by Clare Hunter
In 1981 the Conservative government had announced plans to close twenty-three pits it deemed inefficient. The new head of National Coal Board, the industrialist Ian McGregor, appointed in 1983, began a further programme of pit closures. By March 1984, 21,000 jobs had been lost and a further twenty pits faced closure. The miners in Yorkshire and Scotland took strike action. The leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, called for a national strike, but stopped short of calling for a national ballot. Instead it was left to each area to arrange its own ballot. In Nottinghamshire, the majority of miners deemed the strike unconstitutional and undemocratic and, confident that their modernised pits would be reprieved, 73 percent of them voted against a strike. Their decision was met with fury and derision by striking miners nationwide who began, with flying pickets and anti-Nottinghamshire propaganda, to shame the non-striking workforce into joining their ranks. But those Nottinghamshire miners who continued to work were averse to bullying and remained undaunted. They set up their own union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, and held their ground. For the striking Nottinghamshire miners, now existing without wages and reliant on charity, the decision by their fellow workers was distressing. Mansfield became a divided community.
On Mrs Thatcher’s watch, Mansfield became a testing ground for new tactics to curb civil disobedience. Overnight, small villages were invaded by hundreds of police from all over the country. Their large white vans fringed country lanes. At the still-working collieries, small knots of picketers were penned in by walls of arm-linked officers; peoples’ homes were invaded after dark by the sweep of search lights; strikers were taken away in the night for questioning.
Through the banner project I got to know women involved in the local Miners’ Wives Support Groups. They invited me to their meetings and to village halls where food and clothes were being dispensed to those in need. They enlisted me to drive them to picket lines, negotiating the bends of single-track and back-field roads to avoid being stopped by the police. The Nottinghamshire strikers had no banners of their own, so I began to make them some. The first banner was inspired by a photograph in the local paper of police pushing back a group of protestors: it had a cream silk background with police appliquéd in black satin and a scrolled slogan on a red background that read: It’s Your Future. Stand Your Ground’. One for the Silverhill Strikers had a silver-stitched mineshaft silhouetted against an ominous black silk sky. I became, by default or opportunity, a banner maker.
That May Day march was the biggest rally Mansfield had ever seen. Striking miners came in support of their comrades from other parts of Nottinghamshire. They came from Kent and Yorkshire, from Durham and Wales to make a persuasive show. Arthur Scargill, the national miners’ union leader, was there his fist raised high to the sky, and all around, swirling among the protestors, were the majestic gilded banners of the National Union of Mineworkers. This was an emblazoned show of pageantry and power, the decades-old red silk banners, fringed and tessellated, threading their colour through the crowds. It was a sumptuous display of strength, a reminder of past struggles and of hard-won victories.
The strike failed to save the pits. The striking miners returned to work, walking with heavy hearts behind their swaying banners, many in tears. They walked in the dark light of an early spring morning with their wives and children. Across Britain, long-term poverty descended on mining communities as, over the following three decades, collieries were closed throughout the country. All of the thirty-six pits still operating in Nottinghamshire in 1984 had closed down by 2015. After 750 years of coal mining tradition in Britain, today there is not a single pit left. Cabinet papers, newly released by the National Archive, reveal that in 1983 the National Coal Board did plan to close seventy-five pits over the next three years. The papers stated that no record of the meeting was to be circulated and that none of its papers were to be photocopied.
The glorious miners’ banners have become relics of a condemned industry: their call to ‘defend, unite, support’ is now eternally silenced. Most have gone to museums to be wrapped in tissue and folded into cardboard boxes: curated but uncelebrated. A few banners hang in museum galleries, stilled and sullen: silent ghosts of human hope.
The only British political banners that survive in any quantity were manufactured by the entrepreneur George Tutill, who began his banner-making enterprise in 1837. Drawing on his background in fairground entertainment, Tutill transposed the gaudy paintwork of amusement booths and the advertisement banners he used to attract customers, which were adorned with gilded scrolls and ornate lettering, to furnish trade unions with the means to parade their strength with triumphant showmanship. His commercial acumen coalesced with the growing ambitions of trade unions. During the nineteenth century, his firm undertook the lion’s share of banner-making in Britain, providing 75 percent of trade unions with banners. The banners that Tutill manufactured were not just magnificent in style, but also in scale. He invented and patented a method of coating fabric in rubber, then inking designs into it, which allowed for a single sheet of silk to be illustrated on both sides. It made his banners lightweight and pliable. And when, in the 1880s, he installed the largest Jacquard loom in the world, he could produce banners so big they had to be wheeled down the streets in specially designed carriages. By the latter half of the century, no self-respecting working men’s union was without a Tutill banner.
It was no longer a sign-writer’s or apprentice’s job to pen simple slogans of protest onto a union banner. Tutill employed and commissioned artists of note to craft the painterly detail of socialist heroes, union benefactors, starving children and coal-grimed miners. A litany of virtuous ideals and aspirations could be framed in intricate golden scrolls accompanied by any number of images and symbols to represent unity, strength, industry and justice. With such banner innovation, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen Union no longer needed to be short of words or economical with imagery. Their two-sided banner invested heavily in aspiration: ‘Brothers in Unity for Mutual Help, Industry and Reward, Knowledge and Peace’. It included a miscellany of persuasive motifs and lauded heroes, including James Watt, George Stephenson, Hercules, Vulcan, the figure of Justice, two railway men shaking hands, a union benefactor giving alms to a starving mother, a rocket, a train in a station, birds sitting on a book, a beehive, a laurel wreath, weighing scales and a steam engine.
Although they were large and imposing, however, Tutill’s banners and those that emulated his approach, had a uniform style. They bred a corporate brand. Tutill offered a choice of stock images that were distributed among unions, temperance and friendly societies with barely an attempt to indicate a difference of purpose. Banners began to lose the authenticity of the personal appeal of the hand-made, the comrade-crafted protest. Instead, on their twelve-foot poles, they unfurled a blanket authority over protestors.
In the first decade of the twentieth century it was the suffragettes who reclaimed the crafted banner as an emotive tool of campaign. Made by and held in women’s hands, their embroidered banners claimed needlework as a way to purposely gender their female presence in their political campaign to win for women the right to vote.
The campaign began in 1832, when Mary Smith petitioned the British Parliament to give women the vote. It came to naught. The National Union of Suffrage Societies was set up by Lydia Becker in 1867 with twenty affiliated groups and Millicent Garrett Fawcett as President but, despite an intensive programme of lobbying, public speaking and peaceful persuasion, women’s franchise remained elusive. Impatient and furious, a group of campaigners led by Emmeline Pankhurst launched in 1903 a more intemperate agenda. They formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, a breakaway group with’ Deeds not Words’ as its motto. The WSPU was designed from the outset as a force to be reckoned with. There would no longer be tentative steps towards progress through quietly gathered petitions and respectful letters. Their campaign would be marked by bold and aggressive action. Bastions of male
domination were targeted: churches were torched, department-store windows smashed, the homes of politicians bombed. But public sympathy faltered. Politicians and press deemed the violence unfeminine and unrepresentative. The suffragettes began to be ridiculed. Posters appeared featuring hapless husbands attempting to cook and care for children who had been abandoned by their protesting mothers. There were numerous cartoons of women attacking police with umbrellas or rolling pins. Among the merchandise were satirical toys, including a jack-in-the-box with a suffragette caricatured as a harridan springing free from her prison cell clutching a Rights for Women banner in her hand.
The suffragettes urgently needed to find a more effective and engaging means of protest to regain respect and win popular support. They decided on a series of meticulously staged mass rallies, held between 1907 and 1913, with representatives of women from every walk of life, including international supporters. The rallies were designed as showcases of women’s capacity and as spectacles of feminine solidarity. Their aim was to counter the accusation that the suffrage campaign was a mere diversion for the idle upper and middle classes, perpetrated by women with intellectual pretensions. The Mud March of 1907 (so called because of the terrible weather) attracted 3,000 women to take to the streets, but had neither the scale nor the impact of suffragette ambition. A year later, the movement marshalled ten times that number, with 30,000 taking to the streets of London in support of women’s franchise. This was an unexpected victory at a time when only prostitutes paraded themselves in public.
It wasn’t just the numbers that impressed themselves on the media and the political and public consciousness. Women had not only answered the call in their thousands, but they also represented a plethora of backgrounds. Artists, surgeons, clay-pipe makers, homemakers, sanitary inspectors, bookbinders, shop assistants, writers, barmaids, char women, pottery workers, flower gardeners, shorthand writers, fishwives, actresses, pit-brow women, musicians, academics and gymnasts all walked side by side in a democratic swell of determined political independence. The women in the 1908 rally were accompanied by marching bands, pipe bands and mass choirs: women’s voices rising to a crescendo of protest, singing Ethel Smyth’s suffrage anthem:
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.
Swirling among them were their banners, hundreds of them, billowing above the protestors. The 1908 rally was a glorious visual spectacle that surpassed any trade union show of strength. This was theatrical pageantry on an unprecedented scale, elaborately ornamented in a pronounced show of deliberate femininity. Other rallies followed year on year: A Pageant of Great Women in 1909, the Hyde Park Rally of 1910, From Prison to Citizenship in 1911, in 1913, the Pilgrimage for Women’s Suffrage and, that same year, the grand funeral procession for the suffragettes’ first martyr, Emily Wilding Davison, who had been killed as she tried to pin a suffragette sash onto King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby.
The artist Mary Lowndes was the architect of the visual impact of these rallies. Trained at the Slade School of Art, she was one of the new breed of art-school trained professional women artists. She had exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists and was the co-founder of the Glass House in London, a much-commissioned stained-glass studio. In 1907 she set up the Artists’ Suffrage League to supply the suffragette cause with bold, eye-catching campaigning artwork including posters, cards and banners, and she became the suffragettes’ artistic champion, dedicated to ensuring that suffragette rallies were platforms for the display of women’s distinctive creativity. For the rallies, she penned in 1910 a guide for participants, Banners & Banner-Making. In it she decried the debasement of banner art in the hands of commercial manufacturers like Tutill and exhorted women to make something extraordinary that harnessed their own heritage of needlework:
A banner is a thing to float in the wind, to flicker in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure, to half show and half conceal a device you long to unravel: you do not want to read it, you want to worship it. Choose purple and gold for ambition, red for courage, green for long-cherished hopes . . . It is a declaration.
Not just a ‘declaration’ in Mary Lowndes’ eyes, the suffragette and suffragist banners carried the argument itself. Each silk-embroidered motif, hand-wrought, tasselled, appliquéd motif, was a visible refutation of the criticism that suffragettes were de-sexed and unfeminine. Their banners were designed to be defiant, emphatic evidence of women’s sensibilities and sensuality: ‘the diverse colours of needlework, hand-wrought, are coming into play again, and now for the first time in history illuminating women’s own adventure.’
And adventurous it was. This was no borrowed glory from the masculinity of union banners; Mary Lowndes saw to that. The banners paraded at these rallies were sewn in ravishing needlework, employing the most beautiful of fabrics – brocades, silks, damasks and velvets – and using materials deliberately displaced from the privacy of the drawing room to the public arena of demonstration. They were emblematic rather than pictorial, displaying explicit female imagery: flowers, lit lamps, shells, sun rays, winged hearts. They celebrated female heroines such as Boadicea, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Josephine Butler, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Brontë, among others, and, most audaciously of all, claimed ‘Victoria, Queen and Mother’ as one of their own.
This collective display was the triumph of the suffragettes. There was mile upon mile of women in drifts of colour: the red, white and green of Women’s Suffrage Societies; the blue and silver of the Artists’ Suffrage League; the orange and black of paper designers and printers; the pink and greens of the Actresses Franchise League – and many participants dressed in their occupational diversity, in academic gowns, nurses’ uniforms, servants’ aprons and workers’ overalls. The procession of thousands of women with its swell of music, scent of flowers, its horizontal rainbow of colour and canopy of embroidered banners was a sensory demonstration unlike anything ever encountered before. Over 250,000 spectators came to watch it pass and its subsequent demonstration in Hyde Park attracted the largest number of people ever gathered there for a political purpose.
More rallies were held throughout the country. In 1909 the suffragettes marched in Edinburgh with their leader Flora Drummond, nicknamed ‘Bluebell’, heading the procession on horseback, bedecked in a chieftain’s sash of tartan. Of the hundreds of banners carried that day, none survive. When I asked Elspeth King, the tireless champion of Scottish women’s social history, why it was that so little remained, her answer was curt: ‘misogyny’. The suffragette banners that were offered to Scotland’s museums were, she told me, rejected by male curators at the time who saw no value in their history. The National Museum of Scotland has only one stitched suffrage banner on display. It is for the Federation of Male Suffrage.
It wasn’t only banners that the suffragettes sewed. For the women campaigners incarcerated and force-fed in Holloway Prison, handkerchiefs offered the perfect vehicles for miniature petitions. Embroidered with their signatures and smuggled out, they reassured followers of an undiminished resolve, stitched in the WSPU colours: green for hope, white for purity and violet for dignity.
In America, the suffragettes chose white, purple and gold as their colours. Their fight for the right to vote took on a different tenor. In 1917 Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman’s Party, organised a picket at the White House with what became known as the Silent Sentinels. From 1917 to 1919, women dressed in white stood in silence for six days a week outside the gates of the White House, holding banners on which they had inscribed direct questions and appeals to the then president, Woodrow Wilson:
Mr President How Long Must Women Wait for Their Liberty?
Mr President What Will You Do for Women’s Suffrage?
Mr President You Say Liberty Is the Fundamental Demand of The Human Spirit
.
In total, 2,000 women took their turn to be Silent Sentinels during two years of campaigning. Their banners were torn down, the women were arrested for obstructing traffic, some were jailed. Others went on hunger strike and were force-fed just like their British counterparts, and they too had to withstand the taunts of male critics, derided as ‘bewildered, deluded creatures with short skirts and short hair’. Their nemesis came on 14 November 1917, when the superintendent of the Occoquan Workhouse, where many of the suffragettes were detained, ordered forty guards to brutalise them. A key campaigner, Lucy Burns, was badly beaten and chained with her hands above her head to the cell bars and left overnight. Dora Lewis was thrown into a dark cell, her head smashed against the iron bed. As she collapsed, her cellmate, Alice Cosu, believing Dora had been killed, suffered a heart attack but was denied medical treatment until the following morning. Others were kicked, clubbed, beaten up and choked. Less than two months later, Woodrow Wilson announced the presentation of the first bill in support of women’s suffrage.
These American suffragettes did not use elaborate needlework to further their cause. While these women would have been skilled in sewing perhaps they had less need to publicly present a sewn femininity. Instead, their banners focussed on the suffragette colours and bold messages: slogans, questions, quotations writ large. More socially liberated and lacking the legacy of Tutill’s commercial bannered show of masculine political power, there was maybe a lesser need to devise a gendered alternative, to harness the trope of women’s domesticity to emphasise women’s dissent. But they did use an armoury of textiles as visible declarations of their suffrage campaign. The National Women’s Party Collection is guardian to the sashes, capes, ribbons, aprons, bonnets and costumes donned by American suffragettes.