A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  On 10 June, all three were transferred to first-division status. This was not enough for the WSPU: at a meeting at the Albert Hall five days later, it was announced that all WSPU prisoners would go on hunger strike if not placed in the first division. In another indication of the government’s selective application of forcible feeding, on the grounds of both her social status and her political influence Mrs Pankhurst was never forcibly fed, but she was released on 24 June, seriously weakened by fasting. Mrs Pethick-Lawrence was released the same day, having been forcibly fed once; while her husband came out three days later, having been forcibly fed five times. Perhaps it was thought that subjecting a man to the ordeal would be less likely to provoke public indignation. By 6 July, all WSPU hunger-strikers had been freed, forty-five before their sentences had expired. For some of the lower-profile figures, the suffering had been almost too much. Emily Wilding Davison had attempted suicide in prison by throwing herself off a banister, only to be caught by a wire-mesh screen below.

  The Pethick-Lawrences, Christabel and Mrs Pankhurst now met in Boulogne to discuss tactics. The Pankhursts were determined to continue with window-smashing. Perhaps for the first time, the Pethick-Lawrences offered a serious challenge to the Pankhursts’ strategy for the WSPU, by suggesting that continuing these attacks was counterproductive. Targeting the general public before they had been won over to the cause would, they argued, only antagonise them and make it harder for the WSPU to achieve its political objectives.

  The Pankhursts, and Christabel in particular, were not prepared to accept this challenge both to their authority and to the militant campaign. On their return to the UK in early October 1912, the Pethick-Lawrences were informed that their association with the WSPU was at an end. The total control that Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel now held over the movement was confirmed by the move of the WSPU’s HQ from Clement’s Inn, where the lease had been in the name of the Pethick-Lawrences and the building had adjoined their private apartments, to Lincoln’s Inn House. A deal was agreed whereby, in return for retaining full control of Votes for Women, the Pethick-Lawrences would not oppose their ejection from the WSPU. With the Union’s newspaper out of the Pankhursts’ hands, Christabel produced a new journal, the Suffragette, which she edited herself. The first issue featured an editorial by Mrs Pankhurst explaining the split, and ending with a powerful rallying cry to the WSPU’s followers:

  Those of you who can express your militancy by facing Party mobs at Cabinet Ministers’ meetings when you remind them of their falseness to principle – do so. Those of you who can express your militancy by joining us in our anti-Government bye-election policy – do so. Those of you who can break windows – break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property so as to make the Government realise that property is as greatly endangered by Women Suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old – do so. And my last word to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. I say to the Government, You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for their incitement to rebellion, take me if you dare.1

  Ireland loomed increasingly large as a point of comparison for the WSPU militants. The month before Mrs Pankhurst had issued her call to arms, the Ulster loyalists had signed the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’, a pledge to resist Home Rule, which attracted eighty thousand signatures in one day. Shortly afterwards, the Ulster Unionist Council, headed by Edward Carson, MP, formed the paramilitary offshoot, the United Volunteer Force, to defend the Union by force. The WSPU viewed the Liberal government’s treatment of the Ulster loyalists as markedly more lenient than its approach to suffragette militants. Irish nationalists did not escape WSPU condemnation either, being viewed as backsliders who had reneged on earlier commitments to women’s suffrage in order to protect a Liberal government and, thereby, the prospect of Home Rule. Clear evidence of the suffragettes’ anger at the nationalists’ ‘betrayal’ had come on 18 July 1912 in Dublin, when Mary Leigh hurled an axe into a carriage in which Asquith and the nationalist leader John Redmond were riding. Having fled the scene, that same evening Leigh and Gladys Evans tried to set fire to the Theatre Royal, where Asquith had just seen a performance, setting alight curtains, hurling a flaming chair down into the orchestra and setting off small bombs in tin cans. Neither woman made any attempt to evade arrest and each was sentenced to five years in prison. After hunger strikes, they were released, having served no more than sixteen weeks.

  The actions of Leigh and Evans were only part of a series of dramatic and increasingly violent incidents in the summer of 1912. The most revealing, in terms of both its nature and the arguments used to justify it, was perpetrated by Helen Craggs, a teacher at Roedean and daughter of Sir John Craggs, a chartered accountant.2 Craggs was found on the morning of 13 July in Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire, with flammable materials ready to torch the house of ‘Loulou’ Harcourt, the leading Cabinet ‘anti’. Along with this paraphernalia was found a note that read

  Women … see around them the most appalling evils in the social order; they see children born into conditions which maim them, physically and mentally, for life; they see their fellow-women working in the sweated industries at a wage which makes their life a living death – or sacrificed as white slaves to a life which is worse than death.3

  Craggs was arrested and later sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment in Oxford Gaol. Like the other WSPU prisoners, she was released after going on hunger strike, having been forcibly fed once.

  Craggs’s abortive attempt to set fire to the home of a Cabinet minister was the first of a series of major arson attacks mounted by the WSPU in the coming two years. As well as indicating the path that future militant action would take, the note found with Craggs indicated a significant change in the tone of the militant campaign. The emphasis was shifting away from the depiction of the suffrage movement as a political crusade towards a moral one. The leading WSPU activist ‘General’ Flora Drummond now defined the Union’s aims as bringing an end not only to ‘sweated labour’ but also to the ‘White Slave Traffic’, paedophilia and male predation on young girls. This was a campaign, Mrs Pankhurst now publicly declared, directed at antagonising the public, not just targeting anti-suffrage ministers: ‘We are not destroying Orchid Houses, breaking windows, cutting telegraph wires, injuring golf greens, in order to win the approval of people who were attacked. If the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should be pleased.’4

  The number of militant incidents escalated over 1913–14, to 337.5 Bombing now joined the list of WSPU tactics. At six o’clock in the morning on 18 February 1913, Emily Wilding Davison and accomplices set off a bomb that destroyed five rooms in Lloyd George’s new house near Walton Heath, Surrey. In July of the same year, Edith Rigby planted a pipe bomb in the Liverpool Exchange building. There were even some men involved in the campaign: the young Harold Laski, later a leading British socialist intellectual, planted a bomb in Oxted railway station.6 The use of high explosives brought with it an increased risk of causing death or serious injury to the general public, and it was certainly more through luck than judgement that no one was killed as a result of WSPU actions.7

  It is important to remember, however, that throughout the militant campaign, it was the WSPU activists themselves who were most in danger. Their most famous act of militancy resulted in the death not of a Cabinet minister or member of the public, but of a suffragette. On 3 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison and her flatmate decided to attend the Derby, to be held the following day, and disrupt the race by suddenly waving the WSPU colours before the horses at Tattenham Corner. But instead, Davison dashed on to the course and was run down by the King’s horse, Anmer, fracturing her skull. She died five days later, never having regained consciousness.

  Debate still rages as to whether Davison intended all along to give her life for the cause. She had bought a return ticket, and inside her jacket were found the WSPU’s colours, indi
cating that she may have intended first of all to follow the original plan, her martyrdom only the product of a sudden impulse. However, she had attempted suicide once before and was clearly preoccupied with morbid visions long before Derby Day. In an unpublished article she spoke of ‘a grim holocaust to Liberty’ in which the ‘the surrender of Life itself [was] the supreme consummation of sacrifice, than which none can go higher or greater’.8 Sylvia Pankhurst, for one, believed that her actions were deliberate.9

  Davison’s funeral was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, but the show of public sympathy here masked the otherwise steep decline in the WSPU’s support. The situation was deceptive. Large amounts of money continued to pour in from wealthy donors and a hard core of activists kept up an almost unrelenting campaign of militant action. Yet, by 1913, membership had gone into a steep decline, numbers dropping from 4459 in 1909–10 to 923. This loss of support contrasted with the growth of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,10 whose membership was rising by about 1000 a month in 1913, reaching a peak of nearly 100,000 on the eve of the First World War, with five times the number of local branches as the WSPU. This expansion was at the expense not only of the Pankhursts’ suffragettes, but also of the Women’s Liberal Federation, which lost 18,000 members and sixty-eight local branches between 1912 and 1914.11 The NUWSS had even succeeded in winning over the most masculine bastion of the trade union movement, the miners. A meeting held on 14 February 1914 to seek donations to the new Women’s Suffrage Mandate Fund raised some £6000, mainly from union sources.12 Whereas the NUWSS was able to step up mass meetings and ‘pilgrimages’, on the increasingly rare occasions that WSPU associations held public meetings its members were attacked by hostile groups of men and pelted with mud, stones and rotten fruit.

  The WSPU was losing ground not just because of its continued advocacy of violent militancy, but also because of its interlinking of the suffrage cause with the ongoing campaign against the evils of prostitution and venereal disease. Christabel’s contributions to the Suffragette were now dominated by these themes. As she wrote on 11 April 1913: ‘The chief fruits [sic] of woman slavery is the Social Evil [prostitution]. As a result of the Social Evil, the nation is poisoned morally, mentally, and physically. Women are only just finding this out. As their knowledge grows they will look upon militancy as a surgical operation – a violence fraught with mercy and healing.’13 Her ideas relating to prostitution, sex and marriage were collected in The Great Scourge and How to End It, published in 1913.14 In this work, Christabel made the extraordinary claim that between 75 and 80 per cent of men were infected with gonorrhoea before marriage and that, as a consequence, humanity (at least, British humanity) was faced with the prospect of ‘race suicide’, caused by the sterility the disease wrought in women.15

  According to Christabel, the remedy for the twin evils of prostitution and venereal disease was abstinence and moral purity for men, and the vote for women. In this sense, The Great Scourge was very much a political tract, albeit in the broadest sense. Christabel saw man’s domination over woman as slavery, and marriage as essentially a form of sex-slavery. Only the vote would allow women to break this bondage. ‘Those who want to have women as slaves,’ she wrote, ‘obviously do not want women to become voters.’16 The redefinition of the suffrage movement as a sex war and the feminist separatism suggested by The Great Scourge were certainly radical, though they had their antecedents in the campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.

  However, in many respects Christabel’s portrayal of masculinity was deeply conventional. She shared the assumption of many male medical authorities on sexuality that men were barely restrained sexual predators. Many contemporary discussions of sex portrayed civilised man as forced into a continual struggle against his animal urges. Women, on the other hand, were depicted as having almost no sexual desires whatsoever. Christabel accepted the received wisdom that excess sex degraded men, reducing them to their bestial core: ‘it not only soils and debilitates a man’s body, but also contaminates his mind’.17 But she did engage in a radical assault on the idea that male sexual desire was unconquerable. Self-control, she chillingly assured her male readers, was perfectly possible, and for those who could not master it themselves there was the option of chemical castration, already practised in prisons.18

  Within the movement The Great Scourge went uncriticised, a sign not only of Christabel’s and Mrs Pankhurst’s control over the WSPU but also of the change in its membership. Long a female-only society, it had now even excluded its ‘honorary’ male members and had lost many of its married-women followers as well. What was left was a rump of young, single-female activists less disturbed by the sexual segregation Christabel advocated. Outside of the WSPU, however, The Great Scourge attracted much criticism. The feminist journalist Rebecca West wrote in the Clarion that Christabel’s comments on venereal disease were ‘utterly valueless and are likely to discredit the cause in which we believe’.19 Sylvia Pankhurst included lengthy criticisms of Christabel’s work in her history of the suffrage movement.20 The book even outraged traditional moralists. While the moral conservatism of The Great Scourge might have had a broad appeal – Lord Kitchener had issued similar warnings to soldiers to safe-guard their health and ‘avoid excesses’ – the book’s clear attack on the institution of marriage did not.21

  The main beneficiary of the WSPU’s change in approach was, as we have seen, the NUWSS. The Liberal government made little capital from the narrowing base of support for the suffragettes. Its solution to the heightened militant campaign was to step up its policy of pressurising the organisation’s leadership and repressing rank-and-file activity. Gladstone, a Home Secretary who had been personally sympathetic to the suffrage cause, was replaced by the hard-liner Reginald McKenna. It was McKenna who devised the Discharge of Prisoners Act (given the royal assent on 25 April 1913), better known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. This provided for the release and later rearrest of prisoners staging hunger strikes. The measure was designed to answer complaints in the Conservative press that the suffragettes were successfully flouting the law by securing early release through fasting. On 30 April, the offices of the Suffragette were raided and leading staff arrested. Papers found there provided more information of a centralised conspiracy to commit arson, and research has shown that local militant incidents during 1913–14 were closely linked to the presence of key activists.22 Even with this information, the Special Branch’s attempts to thwart the arson campaign had something of the Keystone Kops about them. Officers complained to the Home Secretary that suffragette activists were avoiding tails by switching cars in mid-pursuit and by employing high-speed motorbikes to get from one arson target to another. One officer was paid to use his own high-performance motorcycle to pursue the WSPU riders, but caught nothing other than the smell of burning suffragette rubber in his nostrils.23

  The spate of arson attacks continued almost unabated, but this is not to suggest that the Home Office’s efforts against the WSPU were futile. Forcible feeding had been resumed in the wake of the clear violation of licence terms by suffragettes such as Mary Richardson, caught red-handed in the vicinity of a flaming mansion. There was clear evidence now that the Home Office was using forcible feeding not so much to keep prisoners alive as to ensure that they made their court hearings; it was also drugging them so that they would not struggle when undergoing the procedure.24 Furthermore, police surveillance techniques were becoming increasingly sophisticated, not to say devious. As the case of Lady Lytton demonstrated, ascertaining the identity of suffragettes was not always straightforward. This was particularly important after the passage of the Cat and Mouse Act, in order to discover whether any ‘mice’ had broken their licence terms. Inevitably, the suffragettes themselves resisted attempts to identify them through photographs and finger-printing. Initially, prison officers resorted to strong-arm tactics. One woman, Evelyn Manesta, was held in an arm-lock while her photograph was taken. The image of the pr
ison warder behind her was later erased from the picture, but the doctored image was scarcely satisfactory as Manesta had kept her eyes shut. More subterfuge was required, so the Home Office enlisted a photographic firm whose employees hid inside a prison van and, using a new-fangled telephoto lens, took surreptitious photos of the women while they were in the exercise yard.25

  The Cat and Mouse Act brought little credit to the Liberal administration. It was further shaken by the prospect that the Conservative Party would outmanoeuvre it on the suffrage issue, and that this, combined with the NUWSS alliance with Labour, could cause the Liberals serious problems in a forthcoming election. However, suppression was arguably working, even as the militant action continued. March 1914 saw another famous act of suffragette vandalism when Mary Richardson slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery. This was not a unique instance: other suffragettes attacked paintings, especially female nudes as examples of the male objectification of women. However, Richardson claimed her gesture was designed to bring attention to Emmeline Pankhurst’s hunger strike – in itself an admission that the publicity value of that particular kind of militancy was on the wane.

  The WSPU was now increasingly isolated. It had rebuffed approaches from the NUWSS for a renewed alliance, persisted with its militant tactics, and now, along with the Pethick-Lawrences, Sylvia Pankhurst had been forced out of the Union. Since 1912, Sylvia had devoted more and more of her time to her own East London Federation. This was already an organisation quite distinct from the WSPU. It advocated universal adult suffrage, had a working-class membership, did not sponsor arson, did not espouse anti-male attitudes, welcomed both male and female members and was both sympathetic to and cooperative with the local Labour movement. Sylvia still practised militancy, training her followers in martial arts and advising them to come armed to meetings, but she was publicly committed to more causes than simply women’s suffrage.