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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‘Slasher Mary’ Mary Richardson Attacks The Rokeby Venus 1914

On 10 March 1914 ‘Slasher Mary’ Richardson attacked The Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in response to the brutal rearrest of Mrs Pankhurst in Glasgow.

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At New Year 1914 Sylvia Pankhurst’s Cat and Mouse licence had expired and she was hiding with friends in Old Ford Road in the East End. On 3 January she was walking in Victoria Park, Hackney, with Norah Smyth when plain-clothes officers, who had followed her from the pub opposite her safe house, arrested her. Sylvia might have escaped the ‘big, heavy men, not good at running … but the button came off my shoe and caused me to run lamely. They caught me … and dragged me back into Hackney. A crowd gathered, sympathetic to me, and menacing towards the two big men dragging me along.’1 The policemen requisitioned a laundry cart to take Sylvia to Hackney Wick police station. Norah Smyth ran beside it all the way. Sylvia was transferred to Holloway Gaol, went on hunger strike – her sixth since July 1913 – and was released on licence on 10 January. When Christabel and Mrs Pankhurst summoned Sylvia to Paris, to rail against her close ties with the Labour Party, Sylvia took Norah Smyth, financial secretary of the East London Federation of the WSPU, with her to represent the members. Hidden in a car to Harwich for the boat to the Hook of Holland, weakened and suffering from seasickness, she was glad to land. Sylvia recorded that the meeting with her sister and her mother was perfunctory. Christabel said that the East London Federation of the WSPU must become a separate organisation. She told her sister that The Suffragette would announce the news, and that unless Sylvia herself chose a name, a new one would be selected for her organisation. Sylvia’s version of this meeting, published twenty years and many family arguments later, describes Christabel as detached and high-handed. Norah Smyth,

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who knew Mrs Pankhurst well, remained loyal to Sylvia. Christabel suggested that in future they should meet ‘not as suffragettes but as sisters’, but Sylvia rejected the idea: To me the word seemed meaningless; we had no life apart from the movement. I felt bruised … my mind was thronged with the memories of our childhood, the little heads clustering at the windows in Green Hayes [their home in Manchester]; her pink cheeks and the young green shoots in Russell Square; my father’s voice: ‘You are the four pillars of my house!’2

Heavily disguised, Sylvia returned by a convoluted route through Normandy, and slipped into England unnoticed. When she reported the news to her East End comrades there was an angry response. Sylvia’s newly christened East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) added socialist red to the purple, white and green colour scheme. (East End suffragettes had already taken to wearing the ‘red caps of liberty’.) Sylvia reports that when her mother returned to England, Mrs Pankhurst ‘hastened to the East End to expostulate: ‘We are the Suffragettes! and that is the name we are always known by and there will be the same confusion as before!’ Sylvia told her mother the members had made the decision and that she would not interfere.3 On 7 February 1914 Christabel Pankhurst announced in The Suffragette that Sylvia’s organisation was no longer connected with the WSPU. She wrote that for ‘a long time Miss Sylvia Pankhurst has preferred to work on her own and independently’. Christabel pointed out that the new arrangements should not suggest that there would be any let-up in WSPU militancy. The WSPU is a fighting organisation, it must have only one policy, one programme, one command, and the word of command is given by Mrs Pankhurst and myself. From the very beginning of the militant movement this has been the case. Consequently those who wish to give an independent lead, or to carry out either a programme or policy which differs from those laid down by the WSPU, must necessarily have an independent organisation of their own.4

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Some of the headlines The Suffragette used for the first four issues of 1914 made members unhappy about how the campaign would develop: ‘Yacht Destroyed at Rosneath Pier’; ‘College Ablaze at Cheltenham’; ‘Bomb Explosion at Glasgow’; ‘Serious Explosion near Cardiff, Suffragettes Suspected’; ‘Exciting Scenes at Corner House, Piccadilly’; ‘Portsmouth Dockyard Fire’; and ‘Scottish Mansion Burnt Down in Lanark’. The fifth issue of 1914 reproduced a forcefeeding poster: four hatchet-faced wardresses hold down a suffragette as food is poured from a funnel into a nasal tube, underscored with quotes from doctors who condemned the practice.5 On 6 February 1914 the United Suffragists, a new organisation, open to men and women, joined the struggle. This new group included members of the NUWSS, frustrated at the limbo in which their modest tactics had placed them, and some members of the WSPU who could no longer condone the dangerous methods sanctioned by their leaders. The headquarters were in Adam Street, off the Strand. The Pethick-Lawrences, who joined the United Suffragists, reported the doings of the new group in Votes for Women. The membership included: Henry and Agnes Harben; George Lansbury and his wife, Bessie; Henry Nevinson; Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson; Evelyn Sharp; Evelina Haverfield and Lena Ashwell. By the time the First World War broke out the United Suffragists had opened offices in London, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and organised three rallies in the capital that summer.6 For the remainder of the campaign Sylvia’s East London Federation of Suffragettes recruited many members and enjoyed the loyal support of Zelie Emerson, Elsa Dalglish, Myra Sadd Brown and her daughter Myra, Lady Sybil Smith, Charlotte Drake, Daisy Parsons, Norah Smyth, Annie Cappuccio, and WSPU members Mary Leigh, who helped from time to time, and Maud Joachim, who became an organiser. Sylvia’s East London Federation of Suffragettes had grown from one paid worker to five, and in a letter to her generous backer, Henry Harben, she hinted: ‘work for the coming year should far outdo the past if the necessary funds are forthcoming. The members are in the main working women, who give their time and energy at considerable sacrifice; it is impossible for them to contribute largely to the funds.’ Sylvia reminded Harben how much good work local women had done by speaking in ‘At Homes’ and at concerts in the West End

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of London, converting ‘many leisured women to the urgent need of the vote, especially from the working woman’s standpoint’.7 The Pankhurst family was in crisis at the beginning of 1914. Adela, Emmeline’s youngest daughter, now twenty-nine years old, was travelling in Switzerland and when Annie Kenney caught up with her in Locarno she told her to go and see her mother and sister in Paris. At an awkward meeting Adela reluctantly agreed, having suffered from poor health for two years, to be sent to Australia. Her mother gave her the fare and £20, some woollen clothing, and a letter of recommendation to the Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein.8 Helen Archdale saw her off: ‘We went sadly to Tilbury and to see that lonely, little figure dwindle in the [ship’s] tender remains a clear but depressing memory.’9 Frail in health since childhood, but a passionate speaker and byelection campaigner since early 1910, Adela Pankhurst was unhappy with the militant direction of the WSPU. Christabel considered her ‘a very black sheep’ and despaired of the intensity of her sister’s socialist views. Adela had collapsed in August 1912 after working on the North-West Manchester by-election campaign and was forced to withdraw from campaigning. Her mother enrolled her on an agricultural course at Studley Hall Horticultural and Agricultural College for Women in Warwickshire. Adela worked as a head gardener and went to live with Helen Archdale as governess to her children, while Helen worked at Lincoln’s Inn House as a prisoners’ secretary.10 According to Ethel Smyth, who prided herself on being on close terms with the family, Mrs Pankhurst was unhappy at the unfocused life Adela was leading, disapproving of her ‘travelling about the Continent with a family friend giving desultory teaching to the children’ which Mrs Pankhurst thought ‘demoralising’ and beneath her: ‘I feel it is high time she settled down to do real work if ever she is to do any.’ Mrs Pankhurst wrote to Ethel: ‘Of course now all is settled I have pangs of maternal weakness, but I harden my heart and I have been busy with domestic cares all the time, sewing for Adela and Christabel.’11 Adela died in 1961 without seeing her family again. * Sacrifice and suffering were the criteria of stardom in the Women’s Social and Political Union, so Kitty Marion was a big star. On 6

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January 1914 she left her hiding place on the Essex coast and travelled to London where she was met by ‘Miss Roberts’, a prisoners’ secretary at WSPU headquarters. Unknown to her, she had been followed by two plain-clothes Special Branch men, Philpott and Kitchener. Kitty was to leave her suitcase in the left-luggage department at Charing Cross station. As Miss Roberts made a telephone call to Lincoln’s Inn House, Kitty was identified from her Special Branch surveillance photograph by Ralph Kitchener. He went up to her and said, ‘Hullo Katie’. Kitchener had been Kitty’s ‘own special “shadow” ’ at Emily Davison’s funeral, and on other occasions. ‘He insisted I was Kitty Marion which I insisted he must prove before I would accompany him to Holloway. My friend came out of the phone booth and took in the situation at once. While I continued arguing I stealthily passed incriminating evidence to her from my coat pocket.’12 Kitty was taken to the station master’s office while Kitchener telephoned for policemen who could further identify her, stating, ‘That’s Kitty Marion right enough.’ Kitty refused to go quietly and Kitchener was helped by the police. As she was being lifted into a taxi, feet first, she broke one of the windows. Eight policemen crammed in with her so that she could cause no more damage. She found the constables to be ‘quite decent lads and we had a suffrage discussion en route to Holloway’.13 Kitty was readmitted to Holloway to continue serving her prison sentence and at once went on hunger strike. As a long-time absconder there was to be no Cat and Mouse licence, and she was force-fed immediately by Dr Ahern, who had previously fed her on a ten-day hunger strike in 1912 at Winson Green Prison. Kitty Marion spent three months in Holloway in 1914 and was force-fed 232 times. She lost thirty-six pounds in weight. Dr Ahern, who did the ‘dirty work’, recognised ‘As fast as they poured the food down it was vomited back up.’ At the beginning of her sentence forcefeeding did not weaken her, rather, the reverse: ‘I became possessed of a most furious rage, like wanting to kill someone.’14 When Ahern and the wardresses left, she ‘smashed every pane of glass in the window and everything else breakable in the cell, the glass over the gas, and the wash-basin and the jug.’15 Later that afternoon she barricaded her cell to delay the next feed: ‘I found blessed relief to my feelings in screaming, exercising my lungs and throat after the frightful sensation

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of being held in a vice, choking and suffocating. I had to scream or go mad.’16 The barricade was dismantled and she was fed again. Kitty set fire to the bed but the bed just smouldered and would not burn, and when the smoke was noticed the wardresses rushed in with buckets of water. When Kitty’s weight loss accelerated she was force-fed three times a day: Resisting the gag was almost useless but I resisted the tube with my throat, until my mouth was full of coiled tube and when swallowing, which happened involuntarily sooner or later, seemed to go down in lumps, uncoiling as it went … When in my agony I managed to wrench a hand free from a wardress I would snatch the tube out, which meant a reprimand for her and repeated torture for me.17

On the days of a triple feed, the ‘vomiting would continue in small quantities for three hours … the remains of the last meal would come back as soon as the tube touched the back of my throat and I started retching’. Home Office files record that each time Kitty was sick they weighed the vomit (the amounts varied from two ounces to twelve ounces), and reported it daily.18 In the latter part of March 1914 Kitty Marion was secretly corresponding in gaol with ‘Rachel Peace’ (Jane Short) and Mary Richardson, who had just arrived in Holloway to serve a six-month sentence with hard labour. The letters in pencil were written on pale brown prison lavatory paper. Although they survive, the paper is so thin you have to hold them up to the light to read them. They tell of Jane Short’s passion for astrology. Based on Kitty’s birthday, she made her an astrological chart: Mars gives you energy and enables you to be a good fighter – also it gives you your red hair, which by the way I thought was golden – but which ever it is, I know it is gloriously beautiful for that much I have seen of you from the window. I expect you are very pretty really … I expect you have blue eyes – very bright ones particularly at night! Venus gives a nice complexion and as a rule a nice figure albeit a tendency to plumpness.19

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Mary Richardson was in awe of Kitty: ‘Dear K, I hate to hear them go into you. I cannot tell you how I admire you for holding on so. It is the stuff that has made our Union famous – militant women – a new order of fanatic creation. I know you would rather die than submit, so would I any day.’20 Reading these letters today we get a glimpse of the wardresses who helped the doctors to feed Kitty. Kitty said how ‘frantic’ she had felt when being fed but that ‘Miss Chandler was trying to pacify me. Miss R stood in the doorway … I could have killed her. Miss C was strong enough to hold me otherwise I would have gone for her. I tried hard enough.’ Mary Richardson told Kitty how ‘Miss Kift got so tired [trying to feed her] they had to fetch her a chair’, and ‘after it was over I still held onto the tube in my teeth and so the doctor pinched my nose’.21 Kitty discovered that the prison authorities were dosing some of the women with bromide to reduce their resistance to feeding and make them more compliant. ‘The food was mostly milk and eggs, beef-tea, sometimes cocoa and sometimes something of a peculiar salty taste which I later learned was bromide, though the authorities denied it, since there was a great outcry against giving us sedative drugs.’22 Olive Beamish was using her alias of ‘Phyllis Brady’ when she was rearrested in January 1914 while on the run on an expired Cat and Mouse licence. She was further charged with having set fire to Lady White’s house in Egham the previous spring, and sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour. Olive was in Holloway at the same time as Kitty and they were able to talk in the exercise yard. When ‘Phyllis Brady’ was on remand she went on hunger strike and was released on licence on 11 February to recover so that she could stand trial. The Bishop of London, who had been lobbied by the WSPU to visit Holloway, investigated the force-feeding of suffragette prisoners and came to the bizarre conclusion that they were being fed ‘in the kindliest of circumstances’ and that he had found ‘Rachel Peace’ ‘somewhat pale’23 but she showed no sign of emaciation or distress. ‘Phyllis Brady’ was returned to prison and went on hunger strike again for thirty days and was fed by force. When she was released on 24 March she went to recover at Dr Flora Murray’s suffragette nursing home, where a urine test revealed that she had been given bromide, commonly used in lunatic asylums to sedate patients.

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On 16 April Kitty was released from Holloway on a six-day Cat and Mouse licence and taken to Mouse Castle in Campden Hill Square. The Home Office had struggled to cope with Kitty and were nervous when she was released. She had no intention of being rearrested and the day before her licence expired she left Mouse Castle accompanied by two friends. The police followed her taxi and at her destination she was helped up the steps looking very weak and wobbly: Kitty’s years of experience on the stage were put to good use. The address was under surveillance, but Kitty left by the back door and was taken away by the son of the house in the sidecar of his motorcycle. ‘It was my first and only sidecar ride and with the excitement and romance of escaping the police once more, quite enjoyable despite my wretched, weak physical condition and the miraculous avoidance of a collision, by a timely increase of speed, with a car at the corner of a hill up which we were turning.’24 While Kitty recovered she received letters from many suffragette comrades, including Constance Lytton, writing with her left hand since her stroke: ‘My reverence for you is of the greatest, and I feel a love for you which I cannot put on paper. I have thought of you incessantly while you were being force-fed.’25 Christabel Pankhurst wrote: ‘My love and thanks to you for your magnificent fight and heroic endurance … There is much rejoicing that you are free and out of the clutches of those terribly cruel enemies of our cause.’26 Mrs Pankhurst sent Kitty a flowering azalea. One of the prisoners’ secretaries at Lincoln’s Inn House sent Kitty £1 and a pair of shoes and was arranging for Kitty’s possessions to be sent to her from Liverpool. She said: ‘You can’t think how proud I was to be allowed to see you yesterday – you have been just grand.’27 A Bristol comrade who had been arrested five times and served prison sentences in 1910 and 1911 wrote twice to Kitty using an affectionate nickname, ‘Clorf Ears’: ‘I think dear you are truly marvellous and only wish I had half your pluck’.28 A friend whom she had served time with in Winson Green in 1912 wrote: ‘My dear brave Kitty, I must write a line just to try to tell you how I love and admire you for your long and splendid fight … I have been fearfully anxious for you for so many weeks.’29 On the last day of May Kitty was accompanied to Paris (wearing a dark wig and heavily veiled) by Mary Leigh, Dr Violet Jones and Mrs Alice Green, who had been Emily Davison’s landlady. Christabel

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Pankhurst could now see for herself how intrepid, loyal, kind-hearted, ‘leading comedienne’ Kitty Marion had suffered for the cause.30 On 10 February Mrs Pankhurst, on the run from the police and staying with the Brackenbury family at Mouse Castle, held an advertised meeting on the balcony of the house. She spoke to a crowd of 600 people, mostly women’s suffrage supporters, but also some antis, too, all waiting eagerly for her. Swathed in black and looking frail, Mrs Pankhurst spoke for half an hour in the cold night air: We women are fighting not as women, but as human beings, for human rights, and we shall win those human rights … because nothing on earth can put down this movement … Let us show the men of the twentieth century that there are things today worth fighting for … I am here tonight, and not a man is going to protect me, because this is a woman’s fight and we shall protect ourselves. I am coming amongst you in a few minutes, and I challenge the Government to re-arrest me.31

In an attempt to drown her voice handbells were rung and hostile songs were sung, and a man shouted that she should be ‘deported as a mover of sedition’. Mrs Pankhurst turned on him: ‘Here is a man whose forefathers were seditious in the past, talking about sedition on the part of women, who are taxed but have no constitutional rights. Yes, my friends, I am seditious, and I shall go on being seditious until I am brought, with other women, within the constitution of my country.’32 To prevent Mrs Pankhurst from being rearrested, Florence Smith was dressed in Mrs Pankhurst’s clothes by Kitty Marshall, wardrobe lady. At the end of the speech suffragettes and their supporters sang ‘The Marseillaise’ as ‘Mrs Pankhurst’ and Kitty Marshall left the house surrounded by her bodyguards, who had been trained in ju-jitsu by Edith Garrud. The bodyguards produced Indian clubs hidden in their clothing when the police – some of whom had been hiding in the bushes – moved forward. Gertrude Harding says: ‘Up came the clubs of the bodyguard. Out swung the fists of the police. People stared in shocked silence as the struggling cluster of women and men reached the street, when more plain-clothes police officers surged forward out of the crowd. One policeman yelled, “That’s

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her, I know her” … with his fist he struck her from behind. “Mrs Pankhurst” and Katherine [Kitty Marshall] pushed from all sides fell to the pavement.’ Kitty’s ribs were badly bruised and ‘Mrs Pankhurst’ was knocked unconscious in the mêlée. The bodyguards punched and lashed out at the police with their Indian clubs and seven members of the bodyguard and ‘Mrs Pankhurst’ were arrested and taken to the police station in Ladbroke Grove. After a short time, at Mouse Castle, the real Mrs Pankhurst, accompanied by Gert Harding, who organised her bodyguard, left the house and hailed a taxi to a secret address.33 * On 18 February 1914, Mary Lindsay from London, a new recruit, mistook Liberal politician Lord Weardale, a joint President of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, for the prime minister. She attacked him with a dog-whip on the platform of Euston station. This was her first militant action. It has not been possible to trace ‘Mary Ogilvy Lindsay’, which suggests this may have been an alias. Mary had mingled with a crowd of 200 wedding guests, of which Weardale was one, on their way to the wedding of Lady Adelaide Spencer of Althorp Park, Northamptonshire. Mary, ‘young and pretty’ and dressed in black, ‘rushed from the crowd and pulled a whip from underneath her coat and struck at Lord Weardale fiercely. So unexpected was the attack, and so energetic was his assailant’s rush that Lord Weardale fell headlong onto the platform’, and his wife’s ear was clipped by the whiplash. Lord Weardale and Mary Lindsay were escorted to Albany Street police station. Later she was charged at Clerkenwell Police Court with assault. When one of the railway policemen described her slashing at Lord Weardale with the whip, Mary Lindsay was reported to have ‘laughed softly’. The court heard that as her victim was helped to his feet, Mary said: ‘I meant to give him a good thrashing; you don’t know what he has done to us.’ Before she was taken to gaol, the magistrate remarked that her behaviour ‘resembled that of a lunatic’. Mary went on hunger strike for three days and was released on 22 February ‘looking very ill’ on her own bail of £50. As it was her first offence she was fined forty shillings for whipping Lord Weardale.34

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On 21 February Kitty Marshall reprised her role as wardrobe mistress to Mrs Pankhurst when she made a speech on the balcony of 63 Glebe Place, the Chelsea home of the suffragette sympathisers Dr Harry and Mrs Gladys Schütze. Twenty members of Mrs Pankhurst’s bodyguard ‘arrived in various disguises – tradespeople and maids … they would come singly in order not to attract attention’.35 The organisers at Lincoln’s Inn House issued detailed requests for their leader’s stay in Glebe Place: Mrs Pankhurst will arrive sometime tomorrow afternoon [20 February] soon after lunch. She will rest from tea until dinnertime and go to bed at half-past nine. She will stay in bed during the Saturday morning. You will have lunch at half-past twelve, so that she rests up before she speaks at half-past two. At eleven o’clock Saturday evening, we shall send cars to take her away, so she will need some dinner. And you had better have enough food in the house for her and the bodyguard for over the weekend, just in case anything goes wrong.36

Gladys Schütze found the members of the bodyguard charming and easy-going: ‘Before bedtime there were ten or so making the best of the floor and easy chairs in my workroom and the drawing-room. I have never come across such cheerful, unfussy young women.’37 She learned that two were shop assistants, two were teachers, there was a dressmaker, a couple were clerks, one had been a mill worker, there was a children’s nurse, three servants, a ‘society lady’, and the rest were ‘middle-class women of no occupation’.38 The Schützes’ cook, Mrs Duckett, was ‘a rabid member of the Union’. Hearing that Mrs Pankhurst was coming to stay, Mrs Duckett was ‘thrilled to the marrow’.39 When the meeting started Glebe Place was ‘black with people’. There were dozens of police and more waiting round the corner. In a rerun of the Mouse Castle speech, Mrs Pankhurst addressed the crowd from a first-floor balcony, challenging the government to rearrest her: ‘I have served about twenty days of those three years [the sentence handed down in 1912]. They have hauled me back to prison five times … They may kill me, but they will not make me serve my three years.’ She told her audience: ‘We are fighting for a time when every little girl

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born into the world will have an equal chance with her brothers, when we shall put an end to foul outrages upon our sex, when our streets shall be safe for the girlhood of our race, when every man shall look upon every other woman as his own sisters.’40 Gertrude Harding arranged for the bodyguards, Indian clubs at the ready, to surround Kitty Marshall and – in the guise of ‘Mrs Pankhurst’ – Florence White. As soon as the meeting ended two cars drew up and Kitty, ‘Mrs Pankhurst’ and half of the bodyguards dashed out of the front door and tried to get into the car, but the police were suspicious and stopped Kitty and ‘Mrs Pankhurst’. Determined not to be duped again, The Times reported: ‘A small group of women left the house, and the police, singling out one of whom they imagined to be Pankhurst, deliberately struck her on the head and then knocked her down.’41 The men lifted her veil and Florence White was taken to the police station, along with two bodyguards. When another group of heavily veiled women left the house, hemmed in by the crowd and plain-clothes policemen, the women drew their Indian clubs from under their clothing and two of them were arrested. Gladys Schütze announced from the front door that the real Mrs Pankhurst had left the house, but no one believed her and the police stayed put. Inside Glebe Place, Gertrude Harding waited with Emmeline to make their escape. On Sunday morning, one of the bodyguards left the house disguised as an elderly maid, prayer book in hand, as if she was going to church, and went to WSPU headquarters for orders. The ‘maid’ returned to report that the attempt to rescue Mrs Pankhurst would be made later that afternoon. At a given signal at four o’clock the bodyguards rushed out and a fresh contingent of women sprang from two cars that had pulled up.42 Kitty Marshall remembered how ‘the girls attacked the police, there were shouts and shrieks, a scene of great confusion’. At nine o’clock in the evening the bodyguards at 63 Glebe Place again rushed out of the front door. A car was waiting outside the tradesmen’s entrance in the back street, and, after a brief scrimmage with a detective, Mrs Pankhurst and three members of her bodyguard escaped. Kitty Marshall’s unpublished memoir ‘Suffragette Escapes and Adventures’ recalled: ‘some of us fell on some policemen and detectives. I chose a big man with a large mackintosh cape. I knocked his helmet over his eyes and brandished my club over his head. Out came Mrs Pankhurst and she was driven away by a smart

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Rise Up, Women! by DIANE ATKINSON @DitheDauntless

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