by Simon Webb
The judge was determined to offer Emmeline Pankhurst as much leeway as he possibly could, but like most of those present in court that day, he must have begun seriously to wonder about the mental state of somebody being tried for an offence of this nature and seemingly unable to understand what was going on. After threatening to go on hunger strike if she was convicted, Mrs Pankhurst made one last, bizarre statement. She said of the suffragettes that, ‘They know that the very fount of life is being poisoned, they know that homes are being destroyed, that because of bad education, because of the unequal standard of morals, even the mothers and children are destroyed by one of the vilest and most horrible diseases that ravage humanity’. It did not take the jury long to find Emmeline Pankhurst guilty, although with a strong recommendation to mercy. She was sent to prison for three years.
Most people, finding themselves standing in the dock at the Old Bailey and charged with inciting acts of terrorism, might perhaps not behave quite as Mrs Pankhurst did on that April day a little over a century ago. Readers will probably wonder what on earth was going through her mind as she gave that speech to the court. ‘Vicious pleasures’, ‘horrible diseases’, ‘fount of life is being poisoned’, dead judges in brothels, what was it all about? It certainly had no connection with the bomb explosion at the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which of course had led to her appearance at the Old Bailey. Nor did ‘horrible diseases’ and ‘vicious pleasures’ appear to have anything to do with the charge that Mrs Pankhurst faced of inciting persons unknown to commit a felony.
To understand Emmeline Pankhurst’s behaviour in court, we must see what Christabel Pankhurst had been doing in Paris while she was in exile. Only then will we be able to understand both what caused Emmeline Pankhurst to talk so oddly at her trial and also to find out how this is connected with the burning down of cricket pavilions, the blowing up of football grounds, the destruction of golf courses and, of course, Emily Davison’s strange actions at that year’s Derby.
From the middle of 1912 onwards, the leaders of the WSPU became convinced that the refusal to grant women the parliamentary vote was a crime against the race. We saw Emmeline Pankhurst hint at this in her letter to the members of the WSPU, when she talked of the injury done by the government, ‘against women and to the race’. Her daughter Christabel explained this passing reference in detail in articles published in The Suffragette throughout 1913. Her pieces on this subject were collected together and published later that year, as a book called The Great Scourge and How to End It.
Briefly, the thesis advanced by the Pankhursts, mother and daughter, was as follows: The great majority of men in Britain, Christabel claimed the figure to be between 75 and 80 per cent, were infected with sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea. They frequently picked up these diseases through visiting prostitutes, which the Pankhursts referred to coyly as the ‘Social Evil’. One consequence of this was that they passed on gonorrhoea to their wives, causing them to become sterile or to give birth to deformed babies. This was described as ‘race suicide’. Another wicked side-effect of men’s insatiable sexual appetites was that a constant supply of prostitutes had to be created by means of the ‘white slavery’ racket, whereby young girls were abducted and forced into prostitution.
From late 1912, these bizarre ideas became official doctrine of the WSPU. The only way to save the race and also protect women from the infections with which men were riddled was to allow women an active role in politics. They would soon put a stop to these disgusting practices!
It seems incredible now that sort of thing could have been taken seriously by anybody, even a century ago. Such seemingly outlandish ideas did no good for the suffragette cause and not only with those who opposed them. As the WSPU increasingly portrayed the struggle for women’s suffrage as a moral crusade to save the race from extinction and little girls from the white slavers, so their membership went into free fall. It was not only men who recognised this rhetoric to be nonsense, even many women who had stuck with the WSPU for years began to become disillusioned with it.
This brings us to the question of the burning of cricket pavilions and the disruption of the Derby by Emily Davison. Those who might be wondering what sort of political act an attack on the golf course at Weston-Super-Mare might be, or about the bomb that was detonated the following month at the Cambridge University football ground, can now see what the motive was. The enemy has been identified. It is not a tiny handful of obstinate politicians who were blocking private members’ bills about extending the franchise. It is all men, or at the very least the 80 per cent of them who, when they are not engaged in the white slave trade, are indiscriminately spreading gonorrhoea to innocent women.
What do men like doing to relax when they are not destroying the race or corrupting innocent children in this way? Well, they like nothing better than to watch racing, play cricket or spend an afternoon on the golf course. Sabotaging those locations will hit them where it hurts. This, at least, was the rationale behind the destruction of sports facilities which was carried out over the next year or so.
A number of attacks in retaliation for the imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst for her role in inciting terrorism were swiftly undertaken. One of the first was in Scotland. In the early hours of 5 April, the grandstand at Ayr racecourse was completely destroyed by fire. This was one of the most costly incidents to date, the value of the grandstand being estimated at £2,000 (perhaps £160,000 in today’s terms). An attempt was also made to fire the grandstand at Kelso. Once again, men’s sporting activities were seen as being the logical focus for outrage.
Before the fire at Ayr, two other attacks had followed the sentence delivered at the Old Bailey, both at a more conventional terrorist target – the transport system. On the very night that Mrs Pankhurst was convicted, a bomb ripped apart a stationary train near Manchester. It exploded as another train was passing and the driver had a very narrow escape, when a piece of wood flew through the cab of his engine, knocking off his cap.
At 6.15am on 4 April, the day after the Old Bailey trial ended, a porter arrived for work at Oxted Railway Station in Surrey. He found that a bomb had exploded during the night in the men’s lavatory. The doors and windows had been blown out, but the damage could have been a lot worse. Firelighters and a two-gallon can of petrol had been placed near the bomb and the obvious hope of the terrorists was that the explosion would spread burning petrol around and destroy the station entirely. It would not have been the first station to be burned down by the suffragettes. The previous month two other stations, Saunderton and Croxley Green, were burned to the ground. There was no doubt as to who was responsible for these acts. At Saunderton, placards were found propped against a nearby wall with the slogans: ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Burning to get the Vote’.
The bomb at Oxted had been more sophisticated than the one that went off at Walton-on-the-Hill. Instead of a burning candle, the trigger for this device was a clockwork mechanism and battery. A loaded pistol was also found nearby. Despite the fact that no suffragette literature was left near the scene, as was common practice in attacks of this sort, it was clear that the WSPU were behind the bomb. A piece of paper recovered from the box containing the firelighters was traced to a member of the WSPU living in the London district of Battersea, but she herself had an alibi for the night.
Striking at railways has always been a popular tactic for terrorists. Attacks on them create inconvenience to travellers and so draw attention to the cause in whose name they have been carried out. The disruption can give rise to the feeling that the government is not really in control of the situation. After the fires at Saunderton and Croxley Green and the explosion at Oxted, patrols were instigated to check railway lines and stations regularly for bombs. There was a real fear, justified by other actions of the suffragettes that attempts might be made to derail a train or otherwise cause an accident. On 17 December 1912, the railway signals at Potter’s Bar had been tied together and disabled. A note w
as found, which said, ‘The vote is the only remedy’.
While it is sometimes suggested that the suffragettes were very careful to avoid injury to others and that their attacks only harmed property, several statements made by the WSPU at the time undermine this. As early as 1909 for instance, Jenny Baines, who was responsible for trying to burn down the crowded theatre in Dublin, made a public statement when the Prime Minister was giving a speech at Bingley Hall in Birmingham. She said, ‘We warn every citizen attending the meeting in Bingley Hall to beware. He may not only get crippled, he may lose his life eventually’. Nor was she joking. This paid organiser of the WSPU climbed onto a nearby roof with a couple of companions and then used an axe to chop slates off, hurling them at the people below. A police officer was seriously injured.
On the night of 3 April 1913, the day Emmeline Pankhurst was sent to prison for three years, the leaders of the WSPU were even more explicit in their threats. They promised, ‘a reign of terror’ and announced that what was to be done ‘Would stagger humanity’. Even more ominously, one of the women speaking at the headquarters in Kingsway announced that ‘human life, we have resolved, will be respected no longer’. This all seems plain enough and, when combined with the actions of the WSPU, no one would be in doubt that some were not at all concerned about causing injury or death.
The fact that some suffragettes were planting bombs to explode near passing trains and sabotaging the signals on busy railway lines makes it hard for us to believe that all members of the WSPU were trying to avoid hurting anybody. This claim is any case a fairly recent one. Meddling with signals and blowing up stations and trains is very hard to square with such a supposed doctrine on the part of the terrorists. If the incidents at which we have just been looking are dubious from this point of view, then the events of 14 April remove all doubt that certain elements among the suffragettes were quite willing to cause injury or death.
At 3.00pm on the afternoon of Monday, 14 April 1913, a young street urchin in central London noticed smoke billowing out from an object attached to the railings surrounding the Bank of England. He drew this to the attention of a police officer and the constable found that a metal milk can had been fixed to the railings near the Bank of England’s Bartholomew Lane entrance. He wrenched it free and ran to the nearby Royal Exchange, outside of which was a fountain. The brave and resourceful man then plunged the mysterious object into the water.
The can turned out to contain an explosive charge, which was to be detonated by a timing device made from a wristwatch and battery. For some reason, the fuse caught fire, but the main charge did not go off. Considering the location of the bomb, immediately opposite the entrance to the Stock Exchange on a busy street in the heart of London’s commercial district, this was fortunate. An explosion could not have failed to cause casualties. There was no direct evidence to link the Bank of England bomb to the WSPU, but it had been attached to the railings with the help of hat pins. As we saw earlier, the finding of hat pins or hairpins was itself a clue to the provenance of a bomb at this time.
One of the most vexing aspects of the suffragette campaign from the point of view of the Liberal government was the way in which they were constantly being manoeuvred, often against their wishes, into taking actions which appeared to be hideously illiberal. Denying half of adult citizens the vote, force-feeding, trying to prevent publication of a newspaper like The Suffragette, which criticised the government – these all ran counter to both the Liberal, with a capital ‘L’, and liberal, with a small ‘l’, tradition.
The next step taken by Asquith’s government continued this trend. It was a ban on open air meetings of the WSPU in London. Home Secretary McKenna directed Sir Edward Henry, who was the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, to tackle what he saw as the problem of suffragette rallies in the capital. It was true that recent meetings at Hyde Park and Wimbledon Common had been the target of counter demonstrations, but this was not the main reason for the ban. It was part of a calculated plan to suppress the Women’s Social and Political Union and prevent them from appearing in public.
Superintendent Quinn, of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, delivered by hand to Harriet Kerr, acting secretary of the WSPU, the following notice on 15 April:
It has been brought to the notice of the Secretary of State that the meetings held by the Women’s Social and Political Union in Hyde Park, Wimbledon Common and other public open spaces in the Metropolitan area have been the occasion of grave disorder, notwithstanding the presence of large forces of police, and I have advised him that, having regard to the character of the speeches delivered thereat, it is not practicable by any police arrangements to obviate the possibility of similar disorder occurring if such meetings are held.
In these circumstances and in view of the fact that it is the avowed policy of the Women’s Social and Political Union to advocate the commission of crimes, the Secretary of State for the Home Department has directed me to instruct the Metropolitan Police to take such steps as are necessary and within their powers to prevent such meetings being held.
The notice was signed by Sir Edward Henry. This was a very ill-judged move by the Home Secretary, because although the Pankhursts and the WSPU had fallen out with both the Labour Party and the more moderate suffragists, nobody liked to see free speech curtailed in this way. Over the next year, not only the WSPU but other groups also sought to defy this ban on open air meetings about women’s suffrage.
On the night of Thursday, 17 April, a bomb was found at Aberdeen Railway Station. It was of the same type used at Lloyd George’s house and consisted of a charge of gunpowder with a burning candle as the fuse. A railway porter put out the candle before it was able to set off the bomb. A week later, the suffragettes had more success with a larger bomb, which did explode.
In Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Assize court, forerunner of our Crown Court, was housed in the old Moot Hall, along with the administrative offices of the Northumberland County Council. Just after dusk on 24 April, the caretaker of the building saw two women emerging from an alleyway at the side of the building. He asked them what they were doing, but they both ran off. When Charles Smith, the caretaker, went into the alleyway, he found a string stretched across it, with a card hanging from the string. It bore the words, ‘Beware dangerous bomb – run for your life’. This was no idle boast, because at that moment, there was a deafening explosion, as a two-foot-long metal pipe, packed with explosives, went off not far from where he was standing. Windows were shattered, the office of the County Surveyor was wrecked and, so powerful was the blast, the chimney of a neighbouring building was blown down.
These were not the only incidents in April. Killarney golf pavilion in Ireland and Perthshire Cricket Club’s pavilion were both burned to the ground, and many letters were damaged in Doncaster. This was in addition to the burning of a number of country houses. A further case of arson that month indicated yet another target towards which the WSPU militants were planning to direct their malice.
Sporting venues were already seen as fair game because they were primarily patronised by men. Men ran the football clubs and golf courses; they also arranged all the horse racing. Emmeline Pankhurst boasted that the damage to golf courses aroused more indignation than any other suffragette activity. There was another area of public life, though dominated by men, and an integral part of the British establishment that the suffragettes had not yet attacked.
During Mrs Pankhurst’s trial in early April, two unoccupied houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb were set on fire. A fire was also started in a church, although the police arrived and soon extinguished it. This was a portent of things to come. The suffragettes had decided that the time had come to call the Church of England to account for its lack of support and, in some cases, downright opposition to the campaign for women’s suffrage. One point of contention was the insistence of the Anglicans in retaining that part of the marriage vow in which brides promise to ‘obey’ their new husbands.
Because it i
s an established church, the Church of England is actually a part of the state in this country. The Head of State is also Head of the Church and so the church is, to a great extent, identified with the actions of the state. The well-known description of the Anglican Church as ‘The Conservative Party at prayer’ was coined by a suffragette, Agnes Maude Royden. It more or less sums up the attitude of many members of the WSPU in the years leading up to the First World War. For them, the Church of England represented reactionary views and an unwillingness to change. Worse, it was a manifestation of the patriarchy and dominated entirely by men. It did not help that a number of churchmen had opposed the very notion of votes for women and attempted to prove by Biblical exegesis that the Deity Himself did not wish for women to have the parliamentary vote.
All of this, at least as far as the militants were concerned, made Anglican churches bastions of male privilege every bit as unacceptable as the golf courses and cricket grounds that they were trying to put out of action. The fire at the church in Hampstead Garden Suburb was a small one, but churches were soon to become major targets of bombing and arson.
The final bomb of April 1913 exploded in Manchester. This bomb was planted at the city’s Free Trade Hall. It was here in 1905 that the very first suffragette act of militancy had taken place, when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney heckled Edward Grey and Winston Churchill. It can hardly have been a coincidence that the very platform on which the two men had been speaking at that time was destroyed by an explosion on 24 April 1913.
It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of every bomb attack and act of arson carried out by the suffragettes in March and April of 1913, as there were simply too many of them. Suffice to say that mansions were burned to the ground in Hertfordshire and Norfolk; there was a plot to blow up the grandstand at Crystal Palace football ground; telegraph wires between Grimsby and Immingham in Lincolnshire were cut; and the burning of a train in Teddington and of a second church took place; the list goes on and on.
