The Suffragette Bombers

by Simon Webb

  On 20 June, the Prime Minister agreed to meet a group of working-class women belonging to Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation. They explained to the Prime Minister that their views would only be respected if they had the vote. After listening carefully to what these women had to say, Asquith gave the clearest hint yet of the direction in which his mind was moving on this subject. According to Sylvia Pankhurst, he said, ‘If the change has to come, we must face it boldly and make it thoroughgoing and democratic in its basis’. This indicates that the Prime Minister was probably thinking in terms of universal franchise. After all, working women like this would be sure to vote for either his party or Labour, with which he was allied.

  Eight days after the meeting between the Prime Minister and representatives of the East London Federation, an event took place in Eastern Europe which was ultimately to bring the suffragette campaign to an abrupt end. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shot dead in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo by a young Serbian terrorist, an action that eventually led to the First World War.

  July saw almost the last of the attacks by the militants of the WSPU. A couple of these were exceedingly odd. On 8 July, for instance, came the attempted bombing of one of the most unlikely targets imaginable. Just before dawn, the nightwatchman at the cottage where Robert Burns was born, not far from the Scottish town of Ayr, heard a noise outside the cottage. He discovered two women placing bombs against the wall of the building. He managed to detain one, although her companion escaped. The bombs were very large, each containing over 8 lbs of blasting powder. Twenty-foot fuses were attached to the devices. It is fortunate for the watchman that he came out when he did, because such a quantity of explosives would have been enough to demolish the building and kill anybody within.

  There were three further terrorist incidents on 12 July, one of which caused serious injury. A bomb exploded in a mailbag on a train travelling between Blackpool and Manchester. Since the suffragettes had been in the habit of sending letter bombs made from phosphorous through the post, it was assumed that they were responsible for the fire caused in the mail van. Six sacks of mail caught fire and this in turn set fire to the wooden carriage of the train in which they were travelling. A guard was severely burned while extinguishing the flames.

  The same day that the train en route to Manchester was set alight by an explosion, a group of militants in Leicester were preparing to attack another part of the railway system. On the London and North Western line, between Leicester and Nuneaton, is the small station of Blaby. In 1914, it was an out-of-the-way spot, where nobody was likely to be around in the early hours of the morning. There were four members in the arson squad who carried cans of naphtha solution to the little station. They began a number of fires, with the result that all the buildings on the ‘down’ side of the tracks were destroyed, including the ticket office. At the scene, they left suffragette literature, so that nobody would be in any doubt about the motive for the attack.

  It is fascinating to look at the subsequent stories of some of those eager young firebrands in later years. One of the women who burned down Blaby Station was Elizabeth Rowley Frisby, whose father was a prominent Leicester businessman. During the First World War, Elizabeth Frisby did a lot of work with the YMCA, for which she was awarded the MBE. After the war, she joined the Conservative Party and in 1927 was elected a member of the City Council. In the same year, she was also appointed a Justice of the Peace. In 1941, she became Lord Mayor of Leicester, the first woman to hold the post.

  In March 1914, a bomb had exploded in the Church of St John the Evangelist in Smith Square, Westminster. Whether coincidentally or not, just round the corner from this church was the house of Home Secretary Reginald McKenna. After the bomb attack, worshippers at the church had been on the alert in case another attempt was made to damage their church. This vigilance paid off, because at the evening service on 12 July, a middle-aged woman was noticed to be behaving in a very strange and furtive manner. As she left at the end of the service, a regular worshipper called Alice Oakley noticed, to her alarm, a flame burning beneath the pew that the other woman had just vacated. She asked the woman if she had perhaps forgotten something. Not receiving a satisfactory reply, Miss Oakley then told Mrs Washbourne, the Deaconess and also the sacristan, Mr Walker.

  While the alarm was spreading in this way, the woman who was the object of such suspicion had hurried out of the church and was heading across Smith Square. What nobody knew was that she had been tailed to the church by plainclothes detectives, because she was the chief suspect in another recent bombing of a church, that of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in south London. The detectives arrested her when they saw the uproar in the church she had just left.

  In the church, the congregation was left to deal with the problem of a large bomb which had a burning candle sticking out of the top. It was carried out onto the steps, and buckets of water thrown over it until the candle was out and the gunpowder thoroughly saturated. As previously noted the rector of the church, Archdeacon Wilberforce, had for many years been an outspoken advocate of women’s suffrage.

  The woman arrested for planting the bomb at St John the Evangelist turned out to be Annie Bell, who was very well-known to the police. As well as being charged in connection with planting the bomb on 12 July, she was also charged with being responsible for the explosion at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. In court, the explosives expert from the Home Office gave evidence that the bomb at Smith Square had contained 5½ lbs of gunpowder, making it large enough to have caused a lot of damage and killed quite a few people had it gone off.

  Many of the suffragette bombers were dangerous and determined. We have looked in some detail at the behaviour of both Emily Davison and Jennie Baines, both of whom were in some ways exceedingly odd and exhibited a desire to cause harm to other people. Annie Bell was of the same stamp, although her conduct was even more peculiar. Were it not for the fact that she thought she was fighting for a good cause, one might perhaps believe that she was a little unbalanced.

  At a demonstration outside Holloway Prison on 22 April 1913, Annie Bell screamed out, to nobody in particular, ‘If any man interferes with me, I have a revolver and will use it!’ This was more than enough for the police, who quickly arrested and searched her. She had been telling the truth, for she did indeed have in her pocket a fully loaded revolver. She had also a firearms certificate which meant that the weapon was legally in her possession, but the police were still not happy about somebody carrying arms like that during a protest. They confiscated the gun.

  At various times during 1913, Annie Bell was arrested and fined trifling sums for obstruction and similar offences. She always refused to pay these, preferring to go to prison. The police began to watch Bell and follow her round unobtrusively. They believed that she was an active terrorist and they were quite right.

  So strange was Annie Bell’s conduct in court, after she had been arrested for the bombing of the two churches, that observers began to doubt her mental state. At her first appearance in the magistrates court, she lay down and asked for a pillow. As she was leaving the court to be remanded, she said to the magistrate, ‘Goodbye, you paid bully’. Her behaviour at the next stage, her committal to the Old Bailey, was even more odd. She sang the Marsellaise, shouted and constantly interrupted the proceedings.

  An alarming fact soon emerged about Annie Bell; she had been released from prison on licence, after going on hunger strike. That somebody could walk free of prison just by refusing to eat for a few days and then carry out bombings in this way was disturbing. It also brought the law into disrepute, because it meant that whatever the crime, suffragettes were essentially exempt from serving their sentence. Little wonder that the prisons had begun force-feeding again.

  Rosslyn Chapel, more properly known as the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew, is perched upon a hill outside Edinburgh. Built in the fourteenth century, it has become famous in recent years for its supposed connections to Freemasonry, the Knight’s Te
mplar, Holy Grail and various other fringe interests. In 2003 it featured prominently in the conspiracy thriller, The Da Vinci Code. So much has been written about this small church and yet few people seem to be aware that it was the site of one of the last suffragette bombings. On Monday, 13 July, a canister full of gunpowder was placed on the ledge of one of the windows of the chapel and then set off by means of a long fuse. Only superficial damage was caused to some of the stonework.

  The police efforts to suppress the WSPU were becoming increasingly successful as the month went on. The headquarters were raided again and Grace Roe, the General Secretary, was arrested for possession of explosives. The publisher of their newspaper, The Suffragette, had been sent to prison for two months for inciting violence. The suffragettes were almost finished as a force to be reckoned with.

  The repercussions of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo continued to reverberate across Europe throughout July 1914. On 23 July, the Austro-Hungarian government sent an ultimatum to Serbia, whom they blamed for Franz Ferdinand’s death. When no satisfactory response was forthcoming, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July. This led to Russia mobilising its army two days later.

  The very last bomb attack carried out by the suffragettes was in Ulster. On the morning of Saturday, 1 August 1914, a bomb exploded outside Lisburn’s Christ Church Cathedral. The blast left a crater four feet deep, blew out a 300-year-old stained glass window and shattered masonry. The next day, police raided the home of a well-known local suffragette and arrested four women found there. It was not only in England that there was deep hostility towards the suffragette bombers. A crowd gathered outside the house in which the women had been arrested and as they were led out they were pelted with stones and mud. The windows of the house were also broken.

  When the women arrested for their involvement in the explosion at the cathedral were taken to court, they were granted bail. However, because local feeling was running so high over the damage to the cathedral, they were taken to the railway station and put on a train to Belfast. News had travelled before them and when the train carrying them stopped at Lambeg, a crowd of women gathered there to denounce the suffragettes for their sacrilegious action. An angry mob was waiting for the train’s arrival at Belfast and the police had to protect the women from attack.

  On the same day as the bomb attack on Christ Church Cathedral, Germany declared war on Russia and then, two days later, on France. The First World War had begun. In the course of their attack on France, the German army had violated Belgian territory. Britain was pledged to defend Belgium and duly declared war on Germany on 4 August. Emmeline Pankhurst was in France at the time with Christabel, having just been released again under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. As soon as Britain declared war, Mrs Pankhurst ordered the WSPU to suspend all activity. She and her daughter returned to their own country and ten days later the Home Secretary announced an amnesty and the unconditional release of all suffragette prisoners. The struggle between the suffragettes and Asquith’s government came to an end by mutual agreement, with neither side winning nor losing.

  There is no telling how the situation would have developed had war not come in the summer of 1914. Both sides were intractable and appeared unwilling to give an inch. As it was, Emmeline Pankhurst quickly lost interest in the struggle for women’s suffrage, throwing her energies into the fight against Germany. She showed no further enthusiasm for the subject of votes for women and it was left to the moderate suffragists to negotiate the deal which eventually led to the enfranchisement of at least some women.

  The extent to which the Pankhursts changed their view about matters may be seen in a statement made by Emmeline, when giving evidence during a court case, which we shall examine in the next chapter. For over a decade David Lloyd George had been the arch enemy of the suffragettes. Speaking of this same man in 1917, Mrs Pankhurst said that: ‘We declare that there is no life more valuable to the nation than that of Mr Lloyd George. We would endanger our own lives, rather than his should suffer’. How times had changed!

  Chapter Ten

  The Plot to Kill the Prime Minister

  ‘ We will hang Lloyd George from a sour apple tree. ’

  (Coded letter from Alice Wheeldon, produced at her trial in 1917)

  Many suffragettes reserved a special place of loathing in their hearts for David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister. This was a little odd really, because he was a dedicated supporter of female suffrage. His real sin in the eyes of the suffragettes was his failure to endorse Emmeline Pankhurst’s own, idiosyncratic vision of equal suffrage, meaning, during the years of suffragette militancy, a franchise largely restricted to the middle and upper classes.

  Whatever the reason, he became the focus of a huge amount of venomous hatred from many members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Some of the actions directed against Lloyd George, we have already looked at – the bombing of his new house, the sending of explosives to him through the post and the attack by Emily Davison on an old man who had the misfortune merely to look too much like the Chancellor. For some former suffragettes, this detestation of Lloyd George lingered on, even after the Pankhursts had made their peace with him.

  The Pankhursts might have become Lloyd George’s friends and enthusiastically supported the fight against Germany, but there were some former suffragettes for whom this was a step too far. They did not subscribe to the bellicose patriotism of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and still regarded Lloyd George as the devil incarnate. These were women who opposed the war on ideological grounds and hated Lloyd George all the more after 1914 for his role in organising the nation to support the military. While the Pankhursts and their supporters were handing out white feathers to men who were not in uniform, other former members of the WSPU were doing everything in their power to sabotage the war effort. One suffragette who felt this way was Alice Wheeldon, who lived in Derby.

  We have already seen that some of the most dangerous suffragettes were willing and able to undertake actions which could result in loss of life: Emily Davison; Jennie Baines, who blew up the train near Manchester; Annie Bell, the woman who planted bombs in London churches. Alice Wheeldon was among this group.

  Alice Wheeldon was 48 when the war began in 1914. She had been responsible for various arson attacks on behalf of the WSPU, including burning down the church at Breadsall on 5 June 1914. In 1916, she was running a second-hand clothes shop in Derby. She lived with two of her children, 25-year-old Hettie and 24-year-old William. Another daughter, Winnie, was married to a chemist called Alfred Mason and lived with him in Southampton. Alice Wheeldon’s husband, William, was a commercial traveller and so infrequently at home.

  At the end of 1916, the authorities had their eye on the Wheeldon household and suspected that they were the centre of an anti-war conspiracy. Specifically, it was thought that Alice Wheeldon and her children were sheltering deserters and conscientious objectors in their home. In 1916, the government brought in the Military Service Act, which meant that all able-bodied men aged between 18 and 41 would be required to join the army. Some men refused to do so on the grounds that military service went against their conscience and many of these men served in ambulance brigades, while others ended up in prison. When there was no more room for them in the prisons, the Home Office set up camps where they were held.

  There is not the least doubt and nor did Alice Wheeldon subsequently deny it, that deserters from the army stayed at the Wheeldons’ house. They were part of a network of people who tried to help such men leave the country. Her own son William was due to be called up and Mrs Wheeldon was desperately anxious to see him travel abroad and so avoid ending up in the trenches of the Western Front.

  A section of MI5 heard about the activities of the women in Derby and despatched an undercover agent, Alex Gordon, to pose as a conscientious objector on the run from the police. Formerly a radical journalist, he was now being paid to work as an informer or possibly a
gent provocateur. His immediate superior was Herbert Booth. On 27 December 1916, Gordon, who went under a variety of aliases, arrived at Alice Wheeldon’s house and asked to be sheltered as a conscientious objector. Mrs Wheeldon arranged for him to stay at another woman’s house and then, a few days later, Gordon returned to Alice Wheeldon, accompanied by a man whom he introduced as ‘Comrade Bert’. This was the MI5 agent Herbert Booth.

  It is now that things become complicated and two very different versions of the events of the next month emerge at the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey. There was no dispute that Alice Wheeldon spoke in very disparaging terms about Lloyd George, who had by that time become Prime Minister. Indeed, she spoke so unflatteringly of him that at her trial, the prosecuting counsel claimed that she used ‘language which would be disgusting and obscene in the mouth of the lowest class of criminal’. In reality this amounted to no more than describing Lloyd George as a ‘bugger’. She also used the word ‘bloody’ fairly freely, which was unusual for a woman at that time.

  While snooping around her home, Alex Gordon found that Alice Wheeldon communicated with others who shared her views of Lloyd George by means of a code. To decipher letters written in this code, it was necessary to know a key sentence, which was, ‘We will hang Lloyd George from a sour apple tree’. Shortly after meeting Alex Gordon, Alice Wheeldon contacted her daughter Winnie in Southampton and asked for her to obtain some poison from her husband, who was lecturing in chemistry at that time. On 4 January 1917, Alfred Mason, Winnie’s husband, sent four glass phials to Derby, two of which contained strychnine and two curare. At the end of that month, Alice Wheeldon, her daughters Hettie and Winnie and Alfred Mason were all arrested and charged with conspiring to murder the Prime Minister.