Chapter Ten

The Plot to Kill the Prime Minister

‘ We will hang Lloyd George from a sour apple tree. ’

(Coded letter from Alice Wheeldon, produced at her trial in 1917)

Many suffragettes reserved a special place of loathing in their hearts for David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister. This was a little odd really, because he was a dedicated supporter of female suffrage. His real sin in the eyes of the suffragettes was his failure to endorse Emmeline Pankhurst’s own, idiosyncratic vision of equal suffrage, meaning, during the years of suffragette militancy, a franchise largely restricted to the middle and upper classes.

Whatever the reason, he became the focus of a huge amount of venomous hatred from many members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Some of the actions directed against Lloyd George, we have already looked at – the bombing of his new house, the sending of explosives to him through the post and the attack by Emily Davison on an old man who had the misfortune merely to look too much like the Chancellor. For some former suffragettes, this detestation of Lloyd George lingered on, even after the Pankhursts had made their peace with him.

The Pankhursts might have become Lloyd George’s friends and enthusiastically supported the fight against Germany, but there were some former suffragettes for whom this was a step too far. They did not subscribe to the bellicose patriotism of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and still regarded Lloyd George as the devil incarnate. These were women who opposed the war on ideological grounds and hated Lloyd George all the more after 1914 for his role in organising the nation to support the military. While the Pankhursts and their supporters were handing out white feathers to men who were not in uniform, other former members of the WSPU were doing everything in their power to sabotage the war effort. One suffragette who felt this way was Alice Wheeldon, who lived in Derby.

We have already seen that some of the most dangerous suffragettes were willing and able to undertake actions which could result in loss of life: Emily Davison; Jennie Baines, who blew up the train near Manchester; Annie Bell, the woman who planted bombs in London churches. Alice Wheeldon was among this group.

Alice Wheeldon was 48 when the war began in 1914. She had been responsible for various arson attacks on behalf of the WSPU, including burning down the church at Breadsall on 5 June 1914. In 1916, she was running a second-hand clothes shop in Derby. She lived with two of her children, 25-year-old Hettie and 24-year-old William. Another daughter, Winnie, was married to a chemist called Alfred Mason and lived with him in Southampton. Alice Wheeldon’s husband, William, was a commercial traveller and so infrequently at home.

At the end of 1916, the authorities had their eye on the Wheeldon household and suspected that they were the centre of an anti-war conspiracy. Specifically, it was thought that Alice Wheeldon and her children were sheltering deserters and conscientious objectors in their home. In 1916, the government brought in the Military Service Act, which meant that all able-bodied men aged between 18 and 41 would be required to join the army. Some men refused to do so on the grounds that military service went against their conscience and many of these men served in ambulance brigades, while others ended up in prison. When there was no more room for them in the prisons, the Home Office set up camps where they were held.

There is not the least doubt and nor did Alice Wheeldon subsequently deny it, that deserters from the army stayed at the Wheeldons’ house. They were part of a network of people who tried to help such men leave the country. Her own son William was due to be called up and Mrs Wheeldon was desperately anxious to see him travel abroad and so avoid ending up in the trenches of the Western Front.

A section of MI5 heard about the activities of the women in Derby and despatched an undercover agent, Alex Gordon, to pose as a conscientious objector on the run from the police. Formerly a radical journalist, he was now being paid to work as an informer or possibly agent provocateur. His immediate superior was Herbert Booth. On 27 December 1916, Gordon, who went under a variety of aliases, arrived at Alice Wheeldon’s house and asked to be sheltered as a conscientious objector. Mrs Wheeldon arranged for him to stay at another woman’s house and then, a few days later, Gordon returned to Alice Wheeldon, accompanied by a man whom he introduced as ‘Comrade Bert’. This was the MI5 agent Herbert Booth.

It is now that things become complicated and two very different versions of the events of the next month emerge at the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey. There was no dispute that Alice Wheeldon spoke in very disparaging terms about Lloyd George, who had by that time become Prime Minister. Indeed, she spoke so unflatteringly of him that at her trial, the prosecuting counsel claimed that she used ‘language which would be disgusting and obscene in the mouth of the lowest class of criminal’. In reality this amounted to no more than describing Lloyd George as a ‘bugger’. She also used the word ‘bloody’ fairly freely, which was unusual for a woman at that time.

While snooping around her home, Alex Gordon found that Alice Wheeldon communicated with others who shared her views of Lloyd George by means of a code. To decipher letters written in this code, it was necessary to know a key sentence, which was, ‘We will hang Lloyd George from a sour apple tree’. Shortly after meeting Alex Gordon, Alice Wheeldon contacted her daughter Winnie in Southampton and asked for her to obtain some poison from her husband, who was lecturing in chemistry at that time. On 4 January 1917, Alfred Mason, Winnie’s husband, sent four glass phials to Derby, two of which contained strychnine and two curare. At the end of that month, Alice Wheeldon, her daughters Hettie and Winnie and Alfred Mason were all arrested and charged with conspiring to murder the Prime Minister.

The trial of the Wheeldons and Alfred Mason opened at the Old Bailey on 6 March 1917. The case for the Crown, outlined by the Attorney General, Frederick Smith, was that a plan had been hatched to fire a dart tipped with the South American poison curare at Lloyd George as he played golf near his home at Walton Heath. It was, he alleged, also the intention of the conspirators to kill at the same time Arthur Henderson, a Labour member of the cabinet. It was for this reason that the poison had been obtained. According to statements from Alex Gordon and Herbert Booth, or Comrade Bert as the Wheeldons knew him, Alice Wheeldon had said that Lloyd George was ‘the cause of millions of innocent lives being sacrificed. The bugger shall be killed to stop it’.

Herbert Booth also said that the Wheeldons had revealed a previous plot to assassinate Lloyd George – when the suffragettes were active before the start of the war – by smearing poison on a nail and then arranging for it to penetrate his boot. It was alleged that she had told Booth and Gordon that a member of the WSPU had taken a job at a hotel in order to put this plan into execution, but when Lloyd George had left suddenly it had come to nothing.

Herbert Booth made a convincing witness, as did the head of his department, Major William Lauriston Melville Lee. Notable by his absence though, was the man who had apparently uncovered this plot. Alex Gordon was not called to give evidence and this omission on the part of the crown was never properly explained. Emmeline Pankhurst was called to give evidence during the trial, in order to show that the suffragettes now regarded Lloyd George as a precious national asset, rather than a bogey man.

The defence alleged that Alex Gordon had set up the whole scenario. Rather than acting as an informant, he was the one who had instigated the obtaining of the poison. This had not been done, according to Alice Wheeldon and her daughters, to kill Lloyd George. It was part of a deal that she had struck with Alex Gordon, whereby she would help him in exchange for a favour which he had promised to do for her. In this version of events, Alex Gordon had told the Wheeldon’s that a camp where conscientious objectors were being held was guarded by fierce dogs. He wished to free some prisoners from the camp and would need first to kill the guard dogs. If Alice Wheeldon could get hold of some poison from her son-in-law for this purpose, then he would help arrange for her son William to evade military service by travelling to America.

There was little to choose between the two stories on offer to the jury. On the one hand, it was perfectly plausible that a former suffragette arsonist had concocted a bizarre plan to dispose of the man whom many members of the WSPU had been indoctrinated to see as their main enemy in the fight for women’s suffrage. On the other, it was equally possible that a shadowy secret agent had dreamed up an elaborate fantasy in order to increase his own importance.

The jury had no such doubts and took less than half an hour to bring in verdicts of guilty against Alice Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie and son-in-law Alfred Mason. Hettie Wheeldon was acquitted. Alice Wheeldon was sent to prison for ten years, Alfred Mason for seven and his wife Winnie for five. None served anything like their full sentences.

Predictably enough, Alice Wheeldon went on hunger strike almost immediately. She was forcibly fed for a time, but her health declined rapidly. On 27 December 1917, the deputy Medical Officer at Holloway Prison reported that her condition was worsening. Her pulse was weak and her heart unsteady. It was in nobody’s interests for a former suffragette to starve to death in prison and on 29 December, Lloyd George interceded. He wrote to Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, urging that Mrs Wheeldon be freed. On 31 December, she was released from prison, only to die a little over a year later in the great influenza epidemic of 1919.

After the war had ended in November 1918, Prime Minister Lloyd George made it plain that he wanted the other two ‘conspirators’ to be freed and on 26 January 1919, Alfred Mason and his wife left prison. They had spent less than two years behind bars.

So what was the truth about the plot to kill the Prime Minister? In recent years, a campaign has been launched to have the case reviewed, with the intention of securing a posthumous pardon for the Wheeldons and Alfred Mason. Derby City Council have placed a blue plaque on the house where Alice Wheeldon and her family once lived to commemorate an, ‘anti-war activist, socialist and suffragist’ (see Plate 2). No mention is made of her being a would-be assassin of the prime minister! Perhaps the safest verdict to bring in, based upon the evidence as we have it, would be the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

The greatest irony of all is that at the very time when Alice Wheeldon might have been conspiring to murder him, Lloyd George was actually in the process of arranging the legislation which would grant women the parliamentary vote. It would be interesting to know the effect that his assassination might have had upon those plans.