Chapter Four

The Use of Terror and the Need for Martyrs

‘ The prominence that would be given to this in the press would probably act on the minds of these half-insane women, and might suggest… the very act it was hoped to avoid. ’

(Police report on a suspected suffragette plot to assassinate Prime Minister Asquith, 1909)

It is quite impossible at this late stage to discover whether or not the Pankhursts planned from the beginning that members of their organisation would set fire to buildings and plant bombs. It is curious, however, that Emmeline Pankhurst chose for what she described as the WSPU’s ‘permanent motto’, the slogan, ‘Deeds, not words’.

The idea of attracting attention to a political cause through violent acts, such as assassinations and bombings, was not a new one when the WSPU began and had by that time become known as ‘Propaganda by the deed’, which sounds very similar to Mrs Pankhurst‘s ‘Deeds not words’. Some nineteenth century revolutionaries had concluded that writing long and convoluted tracts of political philosophy was not an effective way of getting their message across. They decided that the explosion of a bomb or violent death of a politician would catch the attention of the general public far more rapidly than mere words alone; it was a statement that could not be ignored. This was ‘Propaganda by the deed’; deeds, rather than words being used to get the point across. Not only could bombings be used to publicise a cause in this way, they could also be part of a deliberate strategy to force political change. It is in the light of this tradition that Emmeline Pankhurst’s choice of the expression, ‘Deeds, not words’, must be interpreted.

It is sometimes forgotten that Britain had a history of terrorism in the latter part of Victoria’s reign. There is often a tendency today to view terrorism as being a modern phenomenon, a scourge of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, but that is very far from being the case. The worst loss of life in a terrorist attack in London before the 7/7 tube bombings in 2005, for instance, was caused by the detonation of a quarter of a ton of gunpowder placed outside London’s Clerkenwell House of Detention in 1867. Twelve people were killed in this explosion, which demolished a row of houses and caused damage to windows and chimney pots half a mile away.

The Clerkenwell Outrage, as it became known, was Victorian England’s 9/11. Troops were mobilised and police officers armed in the aftermath of this terrible event. The suspicion was that the explosion in Clerkenwell was to be the first in a series of attacks by Irish terrorists which might be aimed at destroying landmarks from the Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s Cathedral. There was talk of introducing identity cards and enlisting concerned citizens in a new militia to guard the capital against further outrages. The man who lit the fuse for this bomb, an Irishman called Michael Barrett, found fame of a sort as the last man in this country to be hanged in public. His name lives on to this day. ‘Mick Barrett’ became a pejorative term for Irishmen, which lingers on as ‘Micks’.

A few years after the Clerkenwell Outrage, Irish extremists conducted a more systematic bombing campaign in England, using dynamite to attack Scotland Yard, the Tower of London, parliament and the London Underground. Visitors to museums and other tourist attractions now had to wait in line to have their bags searched and precautions were taken to protect bridges and public buildings with security grilles to prevent bombs being placed near them. There were some who mocked, but on 13 December 1884, these measures paid off. On that Saturday night, three men in a rowing boat tried to attach a large device containing nitroglycerine to the underside of London Bridge. The newly installed grilles there frustrated their efforts and caused the bomb to be mishandled. The resulting explosion did little harm to London Bridge, but killed all three of the bombers. Paddington Station was targeted on 30 October 1883 and on that same day the first tube bombing in London’s history took place near Charing Cross Station. On 20 January 1885, another bomb exploded on the underground, this time at Gower Street Station.

The Irish were not the only people planting bombs in Victorian London. In 1894 a bomb exploded near Greenwich Observatory and three years later came the first death in a tube bombing, when a charge of dynamite went off on a train at Aldersgate Station, which has since been renamed Barbican. These attacks were the work of anarchists.

The fear of terrorism was keen in Edwardian Britain, although focused less on domestic terrorists than on gunmen and bombers who might be hiding among the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers flooding into the country. In January, 1909, an unarmed police officer was shot dead in Tottenham during a bungled robbery by eastern European asylum seekers, who had been raising funds for a terrorist group. Two years later, on 16 December 1910, five police officers were gunned down, three of whom died of their wounds. The killers were members of a gang of foreign terrorists. These murders culminated in the so-called ‘Siege of Sydney Street’, in London’s East End. The army were called in to deal with the gunmen.

In the Edwardian period, as now, the various subversive movements with terrorist leanings often crossed paths and shared information and resources. In recent years, we have seen connections of this sort between, for instance, the IRA and the PLO. Much the same happened in the years leading up to the First World War. One such association saw some suffragettes moving in the same circles which had seen a political murder being committed, the first in this country for many decades. Although most of those harmed by the suffragettes’ attacks were working people, there were a number of plots to kill politicians and even the occasional magistrate. It has only recently been revealed that there were also plans to assassinate the Prime Minister himself in 1909.

One of the lesser-known terrorist groups operating in Britain during Edward VII’s reign was based at a large house in Highgate, the headquarters of the Indian Home Rule Society. The house was used by Indians opposed to British rule in their country. Various illegal activities took place there, ranging from bomb-making to gunrunning. The activists, many of them students who lived at the so-called ‘India House’, practised marksmanship at a shooting gallery a stone’s throw from the British Museum. The name of this range was, improbably enough, ‘Fairyland’ and it was situated at 92 Tottenham Court Road (see Plate 3).

Some of those frequenting the shooting gallery in Tottenham Court Road used the rifles and pistols supplied there, others brought their own weapons. Young men from the Indian Home Rule Society often arrived there to practise shooting with very modern Browning, semi-automatic pistols. One of the Indians, Madan Lal Dhingra, who had close contact with India House was a 22-year-old engineering student at University College London. On 1 July 1909, he put the skills he had acquired to good effect when he carried out the first political assassination seen in London for a hundred years.

On the evening of 1 July, the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, was due to attend a public meeting at the Institute for Imperial Studies in London. Instead, he sent his political aide-de-camp, Sir Curzon Wyllie. As Wyllie entered the hall, Madan Lal Dhingra approached and shot him in the face four times, killing him on the spot. The Indian was seized by members of the audience and less than three weeks later found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey on trial for his life.

One of those who gave evidence at the trial was the proprietor of the Tottenham Court Road shooting gallery. He testified that the defendant was known to him and had been in the habit of bringing an automatic pistol to his range and practising his shooting. On the evening of 1 July, at about 5.30pm, only two hours before the assassination, Madan Lal Dhingra had arrived at his range with an automatic pistol and fired 12 shots at a target, from a distance of 18 feet. The target was produced for the jury and it was seen that 11 of the shots had hit it. The gun used in that session, a Belgian Browning automatic, was the same one used to kill Sir Curzon Wyllie.

Madan Lal Dhingra was sentenced to death and hanged on 17 August. Scotland Yard’s Special Branch began to investigate both the India House and also the shooting gallery which had been at the centre of the assassination. They soon learned something very alarming – Indian nationalists were not the only dissidents learning to shoot in Tottenham Court Road. Henry Morley, owner of Fairyland, told the police that two women had been coming there over the summer to practise shooting. Intriguingly, they brought with them their own pistol, which happened to be a Browning automatic of the same type used in the recent assassination. These were state-of-the-art weapons, much more sophisticated than the revolvers generally in use at that time. By then, the police had already found evidence which suggested that the Indian Home Rule Society had been involved in smuggling crates of such pistols to India, where they were being used by extremists.

In September, there was an even more disturbing development. From July to October 1909, members of the Women’s Freedom League, a moderate and non-violent group of suffragists, had been picketing parliament. A member of the organisation contacted the police and claimed that this picket had been infiltrated by women who planned to shoot Prime Minister Herbert Asquith as he left the House. Special Branch officers interviewed the woman who wrote to them about this plot and satisfied themselves that there was cause for concern.

The identities of the women who had been learning to shoot were never revealed. Asquith refused to agree to police requests to ban demonstrators from parliament and the most that could be done was to increase the number of bodyguards assigned to the Prime Minister. There were sound tactical reasons for not clearing away the protesters who were picketing the House of Commons – it could precipitate the very act it was hoped to avoid. As the official police report put it:

The serious matter is that we should have to make known the facts leading us to believe that there is a conspiracy to murder the PM. The prominence that would be given to this in the press would probably act on the minds of these half-insane women, and might suggest effectively the commission of the very act which we wish to prevent. Moreover, the removal of the pickets would be looked on by them as an act of violence and injustice, and would make them furious and more ready to commit such a crime.

That the two women who were practising shooting at Fairyland were using exactly the same, exceedingly unusual, pistol as that used to shoot Sir Curzon Wyllie, caused eyebrows to be raised at Scotland Yard. That they should be learning to shoot at the same place that Wyllie’s assassin had been frequenting a few weeks earlier was also a curious coincidence. The men from India House were known for their links with Irish Fenians and it was entirely possible that they had also been friendly with suffragette activists. In the event, the women who had been seen at Fairyland dropped from sight and the ostentatious new security precautions did the trick: there was no attempt on Asquith’s life.

None of the terrorist actions that took place in Victorian and Edwardian Britain achieved the end hoped for by those carrying them out. They certainly attracted publicity, but most people were shocked at the violence and not moved to sympathise with the aims of the terrorists in the slightest. It is in this context that the suffragette bombing campaign must be seen.

England had already experienced terrorism and had shown no inclination to surrender to it. Either the suffragettes were unaware of this or perhaps they thought that their own cause was so strong and morally justified that public reaction would be different. This was a terrible miscalculation because, although the violence certainly captured more attention for the suffragettes, it also lost them support, generating instead revulsion for the actions of the extremists and sympathy for the government which had to tackle such a problem. In short, suffragette terrorism produced precisely the opposite effect from that which was intended. This is always a danger for those using terrorism as a political weapon. It is difficult to judge in advance whether your cause will be advanced or irrevocably harmed by the starting of fires and the causing of explosions.

Why did the WSPU think that the bombs they were planting might help their campaign? There are several ways that terrorism can be used to achieve political ends. One way is as part of a strategy to provoke a general uprising against a repressive government. This entails the systematic use of violence to such a degree that the state responds with harsh measures, typically deploying soldiers and torturing or executing those who oppose the status quo. Once this repression gets under way, the general population becomes caught up in the situation, suffering from the tactics used by the government and its agents. They are then driven into the arms of the revolutionaries and so realise that they have a common interest in the overthrow of the regime. It is hardly necessary to remark that this particular plan would have had little chance of success in Britain at that time.

There is a second way that terrorism may be used by a small and undemocratic group to get what it wants, a method that is more suited to a democratic society. If you can make enough of a nuisance of yourself and cause sufficient disruption to the lives of ordinary people, then there might come a point at which the mood of the public is in favour of the government making concessions or even giving in entirely to those creating the annoyance, just so that ordinary, peaceful life may resume.

After Herbert Asquith replaced Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908, the WSPU began to become more aggressive. From shouting slogans, they moved to smashing windows and chaining themselves to railings. This is all nuisance and vandalism, rather than terrorism. We can precisely date the onset of straightforward terrorism by the suffragettes. It began on the evening of 18 July 1912.

Perhaps the best way to decide if the four women whose actions resulted in their appearing in court in Dublin that year really were terrorists is to look at the charges which they faced. Here are some of the 12 charges that were read out by the clerk of the court before their trial:

Having on July 18th last feloniously, unlawfully and maliciously set fire to the Theatre Royal, unlawfully causing an explosion in the theatre by means of a metal case containing an explosive in the nature of gunpowder, causing by means of gunpowder an explosion of a nature likely to cause serious injury to property, causing by means of a certain explosive unknown an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life and conspiring with other persons to cause an explosion in the United Kingdom likely to endanger life.

It is hard to imagine reading in tomorrow’s newspaper about people being charged with such offences and not assuming that this was a possible terrorist conspiracy. Still, perhaps it was all nonsense and the police had exaggerated what these four women had been up to? Actually, there was no argument about the events which led to the trial in Dublin that year. The suffragette newspaper Votes for Women agreed that the actions of which they were accused had actually taken place. The only debate was whether or not those actions were justifiable.

In July 1912, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith visited Dublin in the company of the Irish nationalist MP John Redmond. On 18 July, he and Redmond, accompanied by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, rode through the city in an open carriage to general acclaim. This was a triumphal procession to draw attention to the Home Rule Bill, which would accord Ireland a degree of autonomy. As they passed cheering crowds, a woman darted out and threw a hatchet at Asquith’s face. It missed him, but sliced through John Redmond’s cheek and ear. Wrapped around the haft of the small axe was a piece of paper bearing the words, ‘This symbol of the extinction of the Liberal Party for evermore’.

The following day, Asquith was due to make a speech at the Theatre Royal. On the evening of the 18 July, a variety show was held at the theatre, with an orchestra and various performers. The place was full and as the audience was about to leave, three women began trying to burn the theatre down. They poured petrol on carpets and curtains, setting fire to them. One of the women, seated in a box, managed to set fire to a chair, which she then hurled down at the orchestra. As if this was not dangerous enough, several bombs were also detonated and an attempt was made to start a fire in the cinema projector room, where reels of highly inflammable film were stored.

Witnesses describe scenes of pandemonium, with flames leaping up the curtain surrounding one box and the theatre filling with smoke after an explosion which, according to a soldier who was present, sounded like artillery fire. The situation in the theatre was unbelievably dangerous. John Moody, conductor of the Theatre Royal orchestra, subsequently gave evidence as to what he saw. A woman threw a blazing chair from the box above the orchestra pit and the chair struck the wall, then landed near to the cello player. He watched as the woman who had thrown the chair set fire to the curtains on the box nearest the stage. They immediately began to blaze. He also saw the fire in the projector room and heard an explosion, which filled the theatre with smoke. Four women were seized by outraged theatre goers and later charged with a series of offences, including conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, in connection with the attack on the Prime Minister and various other charges relating to the explosions and fire at the theatre.

Perhaps we should pause at this point and consider these actions. Throwing a hatchet at somebody’s head is almost certain to result in serious injury – you would be lucky not to blind or disfigure your victim by such an action; you could even kill somebody in that way. That only a few cuts and grazes were inflicted upon one of the men in the carriage was merely good fortune; the intention was surely to maim or disfigure the man at whom the weapon was hurled.

Starting a fire and then setting off explosions in a crowded theatre is foolhardy and dangerous. Quite apart from the obvious risk of burning the building down with the possible loss of life, there is also the risk of causing a panic and stampede for the exits, in which people could be crushed to death. Anybody splashing petrol around, setting it on fire and then detonating bombs in a theatre full of people must be at the very least expecting to cause injury or death.

Who were the women who carried out these attacks? Were they lunatics on the fringe of the suffragette movement, extremists who were operating more or less on their own initiative? In fact, all were at the very heart of the movement, and long-standing members of the WSPU. There is a general tendency to play down dangerous or outlandish actions by suffragettes and pretend that those carrying them out were acting against the wishes of the leadership. Emily Davison is sometimes described, for example, as a ‘lone wolf’, somebody who acted independently and without the sanction of the WSPU leaders. In the case of those involved in the first indisputable terrorist action by suffragettes, such a defence is not possible.

One of the women arrested and subsequently convicted for her part in the attack on the Theatre Royal was 45-year-old Sarah Jane Baines, more commonly known as Jennie Baines. In April 1908, Baines had been appointed full-time organiser for the WSPU in the Midlands and North of England. She received for this work a wage of £2 a week. Mabel Capper, although acquitted of causing any damage, was also an organiser for the WSPU in Manchester. Gladys Evans had been a member of the WSPU marching band and was also a paid employee of the WSPU.

Mary Leigh was a Drum Major in the same marching band and was being paid a salary of over a £1 a week, a decent wage at that time. She was a close friend of Emily Davison and had carried out a number of actions in the company of other WSPU organisers. Three years before the attempt to burn down the theatre in Dublin, she had been involved in an attack during a visit to Birmingham by Asquith. Her protests then were, like the attack in Dublin, carried out together with paid WSPU organisers. The Birmingham protest too was a violent one, in the course of which a police officer was badly injured and several passers-by also needed medical attention.

Emmeline Pankhurst had already said, by the time of the attempt to burn down the Theatre Royal, that she would never disown the actions of any members of the WSPU which were undertaken in the furtherance of its aims. This could be (and indeed at the Old Bailey the following year it was) taken as encouragement and incitement of violence. Having already openly urged the smashing of windows and other destruction of property, Mrs Pankhurst did not hesitate a few months later to endorse even the bombing of a cabinet minister’s home. Those who carried out the attack on the theatre in Dublin were not disowned by the WSPU; in fact, when the police raided the London headquarters of the WSPU the following spring, two of the women on the premises at the time had been among those charged with the arson and bombing of the Theatre Royal.

Five days before the attack in Dublin, a serious attempt to set fire to the home of Lewis Harcourt, Secretary of State for the Colonies was thwarted by the vigilance of a police constable in Oxfordshire. In the early hours of 13 July, PC Godden apprehended a woman loitering near the grounds of Nuneham House, Harcourt’s country residence. She was carrying a satchel which contained cans of oil, boxes of matches, wax tapers, fire lighters and various other incriminating materials. Also found was a statement, which explained the actions the woman was about to take.

Helen Craggs, the woman arrested that night, had since 1910 been a paid organiser of the WSPU. She was, like the others who were carrying out the arson and bombing attacks, close to the leadership of the organisation. This involvement was exceedingly deep – Helen Craggs was romantically entangled with Emmeline Pankhurst’s son Harry. It is inconceivable that Mrs Pankhurst should not have been aware that this woman was proposing to burn down a cabinet minister’s house.

The leadership of the WSPU were evidently pursuing two simultaneous strategies when it came to the use of bombing and arson. We shall see later how these different strands ran alongside each other as the campaign gathered momentum throughout 1913 and 1914. On the one hand there were the targeted attacks on members of the government and others whom the suffragettes felt were enemies of their cause. There were also actions aimed at the general public, particularly men. This too is a classic tactic of terrorism, as outlined by ideologues of the late nineteenth century. So closely does the terrorist campaign conducted by leading members of the WSPU follow the pattern outlined in writings by revolutionaries in Britain, Russia and America, that it is all but impossible to view their actions as random attacks undertaken without a coherent, underlying plan. This was not a collection of scattered, spur of the moment outrages carried out by sympathisers, it was a methodical and systematic crusade directed by a determined leadership.

The decision to resort to bombings in public places was almost certainly a deliberate and calculated move by the WSPU, once they saw that attacks limited to the government and its agents were proving ineffective in rousing the public and persuading them to support the suffragettes. There were, at least at the beginning of the terrorism, sound historical reasons for favouring such a strategy.

When attacks are limited to agents of the government and property owned by the government, then many people soon become a little blasé about such incidents. It begins to look like a private quarrel between the leaders of the country and a group of people who are opposed to them. After all, the windows broken by the suffragettes in government offices did not really affect anybody other than the civil service clerks working there. Finding that your local church has been burned to the ground though, brings it home that you are not merely a bystander to this dispute, it can also have a direct and unpleasant effect upon you. When this happens, perhaps you yourself will start urging the government to give these people what they want, just to end the nuisance that is being caused to you, regardless of how sensible the aims of the terrorists are.

This strategy can be expanded in various ways so that other organisations will, reluctantly, end up supporting your cause and urging the government to settle. This sort of unwilling support for the aims of a terrorist group was exploited by the WSPU and took the form of economic terrorism, amounting, in effect, to something like a protection racket. The main aim of lighting fires and setting off explosives was not to harm people, although the suffragettes were certainly quite

64 The Suffragette Bombers careless about this on many occasions. The most significant purpose was simply to create publicity. Another was to drain the resources of insurance companies and small businesses and so cause them to beg the government to take steps to end the attacks. The accounts of some of the fires started in 1913, the estimates of the financial costs incurred are pretty breathtaking.

Two fairly typical examples are the destruction by fire of St Catherine’s Church in Hatcham on 6 May 1913 and the bombing of the Britannia Pier in Yarmouth on 17 April 1914. The suffragettes had a bit of a bee in their bonnet about churches, which they viewed as being complicit in the patriarchal society which was denying them votes. A number were blown up or torched as a result. The rebuilding of St Catherine’s Church in 1913 was estimated to cost £20,000 (roughly equating today to about £1,600,000). The damage to the pier at Yarmouth, which was caused by a bomb, was quoted by the owner as being in the region of £15,000 (something over £1,200,000 today).

These two instances are not at all exceptional. They pale into insignificance when compared with the initial estimates for the loss of buildings and property at the great Portsmouth Dockyard fire in December 1913, which was commonly regarded as the work of the suffragettes. The cost of rebuilding was announced by the navy to be about £200,000.

These were colossal sums for the insurance companies to find and the WSPU made no bones about their intention to drive some businesses to bankruptcy by their tactics. This began with the mass destruction of plate-glass shop windows in 1912. Some of these shops had insurance, for others, the cost of replacing their windows would have to be borne by their own business. This sort of thing was a win-win situation for the suffragettes. Property insurance was not nearly as common a century ago as it is now, even for commercial premises. Either a small business would find itself with a huge bill for new windows, for example, which it might not be able to pay, or an insurance company would find its profits cut by the amount that was being paid out for attacks.

It was suggested by some leading suffragettes that the big insurance companies began to support votes for women at about this time because they could see their profit margins dwindling. It was said that they were anxious for the government to give in to the militancy, just so that they would stop having to pay out such large sums each month. And the sums really were very large. In February 1914 alone, for instance, the cost of the damages caused by suffragette arson attacks was estimated to be £62,000. It would have been a great relief for the companies paying out such vast sums if the suffragette campaign could be brought to a halt. The easiest way of doing that would be for the government to give in to their demands.

It is for the reasons outlined above that we read of the burning of woodyards and haystacks by suffragettes, as well as the larger fires which destroyed churches and stately homes. All such attacks inconvenienced somebody, all had ultimately to be paid for from somebody’s pocket.

Hand in hand with the use of terrorism went the quest for the raising up of martyrs, as is so often the case with terrorist campaigns. A few martyrs can turn around the fortunes of a militant group and restore their popularity if it appears to be waning. These martyrs should ideally be killed by the state, either by being formally executed or just shot down in the streets. An example of this took place in 1916 with the Easter Rising in Dublin. This involved just over 1,000 Republicans seizing control of key parts of the city from the British. Those who undertook this adventure were extremely unpopular with the citizens of Dublin. In one incident, the Sinn Feéin rebels actually opened fire on Dublin citizens who were shouting abuse and trying to disarm them. After they had been captured by the British army, the rebels were booed, jeered and spat at by angry crowds of Dubliners. The soldiers escorting the captured rebels were forced to protect them from the mobs.

Everything changed within a few weeks. The British executed 15 of the leaders of the rising and these men instantly became martyrs. Their execution was instrumental in changing the attitude of the public to the cause for which they had died. Had the leaders of the revolt simply been sent to prison, the Easter Rising might not hold the iconic place it does in the hearts of many Irish men and women today.

The WSPU recognised the need for martyrs fairly early in their militant campaign. Governments though are often only too aware of the dangers in allowing their opponents to become martyrs and sometimes take great steps to prevent this happening. The WSPU must have known very well that there was not the slightest chance of the government obliging them by killing any suffragettes. If they wanted martyrs, then they would have to manufacture them for themselves, without the assistance of Asquith’s government. This would prove a tricky but not insurmountable problem.

Asquith was a canny enough operator to be fully conscious of the risk of martyring any members of the WSPU. There was little chance of his government going as far as hanging or shooting anybody for breaking windows or even starting fires, but the suffragettes hit upon another tactic which they felt might provide them with the necessary symbolic death.

In June, 1909, a 44-year-old supporter of the WSPU called Marion Wallace-Dunlop stamped a quotation from the Bill of Rights onto the side of St Stephen’s Hall at the House of Commons. She used indelible ink which, according to the charge made after her arrest, caused damage to the value of 10 shillings (50p). She refused to pay the fine imposed upon her when she was brought to court and so was imprisoned. Prisoners were divided into three divisions, according to their social standing. First Division prisoners were allowed many luxuries and could have food sent in from outside. In the lowest grade, Third Division, were ordinary, working-class men and women who were to expect no special privileges. Surprisingly, the First Division was still being used in prisons until 1948.

As soon as Wallace-Dunlop was sent to Holloway Prison, she asked to be treated as a political prisoner and placed in the First Division. When her requests to both the governor of the prison and also the Home Secretary were not immediately complied with, she announced that she would not eat until her crime was recognised as being political in nature and she had been put in the First Division. Today, we are quite familiar with political prisoners or imprisoned terrorists going on hunger strike in this way, but this was the first recorded use of a hunger strike for political purposes. That this can be a tremendously powerful weapon against the state has been amply demonstrated throughout the history of the twentieth century, from Mahatma Ghandi in colonial India to the IRA prisoner Bobby Sands in 1981.

Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone, keenly aware of the dangers of letting a suffragette prisoner kill herself in this way, ordered Wallace-Dunlop’s release after she had refused all food for over 90 hours. The hunger strike was such a novelty that he made a spur of the moment decision, which the government later regretted. In no time at all, the tactic of the hunger strike had spread to many other WSPU members held in prison. Initially, others were also able to avail themselves of what was, in effect, a ‘Get out of Gaol Free’ card. Such a situation could not last for long and so the government, hoping to avoid women becoming martyrs, embarked upon the very strategy that was practically guaranteed to create them.

Inmates of lunatic asylums who refused to eat were sometimes forcibly fed, either by having their jaws prised open or by having rubber tubes pushed down their noses until they were in the patient’s stomach. Milk, sometimes accompanied by raw eggs, was poured down the tube. The dangers of carrying out this procedure on struggling and uncooperative victims were very great. They ranged from cuts to the gums and broken teeth as the jaws were forced apart by steel gags, all the way to the risk of death when, as sometimes happened, the liquid was poured into the lungs and not the stomach. It is probable that some women later died from the after-effects of this treatment.

The powerful visual image of women being held down and forcibly fed has become one of the defining icons of the suffragette struggle. It was used to great effect on propaganda posters circulated by the WSPU, and the Liberal government of Asquith was, with some justification, accused of torturing women. This was a tremendous own goal for a government which had only used this method in order to avoid the creation of martyrs among the women they were holding.

Imprisoned suffragettes might have been denied the chance to die and so achieve martyrdom in that way, but they had now been handed a propaganda masterpiece where helpless women were having things forced into their bodies against their wishes. The comparison with rape was seldom explicitly stated, but hovered in the background of the debate on forced feeding. This visual image was exploited by the WSPU and had a very great impact. Posters featured distraught women being restrained while villainous-looking men wearing pince-nez inserted tubes into them.

Having shot themselves in the foot by setting out to force-feed women prisoners, with all the resultant sympathy this generated for them, the government then came up with another plan. The next scheme only made matters worse. The bind in which Asquith’s government found itself was a tricky one. On the one hand, they did not wish for any of the suffragette prisoners to die. On the other, they were being portrayed as heartless brutes because of their use of force-feeding. The solution was to allow hunger strikers to be released on licence and then rearrested and taken back to prison to complete their sentences once they had recovered their health.

The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 made provision for hunger strikers to be released and then later taken back to prison. It soon became known as the Cat and Mouse Act, due to the supposed similarity with a playful cat releasing and then catching a mouse with whom it is playing. Once more, it provided the WSPU with a brilliant image, that of a woman being held in the jaws of a gigantic cat. It was also a nightmare for the police to enforce, because as soon as suffragettes were temporarily released they would flee from sight. A network of supporters offered accommodation for fugitive prisoners who had been released under the Cat and Mouse Act. J.B. Priestley, in his book The Edwardians, compares the sheltering of such women with the ‘underground railway’ established during the American Civil War to care for runaway slaves.

There is no doubt that by using the weapon of the hunger strike, members of the WSPU were able to cultivate an impression of martyrdom, even if it fell short of the actual sacrifice of their lives. In time, the force-feeding in prisons resumed, because the law was being brought into disrepute. Suffragettes were being sentenced to prison and then freed within a matter of days. They would then flee and the police would have to waste time hunting them down in order to return them to prison for a short time, only for the process to begin anew.

Asquith’s government had been hopelessly outmanoeuvred by the WSPU. Their attempts to avoid providing the suffragettes with their martyr had backfired in the most spectacular way and it was, in any case, all to be in vain. The suffragettes knew that they needed somebody to make the supreme sacrifice which would show to the world that they were serious in their devotion to this cause and that this devotion extended as far as giving their lives.

Some women had almost certainly already done this for the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1910, Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clark, was badly knocked about during a riot near the Houses of Parliament. She was arrested and imprisoned, but soon released. She died a short time later, probably of injuries received during the tussles with the police. There was however, nothing clear-cut and dramatic about the death of Mary Clark. What was needed was an obvious martyrdom, a woman giving her life for the suffragette cause.

Two months after the Cat and Mouse Act received Royal assent, a martyr duly appeared on behalf of those fighting for women’s suffrage. That this disturbed and unhappy woman very nearly took somebody else’s life as a result of her mad actions has been altogether forgotten. Today she lives on as the only suffragette that, apart from the Pankhursts, anybody can instantly remember.

Emily Wilding Davison secured her place in history as the woman who gave her life so that other women could get the vote. However, she is of interest not only for losing her life beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, but also for the fact that she launched the arson and bombing campaigns which set the WSPU on the path of using terrorism to achieve their political ends. She was a violent and irrational woman, whose actions in the years leading up to her death at the age of 40 might encourage any objective observer to suspect that her most famous action was precipitated by factors other than merely strong political views.