The reply of the W.S.P.U. was immediate and forceful. Led by Mrs Pethick Lawrence, our women went out with stones and hammers and broke hundreds of windows in the Home Office, the War and Foreign Offices, the Board of Education, the Privy Council Office, the Board of Trade, the Treasury, Somerset House, the National Liberal Club, several post offices, the Old Banqueting Hall, the London and South Western Bank, and a dozen other buildings, including the residence of Lord Haldane and Mr John Burns. Two hundred and twenty women were arrested and about 150 of them sent to prison for terms varying from a week to two months.
One individual protest deserves mention because of its prophetic character. In December Miss Emily Wilding Davison was arrested for attempting to set fire to a letter box at Parliament Street Post Office. In court Miss Davison said that she did it as a protest against the Government’s treachery, and as a demand that women’s suffrage be included in the King’s speech. ‘The protest was meant to be serious,’ she said, ‘and so I adopted a serious course. In past agitation for reform the next step after window breaking was incendiarism, in order to draw the attention of the private citizens to the fact that this question of reform was their concern as well as that of women.’
Miss Davison received the severe sentence of six months’ imprisonment for her deed.
To this state of affairs I returned from my American tour. I had the comfort of reflecting that my imprisoned comrades were being accorded better treatment than the early prisoners had known. Since early in 1910 some concessions had been granted, and some acknowledgement of the political character of our offences had been made. During the brief period when these scant concessions to justice were allowed, the hunger strike was abandoned and prison was robbed of its worst horror, forcible feeding. The situation was bad enough, however, and I could see that it might easily become a great deal worse. We had reached a stage at which the mere sympathy of members of Parliament, however sincerely felt, was no longer of the slightest use. Reminding our members this, in the first speeches made after returning to England I asked them to prepare themselves for more action. If women’s suffrage was not included in the next King’s speech we should have to make it absolutely impossible for the Government to touch the question of the franchise.
The King’s speech, when Parliament met in February 1912, alluded to the franchise question in very general terms. Proposals, it was stated, would be brought forward for the amendment of the law with respect to the franchise and the registration of electors. This might be construed to mean that the Government were going to introduce a manhood suffrage bill or a bill for the abolition of plural voting, which had been suggested in some quarters as a substitute for the manhood suffrage bill. No precise statement of the Government’s intentions was made, and the whole franchise question was left in a cloud of uncertainty. Mr Agg Gardner, a Unionist member of the Conciliation Committee, drew the third place in the ballot, and he announced that he should reintroduce the Conciliation Bill. This interested us very slightly, for knowing its prospect of success to have been destroyed, we were done with the Conciliation Bill forever. Nothing less than a Government measure would henceforth satisfy the W.S.P.U., because it had been clearly demonstrated that only a Government measure would be allowed to pass the House of Commons. With sublime faith, or rather with a deplorable lack of political insight, the Women’s Liberal Federation and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies professed full confidence in the proposed amendment to a manhood suffrage bill, but we knew how futile was that hope. We saw that the only course to take was to offer determined opposition to any measure of suffrage that did not include as an integral part, equal suffrage for men and women.
On 16th February we held a large meeting of welcome to a number of released prisoners who had served two and three months for the window breaking demonstration that had taken place in the previous November. At this meeting we candidly surveyed the situation and agreed on a course of action which we believed would be sufficiently strong to prevent the Government from advancing their threatened franchise bill. I said on this occasion:
‘We don’t want to use any weapons that are unnecessarily strong. If the argument of the stone, that time-honoured official political argument, is sufficient, then we will never use any stronger argument. And that is the weapon and the argument that we are going to use next time. And so I say to every volunteer on our demonstration, “Be prepared to use that argument.” I am taking charge of the demonstration, and that is the argument I am going to use. I am not going to use it for any sentimental reason, I am going to use it because it is the easiest and the most readily understood. Why should women go to Parliament Square and be battered about and insulted, and most important of all, produce less effect than when we throw stones? We tried it long enough. We submitted for years patiently to insult and assault. Women had their health injured. Women lost their lives. We should not have minded if that had succeeded, but that did not succeed, and we have made more progress with less hurt to ourselves by breaking glass than ever we made when we allowed them to break our bodies.
‘After all, is not a woman’s life, is not her health, are not her limbs more valuable than panes of glass? There is no doubt of that, but most important of all, does not the breaking of glass produce more effect upon the Government? If you are fighting a battle, that should dictate your choice of weapons. Well, then, we are going to try this time if mere stones will do it. I do not think it will ever be necessary for us to arm ourselves as Chinese women have done, but there are women who are prepared to do that if it should be necessary. In this Union we don’t lose our heads. We only go as far as we are obliged to go in order to win, and we are going forward with this next protest demonstration in full faith that this plan of campaign, initiated by our friends whom we honour tonight, will on this next occasion prove effective.’
Ever since militancy took on the form of destruction of property the public generally, both at home and abroad, has expressed curiosity as to the logical connection between acts such as breaking windows, firing pillar boxes, et cetera, and the vote. Only a complete lack of historical knowledge excuses that curiosity. For every advance of men’s political freedom has been marked with violence and the destruction of property. Usually the advance has been marked by war, which is called glorious. Sometimes it has been marked by riotings, which are deemed less glorious but are at least effective. That speech of mine, just quoted, will probably strike the reader as one inciting to violence and illegal action, things as a rule and in ordinary circumstances quite inexcusable. Well, I will call the reader’s attention to what was, in this connection, a rather singular coincidence. At the very hour when I was making that speech, advising my audience of the political necessity of physical revolt, a responsible member of the Government, in another hall, in another city, was telling his audience precisely the same thing. This Cabinet Minister, the right Honourable C.E.H. Hobhouse, addressing a large anti-suffrage meeting in his constituency of Bristol, said that the suffrage movement was not a political issue because its adherents had failed to prove that behind this movement existed a large public demand. He declared that ‘In the case of the suffrage demand there has not been the kind of popular sentimental uprising which accounted for Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the Hyde Park railings in 1867. There has not been a great ebullition of popular feeling.’
The ‘popular sentimental uprising’ to which Mr Hobhouse alluded was the burning to the ground of the castle of the anti-suffrage Duke of Newcastle, and of Colwick Castle, the country seat of another of the leaders of the opposition against the franchise bill. The militant men of that time did not select uninhabited buildings to be fired. They burned both these historic residences over their owners’ heads. Indeed, the wife of the owner of Colwick Castle died as a result of shock and exposure on that occasion. No arrests were made, no men imprisoned. On the contrary the King sent for the Premier, and begged the Whig Ministers favourable to the franchise bill not to resign, and intimated that thi
s was also the wish of the Lords who had thrown out the bill. Molesworth’s History of England says:
These declarations were imperatively called for. The danger was imminent and the Ministers knew it and did all that lay in their power to tranquillise the people, and to assure them that the bill was only delayed and not finally defeated.
For a time the people believed this, but soon they lost patience, and seeing signs of a renewed activity on the part of the anti-suffragists, they became aggressive again. Bristol, the very city in which Mr Hobhouse made his speech, was set on fire. The militant reformers burned the new prison, the toll houses, the Bishop’s Palace, both sides of Queen’s Square, including the Mansion House, the custom house, the excise office, many warehouses, and other private property, the whole valued at over £100,000 – five hundred thousand dollars. It was as a result of such violence, and in fear of more violence, that the reform bill was hurried through Parliament and became law in June 1832.
Our demonstration, so mild by comparison with English men’s political agitation, was announced for 4th March, and the announcement created much public alarm. Sir William Byles gave notice that he would ‘ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention had been drawn to a speech by Mrs Pankhurst last Friday night, openly and emphatically inciting her hearers to violent outrage and the destruction of property, and threatening the use of firearms if stones did not prove sufficiently effective; and what steps he proposes to take to protect Society from this outbreak of lawlessness.’
The question was duly asked, and the Home Secretary replied that his attention had been called to the speech, but that it would not be desirable in the public interest to say more than this at present.
Whatever preparations the police department were making to prevent the demonstration, they failed because, while as usual, we were able to calculate exactly what the police department were going to do, they were utterly unable to calculate what we were going to do. We had planned a demonstration for 4th March, and this one we announced. We planned another demonstration for 1st March, but this one we did not announce. Late in the afternoon of Friday, 1st March, I drove in a taxicab, accompanied by the Hon. Secretary of the Union, Mrs Tuke and another of our members, to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. It was exactly half past five when we alighted from the cab and threw our stones, four of them, through the windowpanes. As we expected we were promptly arrested and taken to Cannon Row police station. The hour that followed will long be remembered in London. At intervals of fifteen minutes relays of women who had volunteered for the demonstration did their work. The first smashing of glass occurred in the Haymarket and Piccadilly, and greatly startled and alarmed both pedestrians and police. A large number of the women were arrested, and everybody thought that this ended the affair. But before the excited populace and the frustrated shop owners’ first exclamation had died down, before the police had reached the station with their prisoners, the ominous crashing and splintering of plate glass began again, this time along both sides of Regent Street and the Strand. A furious rush of police and people towards the second scene of action ensued. While their attention was being taken up with occurrences in this quarter, the third relay of women began breaking the windows in Oxford Circus and Bond Street. The demonstration ended for the day at half past six with the breaking of many windows in the Strand. The Daily Mail gave this graphic account of the demonstration:
From every part of the crowded and brilliantly lighted streets came the crash of splintered glass. People started as a window shattered at their side; suddenly there was another crash in front of them; on the other side of the street; behind – everywhere. Scared shop assistants came running out to the pavements; traffic stopped; policemen sprang this way and that; five minutes later the streets were a procession of excited groups, each surrounding a woman wrecker being led in custody to the nearest police station. Meanwhile the shopping quarter of London had plunged itself into a sudden twilight. Shutters were hurriedly fitted; the rattle of iron curtains being drawn came from every side. Guards of commissionaires and shopmen were quickly mounted, and any unaccompanied lady in sight, especially if she carried a handbag, became an object of menacing suspicion.
At the hour when this demonstration was being made a conference was being held at Scotland Yard to determine what should be done to prevent the smashing of windows on the coming Monday night. But we had not announced the hour of our 4th March protest. I had in my speech simply invited women to assemble in Parliament Square on the evening of 4th March, and they accepted the invitation. Said the Daily Telegraph:
By six o’clock the neighbourhood Houses of Parliament were in a stage of siege. Shopkeepers in almost every instance barricaded their premises, removed goods from the windows and prepared for the worst. A few minutes before six o’clock a huge force of police, amounting to nearly three thousand constables, was posted in Parliament Square, Whitehall, and streets adjoining, and large reserves were gathered in Westminster Hall and Scotland Yard. By half past eight Whitehall was packed from end to end with police and public. Mounted constables rode up and down Whitehall keeping the people on the move. At no time was there any sign of danger….
The demonstration had taken place in the morning, when a hundred or more women walked quietly into Knightsbridge and walking singly along the streets demolished nearly every pane of glass they passed. Taken by surprise the police arrested as many as they could reach, but most of the women escaped.
For that two days’ work something like 200 Suffragettes were taken to the various police stations, and for days the long procession of women streamed through the courts. The dismayed magistrates found themselves facing, not only former rebels, but many new ones, in some cases, women whose names, like that of Dr Ethel Smyth, the composer, were famous throughout Europe. These women, when arraigned, made clear and lucid statements of their positions and their motives, but magistrates are not schooled to examine motives. They are trained to think only of laws and mostly of laws protecting property. Their ears are not tuned to listen to words like those spoken by one of the prisoners, who said: ‘We have tried every means – processions and meetings – which were of no avail. We have tried demonstrations, and now at last we have to break windows. I wish I had broken more. I am not in the least repentant. Our women are working in far worse condition than the striking miners. I have seen widows struggling to bring up their children. Only two out of every five are fit to be soldiers. What is the good of a country like ours? England is absolutely on the wane. You only have one point of view, and that is the men’s, and while men have done the best they could, they cannot go far without the women and the women’s views. We believe the whole is in a muddle too horrible to think of.’
The coal miners were at that time engaging in a terrible strike, and the Government, instead of arresting the leaders, were trying to come to terms of peace with them. I reminded the magistrate of this fact, and I told him that what the women had done was but a fleabite by comparison with the miners’ violence. I said further: ‘I hope our demonstration will be enough to show the Government that the women’s agitation is going on. If not, if you send me to prison, I will go further to show that women who have to help pay the salaries of Cabinet Ministers, and your salary too, sir, are going to have some voice in the making of the laws they have to obey.’
I was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. Others received sentences ranging from one week to two months, while those who were accused of breaking glass above five pounds in value, were committed for trial in higher courts. They were sent to prison on remand, and when the last of us were behind the grim gates, not only Holloway but three other women’s prisons were taxed to provide for so many extra inmates.
It was a stormy imprisonment for most of us. A great many of the women had received, in addition to their sentences, ‘hard labour’, and this meant that the privileges at that time accorded to Suffragettes, as political offenders, were wi
thheld. The women adopted the hunger strike as a protest, but as the hint was conveyed to me that the privileges would be restored, I advised a cessation of the strike. The remand prisoners demanded that I be allowed to exercise with them, and when this was not answered they broke the windows of their cells. The other suffrage prisoners, hearing the sound of shattered glass, and the singing of the Marseillaise, immediately broke their windows. The time had long gone by when the Suffragettes submitted meekly to prison discipline. And so passed the first days of my imprisonment.
CHAPTER II
The panic stricken Government did not rest content with the imprisonment of the window breakers. They sought, in a blind and blundering fashion, to perform the impossible feat of wrecking at a blow the entire militant movement. Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
For days before the two demonstrations described in the last chapter our headquarters in Clement’s Inn had been under constant observation by the police, and on the evening of 5th March an inspector of police and a large force of detectives suddenly descended on the place, with warrants for the arrest of Christabel Pankhurst and Mr and Mrs Pethick Lawrence, who with Mrs Tuke and myself were charged with ‘conspiring to incite certain persons to commit malicious damage to property’. When the officers entered they found Mr Pethick Lawrence at work in his office, and Mrs Pethick Lawrence in her flat upstairs. My daughter was not in the building. The Lawrences, after making brief preparations, drove in a taxicab to Bow Street Station, where they spent the night. The police remained in possession of the offices, and detectives were despatched to find and arrest Christabel. But that arrest never took place. Christabel Pankhurst eluded the entire force of detectives and uniformed police, trained hunters of human prey.
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