoped all this mess would be cleaned up before our children from the Dominions were paying us their visit. Still, although the stove might not be quite as thoroughly blacked as the Mother of Parliaments could have hoped, she offered a warm, though soap-suddy hand. With other European nations putting their political and military houses in frighteningly good order, the promise of a Federated Empire was more important than ever. 20

The question was, would Britannia’s colonial daughters accept the sudsy maternal embrace? Or would they use this moment of vulnerability to tug at the apron strings?

At the Imperial Conference, there was some indication that Daughter Australia was in a bolshy mood. It was a delicate balance. There were important governance issues to negotiate, issues of mutual trade and mutual defence being top of the agenda. Asquith’s main aim appeared to be to get the unqualified support of the dominions in the event of a war against Germany.²¹ Fisher was hoping to secure a greater say in British foreign policy and, in particular, a role in international arbitration to prevent war.

How then to demonstrate loyalty to the matriarch, yet express enough independence and autonomy to retain a healthy self-regard and a prudent self-interest? How to bow, but not scrape, to the sense of superiority that Britain’s parliamentarians often exuded? Men like the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who liked to sneer at these great self-governing colonies as lacking in political sagacity. On the question of women’s suffrage, for example, Curzon had held the line that the mother country, as a Sovereign Imperial State, is totally different from the colonies whose politics, as being merely parochial, can afford no guidance to us. To Curzon, the resolutions of the Australian Parliament had been so much gasbagging. No precedent existed, argued Curzon, for giving women a share in government of a great country or Empire.22

The dominions were clear on one point: they wanted closer consultation in matters of defence. Fisher was adamant:

Hitherto the dominions have not, as far as my knowledge goes, been consulted prior to negotiations being entered into by the Mother Country with other countries…I hold strongly to the view—with great deference to the opinions of His Majesty’s ministers in the United Kingdom—that that is a weak link in the chain of our common interests.²³

Fisher did not necessarily expect his viewpoint to be heeded. Australia had already sent a message, loud and clear, last November with its advice to enfranchise Britain’s women in the common interest of imperial democracy. The missive had seemingly gone in one of Asquith’s tin ears and out the other.

Fisher’s fellow delegate William Lyne²⁴ was now eager to remind his hosts that the parent might have something to learn from the child.

In the Dominion Parliaments it is possible to make experiments in legislation which are not open to the Parliament of the UK, but I hope the Mother of Parliaments will be able to derive some advantage from the experiments in legislation made by the Overseas Dominions and perhaps find guidance in them in some respects. (Hear, hear).

It was only in such intimate intermingling of the representatives of empire, argued Lyne, that ideas could be adequately expressed which were so pregnant with good for the whole. And just in case these metaphors were too subtle, he made himself perfectly clear. It was well and good to discuss mutual needs and concerns, but the Dominions must be allowed to manage their own affairs in their own way.²⁵

There were a host of functions that operated as satellite events to the central conference, pressing wider concerns outside the restrictive atmosphere of Westminster. Andrew Fisher used the occasion of a luncheon at the National Liberal Club to defend his nation’s record of pushing the boundaries, invoking the Harvester Judgment as evidence that Australia was on the right track:

We have not in Australia travelled on a road that led to the destruction of liberty or to the prevention of true progress. Our social legislation is calculated to prevent the degradation of labour, to enable men and women to live in a standard of comfort which human beings ought to live, and to give to everyone the right to sell his labour at a price that would enable him to keep his wife and family in a reasonable state of comfort. (Cheers.)26

There was not an Australian who came to London who did not write home about the shocking prevalence of poverty. Fisher told anyone who would listen that Australia’s social legislation was contributing to the peace of the world and the protection of the down trodden.²⁷

Fisher’s speeches were widely reported in the London papers, but it was left to an American correspondent to analyse the net effect of his remarks. Australia’s prime minister, noted the NEW-YORK TRIBUNE, has been shocking the English by his outspokenness.²⁸

It was not only what Fisher said that overturned propriety, but also what he did. An unostentatious man, he recoiled when his private secretary informed him he would have to wear court dress at the coronation or not attend at all. Fisher eventually consented to a fitting but swore positively that he would not wear the lace, and tore off the trimmings.²⁹ He declined the various honorary titles and degrees he was offered—he simply did not appear at Oxford and Cambridge with the prime ministers of other dominions for the conferral ceremonies—with the reasoning that having no education to speak of, it would not be a compliment to the university. Fisher tried to cloak his principled decisions in self-deprecation, but everyone knew it was a snub.

Mrs Fisher’s demeanour was more ambiguous. She soon tired of the endless round of luncheons and ‘at homes’ (there were at least half a dozen per day) and withdrew from social events, preferring to go sightseeing and shopping with other touring-party wives. She does not like dressing up and being on her best behaviour every day at all sorts of places, reported PUNCH. Besides, she was always being watched and criticised and sized up as though she came from a cannibal island.30 Margaret was certainly no winsome English rose; more like a towering cactus. Good in the heat, but spiky. She was also, of course, eight weeks pregnant.

If Margaret had her own reason to withdraw from the giddy whirl, Andrew Fisher’s rejection of English pretensions was a case of leading by example, manifesting the democratic temper that he consciously and consistently claimed for his nation. The time has come, he told the guests at a function for the British Association for Labour Legislation, when a better distribution of wealth must take place. It was incumbent on the Mother of Parliaments to become the frontrunner. Indeed we in the self-governing colonies would be proud if she did so, but we claim the right to step out in our own way.³¹ By the choices he himself was making in London, by his very conduct and bearing, Fisher proved the point. It did not go unnoticed. The LIVERPOOL COURIER remarked that Mr and Mrs Fisher:

are two handsome people as one could desire to see, and have the atmosphere of the colonies about them…It lies, I think in the greater ease, the more democratic life, the greater freedom between men and men and women and women.³²

At every turn, the Fishers ran their own race.

Fisher also used the public stage to talk up the benefits of emigration to Australia. It was his way of demonstrating that, despite Labor’s affection for immigration restriction policies, the party was not opposed to emigration per se as political rivals were wont to claim. In London, Fisher spruiked the future life of British children in a country where the standard of living and comfort was very high—but it was not only material comfort that distinguished the advantages of his nation. Australia was also a place where men and women had the franchise equally. This was a strong selling point. In Australia, argued Fisher, there was democracy of the purest kind: Australians did British liberty better than the Brits.

It was a feature that William Lyne was also keen to publicise when he spoke at a NUWSS ‘at home’. Australian women had used their vote to purify Parliament, he told the gathering, now their Parliament was one of the model Parliaments in the world.33 He added that Commonwealth MPs only spent on an average 4d per week in the refreshment bar, presumably far less than their British counterparts without the watchful eye of female voters to curtail their boozing. THE TIMES broke its suffrage-coverage boycott to report the meeting and Lyne’s speech was widely covered in the Australian press under the banner Australia’s Model Parliament.³⁴

Fisher’s publicising of Australia’s democratic charms was ably assisted by the suffrage press, who were delighted to finally have a progressive prime minister in their midst. The same week that the Imperial Conference opened, the WSPU used a provocative illustration by Alfred Pearse (signing his work as A. Patriot) as the front cover for its popular publication, VOTES FOR WOMEN.³⁵ A woman sits on the floor, slumped over a chair, face down, her head in her arms. At her feet is a baby, swaddled in sheets, its little mouth open, having just taken its last breath. ‘For These We Fight’ was the title of the sketch. The caption read:

In South Australia in 1893 the number of babies who died under 12 months old was 1,245. In 1894 women got the vote; new laws and regulations were brought in, and in 1908 the number of babies who died under 12 months old was 616, less than half what it was before.

Politicians would huff and puff, but statistics didn’t lie.

*

But not everybody was buying Fisher’s smug boosterism. Refusing to kiss imperial arse was one thing, but promoting a fantasy of Australia’s unsurpassed merits was another. In the Australian edition of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS, editor William Judkins poked fun at the bumptiousness of Fisher’s claims that Australia had set the Empire—nay, the whole world—an object lesson for which it had long awaited.36 The universal love of his own people, Judkins pointed out, had eluded Fisher. The referendum results represented a swing away from the Labor Party, which the people had found arrogant, boastful and unbearable in its manners.

Labor’s overweening immodesty was particularly distasteful given that it had done nothing to stop one of the foulest blots on the annals of the English-speaking race: the treatment of Aborigines. The blood runs cold, castigated Judkins, at recent reports from the Northern Territory of wholesale murder, systematic slavery and the worst crimes against women and children…the young female children are regularly bartered and sold. That the Labor government had taken over the administration of the Northern Territory from South Australia was a step in the right direction. Let us hope, warned Judkins, now that Mr Fisher has taken the matter in hand, that something may be done to wipe this stain from the escutcheon of Australia.³⁷

Judkins’ choice of language was topical. Fisher had in fact proposed a new ‘escutcheon’—the shield that forms the focal point of a coat of arms—to the colonial office for approval in 1911. The new arms also dropped the word Advance (which Fisher despised since, he insisted, Australia already was advanced) from before Australia, offered a less cartoonish portrayal of the kangaroo and emu and substituted wattle for the green grassy knoll on which they stood.

As far as Asquith was concerned, neither cosmetic nor policy changes to Australia’s image mattered a jot when it came to the main sticking point of the Imperial Conference. The dominions would not be consulted when it came to matters of British foreign policy. While the mother country bore the defence burden, she would have supremacy in all imperial relationships. Asquith was cracking the age-old parental whip: she who pays must be obeyed.

Saturday, June 17, 1911 will be a historic date in the annals of England, predicted the Adelaide REGISTER, the procession of women…will be the greatest ever witnessed in the history of the world.38

It was a big call. But there was no doubt, less than a week out from the (predicted) historic date, that enthusiasm for the Women’s Coronation Procession appeared to match the mania for the main event itself.

Remarkably, Emmeline Pankhurst’s truce had held. The second reading of the Second Conciliation Bill had passed on 5 May with a huge majority, after eighty-six city, town and district councils passed resolutions in favour of the measure that would finally give votes to women on the same terms as men.³⁹ (Vida was at Westminster that day. Only woman suffrage could have persuaded her to sit behind the grille for the five-hour reading.⁴⁰) But facilities for the bill still had to be granted: that was the procedural step that the government had used consistently thus far to trip up the suffrage campaign. By the last week of May, it was clear that Asquith had no intention of finding time to debate the bill in the current session of parliament—but he promised a full week would be set aside for another second reading of the bill in 1912.

Emmeline chose to take Asquith at his word. Perhaps it was the glorious sunshine infusing her with optimism. Or perhaps it was a disciplined desire not to do anything that might ruin the prospects of the women’s procession making its historic mark. Though the WSPU was principally sponsoring the event on 17 June, twenty-eight other suffrage groups had agreed to take part—including the NUWSS and the WFL, responding to the call that as women were not included in the royal processions, they must stage their own salute to King, Country and Empire. A sudden outbreak of militancy—smashing windows at the Crystal Palace, say, or derailing the All Red Route or harassing MPs in front of their overseas guests—would threaten the participation of the peace-loving suffragists as well as alienating the devoutly royalist public.

Instead of sabotaging the welcome-home party for the children of empire, Emmeline took the opportunity to point out that Australian women had been enfranchised in the year of Edward VII’s coronation. The year 1911 is a significant one, VOTES FOR WOMEN proclaimed. It is a Coronation Year, and it is fitting, therefore, that it should witness the crowning of womanhood by an act of justice long overdue. But there was a more salient point to be made. It is also the year of a great Imperial Conference, when statesmen representing enfranchised women from the daughter countries will, among others, throng the Capital of the Empire.

Why not make use of the daughter countries and their enlightened leaders? The march would be not only National, but Imperial. Every part of the Empire will be represented. The daughters would all be present to witness the event that would see the crowning of the womanhood of the United Kingdom as a Sovereign half of a Sovereign people. Emmeline announced that Australia would be represented in the procession by Vida Goldstein and Lady Cockburn, while New Zealand would be led in the procession by Anna Stout. And in the ranks, she guaranteed, will be many women who already exercise the franchise in their own country.41 What was needed was thousands of women to join them, to make the march a March of Victory!

The WSPU was clear-sighted about the difficulty of getting the people out into the streets. London is a great city, VOTES FOR WOMEN warned, its population will be nearly doubled during the month of June. How are those millions to know? How is their interest to be aroused?⁴² With all the competing events this summer, the task was to ensure people knew where to be, and when. As Vida herself soon realised, wherever Royalty is present in this country no one thinks of anybody or anything else43—so the effort required would be even greater than usual. And with the continuing press boycott ruling out mainstream media coverage, grass-roots PR was the only option.

To this end, a large army of canvassers was sought to distribute handbills in the street and to convince traders to put up window posters, and householders to put posters in their gardens. Another, more striking, tactic was to drape banners from upper windows and balconies along prominent streets. Cheap banners, roughly made, could be obtained from WSPU headquarters, but when they can be made with care and finish at home they are more effective.⁴⁴ There were countless other ways of advertising the procession, VOTES FOR WOMEN assured its readers: drawing-room meetings, market-square and street meetings, stand-up-on-a-chair-in-a-crowd meetings. (It was the sort of work that Nellie Martel had loved and been so good at. How hard it must have been for the Australian lady to hide in the shadows when she could now have been in her element.)

At least the stars of the various suffrage associations were in alignment. The Women’s Freedom League was as diligent in promoting the event as the WSPU. Its journal, THE VOTE, proclaimed on 13 May that in a few weeks it will be given to the people in London to witness the greatest procession ever known in the world’s history.⁴⁵ On 3 June, as the great day approached, the WFL made a rabid pitch for participation from its members. Put every atom of energy, enthusiasm and ingenuity that you possess into the Freedom League section of the great procession, said THE VOTE, the procession that will set London’s great streets and squares aglitter with the most beautiful display of colour, grace and movement that has ever been seen in their midst.⁴⁶ A column in the international section of THE VOTE made a plea: Will all Americans and suffragists and sympathisers of other nationalities willing to walk in this procession send their names as soon as possible?⁴⁷ If all went to plan, women from across the globe would soon marshal at the Embankment to demonstrate an esprit de corps in which distinction of class, creed, party, race will be forgotten.⁴⁸ Nations outside the empire were sending their dignitaries to fete King George at his coronation, and so too the Women’s Coronation Procession would receive its share of international supplicants. Every civilized country of the world is sending its delegates to take part in it, reported the REGISTER. It was hoped that Indian women, wrapped in their saris, would form a particularly picturesque part of the empire float.

If the organisers’ prophecies were fulfilled, the procession would be four miles long and would stretch from the Houses of Parliament to the Albert Hall, where a monster rally would later take place. Tens of thousands of women united in their demand for a boon that the British Parliament consistently failed to grant them would gather in a show of determination and strength. Tens of thousands of women walking five abreast, with pennants flying, banners held aloft, colours of every hue and shade and gradation blazing in the sun. Tens of thousands of women with faces to the dawn.49 Crowds would line London’s streets, drawn by the sheer spectacle of it all, to watch the women march shoulder to shoulder. They had come in 1908 when the spectacle was a national curiosity. Surely they would come now, when it was billed as a major tourist attraction.

There will be groups of working women, sweated women, factory workers, wrote the GEELONG ADVERTISER, reporting the build-up from the other side of the planet, as well as contingents of nurses, typists, teachers, sanitary inspectors, gardeners and gymnastics teachers; there will be mothers of families, and those engaged in domestic occupations.

Should the months of advertising, recruiting and mobilising pay off, there would be university educated women parading in their academic regalia. There would be artists carrying banners bearing immaculately stitched slogans: Votes for Women; Deeds Not Words; Who would be free themselves must strike the blow; Liberty or Death. Names of banner-bearers were urgently required by organisers. It was not the most glamorous job; scarred hands and aching backs were the price for flying the flag of freedom.⁵⁰

Women were encouraged to spare no expense—or spend not a penny, depending on their circumstances. The WSPU had almost £100,000 in its fighting fund. Women were encouraged to wear white dresses—or, if not white, then green or golden brown—though they were assured that it is much more important that they should come than that they should wear dresses of a certain shade. As for hats, this was up to individual preference too. It was becoming fashionable to forgo headwear, a trend that has much to recommend it, for hats take up a lot of space these days. But for those who felt unfinished without a hat, a lace or silk scarf would be fit for purpose.51

There would be contingents of Welsh suffragettes, Irish suffragettes and male suffragettes, supporting their sisters, daughters, wives and mothers. Catholic women. Jewish women. The best known and most popular actresses of the day would march beside equally famous singers and musicians and a large and influential contingent of women writers. There would be a historical pageant of women representing notable characters from the dawn of history: Florence Nightingale, Jenny Lind, Mrs Carlyle, Grace Darling. There would also be a special pageant consisting of seven hundred women clothed in white and wearing plain prison caps, to represent the number of imprisonments suffered by women since the beginning of the militant suffrage movement six years ago.

All over London there were women preparing for the day. Rooms full of volunteer artists, reported suffragette Elizabeth Robins, bent over historical designs…women cutting fabrics, women sewing, women stencilling banners, gilding emblems…women who have never worked hard before have been working for the pageant these hot June days, from eight in the a.m. till 10 at night.⁵² Dripping in their drawing rooms, these volunteer gentlewomen may have entertained a thought (perhaps for the first time) about the sweated women who have no choice. Young women, flouting their parents’ wishes, signed up as needlewomen, machinists, and cutters-out of pictures. Girls who were usually too occupied with study to lend a hand to the cause were asked to put aside their books and volunteer. Youth was desired as both a practical and figurative commodity. As one poet in the NUWSS publication COMMON CAUSE declaimed, it was at this procession that the world shall grow younger and fairer.53

And the ANZWVCs were there to remind all and sundry what a young and fair nation—in both the moral and racial senses of the world—could accomplish. Through Vida, they’d already reminded the Australian delegates to the Imperial Conference that women had helped to elect the men who would be representing their country at the conference.⁵⁴ She and Anna Stout had also brought the question of iniquitous naturalisation laws before the notice of every member of the Conference.⁵⁵ It was the standard hard-slog lobbying work that Vida had spent her whole adult life doing. But there was one trick she hoped she could pull off for which there was no precedent. At the initial meeting of the ANZWVC in May, it was agreed to ask Margaret Fisher to head the Australian contingent in the Women’s Coronation Procession.

Vida not only had a longstanding association with the Fishers, she was also the woman of the moment in Suffragette circles, as even the Sydney TRUTH had to admit. If anyone could twist an arm, it was Vida. So it wasn’t impossible that the prime minister’s wife would break with tradition and make her own stand on the most pressing political issue of the day.

But she’d been very happy to withdraw from the London circus—would she consent to head back into the fray? Could a woman of such stature be seen to swim with what one US congressman characterised as a great world-tide rising steadily and irresistibly?⁵⁶ Would Margaret lead the wave of ANZWVCs going over the top, or would she stay in her bunker at the Cecil and watch the gathering troops on the Embankment from her window?

Regardless of Mrs Fisher, Australia’s brigade would have to make a good showing or lose significant face. Australia would march at the top of the procession, along with New Zealand, in recognition of Australasia’s world-leading status as democratic exemplar. The Contingent from the Commonwealth of Australia promises to be influential and large, Vida wrote in VOTES FOR WOMEN in mid-May.57 She called upon all Australians currently travelling or residing in London to make contact with her, to discuss the means by which they, as women voters, could help their British sisters in the struggle for the vote.⁵⁸ On Saturday 17 June, wrote Vida,

every Australasian woman, who is enfranchised in spirit, as well as in the letter of the law, will consider it her solemn duty to show her sympathy with the women of this country, who have laboured for over 50 years for the franchise.

It was a stern invocation. Vida’s reputation as the leader of the Australian suffrage movement was on the line. Did she really have the pulling power? Miss Vida Goldstein is anxious to get into direct communication with her countrywomen, revealed an advertisement in VOTES FOR WOMEN, and all letters addressed to 4 Clements Inn, W.C., will reach her without delay.⁵⁹

But Vida herself had an agonising decision to make. The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance was holding its biennial congress in Stockholm in 1911. Carrie Chapman Catt, the IWSA president, had been pleading with Vida—representing our best beloved suffrage achievement, Australia⁶⁰—to attend one of these special events since the inaugural meeting in Washington nine years ago. And Vida had yearned to go; but the expense of the journey and the time away from her Victorian suffrage work had always made it impossible. Now she was finally in the right hemisphere at the right time—and the blasted conference dates clashed with the Women’s Coronation Procession! As talented and as determined a woman as Vida had proved herself, she could not be in two places at once.

Across the globe, from Cape Town to Calcutta, from Melbourne to Munich, the international press waited to see what the British suffragettes would do next. It may be that victory is close at hand, wrote the DOVER EXPRESS on 2 June, and this may prove to be the last great effort which women will have to make in order to obtain the vote.61 But would a peaceful, picturesque show of numbers be sufficient? Perhaps the procession would end in a riot. Would there be more arrests, more violence? More blows taken for the cause?

On 16 June, Elizabeth Robins predicted in the WESTMINSTER GAZETTE that after the world witnessed four miles of women marching towards one goal, British MPs would no longer be able to claim that enough women are not enough in earnest about the idea.⁶² You would have had to be living in a cave these past five years to doubt the dead seriousness of the suffragettes. To those who are still in ignorance of the great force of public opinion behind the demand for women’s enfranchisement, wagered the Adelaide REGISTER, the procession would be a revelation of the solidarity of women.

It could be, as Vida Goldstein prophesied, the greatest procession known in history.⁶³ But first the people must turn up. It was, after all, so frightfully hot.

One of a series of stereograph images of the Women’s Coronation Procession. Nellie Martel is uncharacteristically almost out of frame on the far right. London, 17 June 1911.

Mrs McGowen stands between a pregnant Margaret Fisher and a proud Vida Goldstein, who managed to muster a large Australian contingent to the Women’s Coronation Procession. They wear the empire colours as a right, and not as a privilege.

Dora Montefiore reproduced this portrait, taken in Sydney in 1923, in her memoir From a Victorian to a Modern (1927). The same image was used in a 1932 profile of Dora in The Vote under the heading ‘Mrs Dora Montefiore: Suffragist, Democrat, Internationalist’.

Dora Meeson Coates in 1933, aged sixty-four. The photograph is in the British National Portrait Gallery collection.

The prime ministerial Fisher family after Labor’s historic 1910 election victory. From left, Robert, Andrew Jr, Henry, Margaret Jr (Peggy) and the lap baby, John.

Photographer Christina Broom in pole position to capture the historical pageant in the Women’s Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911.

A 1928 reunion of prominent suffragettes, held to mark the tenth anniversary of (some) British women getting the vote. Muriel Matters is in the back row, second from the right. Teresa Billington-Greig stands on the right. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence is in the front row, second from the left, with Sylvia Pankhurst third from the left.

Vida Goldstein at the Eagle Farm home of the Blathwayt family in Bath, England in 1911. The Blathwayts gave refuge to over sixty suffragettes from 1909–12, to rest and convalesce after their release from prison. Vida planted a tree in the Blathwayts’ suffrage arboretum as a symbol of hope for her British sisters’ political equality.