Chapter Six

Bombing and Arson

‘ If any woman refrains from militant protest against the injury done by the Government and the House of Commons against women… she will share responsibility for the crime. ’

(Emmeline Pankhurst, 10 January, 1913)

There had, from 1911 onwards, been sporadic and isolated attempts at arson and even, as at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, the occasional use of explosives by members of the WSPU. However, the campaign of bombing and arson began in earnest on 19 February 1913.

Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George was probably, for the suffragettes, the most hated man in the government besides Herbert Asquith. Why this should have been the case is something of a mystery. He was a dedicated supporter of the principle of women’s suffrage, although not enthusiastic about the Pankhursts’ idea of ‘equal suffrage’.

In early 1913 Lloyd George was having a house built for himself near the golf course at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey. The men working on the house arrived each morning at 6.30am and left at 5.30pm On the evening of 18 February, the workmen left as usual in the evening and secured the property behind them. There was, however, one small and unfinished window on the ground floor which could not be fully closed. It was later guessed that a boy, or slim woman, might have been able to squeeze through this window and then possibly open another window to let in accomplices.

Cars were something of a rarity at that time and a number of witnesses were woken by the sound of a motor vehicle driving to Walton in the early hours of the morning of 19 February. The car was also heard by a police officer, who noted that it arrived in Walton at about 2.50 am. The sound of a car was sufficiently uncommon to draw attention, particularly at night. He also heard a vehicle, possibly the same one, driving back towards London two hours later. It was unusual to hear a car driving about at that time, but nothing more was thought of it.

At 6.10 am, the windows of the Blue Ball pub in Walton were rattled by a loud explosion. Twenty minutes later, James Grey, foreman of the builders, arrived at the house that he and his men had almost completed and found a scene of devastation. The ceilings had been brought down by an explosion, windows blown out and the force of the blast had even cracked open an external brick wall. Five rooms were wrecked. The police were called and discovered that two bombs had been planted in the house. The method used to trigger the explosions was primitive in the extreme. A paraffin-soaked rag led from the bomb to a saucer of wood shavings, which had also been sprinkled with paraffin. A candle was then placed in this saucer and lit. When it burned down far enough, it set fire to the wood shavings and then ignited the rag which acted as a fuse.

Two bombs had actually been planted in the house, but the explosion of the first had blown out the candle which was meant to trigger the second. This meant that the Home Office explosives expert was able to examine in detail the construction of the bombs. The unexploded bomb consisted of 5 lbs of gunpowder, surrounded with nails to make it more destructive. Anybody who had been in the house at the time of the explosion would have stood a good chance of being killed.

Scotland Yard sent officers from the Special Branch to investigate this latest outrage, which represented a serious escalation in political violence. There were few clues, other than the discovery of two hairpins and a galosh. The leaving of hairpins at the scene of such attacks was to become something of a hallmark of the suffragette bombers and arsonists.

The explosion at Lloyd George’s house had been preceded less than a week before by the burning down of the refreshment shed at Regents Park Cricket Ground in London. After this attack, incidents of arson and sabotage increased dramatically across the whole country. On 12 February, the Tea House at Kew Gardens was burned to the ground. Two days later, Ashford Golf Course was damaged and on 24 February, telegraph poles in Newcastle were cut down. That same day, signal wires were cut on various railway lines. On the following day, telephone wires were cut in Belfast and a bookstall was burned to the ground in Staffordshire. The usual round of window-smashing, letter-burning and other acts of vandalism were continuing throughout the country.

March brought new and even more serious arson attacks. On 9 March, two railway stations, Saunderton and Croxley Green, were destroyed by fire and on 12 March, a fire was started in a lavatory at the British Museum. On 21 March, the house of Lady White at Engle- field Green was burned down and on the same day the golf pavilion at Weston-Super-Mare was also destroyed by fire. Two days later, telephone wires were cut and many yards of them removed near Hull. On 24 March, extensive damage was caused to Sandwich golf links.

Some of the targets are predictable enough for a guerrilla campaign – the transport system and communications infrastructure, for instance. But where do cricket grounds and golf courses fit into the pattern? In fact, they are part of the same overall scheme as Emily Davison’s actions at the Derby. To see what was going on, it is necessary to look at what Emmeline Pankhurst had to say at her trial in early April that year and also to consider the writings of her daughter Christabel from exile in Paris.

The police had been unable to track down and arrest those who had actually planted the bomb at Lloyd George’s house. Sylvia Pankhurst, writing long after the event, claimed that Emily Davison was one of the bombers, although the police had other suspects in mind. Nevertheless, there was no doubt, at least as far as the government was concerned, where ultimate responsibility for this act of terrorism lay and that was with the leadership of the WSPU.

Emmeline Pankhurst in particular, had since the beginning of 1913, been sailing exceedingly close to the wind. On 10 January that year, she wrote to members of the WSPU. Heading the letter, ‘Private and Confidential’, this was, to all intents and purposes, a call to arms. After discussing the situation in parliament, Mrs Pankhurst went on to say:

There are degrees of militancy. Some women are able to go further than others in militant action and each woman is the judge of her own duty so far as that is concerned. To be militant in some way or other is, however, a moral obligation. It is a duty which every woman owes to her conscience and self-respect, to other women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all those who are to come after her.

If any woman refrains from militant protest against the injury done by the Government and the House of Commons against women and to the race, she will share responsibility for the crime. Submission under such circumstances will be itself a crime. We must, as I have said, prepare to meet the crisis before it arises. Will you therefore tell me (by letter if it is not possible to do so by word of mouth), that you are ready to take your share in manifesting in a practical manner your indignation at the betrayal of our cause.

Yours sincerely,

E Pankhurst.

Even before this, Mrs Pankhurst had already openly encouraged illegal actions such as smashing windows. At a public meeting at the Albert Hall in October 1912, she had said, ‘Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the sacred idol of property… do so’.

The general public had on the whole been indifferent to the suffragette campaign. As long as it was limited to heckling cabinet ministers and breaking windows in Downing Street, most people were happy to ignore them. Once the smashing of whole streets of shop windows began and buildings began to be burned down, the mood changed. When the WSPU held their rally for ‘Women’s Sunday’ in 1908, thousands of people came to Hyde Park to see what all the fuss was about. They may not have become active supporters, but they came with open minds and some probably left with a more favourable attitude towards female emancipation than when they arrived. This changed dramatically once the arson and bombing began.

A month after the bombing of Lloyd George’s house, the WSPU held a rally in Hyde Park. The meeting, on 17 March, quickly degenerated into a riot. The suffragettes had complained often enough in the past about the heavy-handed tactics of the police at their meetings; on this occasion, they were grateful that so many police were in attendance. The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly and none of the speakers could be heard above the catcalls and angry shouts. The heckling and abuse had nothing to do with the WSPU’s demand for the parliamentary vote. Instead, the cries were ‘Incendiary!’ and ‘Shopbreakers!’ Clods of earth were dug up and thrown and women grabbed and manhandled. The fury of the mob was concerned solely with the acts of militancy and had no reference at all to political questions. By adopting a policy of violence against privately owned property, the leadership of the WSPU had succeeded in transforming public indifference into outright hostility and ill will. A suffragette open air meeting at Wimbledon also descended into chaos a day or two later and for the same reason: anger over widespread vandalism and arson.

After the bombing at Walton-on-the-Hill, Emmeline Pankhurst at once announced that she was responsible for the explosion. She repeated this assertion in an article published in The Suffragette, the newspaper of the WSPU and on 24 February, she was arrested and charged with ‘Feloniously procuring and inciting a person or persons unknown to commit felony, unlawfully soliciting and inciting persons unknown to commit felony and certain misdemeanours’.

The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 1 April, 1913. Transcripts of various speeches that Emmeline Pankhurst had made were produced in evidence, the prosecution suggesting that these were ‘soliciting and inciting’ others to commit felonies. The letter in January in which Mrs Pankhurst had urged all women to take part in militancy was also read out.

Emmeline Pankhurst did not defend herself in the conventional way, but instead made a long and rambling speech to the judge and jury. Very little of this speech was relevant to the charge against her and some of it was very strange indeed. Among other things, Mrs Pankhurst reminded the court that she had been married to a barrister and that her dead husband had told her some shocking tales about the behaviour of men in high places. She began to tell the story of a judge who had been found dead in a brothel, but at this point, was warned that she must not name anybody and that it would be better to restrict her comments to the charge against her.

It is unlikely that this anecdote about the immoral judge did anything to endear the defendant to the judge trying her own case, but Mrs Pankhurst had more to say on the depravity of men. She continued:

Only this morning I have had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in little children, that they are being purchased, that they are being entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of life.

The judge was determined to offer Emmeline Pankhurst as much leeway as he possibly could, but like most of those present in court that day, he must have begun seriously to wonder about the mental state of somebody being tried for an offence of this nature and seemingly unable to understand what was going on. After threatening to go on hunger strike if she was convicted, Mrs Pankhurst made one last, bizarre statement. She said of the suffragettes that, ‘They know that the very fount of life is being poisoned, they know that homes are being destroyed, that because of bad education, because of the unequal standard of morals, even the mothers and children are destroyed by one of the vilest and most horrible diseases that ravage humanity’. It did not take the jury long to find Emmeline Pankhurst guilty, although with a strong recommendation to mercy. She was sent to prison for three years.

Most people, finding themselves standing in the dock at the Old Bailey and charged with inciting acts of terrorism, might perhaps not behave quite as Mrs Pankhurst did on that April day a little over a century ago. Readers will probably wonder what on earth was going through her mind as she gave that speech to the court. ‘Vicious pleasures’, ‘horrible diseases’, ‘fount of life is being poisoned’, dead judges in brothels, what was it all about? It certainly had no connection with the bomb explosion at the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which of course had led to her appearance at the Old Bailey. Nor did ‘horrible diseases’ and ‘vicious pleasures’ appear to have anything to do with the charge that Mrs Pankhurst faced of inciting persons unknown to commit a felony.

To understand Emmeline Pankhurst’s behaviour in court, we must see what Christabel Pankhurst had been doing in Paris while she was in exile. Only then will we be able to understand both what caused Emmeline Pankhurst to talk so oddly at her trial and also to find out how this is connected with the burning down of cricket pavilions, the blowing up of football grounds, the destruction of golf courses and, of course, Emily Davison’s strange actions at that year’s Derby.

From the middle of 1912 onwards, the leaders of the WSPU became convinced that the refusal to grant women the parliamentary vote was a crime against the race. We saw Emmeline Pankhurst hint at this in her letter to the members of the WSPU, when she talked of the injury done by the government, ‘against women and to the race’. Her daughter Christabel explained this passing reference in detail in articles published in The Suffragette throughout 1913. Her pieces on this subject were collected together and published later that year, as a book called The Great Scourge and How to End It.

Briefly, the thesis advanced by the Pankhursts, mother and daughter, was as follows: The great majority of men in Britain, Christabel claimed the figure to be between 75 and 80 per cent, were infected with sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea. They frequently picked up these diseases through visiting prostitutes, which the Pankhursts referred to coyly as the ‘Social Evil’. One consequence of this was that they passed on gonorrhoea to their wives, causing them to become sterile or to give birth to deformed babies. This was described as ‘race suicide’. Another wicked side-effect of men’s insatiable sexual appetites was that a constant supply of prostitutes had to be created by means of the ‘white slavery’ racket, whereby young girls were abducted and forced into prostitution.

From late 1912, these bizarre ideas became official doctrine of the WSPU. The only way to save the race and also protect women from the infections with which men were riddled was to allow women an active role in politics. They would soon put a stop to these disgusting practices!

It seems incredible now that sort of thing could have been taken seriously by anybody, even a century ago. Such seemingly outlandish ideas did no good for the suffragette cause and not only with those who opposed them. As the WSPU increasingly portrayed the struggle for women’s suffrage as a moral crusade to save the race from extinction and little girls from the white slavers, so their membership went into free fall. It was not only men who recognised this rhetoric to be nonsense, even many women who had stuck with the WSPU for years began to become disillusioned with it.

This brings us to the question of the burning of cricket pavilions and the disruption of the Derby by Emily Davison. Those who might be wondering what sort of political act an attack on the golf course at Weston-Super-Mare might be, or about the bomb that was detonated the following month at the Cambridge University football ground, can now see what the motive was. The enemy has been identified. It is not a tiny handful of obstinate politicians who were blocking private members’ bills about extending the franchise. It is all men, or at the very least the 80 per cent of them who, when they are not engaged in the white slave trade, are indiscriminately spreading gonorrhoea to innocent women.

What do men like doing to relax when they are not destroying the race or corrupting innocent children in this way? Well, they like nothing better than to watch racing, play cricket or spend an afternoon on the golf course. Sabotaging those locations will hit them where it hurts. This, at least, was the rationale behind the destruction of sports facilities which was carried out over the next year or so.

A number of attacks in retaliation for the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst for her role in inciting terrorism were swiftly undertaken. One of the first was in Scotland. In the early hours of 5 April, the grandstand at Ayr racecourse was completely destroyed by fire. This was one of the most costly incidents to date, the value of the grandstand being estimated at £2,000 (perhaps £160,000 in today’s terms). An attempt was also made to fire the grandstand at Kelso. Once again, men’s sporting activities were seen as being the logical focus for outrage.

Before the fire at Ayr, two other attacks had followed the sentence delivered at the Old Bailey, both at a more conventional terrorist target – the transport system. On the very night that Mrs Pankhurst was convicted, a bomb ripped apart a stationary train near Manchester. It exploded as another train was passing and the driver had a very narrow escape, when a piece of wood flew through the cab of his engine, knocking off his cap.

At 6.15am on 4 April, the day after the Old Bailey trial ended, a porter arrived for work at Oxted Railway Station in Surrey. He found that a bomb had exploded during the night in the men’s lavatory. The doors and windows had been blown out, but the damage could have been a lot worse. Firelighters and a two-gallon can of petrol had been placed near the bomb and the obvious hope of the terrorists was that the explosion would spread burning petrol around and destroy the station entirely. It would not have been the first station to be burned down by the suffragettes. The previous month two other stations, Saunderton and Croxley Green, were burned to the ground. There was no doubt as to who was responsible for these acts. At Saunderton, placards were found propped against a nearby wall with the slogans: ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Burning to get the Vote’.

The bomb at Oxted had been more sophisticated than the one that went off at Walton-on-the-Hill. Instead of a burning candle, the trigger for this device was a clockwork mechanism and battery. A loaded pistol was also found nearby. Despite the fact that no suffragette literature was left near the scene, as was common practice in attacks of this sort, it was clear that the WSPU were behind the bomb. A piece of paper recovered from the box containing the firelighters was traced to a member of the WSPU living in the London district of Battersea, but she herself had an alibi for the night.

Striking at railways has always been a popular tactic for terrorists. Attacks on them create inconvenience to travellers and so draw attention to the cause in whose name they have been carried out. The disruption can give rise to the feeling that the government is not really in control of the situation. After the fires at Saunderton and Croxley Green and the explosion at Oxted, patrols were instigated to check railway lines and stations regularly for bombs. There was a real fear, justified by other actions of the suffragettes that attempts might be made to derail a train or otherwise cause an accident. On 17 December 1912, the railway signals at Potter’s Bar had been tied together and disabled. A note was found, which said, ‘The vote is the only remedy’.

While it is sometimes suggested that the suffragettes were very careful to avoid injury to others and that their attacks only harmed property, several statements made by the WSPU at the time undermine this. As early as 1909 for instance, Jenny Baines, who was responsible for trying to burn down the crowded theatre in Dublin, made a public statement when the Prime Minister was giving a speech at Bingley Hall in Birmingham. She said, ‘We warn every citizen attending the meeting in Bingley Hall to beware. He may not only get crippled, he may lose his life eventually’. Nor was she joking. This paid organiser of the WSPU climbed onto a nearby roof with a couple of companions and then used an axe to chop slates off, hurling them at the people below. A police officer was seriously injured.

On the night of 3 April 1913, the day Emmeline Pankhurst was sent to prison for three years, the leaders of the WSPU were even more explicit in their threats. They promised, ‘a reign of terror’ and announced that what was to be done ‘Would stagger humanity’. Even more ominously, one of the women speaking at the headquarters in Kingsway announced that ‘human life, we have resolved, will be respected no longer’. This all seems plain enough and, when combined with the actions of the WSPU, no one would be in doubt that some were not at all concerned about causing injury or death.

The fact that some suffragettes were planting bombs to explode near passing trains and sabotaging the signals on busy railway lines makes it hard for us to believe that all members of the WSPU were trying to avoid hurting anybody. This claim is any case a fairly recent one. Meddling with signals and blowing up stations and trains is very hard to square with such a supposed doctrine on the part of the terrorists. If the incidents at which we have just been looking are dubious from this point of view, then the events of 14 April remove all doubt that certain elements among the suffragettes were quite willing to cause injury or death.

At 3.00pm on the afternoon of Monday, 14 April 1913, a young street urchin in central London noticed smoke billowing out from an object attached to the railings surrounding the Bank of England. He drew this to the attention of a police officer and the constable found that a metal milk can had been fixed to the railings near the Bank of England’s Bartholomew Lane entrance. He wrenched it free and ran to the nearby Royal Exchange, outside of which was a fountain. The brave and resourceful man then plunged the mysterious object into the water.

The can turned out to contain an explosive charge, which was to be detonated by a timing device made from a wristwatch and battery. For some reason, the fuse caught fire, but the main charge did not go off. Considering the location of the bomb, immediately opposite the entrance to the Stock Exchange on a busy street in the heart of London’s commercial district, this was fortunate. An explosion could not have failed to cause casualties. There was no direct evidence to link the Bank of England bomb to the WSPU, but it had been attached to the railings with the help of hat pins. As we saw earlier, the finding of hat pins or hairpins was itself a clue to the provenance of a bomb at this time.

One of the most vexing aspects of the suffragette campaign from the point of view of the Liberal government was the way in which they were constantly being manoeuvred, often against their wishes, into taking actions which appeared to be hideously illiberal. Denying half of adult citizens the vote, force-feeding, trying to prevent publication of a newspaper like The Suffragette, which criticised the government – these all ran counter to both the Liberal, with a capital ‘L’, and liberal, with a small ‘l’, tradition.

The next step taken by Asquith’s government continued this trend. It was a ban on open air meetings of the WSPU in London. Home Secretary McKenna directed Sir Edward Henry, who was the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, to tackle what he saw as the problem of suffragette rallies in the capital. It was true that recent meetings at Hyde Park and Wimbledon Common had been the target of counter demonstrations, but this was not the main reason for the ban. It was part of a calculated plan to suppress the Women’s Social and Political Union and prevent them from appearing in public.

Superintendent Quinn, of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, delivered by hand to Harriet Kerr, acting secretary of the WSPU, the following notice on 15 April:

It has been brought to the notice of the Secretary of State that the meetings held by the Women’s Social and Political Union in Hyde Park, Wimbledon Common and other public open spaces in the Metropolitan area have been the occasion of grave disorder, notwithstanding the presence of large forces of police, and I have advised him that, having regard to the character of the speeches delivered thereat, it is not practicable by any police arrangements to obviate the possibility of similar disorder occurring if such meetings are held.

In these circumstances and in view of the fact that it is the avowed policy of the Women’s Social and Political Union to advocate the commission of crimes, the Secretary of State for the Home Department has directed me to instruct the Metropolitan Police to take such steps as are necessary and within their powers to prevent such meetings being held.

The notice was signed by Sir Edward Henry. This was a very ill-judged move by the Home Secretary, because although the Pankhursts and the WSPU had fallen out with both the Labour Party and the more moderate suffragists, nobody liked to see free speech curtailed in this way. Over the next year, not only the WSPU but other groups also sought to defy this ban on open air meetings about women’s suffrage.

On the night of Thursday, 17 April, a bomb was found at Aberdeen Railway Station. It was of the same type used at Lloyd George’s house and consisted of a charge of gunpowder with a burning candle as the fuse. A railway porter put out the candle before it was able to set off the bomb. A week later, the suffragettes had more success with a larger bomb, which did explode.

In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Assize court, forerunner of our Crown Court, was housed in the old Moot Hall, along with the administrative offices of the Northumberland County Council. Just after dusk on 24 April, the caretaker of the building saw two women emerging from an alleyway at the side of the building. He asked them what they were doing, but they both ran off. When Charles Smith, the caretaker, went into the alleyway, he found a string stretched across it, with a card hanging from the string. It bore the words, ‘Beware dangerous bomb – run for your life’. This was no idle boast, because at that moment, there was a deafening explosion, as a two-foot-long metal pipe, packed with explosives, went off not far from where he was standing. Windows were shattered, the office of the County Surveyor was wrecked and, so powerful was the blast, the chimney of a neighbouring building was blown down.

These were not the only incidents in April. Killarney golf pavilion in Ireland and Perthshire Cricket Club’s pavilion were both burned to the ground, and many letters were damaged in Doncaster. This was in addition to the burning of a number of country houses. A further case of arson that month indicated yet another target towards which the WSPU militants were planning to direct their malice.

Sporting venues were already seen as fair game because they were primarily patronised by men. Men ran the football clubs and golf courses; they also arranged all the horse racing. Emmeline Pankhurst boasted that the damage to golf courses aroused more indignation than any other suffragette activity. There was another area of public life, though dominated by men, and an integral part of the British establishment that the suffragettes had not yet attacked.

During Mrs Pankhurst’s trial in early April, two unoccupied houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb were set on fire. A fire was also started in a church, although the police arrived and soon extinguished it. This was a portent of things to come. The suffragettes had decided that the time had come to call the Church of England to account for its lack of support and, in some cases, downright opposition to the campaign for women’s suffrage. One point of contention was the insistence of the Anglicans in retaining that part of the marriage vow in which brides promise to ‘obey’ their new husbands.

Because it is an established church, the Church of England is actually a part of the state in this country. The Head of State is also Head of the Church and so the church is, to a great extent, identified with the actions of the state. The well-known description of the Anglican Church as ‘The Conservative Party at prayer’ was coined by a suffragette, Agnes Maude Royden. It more or less sums up the attitude of many members of the WSPU in the years leading up to the First World War. For them, the Church of England represented reactionary views and an unwillingness to change. Worse, it was a manifestation of the patriarchy and dominated entirely by men. It did not help that a number of churchmen had opposed the very notion of votes for women and attempted to prove by Biblical exegesis that the Deity Himself did not wish for women to have the parliamentary vote.

All of this, at least as far as the militants were concerned, made Anglican churches bastions of male privilege every bit as unacceptable as the golf courses and cricket grounds that they were trying to put out of action. The fire at the church in Hampstead Garden Suburb was a small one, but churches were soon to become major targets of bombing and arson.

The final bomb of April 1913 exploded in Manchester. This bomb was planted at the city’s Free Trade Hall. It was here in 1905 that the very first suffragette act of militancy had taken place, when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney heckled Edward Grey and Winston Churchill. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the very platform on which the two men had been speaking at that time was destroyed by an explosion on 24 April 1913.

It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of every bomb attack and act of arson carried out by the suffragettes in March and April of 1913, as there were simply too many of them. Suffice to say that mansions were burned to the ground in Hertfordshire and Norfolk; there was a plot to blow up the grandstand at Crystal Palace football ground; telegraph wires between Grimsby and Immingham in Lincolnshire were cut; and the burning of a train in Teddington and of a second church took place; the list goes on and on.

No responsible government can allow a band of terrorists to rampage across the country unchecked. Regardless of the justice of the demands, constant violence in the form of fires, explosions and other damage to property tends to make governments look weak and ineffectual. For reasons outlined in Chapter 2, looking weak was the last thing that Asquith’s administration could afford to do at this time. By the end of April, the decision had been taken at the Home Office that a crackdown would need to take place on the WSPU. A raid was accordingly planned for the end of the month. This operation was successful in that it netted all those leaders of the WSPU whom the government wished to place on trial, but it failed to bring an end to the terrorism. If anything, the pace quickened after the suffragette leaders were behind bars. The WSPU seemed to be like a hydra, and as fast as one head was removed, another sprouted.

Before looking at the raid which was to take place on the headquarters of the WSPU on the last day of April 1913, perhaps we should pause for a moment and ask ourselves a few questions about the motivation of those who were starting the fires and planting the bombs, as well as of the leaders who were inciting, encouraging and financing them. Did they really believe that their militancy could deliver the parliamentary vote to women or could there also have been other reasons for their behaviour?

There were probably a number of explanations for the increasing number of terrorist attacks carried out by WSPU members in 1913 and 1914. For one thing, the vandalism and arson had caused many members to leave and discouraged new ones from joining. In 1909/ 1910, there were around 4,500 new applications for membership; this had dropped to fewer than 1,000 in the year 1912/1913. At the same time, the number of women joining the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was soaring. Many married women left the WSPU at this time and those who remained tended to be single young women, more ready to become involved in illegal activity.

There were also older women, of course; some, like Emily Davison, had little going on in their lives apart from their suffragette activism. For them and also for many younger women, the WSPU functioned as a substitute family, an all-female environment very different from the day to day lives they might otherwise expect to be leading. Life could be pretty dull for women in Edwardian Britain and the militancy offered the chance for excitement, adventure and travel. They could get up to all sorts of daring exploits, even crossing swords with the police and it was all in a good cause! A number of suffragettes, including Annie Kenney, admitted to feeling bored during the ‘truce’ of 1911 and glad when it ended and they could get back to smashing windows and setting fire to things.

It is quite possible to get a taste for violence and danger; one can almost become addicted to it. If this happens, then life can seem flat and uninteresting in the absence of thrills. After a while, the violence becomes an end in itself and the original motive can be forgotten. We see this happening in modern football hooliganism, for example, and the same thing occurs during terrorist ceasefires. The terrorists become restless and eager to get back to the serious business of planting bombs.

There is no doubt that women who acquired a taste for violence and destruction could be found in the WSPU. These women found their ordinary lives lacking in the excitement they found in militant actions. Such a one was Jennie Baines who, it will be recalled, was among the paid organisers of the WSPU who tried to burn down the Theatre Royal when it was full of people. Her career with the WSPU is almost a case study in the kind of person who picks up a taste for violence.

Sarah Jane Baines, known as Jennie, was almost 40 when she was first involved in militant action with the WSPU. She was present at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1905 when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were arrested after hitting a policeman. In 1908, she was the first suffragette to be tried by a jury on a charge of unlawful assembly. The following year she was on the roof of a building in Birmingham, throwing slates down at the police and causing injuries to several people. In 1912, Jennie Baines was in Dublin, where she was involved in the arson and bombing at the theatre where Asquith was due to speak. The following year, she was living in the North of England. On 8 July 1913, a bomb exploded in a railway carriage in a siding at Newton Heath. Jennie Baines was arrested and charged with this offence, but jumped bail and went to Australia.

Here was a woman who, at the age of 47, was still committing acts of violence. This lifestyle gave her an identity. So enjoyable did she find breaking windows, starting fires and setting off bombs, that she was unable to break the habit, despite being imprisoned on a number of occasions. There is a strong suspicion that she was involved in many other attacks for which she was not caught. Fires and explosions certainly seemed to follow Jennie Baines and then cease whenever she moved to another district. Writing in Votes for Women, Judith Smart says that Baines, ‘remembered the suffragette years as her peak experience, when life seemed to take on shape and meaning and an enduring, exalted significance’. This perhaps sums up accurately the feelings of many of the women conducting the guerrilla warfare at that time.

It was not only the women carrying out the attacks who felt this, ‘exalted significance’, which perhaps their lives had previously been lacking. This satisfaction may have been, at least in the case of some of the most important leaders of the WSPU, more important than the cause itself. Christabel Pankhurst, for instance, was open about the fact that she revelled in the terrorism which she had instigated and now controlled from the safety of her home in Paris. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who fell out with the WSPU over this very question, wrote later that Christabel, ‘never made any secret of the fact that to her the means were even more important than the end’. For Christabel Pankhurst, and perhaps to a lesser extent her mother, the militancy was significant in itself, regardless of whether or not it achieved or retarded its stated aim. There was a nobility about the guerrilla warfare being waged in Britain, which had a spiritual significance for women.

It is revealing to read what Christabel Pankhurst herself had to say about the terrorist campaign. On 29 May 1914, she wrote in The Suffragette: ‘The Militants will rejoice when victory comes in the shape of the vote, and yet, mixed with their joy will be regret that the most glorious chapter in women’s history is closed and the militant fight over – over, while so many have not yet known the exultation, the rapture of battle’. Did she really believe that the churches which were being burned down on her instructions, the bombs exploding in public places, the injuries caused by placing dangerous chemicals in postboxes, that this was really ‘the most glorious chapter in women’s history’? Did she honestly ‘exult’ in all this? What kind of person would ‘regret’ the end of terrorist attacks?

There is another factor that should not be neglected when asking ourselves about the motive for the increasingly frequent explosions and fires for which the WSPU were responsible at this time. Documents seized by the police and read out at court proceedings indicated that the organisation was awash with money. This came not from the shilling membership fee paid by new members, but was rather given by a number of rich supporters, some of whom had pledged over £1,000 each year. The more violent the actions of the suffragettes, the more money that was given by such people. The WSPU might have been shrinking in 1913 from the point of view of membership numbers and popular support, but as far as the paid staff were concerned, they were enjoying an unprecedented boom in 1913 and 1914. Put bluntly, the leaders and organisers of the WSPU were doing very nicely out of this new prosperity.

Many women working in factories and mills were earning less than £1 a week at this time. By contrast, organisers at the WSPU were being paid £2, £3, £4 or even, in the case of Christabel Pankhurst, £10 a week. Annie Kenney, who had left school at the age of 13 to work 12 hours a day in a mill, found herself earning four guineas a week by 1913 – four times as much as the average worker.

Some idea of the lifestyles being led by people like Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney may be gauged by the accounts that they subsequently gave of their lives at this time. By March, 1912, Christabel had left England and gone to live in Paris. From there, she directed the operations of the WSPU, by appointing her friend Annie Kenney to run the organisation in her absence. Kenney travelled to Paris every week to receive her instructions. When she first visited Christabel in Paris, Annie Kenney was rather overawed to be received at the salon of Princesse de Polignac, a friend of Christabel’s.

For the whole of the two and a half years that Christabel Pankhurst lived in Paris she did no work at all. All her living expenses were being met by the WSPU. These expenses included an apartment at 8 Avenue de la Grande Armee in the centre of Paris and only a hundred yards or so from the Arc de Triomphe. While other members of the WSPU were on hunger strike and being forcibly fed in Holloway Prison, Christabel Pankhurst was living the life of a well-off lady in the heart of Paris, hobnobbing with princesses.

This state of affairs, with the Pankhursts and their associates living very comfortably on salaries that the ordinary working man or woman could not aspire to, could be prolonged only by escalating the violence. Conversely, the funds might start to dry up if the terrorism died down, as indeed they did during the 1911 truce. This does not, of course, mean that these women were solely in it for the money, but calculations of this sort must have occurred to them.

A glance at the accounts of the WSPU would be enough to warn them of the potential ill effects of scaling back the violence. There was a direct correlation between the levels of militancy and the amount of cash flowing into the coffers of the WSPU. In the year 1907/1908, the annual income was just £7,545. The following year, as things hotted up, this had tripled to £21,213. The following year, 1909/1910, it had shot up to £33,027. It was very clear that the more violent and aggressive the actions of the suffragettes, the more money wealthy people would send their way. Most significantly, in 1910/1911, the period covered by the so-called ‘truce’, when militancy was abandoned, the income of the WSPU began for the first time to fall, to £29,000. The message was plain, increasing violence brought in money and peaceful methods meant a drop in income.

It would be interesting to know more about the motivations of these wealthy backers, who apparently had an interest in fomenting terrorism in this way. In May 1913, following the arrest of the leadership of the WSPU, the police stated that they had seized a list of subscribers to the WSPU funds. It was said that it would create a sensation if the names on this list were to be published. The implication was that in addition to those who genuinely supported the aims of the WSPU, there were others who had more sinister motives for stirring up violence and unrest.

The Home Office was certainly on the trail of the people financing the terrorists. Plans were mooted for pursuing those who had been giving large amounts and even making it a criminal offence to give money to the WSPU in this way. In fact, shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914, it was explicitly stated by the Home Secretary that moves were afoot to take both civil and criminal proceedings against the people who were bankrolling the WSPU.