Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Bloomsbury Publishing

RISE UP, WOMEN!

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR Funny Girls: Cartooning for Equality The Suffragettes in Pictures Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick Elsie and Mairi Go to War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

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RISE UP, WOMEN! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

Diane Atkinson

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Publishing An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 © Diane Atkinson, 2018 Map by ML Design Diane Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 643 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for. ISBN:

HB: TPB: ePub:

978-1-4088-4404-5 978-1-4088-4407-6 978-1-4088-4406-9

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

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For PatrickÂ Hughes

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We hand the key to the coming generations to unlock the door to Freedom and Equal Opportunity. It is for them to campaign for and bring to glorious fruition the great reforms we dreamed of, but being voteless women, were unable to negotiate. Jessie Stephenson typescript, ‘No Other Way’ (1932), pp. 273–4, Museum of London Suffragette Collections

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Branches of the Women's Social and Political Union, 1903â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1914 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Aberdeen Dundee Glasgow Edinburgh Newcastle Belfast Dublin Cork Scarborough Barrow-in-Furness Harrogate York Blackpool Preston Bradford Leeds Hull Halifax Southport Rochdale

22 Manchester 23 Doncaster 24 Rotherham 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

SC OTL AND

Liverpool Birkenhead Derby Nottingham Loughborough Norwich Shrewsbury Wolverhampton Birmingham Leicester Coventry Northampton Cambridge Ipswich

5 6

ENGL AND

IREL AND

14 20

15 21

* Greater London had 35 societies

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70 67

44 47

59*

74 71

50 52 51 54

Barry Bristol Bath Trowbridge Newbury Reading Greater London* Canterbury Guildford Redhill/Reigate Royal Tunbridge Wells Ilfracombe Newquay Truro St Austell Plymouth Paignton Torquay Exeter Lyme Regis Bournemouth Southampton Gosport Portsmouth Worthing Brighton Hastings

29 30 35

40 45

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

23 24

25 28

Worcester Bedford Felixstowe Hereford Hitchin Gloucester Luton Hertford Carmarthen Oxford Pontypool Newport

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

62 77

60 79

76 69

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‘The March of the Women’ ‘No Votes, No Census’ 1911

Indian suffrage supporters at the Women’s Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911, carry wooden elephants, the emblem of their country.

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Constance Lytton went to a talk given by Henry Brailsford and left with the clear impression that he believed the government ‘really now intend to enfranchise women, that they have a new spell of power and yet no majority to enable them to pass a more democratic measure’. Brailsford told her that the government had expected to win the election with a bigger majority but had failed, and now faced the new parliamentary session with a majority of one and even greater reliance on the support of the Irish Nationalists. Brailsford pointed out that some members of the Conciliation Committee had lost their seats in the election, and until the new MPs returned in early February it was hard to gauge whose support the Committee could count on. He thought that there were a hundred MPs who were ‘genuinely and reliably friendly, but not more’, and that Augustine Birrell (despite his recent tangle with the suffragettes in Downing Street) was the Committee’s ‘most trustworthy friend’. Brailsford pointed out ‘the two evils’: first, the risk of ‘Lloyd George and Co.’s opposition killing a new Bill by making too drastic amendments’ at the committee stage; second, the danger of the House becoming ‘unfriendly to the women [militants]’; the government could exploit this by giving the bill enough time in order to be rejected ‘owing to their [the members’] temporary sulkiness’.1 In the early hours of the morning of 2 January 1911, Police Constable Girling, walking his beat past Miss Henria Williams’ house, heard the sound of groaning coming from her home. She moaned: ‘Fetch the doctor and come through the window, I am dying.’ She was dead before the doctor arrived. Local newspapers commented that Miss Williams’ protest on Black Friday was ‘conduct not at all congenial to

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one who suffered from a weak heart’.2 An inquest found that fortythree-year-old Henria had died of angina. Votes for Women published a memoir by her younger brother Llewellyn, with a photograph of Henria standing outside Leyton Town Hall during the Walthamstow by-election in November 1910. Llewellyn wrote, she ‘knowingly and willingly shortened her days in rendering services to the womanhood of the nation’. Henria’s obituary described her actions on Black Friday: ‘she showed marvellous courage’, but was ‘terribly knocked about and came back to Caxton Hall gasping for breath, with face and lips blackened by suffocation’.3 * Sylvia Pankhurst crossed the Atlantic during the first few days of 1911 for a three-month speaking tour of the United States that had been arranged by Harriet Stanton Blatch, President of the American Women’s Political Union. Arriving in New York she was met off the boat by Mrs Blatch and ‘a flock of Pressmen who kept me busy with interviews for three entire days’.4 Her first lecture was on 6 January at the Carnegie Lyceum on Fifth Avenue. Sylvia went to Brooklyn, Albany, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Pittsburg, Chicago, Milwaukeee, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Tennessee. Arriving in Des Moines, Iowa, after an all-night journey, she had almost lost her voice and was met by a group of women’s suffrage activists who had arranged for her to speak at noon to the Senate and House of Representatives. A women’s suffrage bill was pending in Iowa, ‘and in view of this I felt very deeply the responsibility laid upon me’.5 * On 8 January Henry Brailsford wrote to Lord Lytton updating him after a long meeting with Mrs Pankhurst, who was ‘terribly upset’ by the death of her sister and Henria Williams: ‘Her mood is one of still fiercer determination to end the struggle before more deaths occur, but also I am sure that she feels that these risks must not be wantonly incurred.’ Brailsford thought he had managed to reassure Mrs Pankhurst, and was confident that ‘she will allow us some time at the opening of this session before she resumes militancy but I could not get her to say how long’. Brailsford liked Mrs Pankhurst’s suggestion that she should meet the Conciliation Committee before Parliament

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was recalled; ‘she has a way of communicating her determination, and our members need to have their nerves sharpened’.6 In Mrs Saul Solomon’s letter in Votes for Women, describing her distress on Black Friday, and knowing that the Cabinet was meeting to draw up the King’s Speech ahead of the opening of Parliament, the WSPU staged a protest in Downing Street on 20 January. They marched up and down carrying banners decorated with the prisoners’ arrow, and placards demanding the vote.7 The Daily Mirror’s photographer snapped one of the women having ‘a momentarily exciting encounter’ with Winston Churchill when she poked the arrow end of her banner, which demanded ‘Should Mr Churchill Go To Prison?’, through the open window of his taxicab. Despite the pole coming into contact with his silk hat, Churchill emerged ‘smiling and unconcerned at the incident’ as he alighted from the taxi.8 ‘The March of the Women’, the new WSPU battle hymn, by the composer Ethel Smyth, with lyrics by the actress and writer Cicely Hamilton, was first performed on 21 January 1911 at an ‘At Home’ in the Suffolk Street Galleries, Pall Mall, to celebrate the release of some women who had been sent to prison on Black Friday. Ethel Smyth impressed Cicely Hamilton: ‘alternately playing her triumphant march on the piano and reading or chanting verses to us’. The first verse of the suffragettes’ song was to ring out with a blast from a cornet: Shout, shout up with your song! Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking. March, march, swing you along, Wide blows our banner and hope is waking. Sing with its story, dreams with their glory, Lo! They call and glad is their word! Forward! Hark how it swells Thunder and freedom, the voice of the Lord.

Ethel Mary Smyth was born in London in 1858, the same year as Mrs Pankhurst, on whom she doted. Her musical education started late: her governess, Marie Louise Schultz, who had studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, influenced Ethel’s entire life. Ethel was then also determined to study music at the Leipzig Conservatory, and refused to

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take part in the social round to find a husband. Her father, General John Smyth, finally agreed to let her go to Leipzig in 1877, aged nineteen. Ethel’s first opera was well received in 1898 at the court theatre at Weimar. One of her best-known pieces is another opera, The Wreckers, performed at Covent Garden in 1910, conducted by Thomas Beecham.9 When Ethel Smyth went to a meeting addressed by Mrs Pankhurst she, like so many others, was smitten: ‘Mrs Pankhurst came into my life, changing its whole tenor.’ She decided to devote herself and her music to votes for women for two years. Until she met Mrs Pankhurst Ethel had not been troubled by women’s suffrage, but in 1911 ‘The March of the Women’ launched her suffragette career. Ethel was often photographed at Mrs Pankhurst’s side like an unofficial bodyguard.10 Cicely Hamill changed her name to Hamilton when she went on the stage. Her autobiography, Life Errant, speaks of an unhappy childhood, brought about by her mother’s disappearance from the family home in 1882. Her father served in Egypt until 1885 and Cicely and her sister were sent to school in Malvern, then Cicely studied in Germany. She taught in the Midlands for a time and wrote for the sensational press.11 For ten years Cecily was an actress, performing comic and melodramatic roles. She gave up performing in 1905 and turned her hand to writing plays. She wrote a series of curtain-raisers and then in January 1908 had her first big success, Diana of Dobsons, a romantic comedy. She joined the 13 June 1908 procession to Hyde Park and helped carry the banner of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, which she and the novelist Bessie Hatton had recently founded. Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s play, How the Vote Was Won, was put on at the Royalty Theatre in April 1909. In November Cicely wrote and performed in her Pageant of Great Women which was staged by many women’s suffrage groups.12 On 22 January 1910 Henry Brailsford wrote to Lord Lytton about the difficulties which lay ahead, irritated that Lytton was absent from London. Brailsford’s opening sentence sets his tone: ‘I am afraid, as I told you it would, that your absence just now would mean utter disaster.’ No cabinet minister would agree to meet Brailsford and C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian. Brailsford despaired of the MPs

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who had made promises of support doing anything for the bill in 1911, and feared that the prime minister intended to pack parliamentary time with other legislation, including an Irish Home Rule Bill, and a manhood suffrage bill, and there was little chance of getting a name on the ballot for a private members’ bill. Lloyd George emerges from this correspondence as slippery as an eel. What was needed in dealing with such mercurial types as Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George was ‘someone who will simply take them by the throat’. Brailsford’s postscript asked Lord Lytton to excuse his ‘very frank’ letter and begged him to return to London and ‘give all your time for a week at least to try and save something before the coming wreck’. Brailsford warned Lytton that the moment one or both of them slackened, ‘the militants will break out. I think if we are equally resolute in our optimism and our energy we can hypnotise them into trusting us again.’13 Christabel told Henry Brailsford she would have nothing more to do with the Conciliation Bill, and a meeting with her mother was ‘the angriest and most painful’ he had ever had. Mrs Pankhurst reproached Brailsford and Lytton ‘most bitterly’ for having invented the Conciliation movement, and declared it had been from first to last a disaster for the WSPU. Nevertheless, Henry Brailsford and Lord Lytton persisted in their work with the Conciliation Committee and Mrs Fawcett and her supporters.14 The WSPU told the editor of The Times that unless the government made a commitment in the King’s Speech on 6 February to give facilities to Mr Shackleton’s Conciliation Bill in the coming session of parliament, ‘our fireworks will immediately begin’. The leadership said, ‘no reliance can be placed on the so-called pledges of the Prime Minister and his colleagues … We mean to win this time, and in view of what we have heard from private sources, the truce will end on 6 February and hostilities will commence.’15 On the morning of 6 February ‘battalions’ of suffragettes pounced on cabinet ministers as they left their homes to go to Westminster. Among their ranks was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (in her fur coat) and Mrs Kitty Marshall, just out of prison for throwing that potato at the fanlight of Winston Churchill’s door. So well-dressed were they that the policemen on duty did not move them on, but when the prime minister left Number 10 Sophia got past the civil servants

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and policemen who surrounded Asquith and stood in front of the taxi that was to take him to the House. She pulled out a suffragette banner bearing the words ‘Give Women the Vote’ from her muff. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh’s suffragette moment was described in the papers as ‘Princess as Picket’, but she and Kitty were frustrated at not getting the headlines they craved, being denied a court appearance and prison sentence.16 Sir George Kemp, the Liberal MP for Manchester North-West, won first place in the private members’ ballot and was given the date of 5 May for the second reading of the Conciliation Bill. Agreeing to sponsor the Conciliation Bill was consistent with Sir George Kemp’s objection to key Liberal policies, including Lloyd George on finance and Home Rule for Ireland. Sir George said after his resignation from Parliament in 1912 that he ‘loathed politics’ and that it had been ‘a source of unmitigated dislike and unhappiness to him’. His sponsorship of the bill may have been merely a gesture rather than a genuine interest in women’s suffrage.17 On 8 February Kitty Marshall was back in Downing Street helping Marion Wallace-Dunlop stencil ‘Votes For Women this Session’ on the prime minister’s doorstep with what looked like a carpet sweeper. In the middle of February Edith How-Martyn of the Women’s Freedom League announced a new strategy: women should boycott the Census due to be taken of every household in the United Kingdom on Sunday 2 April 1911. Since 1909 the League had been the architect of women’s refusal to pay taxes, and resisting the Census was a logical step. Edith urged women ‘to refuse to supply information to assist a Government which governs without their consent’. By completing the forms which supplied information that could prove the basis for the framing of future legislation they ‘made themselves consenting parties to the present political status of womanhood on this country’. She urged suffragist men and women to ‘refuse to take part in it as a definite, logical and peaceable protest against the callous indifference that has characterised the Government’s treatment of woman suffrage up to the present time’. If women were not even classed as ‘persons’ under British law, and were to continue to be classed politically with criminals and lunatics, ‘then at least they should not consent to be numbered merely for the Government’s convenience’.18

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The painful memories of Black Friday on 18 November 1910 returned when the report of The Treatment of the Women’s Deputations on November 18th, 22nd, and 23rd, 1910 By The Police was published. Compiled by Henry Brailsford with the help of Dr Jessie Murray, the public was reminded of the many examples of police misconduct: at least twenty-nine examples of indecency; the brutal handling of women in their sixties and seventies; constables who used their helmets as weapons; women being kicked as they lay on the ground. The report was clear: ‘we cannot resist the conclusion that the police as a whole were under the impression that their duty was not merely to frustrate the attempts to reach the House of Commons, but to terrorise the women in the process.’ The violence and indecency led Brailsford to believe the police behaved as if they were ‘under unlimited licence to treat the women as they pleased’, and to intimidate them from taking part in such a protest again. The Conciliation Committee asked Home Secretary Churchill for a public inquiry into police conduct, which would investigate the Metropolitan Police’s perception as to how they should handle WSPU deputations, and determine who had given the orders to the police to behave the way they did.19 On 3 March Sir George Kemp released the text of his bill which removed marriage as a disqualification for women voters, ‘provided that both husband and wife shall not be registered as voters in the same Parliamentary constituency’.20 Five days later Hugh Franklin threw a stone wrapped in a letter tied with rubber tubing – the same sort as that used to force-feed suffragette prisoners – at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door in Eccleston Square. Franklin was charged at Bow Street with throwing a missile ‘to the common danger … and threatening behaviour likely to lead to a breach of the peace’.21 Franklin explained to the magistrate, Mr Curtis Bennett, that he was protesting against the treatment of his friend, Mr Abbey, who was being force-fed while on hunger strike in the second division at Pentonville Prison. He was serving a three-week sentence for trying to climb over the garden wall of 10 Downing Street while a Cabinet meeting was in progress. Franklin refused to be bound over and was sent to Pentonville for one month, went on hunger strike and within a week was being force-fed.22 The Women’s Freedom League and the Women’s Social and Political Union urged their members to refuse to supply their personal

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details to the Census Enumerators on the evening of 2 April 1911. The WSPU also suggested the various ways their members could resist and sabotage the Census: it is estimated that Mrs Pankhurst and 4,000 suffragists and suffragettes evaded, boycotted or refused to complete the forms and wrote diagonally across the Census form ‘No Vote, No Census’.23 They had also suggested that women add: ‘If I am intelligent enough to fill in the Census Form I can surely make an X on a Ballot paper.’ Some forms were left empty, some women wrote in the column entitled ‘disabilities’ the word, ‘unenfranchised’. Women were advised to spend the evening away from home to frustrate the Census. (Householders were obliged by law to complete the Census form, and made themselves liable to a fine of £5 or a month in prison if they refused.) On 2 April 1911 suffragettes stayed away from home and had fun: the Skating Rink in Aldwych was packed with women all night, and the non-skaters were entertained by the best actresses and singers of the day. Before Mrs Pankhurst joined them she had been one of hundreds of women who walked around Trafalgar Square until the police cleared the area half an hour after midnight. Wealthy suffragettes opened their homes to Census resisters, and sympathetic heads of colleges filled their buildings with women who did not want to be at home. Some adventurous women hired gipsy caravans and spent the night out. On Census night Kitty Marion was in Trafalgar Square, then she and her comrades left in three horsedrawn caravans for Wimbledon Common.24 Although Colonel and Mrs Blathwayt disliked militancy, their daughter Mary took part in the protest and spent the night in a house with twenty-eight women who slept on mattresses. Mary’s friends Grace and Aethel Tollemache played the violin and piano, and another member of the WSPU gave a lecture on clairvoyance. Women slipped away throughout the night to thwart detectives who had been posted outside to make a note of how many women were present and who they were.25 Jessie Stephenson helped coordinate Manchester WSPU’s Census protest. ‘Our splendid friend Mrs Hyland’ offered one of her empty houses where local suffragettes could spend the evening of Sunday 2 April, an offer Jessie found ‘too scrumptious’.26 The building was large enough to house four to five hundred ‘packed in of course … and a good point was that it had seven entrances. From its various frontages, arrivals could split and not attract attention.’ Rose Hyland

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had known the Pankhurst family for twenty years, was a customer of Mrs Pankhurst’s ‘artistic’ shop Emersons, and made a donation to the Dr Pankhurst Fund when Emmeline was widowed in 1898.27 Jessie Stephenson borrowed hundreds of chairs and a few tables for a night of dancing, a bridge tournament and speeches by ‘General’ Flora Drummond. News of Jessie’s plans reached the Chief Constable of Manchester, who warned her that if she hosted hundreds of women she would be liable for imprisonment for each Census resister she housed. She would have to serve each sentence consecutively or be liable for the £5 fine for each default. He told Jessie, ‘the sentences, in the case of large numbers, might mean the rest of your life in gaol’.28 Rose Hyland’s gardener filled ticking mattresses with hay, fires were lit to welcome the ‘flocks’ of women who poured in with suitcases, many of whom ‘brought their own grub’, while volunteers cooked meals in the kitchens. When Jessie heard that the police were outside she ordered coffee to be made for them, and when she delivered it she learned there were newspaper reporters and invited them inside ‘Census Lodge’ to look around. The men were taken aback at the sight of Flora Drummond reclining on one of the hay mattresses, and the photographers took ‘snap shots by lime-light many of which appeared in the next day’s press’. The newsmen were having a whale of a time, and ‘thought the whole show extremely good fun and begged in vain to be allowed to remain all night for the revels’. Jessie wrote on her form: ‘This house is crowded with women who refuse to fill in the Census form until women are recognised as persons and have the vote.’29 Like a pigeon coming home to roost, Emily Davison spent Census night in a cupboard in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft at the House of Commons. She was discovered by a cleaner. In the morning Emily was taken to Canon Row police station where she was detained for a few hours before being released. In Coram Street, Emily’s landlady completed her form, giving her lodger’s details as she understood them: guessing that Emily was thirty-eight and her occupation was ‘political secretary’.30 The widespread evasion of the Census by the women’s suffrage campaigners led to the government’s decision not to give the women more publicity by bringing any prosecutions. The WSPU was irked by the press boycott of ‘all their peaceful constitutional campaigning work’

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which ‘distorts and misrepresents our militant action’. Mrs Pankhurst asked WSPU members to take part in a sales drive to increase the readership of Votes for Women, ‘to have it read by people in every part of the country’. Members were asked to be Votes for Women agents, and suggestions were given as to how to boost sales: getting a poster displayed at the local railway station, going from house to house, and selling their paper on the street, or at country markets.31 In April a new WSPU shop opened in Streatham, run by the honorary secretary of the branch, Leonora Tyson, who had also been running Lambeth WSPU. The window in Shrubbery Road was ‘tastefully dressed in the colours’. There was an abundance of sweets and cakes for the opening party – some donated by Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – but the cost of renting and decorating the shop had used up all their funds. Leonora Tyson asked members if they could donate any unwanted furniture such as a writing table, paper baskets, a bookcase, a coal-scuttle, doormat and chairs. Like all the WSPU shops, Streatham sold postcards and badges, scarves and muffs, and pamphlets and canvas bags for selling copies of Votes for Women.32 * On 22 April Constance Lytton had declined an invitation from Rose Lamartine Yates to speak at a meeting in Wimbledon because her health kept ‘giving out’. Her shaky hand suggests she was not exaggerating her frailty; she wanted to preserve her strength ‘and was laying herself on the shelf’ in order to write her book, Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal experiences by Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, spinster, which was published in 1914 by William Heinemann.33 * The day before the Conciliation Bill was due to be read for a second time the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage marshalled their views in The Times. They met at the Criterion restaurant two days before the bill was due to be read, presided over by Mr St Loe Strachey, who opened the proceedings by saying he was sure that women’s suffrage could not be granted without incurring the very real danger of ‘a sex conflict’. Mrs Archibald Colquhoun of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was adamant that ‘no change should be made to the franchise until the matter was an issue in a General Election’.34

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On 5 May Sir George Kemp’s Conciliation Bill was read in the House of Commons for a second time. Kemp said that women should be enfranchised because they outnumbered men in the country and suffered many kinds of ‘disabilities’ such as ‘unfair treatment under the marriage laws, chronically low pay’, and women tax-payers paid ‘a considerable proportion of the taxes’. Mr Edward ‘Paddy’ Goulding, Conservative MP for Worcester since 1908, seconded Sir George Kemp’s motion and expanded the argument, saying it was ‘intolerable that the conditions of the employment of women wageearners, the numbers of whom were increasing day by day, should be regulated by men’.35 Goulding, an Irish barrister, told the House that he refused to accept that women did not want the vote, and that if women were enfranchised the House of Commons would ‘be keener to promote their interests’. Goulding, who had served on the London County Council from 1895 to 1901, was committed to social reform, supported old-age pensions, workers’ compensation, shorter hours for shop workers and the payment of MPs.36 In response, Edmund Haviland-Burke, an Irish Nationalist MP, said ‘the expedients to which the militants have resorted smacked of charlatanry and vulgarity’, and he regretted that the ‘older and wiser participants [the NUWSS] had been thrust aside by the impudent cuckoos of Caxton Hall’, at which point ‘the House laughed heartily’. Two hundred and fifty-five MPs voted for the bill, and eightyeight against, a thumping majority of 168. Sir George Kemp moved that the bill be sent to a Committee of the Whole House (as in the previous year) and threw down the gauntlet to Herbert Asquith to keep the pledge he had made in the previous session to grant facilities for the bill. The prime minister kept Parliament and the women’s suffrage campaigners waiting for twenty-four days before giving his response.37 On 12 May Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney had a private meeting with Arthur Balfour. Annie wrote a note in a nervous hand expressing her thanks for his agreeing to meet them and rejoicing at the news of ‘the grand majority’ the bill had won in the House of Commons a week earlier. She told Balfour she would like to have written ‘a lot more but I know how dreadfully busy you must be’.38 While Lytton and Kenney were lobbying Balfour, Mrs Pankhurst was being photographed at the House of Commons with John J. Farrell,

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the Lord Mayor of Dublin, in his official robes, ‘wearing his gold chain of office and carrying a white wand’, who later appeared at the Bar of the House of Commons to present a petition from himself and the aldermen and burgesses of Dublin asking that ‘the Bill to confer the Parliamentary franchise on women may be passed through your honourable house during the present session of Parliament’.39 On 29 May 1911 Lloyd George said no facilities would be granted, and placed other government bills ahead of women’s suffrage. All he offered was that the government would allocate a week for the bill’s debate in the next session, in 1912, after it had been through the rigmarole of being read a second time. Surprisingly, Christabel Pankhurst did not immediately declare an end to the truce. She had been advised privately that Sir Edward Grey was working behind the scenes on the women’s behalf and she held fire. The Conciliation Committee asked the WSPU to accept the government’s promise, as they had decided to do. Christabel Pankhurst said: ‘Our great appreciation of their work and … our strong wish to retain their cooperation made us wish to accept their advice and not bring the movement of conciliation to an end while there was any remaining possibility of its success.’ However, if the Conciliation Committee failed, the WSPU would have no hesitation in resuming ‘the entire and independent conduct of our policy’. Christabel knew there was the real risk of being tricked by ‘a worthless political promise’, and there was the wish ‘to keep with us the understanding and sympathy of the Conciliation Committee, the large House of Commons majority which supported the Bill, and the general public, and the vast numbers of as yet non-militant women’. While she felt that they should have accepted ‘nothing less than immediate facilities for the Bill’, she did not want to risk being seen as the wrecker of the Conciliation Committee. She argued that if the Committee’s work was compromised or wrecked, ‘it should be the Government, not we, who break it. If renewed militancy became inevitable, better let the Government make the need for it clear.’40 On 7 June Christabel announced a surprising departure from their fiveyear by-election policy: the WSPU would not oppose Liberal candidates if they agreed to support the Conciliation Bill and oppose any widening amendments. The policy was only in place for the next two by-elections after events in the House of Commons caused a return to their strategy to ‘Keep The Liberal Out’.41

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Militants like Emily Davison were itching to enact the slogan ‘Deeds Not Words’. Christabel urged members to join the Women’s Coronation Procession on 17 June and attend the evening meeting at the Albert Hall, to demonstrate the scale and scope of the demand for votes for women: ‘Everything depends on numbers, and if the deputation is sufficiently large, the authorities will be placed in an insurmountable difficulty.’ Sir Edward Grey announced that the week allocated for the Conciliation Bill would be ‘elastic’, and there was hope the bill would be passed. Two weeks later, on 16 June, the prime minister wrote to Lord Lytton that Grey had accurately reflected the government’s intentions and that they would not oppose ‘proper use of the closure’, that if the bill got through the Committee of the House the extra time needed for the third reading ‘would not be refused’. Asquith reported that the Cabinet had agreed ‘to give effect not only in the letter but in the spirit to the promise in regard to facilities which I made on their behalf before the General Election’.42 Forty years later Christabel Pankhurst looked back to the beginning of 1911 and remembered the optimism she felt at the prospect of the coronation of King George V and what that might mean for the Cause. ‘Never had a year begun in so much hope. It might be coronation year for the women’s cause as well as for the King and Queen.’43 She explained the significance of the Women’s Coronation Procession on 17 June 1911, a week before the coronation of the King: ‘We decided to prepare the most imposing peaceful demonstration … a great women’s procession and Pageant of Empire to proceed through London.’ The WSPU decided shrewdly that votes for women would be presented in a peaceful and spectacular way.44 The day before the Women’s Coronation Procession the outlook seemed promising even to the hard-headed Christabel, who wrote ‘a hasty note’ to Lord Lytton sending ‘a thousand thanks’. Christabel’s note said ‘how much relieved we are by the Prime Minister’s message which does really seem to give us an assurance on which we can depend and can make the basis of our work for the coming months’. She thought ‘immense progress’ had been made; ‘we may all be happy I think’.45 When Christabel Pankhurst met Henry Brailsford the day before the procession she told him that the WSPU would be issuing no threats, ‘and militancy if it is required will start gradually’.

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Brailsford wrote to Lytton that he was ‘still altogether more hopeful. The feeling in the House is all that we could wish.’46 Estimates of the number of women who took part in the procession range from 40,000 to 60,000 – representing the whole of the women’s suffrage movement. They marched to seventy-five bands. A thousand embroidered and painted banners fluttered. Some of the banners which survive are an elegant mix of the beautiful and the homespun. The exquisitely appliquéd Hammersmith WSPU banner, designed by Sylvia Pankhurst, of velvet and damask, measuring 200 by 96 centimetres, with three panels of hammers, horseshoes and irises bearing the slogan ‘Deeds Not Words’, and the silver-threaded gold satin and silk banner of the Hampstead Church League for Women’s Suffrage, the shield-shaped banner of dark pink velvet with ‘Victoria Queen and Mother’ in cloth-of-gold letters, are in contrast to the homemade banners recycled from old curtains. Chelsea WSPU’s banner of several pieces of cotton sewn together, measuring 100 by 84 centimetres, has a painted scene of two chubby policemen guarding Holloway Prison. Behind them a suffragette is waving a flag proclaiming ‘Votes for Women’ from one window. One of the striking photographs of the Women’s Coronation Procession is of a suffragette dressed as the WSPU’s patron saint, Joan of Arc. Margery Bryce, aged nineteen, led the procession on a white horse and in full armour. Her sister, Rosalind ‘Tiny’ Bryce, aged sixteen, dressed as a medieval page, led the horse by the bridle. The big guns from Clement’s Inn, Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst in her academic robes, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Mabel Tuke walked behind Marjorie on her white charger. The Bryce sisters’ membership of the WSPU was provocative to their father, John Annan Bryce, Liberal MP for the Inverness Burghs, who voted against the second reading of the Conciliation Bill and had anti-women’s suffrage letters published in The Times.47 The ‘Famous Women’s Pageant’ had twenty suffragettes dressed up as notable women from the past, among them Grace Darling, who rescued survivors from a boat wrecked off the Farne Islands in 1838; Mrs Somerville, the science writer and advocate of higher education for women and women’s suffrage after whom Somerville College, Oxford, was named; the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry; Charlotte

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Brontë; Josephine Butler, who campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886, and Florence Nightingale. The Reverend Evan Douglas of Llandrillo gave a goat to the Welsh contingent who marched alongside the Irish and Scottish women. He asked in the pages of Votes for Women for ‘some kind friend to meet the goat at Paddington station on 16 June, who will stable it and feed it and lead it in the procession’. The Welsh women were led by a ‘bard with a circlet of oak leaves binding his long grey locks’, and they were ‘much applauded in their picturesque dress with sugar-loaf hats, they marched gallantly along, some of them knitting, and all lilting a Welsh ditty’.48 Christina and Winnie Broom took close-up photographs of the Irish women’s contingent, carrying green flags with a piper in national costume. Organised by Geraldine Lennox, several were dressed in cloaks and shawls, with golden harps, outsize shamrocks and shillelaghs.49 The procession to the Albert Hall meeting started from Charing Cross Embankment at 5.30 p.m. The streets were packed with bystanders, curious to see what suffragettes really looked like. There were women who had been involved in hand-to-hand fighting with the police, been locked up, gone on hunger strike and been forcefed. ‘There were artists, workers of all classes, including toilers in mill and factory and besides being the largest procession of women ever organised, it was the most dignified.’ The cheers of men and women struggled to be heard above the brass bands and ‘The March of the Women’. Viewers crammed onto balconies and when the women reached Trafalgar Square ‘the dense crowd spread over the monuments and walls’. There were several notables on the long walk to the meeting at the Albert Hall, including Mrs Fisher, who was married to the prime minister of Australia, Mrs McGowan, wife of the premier of New South Wales, and Maud Roosevelt, niece of the ex-president of the United States. Demand for tickets was so high that an overflow meeting was held in the Empress Rooms in Kensington High Street.50 Members of the press were almost unanimous in their praise for the suffragette spectacle. London’s evening paper, the Star, thought it ‘the most beautiful demonstration ever seen in the streets of London … A triumph of organising ability … It also proves that women are capable of emulating masculine endurance of physical fatigue … Nothing can prevent the triumph of a cause which behind it has such vast

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reserves of courage and conviction.’ The Dundee Evening Telegraph said it was ‘the best thing the Suffragettes have done’. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported that the demonstration was on so grand a scale ‘it must have impressed even the most rabid and reactionary “antis” with some idea of the driving force behind suffrage agitation’. The Aberdeen Journal pronounced that the demonstration was an indication that votes for women ‘seems not very far off’. The Daily Mirror reported that the mill workers and weavers were dressed in their working clothes, ‘and these brave tired women, who had left their homes to demonstrate for their fellow-toilers, were loudly cheered by the crowd’.51 Mary Blathwayt came to London with many Bath supporters. As the Royal Albert Hall filled the ‘long line of women seemed to wind itself into a great ball’. The fronts of the boxes were draped with suffragette banners. Christabel Pankhurst moved the resolution ‘That this meeting rejoices in the coming triumph of the votes for women cause, and pledges itself to use any and every means necessary to turn to account the Prime Minister’s pledge of full and effective facilities for the Women’s Enfranchisement Bill.’ This was a warning: the WSPU’s truce was contingent on parliamentary progress in the current session. The resolution, which was seconded by Mrs Pethick-Lawrence and supported by Annie Besant, was carried amid much ‘fervour and enthusiasm’. As treasurer, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence’s role that evening was to fill the war chest. More than £100,000 was raised; in addition to women removing their jewellery and placing it on the collection plates that were taken round, ‘women moved quietly towards the platform from all parts of the building carrying promissory cards, and the treasurer, speaking at the rate of several hundred pounds a minute, read their contents aloud … there was not time to finish the counting of the promised subscriptions before the end of the meeting’.52 In the Lytton Family Papers there is evidence of Constance Lytton’s proselytising for women’s suffrage in her local community. The results of three years of earnest campaigning in her local village of Knebworth are in a handwritten testimonial dated 30 June addressed to Constance’s brother, Lord Lytton. Miss Ellen Avery, the headmistress of the village elementary school for the past ten years, and member of the WSPU, wrote: ‘We the Suffrage women of Knebworth and Woolmer Green beg that you will accept our most

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sincere thanks for the splendid way in which you have laboured for our Cause, and for the Pledge which you have given for the coming year.’ On behalf of forty-one other women who signed the document, Miss Avery thanked Lord Lytton for ‘his faith in us as Women which has so greatly encouraged us, and we hope and believe that in the years to come the Women of our Race – strong in the Freedom which you have done so much to win – will abundantly justify that faith’. Seventeen women bore the WSPU affiliation next to their names. The signatories included Dora Beedham, née Spong, whom we have already met; Jeanie Wilson, whose husband was a land agent; Edith Williams, a farm manager’s wife; Mrs Martha Welland, a hotel proprietor and licensed victualler, and her daughters Lillian and Elsie. Florence Sexton was a teacher and her eighteen-year-old sister Annie was a ‘monitoress’ in the same school; Eliza Hill, a widow of seventythree; and Ethel Smith, the cook at Constance Lytton’s home, who was the only servant in the Lytton household to sign the testimonial.53 Nine of the Knebworth women were members of the NUWSS. Elsie Staines was the wife of the congregational minister; Isabella Wallace was a potato farmer’s wife and the mother of six children; Edith Ramsay Plowden was a wood carver and designer; Marion Buchanan was the wife of an East India merchant; Mary Muirhead and two of her eight children, Maggie, thirty-two, and Bessie, thirty, also signed.54 Illness forced Minnie Baldock, founder of the WSPU in Canning Town, to abandon her organising career in July 1911. Minnie had had an operation for cancer in the summer of 1911 at the New Hospital for Women in Euston Road. Christabel Pankhurst visited her in hospital: the operation was a success – Minnie lived to the age of ninety and died in Dorset in 1954. She occasionally gave speeches for the WSPU, and in 1912 joined the Church League for Women’s Suffrage. It was a worrying year: high unemployment led the Baldocks to leave Canning Town for Liverpool in search of work for her husband and sons Harry and John, all of whom worked in the shipbuilding industry.55 During the summer Mrs Pankhurst embarked on a five-month campaign tour promoting the Conciliation Bill in England, Scotland and Wales. Her chauffeur was Aileen Preston. That summer Aileen Preston advertised her services in the classified advertisement columns

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of the Morning Post and Votes for Women: ‘Lady Chauffeur, RAC certificate, can do running repairs. What offers?’ She was hired by Clement’s Inn to drive Mrs Pankhurst around in an ‘enormous fortyhorse-power car for a pound a week’. Aileen Preston was at first apprehensive about the prospect of driving the Wolseley car presented by a generous female donor. She remembered the five months ‘swathed in motor-veils and swamped in dust … it was a hot dry summer’. It was a pioneering journey, like driving through the Wild West: ‘there were few tarmac roads and shocking cambers … the engine got hot and boiled and tyres got roasted and burst.’ She quickly learned that ‘come what may Mrs Pankhurst must be got to her meeting on time and there were some hair-raising moments. In the event of a puncture I would have to jack Mrs Pankhurst up as well as the car.’ The intrepid chauffeur saw a great deal of Mrs Pankhurst’s ‘remarkable forceful and tremendous personality … she never gave praise or blame … and we understood that her life was dedicated to the cause and we gave her our best’. The drive through the Lake District included the Kirkstone Pass where her passenger was nervous about the descents, and Aileen had to be careful not to overuse the brakes in case the tyres – which were close to the petrol tank – caught fire. That leg was ‘hazardous’. The journey back to London in the heat of August was challenging; the car had five punctures and in the end they had to abandon it and complete their journey by train. On 4 October 1911 Mrs Pankhurst sailed for New York on a fundraising tour of the United States. She was in Minneapolis when she heard that on 21 November Lloyd George had ‘torpedoed’ the Conciliation Bill: ‘I was so staggered that I could scarcely command myself sufficiently to fulfil my immediate engagements … my first wild thought was to cancel all engagements and return to England’, but she did fulfil her commitments. By the time Mrs Pankhurst returned to England on 11 January 1912 the WSPU ‘had entered upon a new and more vigorous stage of militancy’.56 * On 17 October 1911 Millicent Fawcett’s letter to The Times alerted its readers to the recent enfranchisement of women in California, joining the states of Wyoming (1869); Colorado (1893); Utah (1895); Idaho (1896) and Washington (1910). She included the enfranchisement of

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women in New Zealand (1893) and states in Australia: South Australia (1894); Western Australia (1899); New South Wales, (1902); Tasmania (1903); Queensland (1905); Victoria (1908); and also Finland in 1906. The recent experience of California was of ‘great political significance, and will be an important encouragement to the cause of women’s suffrage all over the world’. On the same page The Times reported a WSPU meeting at the London Pavilion, presided over by Christabel Pankhurst, who dismissed Lloyd George’s attempts to widen the Conciliation Bill, which would wreck the bill – as he well knew – and continue to delay women getting the vote. ‘Our conviction is that Mr Lloyd George is promoting his amendment with the object of destroying the Conciliation Bill.’ Whenever his name was mentioned there were hisses, and the consensus was that his ‘one object was to prevent women getting the vote on any terms whatever before the next General Election … and he had yet to convince them that they were mistaken’.57 Meanwhile, in America Mrs Pankhurst’s tour was going well and Votes for Women readers were kept up to date as to her progress. When she spoke at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Mrs Harriet Blatch introduced her as ‘the woman who in all the world is doing the most for the suffrage’. The Brooklyn Eagle reported how ‘the roof rang with applause which lasted for five minutes when Mrs Pankhurst made her appearance’. Her choice of words was ‘simple and she spoke plainly and directly’. When she addressed the National American Woman Suffrage Association Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, she explained the role of militancy: ‘We began with argument, and when we found that argument was accomplishing nothing we went to the record books of man’s enfranchisement and decided to adopt some of the methods some of the men themselves had adopted. We made it politically dangerous for the men to oppose us in our movement.’58 On 7 November the prime minister took everyone by surprise by announcing that during the following parliamentary session of 1912 the government would introduce a Manhood Suffrage Bill – to grant votes to the small percentage of men who were as yet unenfranchised – and frame it in such a way that it could include a women’s suffrage amendment. The WSPU was incandescent. Recalling that autumn in her memoir, Christabel described the feelings of those close to the struggle: ‘The mockery of it was that there had been no real work done

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to bring about a wider franchise, and the Manhood Suffrage Bill was the fruit of our agitation for votes for women!’ Mrs Fawcett said that ‘if it had been Mr Asquith’s object to enrage every Woman Suffragette to the point of frenzy, he could not have acted with greater perspicacity’. Once their incandescence had evaporated, years later Christabel remembered feeling icily calm: ‘We militants were not frenzied, we were firm. We were not moved by an impulse of blind rage but by the determination to act.’59 Two days later ‘General’ Flora Drummond wrote to the secretaries of every branch announcing the resumption of their antigovernment policy after months of patient truce. A deputation to Westminster was being organised for Tuesday 21 November, and secretaries and organisers were asked to muster their members to come to London. They were also asked to write to their local Liberal or Labour MPs and say they expected them to vote against the proposed Manhood Suffrage Bill at every stage unless the government acted beforehand to introduce a genuine measure of adult suffrage which gave votes to women as well as to men. Flora Drummond told them to make it clear ‘that we absolutely refuse to trust any amendment to the Government’s Manhood Suffrage Bill and that we regard the proposal that we should do so as insulting to our intelligence’.60

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An extract from

Rise Up, Women! by DIANE ATKINSON @DitheDauntless

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