Ministers did not have to wait long for their lesson in Unionist determination. The opponents of Home Rule decided to raise a Volunteer Force – 100,000 men, between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, who were to be organised around the Orange Lodges in county battalions. At first they drilled with dummy rifles, but gradually real weapons were smuggled into the country. Earl Roberts, by then the senior Field Marshal of the British Army, on the ‘retired list’ but still in possession of the King’s Commission, recommended the appointment of General Sir George Richardson (late Indian Army) as the Volunteers’ commanding officer, with Colonel Hacket Pain as his Chief of Staff. Yet the Nationalists continued to treat partition as a bad joke and no one in the government, apart from Winston Churchill, seemed even offended by the incipient mutiny. When Churchill told the Liberals of Bradford that the Ulster Voluntary Force (UVF) was ‘a self-elected body composed of people who, to put it plainly, are engaged in a treasonable conspiracy’,33 his colleagues attributed his outburst to the desire to increase his popularity within the party. They were certainly not in favour of his view that ‘the time has come to go forward and put these grave matters to the test’.
So the idea of partition was allowed to take root and grow. Carson wrote to Bonar Law as if it were already accepted in principle. ‘A difficulty arises in defining Ulster. My view is that the whole of Ulster should be excluded, but the minimum would be the six plantation counties.’34 The King – partly out of Protestant sympathy and partly because he feared a civil war – told Churchill and Bonar Law, while they were staying with him at Balmoral, that partition was the proper solution. Churchill, never the most consistent of politicians, made a speech which demanded that Ulster’s special status be considered with respect and understanding.
John Redmond made his party’s position clear. He was prepared to compromise on the extent of the Irish parliament’s powers but not on Home Rule. ‘Irish Nationalists [will never be] assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation. Ireland is a unit.’35 Nevertheless, Asquith began to consider several variations on the partition theme in the hope of finding an agreed solution. Ulster could be given administrative autonomy within the new Ireland. The Six Counties, or Ulster as a whole, might be exempted from Home Rule for three or six years. Redmond – realising that nothing better was on offer – agreed, with the greatest of reluctance, to six. As Asquith might have anticipated, the concession solved nothing. Carson rejected what he described as a ‘sentence of death with stay of execution’.36
There was nothing left for Asquith to do except insist that the law, as passed by the imperial Parliament, would have to be obeyed. The Orange Lodges chose to describe the operation of democracy as ‘The Coercion of Ulster’ – a policy which, in their view, justified the creation of what amounted to a private army. One hundred thousand men – under the command of retired or half-pay officers, supported by their own medical, transport and intelligence corps and armed with machine guns as well as rifles – were ready to do battle with the British Army. However, there was some doubt whether or not the regiments stationed at the Curragh in County Kildare were prepared to do battle with them. When General Sir Arthur Paget, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, visited the War Office in London to receive orders as to how he should respond to the anticipated emergency, he expressed some concern about the attitude of the men under his command. He was told that civil war was not expected imminently and there was certainly no plan to suppress expressions of dissent. Troops would, however, guard railway junctions and reservoirs. What, Paget asked, if the troops refused?
The response revealed some sympathy for Ulster’s cause. Officers with families in Northern Ireland would be allowed, if trouble broke out, to disappear from their units in order to look after their wives and children. But the rest – it went without saying – would be expected to obey King’s Regulations. Paget returned to Ireland and – probably as a result more of stupidity than malice – called his officers together and repeated what he had been told in terms so extreme that he conveyed very little of the War Office’s true intention. Officers not resident in Ulster were offered the opportunity of either agreeing to implement government policy or being dismissed from the service. General Sir Hubert Gough, commanding the Curragh’s Cavalry Brigade, immediately reported that he and fifty-nine of his officers chose dismissal. The Curragh had mutinied.
The rebellion was not limited to the cavalry. A majority of the infantry officers in Ireland decided that they too would leave the Army but were persuaded not to offer their resignations until they received news of the War Office’s reaction to the crisis. General Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of Aldershot District, told Sir Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, that half of his officers would resign their commissions if Gough were to be disciplined. General Wilson reported the news to Lord French, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, with undisguised pleasure. He had spent much of the previous years discussing with fellow Unionists within the Army how the government’s policy and the will of Parliament could be frustrated.
The government panicked. Instead of condemning the ‘mutiny’ out of hand, it attempted to placate the mutineers by assuring them that the dispute had been the result of a ‘misunderstanding’. French, with ministers’ agreement, gave Gough a written statement which contained assurances that the Army would not be called upon to suppress dissent in Ulster. The paragraph which made that intention explicit went far further than the Cabinet intended. It was added to the document by Lord French and James Seeley, the Secretary of State for War, after ministers had seen what they believed to be the final draft. Troops, the late addition promised, ‘would not be called upon to enforce the present Home Rule Bill on Ireland’. Gough returned in triumph to Ulster. Triumph at the Curragh was matched by outrage in Downing Street. When French and Seeley admitted that they had tampered with the Cabinet statement, both men were forced to resign. Asquith himself became Secretary of State for War in the hope that the appointment would make clear that the Constitution would be enforced. Whatever the future of Ireland, it would be decided by the lawful government.
The Ulster Volunteer Force continued to make preparations for secession. At Larne and Bangor, police and customs officers felt able only to watch as 24,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition were landed to use in the fight to keep Ulster within the Union. Supporters of the Orange cause concentrated, with single-minded dedication, on the achievement of their objective. The Green battalions were, on the other hand, faced with a major distraction.
In 1911, Dublin employers had founded an association to ‘meet combination with combination’ and to seize the industrial initiative from Jim Larkin and his Irish Transport and General Workers Union. For two years the balance of power had remained in favour of the Trades Council. Then William Walter Murphy – whose many commercial interests included the Dublin Tramway Company and the Independent newspaper – took command of the employers’ campaign. On Friday 15 August, 1913, he sacked forty workers from the Independent’s despatch department. The provocation had the result for which he hoped. Other workers struck in sympathy. In response, Murphy demanded that all his employees sign an understanding not to respond to an anticipated call for industrial action. The following week, tram drivers, apparently spontaneously, stopped work. All Murphy’s workmen were ‘locked out’. A protest meeting, called by Larkin and meant to assemble in O’Connell Street, was ruled to be illegal. Larkin, despite hiding in the house of Constance Markievicz and, for a time, wearing a false beard, was arrested. In London the Daily Herald asked, not unreasonably, why Carson had not been arrested for committing an identical offence.37
There followed days of trade union demonstrations, all of which were dispersed by unremitting police brutality. Outside the Metropole Hotel, ‘There was a continual rapping of batons on people’s heads … You could hear from the shrieks and cries that the same thing was happening opposite the Metropole and the Post Office.’38 Although, back in 1908
, Larkin had argued for the creation of an Irish Citizens’ Army – partly to fight for Home Rule and partly to defend workers’ rights – there were aspects of the Irish character which he never fully understood. At the height of the dispute with the Dublin Tramway Company he arranged for the starving children of strikers to be sent on holiday to England in the homes of sympathetic British trade unionists – but he could not guarantee that the benefactors would be Catholic. To his amazement the children were ‘rescued’ for the true faith by a band of marauding priests who intercepted the holiday-makers, first in the public wash-house, then on the road to Kingston dock, and eventually on the deck of the ferry which was carrying them to perdition.39
The events of August 1913 convinced sceptics of the need for a paramilitary organisation – a notion which was encouraged by Republicans with no real interest in the industrial struggle, but a single-minded determination to prepare for the political battle which lay ahead. The Irish Citizens’ Army was formed with its headquarters at Liberty Hall, the home of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, under the command of James Connolly, Larkin’s deputy.
So the rival forces were assembled for a conflict that seemed only months away. The future of Ireland, as Arthur Griffith predicted, was to be decided not in Parliament but on the streets and in the hills of Ireland itself. But before the new boundaries could be defined, the Great War – which marked the end of Edwardian Britain – intervened. Gough, Wilson and French became household names. Millions of Irishmen fought for the Empire they longed to leave. After August 1914, in Dublin, no less than in London, nothing was ever the same again.
*Cardinal Vaughan’s contribution to Edwardian life and thought is discussed in Chapter 17, ‘Would You Believe It?’
CHAPTER 10
Votes for Women!
The real campaign for women’s suffrage, like so much else that has come to characterise Edwardian England, was born in the reign of Queen Victoria, but only made a major impact on history when her son was on the throne. Ever since the Greeks created a democracy of sorts in Athens there had been women who rebelled against the absurd injustice of second-class status. But it was always difficult – usually impossible – to defy the prevailing prejudices of male-dominated societies and put together an ‘organisation’ to further their cause. The Great Reform Bill of 1867 stimulated the idea that women might be included in the extended franchise. In 1887 the Victorian pioneers Lydia Becker and Millicent Fawcett became founding members and presidents of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, but their political endeavours were probably less influential than the social and economic pressures towards greater equality. Chief amongst them was the Married Women’s Property Act of 1883.
It was not the first step towards social emancipation. Girton College had opened in Hitchin in 1869 and moved to Cambridge in 1872. Six years later, Lady Margaret Hall had been founded in Oxford. London University had long admitted women undergraduates and the Victoria University, with colleges in the great provincial cities, had welcomed them from its start at the turn of the century. For years women were allowed to study in Oxford and Cambridge without being awarded Oxford and Cambridge degrees. But, when women came regularly at, or near to, the top of the examination list, it became increasingly difficult to deny them formal graduation – though Cambridge managed to resist for fifty years. So in Edwardian Britain it was already being gradually accepted that women were as clever as men. When it was also agreed that, once married, they remained able and entitled to own property and run a company (rather than hand over both their bank accounts and their businesses to their husbands), their right to vote became more difficult to dispute.
In 1884, a backbench Suffrage Bill, which offered the vote to single women who were also householders, was defeated in the House of Commons. A year later, when the County Finance Bill proposed to increase the electorate to between three and five million and introduce the principle of ‘one vote, one value’, a women’s suffrage amendment was put down on the order paper. It was rumoured that Salisbury, the Prime Minister, and his two principal lieutenants, Northcote and Hicks Beach, were sympathetic.1 And The Times called women’s suffrage ‘the trump card which Lord Beaconsfield kept in his hand’.2 But Gladstone threatened to drop the whole bill if the new clause was added and the amendment was lost by 271 votes to 135. By 1886, the idea of ‘votes for women’ had become so popular amongst MPs that the Second Reading of a Suffrage Bill was actually carried after a brief private members’ debate. In the same year, Mrs E. E. Dawson graduated from the Irish College of Surgeons and became the first woman legally entitled to perform operations.
Even without the vote, women were beginning to demand – and in some cases exercise – the freedom which men enjoyed. Lady Harberton founded the Rational Dress Society and offered a prize for the design of knickerbockers which were at once serviceable and seemly. It is an item of dress that most accounts of Edwardian ‘style’ omit to mention, though it is no less representative than the clothes which are often said to typify the age. The huge ‘picture’ hats, the bustles and the long dresses with the flowing trains were worn by an infinitesimal proportion of the female population.
In a sense, none of the alternative explanation for ‘Edwardian women’s dress’ is of much consequence. The styles were less symbolic of an age than of a class. The ‘wasp waists’ were proclamations that women whose corsets constricted their breath and their digestion were not required to inconvenience themselves with physical effort. The high neck was less a sign of the era’s modesty than a desire to copy Queen Alexandra who, according to rival rumours, hoped to hide the marks of syphilis, smallpox or old age. The hobble skirt – which forced even the most robust woman to mince – was either a wilful decision to make women walk like mechanical dolls or a recognition that, the muddy roads having been eliminated from the cities, it was no longer necessary to hitch up skirts to cross from side to side. The brassiere, introduced in 1912, was either a decision to emphasise sexuality (unlikely, since it helped to reduce the Victorians’ extravagant levels of décolletage) or an aid to maternal health and hygiene.
The women about whom Charles Booth wrote in his survey of the London working class lived in another world – one which even the dedicated social scientist did not fully understand. ‘There is a consensus of opinion … that while there is more drinking, there is less drunkenness than formerly and that the increase in drinking is to be laid mainly to the account of the female sex. This latter phase seems to be one of the unexpected results of the emancipation of women.’3 He does not seem to have considered the possibility that women’s increasing influence on men might have contributed to the reduction in drunkenness. But, despite male prejudices, women of every sort were on the march. All they needed to fuse their demands into a coherent movement was leadership. It was provided by a combination of fate and the Pankhurst family.
Richard Pankhurst was a barrister who moved from London to Manchester to practise more successfully on the Northern Circuit. He brought with him his wife, Emmeline, his daughters, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, and his son, Harry. Emmeline, who had presided over a radical salon in London, had always possessed social pretensions. When she left the Lancashire and Cheshire Union of the Women’s Liberal Federation and joined the Independent Labour Party at the end of the 1890s, she had complained that she was no longer invited to civic functions in Manchester Town Hall. But the gaps in her diary were soon filled by visiting socialist celebrities who stayed at her house during visits to the North-West. Keir Hardie, John and Katherine Bruce Glasier, Tom Mann and Robert Blatchford were among them.
Keir Hardie became a particular friend – attracted, it seems certain, by the prospect of the company of lively young women. Hardie’s susceptibilities have not been included in the miasma of myth and legend which surround him as the first Labour Member of Parliament and first Leader of the Party, but from the mist of folklore, some certain facts can be extracted. He was a self-educated miner whose commitme
nt to the moderate form of socialism which became the British model of that philosophy was absolute. Hardie was a brilliant orator, a poor tactician and he wore, not a cloth cap, but a deer stalker’s hat. His historical importance was the determination he displayed to make ‘Labour’ an independent political organisation. His support for the Pankhursts adds a footnote to his paragraph in the history books.
In 1894, after failing to secure a seat on the Manchester School Board, Emmeline Pankhurst stood as an Independent Labour Party candidate for the Board of Guardians and won. By then, Richard Pankhurst had become so prominent in the party that he was nominated to contest Gorton on its behalf in the 1895 by-election. Although the Liberal candidate stood down in his favour, he lost. From then on Richard Pankhurst concentrated his energies on good (generally legal) works. He defended the ILP against the Manchester Council when the party was prosecuted for holding unauthorised public meetings on a piece of public land called Boggart Hole Clough, supported the engineers of Trafford Park in their campaign for an eight-hour day and represented (as honorary counsel) the Peak and District Preservation Committee in its campaign to secure a right of way over Kinder Scout. Despite a rapid deterioration in his health – which his family seemed not to notice or thought it best to ignore – he must have enjoyed considerable professional success. In 1898 his wife took her eldest daughter, Christabel, on holiday to Geneva. They got as far as Paris, where Emmeline intended to revive memories of time she had spent there as a girl. Then the telegram arrived. Her husband had collapsed with stomach pains.
Mother and daughter left at once for England. On the train from London to Manchester she read, in a fellow passenger’s newspaper, that her husband was dead. His coffin was covered in red roses and carnations and the carriage on which it was borne to the cemetery was accompanied by an escort of socialist cyclists from the Clarion Wheelers. The family moved to a less expensive Manchester suburb and rented a smaller house. They spent the next few months in recrimination and anxiety. Which of them deserved most blame for the failure to persuade Richard that his stomach ulcer needed treatment, and how were they going to survive in the years that lay ahead?
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