A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Recent research adds some weight to the argument that the Pankhursts’ split from the ILP was premeditated. Most histories of the suffrage movement trace it to a dispute over the use of Pankhurst Hall, a meeting room established in the memory of Dr Pankhurst through subscriptions raised by the Clarion newspaper. The Pankhursts allegedly claimed that they broke with the party after hearing that the local ILP branch that used the hall would not admit women as members. Yet there is no evidence that this was the case and, indeed, all of the Pankhurst daughters would later speak at the hall, surely an odd decision if it had been such a serious snub.5 Rather than being a reaction to a perceived insult to the memory of Dr Pankhurst, it is more likely that the decision to form the Women’s Social and Political Union, as the Pankhursts’ organisation came to be known, was a considered political choice made on similar grounds to Roper and Booth’s formation of the Lancashire and Cheshire Women’s Textile and Other Workers Representation Committee: namely, the very slow progress in getting a clear commitment to women’s suffrage from the male Labour leadership. Like Roper and Gore-Booth, the Pankhursts hoped to create a ginger group which, without splitting completely from the ILP, would pressurise the party into taking a firmer line and supporting pro-suffrage parliamentary candidates. Indeed, Mrs Pankhurst had initially planned to call her organisation the Women’s Labour Representation Committee, to be prevented only by the similarity to the name of the group already founded by Roper and Gore-Booth.

  The Women’s Social and Political Union was formed on 10 October 1903 at a meeting at Pankhurst’s home. Most attendees were female working-class supporters of the ILP. The WSPU’s position on the franchise mirrored that of Mrs Pankhurst’s late husband: that the terms of the 1884 Representation of the People Act should be changed to include women. Despite the strong ILP presence, the WSPU eschewed any political affiliation and, unlike other suffrage organisations, advertised itself as a women-only party. It was also keen from the beginning to attract supporters from across the social spectrum. The recruitment of Annie Kenney, ‘the little factory girl’ as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (the WPSU’s treasurer) later called her, was a notable propaganda coup for the WSPU.6 In fact, Kenney had only briefly worked in a factory and her father, a cotton minder, had generally been able to provide a more comfortable and ‘respectable’ home than most mill-hands enjoyed, but when it was important for the WSPU to advertise its working-class credentials, Kenney willingly donned her mill-girl’s shawl and clogs. She had been drawn to socialism through reading Blatchford’s Clarion, but his failure to tackle the inequalities faced by women led her to the suffrage movement. Kenney first met Christabel when the elder Pankhurst daughter, with Teresa Billington, was addressing a meeting of the Oldham Trades Council. Kenney initially found Billington the more persuasive speaker, but she liked Christabel more.

  It was the beginning of both a close working relationship and a deep friendship. Kenney was often presented by hostile observers as Christabel’s unquestioning acolyte, and the closeness between the two has even led some historians to allege (on scant evidence) that the relationship was sexual.7 There was more than a twinge of jealousy in Sylvia Pankhurst’s description of Kenney’s ‘abundant, loosely-dressed golden hair’ as ‘the most youthful thing about her’, and her ‘twinkling, bright blue eyes’ surrounded by ‘crow’s feet’.8 Her bitterness again surfaced in this allusion to the differing impacts of the suffrage movement on the lives of activists: ‘Movements for liberation bring with them, to some, opportunities of personal advancement and release from uncongenial drudgery; to others, loss of livelihood, lowering of status, a double load of toil.’9 For middle-class Sylvia, political activism brought poverty, stress and, eventually, the effective breakdown of her relationship with her sister and mother. For respectable, working-class Annie Kenney it brought contact and friendship with wealthy WSPU activists like Lady Constance Lytton and the Pethick-Lawrences, whom she helped bring into the movement; the excitement of foreign travel – she acted as go-between when Christabel was in exile in Paris and later toured America; and personal fame. As a paid WSPU activist, the movement also gave Kenney a reasonable living.

  The root of Sylvia’s unhappiness unquestionably lay in the prominent role, during the key militant years, that Kenney played in the WSPU compared to her own limited contribution. Kenney freely admitted that she was no great thinker, but her contribution was more than mere poster-girl for working-class activism or mouthpiece for Christabel. Her physical frailty, as even Sylvia conceded, masked a considerable mental toughness, and it was her readiness to undertake dangerous activities that saw her, alongside Christabel, involved in the first expressions of WSPU militancy.

  Lady Frances Balfour, younger sister of the Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and a leading member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, described the parliamentary treatment of the issue of women’s suffrage between 1897 and 1906 as being ‘always shoved onto a siding to let express trains go by, and even the slowest train was an express to those who wished the matter shelved’.10 The derision with which another private member’s bill in favour of women’s suffrage was talked out of the House in 1905 – one MP stated that women did not warrant the vote as they were ‘nervous, emotional and had very little sense of proportion’11 – convinced Mrs Pankhurst that the lobbying tactics of the NUWSS would not be enough to achieve their goal.

  The first inklings of suffragette militancy came in February 1904, when Christabel interrupted a free trade meeting at which Winston Churchill was the main speaker to demand the alteration of the Representation of the People Act to include women. This intervention was largely ignored by the press, but the next year, a repeat performance garnered far more impressive results. On 13 October 1905, this time accompanied by Annie Kenney, Christabel interrupted a meeting at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, again featuring Churchill as a speaker. During the time set aside for questions, Annie asked whether the Liberal Party would give votes to women. When the question was ignored, Christabel repeated it. Police dragged the two women out of the hall. Deliberately courting arrest, Christabel spat in the face of both Superintendent Watson and Inspector Mather, hit Mather in the mouth and said that she wanted to assault a policeman. Mather, slapped once more by Christabel, ejected them from the building and asked them to leave, but the women refused and he was forced to arrest them. The next morning Christabel explained their conduct:

  We cannot make any orderly protest because we have not the means whereby citizens may do such a thing; we have not a vote; and so long as we have not votes we must be disorderly. There is no other way whereby we can put forward our claims to political justice. When we have that you will not see us at the police courts; but so long as we have not votes this will not happen.12

  The lessons learnt from the Boggart Hole Clough affair were put into effect. Both women refused to pay their fines and were sent to Strangeways Prison. The hoped-for media attention duly followed, with coverage from significant local papers such as the Manchester Guardian and the national press, including The Times.

  The recycling of an old ILP strategy from the 1890s is a reminder that, at least at this stage, the WSPU’s ‘militancy’ was very similar to the tactics of civil disobedience practised by earlier radical groups. The shock value came from the fact that it was women who were the agents of violence (if, at this stage, largely symbolic). Until 1908, the suffragettes’ strategy was not obviously distinct from the suffragists’, and mirrored earlier movements in its use of marches, mass meetings and petitions.13 Indeed, the device of heckling or otherwise interrupting the political meetings of other parties was itself an established tactic, regularly deployed by the Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s. Given these continuities with the past, it was fitting that the first act of suffragette militancy took place near the site of the Peterloo massacre and in the Free Trade Hall so often used for meetings of the Anti-Corn Law League.

  At this stage, though its activities were beginning t
o gain national attention, the WSPU remained an essentially northern organisation. Now unquestionably one of its leading activists, Christabel had had to return to the North regularly in any case in order to complete her studies at the University of Manchester. She graduated in 1906 with first-class honours in law, one of only two students that year to do so. Sylvia recalled that when her sister went up to collect her degree, she was met with a protest by male students, one of whom, Walter Newbold, went on to be the first avowedly communist British MP.14 Though excluded from the Bar because of her sex, Christabel would soon put her legal expertise on display in defending WSPU members, including herself.

  That same year, the Pankhursts decided to move the WSPU’s headquarters to London. Sylvia, a talented artist, had won a two-year scholarship to the Royal College of Art and was living in lodgings in Chelsea. Isolated from her family and often lonely, she took increasing comfort in the company of Keir Hardie, frequently visiting him in his bedsit at number 14 Neville’s Court.* Hardie impressed her with his frugality and self-sufficiency, cooking for himself on an open range in his room, though his culinary repertoire was hardly varied – he subsisted largely on a diet of drop-scones, bread and tea. When she visited, he would puff away on his pipe, writing letters for the Labour Leader. Occasionally he would read aloud to her from one of his favourite authors: Keats, Scott, Burns, Byron, Shelley or Morris.15

  Sylvia helped bring the teetotal, puritanical Hardie out of his shell, taking him to the theatre to see his first play, an appropriately improving Shavian production, and dining out occasionally in restaurants, where he tried the exotic luxury of black coffee for the first time. The support was mutual, Sylvia recalling a particularly low point in relations with her family, when she had moved into new digs shortly after the death of her brother Harry in 1910:

  all unexpected, Keir Hardie came knocking at my door. With quick discernment and practical kindness, he took command of the situation. He lifted the heavy things into position, and when all was, so far as it could be, in order, took me out for a meal at the little Italian restaurant where Harry and I had lunched on many a happy Sunday. I was immensely cheered.16

  Though Hardie was already married – his wife Lillie stayed in Ayrshire and was offered, unsurprisingly, no encouragement from her husband to venture south – his close friendship with Sylvia had almost certainly become a love affair.17

  It was through Hardie that the Pankhursts were first introduced to Emmeline and Frederick (Fred) Pethick-Lawrence, a wealthy Liberal couple who had devoted themselves for several years to philanthropic work in the East End. At the entreaty of Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence agreed to act as treasurer of the WSPU. It was a momentous decision, for a number of reasons. Hitherto, the WSPU had been a poor organisation, occasionally dependent on handouts from the ILP (itself a pretty cash-strapped party), rustled up by Keir Hardie. Now the Pethick-Lawrences would provide real financial support for the Union, as well as a home for Christabel for the next six years. More than this, the well-connected Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was able, in her role as treasurer, to encourage other wealthy women to contribute, creating the beginnings of the Union’s lucrative donor base in Kensington and Chelsea. This increased financial security raised the prospect of political independence from the Labour movement. The Pethick-Lawrences also set up the WSPU’s first newspaper, Votes for Women. Finally, their charitable efforts in the East End meshed with work that Sylvia and Teresa Billington had undertaken in winning working-class women in London to the suffrage cause.

  It was widely anticipated that the Liberal landslide of 1906 would lead to a shift in the government’s stance on women’s suffrage. Millicent Fawcett believed that the election had brought four hundred MPs sympathetic to the suffrage campaign into the Commons. The march organised by the WSPU on 19 February that year saw large numbers of working-class women take part who had joined the unemployment demonstrations of the previous year. The poverty of the East End, however, shocked even Annie Kenney, whose own background was scarcely middle-class:

  I have travelled through all the great European cities, but I have never seen such drabness, such hopeless despair, such agonizing poverty, as I saw in the East End of London. I felt it was like one big long funeral, but the dead who were being buried were not the human dead – they were the dead of lost endeavour, of lost hopes, aspirations, faith, courage, and of all the qualities that go to make a consciously free man.18

  The Pethick-Lawrences’ money was essential to providing supporters like these with transport and food. As the WSPU’s militant campaign progressed, its ability to use the cash of its wealthy supporters to pay its working-class activists would be a powerful engine to sustain its intensity.

  The march, like the earlier arrests of Christabel and Annie Kenney, proved successful in gathering more publicity for the movement, making the Mirror’s front page. A similar propaganda coup was won the next month when a deputation of thirty women went to 10 Downing Street requesting a meeting with the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The women were asked to leave but two of the contingent, Irene Fenwick Miller and Mrs Flora ‘General’ Drummond, managed to rush back inside, where they were arrested. Annie Kenney then jumped into the Prime Minister’s car and began to address the crowd that had gathered outside. Campbell-Bannerman ordered that the women should not be prosecuted as this would only give their cause greater publicity: the first sign that the government was getting wise to the WSPU’s tactics. Even so, the Mirror again led with coverage of the Downing Street incident.

  In the summer of 1906 the WSPU continued to advertise itself as a movement for working women with socialist ideological sympathies. An editorial in the Labour Record written by Mrs Pethick-Lawrence called for ‘volunteers for what we call Danger-work’, who would engage in ‘active agitation … regardless of the risks or consequences which may be entailed, in the spirit with which they so often sing the well-known song – The Red Flag … This is a people’s movement. It is the awakening of the working women of this country to their need of representation.’19

  Proselytising of this kind overlooked the growing tensions between the Pankhursts and the Labour movement. At the Cockermouth by-election later that year, Christabel announced that the WSPU, in addition to opposing all Liberal candidates – hardly surprising, given the off-hand way the new government had dismissed representations from both the WSPU and the NUWSS – would also adopt a sceptical attitude to all other political parties. In a joint statement with Teresa Billington, Christabel wrote: ‘Labour MPs tell us candidly that they are sent by the Trade Unionists to the House of Commons to promote reforms which must take precedence of [sic] women’s suffrage.’20

  For the time being, there was little public opposition to the non-alignment statement, even though most of the WSPU’s governing committee remained paid-up ILP members and the Union as a whole had owed much of its initial support to the Labour movement. The internal divisions within the WSPU had, however, been visible at the Union’s first conference that same year. Leading socialists such as John Bruce Glasier, husband of the radical suffragist Katherine St John, had already grown tired of what they saw as the increasingly domineering attitude of the Pankhursts. As Glasier recorded in his diary, he had had to endure

  A weary ordeal of chatter about women’s suffrage … belabouring me as Chairman of the Party for neglect of the question. At last, get roused and speak with something like scorn of their miserable individualist sexism; and virtually tell them that the ILP will not stir a finger more than it has done for all the women suffragettes in creation. Really the pair [Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst] are not seeking democratic freedom, but self-importance … They want to be ladies, not workers, and lack the humility of real heroism.21

  The influx of upper-and middle-class supporters was also a cause for concern: Glasier’s wife Katherine took to mocking the WSPU as now ‘the Society Woman’s Political Union’.22

  The draft constitution affirmed at the 1906 WSPU con
ference attempted to assert both the Union’s socialist credentials and its democratic organisational structure. The stated aims of the WSPU were to ‘secure for Women the Parliamentary Vote as it is or may be granted to men; to use the power thus obtained to establish equality of rights and opportunities between the sexes, and to promote the social and industrial well-being of the community’.23 Under the sections on ‘organisation’, a system for electing the executive was put in place, modelled on the democratic structure of WSPU local branches in Scotland, which Teresa Billington had helped to organise. However, though the conference ratified the constitution, the structure it had laid out for the national Union was never implemented. True control of the WSPU lay in the hands of Mrs Pankhurst, her eldest daughter and the Pethick-Lawrences. Historians have often noted the paradox that, as Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence put it, ‘a society that was founded upon a desire for the extension of democracy [turned] into an enthusiastically supported dictatorship’.24

  For the time being, this dispute brewing between the Pankhursts and the large numbers of members who continued to sympathise with the ILP was muted by the WSPU’s success with militant tactics. On 23 October, it mounted a demonstration at the opening of Parliament. A delegation of women demanded that the Liberal Chief Whip give them assurances that women’s suffrage would be discussed before the end of the parliamentary session. When this was, as anticipated, refused, women mounted seats in the Commons’ lobby and made protest speeches, while other suffragettes linked arms and closed around the speakers to protect them. Arrests inevitably followed, including Mary Gawthorpe, who had climbed on to a settee to make her speech, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Annie Kenney, Mrs Montefiore, Adela Pankhurst, Teresa Billington, Edith How-Martyn, Irene Fenwick Miller, Mrs Baldock and Mrs Anne Cobden Sanderson. The prisoners refused to recognise the authority of the ‘male’ court. All were found guilty of breach of the peace, and when they refused to be bound over for good behaviour were sentenced to two months’ imprisonment.