The Suffragette Bombers

by Simon Webb

  No responsible government can allow a band of terrorists to rampage across the country unchecked. Regardless of the justice of the demands, constant violence in the form of fires, explosions and other damage to property tends to make governments look weak and ineffectual. For reasons outlined in Chapter 2, looking weak was the last thing that Asquith’s administration could afford to do at this time. By the end of April, the decision had been taken at the Home Office that a crackdown would need to take place on the WSPU. A raid was accordingly planned for the end of the month. This operation was successful in that it netted all those leaders of the WSPU whom the government wished to place on trial, but it failed to bring an end to the terrorism. If anything, the pace quickened after the suffragette leaders were behind bars. The WSPU seemed to be like a hydra, and as fast as one head was removed, another sprouted.

  Before looking at the raid which was to take place on the headquarters of the WSPU on the last day of April 1913, perhaps we should pause for a moment and ask ourselves a few questions about the motivation of those who were starting the fires and planting the bombs, as well as of the leaders who were inciting, encouraging and financing them. Did they really believe that their militancy could deliver the parliamentary vote to women or could there also have been other reasons for their behaviour?

  There were probably a number of explanations for the increasing number of terrorist attacks carried out by WSPU members in 1913 and 1914. For one thing, the vandalism and arson had caused many members to leave and discouraged new ones from joining. In 1909/ 1910, there were around 4,500 new applications for membership; this had dropped to fewer than 1,000 in the year 1912/1913. At the same time, the number of women joining the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was soaring. Many married women left the WSPU at this time and those who remained tended to be single young women, more ready to become involved in illegal activity.

  There were also older women, of course; some, like Emily Davison, had little going on in their lives apart from their suffragette activism. For them and also for many younger women, the WSPU functioned as a substitute family, an all-female environment very different from the day to day lives they might otherwise expect to be leading. Life could be pretty dull for women in Edwardian Britain and the militancy offered the chance for excitement, adventure and travel. They could get up to all sorts of daring exploits, even crossing swords with the police and it was all in a good cause! A number of suffragettes, including Annie Kenney, admitted to feeling bored during the ‘truce’ of 1911 and glad when it ended and they could get back to smashing windows and setting fire to things.

  It is quite possible to get a taste for violence and danger; one can almost become addicted to it. If this happens, then life can seem flat and uninteresting in the absence of thrills. After a while, the violence becomes an end in itself and the original motive can be forgotten. We see this happening in modern football hooliganism, for example, and the same thing occurs during terrorist ceasefires. The terrorists become restless and eager to get back to the serious business of planting bombs.

  There is no doubt that women who acquired a taste for violence and destruction could be found in the WSPU. These women found their ordinary lives lacking in the excitement they found in militant actions. Such a one was Jennie Baines who, it will be recalled, was among the paid organisers of the WSPU who tried to burn down the Theatre Royal when it was full of people. Her career with the WSPU is almost a case study in the kind of person who picks up a taste for violence.

  Sarah Jane Baines, known as Jennie, was almost 40 when she was first involved in militant action with the WSPU. She was present at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1905 when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were arrested after hitting a policeman. In 1908, she was the first suffragette to be tried by a jury on a charge of unlawful assembly. The following year she was on the roof of a building in Birmingham, throwing slates down at the police and causing injuries to several people. In 1912, Jennie Baines was in Dublin, where she was involved in the arson and bombing at the theatre where Asquith was due to speak. The following year, she was living in the North of England. On 8 July 1913, a bomb exploded in a railway carriage in a siding at Newton Heath. Jennie Baines was arrested and charged with this offence, but jumped bail and went to Australia.

  Here was a woman who, at the age of 47, was still committing acts of violence. This lifestyle gave her an identity. So enjoyable did she find breaking windows, starting fires and setting off bombs, that she was unable to break the habit, despite being imprisoned on a number of occasions. There is a strong suspicion that she was involved in many other attacks for which she was not caught. Fires and explosions certainly seemed to follow Jennie Baines and then cease whenever she moved to another district. Writing in Votes for Women, Judith Smart says that Baines, ‘remembered the suffragette years as her peak experience, when life seemed to take on shape and meaning and an enduring, exalted significance’. This perhaps sums up accurately the feelings of many of the women conducting the guerrilla warfare at that time.

  It was not only the women carrying out the attacks who felt this, ‘exalted significance’, which perhaps their lives had previously been lacking. This satisfaction may have been, at least in the case of some of the most important leaders of the WSPU, more important than the cause itself. Christabel Pankhurst, for instance, was open about the fact that she revelled in the terrorism which she had instigated and now controlled from the safety of her home in Paris. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who fell out with the WSPU over this very question, wrote later that Christabel, ‘never made any secret of the fact that to her the means were even more important than the end’. For Christabel Pankhurst, and perhaps to a lesser extent her mother, the militancy was significant in itself, regardless of whether or not it achieved or retarded its stated aim. There was a nobility about the guerrilla warfare being waged in Britain, which had a spiritual significance for women.

  It is revealing to read what Christabel Pankhurst herself had to say about the terrorist campaign. On 29 May 1914, she wrote in The Suffragette: ‘The Militants will rejoice when victory comes in the shape of the vote, and yet, mixed with their joy will be regret that the most glorious chapter in women’s history is closed and the militant fight over – over, while so many have not yet known the exultation, the rapture of battle’. Did she really believe that the churches which were being burned down on her instructions, the bombs exploding in public places, the injuries caused by placing dangerous chemicals in postboxes, that this was really ‘the most glorious chapter in women’s history’? Did she honestly ‘exult’ in all this? What kind of person would ‘regret’ the end of terrorist attacks?

  There is another factor that should not be neglected when asking ourselves about the motive for the increasingly frequent explosions and fires for which the WSPU were responsible at this time. Documents seized by the police and read out at court proceedings indicated that the organisation was awash with money. This came not from the shilling membership fee paid by new members, but was rather given by a number of rich supporters, some of whom had pledged over £1,000 each year. The more violent the actions of the suffragettes, the more money that was given by such people. The WSPU might have been shrinking in 1913 from the point of view of membership numbers and popular support, but as far as the paid staff were concerned, they were enjoying an unprecedented boom in 1913 and 1914. Put bluntly, the leaders and organisers of the WSPU were doing very nicely out of this new prosperity.

  Many women working in factories and mills were earning less than £1 a week at this time. By contrast, organisers at the WSPU were being paid £2, £3, £4 or even, in the case of Christabel Pankhurst, £10 a week. Annie Kenney, who had left school at the age of 13 to work 12 hours a day in a mill, found herself earning four guineas a week by 1913 – four times as much as the average worker.

  Some idea of the lifestyles being led by people like Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney may be gauged by the accounts that they subsequ
ently gave of their lives at this time. By March, 1912, Christabel had left England and gone to live in Paris. From there, she directed the operations of the WSPU, by appointing her friend Annie Kenney to run the organisation in her absence. Kenney travelled to Paris every week to receive her instructions. When she first visited Christabel in Paris, Annie Kenney was rather overawed to be received at the salon of Princesse de Polignac, a friend of Christabel’s.

  For the whole of the two and a half years that Christabel Pankhurst lived in Paris she did no work at all. All her living expenses were being met by the WSPU. These expenses included an apartment at 8 Avenue de la Grande Armee in the centre of Paris and only a hundred yards or so from the Arc de Triomphe. While other members of the WSPU were on hunger strike and being forcibly fed in Holloway Prison, Christabel Pankhurst was living the life of a well-off lady in the heart of Paris, hobnobbing with princesses.

  This state of affairs, with the Pankhursts and their associates living very comfortably on salaries that the ordinary working man or woman could not aspire to, could be prolonged only by escalating the violence. Conversely, the funds might start to dry up if the terrorism died down, as indeed they did during the 1911 truce. This does not, of course, mean that these women were solely in it for the money, but calculations of this sort must have occurred to them.

  A glance at the accounts of the WSPU would be enough to warn them of the potential ill effects of scaling back the violence. There was a direct correlation between the levels of militancy and the amount of cash flowing into the coffers of the WSPU. In the year 1907/1908, the annual income was just £7,545. The following year, as things hotted up, this had tripled to £21,213. The following year, 1909/1910, it had shot up to £33,027. It was very clear that the more violent and aggressive the actions of the suffragettes, the more money wealthy people would send their way. Most significantly, in 1910/1911, the period covered by the so-called ‘truce’, when militancy was abandoned, the income of the WSPU began for the first time to fall, to £29,000. The message was plain, increasing violence brought in money and peaceful methods meant a drop in income.

  It would be interesting to know more about the motivations of these wealthy backers, who apparently had an interest in fomenting terrorism in this way. In May 1913, following the arrest of the leadership of the WSPU, the police stated that they had seized a list of subscribers to the WSPU funds. It was said that it would create a sensation if the names on this list were to be published. The implication was that in addition to those who genuinely supported the aims of the WSPU, there were others who had more sinister motives for stirring up violence and unrest.

  The Home Office was certainly on the trail of the people financing the terrorists. Plans were mooted for pursuing those who had been giving large amounts and even making it a criminal offence to give money to the WSPU in this way. In fact, shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914, it was explicitly stated by the Home Secretary that moves were afoot to take both civil and criminal proceedings against the people who were bankrolling the WSPU.

  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 semi-automatic 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 (pictured centre) 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.

  Chapter Seven

  The Terrorist Campaign Gathers Pace

  ‘ Have we your sympathy? If not, beware! Votes for Women! ’

  (Note addressed to members of Haslemere Urban District Council, included with a bomb left at Haslemere Station in 1913)

  Since members of the Women’s Social and Political Union had begun to commit acts of vandalism and arson, the government had acted against various individuals on a case-by-case basis. Those caught in the act of starting fires had been prosecuted, as had others like Emmeline Pankhurst, who had merely been encouraging violence. If Asquith and his cabinet had hoped that this would put an end to the burning down of buildings and planting of bombs, then the events of April 1913 would have proved them quite wrong. Acts of terrorism had increased greatly since Mrs Pankhurst’s trial at the beginning of the month. The Home Secretary and Prime Minister now decided that a more radical approach should be taken. Rather than arresting this person or that, an attempt should be made to close down the Women’s Social and Political Union altogether and prevent the publication of their newspaper, The Suffragette.

  The morning of Wednesday, 30 April 1913, was just another day in the headquarters of the WSPU. It was a busy place, occupying four floors of Lincoln’s Inn House, an imposing building in central London, which still stands today. The WSPU had plenty of money and no expense had been spared in employing staff to type letters, answer telephones and generally carry out the day to day running of the organisation. It was just another working day, with nothing to warn anyone in the building of what was about to occur.

  At 11.30 am, a fleet of taxis pulled up outside Lincoln’s Inn House and from them leapt 45 plain clothes policemen from Scotland Yard. At the same moment, a large contingent of uniformed officers, who had been hiding in a side street, emerged and the combined force stormed the building. The raid was brilliantly executed. Ten detectives secured each floor and took control at once of the telephones to ensure that no warning was passed to any other members of the WSPU. The office staff were allowed to leave and the leaders who were present were all arrested on charges of conspiring to cause malicious damage. Among those present in the building but not arrested, were Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans, both of whom had been involved in the attempt to burn down the Theatre Royal in Dublin the previous year. Later that day, a removal van pulled up and every document in the place was removed.

  At the same time that the raid on the suffragette headquarters was taking place, police descended upon the premises of the Victoria House Press, who had only that week agreed to start printing The Suffragette. The previous printer had become too nervous to continue, fearing action of this very sort. The police confiscated the type that had been set, ready to print the next edition of the newspaper, and two days later they arrested the manager of the printing works. While the raids were taking
place at Lincoln’s Inn House and the printer‘s, Annie Kenney‘s flat was also searched.

  On Friday, 2 May Annie Kenney, who had been visiting Christabel Pankhurst in Paris, was arrested when she returned to England. In the absence of the Pankhursts, Kenney was in charge of the WSPU. By the end of the week, the chief organiser of the WSPU, its secretary, financial secretary, the assistant editor of The Suffragette and several other people were all under lock and key. The offices had been ransacked, all their records removed and their newspaper closed down. It must have seemed to the police and the Home Secretary that it was a good day’s work. There was every chance that by removing the entire leadership in this way, they had effectively put an end to the WSPU and that the violence would now stop.

  When the women who had been arrested at the WSPU headquarters appeared at Bow Street court, there was an indication of the seriousness with which the case was viewed by the authorities. The Director of Public Prosecutions himself was present at the hearing before the magistrate to state the case for the prosecution. All of those charged in connection with causing malicious damage were remanded in custody. There was also a man in the dock, analytical chemist Edwy Clayton, whose role turned out to be an interesting one. He had been advising Annie Kenney, the acting leader of the WSPU, on explosives and suitable targets for attack. He too was refused bail. Any hope that the terrorist attacks would now end were to be dashed that very afternoon.