A Radical History Of Britain
Page 49
This was undoubtedly the most successful militant action that the WSPU had mounted so far. It garnered praise and support from both the national press and the constitutional suffragists. The Daily News noted the action in Parliament approvingly, claiming, ‘No class has ever got the vote except at the risk of something like revolution.’ The Daily Mirror compared the suffragettes’ actions with those of male reformers: ‘By what means, but by screaming, knocking and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?’25 When these predominantly middle-class women were categorised as second-division prisoners (‘common’ criminals), it provoked uproar. Correspondents reflected on the different treatments meted out to female reformers and male:
Charles Stewart Parnell, Charles Bradlaugh, Leigh Hunt, Edmund Yates, and other men in like case – that is, who were not criminals, though imprisoned under the laws – were treated differently. They had books and the use of writing materials, they lived in decent rooms, and were allowed to receive letters and occasional callers. But your women political prisoners are being treated like the commonest of criminals, merely for protesting in the hearing of your legislators against the inequality of men and women under our Constitution.26
This public pressure forced the Home Secretary to change tack, announcing that the women would be placed in the first division, the category reserved for political prisoners or those convicted of perjury or contempt of court and which allowed them considerable freedoms and a better diet. A prison warder at Holloway, Agnes Resbury, explained the difference:
First Class Misdemeanours … are allowed special treatment, and if they have the means and wish it, they can have a large cell, furnished to their own liking. I have seen these special cells furnished by Maple’s, the walls hung with pretty drapery, floors covered with rugs, side-board, easy chairs, pretty bedstead, their own bedding from home – eiderdown etc. – also the photographs of their friends standing about; all food sent in from outside restaurants – hot breakfast, lunch and dinner in the evening; they exercise by themselves and do not see or associate with other prisoners and are allowed to be visited every day, by their friends. You will think it no punishment to them, but I’ve seen them very depressed; the confinement to this class of prisoner, in the one cell for months, taken from a Home of luxury and from Society, where their life is usually a whirl of pleasure, must mean suffering to them far more than to the ordinary prisoner coming in and out. Those coming in for the same offence [who] are not able to afford these privileges … are allowed the best treatment the Prison affords; an ordinary furnished cell, small wash-stand and mirror etc., and the best diet, fourth class diet.27
The experience of incarceration brought Mrs Pethick-Lawrence close to a nervous breakdown, and she was released after giving an undertaking to keep the peace for six months. She immediately left the country for Italy to begin her recuperation.
The spectacle of middle-class women treated, at least initially, as common criminals for what were clearly political offences served to elicit a great deal of sympathy and backing from the well-to-do supporters of the NUWSS in London. Alice Milne, secretary of the Manchester Branch of the WSPU, wrote that she had arrived at the London office in October 1906 to find ‘the place full of fashionable ladies in silks & satins. Tea & cakes were handed round & then the organisers each made a speech … The ladies were much impressed & promised to return the following Monday with friends … What a fever our Union Members in Manchester would have been in if such ladies made a de[s]cent on us.’28 The suffragist leadership threw itself behind the cause of the imprisoned suffragettes, Fawcett writing to The Times to declare that the activities of the WSPU had given a boost to the suffrage movement as a whole. When her old friend Anne Cobden Sanderson was eventually released, Fawcett held a special celebratory feast in her honour at the Savoy.
WSPU militancy at this point had undeniably re-energised a movement that, even if it was growing in strength, especially in the North, had stalled at the level of national politics. The success of its tactics could be seen in the extent to which the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies itself now copied them. It shifted from being a group that largely restricted itself to lobbying Parliament to a broader campaigning organisation.29 By the beginning of 1907, both organisations were arranging mass meetings and marches in support of women’s suffrage. In February of that year, the NUWSS organised a procession through London (christened the ‘Mud March’ because of the terrible weather conditions on the day), which involved some three thousand participants. Later in the spring, the WSPU organised successive marches on Parliament in which activists repeatedly tried to breach police lines, leading to further mass arrests and imprisonments. As the militant activity grew, so did the size of the WSPU’s coffers: the Union enjoyed a total income of £2959 in the fiscal year March 1906 to February 1907.30
However, the tensions that had emerged between the Pankhursts and leading socialist members of the WSPU now came into the open. At the 1907 Labour conference, Emmeline Pankhurst reaffirmed Christabel’s stance that the WSPU would not align itself with any political party. In response, Anne Cobden Sanderson and Charlotte Despard, the wealthy socialist philanthropist, stated their personal commitment to supporting ILP candidates. Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel responded to this ‘disloyalty’ by resigning from the ILP, the former heading off attempts to wrest control of the Union from her and her daughter by cancelling the annual conference and dramatically tearing up the democratic constitution passed the previous year. The reaction of the dissidents, led by Teresa Billington-Greig – she had married earlier that year and, like Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, added her husband’s name to her own to indicate the equal nature of their marriage – was to form a new organisation, the Women’s Freedom League. The WFL skimmed off perhaps as much as a fifth of the WSPU membership, and though it remained committed to militant action, this would take a slightly different form from that increasingly pursued by the WSPU: less violent and destructive, more theatrical and spectacular, like Muriel Matters’s showering of London with leaflets from a hot-air balloon, later parodied in the classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.
The split caused great heartache to some former WSPU members, such as Hannah Mitchell. Mitchell never repudiated the militant campaign but was hurt by the Pankhursts’ decision, to her eyes unnecessary, to force WSPU members to choose between socialism and suffrage. But whatever their private feelings, the split gave Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel unchallenged leadership of the Union as well as control of a movement whose wealth and political success went on increasing. Continued militancy seemed to be further justified by political changes in Westminster. Campbell-Bannerman had been replaced as Prime Minister in April 1908 by Herbert Asquith, who, along with his wife, was an out-and-out opponent of women’s suffrage. According to Asquith,
The inequalities which democracy requires that we should fight against and remove are the unearned privileges and the artificial distinction which man has made, and which man can unmake. They are not those indelible differences of faculty and function by which Nature herself has given diversity and richness to human society.31
Asquith deployed two arguments in support of his denial that women’s suffrage was an issue of immediate political concern. First, he pointed out that all of the main political parties were divided on the issue. There was considerable truth in this. Asquith led a party that was predominantly sympathetic to suffrage. In contrast, the Conservative leaders Balfour and Bonar Law were privately in favour of giving women the vote, but most of their party was not. Labour, as we have seen, was divided between a few committed advocates of women’s suffrage such as Hardie, some genuine supporters, and large sections of both the leadership and the rank and file that viewed the franchise as low on their list of political priorities. The WSPU was, at times, insensitive to these complexities.
Second, Asquith argued that women’s suffrage was a minority cause without even the support of the majority of the natio
n’s women. Christabel took this as an invitation to organise a mass demonstration (planned for 21 June 1908), to prove once and for all that public opinion was on the side of the suffragettes. Meanwhile, acts of militancy continued. Asquith’s government proved itself less lenient than Campbell-Bannerman’s. When Flora Drummond and four other women were sent to prison for padlocking themselves to the railings outside 10 Downing Street on 17 January 1908, they were categorised as second-, not first-, division prisoners. When Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested for the first time a month later during another march on Parliament, she too was sentenced – to six weeks – as a second-division prisoner.
The preparations for the mass demonstration were substantial. Seven hundred banners were made up in the WSPU’s colours of white, green and purple. Enormous posters were produced with portraits of the twenty women speakers who would address the crowds that day. A steam launch was hired which, a few days before the event, called in at the terrace of the House of Commons at 4 p.m., while MPs were taking tea. Mrs Drummond, who stood on the cabin roof, invited the MPs to attend the demonstration and assured them that there would be no arrests. On the day itself, thirty thousand WSPU marchers wended their way to Hyde Park. At the head of the procession were horse-drawn coaches carrying the Labour luminaries Hardie, George Bernard Shaw, the Jewish writer and humorist Israel Zangwill, Mrs Thomas Hardy and Mrs H. G. Wells. The crowd was the largest for any pro-reform demonstration in British history and the largest for any British public meeting until the march against the war in Iraq in 2003. Even the usually unsympathetic Times wrote, ‘Its organisers had counted on an audience of 250,000. That expectation was certainly fulfilled; probably it was doubled; it would be difficult to contradict anyone who asserted that it was trebled. Like the distance and numbers of the stars, the facts were beyond the threshold of perception.’32
Not all of the WSPU organisers were convinced that everyone assembled was sympathetic to the cause. Helen Fraser, a Scottish delegate, recalled that ‘the vast mass of people were simply curious – not sympathetic – not opposed. Simply indifferent.’33 Christabel nonetheless felt that the demonstration had made an unanswerable case: ‘What would Mr Asquith say? We had eclipsed every peaceful demonstration made by men when asking for votes. What was the breaking of the Hyde Park railings in the 1860s [during the agitation over the Second Reform Bill] compared to the women’s mighty manifestation?’34
Asquith, however, saw nothing to make him change his earlier stance. Further mass meetings took place later in the summer, with crowds of 20,000 on Clapham Common, 150,000 at Heaton Park in Manchester and 100,000 on Woodhouse Moor in Leeds. But these mass demonstrations were short-lived. The success of the Hyde Park showing had perversely backed the WSPU into a corner. It would be virtually impossible to mount a bigger demonstration of public support than had taken place in June; subsequent ones could only give the impression that backing for the cause was falling off. For an organisation that had made its mark with daring and innovative political interventions, the alternative for the WSPU of adopting the more orthodox campaigning methods of the NUWSS was scarcely appealing. A return to militant action seemed to be not only justified by Asquith’s intransigence, but also the only viable option on the table if the WSPU were to continue as a distinct political organisation.
Militancy was already taking an increasingly violent turn. On the afternoon of 30 June, a group of thirteen women, including Mrs Pankhurst, left Caxton Hall to carry a women’s suffrage resolution to Asquith. When it was rejected, predictably, that same evening a large crowd filled Parliament Square. This only partly comprised suffragettes and their supporters: there was also a sizeable number of men, who had come just to jeer or jostle the women. The increasing risk to their members from hostile elements in the crowd would be another crucial reason for the WSPU’s eventual abandonment of large-scale public meetings. Recalling it later, Hannah Mitchell wrote that in those groups of male ‘roughs’, she could ‘visualize the sadism of the Nazi young men. We saw it there in the minds of those youths. They were encouraged by the inactivity of the police, who just stood round, some of them openly grinning and to whom we appealed in vain.’35
Twenty-five women were arrested that night, again trying to break a police cordon around Parliament. Exasperated by their failure, two WSPU members, Mary Leigh and Edith New, took a cab to 10 Downing Street and smashed Asquith’s windows. At the police station, Leigh warned, ‘It will be a bomb next time.’ The following day, the women were sentenced to two months as third-division prisoners, a fate reserved for the worst class of offenders.
The culmination of these marches on Parliament took place on 12 October 1908, this time with the objective of breaking into the Commons Chamber itself. The WSPU printed up thousands of handbills calling on both men and women to ‘rush the House of Commons’. These were distributed openly: once again, the objective was deliberately to court arrest. Christabel even showed one to a police inspector; that day, summonses for the arrest of Christabel, Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond were duly issued. The women finally presented themselves for arrest at six o’clock the following evening, just before the demonstration was due to start. A crowd of sixty thousand had assembled near Parliament Square, confronted by five thousand police, who had cordoned off the area. In all, twenty-four women and thirteen men were arrested for trying to break police lines, though only one woman, Mrs Travers Symons, Keir Hardie’s secretary, managed to get into the Commons Chamber.
The trial of the Pankhursts and Mrs Drummond for the handbill incident was a considerable propaganda coup for the WSPU. They managed to subpoena both David Lloyd George and Herbert Gladstone as witnesses, giving Christabel the opportunity to finally display her talents as a lawyer. By now, she had already established a keen reputation as a combative platform speaker. Hecklers often found themselves mercilessly dispatched: ‘Many times she was asked: “Wouldn’t yer like to be a man, Miss?” Christabel would look steadily and sweetly at the heckler before replying: “Yes, wouldn’t you like to be a man?”’ Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence recalled how one recipient of a deadly Pankhurst putdown ‘began to bluster and blare, when, to his indignation and utter astonishment, the other men in the audience … turned to him and said: “Shut up!” That was the reward for trying to maintain the supremacy of man! One member of the audience said: “We’ve come to ’ear ’er – not you, see!” and threatened to cop him one on the jaw.’36 As the Daily Mail noted, ‘the hecklers find themselves heckled, twitted, tripped, floored. I think they like it. She does, and shows it. She flings herself into the fray, and literally pants for the next question to tear into shreds.’37
Lloyd George also had a considerable reputation as a mesmerising public speaker. But Christabel had developed a special hatred for the Liberal Chancellor, conceiving him to be her political nemesis, and in the courtroom she proceeded to tie him into a series of knots with an unrelenting barrage of questions. Did the Chancellor really think that the suffragettes were dangerous? If so, why had he brought his young daughter along with him to the meeting at Hyde Park in June? Perhaps hoping to rescue the floundering Lloyd George, the magistrate intervened to tell her that she was not entitled to cross-examine her own witness. Christabel, however, had not got a first in law for nothing: ‘I rather anticipated this difficulty and I looked up Taylor on Evidence and I saw words which I thought gave me a good deal of latitude.’38 The magistrate let her proceed. Turning to Britain’s history of constitutional struggle, Christabel defended the suffragettes’ actions to the jury on the grounds of Magna Carta and the use of violence in other struggles for electoral reform.39 The court encounter was neatly summed up by Max Beerbohm: ‘The contrast between the buoyancy of the girl and the depression of the statesman was almost painful. Youth and an ideal on the one hand, and on the other, middle age and no illusions left over!’40
Yet, though she won the verbal battle, Christabel lost the case. Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond were given three-month prison sentences, Christabel
ten weeks. Lloyd George, for his part, had certainly had enough of the Pankhursts, and Christabel in particular. When the WSPU demanded that he either pledge government action on votes for women or resign, he retorted that he had ‘no desire to speak by Gracious permission of Queen Christabel’.41
20
‘IT IS NO LONGER A MOVEMENT, IT IS A WHIRLWIND’1
The ‘rush the Commons’ case was a significant moment in the progression of WSPU militancy. It was the point at which the Union publicly declared that it had reached the limits of civil disobedience and moved towards a new position advocating active law-breaking and violent resistance. As far as Christabel was concerned, in the rush on the Commons the WSPU had kept within the letter of the law on public petitioning. The guilty verdict indicated that there was nothing to be gained from ‘male’ justice. As with Chartist justifications for the use of ‘physical force’, the suffragettes deemed they had been pushed to the point were violent direct action was the only alternative left open to them. The WSPU now moved away from more established radical tactics to new strategies: hunger-striking, window-smashing, physical assault, and later arson and bombing. Seen from within the organisation, these ploys appeared a success. Its income continued to grow rapidly and its activities remained headline news. Outside the Union, however, militancy, once undeniably the catalyst that had revived a moribund suffrage movement, now threatened to fragment it. As the NUWSS moved from collaborating with the WSPU to distancing itself from ‘militancy’, so the government dug in, becoming ever more intransigent and repressive in its response to the suffragettes’ activities.