We realised the truth of John Bright’s words, spoken while the reform bill of 1867 was being agitated. Parliament, John Bright then declared, had never been hearty for any reform. The Reform Act of 1832 had been wrested by force from the Government of that day, and now before another, he said, could be carried, the agitators would have to fill the streets with people from Charing Cross to Westminster Abbey. Acting on John Bright’s advice, we issued a call to the public to join us in holding a huge demonstration, on 30th June outside the House of Commons. We wanted to be sure that the Government saw as well as read of our immense following. A public proclamation from the Commissioner of Police, warning the public not to assemble in Parliament Square and declaring that the approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept open, was at once issued.
We persisted in announcing that the demonstration would take place, and I wrote a letter to Mr Asquith telling him that a deputation would wait upon him at half past four on the afternoon of 30th June. We held the usual Women’s Parliament in Caxton Hall, after which Mrs Pethick Lawrence, eleven other women, and myself, set forth. We met with no opposition from the police, but marched through cheering crowds of spectators to the Strangers’ Entrance to the House of Commons. Here we were met by a large group of uniformed men commanded by Inspector Scantlebury, of the police. The inspector, whom I knew personally, stepped forward and demanded officially, ‘Are you Mrs Pankhurst, and is this your deputation?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘My orders are to exclude you from the House of Commons.’
‘Has Mr Asquith received my letter?’ I asked.
For answer the inspector drew my letter from his pocket and handed it to me.
‘Did Mr Asquith return no message, no kind of reply?’ I enquired.
‘No,’ replied the inspector.
We turned and walked back to Caxton Hall, to tell the waiting audience what had occurred. We resolved that there was nothing to do but wait patiently until evening, and see how well the public would respond to our call to meet in Parliament Square. Already we knew that the streets were filled with people, and early as it was the crowds were increasing rapidly. At eight we went out in groups from Caxton Hall, to find Parliament Square packed with a throng, estimated next day at at least 100,000. From the steps of public buildings, from stone copings, from the iron railings of the Palace Yard, to which they clung precariously, our women made speeches until the police pulled them down and flung them into the moving, swaying, excited crowds. Some of the women were arrested, others were merely ordered to move on. Mingled cheers and jeers rose from the spectators. Some of the men were roughs who had come out to amuse themselves. Others were genuinely sympathetic, and tried valiantly to help us to reach the House of Commons. Again and again the police lines were broken, and it was only as the result of repeated charges by mounted police that the people’s attacks were repelled. Many members of Parliament, including Mr Lloyd-George, Mr Winston Churchill, and Mr Herbert Gladstone, came out to witness the struggle, which lasted until midnight and resulted in the arrest of twenty-nine women. Two of these women were arrested after they had each thrown a stone through a window of Mr Asquith’s official residence in Downing Street, the value of the windows being about $2.40.
This was the first window breaking in our history. Mrs Mary Leigh and Miss Edith New, who had thrown the stones, sent word to me from the police court that, having acted without orders, they would not resent repudiation from headquarters. Far from repudiating them, I went at once to see them in their cells, and assured them of my approval of their act. The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing displeasure in a political situation. As one of the newspapers, commenting on the affair, truly said, ‘When the King and Queen dine at Apsley on the 13th inst. they will be entertained in rooms the windows of which the Duke of Wellington was obliged to protect with iron shutters from the fury of his political opponents.’
In Winchester a few years ago, to give but one instance, a great riot took place as a protest against the removal of a historic gun from one part of the town to another. In the course of this riot windows were broken and other property of various kinds was destroyed, very serious damage being done. No punishment was administered in respect of this riot and the authorities, bowing to public opinion thus riotously expressed, restored the gun to its original situation.
Window breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime. In sentencing Mrs Leigh and Miss New to two months in the first division, the magistrate used very severe language, and declared that such a thing must never happen again. Of course the women assured him that it would happen again. Said Mrs Leigh: ‘We have no other course but to rebel against oppression, and if necessary to resort to stronger measures. This fight is going on.’
The summer of 1908 is remembered as one of the most oppressively hot seasons the country had known for years. Our prisoners in Holloway suffered intensely, some being made desperately ill from the heat, the bad air, and the miserable food. We who spent the summer campaigning suffered also, but in less degree. It was a tremendous relief when the cool days of autumn set in, and it was with renewed vigour that we prepared for the opening day of Parliament, which was 12th October. Again we resolved to send a deputation to the Prime Minister, and again we invited the general public to take part in the demonstration. We had printed thousands of little handbills bearing this inscription: ‘Men and Women, Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons, on Tuesday Evening, 13th October, at 7.30.’
On Sunday, 11th October, we held a large meeting in Trafalgar Square, my daughter Christabel, Mrs Drummond and I speaking from the plinth of the Nelson monument. Mr Lloyd-George, as we afterwards learned, was a member of the audience. The police were there, taking ample notes of our speeches. We had not failed to notice that they were watching us daily, dogging our footsteps, and showing in numerous ways that they were under orders to keep track of all our movements. The climax came at noon on 12th October, when Christabel, Mrs Drummond and I were each served with an imposing legal document which read, ‘Information has been laid this day by the Commissioner of Police that you, in the month of October, in the year 1908, were guilty of conduct likely to provoke a breach of the peace by initiating and causing to be initiated, by publishing and causing to be published, a certain handbill, calling upon and inciting the public to do a certain wrongful and illegal act, viz., to rush the House of Commons at 7.30 p.m. on 13th October inst.’
The last paragraph was a summons to appear at Bow Street police station that same afternoon at three o’clock. We did not go to Bow Street police station. We went instead to a crowded ‘At Home’ at Queen’s Hall, where it can be imagined that our news created great excitement. The place was surrounded by constables, and the police reporters were on hand to take stenographic reports of everything that was said from the platform. Once an excited cry was raised that a police inspector was coming in to arrest us. But the officer merely brought a message that the summons had been adjourned until the following morning.
It did not suit our convenience to obey the adjourned summons quite so early, so I wrote a polite note to the police, saying that we would be in our headquarters, No. 4 Clements Inn, the next evening at six o’clock, and would then be at his disposal. Warrants for our arrests were quickly issued, and Inspector Jarvis was instructed to execute them at once. This he found impossible to do, for Mrs Drummond was spending her last day of liberty on private business, while my daughter and I had retreated to another part of Clements Inn, which is a big, rambling building. There, in the roof-garden of the Pethick Lawrences’ private flat, we remained all day, busy, under the soft blue of the autumn sky, with our work and our preparations for a long absence. At six we walked downstairs, dressed for the street. Mrs Drummond arrived promptly, the waiting officers read the warrants, and we all proceeded to Bow Street in cabs. It was too late for the trial to b
e held. We asked for bail, but the authorities had no mind to allow us to take part in the ‘rush’ which we had incited, so we were obliged to spend the night in the police station. All night I lay awake, thinking of the scenes which were going on in the streets.
The next morning, in a courtroom crowded to its utmost capacity, my daughter rose to conduct her first case at law. She had earned the right to an LL.B. after her name, but as women are not permitted to practise law in England, she had never appeared at the bar in any capacity except that of defendant. Now she proposed to combine the two rôles of defendant and lawyer, and conduct the case for the three of us. She began by asking the magistrate not to try the case in that court, but to send it for trial before a judge and jury. We had long desired to take the Suffragettes’ cases before bodies of private citizens, because we had every reason to suspect that the police-court officials acted under the direct commands of the very persons against whom our agitation was directed. Jury trial was denied us; but after the preliminary examination was over the magistrate, Mr Curtis Bennett, allowed a week’s adjournment for preparation of the case.
On 21st October the trial was resumed, with the courtroom as full as before and the press table even more crowded, for it had been widely published that we had actually subpoenaed two members of the Government, who had witnessed the scenes on the night of 13th October. The first witness to enter the box was Mr Lloyd-George. Christabel examined him at some length as to the meaning and merits of the word rush, and succeeded in making him very uncomfortable – and the charge against ourselves look very flimsy. She then questioned him about the speeches he had heard at Trafalgar Square, and as to whether there had been any suggestion that property be destroyed or personal violence used. He admitted that the speeches were temperate and the crowds orderly. Then Christabel suddenly asked, ‘There were no words used so likely to incite to violence as the advice you gave at Swansea, that the women should be ruthlessly flung out of your meeting?’ Mr Lloyd-George looked black, and answered nothing. The magistrate hastened to the protection of Mr Lloyd-George. ‘This is quite irrelevant,’ he said. ‘That was a private meeting.’ It was a public meeting, and Christabel said so. ‘It was a private meeting in a sense,’ insisted the magistrate.
Mr Lloyd-George assumed an air of pompous indignation when Christabel asked him, ‘Have we not received encouragement from you, and if not from you from your colleagues, to take action of this kind?’ Mr Lloyd-George rolled his eyes upward as he replied, ‘I should be very much surprised to hear that, Miss Pankhurst.’
‘Is it not a fact,’ asked Christabel, ‘that you yourself have set us an example of revolt?’
‘I never incited a crowd to violence,’ exclaimed the witness.
‘Not in the Welsh graveyard case?’ she asked.
‘No!’ he cried angrily.
‘You did not tell them to break down a wall and disinter a body?’ pursued Christabel. He could not deny this but, ‘I gave advice which was found by the Court of Appeal to be sound legal advice,’ he snapped, and turned his back as far as he could in the narrow witness box.
Mr Herbert Gladstone had asked to be allowed to testify early, as he was being detained from important public duties. Christabel asked to question one witness before Mr Gladstone entered the box. The witness was Miss Georgiana Brackenbury, who had recently suffered six weeks’ imprisonment for the cause, and had since met and had a talk with Mr Horace Smith, the magistrate, who had made to her a most important and damaging admission of the Government’s interference in suffragists’ trials. Christabel asked her one question. ‘Did Mr Horace Smith tell you in sentencing you that he was doing what he had been told to do?’
‘You must not put that question!’ exclaimed the magistrate. But the witness had already answered ‘Yes.’ There was an excited stir in the courtroom. It had been recorded under oath that a magistrate had admitted that Suffragettes were being sentenced not by himself, according to the evidence and according to law, but by the Government, for no one could possibly doubt where Mr Horace Smith’s orders came from.
Mr Gladstone, plump, bald and ruddy, in no way resembles his illustrious father. He entered the witness box smiling and confident, but his complacence vanished when Christabel asked him outright if the Government had not ordered the Commissioner of Police to take this action against us. Of course the magistrate intervened, and Mr Gladstone did not answer the question. Christabel tried again. ‘Did you instruct Mr Horace Smith to decide against Miss Brackenbury, and to send her to prison for six weeks?’ That too was objected to, as were all questions on the subject.
All through the examination the magistrate constantly intervened to save the Cabinet Minister from embarrassment, but Christabel finally succeeded in making Mr Gladstone admit, point by point, that he had said that women could never get the vote because they could not fight for it as men had fought.
A large number of witnesses testified to the orderly nature of the demonstration on the 13th, and then Christabel rose to plead. She began by declaring that these proceedings had been taken, as the legal saying is, ‘in malice and vexation’, in order to lame a political enemy. She declared that, under the law, the charge which might properly be brought against us was that of illegal assembly, but the Government had not charged us with this offence, because the Government desired to keep the case in a police court.
‘The authorities dare not see this case come before a jury,’ she declared, ‘because they know perfectly well that if it were heard before a jury of our countrymen we should be acquitted, just as John Burns was acquitted years ago for taking action far more dangerous to the public peace than we have taken. We are deprived of trial by jury. We are also deprived of the right to appeal against the magistrate’s decision. Very carefully has this procedure been thought out.’
Of the handbill she said: ‘We do not deny that we issued this bill; none of us three has wished to deny responsibility. We did issue the bill; we did cause it to be circulated; we did put upon it the words “Come and help the Suffragettes rush the House of Commons.” For these words we do not apologise. It is very well known that we took this action in order to press forward a claim, which, according to the British constitution, we are well entitled to make.’
In all that the Suffragettes had done, in all that they might ever do, declared my daughter, they would only be following in the footsteps of men now in Parliament. ‘Mr Herbert Gladstone has told us in the speech I read to him that the victory of argument alone is not enough. As we cannot hope to win by force of argument alone, it is necessary to overcome by other means the savage resistance of the Government to our claim for citizenship. He says, “Go on, fight as the men did.” And then, when we show our power and get the people to help us, he takes proceedings against us in a manner that would have been disgraceful even in the old days of coercion. Then there is Mr Lloyd-George, who, if any man has done so, has set us an example. His whole career has been a series of revolts. He has said that if we do not get the vote – mark these words – we should be justified in adopting the methods the men had to adopt, namely, pulling down the Hyde Park railings.’ She quoted Lord Morley as saying of the Indian unrest: ‘We are in India in the presence of a living movement, and a movement for what? For objects which we ourselves have taught them to think are desirable objects; and unless we can somehow reconcile order with satisfaction of those ideals and aspirations, the fault will not be theirs, it will be ours – it will mark the breakdown of British statesmanship.’ – ‘Apply those words to our case,’ she continued.
‘Remember that we are demanding of Liberal statesmen that which is for us the greatest boon and the most essential right – and if the present Government cannot reconcile order with our demand for the vote without delay, it will mark the breakdown of their statesmanship. Yes, their statesmanship has broken down already. They are disgraced. It is only in this court that they have the smallest hope of being supported.’
My daughter had spoken with passion and f
ervour, and her righteous indignation had moved her to words that caused the magistrate’s face to turn an angry crimson. When I rose to address the Court I began by assuming an appearance of calmness which I did not altogether feel. I endorsed all that Christabel had said of the unfairness of our trial and the malice of the Government; I protested against the trial of political offenders in a common police court, and I said that we were not women who would come into the court as ordinary law-breakers. I described Mrs Drummond’s worthy career as a wife, a mother, and a self-sustaining business woman. I said, ‘Before you decide what is to be done with us, I should like you to hear from me a statement of what has brought me into the dock this morning.’ And then I told of my life and experiences, many of which I have related in these pages of what I had seen and known as a Poor Law Guardian and a registrar of births and deaths; of how I had learned the burning necessity of changing the status of women, of altering the laws under which they and their children live, and of the essential justice of making women self-governing citizens.
‘I have seen,’ I said, ‘that men are encouraged by law to take advantage of the helplessness of women. Many women have thought as I have, and for many, many years have tried, by that influence of which we have been so often reminded, to alter these laws, but we find that influence counts for nothing. When we went to the House of Commons we used to be told, when we were persistent, that members of Parliament were not responsible to women, they were responsible only to voters, and that their time was too fully occupied to reform those laws, although they agreed that they needed reforming.
‘We women have presented larger petitions in support of our enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our duty to make the world a better place for women than it is today.
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