Chapter Three

An Undemocratic Organisation

‘ The entire class of wealthy women would be enfranchised… the great body of working women, married or single, would be voteless still. ’

(Ada Nield Chew, writing of the WSPU in 1904)

On 9 October 1934, the British Union of Fascists, better known as the ‘blackshirts’, held a rally at the Pier Pavilion in the south coast resort of Worthing. On the platform was the leader of the blackshirts, Sir Oswald Moseley. He was flanked by two of the most important members of the new party. One of these was William Joyce, who would later become famous for broadcasting on behalf of the Germans during the Second World War, during which time he was universally known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. After the war, Joyce was hanged for treason. The other figure on the stage was a woman. This was Norah Elam, known also as Norah Dacre Fox, and she was perhaps the most influential woman in the British fascist movement. She had also been, from April 1913 until the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, the General Secretary of the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Norah Elam was not the only prominent former suffragette to find her way into the blackshirts. At the same time that she was appearing on a platform alongside Oswald Moseley and Lord Haw-Haw, the chief organiser of the women’s section of the British Union of Fascists was Mary Richardson, who had become famous in 1914 for slashing the National Gallery’s ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as a protest against the treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst. The woman who had organised Emily Davison’s funeral in 1913, Mary Allen, was also an active member of Moseley’s fascists. As well as these well-known suffragettes, there were many former rank and file members of the WSPU to be found in the blackshirt uniform.

It may seem odd to find prominent suffragettes transferring their allegiance to a fascist movement, but it was not really as strange as it might seem. Although many former suffragists drifted left, members of the WSPU, including its founders, tended to move in the opposite direction. Both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst became virulently anti-communist after the First World War and Emmeline later stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. One of her daughters, Adela, moved even further to the right, to the extent that she was arrested and interned during the Second World War for being a Nazi sympathiser.

Quite apart from politics, there was something about the structure of the Women’s Social and Political Union and the way it was run, that seemed to make the British Union of Fascists a logical choice of party in the 1930s for some former members. Even prominent members of the WSPU were aware that Emmeline Pankhurst’s commitment to democracy was a little weak. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence remarked on the paradox that an organisation, ‘that was founded upon a desire for the extension of democracy’ should have become ‘an enthusiastically supported dictatorship’.

In the last two chapters we looked at one or two myths associated with the suffragettes. We must now examine another of these, which is that the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members became known from 1906 onwards as suffragettes, was in some sense a radical, mass movement. Touching closely upon this question is the extent to which the WSPU may be considered in any real meaning of the expression, a democratic organisation or, astonishingly, whether it was really even fighting for democracy. One of the most influential early members of the WSPU, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, compared it in retrospect during the 1930s to the fascist movements then in power in Germany, Italy and Spain.

The fact that the WSPU was a tiny group, lacking any wide support among ordinary people, suggests one of the main reasons why they so readily turned to violence in order to get their message across. When a handful of dedicated activists wish to gain the attention of the general public and impose their will upon others, broken windows, burned-out buildings and bomb blasts are potent methods for achieving this. This aspect of the suffragette movement was recognised during the years when they were active, but has become obscured by the passage of time. The idea has developed that the WSPU somehow represented the interests and wishes of ordinary women, that they were the spearhead or vanguard of a popular movement.

This is certainly the version of history often conveyed to children. A popular children’s book on the suffragette movement, Women Win the Vote (Brian Williams, 2005), says ‘On 6 February 1918, women in Britain were awarded the right to vote in general elections for the first time. Many of those women were suffragettes, who had fought a long, hard battle for the right to vote’. Such books take it as given that the Pankhursts and their suffragettes won the right for women to vote in this country. This is done by portraying the WSPU as a mass movement, dedicated to democracy.

Statements such as this, that many of the women who were able to vote for the first time in parliamentary elections in 1918 were former suffragettes, are misleading. In fact 8.5 million women were on the electoral register for the 1918 General Election. Yet the membership of the WSPU in 1914 stood at between 3,000 and 5,000; the great majority were nominal members who had simply paid a shilling to join. The hard core of activists probably numbered a thousand at most. Almost all the direct action, the bombings and fire-raising, was carried out or organised by paid workers of the WSPU.

To imagine that the WSPU was in any sense a democratic movement, let alone one with popular support, is quite wrong. The suffragettes were just a small strand in the broader tapestry of the movement for female suffrage. To see them in perspective, one only has to look at the membership figures for the WSPU and compare it with the umbrella group for the moderate suffragists. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, founded in 1897, had, at the outbreak of war in 1914, well over 50,000 members. The WSPU had between 3,000 and 5,000. In other words, for every militant suffragette fighting for the vote by means of violence and disorder, there were at least 10 or 20 moderate suffragists, working peacefully and constitutionally towards the same end.

When the WSPU was founded in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst was a member of the Independent Labour Party. Her eldest daughter, 23-year-old Christabel, was taking an increasing interest in women’s suffrage and it was perhaps this that caused her mother to involve herself again in the question of female emancipation. Sylvia, another daughter, also became a member of the initially small group.

It is ironic to find an organisation campaigning for democracy that is, from the very outset, essentially undemocratic. All previous suffragist groups had both male and female members, but the WSPU forbade men to join from its beginning. The idea of a group formed to fight against discrimination on the grounds of gender instituting such discrimination itself is a fascinating one.

Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were also in the habit of falling out with anyone who disagreed with them about either their political aims or the methods by which they chose to work towards those aims. From its very foundation, the WSPU was run by the Pankhursts and they made every decision. Any divergence from their views resulted in members being expelled from the union, so membership entailed not just devotion to a particular ideology, but also personal loyalty to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The Pankhurts were the WSPU.

For the first few years or so of its existence, the WSPU ran in a similar fashion to other suffragist groups. The chief difference between the Women’s Social and Political Union and similar groups was that the WSPU was entirely bound up in the personalities and characters of its two founders. Although the Pankhursts remained members of the Independent Labour Party during this time, there were those in the ILP who regarded them with a good deal of suspicion.

Philip Snowden, who went on to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour government, perceived that to extend the franchise on the terms suggested by the WSPU would mean more votes for the middle and upper classes. Giving women parliamentary votes on the same terms as those that existed for men would serve only to entrench the existing class divisions and do nothing whatever for the benefit of the working classes, either men or women. There were those who believed that the Pankhursts knew this very well and this was the reason why they fought for ‘equal’ franchise rather than ‘universal’ franchise. The Pankhursts had no objection to the continued running of the country by the middle and upper classes; they simply wanted women of those social strata to be able to have their share of power alongside well-to-do men. John Bruce Glasier, chairman of the ILP, observed shrewdly of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, ‘Really the pair are not seeking democratic freedom but self-importance’.

Quite a few left-wing women, particularly from the working class, also mistrusted the Pankhursts and their demand for ‘equal suffrage’. The daughter of a brick maker, Ada Nield Chew, who left school at the age of 11, wrote in 1904 of the idea of ‘equal franchise’: ‘The entire class of wealthy women would be enfranchised… the great body of working women, married or single, would be voteless still’.

From the point of view of socialists like this, the situation could hardly be simpler. Granting women the vote on the same terms as it was currently given to men would mean giving it to female employers and landowners, while at the same time denying it to those women who worked on their farms or laboured in their sweatshops. It would be an iniquitous move. It has to be said that the Pankhursts’ upper-middle-class lifestyle did not exactly endear them to many members of the Labour Party. Glasier said indignantly, when Emmeline Pankhurst was trying to represent herself as a champion of ordinary, working women, ‘She has other people’s daughters acting as her personal servants’. His wife, Katherine St John, a radical suffragist who had even less time for the pretensions of the WSPU, derided them as being composed almost entirely of upper- and middle-class women. She referred to them as the Society Women’s Political Union.

It was this difference of opinion that ultimately caused the Pankhursts not only to leave the ILP themselves, but also to require every member of their organisation to reject any further association with the party. At the Labour Party conference in early 1907, Keir Hardie, the first Labour MP and founder of the Labour Party, put a motion for women’s suffrage. This was framed in terms of ‘equal’ suffrage, in other words, extending the franchise to propertied women on the same terms that men then enjoyed. The conference rejected this and went on to pass by a huge majority a motion calling for universal suffrage, the right to vote in parliamentary elections for every man and woman in the country. Nothing fairer or more democratic could be imagined, but it was enough to cause Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst to leave the ILP.

The attitude of the WSPU towards democracy can be very clearly seen in their pamphlets, which stated unequivocally that, ‘The Women’s Social and Political Union are NOT asking for a vote for every woman, but simply that sex shall cease to be a disqualification for the franchise’. This was quite unambiguous. There was no desire to extend the franchise to working men and women. The sole, direct and immediate aim was to ensure that middle-class women who were householders should be able to vote. The WSPU were simply not interested in universal adult suffrage. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that Emmeline Pankhurst was actually opposed to the idea of working-class people being given the vote.

Later in 1907 another incident revealed Emmeline Pankhurst’s notion of democracy. The Women’s Social and Political Union had a thoroughly democratic constitution, which committed it to annual conferences in which members might vote for changes and select a new committee to run the organisation. A month before the conference was due to be held in October 1907 Emmeline Pankhurst caught wind of the fact that a challenge was planned to the direction in which the WSPU was moving, that is, towards increasing militancy. She regarded this as a personal affront and decided to spike the rebels’ guns.

All that those planning to query the running of the WSPU were really wanting was to draw attention to the increasingly autocratic way in which the Pankhursts were behaving. Their aim was to introduce a more democratic approach. These women, who included veteran women’s suffrage campaigners, such as 63-year-old Charlotte Despard, wished only to present their case to the annual conference and then accept the result of a vote on their own proposals, as opposed to those made by Emmeline Pankhurst. This attempt to use the democratic process irritated Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst enormously.

After requesting and receiving pledges of personal loyalty from various important members of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst called an urgent meeting for 10 September, a month before the annual conference. Only members in London were invited to attend this meeting, in the course of which the old constitution was annulled and a list of names for a new committee were read out. All the members of the new committee had been hand-picked for their devotion to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. Before the meeting in September, Emmeline Pankhurst had announced to one of her supporters that she was going to ‘tear up the constitution’, in order to prevent those with differing views from her own being able to address a large body of WSPU members. As one woman remarked wryly, ‘Mrs Pankhurst wants us to have votes, but she does not wish us to have opinions’.

As far as Emmeline Pankhurst was concerned, the situation could hardly have been more clear-cut and simple. She was the leader and her followers should simply obey her orders without question. Little wonder that one of the women ejected from the WSPU after the meeting on 10 September 1907, said that Mrs Pankhurst was behaving like a dictator. In fact, no bones were made about this being precisely what both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst wanted – complete control of the members of their organisation. Loyalty towards them should be absolute and unconditional.

The best way to see how Emmeline Pankhurst saw the situation is to read what she herself wrote about the WSPU in My Own Life, which was published in 1914:

If at any time a member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy, if any one begins to suggest, that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the W. S. P. U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W. S. P. U. is not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and by-laws, nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an annual meeting. In fact, we have no annual meeting, no business sessions, no elections of officers. The W. S. P. U. is simply a suffrage army in the field. It is purely a volunteer army, and no one is obliged to remain in it. Indeed we don’t want anybody to remain in it who does not ardently believe in the policy of the army.

There is not even the pretence at the organisation being democratic and free admission is made that the WSPU is run in an autocratic fashion. Sylvia Pankhurst, still an ardent socialist, remonstrated with her mother after the attempts to bring democracy to the WSPU: ‘Do not fear the democratic constitution. You can carry the conference with you’. It was not a risk that Emmeline Pankhurst and her oldest daughter felt inclined to take.

Nine days after the special meeting in London, a letter sent to all branches of the WSPU explicitly stated that this was not in any way a democratic group: ‘We are not playing experiments with representative government. We are not a school for teaching women how to use the vote. We are a militant movement… It is after all a voluntary militant movement: those who cannot follow the general must drop out of the ranks’. This is quite unambiguous. Members must not expect to influence policy or question the leader, their role is limited to obeying orders.

There were two practical consequences of the events in 1907, one of which was particularly unfortunate. The leadership of the WSPU had always, with one or two exceptions, been thoroughly middle- and upper-class. There were, however, a number of working-class women in the rank and file, particularly in the north of England. Two of the women expelled from the WSPU, Charlotte Despard and Theresa Billington, formed their own group, calling it the Women’s Freedom League. Many northern branches of the WSPU went over to the new organisation, leaving the WSPU concentrated in the south of England. The effect was to increase the proportion of middle-class members, making the WSPU even less representative of ordinary working women.

The second effect of the shake-up was that members of the WSPU were required to sign a pledge, stating that they were loyal to the ideals of the WSPU and that they would not support any political party. This of course meant that no members of the Labour Party could remain. It also led to anybody who did not approve of the increasing militancy leaving the WSPU. Those who remained were likely to be middle-class firebrands.

The 1907 purge of what might be termed disloyal elements puts one rather in mind of a revolutionary movement determined to allow no divergent views. Combine this with the cult of personality which almost worshipped the Pankhursts and what emerges is less like a pressure group and more like a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Mrs Pankhurst’s followers treated her as an almost superhuman being. After Mary Richardson slashed ‘The Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver, she issued a statement saying, ‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history’.

The expulsion from the WSPU of those who disagreed with or even merely questioned the views of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst continued. One of their most devoted supporters was Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence who had supported Emmeline Pankhurst during the rebellion in 1907. Five years later, in 1912, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband Fred were horrified to learn that the WSPU was going to be taking even more extreme actions than the window-smashing and other vandalism which was already alienating so many potential supporters. They voiced this fear to Emmeline and Christabel, with the result that they too were dropped from the WSPU. Inevitably, the time came when Mrs Pankhurst began to turn against even her own family for their supposed treachery.

Sylvia Pankhurst, one of Emmeline’s other daughters, was a socialist and had many dealings with people such as George Lansbury and Keir Hardie. She set up a branch of the WSPU called the East London Federation, which attracted working-class women to the cause of women’s suffrage. Sylvia Pankhurst was also in favour of universal adult suffrage, rather than the equal suffrage which had for years been the official policy of the WSPU. This, together with her belief in the practice of democracy in her own organisation, led to her falling out with her mother and sister. This schism was, disturbingly, caused because they felt that she had too strong a belief in democracy. There is a touch of Alice in Wonderland about an organisation such as the WSPU being alarmed about the spread of grass roots democracy.

By 1914, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst had had enough of Sylvia’s flirtation with democracy. She was summoned to a meeting with them both, a meeting at which her sister did most of the talking, with her mother’s approval. Their main objection to Sylvia’s activities was plain. Christabel told her, ‘You have a democratic constitution for your federation, we do not agree with that’. It further emerged that neither Emmeline nor Christabel Pankhurst approved of involving working-class women too much in the suffrage movement. Christabel said that their education was ‘too meagre to equip them for the struggle’. She went on, ‘Surely it is a mistake to use the weakest for the struggle? We want picked women, the very strongest and most intelligent’.

It is impossible to avoid the feeling that the real objection to what Sylvia Pankhurst was doing was a combination of distrust of democracy and dislike of the working classes being treated as equals. These people needed strong leaders who would tell them what to do, without any of this democratic nonsense. Christabel then said to her sister, ‘You have your own ideas. We do not want that, we want all our women to take their instructions and walk in step like an army’.

Interestingly enough, it was when Asquith met a delegation of working women belonging to the East London Federation in 1914 that he apparently began to change his view on women’s suffrage. Before that time, he had perhaps seen the suffragettes as middle-class cranks pursuing a fashionable craze. After listening to a group of female industrial workers, who explained their desperate need for the power to vote, Asquith told them that he accepted the logic of their point of view and that, ‘If the change has to come, then we must face it boldly and make it thoroughgoing and democratic in its basis’. Some believe that it was simply meeting and listening to these working-class women that helped to bring Asquith around to the view that the franchise should be extended in this way.

When reading what Christabel Pankhurst had to say about working-class people, one senses at best indifference and at worst something approaching contempt. It is interesting to jump ahead of ourselves a little and see how the suffragette activists, who were setting fire to the homes of wealthy and important people as well as planting bombs in public places and damaging the contents of pillar boxes, showed by their actions their own feelings towards the working classes.

It is a curious fact and one which is seldom remarked upon, that the great majority of the victims of suffragette violence were either women or working men who, like the women, did not have the parliamentary vote. To be fair to the suffragettes, this was probably a matter of pragmatism, rather than a conscious desire to harm working-class people. The MPs and Lords with whom the militants of the WSPU really had their quarrel were often too difficult to get close to and so it might have seemed easier to strike at workers than at their bosses or social superiors. Whatever the reason, it was working men and women who bore the brunt of the terrorism.

Supporters of women’s suffrage in the Liberal and Labour parties knew at the time that the WSPU were harming innocent people, most of them workers. The suspicion existed that the militants, most of whom belonged to the middle class, were careless about the victims of their attacks. In October 1913, after the bombing campaign had been running in earnest for six months or so, Lloyd George said, ‘It’s no good burning pavilions, churches and railway sidings and menacing the lives of poor workmen’. At about the same time, the wife of Labour MP Philip Snowden complained that the methods being used by the suffragettes were themselves unjust because they inflicted suffering upon innocent people.

How were the WSPU causing harm to innocent people and, as Lloyd George put it, ‘menacing the lives of poor workmen’? To answer this, we will look at the one type of arson which is mentioned in modern books on the suffragette movement: the burning and destruction of the contents of letter boxes. This is usually portrayed as a victimless crime, a protest against the ‘establishment’.

On 29 November 2012, the Emily Davison Memorial Campaign was launched in London. The aim of this campaign was to persuade those organising the Derby in 2013, on the hundredth anniversary of Davison’s death, to hold a minute’s silence in her memory. Mention was made at this event of Emily Davison’s pioneering role in setting fire to letter boxes. This was described as, ‘a bold, brave thing to do’ and as ‘attacking the establishment’. It might help to make things a little clearer if we look at one or two of the attacks on the postal system initiated by Emily Davison.

On 29 January 1913, a package addressed to Lloyd George burst into flames at a sorting office. There was also a fire in a sorting office in Croydon, while in York glass tubes containing chemicals started a fire when a postman was emptying a pillar box. These fires were caused by phosphorus, fumes from which filled the rooms where the fires broke out. The smoke from burning phosphorus can cause permanent lung damage and the men in the sorting offices were accordingly at risk of suffering serious and irreversible harm to their health. Less than a week later, on 5 February, five postal workers in Dundee were burned, four of them seriously, as they emptied mail bags at a sorting office. A number of letters addressed to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith proved to have in them phosphorous and other chemicals, which reacted when exposed to the air and caused a fire to start. On 22 February, another postman was burned at Lewisham branch post office in south London, when a letter he was handling suddenly caught fire.

Emily Davison’s original method for starting fires in letter boxes had proved ineffective. Burning, kerosene-soaked rags tended to die out in the enclosed space of a pillar box as soon as they had used up the available oxygen. More ingenious methods were devised, involving phosphorus and sulphuric acid. These started fires which smouldered and then burst forth when the pillar box was opened or the letters emptied out of the sack in the sorting office and exposed to the air.

On 19 July, six letter box fires took place in Birmingham. A postman clearing one of the boxes had his hand burned severely, because acid had been poured over the letters. In addition to using acids as incendiary agents, the suffragettes had now taken to pouring concentrated sulphuric acid or Spirits of Salts (hydrochloric acid) straight into pillar boxes in order to destroy letters. It was inevitable that some postmen would get these corrosive substances on their hands when they emptied the boxes.

On 22 December 1913, mail bags in Nottingham caught fire and several workers received burns. An incident the following year, on 11 July 1914, not only severely injured a guard on a train, but actually set the train itself on fire while it was travelling from Blackpool to Manchester. A Manchester man called Barlow was sorting letters in a mail van as the train passed through the Lancashire village of Salwick, when one of the mailbags he was handling exploded and caught fire. So fierce were the flames that six other bags of mail also caught fire and the side of the wooden carriage itself then began to burn. Bravely, the guard picked up the burning bags and threw them from the train. He was badly burned on his hands and arms as he did so. He then managed to extinguish the flames, which were threatening to set fire to the train. Later investigations showed that a package in one of the burned mailbags had contained a bottle of sulphuric acid and a quantity of magnesium powder. The bottle had broken and so began the fire.

This is a random sample of the results of the WSPU strategy of targeting pillar boxes and post offices with chemicals such as phosphorus and sulphuric acid. These were really cowardly hit-and-run attacks on working men who, like the suffragettes, did not have the parliamentary vote. The victims were not members of the establishment at all, just ordinary men going about their lives and doing routine and menial jobs. It must have been quite apparent to those putting dangerous chemicals in pillar boxes that they would be very likely to cause harm to the people who handled the packages of phosphorus, or who picked up with their bare hands letters deliberately drenched with sulphuric acid.

In recent years, it has been suggested that many of the wilder actions of the suffragettes were undertaken without the knowledge or approval of the leadership. However, the attacks on postal workers were specifically sanctioned by both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. In December 1913, Mrs Pankhurst reacted angrily on hearing that she was rumoured to disapprove of the campaign against the mail. She said on 5 December, ‘Until women get the vote, whether by pillar boxes or other means, women will show their discontent’. In January of the same year, following the defeat of George Lansbury, who resigned his parliamentary seat in order to fight a by-election on the issue of women’s suffrage, Christabel Pankhurst wrote in The Suffragette: ‘By their rejection of the suffrage candidate, the majority of electors ordered women to work out their own political salvation. Those who destroyed the letters acted quickly on this advice. Correspondence would be safe if women had the vote, but if this is denied, they must take the law into their own hands’.

There could be no clearer indication that the leaders of the WSPU endorsed the placing of sulphuric acid and phosphorus in pillar boxes and were therefore ultimately responsible for the attacks in which workers were injured in various ways.

The attacks on postboxes were not isolated or atypical examples of the suffragette strategy. Anybody examining closely the history of the militant campaign might be forgiven for believing that the WSPU saw working-class men and women as unavoidable collateral damage in their struggle.

In the later stages of the suffragette campaign, large country houses owned by politicians who were felt to be unsympathetic to their cause, or even properties owned by the relatives and friends of such people, were burned down by suffragette arson squads. Books written today which mention these attacks almost invariably preface the word ‘building’ with ‘empty’, to indicate that the suffragettes would not have harmed anybody. Even in contemporary newspaper reports these houses were typically described as being ‘unoccupied’. However, the owners themselves may not have been in residence, but caretakers and domestic staff, many of them women, were invariably living in the servants’ quarters. It is little short of a miracle that none of these workers were killed as the result of the arson attacks. Many of the houses were completely destroyed by the fires, which were started with a callous disregard for anybody who was on the premises at the time.

On the night of 4 February 1914, the suffragettes torched Aberuchill Castle in Scotland. The fire swiftly gained a hold and gutted parts of the building. The domestic staff on the upper floors were trapped by the flames and could easily have been killed. Those who started the fire showed complete indifference to the working men and women whose lives were hazarded in this way.

Sometimes, the suffragettes specifically targeted women, with the apparent hope that disrupting their lives or harming their interests would cause them to think hard about the country’s political system. It is an unfortunate fact that those affected by such actions were almost invariably working-class women, who would not reap any benefit if the WSPU achieved their goal of ‘equal’ suffrage. A classic case of this came to light in February 1913 when two members of the WSPU burned down the refreshment pavilion at Kew Gardens.

This was such a senseless act that the proprietor, a Mrs Strange, went to the headquarters of the WSPU to ask why they had done such a thing. She spoke to Harriet Kerr, Secretary of the WSPU. She told Harriet Kerr, ‘By burning down the pavilion you did not injure the government but myself and a number of women that I employ’. Kerr responded by saying, ‘You take too personal a view of the matter. Your women will, I have no doubt, be very glad by and by to think that they have lent their help’. This conversation was related in court by Mrs Strange after the suffragette leadership was arrested for conspiracy.

With no welfare state to cushion its impact, unemployment in Edwardian Britain could be a serious, even disastrous blow for a working-class family. It did not seem for a moment to have occurred to those activists burning down or blowing up buildings that their actions could be harming people, including even the women whose interests they claimed to be advancing.

Another startling instance of the way in which working-class people were treated as expendable when it came to mounting operations against the supposed enemies of female suffrage, may be seen in the attack on the house that Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George was having built at Walton-on-the-Hill, near Dorking. Everyday, builders, carpenters and plasterers arrived to work on the house at 6.30 am. In the early hours of 19 February 1913, a group of two or three women, including Emily Davison, crept into the almost completed house and planted two bombs, each containing about 5 lbs of explosive.

The fuses for the bombs placed in Lloyd George’s new house were primitive in the extreme, consisting of candles placed in saucers full of paraffin-soaked wood shavings. The idea was that as the candle burned down it would set fire to the wood shavings and so ignite a fuse buried among them. It would be very difficult to calculate precisely when a bomb triggered by such an arrangement would detonate. In the event, the first bomb went off with great force at 6.10 am, just 20 minutes before the workmen arrived. It was a close thing and if a workman had arrived a little early that day he could easily have been caught in the blast, which was strong enough to bring down the ceilings, blow out the windows and make a crack in the outer wall of the building which may still be seen today.

The nature of the bomb attack on Lloyd George’s house shows that those carrying it out were not overly cautious about the injuries or deaths that could be caused to the men who were employed there. In fact, one of them was harmed, although not physically. The explosion destroyed the tools of one of the workmen, and he lost his job as a consequence. A century ago this could easily mean the loss of a man’s livelihood, with all that this might entail for his family: hardship, the workhouse or even starvation. It is unlikely that the women who set off these explosions thought for a moment upon the possible consequences of their actions for ordinary men who, like them, had no vote.

One more example should serve to illustrate the indifference towards the livelihoods and, indeed, the very lives of working men and women shown by the suffragettes when conducting their terrorist activities. On the night of 3 April 1913, an empty train standing in a siding at Stockport, a few miles outside Manchester, was attacked by a team of suffragette bombers. They placed firelighters in every carriage, sprinkled paraffin over the seats, and then in one carriage they planted a bomb. Since the train was standing next to a busy railway line, it was perhaps not surprising that when the bomb exploded another train was passing near to it. The force of the blast was great enough to hurl the carriage in which the bomb went off over an embankment. A beam of wood was flung from the destroyed carriage and flew through the cab of the train that was passing. The engine driver could hardly have had a narrower escape. The piece of wood grazed the top of his head, knocking off his cap. An inch lower and he would have been killed.

This incident clearly shows that those carrying out such bombings did not much care who they hurt. Here was an ordinary worker who, under the law as it stood, was not entitled to vote because he was not a householder. Yet those operating on behalf of the WSPU were happy to run the risk of killing such a man, just to make a point. How and why did the WSPU get into the habit of using violence in this way to get across their point? After all, this was not found to be necessary by campaigners for women’s suffrage in any other country; it was a purely British phenomenon and limited only to members of the WSPU. The answer is simple and also sheds light upon yet another reason why the WSPU cannot be regarded as a democratic organisation.

The first acts of suffragette militancy were relatively low key. At a speech by Liberal politicians Edward Grey and Winston Churchill in 1905, Christabel Pankhurst and a close friend called Annie Kenney created a disturbance by climbing onto chairs and heckling the speakers. When ushered out by the police, Christabel spat in the face of one and slapped another, for which she and her friend were arrested. This not only brought great publicity to the WSPU, it also caused wealthy donors to send money in support of their aims. Since this small amount of violence and disorder had been so profitable, both financially and in terms of the publicity generated, it was perhaps inevitable that such behaviour should be repeated, on a larger scale and by more women.

Of course, it might have occurred to somebody at this point that since the claim was being made by those who did not want women to be given the parliamentary vote that women were unfit to take part in political activity because they were too emotional and prone to hysteria, then standing on chairs and screaming, spitting, slapping, throwing things and breaking windows were not the best means of disproving such assertions.

The violence increased inexorably over the next few years. Each increase in militant actions resulted in greater publicity and inspired more wealthy backers to come forward. Conversely, any diminution in violence meant a slump in income. The only year that the WSPU saw a drop in contributions was during the time that they eschewed violence during a truce which they called. It must have been obvious that abandoning militant tactics would cause their wealthy backers to withhold their financial help.

Of course, once the WSPU had found such a winning strategy, they had no motive for abandoning it. From breaking windows, the suffragettes moved to starting fires and then causing explosions. They may have been reaping the benefits of increased income and wider publicity from these tactics, but as the violence became more extreme, so the membership of the organisation declined. At the same time, the larger suffragist groups were growing rapidly. This meant that one of the smaller groups was being treated as though it was of greater importance, purely because it was the most aggressive and likely to engage in dangerous activity.

Other democratic groups at this time, such as trade unions and socialist parties, relied for their income upon regular, small contributions from ordinary members. This helped to ensure that they remained genuinely democratic. When the rank and file are paying, they expect to exercise some control over the party or union. This was not the case with the Women’s Social and Political Union. They were being subsidised by wealthy people in Kensington and Chelsea, who handed over their money to the leaders of the suffragettes. Since the WSPU refused after the first few years to hold Annual General Meetings, this meant that they could spend the money more or less how they pleased.

The amount of money coming into the Women’s Social and Political Union from rich donors is quite simply staggering. Cash receipts for the year 1913/1914 totalled £46,875. This approximates in modern terms to perhaps £3,750,000. Of that enormous sum, less than £50 came from the fees paid by new members. A number of donors were giving over £1,000 a year to the organisation and the only people who decided what this money should be used for were Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.

For comparison, the average wage at that time was a little over £1 a week, although many women earned much less than this, perhaps 15s (75p) a week. The WSPU funds enabled the Pankhursts and their close friends in the organisation to give up work and live on the donations pouring in from rich sponsors. After escaping arrest in 1912 and going on the run abroad, Christabel Pankhurst spent two and a half years in Paris, living on this money. Friends of hers were paid £3 or £4 a week as full-time workers for the suffragette cause. For some idea of what this means, Annie Kenney, a particular favourite of both Pankhursts and for a time acting leader of the WSPU, was being paid four guineas a week. This was a little over four times the average salary at that time. If we take the average salary in the UK today to be around £27,000 a year and then multiply that by four, this might put Annie Kenney’s salary at around £110,000 a year today.

Because the Pankhursts were in complete control of the WSPU – ejecting anybody who disagreed with them or even asked too many questions – they were able to use the huge sums of money flowing into the organisation without reference to anybody else. They were accountable to nobody and there is every reason to suppose that their own finances were inextricably tangled up with those of the WSPU. To put it crudely, they and their associates were on to a good thing and were able to live comfortably without the need for conventional jobs.

All the talk by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst about the need for followers to obey strong leaders, walking in step and avoiding democracy, as well as the giving of unconditional allegiance and adulation to one person – a recurring theme in the suffragette movement – might bring to mind other extremist political movements which became popular in certain European countries during the 1930s. In this connection, it is curious to reflect that WSPU rallies were sometimes spectacular affairs, with everybody decked out in the white, green and purple colours of the organisation – white chosen for purity, green for hope and purple for majesty. Banners often featured pictures of Mrs Pankhurst and many of those attending wore badges showing a portrait of Emmeline Pankhurst. It does not take much imagination to see these adoring crowds come to see their beloved leader as precursors of the Nuremburg rallies. Certainly, such a political cult of personality had never been seen before in the United Kingdom.

A number of former suffragettes noticed this resemblance in later years. Cicely Hamilton, who had worked energetically for the cause of female suffrage, described Emmeline Pankhurst as ‘a forerunner of Lenin, Hitler and Mussolini – the leader who could do no wrong’. An examination of the subsequent stories of some of those who were important figures in the WSPU is revealing when viewed from this perspective.

The almost mindless way in which her followers accepted any position taken by Emmeline Pankhurst was neatly illustrated on the outbreak of war in 1914. So conditioned had members of the WSPU become to blindly obey the whims of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst that many would adopt any position that they were instructed to take. Even so, it came as a surprise to them when Mrs Pankhurst told them that they must now drop their campaign and throw all their weight behind Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. After being told for six years that he was practically the devil incarnate, they were now to follow him as a wise and benevolent national leader.

Emmeline Pankhurst dropped the fight for women’s suffrage as readily as she had previously abandoned socialism. Instead, she became ferociously patriotic and encouraged men to join the army to fight Germany. Later on, she became an opponent of strikes and offered her help in breaking the General Strike of 1926. She was finally adopted as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party. As she threw herself into each new craze, so Mrs Pankhurst seemed to lose interest in the previous one. During the war, she was consulted by Lloyd George on the matter of women’s suffrage and she told him to make whatever arrangements he felt necessary. She was no longer in the least concerned about the notion of equal suffrage, the cause which had resulted in such bitter disputes with her colleagues, friends and family. In the event, the bill that brought some women the vote in 1918 did not incorporate either universal or equal suffrage – men could vote at 21 years of age, some women at 30. By then, Emmeline Pankhurst was visiting Russia and America as part of her crusade against Bolshevism, her latest interest.

Other prominent suffragettes, including all three of her daughters, also turned to other causes. Christabel found religion and devoted her life to working for the Seventh Day Adventists, an evangelical Christian denomination. Sylvia became involved with the mystical sect of Theosophy and the youngest daughter, Adela, after moving through the whole spectrum of political belief, settled down as a sympathiser of the Nazi regime in Germany. During the Second World War, she was interned in Australia as a possible fifth columnist, due to her admiration for the Third Reich. Curiously enough, she was not alone in this among former suffragettes. What possible connection could there be between the suffragettes and the fascists? Some former activists saw distinct similarities.

In the late 1930s, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, once a close associate of the Pankhursts but later expelled by them from the WSPU, observed uneasily the similarities between the suffragettes and the fascist movements in Italy and Germany. Writing in 1938, she said, ‘It is so-called upholders of democracy who create, when they are false in their principles, and when they attempt to crush their opponents, dictatorships’. She also remarked that the WSPU ‘bore a certain resemblance to the dictatorships so common in the world today’. Writing in the 1930s, Cecily Hamilton, another former suffragette, said that the WSPU was ‘the first indication of the dictatorship movements which are by way of thrusting democracy out of the European continent’.

WSPU members often seemed to find that the demise of the union left a gap in their lives. Some filled this gap by becoming writers and artists; others became involved in various churches or political movements, including both socialism and the fight against vivisection. For some of the most high-profile campaigners, the political landscape between the wars contained a very attractive new ideology, a political philosophy which they felt embodied many of the features which they had found so congenial in the WSPU.

Mary Richardson, who had hacked at the Velasquez masterpiece in the National Gallery, was drawn to the British fascist movement under Oswald Mosley. Richardson had been in the thick of much of the suffragette action in the years leading up to the First World War. She went on to become the chief organiser of the British Union of Fascists women’s section and saw in retrospect the suffragettes as a proto-fascist movement. She wrote:

I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement. When later I discovered that Blackshirts were attacked for no visible cause or reason, I admired them the more when they hit back and hit back hard.

For this leading suffragette at least, the blackshirts were in some way the natural successor to the Women’s Social and Political Union.

Norah Elam, also known as Mrs Dacre Fox, was once the General Secretary of the WSPU. Like Mary Richardson, she was imprisoned for her suffragette activities, going on hunger strike on three occasions. Elam and her husband joined the British Union of Fascists soon after it was formed and she became a prominent figure in its women’s section, writing many articles in praise of fascism as an ideology. She stood as a parliamentary candidate for Northampton. In 1940, she and her husband were both arrested and interned under Defence Regulation 18b as possible fifth columnists. Like Mary Richardson, she saw in the structure of the WSPU a forerunner of the fascist movement. She wrote during the 1930s:

The Women’s Movement, like the Fascist Movement, was conducted under strict discipline, and cut across all party allegiances: its supporters were drawn from every class and party. It appealed to women to forget self-interest: to relinquish petty personal advantage, the privilege of the sheltered few for the benefit of the many: and to stand together against the wrongs and injustices which were inherent in a system so disastrous to the well-being of the race. Like the Fascist movement, too, it chose its Leader, and once having chosen gave that leader absolute authority to direct policy and destiny, displaying a loyalty and devotion never surpassed in the history of this country.

She even described Sir Oswald Mosley as a ‘latter day Mrs Pankhurst’. Elam, it must be remembered, was no rank and file member of the WSPU but its General Secretary, one of the first suffragettes ever to undergo force-feeding.

Another of her quotations, from the 22 February 1935 edition of The Blackshirt, gives us a lucid description of the feelings of this former, high-ranking member of the WSPU:

No woman who loves her country, her sex or her liberty, need fear the coming victory of Fascism. Rather, she will find what the suffragettes dreamt about twenty odd years ago is now becoming a possibility, and woman will buckle on her armour for the last phase of the greatest struggle, for the liberation of the human race, which the world has yet seen.

Stirring stuff indeed and a good indication of the way in which the ideology of the suffragette movement could dovetail neatly with that of Mosley’s blackshirts.

Another prominent member of the WSPU who became enamoured of fascism in the 1930s was Mary Sophia Allen. Allen was the WSPU’s organiser for south-west England and was imprisoned three times for breaking windows. An early hunger striker, she was force-fed on one occasion. It was Mary Allen who organised Emily Davison’s spectacular funeral procession through central London. Like many in the WSPU, including of course Emmeline Pankhurst herself, Mary Allen was bitterly opposed to communism, which she saw as the major threat to the world. Her anxieties about a Bolshevik takeover in this country led to her meeting Hitler, Franco and Mussolini during the thirties.

When the Second World War began in 1939, consideration was given to imprisoning Allen under the Defence of the Realm Act, but in the end, this was not thought to be necessary. Instead, she was subjected to an order which prevented her from travelling more than five miles from her home and forbade her to use a telephone or radio. It was feared that she might, in fact, be a spy for the Nazis.

The need to follow a strong leader, to whom unconditional obedience is pledged; the belief that the great mass of ordinary people are not able to decide for themselves what they need; the camaraderie of being a part of a group which is in opposition to the established order – all these were features that might have made the blackshirts attractive to the same type of women who had previously gravitated to the suffragette movement. The obsession with the health of the ‘race’, which both Emmeline and Christabel vigorously espoused, also fitted neatly into this picture.

Another aspect of the British Union of Fascists worth noting is that between a fifth and a quarter of the members were women. This was a far higher proportion than any of the other parties in existence at that time boasted. Moseley acknowledged his debt to the female members of his movement, writing: ‘My movement has largely been built by the fanaticism of women; they hold ideals with tremendous passion. Without women, I could not have got a quarter of the way’.

Of course, not all members of the WSPU were secretly fascist sympathisers, but there were enough similarities between the suffragettes and the fascists to raise more than a few eyebrows. The jingoistic patriotism displayed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst during the First World War, the fanatical distrust not only of communists, but any working man who went on strike, the uncritical adoration of a strong leader, the uniforms and spectacles of public rallies, the readiness to use violent means to achieve political ends – all of these were common both to the WSPU and later fascist movements in Italy, Germany and also in this country.

Some of the similarities between the WSPU and the British Union of Fascists were uncanny. In May 1909, the WSPU organised a ‘Women’s Exhibition’, which was held at the old ice skating rink in Knights-bridge. The building was covered in green, white and purple banners and once inside, it was clear that this was not just another bazaar of the kind beloved of middle-class women. For one thing, there were demonstrations of ju-jitsu, an unarmed combat technique, which some of the suffragettes employed when fighting with the police or those intent on disrupting their meetings. There was the world’s first all-female drum and fife marching band, which played rousing tunes. Even stranger were the displays of drill, with women marching and standing to attention under the supervision of drill instructors. Among the souvenirs on offer were dolls dressed as suffragettes in the colours of the WSPU.

Thirty years later, women in the British Union of Fascists, including a number of former suffragettes, were involved in identical activities, learning ju-jitsu, drilling in military fashion, selling dolls dressed as blackshirts and following a charismatic leader who required unconditional personal devotion.

Far from being a mass movement, the WSPU was a small group of activists who felt that they knew better than ordinary people what was good for them. When those ordinary people showed no enthusiasm for what was being suggested, a hard core of militants attempted to force agreement by the use of violence. The bombings and arson attack were carried out in the main by paid workers from the WSPU and sanctioned by the leadership of the organisation, Mrs Pankhurst specifically endorsing both bomb attacks and fire-raising.

The WSPU did not engage in terrorism from the beginning, although there is reason to suppose that the possibility of such activity was considered soon after its founding. The suffragettes began with fairly mild disorder and violence and moved, step by step, towards out-and-out terrorism when they realised that constitutional methods were proving too slow for them.