by Simon Webb
It is for the reasons outlined above that we read of the burning of woodyards and haystacks by suffragettes, as well as the larger fires which destroyed churches and stately homes. All such attacks inconvenienced somebody, all had ultimately to be paid for from somebody’s pocket.
Hand in hand with the use of terrorism went the quest for the raising up of martyrs, as is so often the case with terrorist campaigns. A few martyrs can turn around the fortunes of a militant group and restore their popularity if it appears to be waning. These martyrs should ideally be killed by the state, either by being formally executed or just shot down in the streets. An example of this took place in 1916 with the Easter Rising in Dublin. This involved just over 1,000 Republicans seizing control of key parts of the city from the British. Those who undertook this adventure were extremely unpopular with the citizens of Dublin. In one incident, the Sinn Feéin rebels actually opened fire on Dublin citizens who were shouting abuse and trying to disarm them. After they had been captured by the British army, the rebels were booed, jeered and spat at by angry crowds of Dubliners. The soldiers escorting the captured rebels were forced to protect them from the mobs.
Everything changed within a few weeks. The British executed 15 of the leaders of the rising and these men instantly became martyrs. Their execution was instrumental in changing the attitude of the public to the cause for which they had died. Had the leaders of the revolt simply been sent to prison, the Easter Rising might not hold the iconic place it does in the hearts of many Irish men and women today.
The WSPU recognised the need for martyrs fairly early in their militant campaign. Governments though are often only too aware of the dangers in allowing their opponents to become martyrs and sometimes take great steps to prevent this happening. The WSPU must have known very well that there was not the slightest chance of the government obliging them by killing any suffragettes. If they wanted martyrs, then they would have to manufacture them for themselves, without the assistance of Asquith’s government. This would prove a tricky but not insurmountable problem.
Asquith was a canny enough operator to be fully conscious of the risk of martyring any members of the WSPU. There was little chance of his government going as far as hanging or shooting anybody for breaking windows or even starting fires, but the suffragettes hit upon another tactic which they felt might provide them with the necessary symbolic death.
In June, 1909, a 44-year-old supporter of the WSPU called Marion Wallace-Dunlop stamped a quotation from the Bill of Rights onto the side of St Stephen’s Hall at the House of Commons. She used indelible ink which, according to the charge made after her arrest, caused damage to the value of 10 shillings (50p). She refused to pay the fine imposed upon her when she was brought to court and so was imprisoned. Prisoners were divided into three divisions, according to their social standing. First Division prisoners were allowed many luxuries and could have food sent in from outside. In the lowest grade, Third Division, were ordinary, working-class men and women who were to expect no special privileges. Surprisingly, the First Division was still being used in prisons until 1948.
As soon as Wallace-Dunlop was sent to Holloway Prison, she asked to be treated as a political prisoner and placed in the First Division. When her requests to both the governor of the prison and also the Home Secretary were not immediately complied with, she announced that she would not eat until her crime was recognised as being political in nature and she had been put in the First Division. Today, we are quite familiar with political prisoners or imprisoned terrorists going on hunger strike in this way, but this was the first recorded use of a hunger strike for political purposes. That this can be a tremendously powerful weapon against the state has been amply demonstrated throughout the history of the twentieth century, from Mahatma Ghandi in colonial India to the IRA prisoner Bobby Sands in 1981.
Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone, keenly aware of the dangers of letting a suffragette prisoner kill herself in this way, ordered Wallace-Dunlop’s release after she had refused all food for over 90 hours. The hunger strike was such a novelty that he made a spur of the moment decision, which the government later regretted. In no time at all, the tactic of the hunger strike had spread to many other WSPU members held in prison. Initially, others were also able to avail themselves of what was, in effect, a ‘Get out of Gaol Free’ card. Such a situation could not last for long and so the government, hoping to avoid women becoming martyrs, embarked upon the very strategy that was practically guaranteed to create them.
Inmates of lunatic asylums who refused to eat were sometimes forcibly fed, either by having their jaws prised open or by having rubber tubes pushed down their noses until they were in the patient’s stomach. Milk, sometimes accompanied by raw eggs, was poured down the tube. The dangers of carrying out this procedure on struggling and uncooperative victims were very great. They ranged from cuts to the gums and broken teeth as the jaws were forced apart by steel gags, all the way to the risk of death when, as sometimes happened, the liquid was poured into the lungs and not the stomach. It is probable that some women later died from the after-effects of this treatment.
The powerful visual image of women being held down and forcibly fed has become one of the defining icons of the suffragette struggle. It was used to great effect on propaganda posters circulated by the WSPU, and the Liberal government of Asquith was, with some justification, accused of torturing women. This was a tremendous own goal for a government which had only used this method in order to avoid the creation of martyrs among the women they were holding.
Imprisoned suffragettes might have been denied the chance to die and so achieve martyrdom in that way, but they had now been handed a propaganda masterpiece where helpless women were having things forced into their bodies against their wishes. The comparison with rape was seldom explicitly stated, but hovered in the background of the debate on forced feeding. This visual image was exploited by the WSPU and had a very great impact. Posters featured distraught women being restrained while villainous-looking men wearing pince-nez inserted tubes into them.
Having shot themselves in the foot by setting out to force-feed women prisoners, with all the resultant sympathy this generated for them, the government then came up with another plan. The next scheme only made matters worse. The bind in which Asquith’s government found itself was a tricky one. On the one hand, they did not wish for any of the suffragette prisoners to die. On the other, they were being portrayed as heartless brutes because of their use of force-feeding. The solution was to allow hunger strikers to be released on licence and then rearrested and taken back to prison to complete their sentences once they had recovered their health.
The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 made provision for hunger strikers to be released and then later taken back to prison. It soon became known as the Cat and Mouse Act, due to the supposed similarity with a playful cat releasing and then catching a mouse with whom it is playing. Once more, it provided the WSPU with a brilliant image, that of a woman being held in the jaws of a gigantic cat. It was also a nightmare for the police to enforce, because as soon as suffragettes were temporarily released they would flee from sight. A network of supporters offered accommodation for fugitive prisoners who had been released under the Cat and Mouse Act. J.B. Priestley, in his book The Edwardians, compares the sheltering of such women with the ‘underground railway’ established during the American Civil War to care for runaway slaves.
There is no doubt that by using the weapon of the hunger strike, members of the WSPU were able to cultivate an impression of martyrdom, even if it fell short of the actual sacrifice of their lives. In time, the force-feeding in prisons resumed, because the law was being brought into disrepute. Suffragettes were being sentenced to prison and then freed within a matter of days. They would then flee and the police would have to waste time hunting them down in order to return them to prison for a short time, only for the process to begin anew.
Asquith’s government had been hopeles
sly outmanoeuvred by the WSPU. Their attempts to avoid providing the suffragettes with their martyr had backfired in the most spectacular way and it was, in any case, all to be in vain. The suffragettes knew that they needed somebody to make the supreme sacrifice which would show to the world that they were serious in their devotion to this cause and that this devotion extended as far as giving their lives.
Some women had almost certainly already done this for the cause of women’s suffrage. In 1910, Emmeline Pankhurst’s sister, Mary Clark, was badly knocked about during a riot near the Houses of Parliament. She was arrested and imprisoned, but soon released. She died a short time later, probably of injuries received during the tussles with the police. There was however, nothing clear-cut and dramatic about the death of Mary Clark. What was needed was an obvious martyrdom, a woman giving her life for the suffragette cause.
Two months after the Cat and Mouse Act received Royal assent, a martyr duly appeared on behalf of those fighting for women’s suffrage. That this disturbed and unhappy woman very nearly took somebody else’s life as a result of her mad actions has been altogether forgotten. Today she lives on as the only suffragette that, apart from the Pankhursts, anybody can instantly remember.
Emily Wilding Davison secured her place in history as the woman who gave her life so that other women could get the vote. However, she is of interest not only for losing her life beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, but also for the fact that she launched the arson and bombing campaigns which set the WSPU on the path of using terrorism to achieve their political ends. She was a violent and irrational woman, whose actions in the years leading up to her death at the age of 40 might encourage any objective observer to suspect that her most famous action was precipitated by factors other than merely strong political views.
Chapter Five
Emily Davison – Portrait of a Terrorist
‘ The government's refusal to grant the vote drove her to make her protest. Argument has not convinced Mr Asquith… perhaps a woman’s death will. ’
(Christabel Pankhurst, The Daily Sketch, 1913)
On the evening of Saturday, 30 November 1912, a Baptist minister stood alone on a platform of Aberdeen’s railway station. This inoffensive clergyman was about to become the victim of a senseless and brutal assault.
There was nothing remarkable or noteworthy about the Reverend Forbes Jackson, minister of the Crown Terrace Baptist Church in Aberdeen. He was just an ordinary, respectable man waiting quietly on the platform, minding his own business and bothering nobody. He could hardly have been more surprised when a middle-aged woman rushed up to him and began slashing him viciously across the face with a dog whip, shouting, ‘I see through your disguise, Lloyd George. You cowardly hound, I‘ll punish you!’
This apparently mad woman was restrained by porters and handed over to the police. She gave her name as Mary Smith and explained that her reason for attacking the Reverend Jackson was because she believed that he was not a genuine clergyman at all, but was in reality none other than Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, travelling under a convincing disguise! She did not tell the officers why she thought that one of the best known and most instantly recognisable men in the whole country should think it a good idea to put on a dog collar and try to pass himself off as a vicar.
By the time the case came to court, Mary Smith had, not unexpectedly, been revealed as a pseudonym or nom de guerre. The real name of the 40-year-old woman who had behaved so ferociously towards the innocent and law-abiding minister was Emily Davison and she was well-known to the police as one of the most militant of suffragettes.
Even now, a century after her violent death, Emily Davison is widely regarded as a secular saint in the struggle for women’s rights. She is perhaps the only suffragette, other than the Pankhursts, whose name is still recognised a hundred years later by the average person. The scenes shot by the Pathé film crews at the 1913 Derby, showing Emily Davison falling beneath the hooves of the King’s horse, are among the most iconic newsreel footage of the twentieth century. She is today revered in some quarters for her supposed martyrdom in the cause of women’s rights.
In 2012, for example, a petition was organised calling for a minute’s silence at the following year’s Derby as a mark of respect for Emily Davison on the centenary of her actions at Derby Day in 1913. Among the founder members of this campaign was the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Danny Boyle, who choreographed the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, has said that the whole pageant was inspired by Emily Davison and her supposed martyrdom. Her death during the 1913 Derby Day was re-enacted during the opening ceremony, showing her being carried with her arms outstretched in a deliberate pastiche of Christian iconography; the audience were invited to compare her sacrifice with that of Christ.
Davison’s name is still, for some at least, a byword for selfless devotion and readiness to sacrifice one’s life for a just cause. This popular image is undeserved. She may well have thrown her own life away, but Emily Davison was far from being a gentle martyr. In fact, she was an extremely volatile and unpredictable woman, rootless and unemployed. She was responsible for injuring at least one person so severely that she almost faced a charge of causing grievous bodily harm, as well as being the first suffragette to use arson as a weapon and carrying out the first bomb attack in twentieth-century England. In many ways, Emily Davison epitomises the more aggressive type of suffragette who cheerfully engaged in acts of violence and destruction, giving no thought at all to those who might be injured or lose their lives in the process.
Emily Wilding Davison was born in South London on 11 October 1872. When she was three, her family moved to Hertfordshire and later back to London. A bright girl, she attended the Kensington High School where she did very well, both academically and in more athletic pursuits such as swimming, for which she won a gold medal. At the age of 19, she was awarded a bursary to study English at the Royal Holloway College. She later spent a term at Oxford University and then studied for an honours degree from the University of London.
After she had completed her studies, Emily Davison worked as a teacher and governess in various parts of the country. Before she was in her mid-thirties, there is no evidence that Davison took any interest in politics and it was not until the autumn of 1905, when she read about the imprisonment of Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, that she became intrigued by the new and militant form of suffragism which was being promoted. She was then 33 years old.
Over the next few years, Emily Davison was drawn into the activities of the WSPU. By 1908, she was acting as one of the chief stewards on the ‘Women’s Sunday’ rally, which took place in Hyde Park that year. The following year, Davison was arrested for the first time and sent to prison for a month, after a protest at the Houses of Parliament.
In the summer of 1909, Emily Davison was back in prison for disrupting a meeting which was being addressed by Lloyd George. As soon as she was placed in her cell, she smashed 17 panes of glass. On being moved to another cell, she broke seven more. She had in fact brought a hammer into the prison but nobody had thought to search her. Later that year, Davison found herself in prison again, for disrupting a political meeting, and was subjected to force-feeding when she went on hunger strike. After this experience, she barricaded herself in her cell and the warders directed water from hoses through the window of the cell in an effort to subdue her.
During 1910, Emily Davison wrote articles for the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, as well as sending innumerable letters to magazines and newspapers of all types, demanding that women be given the parliamentary vote. Twice that year, she received short prison sentences for breaking windows.
For most of 1911, the WSPU maintained a ‘truce’, abstaining from militant acts. This was in the expectation that a bill then passing through parliament could be amended to include a clause on women’s suffrage. When the truce ended, Davison made the decision to ratchet up the violence by resorting to arson.
This was the first time that this tactic had been used by the suffragettes and marks a new and dangerous departure from previous militant acts. It could be said that this was the moment at which the suffragettes moved from simple vandalism to the first stages of terrorism. The deliberate setting of fires has always been viewed as a grave crime, because of course flames are indiscriminate and uncontrollable. Once you begin a fire, there is no telling where or when it will stop. In later chapters we shall see how arson became a major weapon in the armoury of the WSPU, quite possibly leading to deaths. The first step though, taken by Emily Davison on Friday, 8 December 1911, was a small one.
On that particular morning, Davison went to the post office at 43 Fleet Street in London with a specially prepared package. This was cloth soaked in kerosene and contained in a paper envelope. A postbox was built into the front of the Fleet Street post office and after setting fire to her package, Emily Davison dropped the whole thing through the slot and into the post office. Fortunately, it went out almost immediately. Had it not done so, the consequences could have been serious, because the letters posted here all dropped down into a wooden box. Had the fire taken hold, the post office building, as well as those who worked in it, could have been in jeopardy.
When the letters from the Fleet Street post office were delivered to the Mount Pleasant sorting office later that day, the crude incendiary device was found, although nobody thought to report it. After seeing nothing about the attack in the newspapers over the weekend, Emily Davison marched up to Police Constable 185 on the following Monday and demanded to be arrested. He treated her as a crank and took no notice.
