Chapter Eight

Winter, 1913

‘ $1,000,000 Damage and Two Deaths – Suffragettes Suspected. ’

(The New York Times, 22 December 1913)

By autumn 1913, it was apparent to everybody other than some of the more dedicated members of the WSPU that their activities were not only failing to advance the cause of women’s suffrage, but that they were now acting as a positive hindrance. Having dealt with the wave of industrial unrest, known as the Great Unrest, which was itself marked by acts of sabotage, and facing now the threat of armed insurrection in Ireland, the last thing that Asquith’s government could afford to do was display any weakness in the face of terrorism or the menace of violence.

Support for the WSPU was falling, while at the same time membership of the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was growing by the day. The suffragettes were rapidly becoming an irrelevant distraction in the struggle for female emancipation. They had been reduced to a small, fringe group, a corps of professional activists concerned less with democracy and the views of the majority than seeking to impose their own ideology by the use of violence against those who disagreed with them. Given the circumstances, they had no other weapon in their armoury but the continued use of explosives and petrol.

In the early months of the bombing campaign, many of the bombs planted by the suffragettes had failed to explode. With each new bomb though, the makers were becoming more proficient and from November 1913 onwards, the bombs planted were, more often than not, going off and damaging their intended targets.

On the night of Monday, 10 November, the pavilion at Catford Lawn Tennis Club in south London was burned down by suffragettes. A few hours after this fire, a more serious incident took place in Manchester. At 4.20am on 11 November, residents living near Alexandra Park in Manchester were woken by a huge explosion. Many people rushed into the street to see what had happened and found that their front gardens were covered with broken glass. An 18-inch-long metal pipe, packed with explosives, had been placed on the steps of a greenhouse in Alexandra Park. The greenhouse contained a valuable collection of cacti. When the bomb had exploded, it had hurled shards of glass across much of the surrounding area.

Three days later, the bombers struck again at the Sefton Park Palm House in Liverpool. This time, the bomb failed to explode. The same month saw a number of attacks – a fire started by suffragettes at Streatham Hill Station in London, the destruction by fire of ‘Begbrook’, a mansion near Bristol and various other incidents of arson, including the burning of a haystack at Burton on Trent.

December brought fresh attacks. One of the most serious of these took place in Manchester before a visit by Prime Minister Asquith. On 7 December, shortly before the Prime Minister was due to arrive in the city, The Rusholme Exhibition Centre was completely gutted by fire. Suffragette literature was scattered nearby, along with the message, presumably addressed to Asquith, ‘This is your welcome to Manchester and Oldham.’ At about the same time, an attempt was made to burn down a grandstand at the Aintree racecourse. On 16 December, a fire was started in St Anne’s Church in Liverpool’s Aigburth district. A lot of damage was caused, the organ and pulpit being destroyed by the flames, although the fabric of the church itself was saved.

Over the course of two days in December, 1913, two separate incidents occurred which indicated just how dangerous the suffragette attacks were becoming. Members of the WSPU had rented and used as their district headquarters a house at 12, Dalmeny Avenue in London. This property backed onto Holloway Prison, where many imprisoned suffragettes were held at various times. It had proved possible to signal to these prisoners from the back windows of the house in Dalmeny Avenue. On the night of Saturday, 13 December, Emmeline Pankhurst was being held in the prison and a suffragette had climbed onto the roof of No. 12 and serenaded her by playing a cornet. Mrs Pankhurst was released a few days later, leaving only one suffragette prisoner in Holloway.

By 18 December 1913, Rachel Pearce, serving 18 months for burning down a mansion in Hampton, was the only suffragette prisoner in Holloway. Pearce had been in prison for a month and was currently being force-fed, after embarking on a hunger strike. There was a good deal of anger among members of the WSPU at her treatment.

On the night of Thursday, 18 December, the London districts of Camden and Holloway were shaken by two tremendous explosions, which shook the area for a mile or so around Holloway Prison. The explosions were separated by a period of 30 seconds. Many houses near Holloway Prison had their windows blown out by the bombs. Investigations showed that two charges of dynamite had been buried at the foot of the wall surrounding the prison garden. This wall was so severely damaged that it would have to be demolished and rebuilt. It could hardly have been a coincidence that the seat of the explosions was directly opposite the back garden of 12 Dalmeny Avenue.

The police found the remains of two 50-foot-long fuses that had been laid from 12 Dalmeny Avenue, all the way to the wall of Holloway Prison. They also found a mass of blonde hair in the garden of No. 12 and also some bloodstains. It looked as though the bomber might have been injured by the explosion she had triggered. The trail led nowhere though and nobody was ever tried for this particular action.

There was considerable anger locally about the bomb attacks. A family living next door to the house that the suffragettes had been renting were especially upset. Two small children at 10 Dalmeny Avenue had been asleep in bed when the dynamite was detonated. Their bedroom window had been blown in and their bed covered with jagged pieces of glass. Miraculously, neither child had been injured.

We come now to what is perhaps the worst attack attributed to the activists of the WSPU. It must be said, however, that it is not certain that this attack, if it was an attack, really was the work of the suffragettes, although that was the general assumption at the time.

Two days after the bomb attack on Holloway Prison, there was a disastrous fire at Portsmouth Dockyard. There were a number of old wooden buildings at the dockyard, in particular a semaphore tower dating from the late eighteenth century. It was thought that the fire began in a sail loft, before spreading to a rigging house and then the semaphore tower. Various stores and oil tanks caught fire and the blaze was so fierce that the battleship Queen Mary, which was moored nearby, had to be towed to safety. When the flames had been extinguished, it was found that two sailors had died. The cost of the damage caused was estimated to be in the region of £200,000. Almost immediately, rumours began to circulate that this fire had been started deliberately by the suffragettes.

When the police raided the Kingsway headquarters of the WSPU at the end of April 1913, they seized a large quantity of paperwork, including correspondence. One letter excited their special interest. It was addressed to Flora Drummond, a prominent organiser for the WSPU, and signed by a code name. Judging by the contents, the sender of this letter had been in touch with the WSPU before. In light of what happened at Portsmouth that December, this communication could have been very significant. It read:

I am very sorry that I have not been able to reply to your letter before now, but I have only just returned from a short stay at Hove. I did not get your letter until yesterday. With regard to the proposal you make therein, it must be obvious that the sum you mentioned is really insignificant compared to the splendid result to our cause if the job comes off all right. It will cost not less than £20, besides two men. Although I would love to be the sole villain of the piece, I fear the dockyard police would suspect a lady visitor, and so I propose to be the brains this time and not the hands. At any rate, the damage would not be less than £20,000.

There are a number of interesting points about this letter which could tie in very neatly with the Portsmouth fire – the mention of the dockyard police tells us that an illegal action was planned in connection with a dockyard. The fact that this action was likely to cause over £20,000 worth of damage, tells us that a fire is being contemplated. Hove, like Portsmouth, is on the south coast of England, which raises the possibility that the dockyard discussed in this letter is in fact Portsmouth.

It certainly appears from the letter quoted above that the leadership of the WSPU were in negotiations with somebody in 1913 who was offering to start a large fire in a dockyard, a dockyard that might well have been on the south coast. That such a fire actually took place a few months later might be a coincidence, but if so, it would have been a very remarkable one. Another hint that the Portsmouth fire might have been carried out by or on behalf of the WSPU is provided by the fact that it was mentioned in the next issue of The Suffragette. Although stopping short of claiming that it had been their work, it seems curious that the writers of the magazine would have said anything about this deadly blaze, had it been just another accidental fire.

There is no doubt that it was generally assumed at the time that the suffragettes were responsible for this terrible event. The rumours even reached across the Atlantic within a few days. On 22 December 1913, the New York Times carried a piece with the following headline:

BIG PORTSMOUTH FIRE LOSS
$1,000,000 Damage and Two Deaths – Suffragettes Suspected.

The article began by saying: ‘The suffragette ‘arson squad’ is popularly credited with the starting of the great fire in the dockyard here Saturday night. It is recalled that when the headquarters of the militants were raided, papers were discovered disclosing a design to fire the yard’.

The inquest into the deaths of Pensioner Chief Yeoman Pook and Signalman Stewart opened on 31 December and it was immediately obvious who was suspected of causing the death of the two sailors. Sir Thomas Bramsdon, the coroner, heard evidence that 60 men and 30 women worked in the sail loft, where the fire was thought to have started. He asked, ‘What class of women are they?’ On being reassured that many were the widows of servicemen and hearing a little about the working conditions at the dockyard, it seemed that some of the jurors still had their suspicions. One enquired of the foreman who was giving evidence, ‘What means have you of checking the women coming in?’

There was some discussion about whether it would have been possible for any woman to slip in without being identified. Another juror then asked, ‘If I was at the dockyard that night and wanted to set fire to it, could I have got into it?’ He was assured that this would not have been possible. Later on, the idea that a woman could have entered the dockyard disguised as a naval officer was raised. The prevailing mood was that a woman had started the fire.

The whole of the inquest was concerned with the question of women being able to gain access to the dockyard and the impossibility of any outsider getting in to start a fire. Although no link was ever conclusively established, the general belief was that this had all the hallmarks of another arson attack by the WSPU. The verdict of the jury was that the two dead sailors had died from suffocation, which was indisputably true. They further said that there was no strong evidence to show how the fire had started. During the inquest, an Admiralty chemist had mentioned that a pile of hemp from ropes could catch fire spontaneously, under the right circumstances. He gave as an example, the heat of the sun being so great as to start a fire. This struck everybody as being singularly unlikely in the middle of December and the jury specifically declined to accept this theory.

The balance of possibilities suggests that the fire at Portsmouth was the work of suffragettes. It was, however, in nobody’s interests for anyone to be pursued, let alone convicted, for the blaze. It would have put the government in the most terrible position if a woman was sentenced to death for an attack like this.

What was going on in the wider political scene at this time? The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies had formed an alliance with the Labour Party and were lending it their support at by-elections. The NUWSS had the previous year established the Elections Fighting Fund Committee, whose aim was to raise money and offer support to Labour candidates during elections. Partly as a reward for this support, the Labour Party had agreed at their 1913 conference not to support any change in the franchise unless it included the vote for women. This neat politicking on the part of the NUWSS was in sharp contrast to the attitude of the WSPU, who refused to have any dealings with the Labour Party and virtually regarded them as enemies.

The Liberals were now in an unenviable position. They had, since the two general elections of 1910, relied upon Labour and the Irish Nationalists to give them a majority over the Conservatives in parliament. The Liberal government had already had to offer various concessions to the Irish Nationalists as the price for their continued support, now what if the Labour Party were to demand an extension of the franchise to working men and women as their price for backing the Liberals in parliament? Plainly, Millicent Fawcett and her NUWSS were playing a very shrewd game and a far more productive one politically than the stance which the WSPU had adopted.

The fiction is maintained, whenever suffragette violence is mentioned, that great care was taken by those initiating attacks to ensure that nobody was hurt in the process. Two bombings carried out in January, 1914, should alone be sufficient to give the lie to this assertion.

At 8.00pm on Wednesday, 7 January 1914, in the city of Leeds, an explosion took place which was so loud that it was heard across the entire city. It had taken place at the Harewood Territorial Army Barracks in Woodhouse Lane, one of the main streets of the city. The barracks were being used as a temporary police base at the time of this incident. It was a miracle that nobody was seriously hurt by the dynamite bomb which was lobbed over the wall of the barracks, landing near the canteen. A caretaker was cut by flying glass when all the windows in the nearby buildings were blown in. A near casualty was Sergeant-Major Payne of the West Riding Ambulance Corps. He was sitting in his office and the blast knocked him off his chair.

The attack on the barracks was the second bomb to explode in Leeds in the space of 24 hours. The night before, an electricity generating station in the Crown Point district of the city was damaged by high explosives. Although no responsibility for these two attacks was claimed by the WSPU, it is hard to know who else could have been to blame. The suffragettes were the only terrorist group operating in Britain at that time.

In 1873, an enormous glasshouse was opened at the Glasgow Botanic Gardens. It was a fantastic structure, with a 150-foot-wide dome, made up of small panes of glass. This was called the Kibble Palace, after the man responsible for its construction and soon became a landmark in the city. Both Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were, at different times, installed as rectors of Glasgow University, both events taking place in the Kibble Palace.

In the early hours of 24 January 1914, the watchman employed to keep an eye on the Kibble Palace at night and protect it from thieves or vandals, was making his rounds of the building. He checked that nobody was in the Botanic Gardens after dark and that nothing was amiss. His work entailed nothing more arduous than chasing the occasional adventurous teenager out of the gardens. This night though, was due to be different. As he patrolled the outside of the glass palace, he spotted something very odd. It was a sputtering length of string. When he bent down to investigate, he found to his horror that this was a fuse, attached to a bomb. Instead of fleeing in panic, the man took out a penknife and calmly severed the fuse, thus rendering the bomb harmless.

As the night-watchman stood up, he must have been congratulating himself on a narrow escape. At that moment, a second bomb exploded nearby, with devastating force, shattering the sides and roof of the great glasshouse. It was the closest of shaves for the man, who fortunately had his back to the explosion, which showered him with fragments of broken glass. Investigation of the scene in daylight provided a chilling insight into the minds of those responsible for the attack on the Kibble Palace. A woman’s veil was found, together with an empty champagne bottle and the remains of some cakes. Footprints indicated the presence of at least two women.

Whoever had planted the bombs had sat, eating and drinking, waiting for the best opportunity to strike. They must have seen the watchman on his rounds, knowing perfectly well that somebody was walking around the glasshouse. Setting off two explosions under such circumstances shows that those who lit the fuses did not care at all if this man was injured or even killed by their actions. Later that year, Marion Crawford, a prominent member of the WSPU, was sent to prison for two years for this attack, she was lucky not to have faced a charge of murder.

Less than a fortnight after the bomb attack in Glasgow, three country houses were attacked in Perthshire, two burned to the ground and the third severely damaged, but not wholly destroyed by the fires which were started. Once again, the suffragettes showed a complete disregard for the lives of others.

The owner of Aberuchill Castle was not in residence at the time, but a number of domestic staff was living on the premises, in quarters at the top of the house. By great good fortune, the alarm was raised and they were able to escape, but the scenario could have turned out very differently. In modern histories of the suffragettes, this kind of activity is almost invariably dismissed casually as an attack on an ‘empty house’.

The terrorist attacks of the suffragettes were becoming more and more erratic and irrational. Why anybody would imagine for a moment that blowing up a greenhouse would lead to the extension of the franchise is something of a mystery. Even by the standards of the WSPU though, the next attacks in February 1914 were baffling.

In 1906, a Carnegie public lending library was opened in Northfield, a suburb of Birmingham. It was hugely popular with local people. At 2.00am on 12 February 1914, the library was broken into and a fire started. Within a few hours, the building was gutted: the roof had fallen in and the library was a smoking ruin. When dawn came, a piece of paper was found attached to the railings at the back of the building. It proclaimed, ‘Give Women the Vote’. Nearby was a parcel, which when opened proved to contain a copy of a book by Emmeline Pankhurst. Inscribed in this was the message: ‘To start your new library’. Much anger was generated locally against the suffragettes by this singularly pointless act of vandalism.

On the same night that the library at Northfield was burned to the ground, a bomb was planted at the home of Arthur Chamberlain. Moor Green Hall was a mansion near Birmingham and somebody had broken in and left a bomb, which was supposed to be triggered by a burning candle. Fortunately, this primitive timing mechanism failed to set off the explosives.

The church of St Mary’s in the tiny Scottish village of Whitekirk, is one of the most ancient in Scotland. Dating from the 1100s, it was in medieval times a site of pilgrimage. It seems inconceivable that anyone could wish to damage such a place, but a little over a week after the library at Northfield had been destroyed, a suffragette squad arrived at St Mary’s Church in the middle of the night and burned it down. A photograph taken the day after the fire shows the church a smouldering wreck, with the roof having fallen in and all the windows blown out by the heat. We can only imagine what the residents of the village felt about the loss of their beautiful old church and the feelings aroused against those who had carried out such a vindictive act.

On the first day of spring, the terrorists turned their attention once more to London. In 1914, the rector of the Church of St John the Evangelist, Westminster was the Venerable Albert Wilberforce, Archdeacon of Westminster and Chaplain to the House of Commons. Perhaps it was his connection with parliament that led to his church being targeted by the suffragettes. If so, then the terrorists were making a grave mistake as the Venerable Wilberforce was an outspoken supporter of women’s suffrage. Half an hour after the end of the evening service at St John’s, on Sunday, 1 March, a bomb exploded in the gallery. Stained glass windows were blown out and a number of pews were destroyed. This was the first of a number of bombs aimed at churches in central London.

By the beginning of spring 1914, the WSPU had been reduced to the status of a very small militant group, rampaging around the United Kingdom and attacking increasingly peculiar targets, such as greenhouses, libraries and churches. The idea of ‘social purity’, which was becoming an obsession with both Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, could only have the effect of alienating still more potential supporters of the WSPU. The only thing that the group really had going for it was the input of wealthy donors who were paying the wages of the terrorists and so enabling them to continue their activities. The WSPU would struggle on for another six months, but it was really dead on its feet, disliked by many of the general public, viewed with detestation by the main political parties and regarded as a positive nuisance by the moderate suffragists who were making great strides by working patiently with sympathetic members of the Liberal and Labour parties.

The one thing that the WSPU did have though was money. The spectacular attacks, which attracted so much attention, also prompted various rich women to send more money to Mrs Pankhurst. Overall membership numbers might be dwindling, but those who remained in the organisation were still ready and willing to conduct further terrorist attacks. The fact that their activities were now acknowledged even by other suffragists as harming the cause, made not the slightest difference. The bombings and arson continued.