by Simon Webb
That the police proved themselves prescient on this point may be seen from the actual arrangements made for what was destined to be the last great public display by the WSPU. The advice that the hearse should be ‘taken through streets where traffic conditions will not interfere with its progress’ was hardly adhered to, as the procession behind the hearse passed through some of the busiest streets in the capital, including Piccadilly Circus, Shaftesbury Avenue and Euston Road. Nor were ‘a limited number of mourners’ involved. The WSPU worked frantically to ensure that as many of their members as were able came to London for the day. Traffic came to a standstill on Saturday, 14 June, as apart from the many suffragettes marching behind the hearse, thousands of people thronged the streets to watch the show.
The cynicism of the WSPU in using Emily Davison’s death in this way as a propaganda coup can be more readily appreciated when we learn that her mother, who was intending to bury her daughter in Northumberland on the following day, very nearly had to cancel the funeral arrangements. The suffragettes held a service of their own at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury and what with the high numbers of mourners that they had laid on and the crowds they had courted, combined with a route which passed deliberately through the most congested streets of the capital; everything took far longer than had been planned for. The train that was scheduled to carry Davison’s remains to Northumberland was due to leave King’s Cross at 5.30pm. The grand spectacle laid on by the WSPU took so long that the coffin arrived at King’s Cross precisely one minute before the train left. The coffin was hurriedly loaded on board the train in a manner which was anything but ‘seemly and reverential’. Two minutes more and Mrs Davison would not have been able to bury her child on the day of her choice.
This then was the life and death of the first suffragette arsonist and bomber. A seemingly disturbed and aggressive woman who at 40 had no permanent home of her own and was constantly hard up and unable to get a job. Who, in her right mind, could honestly believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would travel about the country dressed as a clergyman? Who, except somebody quite heedless of the lives of others would try to block the path of a galloping horse? When looked at without prejudice, it is hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed by Queen Mary when writing to the unfortunate Herbert Jones. She commiserated with him on his, ‘sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal, lunatic woman’.
Although the WSPU had worked long and hard to find themselves a suitable martyr who could be manipulated as part of a public relations exercise to blacken the name of Asquith and his government, reactions were not all that could have been desired. It is true that the actions of Emily Davison garnered a huge amount of publicity for the suffragette cause and captured the front pages of all the newspapers. Whether by accident or design, Emily Davison chose the perfect spot to carry out her mad protest. Not only were there many newspaper photographers on hand, the newsreel cameras were also running and film of the incident appeared in cinemas across the country. Emily Davison, and of course the cause for which she died, became tremendously famous overnight. Her funeral procession through central London was also a media event, lapped up by the papers and newsreels.
Getting publicity is one thing, ensuring that those viewing that publicity take away with them the right message is something else again. Emily Davison’s death changed the way that people regarded the suffragettes in two very different ways. On the one hand, it was undeniable that here was a cause for which people had now shown that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. This is a sobering reflection, whatever you might personally feel about a cause for which a life has been given. The other change in perspective was not so desirable for the WSPU. The question began to be asked, if this is how a highly intelligent, middle-aged university graduate behaves, what does this tell us about the fitness of women to have the vote? If even the most educated, older women are liable to carry on like this, whatever must the mental state of the uneducated, younger ones be like? Were all the suffragettes as unbalanced as this?
There was a bizarre sequel to Emily Davison’s act at the 1913 Derby, which did nothing to dispel the idea that such behaviour verged on lunacy. Most people in Britain today are vaguely aware of Emily Davison’s name and the protest for which she is remembered, but few now recall the name of Harry Hewitt. This is surprising, because two weeks after Emily Davison’s protest, Harry Hewitt did precisely the same thing, under similar circumstances and perhaps for the same reason.
The next major horse racing event after the 1913 Derby was the Ascot Gold Cup, held on 19 June. It was a beautiful summer’s day and most people had forgotten all about the unfortunate incident at the Derby. Herbert Jones, the jockey who had been injured by Emily Davison, had recovered and was attending the Gold Cup as a spectator. As the horses came into the final curve before they thundered past the stands, Tracery, ridden by Albert ‘Snowy’ Whalley, was in the lead. A smartly dressed man, wearing a grey suit, ducked under the fence surrounding the track and walked calmly out in front of the horses. He looked so respectable, that many in the watching crowd formed the impression that he was an official, connected in some way with the race. Then, he produced a suffragette flag in one hand and a revolver in the other and ran straight into the path of the leading horse.
What followed was virtually a carbon copy of the Derby. Tracery crashed into the man, knocking him down and then the horse itself went down, throwing Albert Whalley in the process. The following horses managed to avoid the tangled group, although one of them clipped the man who had disrupted the race with its hoof.
The jockey suffered from concussion, but Harry Hewitt, the man who had made the protest, needed surgery, a piece of bone having been driven into his brain by the kick he received from one of the horses. He was later removed to an asylum, from which he escaped and fled to Canada. Pity poor Herbert Jones, who had come to spend a day at the races largely in order to forget about his role in Emily Davison’s death. The copycat incident at Ascot showed how easily one irrational person can encourage others who are slightly unbalanced to emulate them.
A century has passed since the death of Emily Davison, the first of the WSPU’s arsonists and bombers. We are now in a position to make a fairly balanced and objective judgement about the woman and her actions at the 1913 Derby after the passage of so much time, but the verdict is not a favourable one to her. We know that Emily Davison inflicted grievous bodily harm upon Herbert Jones, the King’s jockey. There is also no doubt that she was willing to slash a complete stranger across the face with a whip, because he bore a passing resemblance to a well-known politician. This same woman did not hesitate to detonate 5 lbs of explosives in such a way that there was an excellent chance of killing somebody. In the course of this action, she deprived an ordinary, working man of his livelihood. Not only that, she also tried to set fire to two post offices.
It is almost beyond belief that a century later, such a woman as this could be put forward as somebody deserving of our admiration and respect. The very name, ‘Emily Davison’, is spoken reverently, as though it is taken as read that she was a remarkable, and indeed wonderful, human being. In one way at least, Emily Davison was indeed remarkable. She was a pioneer of terrorism, being the first suffragette in England to resort to arson and bombing to further the aims of the WSPU. Where Davison led, others followed. The bombing of Lloyd George’s house was the opening shot in a campaign of violence which swept the country during the course of 1913 and 1914.
Chapter Six
Bombing and Arson
‘ If any woman refrains from militant protest against the injury done by the Government and the House of Commons against women… she will share responsibility for the crime. ’
(Emmeline Pankhurst, 10 January, 1913)
There had, from 1911 onwards, been sporadic and isolated attempts at arson and even, as at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, the occasional use of explosives by members of the WSPU. However, the campaign of bombing and arson began in earnest o
n 19 February 1913.
Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George was probably, for the suffragettes, the most hated man in the government besides Herbert Asquith. Why this should have been the case is something of a mystery. He was a dedicated supporter of the principle of women’s suffrage, although not enthusiastic about the Pankhursts’ idea of ‘equal suffrage’.
In early 1913 Lloyd George was having a house built for himself near the golf course at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey. The men working on the house arrived each morning at 6.30am and left at 5.30pm On the evening of 18 February, the workmen left as usual in the evening and secured the property behind them. There was, however, one small and unfinished window on the ground floor which could not be fully closed. It was later guessed that a boy, or slim woman, might have been able to squeeze through this window and then possibly open another window to let in accomplices.
Cars were something of a rarity at that time and a number of witnesses were woken by the sound of a motor vehicle driving to Walton in the early hours of the morning of 19 February. The car was also heard by a police officer, who noted that it arrived in Walton at about 2.50 am. The sound of a car was sufficiently uncommon to draw attention, particularly at night. He also heard a vehicle, possibly the same one, driving back towards London two hours later. It was unusual to hear a car driving about at that time, but nothing more was thought of it.
At 6.10 am, the windows of the Blue Ball pub in Walton were rattled by a loud explosion. Twenty minutes later, James Grey, foreman of the builders, arrived at the house that he and his men had almost completed and found a scene of devastation. The ceilings had been brought down by an explosion, windows blown out and the force of the blast had even cracked open an external brick wall. Five rooms were wrecked. The police were called and discovered that two bombs had been planted in the house. The method used to trigger the explosions was primitive in the extreme. A paraffin-soaked rag led from the bomb to a saucer of wood shavings, which had also been sprinkled with paraffin. A candle was then placed in this saucer and lit. When it burned down far enough, it set fire to the wood shavings and then ignited the rag which acted as a fuse.
Two bombs had actually been planted in the house, but the explosion of the first had blown out the candle which was meant to trigger the second. This meant that the Home Office explosives expert was able to examine in detail the construction of the bombs. The unexploded bomb consisted of 5 lbs of gunpowder, surrounded with nails to make it more destructive. Anybody who had been in the house at the time of the explosion would have stood a good chance of being killed.
Scotland Yard sent officers from the Special Branch to investigate this latest outrage, which represented a serious escalation in political violence. There were few clues, other than the discovery of two hairpins and a galosh. The leaving of hairpins at the scene of such attacks was to become something of a hallmark of the suffragette bombers and arsonists.
The explosion at Lloyd George’s house had been preceded less than a week before by the burning down of the refreshment shed at Regents Park Cricket Ground in London. After this attack, incidents of arson and sabotage increased dramatically across the whole country. On 12 February, the Tea House at Kew Gardens was burned to the ground. Two days later, Ashford Golf Course was damaged and on 24 February, telegraph poles in Newcastle were cut down. That same day, signal wires were cut on various railway lines. On the following day, telephone wires were cut in Belfast and a bookstall was burned to the ground in Staffordshire. The usual round of window-smashing, letter-burning and other acts of vandalism were continuing throughout the country.
March brought new and even more serious arson attacks. On 9 March, two railway stations, Saunderton and Croxley Green, were destroyed by fire and on 12 March, a fire was started in a lavatory at the British Museum. On 21 March, the house of Lady White at Engle- field Green was burned down and on the same day the golf pavilion at Weston-Super-Mare was also destroyed by fire. Two days later, telephone wires were cut and many yards of them removed near Hull. On 24 March, extensive damage was caused to Sandwich golf links.
Some of the targets are predictable enough for a guerrilla campaign – the transport system and communications infrastructure, for instance. But where do cricket grounds and golf courses fit into the pattern? In fact, they are part of the same overall scheme as Emily Davison’s actions at the Derby. To see what was going on, it is necessary to look at what Emmeline Pankhurst had to say at her trial in early April that year and also to consider the writings of her daughter Christabel from exile in Paris.
The police had been unable to track down and arrest those who had actually planted the bomb at Lloyd George’s house. Sylvia Pankhurst, writing long after the event, claimed that Emily Davison was one of the bombers, although the police had other suspects in mind. Nevertheless, there was no doubt, at least as far as the government was concerned, where ultimate responsibility for this act of terrorism lay and that was with the leadership of the WSPU.
Emmeline Pankhurst in particular, had since the beginning of 1913, been sailing exceedingly close to the wind. On 10 January that year, she wrote to members of the WSPU. Heading the letter, ‘Private and Confidential’, this was, to all intents and purposes, a call to arms. After discussing the situation in parliament, Mrs Pankhurst went on to say:
There are degrees of militancy. Some women are able to go further than others in militant action and each woman is the judge of her own duty so far as that is concerned. To be militant in some way or other is, however, a moral obligation. It is a duty which every woman owes to her conscience and self-respect, to other women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all those who are to come after her.
If any woman refrains from militant protest against the injury done by the Government and the House of Commons against women and to the race, she will share responsibility for the crime. Submission under such circumstances will be itself a crime. We must, as I have said, prepare to meet the crisis before it arises. Will you therefore tell me (by letter if it is not possible to do so by word of mouth), that you are ready to take your share in manifesting in a practical manner your indignation at the betrayal of our cause.
Yours sincerely,
E Pankhurst.
Even before this, Mrs Pankhurst had already openly encouraged illegal actions such as smashing windows. At a public meeting at the Albert Hall in October 1912, she had said, ‘Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the sacred idol of property… do so’.
The general public had on the whole been indifferent to the suffragette campaign. As long as it was limited to heckling cabinet ministers and breaking windows in Downing Street, most people were happy to ignore them. Once the smashing of whole streets of shop windows began and buildings began to be burned down, the mood changed. When the WSPU held their rally for ‘Women’s Sunday’ in 1908, thousands of people came to Hyde Park to see what all the fuss was about. They may not have become active supporters, but they came with open minds and some probably left with a more favourable attitude towards female emancipation than when they arrived. This changed dramatically once the arson and bombing began.
A month after the bombing of Lloyd George’s house, the WSPU held a rally in Hyde Park. The meeting, on 17 March, quickly degenerated into a riot. The suffragettes had complained often enough in the past about the heavy-handed tactics of the police at their meetings; on this occasion, they were grateful that so many police were in attendance. The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly and none of the speakers could be heard above the catcalls and angry shouts. The heckling and abuse had nothing to do with the WSPU’s demand for the parliamentary vote. Instead, the cries were ‘Incendiary!’ and ‘Shopbreakers!’ Clods of earth were dug up and thrown and women grabbed and manhandled. The fury of the mob was concerned solely with the acts of militancy and had no reference at all to political questions. By adopting a policy of violence against privately owned property, the leaders
hip of the WSPU had succeeded in transforming public indifference into outright hostility and ill will. A suffragette open air meeting at Wimbledon also descended into chaos a day or two later and for the same reason: anger over widespread vandalism and arson.
After the bombing at Walton-on-the-Hill, Emmeline Pankhurst at once announced that she was responsible for the explosion. She repeated this assertion in an article published in The Suffragette, the newspaper of the WSPU and on 24 February, she was arrested and charged with ‘Feloniously procuring and inciting a person or persons unknown to commit felony, unlawfully soliciting and inciting persons unknown to commit felony and certain misdemeanours’.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 1 April, 1913. Transcripts of various speeches that Emmeline Pankhurst had made were produced in evidence, the prosecution suggesting that these were ‘soliciting and inciting’ others to commit felonies. The letter in January in which Mrs Pankhurst had urged all women to take part in militancy was also read out.
Emmeline Pankhurst did not defend herself in the conventional way, but instead made a long and rambling speech to the judge and jury. Very little of this speech was relevant to the charge against her and some of it was very strange indeed. Among other things, Mrs Pankhurst reminded the court that she had been married to a barrister and that her dead husband had told her some shocking tales about the behaviour of men in high places. She began to tell the story of a judge who had been found dead in a brothel, but at this point, was warned that she must not name anybody and that it would be better to restrict her comments to the charge against her.
It is unlikely that this anecdote about the immoral judge did anything to endear the defendant to the judge trying her own case, but Mrs Pankhurst had more to say on the depravity of men. She continued:
Only this morning I have had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in little children, that they are being purchased, that they are being entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of life.
