Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  On 22 June, Castello admitted seven of the offences with which the princess had been charged, but informed the court that even though she acknowledged she was breaking the law, regrettably she would not be paying the fine.23 Instead Sophia asked him to read a long statement on her behalf. It spoke of the injustice of making women pay tax when they had been given no voice in the governing of the country. She, and others like her, had no intention of contributing until the situation was rectified.

  The judge listened impatiently to the lecture, and then informed Castello that the court was not in the least bit interested in the princess’s political essay. Bringing down his gavel he fined her one pound for the dog licences, one pound for the servants, and one pound for the carriage.24 Castello was unsurprised by the judgment and nodded sympathetically as he heard the details of the fine. When the judge finished speaking, the princess’s lawyer informed him that his client would not be paying a penny of the tax due or the fine just imposed. The court bristled with excitement as everyone realised they were witnessing the birth of a scandal. Just how far would Princess Duleep Singh take this? Would she be prepared to go to gaol like Emma Sproson?

  Again, the authorities were reluctant to endure the storm of publicity which would follow the princess’s imprisonment, so instead they decided to try and force Sophia to pay the fines. Two weeks after her non-appearance at Spelthorne Court, bailiffs for the County of Middlesex arrived at Faraday House with a warrant. They informed the housekeeper that if the bill for the outstanding licences and the court penalties was not paid immediately, they would have no choice but to enter the property and seize goods for sale. Alarmed, Margaret Mayes disappeared for some minutes to confer with her mistress. When she returned, she told the men on her doorstep that Princess Sophia had a counter-offer to make. She would gladly pay them as soon as the prime minister ensured she had the right to vote. Unimpressed, the men barged past and entered the house. Experienced as they were, they made their way immediately to where a lady might keep her jewellery, and took a seven-stone diamond ring from Sophia’s vanity case.25 The ring was worth considerably more than the fines and court costs combined.

  When the item came up for sale in July at an auction house in Ashford in Kent, almost all the seats were taken up by women bedecked in the colours of the suffragettes. They waited patiently for the princess’s ring to come under the hammer, and when it did not one of them raised their hands to bid, nor in the midst of their considerable clamour could any other attendee place a bid on Sophia’s jewels. As this went on, the auctioneer was forced to repeatedly drop his starting bid to kick-start the sale. It was not until he reached the sum of £10, that one woman calmly raised her hand and the hammer fell.26

  The buyer was Louise Jopling Rowe, one of the most prominent women artists of the Victorian era, and confidante of the painter James Whistler and playwright Oscar Wilde. She was also a passionate suffragette. Upon winning her lot she graciously returned the ring to Sophia amidst hearty applause from the other women.27 The suffragettes then unfurled banners in the auction rooms and proceeded to hold a noisy rally. With bemused staff looking on, the women congratulated Sophia for making her stand and risking prison for their cause. As she turned the ring over in the palm of her hand, she may have reflected on the last time diamonds had been taken from her family by the state. They had been considerably bigger then, and nobody had tried or even wanted to give them back.

  17

  We Have No Hold

  Sophia’s dedication to the cause in 1911 endeared her to the most influential woman in the country, the WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst. In October, Emmeline had decided to embark on a tour of North America, hoping to encourage the suffragettes across the Atlantic. The Americans and Canadians would pay handsomely to hear her speak, and since her personal funds had been severely depleted over her years of suffragette campaigning, the tour made financial and political sense. On 2 October 1911, two days before she was set to leave, the suffragettes of the WSPU gave her a rousing farewell at the London Pavilion theatre. It was a raucous and packed affair, and Emmeline responded with her usual gusto. However, the moment of her departure was altogether more intimate.

  Two days later she was met by a small party of her closest friends at Waterloo station. From here she would make her way by train to Southampton and board the White Star liner RMS Oceanic. Lady Constance Lytton, Annie Kenny and Emily Wilding Davison were waiting for her, as were Mabel Tuke, Kitty and Alfred Marshal and Victor Duval, the husband of Una Dugdale. With them was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh.1 As she waved her leader farewell, Sophia’s place at the heart of the movement was confirmed, as was its place in her own heart.

  On her return from North America four months later, Emmeline Pankhurst seemed even more fired up than before. On 16 February 1912 she declared that ‘the argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics’.2 It was fair warning for what was to follow for, less than a month later, her organisation entered the most violent stage of coordinated militancy to date.

  On 1 March, a group of around 150 women were summoned to WSPU headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn for a special operation. There, just across the road from the Royal Courts of Justice, they were issued with detailed instructions, maps and timings. Little toffee hammers, usually found in confectioners’ shops, were also handed out. Folding their papers away, and tucking their hammers into sleeves, the specially selected suffragettes left in small groups, heading off in different directions. They aroused no suspicion in the bustling streets, having left all their suffragette paraphernalia at home. To all intents and purposes, they were just well-heeled ladies out for an afternoon of shopping. Nobody seemed to notice that although they looked at the window displays for long periods of time, they seemed to take no interest in the items for sale.

  At exactly 5.45 p.m., with calm calculation, each woman took her hammer from its hiding place and struck out at any large window before her. The suffragettes had learnt about the weakest points in glass, and how to hit in such a way as to give maximum time to retreat from falling shards. Windows came crashing down all over the capital. The suffragettes had set out to target some of London’s most famous commercial giants: Liberty, Marshall & Snelgrove and Burberry were among the biggest department stores in the world. Passers-by were left gaping as cascades of jagged glass came down. Messrs Stewart Dawson and Co. on the Strand, an international watchmakers and jewellers, with the motto: ‘There is no new thing under the sun’, struggled to grasp the novelty of what had happened to them. Their windows had been smashed but no attempt had been made to grab any of the valuable jewels on display. Bemused pedestrians ground the transparent splinters into sparkling dust underfoot as police pushed them back from the scene.

  The suffragettes struck art dealerships too, including the highly respected Duveen Brothers. With art galleries in London, New York and Paris dating back to the 1860s, Duveen’s had thought themselves above the vagaries of common politics; however nobody was immune that day. International corporations in large imposing buildings found themselves on the suffragette lists too. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company and Norddeutscher Lloyd, the most important German shipping company, as well as Sophia’s own beloved American Eastman Kodak store, all had their London headquarters targeted by the tap of the toffee hammer. If the suffragettes had sought to embarrass their government before the eyes of the world, they succeeded.

  Emmeline Pankhurst not only orchestrated the window smashing, she took part personally. The WSPU leader had set her sights on Asquith himself, and that day she travelled to the prime minister’s residence, where she smashed four of Downing Street’s windows. Promptly arrested by the police, she managed to wrench her arm free from a constable’s grasp and broke a Cabinet Office window in the time it took for them to take hold of her again. Collectively, the suffragettes caused thousands of pounds worth of damage; carpenters were busy through the night, boarding up around the city. Never before had the women embarked o
n such a large-scale, destructive demonstration. The day of window smashing marked a dramatic change in tactics. It was the beginning of the full-skirted ‘guerillists’.

  More than 120 women were arrested on 1 March, but that did not stop the WSPU from proceeding with a similar protest three days later. With their leader behind bars, the guerillists organised another sizeable demonstration in Parliament Square. It too ended in shattered glass. Suffragettes hurled rocks at the windows of any government building they could get close to. In response, the police raided WSPU headquarters in London’s Kingsway, rounding up anyone they could find. It was a deliberate show of force, during which police overturned furniture and ransacked offices. Although they managed to arrest most of the people in Lincoln’s Inn House, one important figure managed to evade them. According to the Thames Valley Times,3 a militant suffragette adopting a disguise managed to slip out of the building, escaping right from under the noses of the raiding police. The newspaper for the Richmond and Twickenham area4 gave more colourful details, reporting that Christabel Pankhurst was the fugitive. According to the paper, she had calmly walked out of Lincoln’s Inn House after letting down her long hair, putting on a short skirt and school hat. After giving police the slip, the schoolgirl-suffragette had made her way to their local area and was now hiding somewhere between Richmond Bridge and Hampton Court, aided by ‘local sympathisers’. Everybody in the area was aware of their most high-profile local suffragette; suspicion would invariably have fallen on the dark princess at the palace.

  In reality, Sophia had nothing to do with Christabel’s escape. Not only were the reports of Christabel’s whereabouts untrue, they had been deliberately seeded in the press to throw police off her trail. Emmeline’s daughter had in fact left the country the day after her escape from Lincoln’s Inn, and was now in Paris, far out of the reach of the law. Notwithstanding the truth, when it eventually emerged, Sophia’s neighbours had even more reason to regard her with suspicion and animosity.

  Some politicians were trying desperately to push another Conciliation Bill through Parliament. Like its predecessor, it too had success at second reading. However, against the backdrop of escalating suffragette violence, MPs who had once been sympathetic to the cause found it impossible to support the bill. The legislation was defeated and the WSPU responded by ratcheting up their campaign further. Window-smashing continued while the suffragettes also turned their attention to the places where Cabinet ministers liked to relax. They carved up golf courses and interrupted operas and plays. In the early hours of 13 July, police arrested two women outside the country residence of Lewis Harcourt, one of the leading anti-suffragists in Parliament. When the women were searched, a constable found cans of flammable oil, matches, firelighters, a hammer, tools to pick a lock, a torch, and ‘a piece of American cloth smeared over with some sticky substance’.5

  Less than a week later, Mary Leigh, a suffragette who had already been arrested nine times for acts of militancy, threw a small axe into a carriage in which the prime minister was travelling during a tour of Ireland. Asquith was unhurt and Mary managed to escape, only to appear later that same evening at the Theatre Royal in Dublin where she set fire to the curtains behind a box and threw a flaming chair into the orchestra. Together with her accomplice, she then attempted to set off small homemade bombs made out of tin cans. When the police came to arrest them, Mary made no attempt to escape. Her arson attempt had succeeded in its aim. It had terrified Herbert Asquith once more, who only a short time before had been watching a play in the same theatre.

  The headlines shocked the public. However it was the suffragettes’ assault on His Majesty’s Royal Mail which turned their anxiety into rage. Common people were now caught up in the crossfire. In October, letters in a pillar box outside Kew Green post office were found to be soaked in a concentrated solution of potassium permanganate; the letters inside were completely ruined.6 Uncorked bottles, which once contained the offending chemical, had been posted in the same box. To ensure everyone knew who was responsible, they were placed in a large envelope marked ‘Votes for Women’.

  The letter-spoiling campaign got even closer to Sophia’s home four weeks later, when pillar boxes in Richmond were attacked with bottles of ink, tar and burning rags.7 During this time, many high-profile members of the suffragette movement condemned the violence and left the WSPU. They abhorred the way the movement’s campaign was now impacting on the life of law-abiding citizens. Sophia was not merely uncritical of the organisation’s methods, she actively supported them. Continuing as a prominent member of her local Kingston branch, she also went out of her way to be seen at the much-maligned Richmond and Kew branches, epicentres of the postal outrages. Moreover, even though her shyness of public-speaking made it difficult, she accepted more invitations to appear on stage with the most hated women in the country.

  Early in February 1913, two of the orchid houses at Kew Gardens were broken into and exotic plants pulled from their pots and trampled into the ground.8 Sophia and her sisters had loved Kew, as had their father before them. If she felt any personal pain at the destruction, Sophia recorded none, unlike the newspapers who gave full vent to their anger. There was something peculiarly outrageous in the eyes of the male-dominated press about the damaging of flowers. It had been argued many times that women were built to love and nurture living things. In the minds of the anti-suffragists, women who destroyed flowers were somehow ‘unnatural’, and capable of any depravity. The Times commented on the ‘wanton character’ of those responsible. To taunt them further, the vandals had left a calling card near the broken and shredded plants, on which was written: ‘orchids can be destroyed, but not a woman’s honour’. 9

  Two days later. Emmeline Pankhurst made a speech in which she deliberately drew audience attention to a large bouquet of orchids left casually on the table in front of her. She also acknowledged that the recent suffragette tactics might be causing the general public much inconvenience: ‘We are not destroying Orchid Houses, breaking windows, cutting telegraph wires, injuring golf greens, in order to win the approval of the people who were attacked. If the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should be pleased.’10

  The suffragettes were becoming more ambitious as the weeks passed by. Returning to Kew Gardens just a couple of weeks later, two suffragettes soaked the rustic Tea Pavilion with paraffin and set it alight. As the building burned to the ground, firemen, who had come too late to save the place, found calling cards strewn nearby. One read: ‘Peace on earth and goodwill to men, when women get the vote.’11

  Arson was fast becoming the favoured weapon in Pankhurst’s guerrilla war. At 6.10 a.m. on the morning of 18 February, Emily Wilding Davison, the same suffragette who had hidden from the census in a cupboard at the House of Commons, together with willing accomplices, fire-bombed a partly built house in Surrey. The house belonged to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George. Although he was far away at the time, all politicians were shaken by the fact that suffragettes were now targeting them individually, and their attacks were becoming potentially life-threatening.

  Personal animosity did not always dictate the target. On 26 April the suffragettes decided they would set fire to an empty commuter train. The 9.15 from Waterloo to Teddington had been shunted into a siding in preparation for the next day’s journeys. Sometime around three in the morning, a local policeman called in a report of seeing flames rising from the carriages. The fire took hold with surprising speed and ferocity. According to staff working for South Western Railways: ‘it seemed as if the whole train was doomed to destruction as a strong wind was blowing, which carried the flames from one compartment to another. In less than a quarter of an hour the entire compartment of the second-class coach burnt out from the floor to the roof.’12

  The plans had been both ambitious and meticulously planned. Suffragettes had entered by a siding, ‘removing a paling from a fence
nearly six-foot high’.13 Squeezing through the small gap, they had made their way in total darkness, across uneven ground to the stationary train. Small footprints were found in the dirt leading from the rails to the road, suggesting two women might have been involved in the attack. When police combed the wreckage at dawn, they found a large number of partially burnt candles, four cans of petrol, three of which had been emptied, and a basket filled with cotton wool. It was doubtful that whoever lit the fires was new to the art of arson. Just as at Kew’s orchid houses, the women left calling cards. Suffragette literature and a number of postcards addressed to ‘dishonourable MPs’ were found scattered around the charred remains of the carriage.14

  Sir Robert Anderson, formerly the head of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, reacted with fury and suggested that a bill should be put forward in Parliament which would declare all window-smashers and fire-starters ‘criminal lunatics’, therefore allowing them to be sent directly to asylums when caught.15 Although his response was extreme, much of the country was beginning to agree with a more hard-line approach. All were on edge, waiting to see where the women might strike next. Conjecture ran wild: the Standard reported that the suffragettes were planning to kidnap members of the Cabinet. The government was taking no chances and special measures were put in place. Detectives were attached to every prominent member of the front bench and they followed them like shadows.

  Pankhurst’s guerillist campaign was causing nationwide chaos, and increasing numbers of Sophia’s suffragette friends found it impossible to justify the climate of fear being created. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the Pankhursts’ most loyal lieutenant, began to openly question the arson campaign. Evelina Haverfield, who had ridden into the crowds during Black Friday brandishing her whip, withdrew from active WSPU service altogether. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson also backed away, warning her daughter to do the same. She withdrew much-needed funding from the organisation, as did Hertha Ayrton, the engineer and ardent defender of Marie Curie who had risked the blows of policemen as she walked beside Sophia two years before. Even the most committed supporters of women’s franchise found they could no longer call themselves WSPU suffragettes.