During the meeting and at the end of his speech Mr. Asquith was questioned by several women, all of whom were ejected with the greatest violence, whilst the audience broke into the now familiar turmoil. The cowardly and unnecessary brutality shown to them by the stewards at recent Liberal meetings, had by this time aroused great indignation amongst the women. Theresa Billington, who was of strong and vigorous physique and whose instinct, like that of every man, was to strike back if she were hit, had come to feel that she could no longer quietly endure the disgraceful treatment to which she had been subjected on several occasions. To this meeting therefore, she had gone armed with a dogwhip, the weapon she felt most suitable to employ against cowardly men. Her intention was not to use it if she were merely dragged out of the meeting, just as a man might have been, but only if her assailants should seek to take advantage of the fact that she was a woman and should behave in a peculiarly objectionable way.1 Therefore, when the stewards had torn down her hair and treated her with every form of indignity and violence, not merely in dragging her from the hall but outside in the corridors as well, she had pulled out her whip and made a fairly free use of it.
The general trend of events now made us feel the necessity of securing a personal interview with Mr. Asquith, and we therefore wrote asking him to receive us. He replied that his rule was not to receive any deputation unconnected with his office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and we then wrote as follows: —
TO THE RIGHT HON. H. H. ASQUITH, CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER.
Sir:
I am instructed by my Committee to say that the subject of the enfranchisement of women, which they desire to lay before you, is intimately bound up with the duties of your office. Upon no member of the Cabinet have women greater claims than upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Your Budget is estimated on a system of taxation which includes women. Women not being exempt from taxation have a right to claim from you a hearing. Women are told that you are mainly responsible for the refusal of the Prime Minister to deal with their claim. But being convinced of the justice of giving votes to women they renew their request that you receive a deputation on an early date in order that their case may be presented to you.
Faithfully yours,
E. SYLVIA PANKHURST.
Hon. Sec. of the London Committee of the Women’s Social and Political Union 45, Park Walk, Chelsea, S.W.
Mr. Asquith returned no answer to this our second letter, and therefore, without making any further attempt to obtain his consent, we wrote to him saying that a small deputation would call at his house, No. 20 Cavendish Square, on the morning of Tuesday, June 19th. On the appointed day the women arrived just before 10 o’clock in the morning, but, early as it was, they were told that Mr. Asquith had already gone to the Treasury. They thereupon decided that half their number should wait on the doorstep and that the other half should go to look for him. Those who went to the Treasury were told that Mr. Asquith had not arrived, and those who remained on guard at his house were equally unsuccessful, for whilst they had been standing there waiting, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had escaped through the back door in a closed motor car.
Our determination to meet Mr. Asquith face to face was still strong, and after our failure to see him on the Tuesday we at once wrote to say that we were sending a larger deputation to interview him in two days’ time. We had now three flourishing branches of the Union in London, one in the centre and two in the East End, and some thirty or forty representatives, partly drawn from these branches and partly from our central Committee, formed the deputation.
Carrying little white Votes-for-Women flags and headed by Theresa Billington, some thirty of the East End members marched off in procession for Mr. Asquith’s house; but on arriving at the edge of Cavendish Square, they were met by a strong force of police who told them that they must at once turn back. The poor women stood still in affright, but would not turn. Then the police fell upon them and began to strike and push them and to snatch their flags away. Theresa Billington tried in vain to prevent this violence, “We will go forward,” she cried. “You shall not hit our women like that,” but a policeman struck her in the face with his fist and another pinioned her arms. Then she was seized by the throat and forced against the railings until, as was described by an onlooker, “she became blue in the face.” She struggled as hard as she could to free herself but was dragged away to the police station with the East End workers following in her train.
Immediately afterwards Annie Kenney, with a number of others, most of whom were members of our Committee, came into the Square. Annie knew nothing of what had taken place and, preoccupied and intent on her mission, she walked quickly across the road, but, as she mounted the steps of Mr. Asquith’s house and stretched out her hand to ring his bell, a policeman seized her roughly by the arm and she found herself under arrest. Following this, Mrs. Knight, one of the East End workers, who, because she suffered from hip disease had felt that she could not walk in the procession, came into the Square and crossed the road. On seeing none of the other women she concluded that they had already gone into Mr. Asquith’s house. She intended to join them but, just as she was about to step on to the pavement opposite No. 20, she was roughly pushed off the curb-stone by a policeman and arrested as soon as she attempted to take another step forward. Mrs. Sparborough, a respectable elderly woman dressed with scrupulous neatness in worn black garments, who by the work of her needle supported herself and her aged husband, stood watching this scene in deep distress. Noticing that two maid servants and some ladies at the window of Mr. Asquith’s house were laughing and clapping their hands, she turned to them protesting gravely: “Oh, don’t do that. Oh, don’t do that. It is a serious matter. That is how the soldiers were sent to Feather stone.”2 A policeman immediately pounced upon her and dragged her away.
At the police court afterwards Theresa Billington, on being charged with an assault upon the police, refused either to give evidence or to call witnesses in her defence, saying that she objected to being tried by a court composed entirely of men and under laws in the framing of which men alone had been consulted. Her plea was abruptly swept aside and she was ordered to pay a fine of £10 or in default to go to prison for two months.3
Miss Billington chose imprisonment, but her resolution was balked by “an anonymous reader of the Daily Mirror,” who handed the amount of her fine to the Governor of Holloway Gaol.4
The charges of disorderly conduct against the other three women were adjourned until July 14th.
Every charge against the prisoners, except that of being in Cavendish Square with the object of seeing Mr. Asquith broke down, but Mr. Paul Taylor, the magistrate, who seemed quite incapable even of trying to understand their motives, decided that they had created an obstruction and ordered them to enter into their own recognisances in the sum of £50 and to find one surety for the same amount, to be of good behaviour and to keep the peace for twelve months. In the event of their not finding such sureties and consenting to be so bound over he ordered that they should be sent to prison for six weeks.
To agree to be bound over to keep the peace would have been both an admission of wrongdoing and a promise to refrain from similar methods of agitation. Rather than this Annie Kenney preferred to suffer a second imprisonment and the other women, though they had but recently joined the Union and though many friends urged that they had already done good work and might now fairly return to their homes, decided that they too would go to gaol.
In the meantime there were stirring doings in Manchester. On June 23rd there had been a great Liberal Demonstration at the Zoological Gardens, Belle View, on the outskirts of the town, where Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. John Burns and Mr. Churchill had been the principal speakers. Representatives of the Women’s Social and Political Union had been present to question the Cabinet Minister and had been thrown out as soon as they had raised their voices. In the scuffle Mr. Morrissey, a Liverpool city councillor, intervened to protect his wife from the violence of the st
ewards and was very roughly used. As the Suffragettes were flung by the stewards into the public road outside they were ordered to move on by the police and because Mr. Morrissey, whose leg had been seriously injured by his assailants, was unable to walk away, he was arrested. Seeing this my youngest sister, Adela, then scarcely out of her teens, and only about five feet in height, expostulated with one of the constables and in doing so laid her hand upon his arm, saying, “Surely you can see that Mr. Morrissey cannot walk!” But at that she was accused of attempting to effect a rescue, and was also taken into custody. The councillor’s wife and a friend, who both offered similar protests, were treated in the same way. The case of these four people came up in Manchester simultaneously with that of Annie Kenney and her comrades in London, with the result that Adela was committed to prison for a week on refusing to pay a fine5 of five shillings and costs whilst Mrs. Morrissey and Mrs. Mitchell on refusing to be bound over to keep the peace were imprisoned for three days. Of course this punishment was for daring to urge an unwelcome question upon Members of the Government, but as this was not a punishable act the charges of disorderly conduct outside in the road had been trumped up.
The question of these trials was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Keir Hardie, who declared that it was stretching the law too far to forbid a deputation to approach a private house. He also pointed out that Mr. James Kendall, one of the magistrates who had tried the case of the Manchester Suffragettes, and had been Chief Steward at the Liberal meeting from which they had been ejected, Mr. Cremer and Mr. Maddison both delivered vindictive speeches against the Suffragettes, the former describing the sentence passed upon them as “extremely lenient” and the latter referring to them as “female hooligans.” The more sensational and less reputable of the newspapers adopted a similar line speaking of the women as “Kenney,” “Knight” and “Sparborough,” calling them “mock martyrs” and “martyrettes” and publishing hideous and libellous drawings of them. Even the staider and more serious periodicals gave one-sided and biassed accounts of what had taken place, rebuking the Suffragettes for what they termed their “disgraceful behaviour,” telling them that they were “ruining “their cause, and urging them to save it by returning to “Constitutional” and “orderly” methods of propaganda.
The following interesting and valuable letter to the press from Mr. T. D. Benson, the Treasurer of the Independent Labour Party cleverly exposed the hypocrisy of these strictures: —
Dear Sir:
Having had, through illness, plenty of time on my hands this last week, I have made a calculation of the number of years which the lady Suffragettes have put back their movement. I find that it amounts to somewhat about 235 years. The realisation therefore, of their aims is, according to this mode of chronology, as far off in the future as the Plague and the Fire of London are in the past. Nevertheless, I shall not be surprised if they succeed within the next twelve months, or two or three years at the most.
Of course, when men wanted the franchise, they did not behave in the unruly manner of our feminine friends. They were perfectly constitutional in their agitation. In Bristol I find they only burnt the Mansion House, the Custom House, the Bishop’s Palace, the Excise Office, three prisons, four toll-houses, and forty-two private dwellings and warehouses, and all in a perfectly constitutional and respectable manner. Numerous constitutional fires took place in the neighbourhoods of Bedford, Cambridge, Canterbury and Devizes. Four men were respectably hanged at Bristol and three in Nottingham. The Bishop of Lichfield was nearly killed, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was insulted, spat upon, and with great difficulty rescued from amongst the yells and execrations of a violent and angry mob. The Suffragists in those days had a constitutional weakness for Bishops, and a savage vandalism towards cathedrals and bishops’ palaces. A general strike was proposed, and secret arming and drilling commenced in most of the great Chartist centres. Wales broke out even into active rebellion, and nine men were condemned to death. At London, Bradford, York, Sheffield, Liverpool, Chester, Taunton, Durham and many other towns long sentences of penal servitude were passed. In this way the males set a splendid example of constitutional methods in agitating for the franchise. I think we are well qualified to advise the Suffragettes to follow our example, to be respectable and peaceful in their methods like we were, and then they will have our sympathy and support.
Yours truly,
T. D. BENSON.
“The Downs,”
Prestwich,
July 3rd, 1906.
The day after the trial Mrs. Pethick Lawrence received from Annie Kenney a little note hastily scribbled in pencil and posted by some kind-hearted person just as she was being taken away from the Police Court cell. “I am writing this,” it read, “before going in the van. I am very happy and I shall keep up and be brave and true, and when I come out I shall be fully prepared to do anything the Union asks of me.”
As yet most of us knew little of the interior of a prison, but, on those burning July days, we knew enough to think with sorrow and anxiety of our comrades shut away from the beauty of the summer in the heat of their small, stifling cells. We heard with joy that they were happy and contented to suffer imprisonment for the women’s cause.
And now it seemed to us as though the spirit of revolt against oppression were flowing onward and spreading, like some great tide to all the womanhood of the world. We read of that wonderful Marie Spiridorovna, the Russian girl who after enduring the most incredible and unspeakable torture and dying in the agony of her wounds, was yet upborne by the greatness of the cause for which she suffered, and cried with her last breath, “Mother, I die of joy.” The movement towards liberty then springing up amongst the women of the Far East also inspired us. We read of the words of one of the Korean women leaders who said: —
The women of our country are the most pitiable of all civilised humanity. … They are enclosed like prisoners, bottled up like fish. But we must remember that after the cock crows the dawn comes, and after work there is reward. Should we but put forth together our feeble efforts a way will be found of accomplishing our object and women will gradually be able to stand in the shining light of the sun and to breathe the sweet heavenly air freely and happily.
News of the Women’s cry for freedom came to us from North, South, East and West, and we felt ourselves part of a Universal movement. We were keyed up to any sacrifice. We felt that the fate of other women depended upon us. We knew that our battle to overcome the first and greatest barrier — to obtain political liberty — was to be a sharp one. We hoped it would be short. We heard that on June 14th, but a month before our women had gone to prison, the women of Finland had gained their vote. We believed then that the franchise would be won for British women within a few months’ time.
Very soon after Annie Kenney, Mrs. Knight and Mrs. Sparborough had gone to prison, another opportunity occurred for our Union to strike a blow at the Government, for it was announced that there was to be a by-election; this time at Cockermouth. Christabel was at first the only member of the Union free to take part in the Election. She at once introduced an entirely new departure in electioneering tactics by hiring a stall in the market-place, where she sold Votes-for-Women literature. When, by this means she had collected a sufficient crowd around her, she mounted a stool and addressed the people, explaining to the electors that she wished them to vote against the Liberal candidate in order to show the Government that they did not approve of its refusal to give votes to women. After a time other women joined her and the little band of Suffragettes made a considerable impression upon the people of Cockermouth, who had heard of the imprisonments in London and Manchester and who were deeply moved by learning that women were prepared thus to fight and to suffer for their cause. When on August 3rd, the poll was declared, it was found that the Liberals had lost the seat which had long been held for them by Sir Wilfred Lawson, and that Sir John Randies, the Unionist candidate had been returned by a majority of 690. The figures being:
The Votes at the General Election had been:
Probably because the Liberal nominee against whom she was working had been returned to Parliament, and also because she had been single-handed, Mrs. Drummond’s campaign at Eye had passed almost unnoticed outside the constituency itself. At Cockermouth, on the other hand, the Liberal had been defeated, and so it naturally followed that all the influences that had led to his defeat were carefully analysed by the politicians and the Press. Some of the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union had formerly been Liberals and though the Liberal leaders steadfastly declared that the action of women could make no possible difference to the situation, they were very deeply incensed by the thought that women should dare to put the question of their own enfranchisement before every other consideration and, instead of seeking to win the Government’s favour as they had done in the past, should prefer attempting to force those in power to attend to their claims.
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