I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days, long enough for the Commissioner of Immigration at Washington to take my case to the President who instantly ordered my release. Whoever was responsible for my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident. My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for England late in November with a very generous American contribution to our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver in person.
The night before the White Star liner Majestic reached Plymouth a wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a fisherman’s dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched, stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the women called out to me: ‘The Cats are here, Mrs Pankhurst! They’re close on you –’ Their voices trailed away into the mist and we heard no more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship’s boy appeared on deck and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship anchored two miles out at sea.
Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following my arrest, and the great sum of £15,000 was poured into the coffers of militancy. This included the £4,500 which had been collected during my American tour.
Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to open, returning to attend a W.S.P.U. meeting on the day before my licence expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest. We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of attack.
The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the part of the police of the bodyguard of women, just then organised for the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly had it on this occasion, for knowing that the bodyguard was waiting at Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried across the arrival platform between a double line of police and detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within by two plain clothes men and a wardress, and without by three more policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxicabs filled with plain clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.
Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion. When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined, saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full responsibility for my condition. ‘I refuse to be examined by you or any prison doctor,’ I declared, ‘and I do this as a protest against my sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have imposed upon me.’
Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I was kept in prison until the following Wednesday morning. During all that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor, resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. ‘You are not a doctor,’ I told the man. ‘You are a Government torturer, and all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to die.’ The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and looked extremely unhappy. ‘I suppose you do think that,’ he mumbled.
On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the coldness of the Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.
These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke out in the timberyards at Richmond Walk, Devonport, and an acre and a half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of The Suffragette and to another railing two cards, on one of which was written a message to the Government: ‘How dare you arrest Mrs Pankhurst and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr Bonar Law to go free?’ The second card bore the words: ‘Our reply to the tor
ture of Mrs Pankhurst, and her cowardly arrest at Plymouth.’
Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St Anne’s Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners who were suffering for conscience’s sake. The reader no doubt has heard of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: ‘God save Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her, spare those who suffer for conscience’s sake. Hear us when we pray to Thee.’ They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man, who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before the vergers came.
Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities, the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal residence until surrender followed – as it invariably did.
As Holloway Prison is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited by the W.S.P.U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of his interview with them which was in effect the Government’s version of the facts. The W.S.P.U. was naturally indignant, while all the Government’s friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of the iniquity which the Bishop of London was manoeuvred by the Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote in The Suffragette, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a cinder in her eye. ‘The principle,’ declared Miss Richardson, ‘is the same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another reason – a moral reason – for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One’s whole nature is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable.’
I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps heard of Suffragette ‘insults’ to King George and Queen Mary, and it is but just that he should hear a direct account of how these ‘insults’ are offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament, and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by one of the King’s equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.
We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the King because we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government, we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the Monarch. Late in December 1913, while I was in prison for the second time since my return to England, a great gala performance was given at Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d’Arc of Raymond Rôze. The King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women were today fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church, and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King’s authority.
The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below. It was fully three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers could go on with the opera.
The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to make a second attempt to arouse the King’s conscience, and early in January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest against three things – the continued disfranchisement of women; the forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely of attacking property, but of destroying human life.
I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him ‘the respectful and loyal request of the Women’s Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will give audience to a deputation of women’. The letter went on: ‘The deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women’s equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.
‘The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the medieval and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty’s Ministers are seeking to repress wom
en’s revolt against the deprivation of citizen rights –a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride of the British race.
‘We have been told by the unthinking – by those who are heedless of the constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an audience of Your Majesty in person – that our conversation should be with Your Majesty’s Ministers.
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