by Simon Webb
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
PEN & SWORD HISTORY
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Copyright © Simon Webb, 2014
ISBN 978-1-78340-064-5
eISBN 9781473838437
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Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Suffragettes and Suffragists
2. The Edwardian World
3. An Undemocratic Organisation
4. The Use of Terror and the Need for Martyrs
5. Emily Davison – Portrait of a Terrorist
6. Bombing and Arson
7. The Terrorist Campaign Gathers Pace
8. Winter, 1913
9. Dead End – Saved by the War
10. The Plot to Kill the Prime Minister
11. How the Vote was Won
12. The Birth of a Myth
Bibliography
List of Plates
1. Newspaper headline on the first terrorist bombing in Ulster of the twentieth century; carried out not by the IRA but by the suffragettes.
2. Memorial plaque to Alice Wheeldon, the suffragette convicted at the Old Bailey of conspiring to murder the Prime Minister.
3. Glorifying terrorism; the inscription at the base of Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue, commemorating the militant campaign.
4. The statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragettes, who was convicted at the Old Bailey of inciting a terrorist bomb attack against the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
5. Emily Davison, pictured a few weeks before she inflicted GBH on a complete stranger.
6. Death of a terrorist: Emily Davison was mortally injured at the 1913 Derby.
7. The shooting gallery in London’s Tottenham Court Road, where would-be suffragette assassins honed their skills with semiautomatic pistols.
8. Lincoln’s Inn House, the London headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union, where the bombings and arson attacks were coordinated.
9. ‘Votes for Women’ badge: some suggested that ‘Votes for ladies’ might have been a more appropriate slogan for the socially exclusive suffragettes.
10. The true cost of suffragette militancy: a number of women lost their jobs as a result of the attack on this teahouse at Kew Gardens.
11. Saunderton Railway Station was destroyed by the suffragettes as part of their campaign of terror against the transport infrastructure in 1913.
12. Suffragette propaganda posters.
13. A typical suffragette terrorist: Mabel Capper took part in bombings and arson.
14. Christabel Pankhurst: architect of the bombing campaign.
15. Damage to a house near Holloway Prison, after the suffragettes set off two explosions near the prison.
16. Fascist leader Oswald Mosley: his party seemed the natural home for many former suffragettes.
17. Behind the propaganda: how the suffragettes were often viewed by ordinary people.
18. June 1914: the climax of the suffragette bombings.
Acknowledgements
Within the Plate Section images 10 and 11 were sourced from the Library of Congress, while image 17 was originally published in Punch magazine.
Introduction
History has been kind to the suffragettes. A century after their activities ended, they are almost universally regarded as having been heroic fighters for a noble and just cause. Hunger strikes, chaining themselves to railings, smashing windows, dying under the hooves of the King’s horse at Epsom – these are the images that we associate with the suffragettes. There was another side to their struggle though, and it is one that has been almost wholly forgotten.
In addition to their legitimate political activity and more boisterous protests, they also conducted a widespread and sustained bombing campaign against targets throughout the entire country. These targets included the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, theatres in Dublin and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, as well as other places as varied and disparate as the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and a barracks in Leeds. The bombings reached a climax in the summer of 1914 with explosions at Westminster Abbey in London, Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and a cathedral in Ireland.
The combination of high explosive bombs, incendiary devices and letter bombs used by the suffragettes provided the pattern for the IRA campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the first terrorist bomb to explode in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century, at Lisburn’s Christ Church Cathedral, was detonated not by the IRA, but by the suffragettes in August 1914.
Criticising the suffragettes makes many people feel uncomfortable. They were so obviously justified in their anger at being deprived of the vote that it may seem a little small-minded a hundred years later, to be quibbling about the finer details of their methods. After all, the predominant image we have today of the suffragettes is of dedicated women suffering and even being prepared to die for a principle in which they believed, a principle which is today almost universally accepted – that men and women should have equal rights in a democratic society.
At the heart of the popularly accepted narrative about the suffragettes lies two intertwined ideas. The first is that the suffragettes were instrumental in helping British women to gain the vote. The second is that they did so by unconventional, but almost entirely non-violent means. The myth runs that the Pankhursts and their acolyte, Emily Davison, endured hardship and pain themselves in order to draw attention to the injustices of the society in which they lived. They were Victorian women who triumphed in the end by ensuring that it was they, rather than their opponents, who suffered. They sacrificed themselves for the greater good. True, they and some of their more enthusiastic followers might have broken a few windows or trashed pillar boxes, but this was pretty harmless stuff and they wouldn’t have dreamed of hurting anybody. When we think of them, it is usually as victims, rather than as aggressors.
Open any book mentioning the suffragettes or visit a museum with a display about them and you are sure to encounter at least two posters created by the suffragette movement which epitomise how we view these women today. The first, entitled ’Torturing Women in Prison’, shows a hunger striker being force-fed and the second, a response to the ’Cat and Mouse Act’, depicts a lifeless woman in the mouth of a cruel animal. U
ndoubtedly, these are brilliant pieces of political propaganda; both posters intended to show women as helpless, cruelly mistreated creatures. These are women to whom things are done.
The general feeling now is that although these women may have shouted, thrown things, damaged letter boxes and made a nuisance of themselves, they are the ones who suffered and who were the objects of violence and oppression. It was the police who were agressive towards them; the prison authorities who tortured them by force-feeding; the rough crowds of men who taunted and sometimes manhandled them at their public rallies; and the government who played cat and mouse with them.
This archetype of woman as suffering martyr is appealing, in a mawkish and sentimental way, with its selfless heroines who never need to resort to the masculine devices of violence and aggression to get their way. It’s a harmless enough fairy tale, as long as we bear in mind that it bears little or no relation to the truth. The reality is very different. Not only were the suffragettes representatives of a profoundly undemocratic and arguably proto-fascist terrorist organisation, it is very likely that their actions delayed, rather than hastened, votes for women.
That the suffragettes were prepared to suffer themselves, and also to inflict suffering upon others, seems a strange idea, running counter to all that we think we know about the campaign for women’s votes. So deeply embedded in the national psyche is the notion of suffragettes as tireless campaigners and sometimes selfless martyrs, so powerful is the mythology surrounding them, that one feels instinctively that they could not really be described as ’terrorists’. This is certainly the view of almost every modern author who mentions them. Andrew Marr, for instance, writing in The Making of Modern Britain, cites one relatively innocuous bomb attack upon an unoccupied house belonging to Lloyd George, and then claims that the suffragettes ’were not terrorists in any serious modern sense’.
It would be interesting to know what people in London’s West End would have made of the above assertion if they were among those who happened to be in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square on 5 April 1914. At 10.30pm that evening, a bomb planted by the suffragettes in the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields exploded, blowing out the windows and showering passers-by with broken glass. The explosion started a fire inside the church and hundreds of people soon flocked to the scene, many voicing their anger at the suffragettes who had carried out this attack.
The best way to consider the true nature of suffragette activity in the years leading up to World War One is to take a few random incidents from that time, transplant them from Edwardian Britain to the present day and then see what we would think of them now.
Imagine for a moment that the leader of a militant group has been jailed. Comrades on the outside decide to mount a protest against the imprisonment by placing two powerful charges of dynamite against the wall of the prison where their leader is being held and then detonating them without warning. The only damage to the prison is the partial demolition of a surrounding wall, but nearby houses have all their windows blown out. Jagged shards of broken glass narrowly miss two young children asleep in their beds. Would this be defined as terrorism?
Or consider this: a bomb is planted in an empty train, which is standing beside a busy railway line. It explodes as another train is passing. The force of the explosion blows apart the carriage in which the bomb had been placed and a beam of wood is hurled into the cab of the other train, nearly killing the driver. Is this terrorism?
A final example should be enough to make the point. Petrol is splashed around the carpets and curtains of a crowded theatre, then set alight. At the same time, several bombs are detonated inside the building. Fortunately, the fires are extinguished before they get too great a hold, disaster is averted, but it is a close thing. Terrorism?
These were not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated campaign of bombings and arson designed to put pressure on the government in Westminster. Such attacks were instigated by the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose members were commonly known as the suffragettes. Paid workers from the organisation were involved in acquiring explosives, transporting them about the country and constructing bombs. It is hard to know what this could possibly be called, other than terrorism.
The definition of terrorism currently used by the British government might help us decide how to describe the activities of the suffragettes. According to this definition, taken from the Terrorism Act 2000, terrorism is:
The use or threat of action designed to influence the government… to intimidate the public or a section of the public, made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause and involving serious violence against a person, serious damage to property, a threat to a person‘s life, or a serious risk to the health or safety of the public.
This seems straightforward enough and if you count the planting of bombs in public places, attempts to sabotage the water supply to cities and the destruction by fire and explosives of various churches, railway stations and houses as being serious violence against property undertaken to advance a political course of action, then you will probably accept that some suffragettes were terrorists. When we discover that Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragettes, was convicted at the Old Bailey of inciting others to explode a bomb at the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she was in fact the leader of a terrorist group.
The real question to ask is why the first organised terrorist campaign in twentieth century Britain seems to have been airbrushed from history. From attacks on the transport infrastructure and water supply, to the explosion of a bomb at a public hall in Manchester, from letter bombs to politicians and judges to the attempt to flood a valley in the Midlands, this was a ruthless and determined strategy designed to force political change by the constant threat of violence. Books on the suffragettes invariably skim over this aspect of the movement, usually making only brief mention of fires in pillar boxes and the breaking of windows. We read about the slashing of a painting in the National Gallery, but know nothing about the planting there of a bomb; we have all read about Emily Davison falling beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, but not everybody knows that she initiated a campaign of arson and had earlier that year set off the first terrorist bomb to be exploded in England in the twentieth century.
This ignorance of the true nature of suffragette activity permeates our society. Danny Boyle, the man who choreographed the historical pageant at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, said that it was inspired by Emily Davison. It is probably fair to say that few of the 25 million or so people in this country and the hundreds of millions in other parts of the world, who watched this spectacular exhibition realise that Emily Davison was a suicidal terrorist bomber! The result of this ignorance is that we are left with a bowdlerised version of history, with many of the suffragettes’ activities hidden from view.
While looking at the violent activities of the suffragette movement, we shall also be exploring the thesis that they did more harm than good to the cause of women gaining the parliamentary vote. They were, after all, only one small group working to that end in Edwardian Britain and the other, larger groups were actually achieving more politically than the suffragettes. While the suffragettes were burning down churches and blowing up trains, other women were negotiating patiently for the extension of the franchise. Their efforts bore fruit, but because they made less of a noise than the militants their role tends to be overlooked today.
Some readers might have been taken aback to see the suffragettes described above as an undemocratic and possibly proto-fascist group. This is because just as many of their actions have now been conveniently forgotten, so too has the essential nature of their organisation and the details of what they were actually fighting for. For instance, the Women’s Social and Political Union was certainly not hoping to see the vote given to all women. In their literature, they specifically denied that this was their intention and made it
clear that they only wanted female ratepayers, property owners and university graduates to be given the right to vote. They were not fighting so that working-class women should be included in the franchise.
Such views bring into question the extent to which we can accept that the suffragettes were fighting for democracy, at least as we think of it today. After all, what would we think of a modern, British political movement whose stated aim was to restrict voting to men and women who owned their own homes or were well educated? Would we think of this as a group fighting for democracy?
Before looking at the women who carried out the bombings and incendiary attacks during 1913 and 1914, we will need to examine Edwardian society in general, thereby placing the suffragettes in context and seeing what it was that made them so different from all the other groups working at that time to acquire the vote for women. In the course of this investigation, it will be necessary to explode a number of myths. We will begin with two of the most deeply rooted of these wholly mistaken ideas. One of these is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, men in Britain had the vote and women did not; the other, that the suffragettes were fighting so that all women might have the vote.
Chapter One
Suffragettes and Suffragists
‘ The Women’s Social and Political Union are NOT asking for a vote for every Woman… ’
(Outline of the aims included in all WSPU publications)
One of the commonest and strangest misconceptions about the suffragettes is that they were struggling for the right of all women in the United Kingdom to be able to vote in parliamentary elections. In fact, as they made very clear in the booklets, newspapers and pamphlets they published, most suffragettes wanted the vote to be limited only to middle and upper-class women, those who owned property, paid rates or who had attended university. Gaining the vote for working-class women was never their intention. Some socialists at the time, who were working to gain the vote for every adult in the United Kingdom, regardless of gender or social class, remarked that the suffragette slogan should have been not ‘Votes for Women’, but rather ‘Votes for Ladies’!
