Chapter Seven

The Terrorist Campaign Gathers Pace

‘ Have we your sympathy? If not, beware! Votes for Women! ’

(Note addressed to members of Haslemere Urban District Council, included with a bomb left at Haslemere Station in 1913)

Since members of the Women’s Social and Political Union had begun to commit acts of vandalism and arson, the government had acted against various individuals on a case-by-case basis. Those caught in the act of starting fires had been prosecuted, as had others like Emmeline Pankhurst, who had merely been encouraging violence. If Asquith and his cabinet had hoped that this would put an end to the burning down of buildings and planting of bombs, then the events of April 1913 would have proved them quite wrong. Acts of terrorism had increased greatly since Mrs Pankhurst’s trial at the beginning of the month. The Home Secretary and Prime Minister now decided that a more radical approach should be taken. Rather than arresting this person or that, an attempt should be made to close down the Women’s Social and Political Union altogether and prevent the publication of their newspaper, The Suffragette.

The morning of Wednesday, 30 April 1913, was just another day in the headquarters of the WSPU. It was a busy place, occupying four floors of Lincoln’s Inn House, an imposing building in central London, which still stands today. The WSPU had plenty of money and no expense had been spared in employing staff to type letters, answer telephones and generally carry out the day to day running of the organisation. It was just another working day, with nothing to warn anyone in the building of what was about to occur.

At 11.30 am, a fleet of taxis pulled up outside Lincoln’s Inn House and from them leapt 45 plain clothes policemen from Scotland Yard. At the same moment, a large contingent of uniformed officers, who had been hiding in a side street, emerged and the combined force stormed the building. The raid was brilliantly executed. Ten detectives secured each floor and took control at once of the telephones to ensure that no warning was passed to any other members of the WSPU. The office staff were allowed to leave and the leaders who were present were all arrested on charges of conspiring to cause malicious damage. Among those present in the building but not arrested, were Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans, both of whom had been involved in the attempt to burn down the Theatre Royal in Dublin the previous year. Later that day, a removal van pulled up and every document in the place was removed.

At the same time that the raid on the suffragette headquarters was taking place, police descended upon the premises of the Victoria House Press, who had only that week agreed to start printing The Suffragette. The previous printer had become too nervous to continue, fearing action of this very sort. The police confiscated the type that had been set, ready to print the next edition of the newspaper, and two days later they arrested the manager of the printing works. While the raids were taking place at Lincoln’s Inn House and the printer‘s, Annie Kenney‘s flat was also searched.

On Friday, 2 May Annie Kenney, who had been visiting Christabel Pankhurst in Paris, was arrested when she returned to England. In the absence of the Pankhursts, Kenney was in charge of the WSPU. By the end of the week, the chief organiser of the WSPU, its secretary, financial secretary, the assistant editor of The Suffragette and several other people were all under lock and key. The offices had been ransacked, all their records removed and their newspaper closed down. It must have seemed to the police and the Home Secretary that it was a good day’s work. There was every chance that by removing the entire leadership in this way, they had effectively put an end to the WSPU and that the violence would now stop.

When the women who had been arrested at the WSPU headquarters appeared at Bow Street court, there was an indication of the seriousness with which the case was viewed by the authorities. The Director of Public Prosecutions himself was present at the hearing before the magistrate to state the case for the prosecution. All of those charged in connection with causing malicious damage were remanded in custody. There was also a man in the dock, analytical chemist Edwy Clayton, whose role turned out to be an interesting one. He had been advising Annie Kenney, the acting leader of the WSPU, on explosives and suitable targets for attack. He too was refused bail. Any hope that the terrorist attacks would now end were to be dashed that very afternoon.

The police were keenly aware that attempts would probably be made to show that the suffragettes were not crushed by the latest action against their leaders. On the afternoon of 2 May, a policeman patrolling Piccadilly Circus tube station in London’s West End noticed a brown paper bag propped against the wall on one of the platforms. It contained a large bottle, labelled ‘Nitroglycerine’. The station was evacuated and Home Office chemists later confirmed that it did indeed contain the explosive. Nitroglycerine is a notoriously unstable explosive, which can be detonated by something as trifling as a sharp blow. Had the bottle been knocked over or accidentally broken, the consequences on a crowded platform would have been extremely serious.

The police had found plenty of evidence during their raid that the leaders of the WSPU were coordinating the arson and bombings. Some of what they found at Lincoln’s Inn House was damning. In Annie Kenney’s office, for example, a satchel contained eight bottles of benzine, a highly inflammable liquid. At her flat in Mecklenburgh Square, letters were found from Edwy Clayton, suggesting buildings and woodyards which could be burned and giving explicit details as to how this might be done. The National Health Insurance Commission was mentioned in one letter and the suggestion made that someone might visit it during the day, when the building was occupied and then, ‘pour out some inflammable liquid, such as benzoline, methylated spirits or paraffin, apply a light and instantly walk out of the building’. In other words, torch offices which contained many ordinary clerks while they were working in the building. Other letters by Edwy Clayton contained cryptic references to mixing up chemicals which would be useful to the suffragette bombers and arsonists. We shall see later to what this may have referred.

One of the most destructive fires ever started by the suffragettes took hold in Bradford on the night of 2 May. The freight sheds of the Midland Railway were burned, causing over £100,000 of damage. This would run into millions at today’s values. The sheds were 750 feet long and contained freight cars loaded with carpets and dry goods. The fire brigade only brought the blaze under control by flooding the whole place, in the process damaging many of the goods which had survived the fire.

The WSPU appeared to have access to a steady supply of explosives, both gunpowder and the more dangerous nitroglycerine. Staff at the post office in Borough High Street, just south of London Bridge Station, were sorting parcels on Monday, 5 May, when one caught their attention because it was so heavy and rattled curiously when shaken. The parcel was taken to the nearby police station, where officers opened it. To their horror, they found not only a substantial quantity of gunpowder and lead shot, but most alarmingly, a tube of nitroglycerine. While the militants were raising awareness of women’s suffrage by their dangerous antics on the streets, which while attracting attention, also promoted hostility, a move was afoot in parliament to introduce a women’s suffrage bill. There was little chance of this reaching the statute book, but the reaction to the bill in the Commons would provide some measure of how the question was being viewed by both the government and the opposition.

It was a Liberal MP who introduced the private bill for women’s suffrage. Willoughby Dickinson had been promised by Asquith that if his bill won a second reading in the Commons, then the government would allow it as much time as necessary for it to become law. Dickinson’s bill provided for women over 25 who were either householders or married to householders to be given the vote. This would have had the effect of increasing the electorate by six million at one stroke, the biggest jump in the number of people able to vote in this country ever seen. For that reason alone, it was viewed with caution. The British tradition was to increase enfranchisement by small increments.

The House of Commons had in the past given second readings to bills for women’s suffrage by healthy majorities in the years preceding Dickinson’s, although none had progressed further. It was a sign of the times that this bill did not even make it that far. The Prime Minister spoke against the bill and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey supported it. That the Liberals were generally in favour of female suffrage could be seen by the fact that when it came to the vote, 146 voted in favour of the bill, with 74 against. Overall though, the figures in the House were 268 against and 221 for.

The day after the defeat of Dickinson’s bill, on Wednesday, 7 May, a number of newspapers analysed the reasons for its failure. The editorial in The Times was typical of many and cut to the heart of the matter. Among other things, it stated:

The band of women and girls who call themselves militant suffragettes have done their own cause more harm than they know. The embarrassment they have inflicted on their best friends has been growing more evident of late, and no attempt to conceal it was made in the House of Commons. It lay like a dead weight over the whole course of the debate on the bill.

The message from The Times and other newspapers and magazines was clear: the suffragettes had put back the cause of women’s suffrage and were alone responsible for a decline in support for the idea of giving women the vote. The editorial continued, ‘But if they have not altogether lost the faculty of reasoning, they must perceive that the attention that they are attracting is more and more positively and angrily hostile, and that the effect on the legislature, which alone can give them what they demand, is to throw back their cause’.

It is true that The Times was not sympathetic to women’s suffrage, but they had put their finger on the problem here. Previous bills intended to provide for the enfranchisement of women had passed to their second readings with reasonable, even large, majorities. By the summer of 1913, the tide had turned and parliament was reflecting the mood of men and women in the street by rejecting the idea. This change in mood had been brought about almost single-handedly by the violent activities of the WSPU.

Even the pro-suffrage Manchester Guardian acknowledged that the suffragettes were responsible for the erosion of support for the cause of women’s suffrage. On 6 May, their editorial said:

Though reason, good sense, Liberal tradition, and every consideration to be drawn from a broad view of the march of civilisation are behind Mr Dickinson’s bill, there is little prospect of its success in the highly charged state of the political atmosphere. The agitation, therefore, will go on, and we still have to deal with the situation produced by the outrages of the militants. It is the first duty of every government to maintain order.

Both sympathisers and enemies were agreed – the suffragettes’ activities were harming and bringing into disrepute the whole idea of women’s suffrage.

On the same day that Dickinson’s bill failed to gain a second reading, St Catherine’s Anglican Church in Hatcham was burned to the ground. The cost of rebuilding the church was estimated at somewhere in the region of £20,000. The suggestion was sometimes made that the WSPU leadership employed dupes to carry out their attacks, foolish people who did not fully understand the nature of what they had become involved in. A possible example of this occurred on the same day that St Catherine’s Church was burned down.

Police Constable 728A was on the beat in Northumberland Avenue, near London’s Charing Cross Station, when he saw a woman well known to local officers. She was Ada Ward, a middle-aged drunkard who had been arrested many times for being intoxicated in public. It was 2.30am and there were few people about. He watched curiously as she passed the Grand Hotel and stooped, placing something on the steps of the hotel. He went to investigate and found a metal canister with a lit fuse protruding from it. Attached to the side was a card, bearing the inscription, ‘Votes for Women’. The constable extinguished the fuse and then picked up the bomb and placed it on a traffic island in the road. Then he went in pursuit of Ada Ward. When he found her, she denied having been near the Grand Hotel and PC 728A took her back there, only to find that the bomb had been removed by somebody.

When Ward was brought to court the following day on a charge of being a suspected person, both the magistrate and the solicitor acting for the police drew the same conclusion about the vanishing bomb. Mr Dickinson, the magistrate, said that it seemed to him that somebody must have been watching Ada Ward and that she was hardly the sort of woman one would expect to be involved in political activism of this sort. In the end, Ada Ward was remanded in custody so that the police could make further enquiries. That night, the terrorists turned their attention to another church, possibly the most famous in the entire country.

Having decided that the Anglican Church was an appropriate target for their anger, the WSPU must have thought that there was no reason to fiddle around with little parish churches. Why not strike a blow at the very heart of this establishment proxy? On the morning of 7 May, a verger at St Paul’s Cathedral in London was passing the bishop’s throne, when he heard a loud ticking. He traced the source of the noise to a brown paper parcel which had been hidden beneath a chair in the choir. The verger plunged the parcel into a bucket of water and called the police. When they undid it, they found that the parcel contained a bomb, which was to have been detonated by a clock and two batteries. The police later described the device as, ‘small, but fiendishly powerful’. An interesting circumstance was that the explosive used in this bomb was not gunpowder or dynamite, but the far more dangerous nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine is liable to explode when banged or splashed. For that reason, it had since the 1860s been used in the form of dynamite, which consists of nitroglycerine that has been absorbed by a form of porous clay called kieselguhr. It is easy enough to manufacture nitroglycerine in a laboratory, or even at home, but there are two chief difficulties with making nitroglycerine – one is the amount of heat generated by the process and the other is ensuring that the proportions are precisely correct. Failing to take into account either of these factors can result in the substance exploding during manufacture.

During the raid on the WSPU headquarters, a letter was found from the analytical chemist Edwy Clayton, in which he referred specifically to the problem with getting the quantities right for some substance he was preparing for the use of the militant suffragettes. In view of the fact that nitroglycerine was only used in a small number of bombs planted in the month following Clayton’s arrest, it is reasonable to assume that he had previously made some nitroglycerine and passed it on to the bombers.

That same morning that the bomb was found in St Paul’s Cathedral, the cricket pavilion at Bishop’s Park in Fulham was burned to the ground and a fire was started at a woodyard in Lambeth. An unoccupied house in Hendon was also set alight by an incendiary device. Close examination of the bombs recovered, which had failed to explode, showed that they had been well-made, but suffered from minor defects such as broken connections in the firing circuits. Some of these related to the soldering of electrical connections, indicating that those using the soldering irons might not have had much experience. It was the ineptitude of the bombers which was responsible for the failure of their devices to go off, not a reluctance to cause explosions in public places.

On 10 May, the suffragette bombers turned once again to men’s sport. In perhaps the most bizarre bomb attack ever carried out in this country, the changing rooms at the football ground of Cambridge University were damaged by an explosion. As in similar attacks, cans of petrol and other combustible material was placed near the seat of the explosion, but they had not caught fire. Other bombs were also planted that day, including one at the waiting room at Lime Street Station, in Liverpool. Although not large, it had been surrounded with iron nuts and bolts, obviously to increase the chances of causing injury or damage. The timing mechanism here was primitive – an oil-soaked fuse which had been lit before the bomber made herself scarce. Luckily, it had gone out, but the intention had definitely been to cause an explosion in a busy railway station.

It was apparent that arresting the leadership of the WSPU had had the opposite effect to that intended – rather than a reduction in terrorism the violent attacks seemed to be increasing day by day. Nor was this new wave of bombings limited to England. On the same day that the bombs had been left at the station in Liverpool and the Cambridge football ground, a device was found in a lavatory at the Empire Theatre in Dublin.

During the Saturday afternoon performance at the Empire Theatre, a woman obtained the key to the lavatory from one of the attendants. When she entered, she discovered a bomb made up of 24 cartridges of gunpowder. The fuse was burning. Showing great presence of mind, the woman plunged the bomb into a washbasin full of water. Once again, those lighting the fuse of such a device showed a complete disregard for the safety and welfare of the public.

On the same day, Farington Hall, a country house near Dundee, was destroyed. Fires had been started simultaneously in half a dozen places. Back in England, an alarming development was the sending of explosives through the post. Ticking was heard from a parcel at Reading post office. It was addressed to a municipal official in the town. The police were called and found that the parcel was a time bomb, containing both gunpowder and also a quantity of nitroglycerine.

The wave of bombings did nothing to help the cause of the suffragettes, who were fast becoming extremely unpopular with the public. Their reputation was hardly enhanced by the evidence produced at the committal proceedings for those arrested during the police raid on Lincoln’s Inn House. Before the case was sent to the Old Bailey, preliminary hearings were held at Bow Street Magistrates Court, to establish if a prima facie case could be made out against them. They were charged with ‘Conspiring together and with others maliciously to cause damage, injury and spoil in and on property belonging to tradesman and others, contrary to the Malicious Damage Act 1861’.

The hearings which took place in May were conducted before Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, the chief metropolitan magistrate. He made no secret of his feelings about the man – Edwy Clayton – and women in the dock and was soon a figure of hatred for the suffragette movement. When an application for bail was made on behalf of Flora Drummond, on the grounds that her health was bad and that she was suffering from an ‘internal complaint’, Sir Henry remarked sourly, ‘She’s suffering from extensive bad behaviour’.

The newspapers reported details of the WSPU’s financial arrangements which must have made many people ask what was going on. The sums of money mentioned were so enormous that one wonders what the average working person made of it all. To give just two examples, it was mentioned that a cheque from one of the WSPU’s bank accounts had been drawn in favour of Beatrice Saunders, an officer of the organisation, for the sum of £3,706 2/6. There was a good deal of speculation in the press as to what Miss Saunders could have been doing to receive such a huge sum. Working-class women who had paid their shillings to join the WSPU would typically have to have worked for a hundred years to earn this much money!

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that information like this was being produced in court because it was precisely the kind of thing that the newspapers would pick up on. There was no suggestion that any of the figures being bandied about during the hearings at Bow Street were untrue. At any rate, neither the women in the dock nor their lawyers challenged any of it.

Another titbit that found its way into the papers was that Christabel Pankhurst, who had for over a year been living in Paris, was paid £175 over four months in salary and expenses. This would have worked out at over £500 a year, ten times as much as the average person was earning at that time. What Christabel Pankhurst was spending this salary on, we do not know, though it is possible that some of it went towards entertaining foreign royalty.

Even the minor expenditure of the WSPU was lavish. It was the custom to give members badges and medals for various acts, such as going on hunger strike. According to the papers seized by the police during their raid on the headquarters, £90 had been spent with one firm alone on such trinkets. This represents two or three years’ wages for a female textile worker at that time.

If the intention of reading out details of the WSPU’s financial dealings in open court was to blacken them in the eyes of the public, then it probably succeeded. So steep was the decline in applications for membership after that month that the WSPU soon stopped publishing the figures. The overall impression was of a bunch of very highly-paid people for whom money was no object.

Another bomb attack was carried out against a sporting target on 12 May and even by the odd standards of the suffragettes, it was a very strange place to plant a bomb. At 5.30 am, George Cook, caretaker of the premises of the Oxted Badminton and Lawn Tennis Club, arrived to work and at once became aware of an ominous ticking when he entered the clubhouse. It was coming from a metal canister with a clockwork mechanism attached to the top. He put it in a fire bucket full of water and then called the police. The bomb turned out to contain nitroglycerine. A card was later found in the grounds of the club, upon which was written, ‘Votes for Women’.

Perhaps it was because of the bad publicity that was generated by the committal proceedings, this publicity being encouraged by the magistrate, that some of the suffragettes decided to try and assassinate Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett. On 14 May, a parcel was sent to him at Bow Street. It aroused the suspicions of staff there and they called the police. The package was an ingenious letter bomb – a tin full of gunpowder had a round of ammunition fixed, so that it pointed at the explosive charge. A nail was held in place over this, with the point resting on the percussion cap of the cartridge. A sharp tap would have been enough to detonate the device.

We tend to think of letter bombs as a weapon of modern terrorists, but actually it was the suffragettes who first devised them. Later on, more sophisticated letter bombs were made, using phosphorous. Lloyd George was the intended recipient of one of these lethal packages.

When the letter bomb failed to kill Sir Henry, more direct methods were adopted. A few days after being sent the lethal package, Sir Henry was walking along the cliffs near Margate, in Kent. Two women walked towards him. He did not realise his danger until one of the women shoved him hard, trying to knock him off balance, and the second then grabbed hold of him and attempted to push him off the top of the cliff. He was very shaken by this experience, after which he was assigned detectives who accompanied him everywhere.

The bomb attacks and arson continued throughout the rest of the month. It would be tedious simply to list these many and various acts of terrorism. Most were relatively minor incidents of fire-raising: the burning of haystacks, wood yards and other locations where a mass of combustible material would make a good blaze. These days, terrorism is far more often associated with guns and explosives than arson, but there is a long tradition in this country of fire being used as a tool of political violence. For angry and discontented people without access to explosives, arson is a very public way of drawing attention to their grievances. During the Swing Riots in 1830, for instance, haystacks were routinely torched in England as a political protest.

The IRA was at one time very fond of using arson as a terrorist weapon. They often tended too, just like the suffragettes, to focus their attention upon commercial premises. In fact, the IRA were so keen on starting fires, particularly in shops, that it seems very likely that they picked up the idea from the suffragettes. We can see this connection very clearly in the first IRA campaign on mainland Britain, which began in 1920, just six years after the suffragette arson campaign came to an end. This terrorist campaign, just like that of the suffragettes a decade earlier, has also largely disappeared from memory.

A small bomb was planted by suffragettes outside the National Gallery in London on 15 May. It failed to go off. The next day, there were other bombs in locations as far apart as a library in south London, a church in Hastings and an hotel in Brentwood. One bomb was aimed again at the railways. Beneath the footbridge at Westbourne Park Station, a package was found which had been placed there with the intention of setting fire to the bridge. It was made of live cartridges, explosives and oil-soaked cotton wool. The fuse had been lit, but later gone out.

As the committal proceedings of the prominent suffragettes facing conspiracy charges continued at Bow Street Magistrates Court, more information was emerging to shed light on the practical consequences of the WSPU’s campaign of violence. As already asserted, it is often suggested today that the suffragette militants took great care to harm only property. The burning and destruction of letters is sometimes cited as an example of this – nobody could be hurt by fires taking place in iron pillar boxes. At worst, it would surely cause no more than a little inconvenience to the intended recipients of the letters that were destroyed.

A postman was summoned to give evidence at Bow Street about the injuries he had received from a fire started in a pillar box. It emerged that he and a number of other workers had been burned by fires started by suffragettes in letter boxes. It is intriguing to see how this aspect of the suffragette campaign is now presented by modern historians in a completely different light than it was viewed at the time.

Not all the arson attacks on houses in 1913 were against castles and grand mansions. Some suffragettes were burning down the homes of ordinary people who had nothing at all to do with their cause. On the night of 16 May, Miriam Pratt, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Norwich, went to Cambridge with two fellow suffragettes and set fire to two houses. There was nothing remarkable about these houses; they were empty because they were being decorated. After breaking into one of the properties in Storey’s Way and setting fire to it, they crossed the road and splashed paraffin about in another house and torched that one as well. Miss Pratt had the misfortune to be living with her uncle, who was a police sergeant. When he found out what they had done, he was so horrified that he turned them over to the police in Cambridge. It is evident, therefore, that the activities of the militant suffragettes were not restricted to those whom they saw as their enemies. Anybody at all was fair game, even ordinary householders whose homes were being decorated.

On the day after the houses in Cambridge were burned, came a bomb attack in Scotland. On 17 May, a bomb containing 12 lbs of gunpowder was placed in St Mary’s Church at Dalkeith Park. The fuse was lit, but went out. Four days later, the bombers were more successful when they attacked the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. It is impossible to be sure of the reasons for this – perhaps the fact that the complex of buildings was perched high above the city of Edinburgh on Blackford Hill, and so the sound of the explosion would reverberate across the whole city, that made the observatory seem like a suitable target.

More likely is the fact that there was a precedent for such an action – London’s Royal Observatory had suffered a similar attack less than 20 years earlier when 26-year-old Frenchman Martial Bourdin decided that he wished to blow up the observatory at Greenwich. He attempted to do so on 6 February, 1894, but his plans were unfortunately thwarted in the most gruesome way imaginable. His chosen explosive was nitroglycerine and, as he made his way up Greenwich Hill to the Royal Observatory, he must have stumbled and dropped his bomb. Nitroglycerine reacts badly to being shaken or banged and the can full of the oily liquid went off at once. Splashes of blood and fragments of Bourdin’s body, including a two-inch-long piece of bone, were found more than 60 yards from the site of the explosion. Over 50 pieces of the unlucky terrorist were later collected from a wide area of Greenwich Park.

Professor Ralph Allen Sampson had been appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland in 1910. He and his wife lived ‘over the shop’ in a house next to the building which held the telescopes. At 1.00am on 21 May, Professor Sampson was woken up by a loud noise, which he took to be a door being slammed somewhere. In the morning, he found that a bomb had gone off inside the main building of the observatory. The terrorists had got in by breaking a pane of glass in an external door and making their way down a spiral staircase to the chronograph room.

None of the telescopes or other scientific instruments were harmed by the bomb, which caused only a certain amount of structural damage, blowing out windows, bringing down a ceiling and chipping brickwork. The clock that drove the 24-inch reflecting telescope was housed in the room where the blast occurred, but had only been covered in plaster. It was still working.

That the suffragettes had been responsible for the bomb outrage was beyond doubt. A woman’s handbag was left behind and also some biscuits. Two pieces of paper were also deliberately placed at the scene. One of these said, ‘How beggarly appears argument, before defiant deed! Votes for women’. On the other, was written, ‘From the beginning of the world every stage of human progress has been from scaffold to scaffold and from stake to stake’.

Incidents like the attack on the observatory in Edinburgh were causing resentment to build up against the suffragettes for the escalating terrorism. Unfortunately, this was manifested in hostility towards even the non-militant suffragists of the NUWSS. It seemed that any mention of female suffrage was now associated with arson and explosions. Even those who had been in favour of women being granted the parliamentary vote were now changing their minds. The entire movement was being tainted by the mad actions of a handful of fanatics. It was becoming hazardous now for any meetings to be held by either suffragettes or suffragists. This was neatly illustrated by the events in the coastal town of Hastings on 20 May 1913.

One of the largest and most important houses in Hastings had been razed to the ground by the suffragettes the previous month. This was Levitsleigh, formerly the home of the town’s MP. Many people in Hastings were angry about this act of wanton destruction and it became risky for the local branch of the WSPU to meet in public. The information appearing in the newspapers about the apparently vast amounts of money at the disposal of the suffragettes did nothing to help matters and when on 20 May, the WSPU announced that they would be holding an open air meeting at Wellington Square, there were rumours that a counter demonstration was planned by residents of Hastings, with the intention of showing the suffragettes exactly what people thought about their behaviour. Following the advice of the police, who were naturally keen to avoid a riot, the WSPU cancelled their meeting.

By ill coincidence, there was a meeting that night of the local branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, an organisation that rejected militant action in favour of constitutional methods. This was too fine a point for the angry crowds who had gathered to oppose the suffragettes in Wellington Square and so they transferred their attentions to the Suffrage Club in Havelock Street, throwing eggs and stones at the building. When the women tried to leave, they were manhandled and abused. Some took refuge in a nearby hotel, with the result that the crowd smashed the windows. Some witnesses said that there were as many as 3,000 people outside Green’s Hotel, baying for the blood of the suffragists.

Similar scenes were enacted a few days later in London, when Sylvia Pankhurst tried to hold a meeting in Victoria Park in the East End of London. The rally was to have been a large one, with 15 wagons for the members of the WSPU and Labour Party to speak from. Many East Enders though had different ideas and the suffragettes were mobbed. The police had to step in and escort the suffragettes to safety. The crowd were angry, not at the idea of equal suffrage but because of the bombs which were going off almost every day. Partly due perhaps to the press coverage of the committal proceedings of the WSPU leadership, the feeling was growing among working-class men and women that these women did not represent people like them at all.

Sylvia Pankhurst’s abortive rally in the East End took place on Sunday, 25 May. Two days later came a suffragette attack that was even more irresponsible than usual and which could have had terrible consequences. As the Bristol Express passed through Reading Station on 27 May, a bomb was thrown from a window of the train onto the platform. At the same time, suffragette literature was also thrown from the train. The bomb exploded without causing too much damage, but it was a foolhardy and dangerous action.

Throughout June, the trial took place at the Old Bailey of those arrested during the raid on Lincoln’s Inn House. The six women and one man, Edwy Clayton the chemist, were charged with ‘conspiring together and with others to inflict damage on property and inciting other members of the WSPU to damage property’. The bombings continued during the trial.

On 11 June, a bomb exploded at the new wing of the post office in Newcastle-on-Tyne. On 15 June, a bomb was found in the waiting room at Eden Park Station, near Beckenham. The clockwork mechanism which had been meant to trigger the device had stopped. Two days later, there was another explosion in central London. At 4.00pm on Tuesday, 17 June, there was an explosion near Blackfriars Bridge. The bomb had been thrown from the bridge and exploded as it hit the surface of the Thames. A plume of water shot up and a cloud of blue smoke rose into the air. The railway bridge was shaken by the explosion and railway workers rushed to the scene to check that no damage had been done to the bridge. Whoever had thrown the bomb had disappeared.

Although it had not been long in force, the notorious ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ was already making a nonsense of the law. At the conclusion of the suffragette conspiracy trial, there were a number of prison sentences, including one of a year and nine months for Edwy Clayton. Clayton, it will be remembered, had been suggesting targets for the terrorists and also making explosives for them. Given the evidence, he might very well have thought that a year and nine months imprisonment was a light-enough punishment. In fact, he was freed after just 15 days, having gone on hunger strike. As soon as he was out of prison, he left the country. It was becoming very apparent that there was little point in sending suffragettes and their supporters to prison, because they would be back on the streets in a matter of days.

On the same day as the bomb at Blackfriars Bridge in London, came an attack which could have been catastrophic. On the morning of Wednesday, 18 June, John Sales, who lived near Birmingham, was walking along the towpath of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal, which runs south of Birmingham. Sales, who lived at Warstock, now a suburb of Birmingham, was horrified to find that the canal bank had almost been breached by what looked like the crater of a very large explosion. At this point, near Alcester Road, the canal runs along some high ground, above fields and farmhouses which lie in a valley below.

On investigating, it was found that a hole five feet wide had been blown in the embankment and that the lip of this crater was only three inches from the edge of the water. A spade lay nearby and also the charred remains of a long fuse. A piece of cardboard was propped up, not far away, on which were the words, ‘Votes for women. Mind your canals’. There were no locks for 11 miles on that stretch of the canal and so if the wall had been breached at this high point, then 11 miles of water would have been emptied into the farmland below, with inevitable loss of life. It was a very narrow escape indeed for those living in the cottages beneath the embankment.

There were two more incidents the following weekend, one aimed at a church and the other at a university. Just after dawn on the morning of Saturday, 21 June, fishermen at sea off the coast of St Andrews, on Scotland’s east coast, saw smoke rising from the university in the town. They returned to shore and notified the coastguard, who then called the fire brigade. Somebody had broken into the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews University and spread inflammable liquid about the place. The east wing of the laboratory, which housed many scientific drawings and other materials, was gutted by the fire. This wanton destruction caused a lot of anger in the town against the vandals responsible.

At the other end of the country, in Southend, Essex, an attempt had been made to burn down a local parish church. When the verger entered the church early on Saturday morning, he found that the door to the organ was open, which was unusual. Inside was a collection of live cartridges, oily rags, paper and other inflammable material. A wax taper had been lit and placed so that it would act as a fuse. Fortunately, a draught seemed to have blown it out and saved the church from destruction.

The fire at St Andrews University was one of many such attacks in Scotland, which for a time bore the brunt of the suffragette ‘arson squads’. Although many of the fires started caused only minor damage, others threatened life and were hugely costly to either the owners of the properties or the companies which insured them. Two examples from the end of June illustrate this point. Both took place in the early hours of 30 June.

What The Times described as ‘the most disastrous fire that has occurred in Stirlingshire for many years’ broke out at Ballikinrain Castle, a huge country house which contained over a hundred rooms. The fire was started at about 3.00am and although the fire brigade were called, there was no ready supply of water for them to work with. The entire building was completely destroyed. The fire had been deliberately started and two women cyclists had been seen in the vicinity a few hours earlier, with packages.

At the same time that Ballikinrain Castle was being burned down, the railway station at Leuchars Junction, near St Andrews was also going up in flames. Tins of inflammable material were found near the fire, along with suffragette literature. The combined cost of these two fires alone came, in modern terms, to millions of pounds.

The bomb attacks and arson continued unabated through July 1913. On the night of Saturday, 5 July 1913, a bomb exploded in a passageway beneath Liverpool Cotton Exchange. The Cotton Exchange, an office building erected in 1906, was the centre for the city’s cotton trade and was linked to the world by a state-of-the-art system of telegraph and telephone lines. There were no clues, but the bombing was generally attributed to the suffragettes.

The following Wednesday, the wife of a local doctor approached the police and admitted that she was the one who had detonated the bomb. Edith Rigby was well-known to the police, having been arrested a number of times for her actions at protests in Liverpool. When she appeared in court the following day, Mrs Rigby gave as her justification for the bombing, the passing of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. We catch a glimpse in her speech to the magistrate of the adoration that Emmeline Pankhurst awoke in her followers. She said in court, ‘Under this Act, one of the greatest women in the land is going to be done to death… I do not think the government realises that it is literally going to kill that woman’. The magistrate’s response was to remand her until the following Monday. Before she was taken from the dock, Edith Rigby suddenly announced that she wished to claim responsibility for another attack, the destruction by fire of a house belonging to Lord Leverhulme, which had taken place on the Monday after the bomb at the Cotton Exchange. The cost of rebuilding the house had been estimated at some £20,000.

On 8 July, a fire was started at Southport Pier. Fortunately, two fishermen saw the flames and bravely tackled the fire themselves. Empty bottles of paraffin were found and a woman had been seen leaving the scene of the fire shortly before it was discovered.

As already noted, the same names crop up again and again when examining the terrorist actions of the WSPU. Many of these familiar names belong to women who were paid employees of the WSPU, such as those responsible for trying to burn down the theatre in Dublin 1912. Not only were they not thrown out of the WSPU for their actions, but they were still being paid a year later when the police raised the headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn House. Indeed, two of them, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans, were actually present during the raid. The third of the women who so very narrowly avoided committing mass murder on that occasion, Jennie Baines, was also retained by the WSPU as a paid organiser. She had been sent to prison for seven months for her part in the attack on the Theatre Royal, although of course she had not served anything like that, due to going on hunger strike. Her experiences in Dublin seem to have taught her nothing, because in July 1913, she was on trial again, in connection with explosives and firearms.

Jennie Baines was a classic example of the sort of woman who has to have a cause to which she might devote her life. She had been a member of the Salvation Army, a temperance advocate and other things besides, when she joined the WSPU. She was in and out of prison for the next few years, being implicated in various arson attacks. On 10 July 1913, Mrs Baines appeared in court in Manchester with her husband and 16-year-old son, charged with having set fire to two railway carriages at Newton Heath. Also in the dock was Kate Wallwork, secretary of the Manchester branch of the WSPU.

The Newton Heath outrage was another of those cases where it was more by luck than anything else that an innocent person was not killed by the suffragettes’ bomb. At about 11.30pm on 7 July, the nightwatchman at Wilson’s Brewery saw two men and a woman walking towards the Monsall Road railway sidings. Twenty minutes later, a police constable on his routine patrol walked up the road which ran between the brewery and the railway lines. There was a loud explosion and he was showered with debris, including large pieces of broken glass.

A bomb had been placed in a carriage standing in the sidings and it had gone off, shattering the carriage and starting a fire. At the subsequent court proceedings, the police gave evidence that when the Baines family were arrested, a tin of gunpowder was found, as well as a loaded revolver. Jennie Baines was herself currently out of prison, having been freed under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. That somebody released in this way, could then go on to commit another act of arson, made the law look ridiculous. She and her family jumped bail and sought refuge in Australia.

On the same day that the carriage was blown up in Newton Heath, the suffragettes attacked an aqueduct, also in Manchester. An inspector called James Blythe was walking along the Brock aqueduct, which ran from Thirlmere, when he noticed something bright and shiny concealed near a crack in the stonework of the aqueduct. This turned out to be a lantern with a candle inside. This led to a fuse, which in turn ran to a bomb, which had been wedged between two stone blocks. The candle, evidently intended to light the fuse, had fallen sideways and gone out. The consequences of damaging an aqueduct in this way could have been very serious.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the suffragette bombing campaign is the extraordinary leniency of the sentences imposed. These were light enough to begin with, seldom more than six months or a year and in reality, most of the women were released within a few weeks when they went on hunger strike.

Two days after Jennie Baines appeared in court, a Welsh suffragette – Margaret Mackworth, of Carleon – was tried on what would today be viewed as a very serious offence: placing an explosive substance in a post office letter box. She was seen placing a package in a pillar box. Almost at once, smoke began billowing from the box, upon which Mackworth was seized by passers-by. When the pillar box was opened, it was found that the package contained two glass tubes, one of which contained phosphorous and the other, a substance that was not named in open court, but only whispered to the magistrate.

It is hard to imagine a bomber of this sort heading anywhere today, other than straight to prison. Rather than being sent to prison, Margaret Mackworth, however, was merely fined £10, with a further £10 to be paid in costs. It was not as though this sort of crime was victimless. On 19 July, six postboxes in Birmingham were set alight by the use of chemicals. A postman taking letters from one box was burned by a corrosive liquid which had been poured into the pillar box by militant suffragettes.

On the same day that the postman in Birmingham was injured, the railways were once again the target for the suffragettes. That evening, a porter at Haslemere Station in Surrey found a box on the stairs leading from one of the platforms. He had the presence of mind to plunge the box into a pail of water, which was fortunate, because it was, of course, a time bomb. When the police later opened it, they found it consisted of a clock, battery, fuse and explosives. There was also a message, addressed to the members of the newly formed Haslemere Urban District Council, which said, ‘Have we your sympathy? If not, beware! Votes for women.’

That night, a large house at Selly Oak, near Birmingham, was nearly burned to the ground. Suffragette literature was found nearby. It was a particularly ill-chosen target as, until a few weeks earlier, the house had been used as a home for orphan girls.