A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Mrs Pankhurst increasingly referred to the WSPU’s actions as a military campaign. Certainly, the militarism of the Union was on display at the Women’s Exhibition at the Princess Skating Rink in Knightsbridge, held between 13 and 26 May 1909. Women were given lessons in ju-jitsu (a martial art that Sylvia Pankhurst practised) while other members performed drill exercises under the direction of NCOs. Resistance continued to be defended, as it had been by the Chartists, on the grounds that it was a constitutional right. With another march on Parliament scheduled for 29 June, WSPU propaganda followed Christabel’s rhetoric at her recent trial by stressing the legitimacy of the suffragettes’ actions, quoting the right to petition embodied in the Bill of Rights of 1689:

  ‘It is the right of the subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’ Mr Asquith, as the King’s representative, is bound, therefore, to receive the deputation and hear their petition. If he refuses to do so, and calls out the police to prevent women from using their right to present a petition, he will be guilty of illegal and unconstitutional action.2

  The first suffragette hunger-striker was actually sent to prison for asserting the people’s right to petition Parliament.3 On 24 June, Marion Wallace Dunlop, an artist, illustrator of children’s books, Fabian and suffragette, stamped the words of the Bill of Rights on to the walls of St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster with indelible ink. At her trial on 2 July, she was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and denied classification as a first-division prisoner. Apparently without the knowledge of the WSPU leadership, she then began a hunger strike.4 After refusing food for nearly four days she was released. The tactic was unprecedented, though it would be taken up by later political movements across the world, both violent and non-violent.

  The WSPU quickly latched on to the powerful propaganda value of the hunger strike. On 29 June, Mrs Pankhurst, along with eight elderly women, came to the Commons where they were met by one Chief Inspector Scantlebury who presented Pankhurst with a letter from Asquith’s private secretary declaring that the Prime Minister would not receive the deputation. Pankhurst threw the letter to the ground and struck Scantlebury in the face, first lightly and then with more force when the initial assault failed to procure her arrest. When the delegation was taken into custody, it precipitated a riot in which 106 women and fourteen men were arrested. At nine o’clock that evening, another weapon was added to the suffragette armoury as thirteen women began to stone the windows of the Home Office, the Privy Council and the Treasury. At this stage the WSPU was still anxious to minimise the risk of injury, so the stones were attached to pieces of string so as not to hurt the people inside. The window-breakers, also refused status as political prisoners, went on hunger strike on 14 July, and six days later they were released.

  In the late summer of 1909, seemingly without provocation, the WSPU’s tactics changed quite dramatically. The window-breaking continued, but now with noticeably less regard for public safety. On 20 August, members hurled stones through the windows of Sun Hall, Liverpool, where the War Minister, Richard Haldane, was delivering a speech. When a policeman tried to stop them, a brick was hurled at him. Mary Gawthorpe, one of the Manchester organisers and a member of the WSPU’s central committee, later told an impromptu meeting: ‘The attack on Sun Hall was premeditated. Whether people liked it or not the stone-throwing epoch had been reached, and there would be a good many more stones thrown before the fight was over if the government did not give women what they wanted.’ These violent actions reached their climax on 17 September, with an attack on Bingley Hall in Birmingham, where Asquith was speaking. Two days earlier, Jennie Baines, a local activist whose husband George and son Wilfred assisted her in her militant activities, delivered this warning at an open-air gathering: ‘We warn every citizen attending the meeting in Bingley Hall to beware. He may not only get crippled, he may lose his life eventually.’5

  When the day arrived, Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh equipped themselves with axes and climbed on to the roof of a nearby building. They then proceeded to chop slates from the roof to hurl at Asquith’s car and at policemen below. The assault caused not only physical damage but personal injury – one of the policemen was badly hurt by a piece of slate, while a detective who attempted to reach the women on the roof was knocked down to a lower building. Leigh and Marsh were finally brought down from the roof with a high-powered water hose. On the ground, another suffragette, Mary Edwards, assaulted policemen. At her trial on 20 September she declared unrepentantly, ‘I had the opportunity, had I chosen to take it, of seriously injuring Mr Asquith. I am now sorry I did not do it. As he will not listen to words I think it is time that blows should be struck … I was two yards from him.’6

  In all, the WSPU committed some thirty militant actions over the course of 1909. As the comments of Mary Gawthorpe indicated, the militancy of that late summer could not be described as merely a reaction to the incarceration of WSPU members, not least because no suffragettes were imprisoned at this time. Moreover, as recent research has shown, nearly half of those involved in the militancy could be defined as paid employees of the WSPU, and the same proportion were involved in more than one incident.7 This indicated that rather than resulting from the spontaneous initiative of individual suffragettes, much WSPU militancy was the work of a hard core of salaried activists with clear links to the leadership. What had brought about this shift towards a more violent and directed campaign?

  Two reasons have been identified. The first was relatively longstanding, though it was exacerbated in 1909 by the emerging crisis over Lloyd George’s ‘people’s budget’. Suffragettes had already complained of the danger of becoming the subjects of crowd violence during the mass meetings of 1908. In 1909, suffragettes who attempted to interrupt pro-budget meetings often received harsh treatment. As the Manchester Guardian reported of the Birmingham demonstration:

  An enormous crowd of men, many of whom were of the roughest class, possessed [Broad Street] … Nothing but the hoofs of the policemen’s horses could make them give an inch of ground, but whenever a woman came along and made for the gate into King Alfred’s Place they parted before her, gave her a clear approach, and when she had got into her stride closed up around her and bore her forward into the arms of the police … Each time the woman, who was acting the part of the football in this unseemly scrimmage, was driven back until she was lost in the crowd, but she would reappear in a few moments and the same process would go on again.8

  At the same meeting, the suffragist Laura Ainsworth complained that the police had driven them into a back alley where they were left at the mercy of a mob who hurled everything they could find at them. Misogyny was, perhaps, not the only motivation for these attacks. For the first time in British history, Lloyd George’s budget promised some system of social security for the people, offering old-age pensions and a national insurance scheme that would help the unemployed. When, in the autumn of 1909, the Lords rejected his budget, Lloyd George denounced them as merely ‘five hundred ordinary men chosen by random out of the ranks of the unemployed’ on the principle of ‘the first of the litter’.9 It was now Lloyd George, not Christabel Pankhurst, who was seen as the champion of the downtrodden.

  Second, the dispute over the ‘people’s budget’ threatened seriously to overshadow suffragette activity. The initial publicity that the first WSPU hunger-strikers had achieved had given way to some public scepticism about these tactics, especially when they repeatedly secured the prisoners an early release. Pressure was being exerted at the highest level for the Liberal government to take a harsher line. On 15 August 1909, Gladstone had received a letter from the King requesting to know why ‘the existing methods which must obviously exist for dealing with prisoners who refuse nourishment’ were not being employed.10 Similar questions were being raised in the press. Shortly after the Bingley Hall assault, an editorial in the Pall Mall Gazette demonstrated the cynical response the suffragettes’ activiti
es were provoking in some parts of the media:

  We shall wait to see whether the women secure their release from prison like some of their predecessors by the simple expedient of a two days’ fast. If they do, it will be time to let the Home Secretary understand that his supine sentimental methods involve taking liberties with the public safety, which should not, and will not, be tolerated.11

  That month, the most infamous government response to the militant campaign yet seen began. When seven women in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham again went on hunger strike, medical officers began forcibly feeding them. Within government, there had already been extended discussions concerning force-feeding prisoners. Gladstone had listened to evidence from asylum doctors, where forcible feeding was used to nourish patients too mentally incapacitated to swallow food properly. Feeding patients through tubes inserted in the nose had been practised very successfully in asylums for several years, with little in the way of medical complications. However, forcibly feeding healthy, mentally competent women who did not want to be treated in this way would clearly be a very different case. For the time being, Gladstone and Asquith had followed medical advice in resisting its use.12

  The events of the late summer of 1909 left the Crown, the courts and a significant section of the press feeling that the suffragettes were clearly abusing their privileges as first-division prisoners, effectively thumbing their nose at the judicial system. The government responded by reminding prison medical officers that they were legally responsible for the well-being of their inmates and that assisting in the suicide of prisoners was a crime. The WSPU prisoners could not be allowed to starve, nor could they be released, so forcible feeding must be used.

  The horrors of forcible feeding are vividly detailed in suffragette accounts, and the resonances with torture are not hard to appreciate. It is a moot point whether it was really a medical procedure used to prevent inmates from starving themselves to death, or rather an invasive punishment used to compel suffragettes to submit to the prison regime. Some prison officers clearly began forcible feeding long before the prisoner was in any danger of causing harm to herself by refusing to eat.13 Whatever the government’s motivation, the physical and mental suffering endured by suffragette prisoners cannot be denied. Mary Leigh wrote:

  I was … surrounded, forced back on the chair, which was tilted backwards. There were about ten of them. The doctor then forced my mouth so as to form a pouch, and held me while one of the wardresses poured some liquid from a spoon; it was milk and brandy … on Saturday afternoon, the Wardresses forced me on to the bed and two doctors came in with them, and while I was held down a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long with a funnel at the end – there is glass junction in the middle to see if the liquid is passing. The end is put up a nostril, one one day, and the other nostril, the other. Great pain is experienced during the process … the drums of the ear seem to be bursting, a horrible pain in the throat and the breast. The tube is pushed down 20 inches. I have to lie on the bed, pinned down by Wardresses, one doctor stands up on a chair holding the funnel at arm’s length, so as to have the funnel end above the level, and then the other doctor, who is behind, forces the other end up the nostrils.14

  Leigh reported feeling faint afterwards and vomiting the first time the tube was withdrawn.

  Case reports reveal the mental as well as physical trauma that the procedure inflicted on the women. Prison medical officers noted that Jessie Lawes, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence’s cousin, was

  nervous and hysterical, and in much nervous dread amounting to horror at any artificial feeling. Dr Cory thought it wise not to feed her again today, knowing by experience how much this comparatively simple proceeding appears to upset her. General condition good. She takes no food, and yet needs it; yet the operation profoundly upsets her and the looking forward to it seems to be a mental torture.15

  Sylvia Pankhurst recalled how Emily Wilding Davison had been so terrified by the procedure

  that when, by accident, the wardress locked her into a cell where there were two plank beds, she conceived the idea of using them to fasten herself in. She laid them on the floor, end to end, jammed the wooden stool and her shoes into the intervening space, and crouched down, holding all in position. Threats and coaxing failed to move her. By order of the visiting Magistrates who happened to be in the prison at the time, the cell window was broken, the nozzle of a hose pipe poked in, and the great stream of water turned on. Already weak from five days’ hunger strike and three days’ forcible feeding, she clung to the bed boards, gasping for breath. When the water was six inches deep a voice cried: ‘Stop!’16

  The WSPU also alleged, probably with good cause, that forcible feeding was used only against the lower-profile working-class inmates. The wife of H. N. Brailsford, the leading Liberal journalist, was sent to prison for attacking barricades outside a meeting in Newcastle being addressed by Lloyd George, with an axe hidden in a bunch of chrysanthemums. Mrs Brailsford began a hunger strike, but unlike her fellow prisoners was not forcibly fed. The WSPU alleged that this was because of her privileged position. A more celebrated case occurred when Lady Constance Lytton was imprisoned, having assumed the identity of a working-class suffragette, ‘Jane Wharton’. When she had been taken into custody under her own identity, Lytton had been carefully examined by two prison doctors and another external medical authority, who had confirmed that she had a heart condition and ordered her release. However, Christabel Pankhurst recalled,

  [as] ‘Jane Warton’, the working woman, she had no heart examination at all, and was forcibly fed. Four wardresses held her down, a fifth helped in the forcible feeding processes. The doctor offered a choice of a steel or a wooden gag, explaining that the steel gag would hurt. The prisoner was silent. After an effort with the wooden gag, the steel gag was used. Her jaws were forced painfully wide, the large tube pushed far down her throat and food very quickly poured down but returned in a few seconds after, in a bout of sickness, while doctor and wardresses held down her retching body. Then they left her – no clean clothing could then be supplied, it seemed, and she lay as she was, until the next morning. From the next cell the distressing sounds of the forcible feeding of Elsie Howey could be heard.

  According to Pankhurst, Lytton was repeatedly force-fed, though the assistant medical officer tested her heart ‘and cheerfully pronounced it a “splendid heart”’.17 Shortly after her release from prison she suffered a heart attack, and two years later a stroke which left her paralysed.

  The horrors of forcible feeding, which Lytton herself did much to publicise both immediately after her release and in her book Prisons and Prisoners (1914), led to a public outcry. One hundred and sixteen doctors signed a memorandum against the practice, and H. N. Brailsford and H. W. Nevinson, another journalist, resigned as writers on the Daily News in response to its support for the practice. However, their resignations told a story. Public denunciation of forcible feeding was largely limited to the pages of the WSPU’s Votes for Women. Even newspapers such as the Nation and Daily News, which had been sympathetic to the suffrage cause, refused to condemn it. The medical establishment, despite the protests of some – predominantly female – doctors, when it discussed the practice at all, tended to support it. Letters and articles in the British Medical Journal reassured the public that the procedure was relatively simple and free of complications, despite later cases such as that of Lilian Lenton, who developed pleurisy after being forcibly fed. The Lancet showed how seriously it took the dispute by publishing a parody of the force-feeding controversy by one Dr Charles Mercier, which referred to the complications of ‘forcible bathing’ for prisoners who refused to wash.18

  The WSPU responded by upping the ante with further assaults on people as well as property. On 15 November 1909, Winston Churchill was attacked leaving a train at Bristol by Theresa Garnett, who beat him with a riding crop, screaming, ‘Take that, you brute!’19 The government was now seriously worried that Asquith himself might become the subject of
an assassination attempt, fears that were exacerbated by (almost certainly false) reports of Women’s Freedom League members practising with firearms at 92 Tottenham Court Road in London. Indeed, it was ultimately the activities of the WFL, though misconstrued, and not the WSPU, that would drive a wedge between ‘constitutional’ suffragists and militants. In October, Millicent Fawcett had publicly criticised militant activity when it was mistakenly reported that a WFL member had thrown acid at an election official at the Bermondsey by-election. In fact, in keeping with the WFL’s increasingly non-violent brand of militancy, the activists had merely poured some non-toxic liquid into a ballot box.20

  The criticism of the Women’s Freedom League was misplaced, given not only the different nature of their militancy, but also the fact that WFL members themselves were increasingly critical of the suffragettes’ tactics. Dora Marsden, a recent convert to the WFL from the WSPU, condemned the Pankhursts’ militancy as ‘puerile’. Teresa Billington-Greig dismissed the WSPU for relying on ‘cheap sentiment’.21 Within the organisation’s leadership, questions about the militant campaign were starting to be raised. A letter to The Times, purporting to be from working-class activists, complained:

  It is not the fact of demonstrations or even violence that is offensive … it is being mixed up and held accountable as a class for educated and upper class women who kick, shriek, bite and spit. As far as importance in the eyes of the Government goes where shall we be if working women do not support us? … It is not the rioting but the kind of rioting.22