Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  After almost six long hours of struggle on the streets of Westminster, the police had finally changed their tactics and rounded up the suffragettes for arrest. Bow Street police station became a scene of bedlam with the arrival of so many suffragettes. Police officers wearily noted down particulars as the stream of arrested crammed into the entrance. It had been a long day for them too and many suspected that some of the women were giving them false identities to make their jobs even more difficult. At least the officer who processed Princess Duleep Singh of Hampton Court Palace knew she was not telling lies. Sophia was charged with obstructing the police in their duties and told, like the rest of the protesters, that she was bailed until the morning when she would have to return to Bow Street magistrates’ court and hear her fate.

  Sophia’s name was added to a fat Home Office ledger containing the names of hundreds of suffragettes who had found themselves placed under arrest. Handwritten and annotated with references to other police files and surveillance records, the book was a record of some of the most troublesome and politically organised women in Britain. Under the date Friday 18 November 1910, nestled between ‘Alice Singer’ and ‘Margaret Skewing’, Sophia’s name – incorrectly recorded as ‘Singh Princess A Duleep’ – sat incongruously. Scrawled tightly beneath her entry is the line ‘complains of police conduct’.28 Sophia returned to Hampton Court to spend an unsettled few hours, plagued by images she had witnessed that day.

  When the women turned up at Bow Street magistrates’ court in the morning, they found all charges against them had been dropped. Emmeline Pankhurst claimed fear of their testimony lay behind the leniency. Though they were denied their day in court, the sworn statements given by suffragettes to the likes of Henry Brailsford in the days that followed continued to cause shock and disgust. In particular, sexual brutality was highlighted again and again: ‘Several times constables and plain-clothes men who were in the crowd passed their arms around me from the back and clutched hold of my breasts in as public a manner as possible, and men in the crowd followed their example. I was also pummelled on the chest, and my breast was clutched by one constable from the front. As a consequence, three days later, I had to receive medical attention . . . my breasts were discoloured and very painful . . . My skirt was lifted up as high as possible, and the constable attempted to lift me off the ground by raising his knee. This he could not do, so he threw me into the crowd and incited the men to treat me as they wished. Consequently several men who, I believe, were policemen in plain clothes, also endeavoured to lift my dress.’29

  It was widely believed at the turn of the century that blows to the breasts caused cancer, so many of the women spent the next few months racked with worry. Although nobody was killed on Black Friday itself, two women died in the weeks that followed from injuries sustained that day. One was Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister Mary Clarke, the other a suffragette from Upminster, Henria Williams.

  Brailsford demanded a government inquiry, blaming Churchill’s order to avoid arrest for the excessive violence. Notwithstanding the offending instruction, Brailsford was stunned by ‘the frequency of torture and indecency’ and ‘the more obviously unprovoked acts of violence which many of the men committed. A man acting under this order might feel he was justified in flinging a woman back with some violence when she attempted to pass the cordon. But this order alone would not suggest to him that he should run forward and fell her with a blow on the mouth, or twist her arms, or bend her thumb, or manipulate her breasts.’30 In Brailsford’s opinion, the home secretary had allowed the police to feel themselves above the law that day.

  Despite his accusations, Churchill refused an official inquiry. He also refused to act on Sophia’s letter of complaint. Instead, Churchill directed her handwritten note to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who in turn forwarded it to Constable V700’s section head for investigation. Some in the commissioner’s department were trying to discredit the complaints. On one Home Office file, which had been opened solely to deal with Sophia’s allegations, a senior officer had written: ‘? Put up,’31 suggesting that he thought Sophia had been coached into making the complaint.

  After three weeks of paper-shuffling, the Police Commissioner ruled in favour of officer V700, stating that he had not used ‘more force than necessary to repel the attempts made by suffragette ladies’.32

  Sophia refused to accept the verdict and harried the commissioner with further questions. On 17 December 1910, Winston Churchill personally annotated her file with the terse comment: ‘Send no further reply to her’.33 He signed off with his initials ‘WSC’, and the case was closed.

  To Sophia, it was reminiscent of her time in the Punjab, when her complaints had gone unheeded. She would soon discover that some of the same figures who had loomed large then, were playing a prominent role in her current struggle too.

  16

  A Familiar Enemy

  George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquis Curzon of Kedleston, and former Viceroy of India, was back in Britain, watching the events of Black Friday in horror. It confirmed what he had always thought: some women were simply out of control and had to be reminded of their place. While Sophia and the others regrouped, Curzon set up ‘The National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’. It was an influential organisation which would try and block any attempt to grant votes to women. By his actions, Curzon became one of the most detested figures among Sophia’s friends. The princess’s feelings, however, had much deeper roots.

  In 1902, Sophia and her sisters had blamed Curzon for the indignity of being shut out of the Punjab camp while everyone they knew watched the durbar from prominent VIP seats. The Viceroy had enjoyed the status of a god while they had been forced to make their way to their father’s former empire in nervous anonymity. Sophia’s fury had not diminished over time. In India, Curzon had seemed omnipotent. It had taken one of Britain’s most ruthless soldiers to bring him down off his pedestal.

  Horatio Herbert Kitchener was a decorated war hero with an imposing moustache and a formidable reputation. At the turn of the century he was enjoying a similar deified status to the Viceroy himself. While Curzon had nawabs and maharajahs bowing before him, Kitchener’s military successes in Egypt and Sudan, against armies much larger than his own, gave him an air of invincibility. When, in November 1902, Kitchener was appointed Curzon’s commander-in-chief, ripples of excitement ran through the Raj. Two giants of British colonial rule were going to work together. India would be led by an unassailable team.

  Outwardly, the men had much in common. Like Curzon, Kitchener was well over six feet tall and able to intimidate people just by walking into a room. The general, then in his early fifties, carried himself with the straight-back discipline of a lifelong army man. Curzon, almost ten years younger, walked with a similarly formal and erect bearing. The Viceroy, who had never served in the military, could thank a metal corset for his gait. After he sustained a serious spinal injury from a boyhood riding accident, the contraption had been wrapped around his torso every day of his life. Constantly in pain, Curzon often found it hard to sleep, and was frequently irascible. Yet there was another, more sinister comparison which bound them to each other. Nationalists blamed Curzon for mishandling relief efforts during the Indian famine of 1899–1900, thereby causing a far greater loss of life. Kitchener too stood accused of starving men, women and children to death. The difference was that Curzon had been dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster and Kitchener’s South African famine was all his own work.

  Before India, Kitchener had proved himself a ferocious champion of empire in another continent. The invasion, colonisation and annexation of African territory by European powers during the nineteenth century had left the region unstable for decades. Descendants of Dutch and Huguenot colonists clashed with the British in South Africa leading to the First Boer War in 1880. Fighting was fierce but brief, lasting only a year. After the signing of treaties, a fragile peace held for almost two decades. However, the inexorable spread of
Queen Victoria’s empire pushed the region to the brink once more. War was declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899, and having taken the initiative, the Dutch-speaking farmers proved to be surprisingly successful. British garrisons were left beleaguered and stranded. In response, the Empire called for their best military man to crush the threat once and for all. They called for Kitchener and the tide began to turn. The Boers lost battles and thousands became disheartened and surrendered; only 20,000 ‘bitter-enders’ refused to give up. They knew the land better than the British soldiers, and kept the fight going for two further years using guerrilla tactics.

  Kitchener responded with two strategies which would gain international notoriety for decades. ‘Scorched earth’ and ‘concentration camps’ were unfamiliar tactics until his devastating use of both. First Kitchener ordered his men to set fire to Boer fields, farms and storehouses, killing crops and livestock. He wanted to hobble the Afrikaners’ means of food production for years to come. With the camps, his ambitions were more far-reaching. They were designed to break the spirit of the Boer rebels for ever.

  Male prisoners of war were captured and sent to overseas prison camps in St Helena and Ceylon. Women, children, the elderly and infirm were also rounded up and marched for miles to forty-five internment camps. Black South Africans found themselves herded into sixty-four separate, racially segregated camps. They had nothing to do with the war, but were simply farm labourers whom Kitchener wanted to keep out of the fields. Any harvests that escaped his flames would be left to rot in the soil.

  Regardless of skin colour, when prisoners (or rather ‘the interned’) arrived at their respective camps, they found disease-ridden pits of despair. All had been hastily constructed and were badly managed. Without adequate rations or sanitary provision, and with scant shelter from the elements, infants were the first to die. Nursing mothers found they made no milk to breastfeed. The children were next; emaciated by their tiny rations they were too weak to fight infections. Their deaths were often painful and drawn out. Little wrapped bodies were removed from the camps on a daily basis.

  Despite Kitchener’s best efforts, rumours of the enormous suffering in his camps began to seep out, causing much disquiet in Westminster. The Secretary of State for War, Sir William St John Freemantle Broderick, was forced to calm critics in England by insisting that all the interned Boers were ‘contented and comfortable’. His words, however, were exposed as lies by the most unlikely of characters. Emily Hobhouse, a rector’s daughter from the tiny parish of St Ive near Liskeard in Cornwall, had a very different story to tell.

  Born in 1860, Emily was handsome but highly strung, which made her shun attention. Victorian England had failed to give her an education commensurate with her intelligence, so instead she busied herself with social work around her father’s church. Her mother died young, and her father became grievously ill soon after, leaving Emily to act as his sole nurse and companion. She tended him with enormous dedication for many years; however when he too died in 1895, Emily was left bereft. Church work was no longer fulfilling and, audaciously, Emily decided to leave England. Travelling to America, she settled in a region of Minnesota, where many Cornish miner emigrants lived. There, just as she had at home, Emily helped the poorest families, distributing food and clothing among the most needy, and working to combat prostitution and drunkenness. In the course of her charitable endeavours Emily fell in love. Unfortunately, she also had her heart broken.

  Although Emily Hobhouse never did say why the engagement to an American businessman, John Carr Jackson, ended as abruptly as it did, contemporaries believed he had given her plenty of reason to call the marriage off. His worst transgressions involved excessive drinking, but he also managed to squander much of her meagre fortune on disastrous land speculations. After she separated from him, Emily moved back to London to find her country preparing for war in South Africa. She saw young men, clearly unfit to fight, signing up at recruitment offices. They came from poor backgrounds and many had rickets or other obvious signs of malnutrition and sickness. These men were accepted by the army, put into uniforms and shipped off. Emily was outraged and became an ardent pacifist. Around 22,000 British and colonial soldiers would die during the Second Boer War, the vast majority losing their lives to typhoid and dysentery, too feeble to resist contagion.1

  Under the watchful eye of her uncle, the Liberal politician, Henry Hobhouse, Emily found herself appointed Secretary of the Women’s Branch of the South African Conciliation Committee. It was not long before news of atrocities in the concentration camps began to trickle through to her. She wanted to see for herself what was being done in Britain’s name, and packed her bags for the long voyage to South Africa. When later asked why she had decided to take such a step, Emily declared that the suffering of her fellow women compelled her: ‘I came quite naturally, in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood . . . it is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself.’2 As her words suggest, Emily was a suffragette.

  Alongside her pacifist commitments she had pledged loyalty to the Adult Suffrage League, a radical group that believed all women, regardless of their social and financial status, deserved to be given the vote. From the moment Emily Hobhouse arrived in South Africa she set about collecting food and clothing for those interred in the camps. Armed only with letters of recommendation from a couple of influential Liberal politicians, she demanded that they opened the gates and let her see what was going on inside.

  Kitchener despised Emily’s meddling. He took to referring to her as ‘that bloody woman’,3 and barred her from seeing most of his concentration camps. Nevertheless the ones she was able to visit uncovered a picture far worse than any she might have imagined. Typhoid, measles and dysentery were running wild among the ragged and starving. Children were dying in startling numbers, and those who survived were skeletal shadows, unable to support the weight of their own bodies. Emily saw lips pulled back with malnutrition and hollow shadows around vacant, rheumy eyes. It is estimated that almost 30,000 Boers died of starvation and disease in the camps during the Second Boer War. Children accounted for more than 22,000 of those deaths.

  Appalled, Emily Hobhouse stepped up her relief efforts, hiring trucks, filling them with provisions paid for with money she had raised in London, and attempting to deliver to as many of the internees as she could reach. Emily also collected testimonies and photographic evidence of life in the camps. She used these to produce a blistering report which she intended to put before Parliament on her return to England: ‘I call this camp system a wholesale cruelty . . . To keep these Camps going is murder to the children . . . The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears . . . only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out . . . I can’t describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It’s just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one has to stand and look on at such misery, and be able to do almost nothing.’4

  Emily’s report, a ‘Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies’, was delivered to Westminster in June 1901. So seismic were her revelations that just weeks later the British government established a commission, headed by the moderate suffragette leader Millicent Fawcett. She visited South Africa and confirmed Emily’s damning evidence of neglect, disease and cruelty. Despite the commission’s findings and the horror with which they were greeted, Kitchener was not censured by his superiors. Rather, his career rocketed and he was promoted in 1902 to the rank of general, given the title ‘Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum and of the Vaal in the Colony of Transvaal and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk’ and sent, with all honours, to serve alongside the Viceroy of India.

  Due to his early experiences with women such as Hobhouse and Fawcett, Kitche
ner loathed the suffragettes. He would later describe himself as ‘disgusted’ when he found out that his own niece, Franny Parker, turned out to be one of the most militant, hunger-striking members of the WSPU. Under the alias of ‘Janet Arthur’, Franny would be imprisoned on several occasions for causing damage to property and, most notably, for trying to blow up the cottage of Scotland’s greatest poet, Robbie Burns.5

  After his arrival in India, Kitchener managed to work effectively with Curzon for a while. Charged with reorganising the Indian Army, the general did so with great speed and efficiency, much to the delight of the government in London. However, it was not in Curzon’s nature to share the limelight for long, and soon the growing praise for Kitchener began to grate. The Viceroy taunted his general constantly, even taking issue with the way Kitchener signed his letters ‘Lord Kitchener of Khartoum’. Knowing how much it would irritate him, Curzon told him that his signature took up too much space on the page and too much time to read. He suggested that he simply sign off as ‘Kitchener’ instead.

  The underlying accusation of narcissism from one as conceited as Curzon was too much to bear. From his time at Balliol College, Oxford, Curzon had been mocked for his vanity in prose and verse. One particular piece of undergraduate doggerel followed him all his life:

  My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,