The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Christabel Pankhurst wrote to C. P. Scott asking, ‘Can you and other Liberals wonder that we have come to the conclusion that we must take up again the weapons we laid down after the general election?’38 But, although there was another great demonstration in Hyde Park (forty platforms and one hundred and fifty speakers) and the Prime Minister’s motor car was damaged in Downing Street, the year petered out comparatively peacefully. A rally in the Albert Hall at the end of January 1911 was enlivened by the first performance of Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women. Although the King’s Speech for that year did not mention votes for women, a Liberal MP won first place in the private member’s ballot and announced his intention of introducing the Conciliation Bill once more. Christabel Pankhurst promised her support. Both Asquith and Grey gave assurances that time would be made available to complete all its stages. Lloyd George again had doubts about ‘a bill which would, on balance, add hundreds of thousands of voters to the strength of the Tory Party’.39 The Liberal government should, he argued, decide whether it ‘would put workmen’s wives on the register as well as spinsters and widows or whether it will have no female franchise at all’.

  So Asquith announced the government’s intention at last to bring forward a bill to extend the male franchise and added that it could be amended to include votes for women. Christabel, firmly in charge of the WSPU, was outraged. She had agreed to compromise on conciliation. The offer of all-or-nothing had outflanked her and made her look both weak and foolish. Anger turned to rage when, at last, the Prime Minister agreed to meet a WSPU deputation. He told them that, personally, he was opposed to votes for women. Christabel made herself ridiculous by saying they would find a new Prime Minister.

  Another deputation was organised, without any real hope of a meeting, for 21 November. The participants were told to bring a change of clothing – prison was not so much to be expected as sought and welcomed. As Mrs Pethick-Lawrence led her troops towards Westminster she boosted their morale with the reminder that Churchill’s relaxed prison regulations still held good.

  A second group of women had assembled at the Women’s Press Shop. As well as a change of clothing, they brought hammers and stones. They spent the day vandalising government property. So began an accelerating campaign of moral intimidation and physical destruction. On 13 December, Emily Wilding Davison set fire to three pillar boxes at the beginning of a rampage across the country which included locking herself to the statue of Lord Falkland in the Palace of Westminster’s St Stephen’s Hall and only ended when she fell under the King’s horse, halfway through the 1913 Derby. Emmeline, touring America, told her admiring audience, ‘The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable in modern politics.’ At home, suffragettes took her at her word. On 1 March, they smashed their way down Regent Street, Bond Street, Oxford Street and the Strand. Three days later, they rampaged along Knightsbridge and Kensington High Street.

  C. P. Scott judged: ‘They are mad. Christabel has lost all sense of proportion.’ She had not, however, lost all instinct for self-preservation. True to her injunction that the WSPU leaders should avoid gaol, she left London disguised as a nurse and took the Folkestone boat train to Boulogne. Then she moved on to Paris. She stayed there until August 1914. The suffragists had lost their leader and Christabel had sacrificed much of the heroic reputation which she had once enjoyed.

  There was talk of applying to the French government for Christabel’s extradition, but Reginald McKenna, who had succeeded Churchill as Home Secretary, was content for her to remain in Paris. Other suffragists served out their prison terms, but Emmeline and the Pethick-Lawrences were granted bail as they awaited trial on the greater charge of conspiracy. Emmeline foolishly chose to defend herself. Her argument that she was motivated by politics, not innate violence, could only have ended in conviction. Despite the jury’s recommendation of clemency, she was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Martyrdom allowed her to claim the leadership of the WSPU. She established her position by expelling the Pethick-Lawrences (her only rivals) and telling an Albert Hall rally on 17 October 1912, ‘Be militant in your own way. Those of you who can break windows – break them.’40

  Despite all the brave talk, the WSPU was degenerating into a Pankhurst fiefdom and the unity of even that limited alliance was put in jeopardy by Sylvia’s sudden discovery of socialism and her decision to support George Lansbury in a campaign for universal suffrage for both sexes and all classes. But in January 1913 the Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that the Franchise Bill dealt only with voter registration. An amendment to extend the franchise would be beyond its scope. Mr Asquith was genuinely surprised and therefore should be absolved from all accusations of duplicity. ‘This’, he told the King, ‘is a totally new view of the matter … In Mr Asquith’s opinion, which is shared by some of the best authorities on procedure, the Speaker’s judgment is entirely wrong.’41 But there is no doubt that he welcomed the decision. On 7 January he told Venetia Stanley, ‘The Speaker’s coup d’état has bowled over the women for this session. It is a great relief.’42

  Speakers’ judgements on such matters are rarely challenged with success, and it was the nature of the suffragettes to identify betrayal where it did not exist. The belief that they had been cheated was a great incentive to renewed activity. The inevitable result was more violence. Letters sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister contained crude phosphorus bombs. No one was hurt. But on 3 April Emmeline stood trial for causing the explosion that damaged Lloyd George’s house. She had no direct responsibility for the outrage, but she refused to plead. Her speech from the dock warned that, if sent to prison, she would immediately go on hunger strike – if necessary unto death. The judge was not impressed. The sentence was three years’ penal servitude.

  In prison, although Emmeline was offered food more appropriate to the dining room of a London hotel, she always refused to eat. She also refused to submit to medical examination. Eight days after her arrival in Holloway, the medical officer adjudged her too weak for forcible feeding. She was put in a hansom cab and sent home. Her official status was ‘prisoner on licence’. The Home Secretary was operating the policy that he proposed to legitimise under the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge Bill which he was about to introduce into the House of Commons. Suffragettes on hunger strike to the point of death were to be released. They were to be rearrested and returned to prison for the completion of their sentence when in liberty they had recovered their strength.

  Emmeline was back in prison on 26 May and released again on the 30th. Her licence expired on 7 June, but she failed to return and was arrested on the 14th. She was discharged on 16 June with licence to remain at large until the 23 rd. The distasteful process of what came to be called ‘The Cat and Mouse Act’ dragged on throughout the summer. Philip Snowden, the Sea Green Incorruptible of the Labour Party, claimed to speak for the nation when he said with impeccable, if slightly callous, logic, ‘She is punishing herself because she will not take the punishment which a court of law has imposed upon her for outrages which no community can allow anyone to perpetrate.’43 He probably overstated the level of national antagonism to the women’s behaviour. But the suffragettes themselves constantly undermined their own cause by behaviour which was simultaneously childlike and destructive. In May 1914, a police raid on a flat in Maida Vale resulted in the confiscation of half a ton of pebbles, three hammers and a hatchet. In July of that year the ‘Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery was slashed. The perpetrators were on the point of prosecution when the Great War broke out. Even the suffragettes had the sense to realise that while men fought and died in France the British people would have little patience with women who smashed shop windows. However, Christabel, with the insensitivity which so often characterises the champions of great causes, proclaimed: ‘This great war … is God’s vengeance upon people who held women in subjection.’44

  The Great War both made votes for women irresistible and postponed a reform which ju
stice and agitation had already ensured would come about. Lloyd George, who had never really wanted to resist, replaced Asquith as Prime Minister and, after four years in which women had done men’s work, it was impossible to deny them men’s rights. Emancipation came slowly. But it came – not in Edwardian Britain, but because of what had happened during the Edwardian era. Asquith, as was so often the case, typified the feelings which simultaneously promoted and retarded female emancipation.

  There are very few issues in politics upon which more exaggerated language is used both upon one side and upon the other. I am sometimes tempted to think, as one listens to supporters of women’s suffrage, that there is nothing to be said for it. And I am sometimes tempted to think, when I listen to the opponents of women’s suffrage, that there is nothing to be said against it.45

  The suffragettes defied the spirit of Victorian England by preferring tumult to calm and passion to reason. They were the street fighters in the social revolution which was Edwardian Britain.

  * The 1884 Reform Bill had extended the vote only to adult male householders in the counties as well as the towns and to ‘£10 male lodgers’. In 1918 all men over twenty-one were enfranchised together with women over thirty.

  CHAPTER 11

  United We Stand

  The Taff – surprisingly not the origin of the nickname by which Welshmen are known worldwide – is not the sort of river along which history is supposed to flow But, during the high summer of 1901, the behaviour of the little railway company which took its name from that thin line on the map changed the British political landscape. In the second week of a sweltering August, a signalman who had led the agitation for increased pay was sacked. His comrades, believing that his dismissal was unrelated either to conduct or competence, cried ‘victimisation’ and came out on strike. Their trade union, the Society of Railway Servants, declared the dispute ‘official’.

  Ammon Beasley, the Taff Vale Railway Company’s general manager, was not the man to attempt immediate conciliation. Instead of arguing the justice of his cause or even waiting for his workers and their union to lose hope of victory, he called in William Collison, a former omnibus driver and one-time trade union activist, who had set up the National Free Labour Association to deal with exactly such situations. Collison supplied ‘blackleg’ labour to companies whose regular workers were on strike. The NFLA had helped to defeat the Amalgamated Society of Engineers when they had campaigned for an eight-hour day. The Railway Servants’ executive were determined that their union should not be Collison’s second victim. Richard Bell, the general secretary – and a man destined to play an equivocal role in the long march to parliamentary representation – urged caution. But he was overruled. The premises of the Taff Vale Railway Company were picketed and virtually closed down.

  Beasley consulted the Employers’ Parliamentary Council, an organisation which had been set up to co-ordinate the work of the many employers who sat in the House of Commons. Its main purpose was the organisation of lobbying on behalf of business interests, but it had also published The Case Against Picketing by W. J. Shaxby. The text suggested that, on the precedent of Lyons v. Wilkins (a dispute in 1896 between a leather goods manufacturer and the Amalgamated Trade Society of Fancy Leather Workers), the Taff Vale Railway Company was likely to obtain an injunction prohibiting the picketing of its premises and might even be awarded damages against the union. Shaxby proved a wise counsel. The courts both granted the injunction and agreed that the union must pay. Gratified by his legal victory, Beasley offered mediation which the union, chastened by its defeat, accepted. The dispute was settled within eleven days. But the legal processes went on and, to the delight of the union, the Court of Appeal reversed the original decision and absolved it from payment of damages. Then, in July 1901, the House of Lords reversed the decision again and added, crucially for the future of organised labour, that the funds of a trade union could be sequestrated to pay damages incurred by its individual members and officials.

  Some of the more legalistically minded (and pathologically optimistic) general secretaries believed that there was some benefit to be gained from trade unions’ recognition as legal entities. In theory, corporate existence paved the way for legally enforceable agreements between masters and men. But reality made most trade unionists accept that the Taff Vale Judgement imposed debilitating restrictions on their activities and posed a serious threat to their funds. It had cost the Society of Railway Servants £23,000 in damages and another £3,000 in costs. Combined with a second House of Lords Judgement – Quinn v. Leathem – which prohibited the promotion of boycotts, the precedent of Taff Vale could bankrupt any union which sought to defend its members’ interests by direct action. It also threatened to impose financial penalties on union leaders. Offended companies could seize officials’ savings or property as a contribution to the payment of the damages. John Hodge, Secretary of the Steel Smelters, announced – probably unnecessarily and certainly theatrically – that he had ‘made over his little possessions to his wife by deed of gift’.1 Protecting trade union funds by promoting legislation that reversed the House of Lords judgement – and therefore following the parliamentary route to power – gained hitherto unrecognised attractions. The idea of trade union representatives in the House of Commons – previously regarded as unacceptable ‘political action’ – began to gain ground.

  The leaders of the older unions, most representing skilled crafts and ancient trades, remained dubious about the Trades Union Congress, which had co-ordinated union activity since 1868, playing any part in politics. The men who created ‘New Unionism’, mostly to organise the dockers and the gas workers, had less professional pretension and fewer inhibitions. Even so, in 1899, a TUC resolution – suggesting no more than that those unions which chose to do so should come together to consider political representation – had been carried, on a block vote, by only 546,000 to 434,000. Unions representing a third of the total voting strength had abstained.

  Before the turn of the century, what politics the TUC allowed was carried on by its Parliamentary Committee. Ten years earlier, Sidney Webb had complained that ‘the work annually accomplished by the Committee … has, in fact, been limited to a few deputations to the government, two or three circulars to the unions, a little consultation with friendly politicians and drafting an elaborate report to Congress.’2 But until 1901 there were many general secretaries who gladly accepted its inactivity. When he was elected to lead the Shipwrights Union, Alexander Willie described himself as apolitical and argued that the shipwrights’ aims should be achieved by industrial action. He was then persuaded that the Liberal Party best represented his members’ interests. But, after Taff Vale, he became a ‘Labour man’, and when he stood for Parliament in Sunderland, it was only with the greatest reluctance that he accepted the description ‘Lib-Lab’ instead of ‘Lab’ alone.3

  Initially the Boilermakers had expressed doubts about the wisdom of the Railway Servants picketing at Taff Vale. ‘Many of us’, wrote D. C. Cummings, the general secretary, ‘no doubt believe that mistakes have been made and lack of tact displayed.’ But the House of Lords’ judgement convinced him that something must be done to ‘ensure the safety of the funds we have for long years been building up for relief of sickness, old age and accident, death and want of work’.4 He reinforced his argument with the demand for a Boiler Registration and Inspection Bill.

  The executive of the Boilermakers went further and asked the members of their society to endorse a resolution which called for ‘working-class opinion being represented in the House of Commons by men sympathetic with the aims and demands of the Labour movement’. It was carried by 26,478 votes to 8,905. The Executive Committee then considered the controversial question of remuneration and agreed that, if one of its members should be elected, he should receive an annual salary of £325. A more generous amendment proposing £350 was defeated. It was also agreed that, since the House of Commons sat for only half the year, a Boilermakers MP must also act as
an (unpaid) union organiser.

  Until Taff Vale, most trade unions regarded politics as peripheral to their real work. Miners in all of the coalfields which made up the several loosely allied federations were not sure that their traditional militancy needed the help of parliamentary representation. In Lancashire, where, unlike other mining counties, the colliers did not live in homogeneous pit villages but were minorities in textile towns, there had been a residual affection for the Conservative Party. The Tories had passed the Mines Act of 1860 and, because of John Bright’s criticism of the bill – based on his extreme view of laissez faire – the Liberals in general were thought to be unsympathetic to the miners’ cause. The Tories were also opposed to Irish immigration which, according to the miners, was the reason why their wages were constantly depressed. The most commonly held view in the Lancashire coalfield was that the miners should represent themselves. But they realised that even a collier was more likely to succeed if he was supported by sympathetic colleagues. In other coalfields, miners claiming greater self-confidence judged they could fight their own corner without parliamentary help. So alone among all the mining unions of Great Britain, the Lancashire Federation sent delegates to the inaugural conference of what came to be called the Labour Representation Committee. One of them, Tom Greenall, topped the poll in the vote for trade union representation on the national committee and was appointed vice-chairman. Two months later, the Lancashire miners decided not to confirm their affiliation and he was forced to resign.