The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

Rebel Girls

  Boggart Hole Clough in Manchester, on a beautiful Sunday morning in July 1906: a young, determined-looking girl has been addressing a huge crowd in this ancient park, shaped like a bowl, or primitive amphitheatre. She and her fellow speakers are at the bottom, talking upwards to a large crowd, not entirely friendly. Then a large group of young men, local footballers many of them, charge downhill with sticks. As the crowd begins to panic, the men link arms and surround the women. The young female speakers in particular are singled out, grabbed by their arms and dragged around the park, passed from man to man as if they were rugby balls. Their clothes are half ripped off, they are beaten across the face until bleeding. Older men shout obscene suggestions and the crowd begin yelling ‘like savages’. Eventually the girls are rescued by a counter-attack of other men and women and dragged to a house nearby for refuge. The young woman speaker was Adela Pankhurst, youngest of Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughters. She always felt her mother had not given her enough love and support but now, for once, she had earned respect. Adela had been imprisoned for disrupting meetings and was addressing a suffragette crowd about her experiences. Her redoubtable mother had come from London to hear her in a park where Emmeline herself had confronted the authorities a decade earlier in a row about free speech.

  The Edwardian suffragette campaign was extraordinarily violent. It involved arson and death as well as marches and window-smashing. Members of Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU – the Women’s Social and Political Union – disrupted meetings of Liberal politicians, heckled, petitioned and sold their newspaper on the streets. But they also rushed Parliament, challenged the police with mass marches which turned violent, smashed huge numbers of shop windows, set fire to letter-boxes, slashed famous paintings in art galleries, disrupted courtrooms and deliberately got themselves arrested, refusing to pay fines and therefore facing imprisonment, during which many went on hunger strike and had to be force fed. They attacked politicians. The prime minister, Asquith, was punched, had an axe flung at him and had slates thrown at his car. Winston Churchill was attacked at Bristol railway station by a riding-crop-wielding woman who hit him on the face. ‘Take that, you brute, you brute,’ shouted Theresa Garnett. ‘I will show you what an English woman can do!’ Lloyd George’s half-built house at Walton Heath in Surrey was partly destroyed by a bomb. The suffragettes did not try to take human life – they were not terrorists in any serious modern sense – but their actions were considerably more vigorous than the later Gandhi style of passive and peaceful protest. Most of the violence was the violence they deliberately allowed to be inflicted on themselves; and it was this more than anything which discomfited and shook traditionalist Edwardian Britain.

  The most famous incident occurred at the 1913 Epsom Derby when Emily Wilding Davison killed herself under the hooves of the King’s horse. Emily had been, by all accounts, a determined and idealistic girl, one of nine children of a middle-class Hertfordshire family. Her early life shines with promise, like a Wellsian heroine’s: a gold medal-winning swimmer, keen cyclist, deeply religious Christian, a theatre lover and admirer of Shaw’s plays, who managed to get herself to college and eventually achieved a first-class degree from the new St Hilda’s College, Oxford. But, like the Pankhurst girls and many other prominent suffragettes, she lost her father early – creating not just a personal but an economic problem, which meant she worked unhappily as a teacher and more happily as a governess. Emily may or may not have been a lesbian. The suffragette story is full of passionate relationships between women who live together but the reticence of the age generally leaves their private lives just that. People were less explicit, asked less, knew less and perhaps speculated less. At any rate, she was drawn into the cause by friends and quickly became a militant, moving from speaking in public to heckling Liberal politicians and then rushing the Commons, where she also hid overnight three times, sustained by bananas and chocolate.

  All this meant prison, force feeding and rough treatment. Not forgetting her religious faith, she would write ‘Rebellion against Tyrants is Obedience to God’ on the cell wall. She became involved in arson, including possibly the attack on Lloyd George’s house, and in November 1912 in a bizarre incident attacked with a dogwhip a harmless Baptist minister in Aberdeen, apparently mistaking him for the Liberal chancellor. When she went to Epsom racecourse she may have not intended to kill herself – she had bought a return ticket – but was fired up by thoughts of martyrdom. She watched the first two races and even marked her race-card before running out into the course and trying to grab the reins of King George’s horse, Anmer, as it raced past. Unsurprisingly, the horse trampled her. The jockey suffered concussion and Emily died four days later in Epsom Cottage Hospital from concussion of the brain. Entirely predictably, while there was national interest in her fate – shared by the royal family – the mail that poured into the hospital was savagely hostile: how dare she risk the life of the poor horse? (Anmer, it should be recorded, suffered nothing worse than slightly bruised shins.)

  This is the incident almost everyone has heard about, partly because it was caught on film and partly because Emmeline Pankhurst decided to make Emily a great public martyr to the cause, and her funeral a major WSPU event. But she was by no means the first suffragette to have given her life.29 At least two other women had by then died prematurely, almost certainly of injuries inflicted by the police. The force feeding of women in prison who had gone on hunger strike was itself a brutal business. Trying to force mouths open to accommodate metal contraptions resulted in broken teeth and ripped gums; alternatively the passages of the nose would be bruised by rubber tubes shoved down and into the stomach. In Holloway Prison in London, a twenty-one-year-old working-class girl from Leicester who had trained as a dancer, Lilian Lenton, was subjected to force feeding and had the tube accidentally pushed into her windpipe. Her left lung was filled with sloppy food and she nearly died from septic pneumonia. Hurriedly released, her case led to the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act which provided for very ill suffragettes to be released from prison, watched until they recovered, and then arrested and jailed again. But Lilian herself, a slight, striking girl, was also a completely committed arsonist. After her birthday she had embarked on a programme of window-smashing before visiting the suffragette headquarters to announce a change of tactics: ‘my object was to burn two buildings a week . . . whenever we saw an empty building we would burn it’. They included Kew Gardens pavilion. Pursued by police, Lily proved adept at disguising herself as a boy and making dramatic escapes when cornered.30

  These and many similar stories have made the militant suffragettes one of the best-known political successes of twentieth-century British politics. Yet several aspects of their story need to be added to get a complete picture. First, most women supporters of the suffrage campaign were never ‘suffragettes’ (a term originally meant as derisive, coined by the Daily Mail) at all. By the height of the agitation, just before the First World War, the Pankhursts’ WSPU had around 2,000 members but Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which had been formed as early as 1887, had around 100,000 members and branches almost everywhere. The larger organization was more democratic internally, and did not split, as did the WSPU, which, had war not intervened, might well have fallen apart entirely. The less militant suffragists were often friendly towards their more aggressive rivals, and brave too. For many middle-class women, taking part in outdoor protests such as the ‘mud march’ on Parliament was traumatic in itself, and in many households they were confronting obdurate and bewildered male relatives. There were many parallels between Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst. Fawcett, like Pankhurst, had married a Liberal politician, though her husband rose to be a cabinet minister under Gladstone, while Pankhurst’s never achieved worldly success, either as a radical Liberal candidate or later as a socialist. Both women were inspired by the new thinking of late-Victorian England – Fawcett was a friend of the early women’s rights politician and ph
ilosopher John Stuart Mill. Both lost their husbands relatively early. Both were good organizers and both utterly determined. But Fawcett and her movement worked inside the system, quietly converting MPs until by the early 1900s she had a Commons majority in favour of giving women the vote.

  Her problem was that MPs smiled and nodded but never quite got round to the subject, which kept being delayed; this led to suffrage campaigners first splitting away from the formal Liberal and Independent Labour organizations, and later actively targeting them. In addition, Edwardian MPs were not prepared to contemplate any vote for working-class women. The newly formed Independent Labour Party and radical Liberal MPs were deeply worried that the vote would eventually be given to middle-class women only, the wives and daughters of their class enemies, and so would result in Britain becoming more conservative, not less. Keir Hardie, despite this, staunchly supported votes for women. That other titan of early Labour history, George Lansbury, even went to prison and endured force feeding for the suffrage cause, later attacking Asquith in the Commons at the height of the agitation: ‘You will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women. You ought to be driven from public life.’ Yet when Lansbury resigned his seat in east London’s Bow and Poplar in 1912 to stand on the specific cause of votes for women, he was easily defeated. The tension between male Labour leaders and suffragettes was always there and, as we shall see, when war came the suffragettes gave the socialists good reason to be bitterly disappointed.

  The strongest rebuke to radical Liberal and Labour worries about the cause being essentially middle class came from the growing number of working-class militants, the so-called ‘rebel girls’ of the suffragette story. Few of them left much in the way of books or diaries but a rare exception was the Manchester radical Hannah Mitchell, whose memoir The Hard Way Up was discovered among her papers when she died in 1956 and published only in 1968.31 It is from there that the description of the Boggart Hole riot comes, and Hannah is worth dwelling on, because she reveals much about the suffragette and socialist story which is missing from the lives of the movement’s better-off leaders. She came from a remote farm in Derbyshire and suffered under a mother driven to furious temper tantrums by housework and drudgery. Refreshingly straightforward in her memoir about how she dislikes the heavy routine of housekeeping, Hannah loathes cooking too and is not much enthused by motherhood. Missing formal education, she runs away and becomes a seamstress in various northern cities, eventually marrying a young fellow lodger, beginning to read and going to socialist meetings. As to marriage, she reflects that it was probably for her a mistake. She wanted comradeship and soon believed birth control was vital – ‘by far the surest way for women to obtain some measure of freedom. I had seen many pretty, merry girls who had married on a small wage, and whose babies had come fast, turned into slatterns and prematurely aged women.’ She herself gives birth to a son, which without anaesthetic and with forceps was ‘sheer barbarism and ought to be regarded as “wilful cruelty” and dealt with accordingly’. But after that her husband ‘had the courage of his socialist convictions’ and no more children follow. In mining villages and then in Ashton-under-Lyne, Hannah becomes a speaker at socialist meetings, attends the ‘Labour church’ and by 1904 is a Poor Law Guardian – one of the few positions women could take in public life. The following year, almost inevitably, she becomes involved with the Pankhursts and the suffrage issue, speaking outdoors ‘on the steps of shows or roundabouts, on the market grounds, or at a street corner, on a chair, on a soap box from the nearest shop, often lent only in the hope of seeing some fun’.

  Hannah Mitchell was the anonymous woman described as heckling Winston Churchill at the Manchester Free Trade Hall during the 1906 election, when he had her pulled up to the platform and briefly debated with her. She then passed through most of the rituals of the suffragette. She was imprisoned – the clothes were horrible, she reported, and ‘the absence of garters and knickers made one feel almost naked’ – but possessed such energy that she survived without the ordeal of force feeding. She took part in a famous raid on the Commons, fly-posted propaganda and, above all, spoke, endlessly, touring the country until she suffered a complete breakdown. The biggest impression left by her book was that the suffragette cause provided her with an escape route from the dreary, repetitive manual work required by the Edwardian home. A rebel against the role of mother and wife which, for the vast majority too poor for servants of their own, meant grinding toil – the scrubbing, washing, mangling, ironing, cleaning, baking and feeding that underpinned Edwardian respectability – she eventually joined the breakaway and more democratic Women’s Freedom League. Hannah stands for a spectral army of unrecorded domestic dissidents.

  Until the recent release of census information, the full story of the suffragettes of the Yorkshire and Lancashire mill towns and northern industrial cities has been underplayed.32 Many came from homes in which the father was drunk or absent, and the mother the leading figure. In Hannah’s case her mother was a termagant and her father nice, but very weak. Other families were more dramatic. Nellie Gawthorpe of Leeds effectively kicked her alcoholic and sexually aggressive father out, and set up home with her sister and mother. Annie Kenney, who with her heroine Christabel Pankhurst heckled Churchill in Oldham in 1905, was the daughter of a textile worker in the West Riding of Yorkshire whose early life was dominated by a strong mother. Annie herself tore off a finger as a ten-year-old mill girl and, when her mother died, was left bereft: for her the suffrage cause was a new all-female family. Edith Key was the daughter of a mill worker and a mill owner straight out of pulp fiction, who had seduced his employee and then stalked off. This was a time when women who had been let down by the male social system – through death, drink or desertion – could begin to glimpse wider horizons. The Pankhurst daughters themselves, though comparatively well off, had had a hard time because of their father and mother’s endless radical politicking. Their lives were changed for ever by his early death from a perforated ulcer. Rebecca West, as a young teenage girl in Edinburgh, was writing pro-suffrage letters to the Scotsman and parading to school wearing Votes for Women badges. Her father, a rackety adventurer, right-wing journalist and gambler, had long before abandoned his family and lived alone in a Liverpool tenement. In his final illness he sent a pathetic letter to Edinburgh: ‘Good bye Lettie, Winnie, Cissie. I am dying. I loved you. Papa.’33 His wife, who had not seen him for five years, went to bury him alone.

  Clearly, many suffragettes and more moderate suffragists had happy upbringings, stable marriages and were supported by men who enthused about the cause too. Yet Edwardian life was economically risky, with yawning holes in the pavement for the unlucky and grimly constrained lives for, in particular, women who failed to make a good marriage. And the suffrage campaign was understood at the time to be about more than just the vote. Cartoons, postcards and anti-suffragette propaganda show them as men-haters who want to dominate weak husbands, wear the trousers and generally upend the social order – as unnatural and mannish freaks. There were lesbian and man-hating suffragettes, which is hardly surprising, and stoutly independent characters such as the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, in her tweeds and pork-pie hat, who did not care a fig what any man thought. But in a traditionalist society the psychological pressure on women attacked for their sexuality and lack of femininity was intense and may help explain why, later, so many suffragettes would make a point of their conservative and traditionalist views about other issues, from child care and venereal disease to the beastliness of Germans. The courage it took to stand up publicly to hardened male politicians, egged on by crowds of jeering men, never mind the physical protests and arrests which followed, should never be underestimated. Suffragettes smashed the complacent face of Edwardian Britain, and gave the lie to the world’s view of Britain as a hidebound, conventional and stable society.

  The Welshman and the Dukes

  The Edinburgh Castle in the depths of London’s Limehouse was the scene of Lloyd Geor
ge’s greatest speech, one of the most dramatic in the politics of radical Britain. Generally called a pub by historians, it was a strange, whitewashed building with battlements and turrets, flagpoles and slit windows. Once reeking of gin and tobacco, it had been converted into a centre for evangelical meetings in the East End and so was appropriate for Lloyd George’s provocative sermon against the aristocracy. On the evening of 30 July 1909 a large body of police was on duty outside, struggling to repel suffragettes who had mustered in force. Inside around 4,000 men were waiting. The windows were open and the chants of the angry women outside could be easily heard. Inside, male suffragette sympathizers had infiltrated themselves, and one managed to climb one of the columns on the stage, dressed in suffragist green and purple, tying himself to it. He was soon followed by half a dozen stewards. One climbed up to him and, pulling out a knife, cut the ropes and straps and hauled him down. As he and other protestors were hustled out, punches were thrown by the Liberal crowd. Then, to loud applause, up got the small, wiry, long-haired and instantly recognizable figure of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Today and for many decades chancellors have been accustomed to defending their Budgets in the Commons and broadcast interviews. This was a rare thing, a chancellor obliged to take his Budget, already being called the People’s Budget, to the people themselves. But Lloyd George was no ordinary Treasury minister. He was by now the most controversial and, to many, the most dangerous, politician in the country.

  There were plenty who saw him in his prime who thought he was the greatest orator democratic British politics ever produced – greater than Churchill himself. Among those who seem to have taken that view was Churchill, at that time Lloyd George’s follower and acolyte. To the most fervent of his admirers he was the Welsh wizard, the Merlin of radical politics or simply, in the words of one who introduced him at Rhyl, ‘the greatest man since Christ’.34 Yet to many others he came across as corrupt and hypocritical, constantly on the look-out for personal advancement, just as ready as Joe Chamberlain to split parties and very much the deluded egotist who would end up, as he did, crawling to Hitler. The historian Robert Blake asked with genuine bewilderment: ‘Was he a man of principle pursuing by devious means a consistent end, or was he an opportunist who relied upon his intuition to gratify at every turn, his love of power and office?’