Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  Her inked message pre-empted a planned WSPU march, due to take place three days later. Emmeline Pankhurst was going to present the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, with a petition calling for the vote for women. Only male householders over the age of twenty-one were entitled to vote in Britain at the time, and the calls for greater enfranchisement were getting louder. If she could garner enough signatures the country’s Bill of Rights granted the suffragette leader permission to take her case to the King. With hundreds of followers in tow, on the evening of the 29th, Pankhurst approached the gates of the House of Commons and demanded to speak to the prime minister. When he would neither see her nor accept her petition, scuffles broke out in Parliament Square. Suffragettes began to smash the windows of the House of Commons, showering MPs inside with glass. The sound of falling shards provoked a roar of noise below, and battle commenced. There began, as Emmeline put it, ‘that old miserable business of refusing to leave, of being forced backward, and returning again and again until arrested’.4 Politicians clambered out onto the railings of Palace Yard to get a better look as suffragettes were lifted off their feet and thrown backwards. The women got up again and again and pushed against the uniformed men, attempting to reach the gates. Some managed to get close while others were dragged away punching and kicking. The police and the suffragettes flailed at one another in full view of the press and the public. Some women were slapped, others pinned to the walls of the palace. Silk hats and helmets littered the road under Big Ben. Emmeline Pankhurst herself struck an officer twice in a deliberate attempt to get arrested. She was lifted off the pavement, a policeman holding her under each arm.

  Una Dugdale, the suffragette who had converted Princess Sophia to the cause just weeks before, was among the 107 women and eight men who were also hauled off to the police station. Una had struggled with two police officers outside the Stranger’s Entrance and had been punched repeatedly about the head. If Princess Sophia had seen her new friend in the days that followed, she would barely have recognised her, such were her injuries. Her complaints of police brutality were ignored and, like many of her companions that day, Una was given a one-month sentence at Holloway Prison, charged with assaulting a police officer.5

  In the wake of the press interest that followed, Marion Wallace-Dunlop, who was already in custody for her ‘graffiti’, was swiftly tried, found guilty and fined for ‘doing damage to the value of 10s’. When she refused to pay, the judge ruled that she too should be sent to prison for a month. It was not Marion’s first brush with the law. In 1908 she had been arrested for throwing stones at the windows of 10 Downing Street. She had been sent to prison then too and had been appalled by the treatment of suffragettes behind bars. Despite being arrested for what they insisted were political crimes, she and her fellow campaigners were held with thieves and murderers in the lower divisions. By classifying their acts as criminal, the justice system was debasing the suffragette cause. Marion vowed never to submit to such treatment again.

  In 1909, after her ‘defacement of Parliament’, Marion once again demanded to be classed as a political prisoner. She informed Holloway staff that not only would she refuse to submit to the lower division regime, she would also not wear the black-and-white arrowhead prison uniform. When her transfer request was refused, Marion stopped eating. No matter how she was cajoled by the wardens, she refused to let any food and barely any water pass her lips. Holloway was in uproar as news of her defiance spread. Her hunger strike threw the guards into a panic, and caused a sensation among sympathisers: one summed up the feelings of many when he wrote to Marion, praising her for her sacrifice: ‘Nothing has moved me so much – stirred me to the depths of my being – as your heroic action.’6

  Wallace-Dunlop never did get her wish to become a first-division prisoner. After only ninety-one hours of hunger strike, the governor set her free, realising he might have a dead suffragette on his hands if he did not. Almost immediately other suffragettes up and down the country followed Marion’s example. As a result they too were released, and brass bands comprised of rapturous women set up outside the gates of their prisons, ready to welcome them like heroes. The loud and impromptu parties made a mockery of the courts, the wardens, the home secretary and ultimately the prime minister himself.

  There was one prison, however, which took a stand. The governor at Birmingham’s Winson Green decided that women who refused food would have nourishment forced into their bodies. The government gave nervous assent as Winson Green became a test ground for a new and uncompromising strategy. Women found their jaws prised apart by metal vices and had rubber hosepipes forced down their throats. Doctors then poured a starchy liquid through a funnel at one end. Guards held down thrashing bodies of women who felt like they were drowning. Others checked pulses to ensure they were not straining the prisoners to the point of cardiac failure. Where Winson Green led the way other prisons quickly followed. Reports of force-feeding spread throughout the country and detailed accounts from the prisoners brought a deluge of complaints.

  One of the first suffragettes to be force-fed was Laura Ainsworth. She told Marion Wallace Dunlop, and a journalist, Henry Noel Brailsford, what she had been through. Four women wardens had entered her cell, grabbing Laura and pinning her to the bed: ‘One doctor (with a towel round his neck) kneels at the back of your right shoulder and forces your head back, there is a wardress at the back to help him, he forces your mouth and the other doctor (who faces you) pushes the tube down your mouth about 18 inches; while this is being done you first have a very great tickling sensation, then a choking feeling, and then you feel quite stunned; when the tube has gone down the required distance the gag (a cork one) is forced down between your teeth.’7

  The feed, a white liquid called Benger’s Food, was sludge-like and cloying and often ended up being vomited after bouts of choking. Widely available on grocers’ shelves, it was marketed as a food supplement for children with ‘stomach troubles’. Under a picture of a silhouetted mother with her two frolicking children, the marketing material for the product read: ‘Watch your children during their growing period. Those who are not fully enjoying fair “happy days” should have a cup of Benger’s Food between meals and just before bedtime.’

  If too much liquid came back up after force-feeding, the prison staff held the woman down for a second feed. The ritual often left women physically and emotionally broken. They spoke of having the insides of their mouths ripped and of being bloodied by the struggle to get the pipe down. Others spoke of having tubes forced into their nostrils and rectums in order to administer feed. The horror was often described in terms akin to rape. Henry Brailsford was so sickened by the practice that he resigned from his newspaper, the Daily News, when it came out in support of force-feeding.

  For many outside the suffragette fold, it seemed as if Britain in 1909 was in the grip of mania. Daughters of perfectly respectable households appeared to have gone mad, smashing windows and chaining themselves to government buildings, while the upholders of law and order responded like barbarians. The WSPU marched, harried politicians in the street, and no longer restricted their targets to government buildings, smashing the windows of London’s gentlemen’s clubs too. One suffragette, Muriel Matters, commandeered an airship and dropped hundreds of ‘Votes for Women’ leaflets over the Houses of Parliament. Others urged even more incendiary responses.8

  In October 1909 a new suffragette organisation, the Women’s Tax Resistance League, was born. Based on the American Independence battle cry: ‘No taxation without representation’, the league decided to hit the government where it hurt most: in the Exchequer. Suffragette tax resisters refused to declare their incomes, tore up letters from the tax office and slammed their doors in the faces of inspectors. The courts warned the women that if they refused to pay, they risked the enforced seizure and sale of their property and the worst offenders would be sent to prison. Despite all the attendant horrors that custodial sentences represented at this time, Princess Sophia im
mediately signed up as a tax resister. She did so against a backdrop of increasing activism and lawlessness.

  Suffragettes were turning their ire on politicians everywhere. Speeches were disrupted, nails thrown under tyres and placards thrust in faces. Police forces often responded violently and neither side showed any sign of backing down. To add to the sense of chaos, the government itself looked like it might fall. The Tory-dominated House of Lords had rejected the Liberal government’s so-called People’s Budget, a radical set of reforms in social welfare. By doing so they made it inevitable that Asquith would have to call a general election three years early to prove he still had the mandate of the people. It was a particularly poisonous time in Parliament, with Liberals and Conservatives at loggerheads. The country braced itself for weeks of febrile electioneering at a point where the British people were feeling more insecure than ever. The polls were set to open on 15 January 1910, and in the flux that preceded them, the suffragettes saw their chance to take their campaign right into the heart of democracy.

  At hustings all around Britain, suffragettes harried Liberal MPs, shouting and ringing noisy hand bells to drown them out. They plastered the walls of speaking venues with images of force-feeding, and hid in cupboards and behind church organs so that they might leap out and disrupt unfriendly politicians mid-flow. Suffragettes canvassed for candidates opposing sitting Liberal MPs, and denounced Asquith’s front bench with inexhaustible zeal. Their constant interference with his campaign drove the prime minister to demand that suffragettes be kept well away from him at all times. As Emmeline Pankhurst wrote gleefully in her memoirs, ‘Mr Asquith travelled from one constituency to another accompanied by a bodyguard of detectives and official “chuckers out”, whose sole duty it was to eject women, and men as well, who interrupted his meetings on the question of Votes for Women.’9

  Asquith was wise to engage special suffragette-repelling bodyguards. In November 1909, a woman called Therese Gurnett, described by the papers as being ‘modishly dressed’, broke through the police lines at Brighton station, ran up to the Liberal candidate, Winston Churchill, and proceeded to thrash him repeatedly with a dog whip. Newspapers across the globe devoured the story. The New York Times reported: ‘The astounded statesman seized his pettycoated assailant, who fought like a tiger cat, and after a sharp tussle, during which the two barely escaped falling from the platform to the tracks below, succeeded in wrenching the weapon from her hands.’10

  Churchill managed to disarm the suffragette with the help of two police officers, but not before she landed blows. Only his hat saved him from worse injury. ‘The Lash curled about his face and left a red mark. When the police got hold of the woman she pointed scornfully at the minister’s dented headpiece and while her face flushed with excitement, cried: “That’s what you’ve got and you’ll get more of the same from British women”.’11

  The Liberals’ constant skirmishes with women made them easy targets for opposition mockery. The Tories characterised them as weak and feeble, unable to deal with the ‘fairer sex’. The Labour Party painted them as reactionary old fools. In January 1910, when the votes were finally counted, Asquith’s party was returned to power, but his majority was in tatters. The Liberals could only rule with the support of the Labour Party and the Irish nationalists. Asquith never forgave the suffragettes for wrecking his election.

  Asquith was a peculiar mix of contradictions. A plain-speaking Yorkshire-born barrister with a remarkably forensic mind, he had acquired a fearsome reputation as a social reformer. But where women’s suffrage was concerned, Asquith had a blind spot. Some have blamed his aggressively anti-suffragette stance on a life spent in some of England’s most elitist male-dominated institutions, or even as an embittered reaction to his second wife, Margot Tennant – a wildly indiscreet woman who could not be trusted with political pillow talk. Either way, the man described by his predecessor as ‘the sledgehammer’ for his debating power in the Commons was implacably hostile to Emmeline Pankhurst and all who followed her.

  Despite Asquith retaining his position as prime minister, the period after the general election brought with it a lull in hostilities. The government set up a committee to look into the possibilities of extending the vote to women. Chaired by the Earl of Lytton, whose own sister was a leading suffragette, the committee consisted of twenty-five Liberals, seventeen Conservatives, six Irish nationalists and six members of the Labour Party. The cross-party participation was encouraging and the men worked hard to find compromise legislation which might be palatable to all their disparate political ideologies but at the same time satisfy the suffragettes. After much wrangling, the ‘Conciliation Bill’ was drafted. It was a watered-down version of what Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers wanted, since it only granted the vote to women householders and to women occupiers of business premises paying £10 or more in rental. But sensing that it was the best deal they could get, the suffragettes of the WSPU reluctantly accepted the offer. After years of struggle, they finally seemed to be getting somewhere.

  On 6 May 1910, King Edward VII died during the night. With his death, the Duleep Singhs lost their last real benefactor at Buckingham Palace. The King, like his mother and father before him, had genuine affection for Sophia’s family. In contrast, Edward’s son and successor, George V, had little, if any memory of the Maharajah and cared less about his progeny. Edward’s demise was sudden but should have come as no surprise. He had been a voracious smoker most of his life, with a twelve-cigar-a-day habit to add to his numerous cigarettes. The day before he died, Edward suffered several heart attacks which left him weak and extremely short of breath. Ignoring the advice of his physician and family, he refused to go to bed, saying: ‘No I shall not give in; I shall go on; I shall work to the end.’12 The next night he slipped into unconsciousness and was declared dead just before midnight.

  Despite King Edward’s death, the business of government continued. A month later, on 14 June 1910, the Conciliation Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by David Shackleton. A large-bellied MP with a full black beard and rumbling laugh, Shackleton was the ideal candidate to push through the bill. One of only a handful of Labour MPs in the house, he had grown up in the industrialised north and had first-hand knowledge of the issues championed by social reformers and suffragettes. Born to a poor family in the small hamlet of Cloughfold in Lancashire, Shackleton found himself working in a weaving shed by the age of nine; by twelve, he was running three large looms himself.13 Around him, men and boys aged rapidly with their back-breaking work. Many turned to alcohol, drinking their wages away and leaving their wives to scrape for money to feed the children. Sometimes the alcohol led to domestic violence. Shackleton had been determined to escape the cycle of poverty and was a staunch teetotaller. From the age of twelve, he walked to evening classes in Accrington after his long and exhausting days in the factories. By twenty, he had become an ardent trade unionist and in 1902, he was elected MP for Clitheroe. The Conciliation Bill appeared to be in safe hands.

  The passage of any bill through Parliament can be a long and tortuous process. Proposed legislation is debated, amended and batted between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, until Parliament agrees that it is fit to receive Royal Assent and become law. Before the Parliament Act of 1911, legislation was even more fragile than it is today. Peers could vote to veto a bill, killing it dead in its tracks, and thwarting the will of the elected house in the process. Shackleton’s bill therefore had to run the gauntlet before it could pass into law. In 1910 all the signs seemed to suggest that the Conciliation Bill would make its way smoothly through. After sailing through the first stage, the government set aside 11 and 12 July for the second reading, leaving plenty of time for the bill to complete its journey before the end of the parliamentary session. To the suffragettes’ delight, the Conciliation Bill then went through its second reading with a majority of 109 votes. Their joy was short-lived, however. Asquith suddenly decided to change the rules declaring that all franc
hise bills should now go to a ‘Committee of the Whole House’, thereby immediately lengthening the time needed for the legislation to pass. It could, in theory, still get through, but it would almost certainly need extra time to accommodate the added layers of debate and scrutiny.

  Alarmed by the prime minister’s manoeuvre, and anxious to press upon the politicians the importance of haste, the suffragettes swiftly organised a huge demonstration in support of the bill. On 23 July half a square mile of space was cleared in Hyde Park for forty large, makeshift platforms. One hundred and fifty prominent supporters were booked to speak and bands from all over the country promised to come and play. Two mammoth processions, representing suffragettes from all parts of the political spectrum, converged on the site at 5.30 p.m. Dressed in whites, they snaked their way through opposite sides of the park, cutting a pale river through banks of spectating men in their dark suits and hats.

  The march from the west was organised by the Women’s Freedom League and had a Roman theme. Women carried centurion-like standards declaring where they had come from or what they had come for. The words ‘Justice’ and ‘Victory’ hovered over their heads. The procession from the east was organised by the Women’s Society for Social and Political Union and had an Oriental theme. Colourful bonnets and sashes brought splashes of colour to their otherwise snow-white attire. Not for the first time, East and West collided in Sophia’s politics, as the space in Hyde Park filled with some 20,000 protesters. Stages were decorated in purple, green and white suffragette colours, and banners were raised with such slogans as ‘The Bill Must Go Through’, and ‘Where There’s A Bill There’s A Way!’ Their efforts were doomed from the start. On the very evening of the Hyde Park demonstration, Herbert Asquith wrote privately to Lord Lytton, the chairman of the Conciliation Bill committee, and told him he would not allow any more time for the bill during that session of Parliament. He was in effect smothering the legislation in its infancy.