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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 Patrick 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, 1903–1914 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
1
2
3
4
5 6
ENGL AND
10
11
13
IREL AND
19
27
7
14 20
26
18
15 21
22
AL
ES
33
43
W
8
48
34
53
64
55
36
72
65
* Greater London had 35 societies
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66
70 67
31
37
38
41
56
46
57
73
39
44 47
42
59*
58
74 71
17
49
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
32
Worcester Bedford Felixstowe Hereford Hitchin Gloucester Luton Hertford Carmarthen Oxford Pontypool Newport
9
12
16
40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
61
62 77
75
63
60 79
78
76 69
68
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Purple, White and Green Suffragette Spectacle 1908
Patricia Woodlock (left), thirty, of Liverpool, and Mabel Capper, twenty, of Manchester, advertise a ‘monster meeting’ in Heaton Park, Manchester, in 1908.
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On the morning of 17 January 1908, Edith New, a schoolteacher, and Olivia Smith, a nurse, arrived in Downing Street. Under their coats they were wearing steel chains round their waists. They padlocked themselves to the railings outside Number 10, shouting ‘Votes for women!’ loud enough for the cabinet ministers inside to hear them. Sylvia Pankhurst said: ‘Chains symbolically express the political bondage of womanhood, and for the practical reason that this device would prevent the women being dragged away’.1 Policemen tried to destroy the padlocks. ‘Considerable force was used before the chains could be broken.’2 When Herbert Asquith, chancellor of the exchequer, arrived, more suffragettes tried to surround him but he was protected by a circle of policemen. Two taxi cabs then pulled up, one of them carrying Flora Drummond and Elizabeth McArthur, and during the ensuing chaos the two women slipped into Number 10. Mrs Drummond knew ‘the secret of the little knob’ in the door, and pushed it. Miss Mary Garth, ‘a frail, pale-complexioned girl’, followed them. The women nearly reached the Cabinet Room where they intended to ask Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the Cabinet if women’s suffrage was to be included in the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament, but all three were grabbed by the porter and policemen and thrown out of the building. One of the suffragettes outside was knocked down in the mêlée. Flora Drummond was ‘very violent’ and ‘tripped up a gentleman and he would have fallen had he not seized the rails’.3 The suffragettes refused to leave Downing Street and five were arrested and taken to Canon Row police station. That afternoon their cases were
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heard by the chief magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen. Flora Drummond, Elizabeth McArthur, Edith New, Olivia Smith and Frances Thompson were sentenced to three weeks in the second division in Holloway Gaol. The next day a photograph of Flora Drummond, dwarfed by five burly policemen, appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Olivia Smith told the court she had refused to unchain herself from the railings because ‘I do not see why I should not chain myself up on a man’s fence if I like. I did not hurt the fence, I did not hurt anybody … it is my right to exert my individuality and accept my three weeks’ imprisonment.’4 Edith New had already served two weeks in Holloway for her part in the protest at the House of Commons on 8 March 1907. Born in Swindon in 1877 and a member of the WSPU since 1906, Edith was a paid organiser. Before her suffragette days she had been a schoolteacher in Greenwich.5 In January 1908 the Leicester branch of the WSPU was set up by Mrs Alice Hawkins who spent two weeks in Holloway after being arrested in skirmishes with the police in Westminster in February 1907. Alice Riley, who worked in the boot and shoe industry before and after her marriage to Alfred Hawkins, was born in Stafford in 1863. In 1886 Alice went to work at Equity Shoes, a cooperative, where workers were encouraged to participate in political organisations. Alice’s husband, Alfred Hawkins, a shoe clicker – he cut the uppers from the leather – was born in 1857. The couple married in 1884, had six children and were long-standing political activists; they joined the Independent Labour Party in 1892, and met the Pankhursts in the mid-1890s. In 1896 Alice joined Equity Shoes’ branch of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, and was active in the Boot and Shoe Trade Union. In 1906, because of its failure to promote women’s suffrage, Alice fell out with the ILP. Her husband looked after the children when Alice went to London to attend the Women’s Parliament on 14 February 1907. One day in the exercise yard at Holloway Alice saw women with babies: ‘The thought that a young life born into the world should have to spend its first months of life in prison. It was one more injustice to add to our cry for the right to stop some of these horrible things being allowed.’6 The Hawkinses invited Sylvia Pankhurst to Leicester and introduced her to the workers at the Equity Shoes factory. Sylvia spent the summer of 1907 with the Hawkins family, drawing and painting and writing about the women in the town’s boot and shoe trade as they worked.7
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In the January issue of Votes for Women the Pethick-Lawrences launched the campaign for 1908. They presented readers with stark choices: Are you going to play the woman or are you going to play the coward? Are you going to stand by and let others bear the brunt of battle? Are you going to say to yourself, ‘I will be sympathetic; I will occasionally talk about it to my friends, perhaps I will give a little money, but I do not mean to risk my reputation or friendships or personal esteem by too prominently identifying myself with the cause of my sex’ … or are you made of sterner stuff than this? Are you going to come forward and say, I will be a battle comrade in the great fight; I will share the difficulties and the hardships; I will make the sacrifices that are required of me.
Fred and Emmeline urged: ‘stand with us so that this year shall see the fulfilment of the promise for which women have worked so long.’8 During the first six weeks of 1908 Clement’s Inn – which now employed twenty workers and had dozens of volunteers – made preparations for the three-day Women’s Parliament at Caxton Hall, on 11–13 February. The WSPU’s plan was to present a petition to the House of Commons on the first day by smuggling themselves into the building in two pantechnicons. The Trojan horse raid was the brainchild of Mrs Pankhurst’s son, nineteen-year-old Harry, and twentyone women almost succeeded.9 Clement’s Inn hired two vans from a furniture remover. Inside each van were twenty-one suffragettes waiting to get out as soon as the vehicle reached its destination, St Stephen’s Entrance, at four o’clock. Two artists, Marie and Georgina Brackenbury, were travelling in one van. Marie remembered: ‘A great clattering of horses and a sense of jolting and rumbling which lasted for what seemed to us like an age. Suddenly the van stopped, and our hearts beat fast, and the doors swung open, and we saw the House of Commons before us and out we all flew.’10 The suffragettes found themselves face to face with startled policemen: ‘they had been warned to be ready for a suffragette attack … but they had never suspected a ruse such as this.’ The police stood to one side for the Members of Parliament who were approaching the building and the suffragettes darted forward and tried to get into
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the House by joining the Members as they entered. The police seized the women by ‘the neck and threw us in the road. We picked ourselves up, and as smilingly as we could, came back to the doors [of the House] only to be flung down again.’11 Next, hearing what had happened to the women in the pantechnicons, about fifty suffragettes, fired up by indignant speeches in Caxton Hall, set off to the House of Commons, but found the roads blocked by the police. Annie Kenney arrived in a cab looking distinctive in ‘bright electric blue’,12 wisely having left her hat behind in case she lost it. Christabel Pankhurst came too but was turned back as the police recognised her. All the women arrested that day were bailed by Fred Pethick-Lawrence and returned to Caxton Hall in the evening to report their experiences to a crowded, indignant meeting. The meeting spilled out and 300 women set off to try to enter Parliament, rebuffed by an enormous show of police strength. By the end of the first day of the 1907 Women’s Parliament fifty women had been arrested and taken to Canon Row police station, forty-seven electing to go to prison, with sentences of between four and eight weeks. Edith Rigby, Beth Hesmondhalgh, Rose Towler and Grace Alderman had travelled to London from Preston for the occasion. Before they left Mrs Towler spent the week preparing enough food to last her husband and four sons for two weeks in case she was sent to prison. The four Preston women were in one of the furniture vans. Edith Rigby led the charge towards St Stephen’s Entrance, with Mrs Towler, a schoolmistress, not far behind, ‘brandishing their petitions like a torch’.13 Edith urged the women to push their way in but ‘the police rushed at them, driving them back into the crowd which pressed towards them like an oncoming tide’.14 They were ‘tossed about as though by the breakers of a stormy sea’.15 Edith Rigby’s wrists were sprained and her thumbs bent back as she tried to fight past the police; she was arrested and gaoled. Grace, Rose and Beth were also sentenced to a month in Holloway. Mrs Rigby wrote from prison: ‘Do not these things repay one thousandfold for the painful publicity and personal suffering?’16 Twenty-three-year-old Grace Alderman, a machinist before her marriage to a solicitor, was the chairwoman of Preston WSPU. She found Edith Rigby to be ‘dependable, straightforward and always kind’.17 When the meetings were held at the Rigbys’ home at Winckley
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Square, however, Edith was inflexible when it came to her husband Charlie’s supper: ‘At five minutes past nine promptly, no matter what stage the meeting might have progressed, Mrs Rigby would stand up and say, “Well, ladies, it’s the doctor’s supper time. I must go. You must stay on and finish what’s to be done. Don’t forget to close the door behind you! Good night and thank you.” ’18 The Brackenbury sisters, Marie and Georgina, and their widowed mother, Hilda, joined the WSPU in 1907. Roughed up as they tumbled out of a van on 11 February, the sisters were arrested and sent to Holloway Prison for six weeks. They were both members of the NUWSS and the WSPU, but chose to throw themselves into the militant organisation at the start of 1908. Their mother’s upbringing and marriage to a general made her fearful of an organisation that challenged her notions of womanliness, but her daughters persuaded the seventy-six-year-old to put her anxieties to one side and she became an enthusiastic suffragette. Marie Brackenbury remembered: ‘Night after night we wrestled over the new ideas and her soul was troubled. But she had always been a brave seeker after the truth, and one by one she gave up the old ways of thinking, and became fired with the just and true ideals of women.’19 Twenty-seven-year-old Elsa Gye, who had studied at the Guildhall School of Music, was in one of the pantechnicons and got six weeks in Holloway. In the summer of 1908 she returned to Nottingham with Minnie Baldock to build that town’s branch of the WSPU. Elsa Gye got to know ‘Daisy’ Bullock from Long Eaton, Derbyshire, who worked in a lace factory. Elsa and Daisy met in December 1907 when Elsa was in Nottingham with Aeta Lamb to disrupt Herbert Asquith’s meeting at the Mechanics’ Institute. Despite the efforts of the Liberal stewards to keep any suffragettes out of the building, five women heckled the chancellor and were thrown out, only to convene a meeting outside.20 Daisy introduced Elsa to her elder brother, Will, who had a B.Sc. in chemistry from University College, Nottingham, and was hoping to become a doctor. Their father, Charles Bullock, was a signalman on the Midland Railway. When William Bullock married Elsa Gye in Edinburgh in 1911 he was a medical student, able to pursue his studies because of the ‘kindness of two friends’, one of whom was Elsa. Before getting his degree Will had been a pupilteacher, worked in a bicycle factory and as a clerk on the railways.21
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A young woman of eighteen who called herself ‘Vera Wentworth’ also fell out of one of the vans. Like many of her comrades she was sentenced to six weeks in prison, but she had to serve an extra day for scratching ‘Votes for Women’ on the wall of her cell with hairpins. ‘Vera’ was born Jessie Spinks in Westminster in 1889, and was working in a shop when she joined the WSPU in 1906. In 1907 she formally changed her name to Vera Wentworth and became a full-time suffragette.22 It was through her brother Wilfred that Jessie became friends with Fenner Brockway. Brockway, who called ‘Wilfie Spinks’ his ‘explosive friend’, had led an unsuccessful strike of women workers in the East End of London. He was eighteen years old, a socialist journalist and ardent admirer of Keir Hardie. Through Hardie’s influence he volunteered to help out at Clement’s Inn. ‘Their faces dropped when they saw my youthfulness – and gave me envelopes to address.’23 Vera Wentworth was one of several young women who showed their devotion to Christabel Pankhurst by wearing a badge with her portrait on their chests. When Vera was released from Holloway in March 1908 she went to help at the Peckham by-election that month; the Liberals lost the seat after having won it in 1906, a result which delighted the suffragettes. According to Sylvia Pankhurst the Conservative voters who had gathered to hear the results were so happy that they hoisted Flora Drummond shoulder high.24 In the press the Daily Chronicle was appreciative: ‘the Suffragettes are essentially heroic. First they lash themselves to the Premier’s railings; now borrowing the idea from the Trojan horse, they burst forth from a pantechnicon van … A high standard of artifice has been set and it should be maintained.’ The second day of the Women’s Parliament was devoted to deploring the prison sentences. Annie Kenney said she was prepared to go to prison for three months. Mary Blathwayt remembered Mrs PethickLawrence being moved by Annie’s commitment: ‘She is generally all smiles but nearly broke down. She had to lean forward and cover her eyes with her handkerchief.’25 On the last day of the Women’s Parliament Mrs Pankhurst led the deputation from Caxton Hall to the House of Commons, carrying a petition and a bunch of lilies. When Flora Drummond saw Mrs Pankhurst was struggling – her ankle was still painful from her recent
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by-electioneering in Newton Abbot – Flora asked a man with a dogcart to take her to the House of Commons, but the police ordered Emmeline out of the cart. She was helped along by two women, but they were stopped by the police who told the three women they could only walk in single file. Mrs Pankhurst became ‘faint from the pain’ and could not walk unaided, and she asked two members to hold her arms as they walked towards Parliament Square. ‘We walked with difficulty for the crowd was of incredible size. All around, as far as the eye could see, was the great moving, swaying, excited multitude, and surrounding us on all sides were regiments of uniformed police, foot and mounted.’ As soon as they entered the Square Mrs Pankhurst was arrested. The women holding her refused to leave and they too were arrested. Thirteen women, including Minnie Baldock and Annie Kenney, were charged with obstructing the police and sentenced to four to six weeks in Holloway in the second division. Their cases were heard at Westminster Police Court the next day. Mrs Pankhurst ‘listened with a suspicion that my ears were playing tricks on my reason, to the most astonishing perjuries put forth by the prosecution’. The women were accused of leaving Caxton Hall singing and shouting, of ‘the most riotous and vulgar behaviour’, of knocking off policemen’s helmets and ‘assaulting officers left and right as we marched. Our testimony and that of our witnesses was ignored.’ The government’s ambition to revive the Tumultuous Petitioning to the Crown or Parliament Act, passed by King Charles II in 1661, which forbade any procession of more than thirteen persons, in order to ban suffragette protests in the environs of the House of Commons, was shelved. Mrs Pankhurst was sent to Holloway for six weeks: it was her first time in prison. Within three days she was so run-down that she was transferred to the hospital wing, from where she sent a message to WSPU members which appeared in Votes for Women titled ‘Work, Work, Work’, telling them, ‘not to be anxious about me … and to be of good courage and work, work, work’ for the success of the next meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘Whatever happens, I shall stay in Holloway till my six weeks are up!’26 Minnie Baldock smuggled out of gaol a defiant message to her comrades, saying she had ‘gone to prison to help to free those who are bound by unjust laws and tyranny. I love freedom so dearly that I
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want all women to have it, and I will fight for it until they get it.’27 The publicity surrounding the WSPU’s third Women’s Parliament lasted five days as their court appearances kept the story running. Annie Kenney noted that arrest and imprisonment ‘worked miracles for the Cause’.28 The 7,000 people – mostly women – present at the WSPU’s meeting at the Albert Hall on 19 March raised £7,000 for campaign funds. Mrs Pankhurst, who had been released that morning, was in the chair. Votes for Women proudly announced it had been ‘the largest gathering of women inside a hall which has ever taken place’.29 Kate Parry Frye, by inclination a suffragist rather than a suffragette, was taken along by a friend and found the occasion thrilling: ‘It was an exciting meeting … like magic the way it [the money] flowed in. It was all just a little too theatrical but very wonderful. Miss Annie Kenney interested me the most – she seems so “inspired” quite a second Joan of Arc.’30 Annie said that ‘gaol-birds created gaol-birds. Halls were overcrowded with would-be activists, donors and unpaid volunteers’ and that ‘pockets were emptied and prisons were filled’.31 For many women who had not yet joined the WSPU, newspaper reports of Mrs Pankhurst’s activities would be a catalyst. On 21 March photographs of Emmeline Pankhurst’s stage-managed arrival in Peckham, at a by-election, were on the front page of the Daily Mirror. A garlanded wagon carried her, festooned with ‘Welcome Mrs Pankhurst’ banners. Following behind were a dozen horse-drawn brakes for the suffragettes who were canvassing against the Liberals. The Liberal candidate, Thomas Gautrey, a former teacher, was the sort of man with whom other suffragettes would have had an affinity in the past. Tom Gautrey supported women’s suffrage but because of the WSPU by-election policy he faced relentless opposition from the suffragettes. Christabel and her team kept up the pressure until every vote was counted: ‘while the men in the crowd sheltered under umbrellas, the suffragette speakers boldly faced the tempest, and standing on the drays, which were used as platforms, appealed to voters “to keep the Liberal out”, caring not one whit for the rain which drenched their clothes.’32 Hecklers met their match: Christabel would point at one ‘with a merry smile and play ever so gently with him, as a cat with a mouse’.33 Tom Gautrey and the Liberals, who had won the seat in 1906, were heavily defeated by the Conservatives. Although issues such as free trade, temperance and licensing had been at stake,
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the WSPU were delighted with the result and took the credit for Gautrey’s defeat.34 Mrs Pankhurst received considerable fanmail, including a letter from Beatrice Parlby of Hereford. Beatrice was typical of many educated middle-class women who felt their lives were unfulfilled or had stalled. In her reply Mrs Pankhurst told her new admirer ‘how good it is to be back again amongst our women workers and to know that by going to prison great good has been done in the cause for which we are working’. Mrs Pankhurst hoped Miss Parlby would come to London on 21 June for ‘Women’s Sunday’. Beatrice Parlby, the eldest of four daughters – all of whom were interested in women’s suffrage – was born in Aylesbury in 1872. She studied at Royal Holloway College reading for the Oxford English Tripos but was disappointed with her results. Although women were not awarded degrees from Oxbridge they could sit the men’s examinations and have their papers classified without being given a degree (this did not change until 1920 in Oxford and 1947 in Cambridge). Beatrice wrote an apologetic letter to her parents: ‘I know I am worth more than a third … I hope you won’t all think me a dreadful fraud.’35 In 1901 Beatrice was teaching English at Burnley Grammar School where girls were admitted for the first time, although classes were segregated. At the age of twenty-eight her career unravelled when she fell madly in love with the headmaster, Henry Lincoln Joseland. Her feelings for him were unrequited: he knew nothing about her passion. Needing to leave her unhappy situation, Beatrice threw herself wholeheartedly into looking for another job; Henry Joseland gave her an excellent testimonial but she did not secure the post she wanted. Beatrice had a breakdown, and recovered, but her teaching career was over. She became a valuable foot soldier for the women’s suffrage cause, helping to ‘rouse the town’ of Hereford. Sympathisers hosted drawing-room meetings, shopkeepers displayed suffragette handbills in their windows and Beatrice canvassed pluckily from door to door. Some time before 1914 she had another nervous breakdown and was again admitted to the County Asylum.36 Even though women’s suffrage was not mentioned in the King’s Speech on 29 January, time was given for the reading of a private members’ bill, Henry Yorke Stanger’s Women’s Enfranchisement Bill, to be debated on 28 February. It proposed wide reform, enfranchising
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single and married women. Mr Stanger was the Liberal MP for North Kensington, where the suffragettes were a lively presence. Stanger had more liberal views on women’s suffrage than many of his colleagues, but he worried about militancy and ‘any incidents which might cause a feeling of disgust in the minds of the people. Their aim must be to convert their opponents to win recruits and for their army to strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees.’37 Mr Stanger’s bill easily passed its second reading in the House of Commons with a majority of 179 votes, but without government help it could not proceed. On 1 April 1908, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s failing health caused him to resign as prime minister. The death of his wife in August 1906 had precipitated his decline. Friends believed he should have resigned after her death but the bereft seventy-one-year-old soldiered on though ‘his position was exacting in the extreme’.38 CampbellBannermann was succeeded by his chancellor of the exchequer, Henry Herbert Asquith, who was summoned by King Edward VII from a holiday in Biarritz, and David Lloyd George replaced Asquith at the Treasury. Asquith and Lloyd George had revealed themselves to be no friends of women’s suffrage. In fact, their attitude was an inversion of the WSPU’s motto: words not deeds. At a suffragette meeting in the Portman Rooms about what the changes in government might mean, Christabel issued a broadside: ‘If Mr Asquith won’t bend to us he must break, and we believe we shall break him’, adding, ‘Mr Winston Churchill was our first victim, and if he seeks re-election I hope he will be our last’.39 This was fighting talk: Christabel cannot have been confident that the vote would be granted in the current session of parliament, but controversy was one of her special strengths. On 22 April 1908 Henry Campbell-Bannerman died at 10 Downing Street.40 Politicians who were promoted had to stand for re-election to their seats. Before the late prime minister’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, two constituencies were due to go to the polls: North-West Manchester, on 24 April 1908, and Kincardineshire, near Aberdeen, north-east Scotland, on the 25th. North-West Manchester was of special interest to the WSPU who were determined to frustrate their enemy, Winston Churchill, in his attempt to get re-elected. One evening the suffragettes held a meeting ‘in the moonlight’ at the tramway depot where the socialists had a platform nearby for their candidate, who was fifteen minutes late. By this time the
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suffragettes’ lorry was surrounded by a crowd of 500. Every time the socialists tried to interrupt the women they were howled down. The Pankhursts’ long association with Manchester and the Independent Labour Party clearly counted for something when it came to audience behaviour: having a meeting at night for hundreds of women was potentially dangerous. After two hours the women drove off in their ‘triumphal’ lorry to loud cheers.41 Helen Craggs joined the WSPU in 1908 at the age of twenty, had campaigned at the Peckham by-election and was back in action in Manchester with ‘General’ Flora Drummond, who was on her home turf where her husband and toddler son, Keir Hardie Drummond, lived. Helen used the name ‘Miss Millar’ to spare the embarrassment of her father, Sir John Craggs. She chalked pavements and sold picture postcards of the stars of the movement. Helen was educated at Roedean but her father would not allow her to study medicine, a disappointing decision for a man who donated money to the study of tropical medicine. Helen Craggs was one of many suffragettes who had faced paternal hostility to their wish to pursue a career. In Helen’s case becoming a suffragette was an extreme act of rebellion and one her parents would neither condone nor forgive.42 When the votes were counted on 24 April, Winston Churchill was shocked to find he had lost his seat to the Conservative candidate, William Joynson-Hicks, from whom he had taken it in 1906. The suffragettes were cock-a-hoop. Churchill’s majority of 1,241 in 1906 had been wiped out. A number of issues lost the Liberals valuable votes, including the argument over free trade versus tariff reform, and Manchester’s Jewish community were unhappy with the workings of the Aliens Act of 1905 which had introduced immigration controls for the first time. The well-organised WSPU, on home ground, had proved a formidable force, and claimed the Liberal defeat as their victory. Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney had their revenge for being thrown out of the Free Trade Hall in 1905. The Liberal Party looked for another seat for Churchill: polling day in Dundee was announced for 9 May.43 As Winston Churchill tried to woo the voters of Dundee, where large numbers of women worked in the jam factories and jute mills, he was hounded by the suffragettes. Dundee had had a WSPU branch since 1906. Very experienced organisers including Mary Gawthorpe,
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Helen Fraser from the Glasgow office, Rachel Barrett and Elsa Gye ‘worked up’ the constituency. They spoke at factory gates, hired the Gaiety Theatre twice for ‘monster meetings’, and held 200 meetings in the final week of campaigning, popping up anywhere to tell voters of the new prime minister’s machinations. In the early hours on the morning of polling day Mary Gawthorpe took a group of local WSPU members and ‘invaded’ the office of the Dundee Courier and addressed a meeting of the night staff which went down well. Before Mary and her team left there ‘were three cheers for the ladies’.44 Miss Molony, a member of the Women’s Freedom League campaigning in Dundee, rang a bell so persistently throughout Churchill’s speech at a dinner-hour meeting at a foundry that he had to give up and she addressed his audience instead. News of his retreat was reported as far afield as Newfoundland and New Zealand. Churchill told a local women’s suffrage campaigner that he was ‘not prepared’ to exert himself ‘to extract a Government pledge’.45 Despite the suffragettes’ best efforts Churchill retained the seat for the Liberals – the incumbent had been elevated to the House of Lords – although the Liberal majority was now 2,000 votes less than it had been in the 1906 general election. Issues such as free trade, temperance and Irish Home Rule, rather than votes for women, had been the big subjects of debate, but the suffragettes were pleased to think they had played a role in reducing Winston Churchill’s majority.46 On 28 April Minnie Baldock received a letter from a new WSPU member, Emily Cobb, who was keen to support the Cause, offering to help Minnie with her activities in the build-up to the meeting in Hyde Park on 21 June. Not wanting the Baldock family to be neglected, Emily offered to pay a pound a week ‘for someone to do your home [house] work and so set you free to do work which you can do and many of us can not’. She sent Minnie a cheque for £2 and promised to send another one if ‘dear Mrs Baldock agreed to the plan’.47 On 20 May Prime Minister Asquith was asked by Liberal MPs who were in favour of women’s suffrage about the fate of Mr Stanger’s bill which had passed its second reading three months earlier. They were told that he would not oppose any amendment with regard to votes for women in a general Electoral Reform Bill, which had not been sought. A significant change, such as giving women the vote, could not be contemplated unless it was demonstrated that it had the
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support of women of the country. When asked by a Liberal opponent of women’s suffrage what would happen if a women’s suffrage amendment to a proposed Reform Bill was carried in the House of Commons, he replied evasively: ‘My honourable friend has asked me a contingent question with regard to a remote and speculative future.’48 Asquith’s obfuscation would earn him the WSPU sobriquet ‘the right dishonourable double-faced Asquith’.49 Asquith had thrown down the gauntlet and the WSPU were happy to seize it. A ‘Women’s Sunday’ demonstration on 21 June, already well advanced in the planning, would prove the extent of the demand for women’s suffrage. The leadership intended it ‘would out-rival any of the great franchise demonstrations held by the men’ in the 1830s, 1860s and 1880s. Mrs Pankhurst said that the greatest number of people ever to gather in Hyde Park had been 72,000 and the WSPU was determined to fill the park with at least a quarter of a million. Sunday had been chosen so that as many working women as possible could attend. Women who could not afford the train fares had their expenses paid by better-off members in their local branch. Fred Pethick-Lawrence was in charge of the arrangements for the ‘monster meeting’ that was to be ‘the greatest franchise demonstration ever known’. It was funded by his wife’s idea of holding a ‘Self-Denial Week’ in February, and the collection taken at the meeting at the Royal Albert Hall on 19 March which had raised £7,000. Members were asked to deny themselves something during that week, such as a pair of stockings, or a tea and buns with friends, and donate the money to WSPU funds. The idea was so effective that self-denial weeks became an annual event.50 In the weeks leading up to 21 June, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence launched the tricolour combination she had devised. Black and white photographs only tell half the suffragette story: if colour photographs had been available, our impression of the militant movement would be a riot of colour. The imaginative merchandising of the colour scheme of purple, white and green announced the modernity of the WSPU. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence explained: ‘Purple is the royal colour. It stands for the royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette, the instinct for freedom and dignity … white stands for purity in private and public life … green is the colour of hope and the emblem of spring.’51 Working closely with Mrs Pethick-Lawrence,
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An extract from
Rise Up, Women! by DIANE ATKINSON @DitheDauntless
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