I Didn't Do It for You

by Michela Wrong

  Miss Pankhurst–for she was always to be a ‘Miss’, despite the eventual acquisition of both partner and child–could be described as one of Ethiopia’s earliest True Believers.

  She discovered the country late in life, but like all converts, she made up in enthusiasm for what she lacked in experience. ‘This confounded Pankhurst woman,’ a Conservative member of parliament once complained in a letter to Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, ‘[is] plus fuzzy-wuzzie que les fuzzy-wuzzies.’3 If the language grates today, he had nonetheless put a finger on the characteristic that constituted both Sylvia’s most admirable quality and her biggest weakness. She would always be her own government’s most implacable critic, showing an almost uncanny instinct for the baser motives that lay behind the British establishment’s obfuscations. But when it came to Ethiopia–the land in which she chose to end her days–everything would always be viewed through an indulgent golden haze.

  By the time she latched on to what was to be the last of her many all-consuming crusades–a passion that would span over a quarter of a century–Sylvia was already in her early fifties and had learned all there was to know about being an effective lobbyist and relentless agitator. An understanding of how to achieve a maximum of political impact at a minimum of expense had virtually been imbibed at her mother’s breast, for Sylvia came from the least ordinary of families.

  During the 1900s and 1910s Sylvia, her more glamorous sister Christabel, the quiet Adela and their widowed mother Emmeline had all braved violence on the political podium in their campaign to win British women the vote. The suffragettes, as they came to be known, had been manhandled by male hecklers, arrested by police and–when they went on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment–been subjected to the horrors of force-feeding, an experience the women regarded as akin to rape. But as the suffragette cause had gradually triumphed, the family had split asunder, riven by ideological differences and long-simmering jealousies.

  Emmeline had swung firmly to the right. Christabel had found God and lectured on the Second Coming. Adela had sailed for Australia and become a pacifist. Sylvia–now not on speaking terms with Christabel and Emmeline–had set herself up in London’s deprived East End, publishing the socialist paper Women’s Dreadnought through the First World War. She had embraced Bolshevism–an enthusiasm that waned with time–and travelled to Moscow to meet Lenin, moves that brought her under the scrutiny of the British police’s Special Branch.

  Of solid middle-class stock, she had led a Spartan existence, the modest sums earned by journalism and political writing, combined with the odd contribution from a former patron of the suffragette cause, barely saving her from real poverty. For the Pankhursts, money matters always came a careless second. Like every member of the family, Sylvia could not imagine life without a cause, preferably one that seemed, at least at its inception, doomed to failure. Once the slogan ‘Votes for Women’ had lost its crowd-pulling force, she dabbled with Indian history, took up Interlingua–an alternative to Esperanto–and grew interested in the Romanian poet Mihael Eminescu. But Mussolini’s coming to power was to provide her with the fresh intellectual focus she craved.

  To her credit she grasped, more clearly than most of her contemporaries, that Mussolini’s brand of thuggish expansionism posed a threat extending far beyond the frontiers of Italy itself. Encouraging her to concentrate on events in Rome was Silvio Corio, an Italian anarchist seven years her senior. Exiled to London, he had worked with Sylvia on the various political journals she produced, becoming her lover and father of her only child. They never wed, a fact Sylvia–very much the dominant partner–made no attempt to conceal. A vocal exponent of free love, who had in her youth conducted a doomed relationship with the married Labour politician Keir Hardie, she brazenly sold the story of her ‘eugenic’ baby–‘eugenic’ because he was born to two intelligent adults free from hereditary disease and untrammelled by social convention–to the sensationalist News of the World. ‘I suppose you think I am awfully silly, don’t you?’ the 45-year-old unmarried mother asked a journalist in an uncharacteristic moment of girlishness. Her own mother thought her not so much silly as shameless. When Emmeline died six months after the birth of Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst–named after Sylvia’s adored father–many friends blamed it on the shock caused by her estranged daughter’s outrageous behaviour.

  With Corio as self-effacing editorial helpmate, providing her with insights and news of his native country, Sylvia turned her attention to exposing the horrors of Mussolini’s Italy. Campaigning against Fascism led ineluctably to campaigning on behalf of the African nation Italy was preparing to attack. To the British public, the invasion of Ethiopia was little more than an exotic distant adventure, immortalized in Evelyn Waugh’s semi-fictional Scoop, which allowed a generation of foreign correspondents to win their spurs. Glossing over the cudgellings, castor-oil treatments and murders that had accompanied Il Duce on his rise to the top, many Britons dismissed Mussolini as a grandstanding buffoon, all comic-opera wind and bluster. His African escapade was soon sidelined, as public attention focused on Hitler’s ascension and the threat of a second, devastating world war.

  For Sylvia, the two developments could not be separated. Ethiopia, she sensed, represented a dry run for the Fascists; Rome’s readiness to use chemical weapons there was likely to be a grim precursor of atrocities to come in Europe. With remarkable prescience, she warned that appeasement in Ethiopia would merely encourage Europe’s bully boys to make ever more presumptuous territorial claims. ‘REMEMBER–Everywhere, Always, Fascism means War’,4 she was to tell her readers, long before many could bear to think she might be right.

  She had always found it difficult to share the limelight or work alongside fellow activists. Now, realizing she had found a neglected niche in which she could flourish virtually alone, she set about making the Ethiopian cause her own. On May 5, 1936, the day the Italian army entered Addis, she launched the New Times and Ethiopia News, a weekly newspaper dedicated to keeping the Ethiopian war in the public eye. If the concept of collective security was to have any meaning, the League of Nations should impose sanctions on Italy, she argued. ‘As I view it,’ she explained to a friend, ‘both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are going to make war whenever they find a sufficiently good chance of success, and I am perfectly convinced that if the [Italian] armies come back from Africa with a victory, a new enterprise will be entered upon before long…You cannot buy these super-militarist governments off by treating them well.’5

  History was to prove her correct, but it was not a message the British government was disposed to hear. The timing was not right: frantically scrabbling to rearm ahead of the coming storm, London wanted Mussolini indulged and appeased as long as possible rather than punished and pushed into Hitler’s arms. The invasion of Ethiopia seemed a small sacrifice to make in the context of the greater game of gearing up for another world war, hence the eventual decision by both the United Kingdom and France to recognize the Italian conquest. This was exactly the kind of short-term, pragmatic calculation Sylvia, by her very nature, was incapable of making.

  By the age of 50, George Orwell once wrote, everyone has the face they deserve. In Sylvia’s case, his maxim did not quite ring true. Her true face crept up on her through the decades, the gap between personality and appearance narrowing with the years. But a vital element somehow remained missing: nothing in the placid portraits left behind explains why quite so many British officials came to regret coming into contact with Miss Pankhurst, or what element in her make-up prompted the splenetic comments spluttered across government paperwork of the day.

  Photographs of the young Sylvia show a gloomy child, just the kind of oversensitive introvert likely, as contemporaries remembered, to indulge in fits of copious weeping. The artistically-gifted daughter of a left-wing, politically-active Manchester lawyer, she was brought up in an agnostic, anti-monarchist, cash-strapped, decidedly eccentric household in which the children were often left to educ
ate themselves, Emmeline Pankhurst having developed a deep suspicion of formal schooling. Sylvia registered early on that she was not her mother’s favourite–that role went to Christabel–and the realization cast a plaintive shadow across her life. As the years passed and the puppy fat of youth disappeared, it became clear that the girl had not inherited the aristocratic cheekbones and high forehead of Emmeline, vivacious beauty of the family. The adult outline that emerges is that of a somewhat doleful young woman. From her hooded eyelids to her protruding top lip and receding chin, Sylvia’s features seem to have surrendered early to gravity’s pull: they drooped more dramatically than was necessary, a mournful effect heightened by the severe hairstyle of the bluestocking. Here was a woman, the photographs suggest, resigned to suffering, capable of self-sacrifice and nobility of purpose. A woman commanding respect, but not someone you would necessarily want sitting next to you at a dinner party. Somehow, it is impossible to imagine her in fits of laughter. ‘She had an overwhelming personality,’ confirms Eritrean academic Dr Bereket Habte Selassie, one of the many students Sylvia was to take under her maternal wing. ‘When she was in the room she filled it. But she had absolutely no sense of humour.’6

  What the photographs fail to capture, at any age, is the element of steel. She had a talent for self-flagellation, setting suffragette records in Holloway prison for the refusal of food, water and sleep. On one occasion, she was left so debilitated she had to be carried in a stretcher along a demonstration’s route. Her long life saw a vast outpouring of physical and mental energy, funnelled into her grittily realistic paintings, impassioned speeches and relentless lobbying work. All the while, she produced a ceaseless stream of books, articles, poems and translations. The New Times and Ethiopia News, for which she penned a 2–3,000 word weekly editorial, was largely made up of her own contributions. While juggling that commitment, she pumped out a flow of importuning letters, political pamphlets and appeals. Even in old age, the kindly grandmother’s face that gazes out at us, its contours softened by trailing wisps of grey hair, gives little hint of this tremendous capacity for hard work. ‘A biographer once asked us what we used to do in the holidays,’ her daughter-in-law Rita Pankhurst later recalled. ‘It was only then we realized that there were no holidays. With Sylvia it was always work, work, work.’7

  Ironically, given her early Marxist convictions, Sylvia’s own life defied the deterministic vision of history as a vast, economic process whose grinding wheels render free will a fantasy, reducing individuals to destiny’s pawns. She always acted on the assumption that a single, driven person could exert a level of influence out of all proportion to their political backing or social standing. Her formal education might have been shaky, but she knew exactly how to go about drumming up international sympathy for Ethiopia. ‘To get your answer into the hands of people who count has been and remains terribly important, and should be done through the Press, by pamphlets, circularisation and so forth,’ she lectured Ethiopia’s representative to Britain. ‘I strongly urge propaganda in every possible way.’8

  Her previous campaigns had taught her the value of headed notepaper. She knew the classic lobbyist’s trick: that a letter sent from an ‘institute’ or ‘international council’ will always have more impact than the individual appeal, even when the institute is run from a front living room and its staff consists of a few relatives and friends. She set up the International Ethiopian Council, in whose name she wrote letters to The Times and impertinently peppered such notables as Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, the Archbishop of Canterbury, King George VI and President Franklin D Roosevelt with advice. Her home in Woodford Green, a north-east London suburb, became a cosmopolitan gathering place for Italian anti-fascists, lonely Ethiopian students and African dissidents, where she arranged for friendly MPs to raise questions in parliament, organized bazaars to raise funds, and pulled together demonstrations.

  The New Times and Ethiopia News, sent out to MPs, journalists, churches and ambassadors, had a weekly print run of only 10,000 copies, but its influence spread far further than this figure suggests. Around the world, black resentment of white rule was stirring. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s future president, was in Britain at the time of Mussolini’s invasion and he later articulated the outrage of a generation of Africans who heard the news. ‘It was almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally,’ Nkrumah recalled in his autobiography. ‘For the next few minutes I could do nothing but glare at each impassive face wondering if those people could possibly realise the wickedness of colonialism.’9 For an embryonic black consciousness movement in search of heroes, Ethiopia–hitherto untainted by European colonialism–served as an inspiration and rallying cause. Its beleaguered Emperor, nominated 1936 ‘Man of the Year’ by Time magazine, seemed nothing short of a saint.10 Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, ITA Wallace-Johnson: London in those years was a gathering place for the educated young Africans who would go on to become the continent’s post-independence leaders. The New Times and Ethiopia News fed their appetite for news from Ethiopia and disseminated Pan-African notions to the restless colonies. It was sent to the West Indies, read as far afield as South Africa and Sierra Leone, and its articles were reproduced in Nigerian and Ghanaian newspapers.

  While the uneven war in Ethiopia still raged, Sylvia published chilling accounts of the effects of mustard gas and shocking photographs showing grinning Italian soldiers brandishing the severed heads of Ethiopian warriors. When Haile Selassie arrived in Britain to start a five-year exile in Bath, she organized a noisy welcome at Waterloo Station, knowing this would embarrass her government, then busied herself trying to find him a residence. At a time when British officials were assiduously avoiding contact with their unwelcome guest, the New Times and Ethiopia News published long, admiring interviews with HIM (His Imperial Majesty), who had the sense to recognize a valuable mouthpiece in this dowdy, garrulous Englishwoman. Hoovering up information from Ethiopians in London and informants in the Horn, Sylvia tracked the Ethiopian resistance movement as it made a mockery of Mussolini’s conquest.

  It made things decidedly awkward for the British government, which had already recognized Italy’s Victor Emmanuel as King of Ethiopia. So awkward, that during the nine-month hiatus between the outbreak of the Second World War and Mussolini’s entry on Hitler’s side, Sylvia’s newspaper was placed on a ‘Stop List’ of publications whose export was deemed likely to damage Anglo–Italian relations. Then, in June 1940, everything changed. ‘There were a large number of Italian refugees at home and I remember that we were having pasta and someone turned the radio on,’ recalls Richard Pankhurst.11 ‘We heard a newscaster saying “Signor Mussolini, in his declaration of war…” There was great rejoicing.’ As the diners knew, the keystone of Britain’s hypocritical foreign policy–the need to placate Il Duce–had just been removed.

  One argument–the threat Fascism posed to world peace–had been won, but new ones remained to be fought for someone fretting over Ethiopia’s future status in the world. Despite the fact that Mussolini was now the enemy and British soldiers would soon be confronting Italian Alpini in the Horn, London refused to rescind its recognition of the dictator’s Ethiopian conquest. The RAF flew the Emperor to Sudan, but British generals proved strangely reluctant to use him as a rallying figure for Ethiopia’s resistance, ensuring that when Addis was liberated on April 6, 1941, it was by South African troops, not Ethiopian warriors under imperial command.

  The truth was that Britain still viewed Africa through colonialism’s cold lens. Wars had always presented European powers with treasured opportunities for redrawing the world map and by spelling the de jure end of the Ethiopian nation-state, Mussolini’s invasion had made a new carve-up possible. Looking at the Horn with the calculating eyes of a land surveyor, London sensed a chance to tie up some colonial loose ends to the benefit of its own African territories. The region, British policymakers suggested, would be more stable if the various areas inhabited by Somal
is–including Ethiopia’s eastern Ogaden–were merged to form a ‘Greater Somalia’. Borana, in Ethiopia’s south, should go to Kenya and as for Eritrea, it could be sliced in two, with the Moslem west attached to Sudan and the Christian highlands and ports given to Ethiopia. No wonder the government was in no hurry to recognize Ethiopia as an ally, or grant the reinstated Emperor too long a leash. ‘We are free of any obligation not to disturb the existing legal position and have our hands free to make such settlement of the future of Abyssinia as we may think fit,’ one Foreign Office official confidentially noted, when Sylvia sought clarification of Britain’s stance. ‘Let us remember,’ a colleague added, ‘that what we are doing in Abyssinia is for our own benefit, not for that of the Abyssinians, and it is possible to imagine circumstances in which it might suit us to throw them over.’12

  In public, London insisted it had no intention of tinkering with Ethiopia’s frontiers. But Sylvia had a nose for colonial machinations. Haile Selassie, she felt, had not in the past been sufficiently alert to the possibility that Britain might simply replace Italy as his country’s new master. ‘With all his ability and dignity, I often felt…as though I was talking to a sick child who did not know how to deal with the politicians about him,’ she told a sympathetic member of the House of Lords.13 She herself wrote so many letters denouncing what she described as ‘the predatory subterranean policy of the Foreign Office’, the ministry in question opened a special file labelled, ‘How to deal with letters from Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’, whose entries log the increasing testiness of the officials assigned to answer her. ‘Unbalanced and fanatical’, ‘Busybody Miss Pankhurst’, the Foreign Office men called her in their internal correspondence, giving expression to a fury they could not voice in public. ‘Miss Pankhurst only wants to be tiresome,’ one man has scrawled. ‘Does it matter what Miss P. thinks?’ another asks. ‘She’s a crashing bore who will deserve to be snubbed if in fact it were possible to snub her.’14