1913

by Charles Emmerson

  That summer, the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill had called the troops on to the streets of east London and other cities throughout the country. Though previously sympathetic to the trade unions, Churchill now pivoted to ‘order’ as the maxim of the day. After the event, he justified his actions to Parliament contending that:

  I am sure the House will see that no blockade by a foreign enemy could have been anything like so effective in producing terrible pressures on these vast populations as the effective closing of those great ports coupled with the paralysis of the railway service.18

  In 1912 Tom Mann, a British trade unionist instrumental in the London dockworkers’ strike of 1889 and who had subsequently spent time as a union agitator in Australia, was jailed for writing an article which urged soldiers not to shoot at strikers, the argument being made that this constituted an incitement to mutiny. The same year his firebrand colleague Ben Tillett led dockworkers in a violent chant directed at the chairman of the London Port Authority: ‘He shall die, he shall die’.19 Tillett called the House of Commons ‘the rich man’s Duma’, a reference to the post-revolutionary Russian parliament, which appeared to confirm a willingness to pursue extra-parliamentary means to achieve his political ends. Though a founder member of the Independent Labour Party, he now became involved with the British Socialist Party, further to the left. In 1913 Parliament passed the Trade Union Act allowing unions to donate money to political parties – something which a court judgement had previously banned them from doing – in the hope that labour militancy would now be subsumed into the more pragmatic aims of the parliamentary Labour party. But Londoners lived on tenterhooks – uncertain of when the next strike would come, the next industrial stoppage, and what its consequences might be.

  Meanwhile, of still greater concern even than labour unrest to some Londoners – and certainly more visible, most of the time – was the sharpening militancy of the movement for women’s suffrage. By 1913 Britain had, in effect, been engaged in civil conflict over votes for women for a decade or more. Families and political parties had been divided. Common civility had been tested. The conflict had claimed victims and created martyrs. The suffragettes’ struggle was endlessly in evidence on London’s streets – in a scuffle with police on a street-corner, in an unfurled banner, in a voice raised to claim women’s right to vote, or one condemning it as unwelcome agitation, as likely to harm women as to advance them. Nearly a thousand suffragettes had gone to prison; a handful had died.20 Thus far, they had little to show for their sacrifice.

  The normal political process seemed stuck. At Westminster many MPs supported women’s suffrage of one sort or another – in principle, in broad terms, as an idea whose time was coming. Women’s suffrage bills were regularly introduced by individual members of Parliament, and received support in the House of Commons. But it would take government intervention to provide the parliamentary time to allow private suffrage bills to have a chance of becoming law. This, governments had been generally unwilling to do. Even if a bill was actually debated in Parliament there were other obstacles to its passage. Every permutation of women’s suffrage had its drawbacks – Irish MPs might argue that it was taking time away from discussing Home Rule and vote against it, Liberals might oppose it on the basis that if only wealthy women were granted the vote then this would be a boon to the Conservatives, Conservatives might oppose votes for women for the damage that this would supposedly do to home life. Unlike Irish Home Rule, for which there was a substantial and permanent caucus of Irish MPs in Westminster willing to vote and lobby for their own particular cause, women’s suffrage was a political orphan, with many supporters, but few willing to make it the objective of their career.

  In debate, questions of expedience masqueraded as questions of principle and vice versa. Should the vote be extended to women on the same basis as it was extended to men (in which case women voters would outnumber men)? Should some more limited franchise be adopted? In May 1913 a private member’s bill opted again for the limited option, with far greater qualifications on which women could vote than applied to men. The bill, its sponsor claimed, charted a course ‘as Ulysses steered between Scylla and Charybdis’.21 Had it become law no more than one in every ten British women above a certain age would have won the vote. But even this was too much for some. Speaking in the debate, the Prime Minister himself, a Liberal, launched into the nonsensicality of a partial franchise – only to then oppose votes for women on any basis. ‘Democracy’, he informed its sacred (male) guardians, ‘aims at the obliteration of arbitrary and artificial distinctions’. But not in this case:

  Democracy has no quarrel whatever with distinctions which nature has created and which experience has sanctioned. If I may put in one sentence which seems to me to be the gist and core of the real question the House has to answer tonight, it is this: Would our political fabric be strengthened, would our legislation be more respected, would our social and domestic life be enriched, would our standard of manners – and in manners I include the old-fashioned virtues of chivalry, courtesy, and all the reciprocal dependence and reliance of the two sexes – would that standard be raised and refined if women were politically enfranchised?22

  Having placed an impossible burden of proof on the advocates of women’s suffrage, Asquith answered his own question in the negative.

  Asquith’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, took the opposing view. Why should five million working women not be able to influence the conditions under which they worked? Was it not wrong to argue that women could not be granted the vote because it was only men who served in the country’s army, and therefore only men who bore the ultimate burden for the nation’s security? Grey could not see ‘on what grounds of justice, logic, reason, or even expediency’ women’s suffrage could be opposed.23 But his fine words did not carry the votes of his colleagues. On 6 May 1913 most Liberal and Labour MPs, and some Conservatives, voted in favour of a modest number of women being granted the right to vote. Most Conservatives voted against it. So too did Irish parliamentarians, desirous of greater freedom for their nation but not for their wives, and thinking the suffragette cause distracted from their own, more noble, endeavours. Tramping into the lobby beside them was not only the Prime Minister, but one of his most controversial ministers: Winston Churchill.

  Faced with repeated parliamentary standoffs of this nature, militant suffragettes began to adopt a different strategy, a long way from the genteel garden parties that were the polite form of female engagement with national politics. On the night of 6 May, a bomb in a mustard tin was placed under the Bishop of London’s chair in St Paul’s Cathedral, at the very heart of London, primed to go off at midnight. ‘Only the fact that an electric switch was turned in the wrong direction had prevented the infernal machine exploding’, reported the Daily Chronicle the next day.24 ‘Those who set themselves to do the Devil’s work often cannot even do that right’, remarked the bishop smartly in the following evening’s sermon, after thanking God for delivering the cathedral from the bombers.

  This attack had failed, but it was not an isolated event. As the Bishop of London was delivering his riposte in St Paul’s, a suffragette was preparing herself to burn down a bowling pavilion in Fulham and seed the grass with acid. A postcard claiming responsibility read: ‘When men play the game and give votes to women they will be allowed to play their own games in peace’. In the first two weeks of May alone, a suffragette plot to blow up London’s dockyards was reported in the press, an MP’s mansion in Lancashire was destroyed by fire, postboxes were attacked, a brown-paper packet marked ‘Nitroglycerine, Dangerous’ was found in Piccadilly Circus tube station, and a bomb containing fifty bullets was found in the Empire Theatre in Dublin.25 A visitor to London would find the Tower of London, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and Hampton Court Palace partially or entirely closed, with the shutters of Kensington Palace fastened against the possibility of attack. While the British Museum remained open, its security was upgraded. A letter
writer to the Daily Graphic – signing himself ‘Centurion’ – recommended local vigilante groups be formed as the last line of defence. ‘Let the vigilantes find them [the suffragettes] out, and mark them down’, he suggested.26

  Born of understandable desperation, did militant action risk alienating supporters and further distancing adversaries who saw it as blackmail, if not terrorism? The suffragettes had succeeded in generating fear and loathing; but could they direct this towards their stated goals? They could not, responded The Economist. The consequences of militancy, it contended, were that ‘enthusiasts become apathetic [and] apathetic people become strong opponents’. The cause was thus set back. Those already predisposed against women’s suffrage would argue that militancy proved their case, that ‘frenzy and lawlessness’ were women’s politics, as against the steady and sensible deliberation of men.27 The one should not be allowed to infect the other. Had the Suffrage Bill passed in this atmosphere of violence, the editors suggested, would not other varied discontents have felt direct action was the way to achieve their aim? While the suffragettes had stopped at arson, might others – ‘in Ulster, perhaps’ – go as far as murder?28

  A few weeks later the Daily Express concluded that even that threshold had now been passed. Editorialising on the actions of Emily Davison, the suffragette who ran in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby, its editors condemned Davison’s intentions as ‘murderous’, likely to result in the loss of two if not three human lives. (In the end it was only Davison herself who was killed.29) The suffragettes had gone too far, it warned: ‘perhaps the Derby tragedy of 1913 is the real deathblow of feminist hopes for many years to come’. More eloquent than the Daily Express was ever likely to be was The Suffragette, the magazine of the Women’s Social and Political Union, in whose militant cause Davison had died. On its cover, Davison was portrayed as an angel. ‘Greater love hath no man than this’, it read underneath, ‘that he lay down his life for his friends’.30 It was a noble thought, in a noble cause, the ideal of sacrifice for an idea of equality, for one’s mates, for one’s freedom: it was an ideal which reverberated through the age. Yet by the end of 1913 women were no closer to winning the vote than they had been at the beginning of the year. Parliamentary action had come to a dead end. Had extra-parliamentary action reached the same?

  Or was it just a matter of time? ‘That women’s suffrage will pass over the body of Mr Asquith’, wrote the British-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill in November 1913, ‘is one of the few certainties of the near future’.31 Though not in agreement with the militant strategy as a whole, he could not help but admire the fortitude of its foot-soldiers. ‘They have been stoned and beaten, ducked in horseponds, obscenely maltreated, imprisoned in third class with drunkards and pickpockets, sentenced to penal servitude, loathsomely fed by tubes and pumps’, he wrote. They had compelled the state to resort to violence in force-feeding hunger striking suffragettes. They had then made the state appear both devious and weak by adopting a policy of ‘cat and mouse’ whereby hunger-striking suffragettes would be released as soon as they fell ill, and reimprisoned when they had recovered. ‘Captain Scott, perishing in Antarctic snows for lack of food was less essentially heroic’, he contended, ‘than Miss Wallace-Dunlop, the fragile inventress of the hunger-strike, starving with luxuries heaped beseechingly around her’.

  Surely the suffragettes’ sacrifice would ultimately be repaid in justice for their cause. If not this year, then perhaps next year, or the year after. Progress could be slowed, after all – but not stopped.

  ‘The turn of the year’, wrote Clarence Rook in the Daily Chronicle on 31 December 1913, ‘is the point at which the world seems to turn over a new leaf’:

  It is the moment when your calendars and almanacs and time-tables and books of reference suddenly become obsolete and even the date you put at the top of your note-paper must undergo a change. It gives a man a jerk to change the superscription from 1913 to 1914 and realise that he is a year’s march nearer his long home.32

  As 1913 ended, the newspapers of London looked back on the year and, as the city’s pubs, bars and hotels filled with revellers for the Christmas season, they looked ahead.

  The Lord Mayor of London told readers in the Evening Standard that his greatest wish was for the ‘uninterrupted prosperity of London, the commercial centre of the world’, predicated on international peace.33 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, wrote of his ambitions for the commencement of a Channel Tunnel to connect Britain to Europe by train. British comic writer Sir Francis Burnand wrote of his hope that ‘John Bull may see clearly and have no trouble with his “I’s” – i.e. Ireland and India’. Lord Desborough, a sportsman and politician, wished above all for ‘discipline’; Israel Zangwill for the granting of the vote to women. Mr H. Gordon Selfridge, owner of the London department store, replied to the Standard that ‘if one could have his wish mine would be for 1914 a year which will develop in every nook and corner of the world of commerce ever broader ideas, a wider horizon and bigger ideals’.

  ‘Although there are some awkward problems ahead’, editorialised The Economist, ‘there is no reason why the inhabitants of this prosperous little kingdom should not enjoy a merry Christmas’.34 Financial conditions had been tight over 1913. Stock prices had not been as stellar as in previous years, indeed they had been subject to the ‘relentless, unvarying monotony of falling prices’. War in the Balkans had dampened economic optimism, as had the rising toll of military expenditures on the European continent. The European situation remained a worry, but apparent outbursts of Anglo-German friendship were greeted warmly. Public opinion was viewed as peaceful the world over. ‘The Reichstag and the French Chamber, the American Congress and innumerable resolutions passed by political and commercial associations in this country, all point in the same direction’, The Economist reported: in favour of peace. Economic conditions in Mexico were tough as the result of civil war, and the new government in China, it was noted, was ‘up to its neck in difficulties’. Yet the reduction in American tariffs was sure to accelerate the pace of the global economy. Overall, it was concluded, ‘with an improvement in political conditions abroad, we should look for some amelioration of the financial stringency before the next summer’.

  There were sourer notes. The Daily Graphic, while welcoming the fact that European peace had weathered the storms of wars in the Balkans, saw problems in Mexico and in the Middle East as particularly worrying. ‘With every opportunity of doing otherwise’, the newspaper noted, 1913 ‘has spared us Armageddon’.35 But for 1914: ‘wherever we look we see the grim apparatus of war, ever growing, ever more and more viciously on the alert, clogging the wheels of industry and squandering the fruits of peace. Well may we pray for a Happy New Year!’

  ‘Where will it all end?’ asked the editor of another London paper, launching himself into criticism of increases in military expenditure over the course of the year.36 ‘It requires no gift of prophecy’, he noted, ‘to foretell that this mad competition in military expenditure will end in disaster’. The check on such madness could only come from the people themselves: ‘Where aristocracies and plutocracies have signally failed, democracy may yet succeed. May its reign soon dawn!’

  At the printing presses of the Daily Chronicle, rushing to complete their work before the end of the day, the newspaper’s typesetters put into order the letters of the year’s final poem before going out into the cold London night, the air rich with the smell of roasting chestnuts. Tonight they would celebrate, consigning 1913 to history and beginning a fresh year – for them, for their families and friends, at the heart of their city, their country, their empire, the greatest on earth, the centre of the universe:

  I do not mourn your passing, shed no tear,

  As you are whelmed in shadows of the past:

  I only sigh and say – Please God next year

  Will be more fruitful, fuller, than the last

  I mourn not your dead roses, nor t
he day

  When life stood tiptoe for a little space;

  Roses will bloom again, and I can pray

  For such another crowning hour of grace.

  Pass, then, to those grey shades where memory dwells

  Inviolate, but mourns not. You shall bear

  From me no heavy burden of farewells;

  I turn to watch the year dawn that shall be.

  At the stroke of midnight 1913 died. The year was 1914.

  EPILOGUE

  The Afterlife of 1913

  The world went to war in 1914. For four years – in the mud of Flanders, in the Alps, along the Eastern Front, in the Dardanelles, and elsewhere across the globe – men attempted to kill other men, sometimes as a matter of national survival, sometimes in the service of some higher ideal, sometimes because they were told to and sometimes because death and killing had become a way of life for them. Millions fell; others, not necessarily more fortunate, were wounded. The hopes and dreams of a generation were ground into dust by the pounding of artillery shells. Families were ripped apart. Humanity looked into the abyss and, peering into the depths, found its own dark, disfigured reflection staring back.

  Though the ferocity of the military conflict was concentrated in Europe, and although most combatants were European, this was a global war. Naval battles were fought in the South Atlantic and in the North Sea. The shipping of initially neutral countries such as the United States and Brazil came under German U-boat attack. In the mountains of East Africa and on the high Persian plateau skirmishes of the Great War were fought between the great powers. Indians, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Irishmen fought alongside the British all over the world. Algerians and Senegalese fought alongside the French. In an effort to win favour with the British and the French, the young Chinese Republic sent tens of thousands of Chinese labourers to dig trenches in Europe. Americans, who had stayed aloof from war in 1914 and who elected Woodrow Wilson president for a second term in 1916 on a platform promising peace, entered the war nonetheless the following year, pouring troops and resources into the Western Front at a rate that only American scale and organisation could achieve. On the Eastern Front, soldiers from every corner of the Russian Empire – Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, Armenians, Kyrgyz, and Kazakhs – had been sent to die for Tsar and Motherland. German colonies in the Pacific were occupied by troops from Australia and New Zealand. The German concession of Qingdao in China was overrun by the Japanese. At the outset of war German spies had hoped that the banner of Islamic Jihad (holy war) raised by their allies the Ottomans would bring about a Muslim rising against British interests in the Middle East and India.1 In the end, it was British spies who were more successful: turning Arab nationalism into a weapon against Constantinople’s hold on its southern flank. Ottoman Armenians, long seen by Turkish nationalists as being the enemy in their midst, suffered gruesome retribution as the Ottoman Empire, beset on all sides, began to fall apart. Everywhere, disease followed where war had led.