by Simon Webb
The police were keenly aware that attempts would probably be made to show that the suffragettes were not crushed by the latest action against their leaders. On the afternoon of 2 May, a policeman patrolling Piccadilly Circus tube station in London’s West End noticed a brown paper bag propped against the wall on one of the platforms. It contained a large bottle, labelled ‘Nitroglycerine’. The station was evacuated and Home Office chemists later confirmed that it did indeed contain the explosive. Nitroglycerine is a notoriously unstable explosive, which can be detonated by something as trifling as a sharp blow. Had the bottle been knocked over or accidentally broken, the consequences on a crowded platform would have been extremely serious.
The police had found plenty of evidence during their raid that the leaders of the WSPU were coordinating the arson and bombings. Some of what they found at Lincoln’s Inn House was damning. In Annie Kenney’s office, for example, a satchel contained eight bottles of benzine, a highly inflammable liquid. At her flat in Mecklenburgh Square, letters were found from Edwy Clayton, suggesting buildings and woodyards which could be burned and giving explicit details as to how this might be done. The National Health Insurance Commission was mentioned in one letter and the suggestion made that someone might visit it during the day, when the building was occupied and then, ‘pour out some inflammable liquid, such as benzoline, methylated spirits or paraffin, apply a light and instantly walk out of the building’. In other words, torch offices which contained many ordinary clerks while they were working in the building. Other letters by Edwy Clayton contained cryptic references to mixing up chemicals which would be useful to the suffragette bombers and arsonists. We shall see later to what this may have referred.
One of the most destructive fires ever started by the suffragettes took hold in Bradford on the night of 2 May. The freight sheds of the Midland Railway were burned, causing over £100,000 of damage. This would run into millions at today’s values. The sheds were 750 feet long and contained freight cars loaded with carpets and dry goods. The fire brigade only brought the blaze under control by flooding the whole place, in the process damaging many of the goods which had survived the fire.
The WSPU appeared to have access to a steady supply of explosives, both gunpowder and the more dangerous nitroglycerine. Staff at the post office in Borough High Street, just south of London Bridge Station, were sorting parcels on Monday, 5 May, when one caught their attention because it was so heavy and rattled curiously when shaken. The parcel was taken to the nearby police station, where officers opened it. To their horror, they found not only a substantial quantity of gunpowder and lead shot, but most alarmingly, a tube of nitroglycerine. While the militants were raising awareness of women’s suffrage by their dangerous antics on the streets, which while attracting attention, also promoted hostility, a move was afoot in parliament to introduce a women’s suffrage bill. There was little chance of this reaching the statute book, but the reaction to the bill in the Commons would provide some measure of how the question was being viewed by both the government and the opposition.
It was a Liberal MP who introduced the private bill for women’s suffrage. Willoughby Dickinson had been promised by Asquith that if his bill won a second reading in the Commons, then the government would allow it as much time as necessary for it to become law. Dickinson’s bill provided for women over 25 who were either householders or married to householders to be given the vote. This would have had the effect of increasing the electorate by six million at one stroke, the biggest jump in the number of people able to vote in this country ever seen. For that reason alone, it was viewed with caution. The British tradition was to increase enfranchisement by small increments.
The House of Commons had in the past given second readings to bills for women’s suffrage by healthy majorities in the years preceding Dickinson’s, although none had progressed further. It was a sign of the times that this bill did not even make it that far. The Prime Minister spoke against the bill and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey supported it. That the Liberals were generally in favour of female suffrage could be seen by the fact that when it came to the vote, 146 voted in favour of the bill, with 74 against. Overall though, the figures in the House were 268 against and 221 for.
The day after the defeat of Dickinson’s bill, on Wednesday, 7 May, a number of newspapers analysed the reasons for its failure. The editorial in The Times was typical of many and cut to the heart of the matter. Among other things, it stated:
The band of women and girls who call themselves militant suffragettes have done their own cause more harm than they know. The embarrassment they have inflicted on their best friends has been growing more evident of late, and no attempt to conceal it was made in the House of Commons. It lay like a dead weight over the whole course of the debate on the bill.
The message from The Times and other newspapers and magazines was clear: the suffragettes had put back the cause of women’s suffrage and were alone responsible for a decline in support for the idea of giving women the vote. The editorial continued, ‘But if they have not altogether lost the faculty of reasoning, they must perceive that the attention that they are attracting is more and more positively and angrily hostile, and that the effect on the legislature, which alone can give them what they demand, is to throw back their cause’.
It is true that The Times was not sympathetic to women’s suffrage, but they had put their finger on the problem here. Previous bills intended to provide for the enfranchisement of women had passed to their second readings with reasonable, even large, majorities. By the summer of 1913, the tide had turned and parliament was reflecting the mood of men and women in the street by rejecting the idea. This change in mood had been brought about almost single-handedly by the violent activities of the WSPU.
Even the pro-suffrage Manchester Guardian acknowledged that the suffragettes were responsible for the erosion of support for the cause of women’s suffrage. On 6 May, their editorial said:
Though reason, good sense, Liberal tradition, and every consideration to be drawn from a broad view of the march of civilisation are behind Mr Dickinson’s bill, there is little prospect of its success in the highly charged state of the political atmosphere. The agitation, therefore, will go on, and we still have to deal with the situation produced by the outrages of the militants. It is the first duty of every government to maintain order.
Both sympathisers and enemies were agreed – the suffragettes’ activities were harming and bringing into disrepute the whole idea of women’s suffrage.
On the same day that Dickinson’s bill failed to gain a second reading, St Catherine’s Anglican Church in Hatcham was burned to the ground. The cost of rebuilding the church was estimated at somewhere in the region of £20,000. The suggestion was sometimes made that the WSPU leadership employed dupes to carry out their attacks, foolish people who did not fully understand the nature of what they had become involved in. A possible example of this occurred on the same day that St Catherine’s Church was burned down.
Police Constable 728A was on the beat in Northumberland Avenue, near London’s Charing Cross Station, when he saw a woman well known to local officers. She was Ada Ward, a middle-aged drunkard who had been arrested many times for being intoxicated in public. It was 2.30am and there were few people about. He watched curiously as she passed the Grand Hotel and stooped, placing something on the steps of the hotel. He went to investigate and found a metal canister with a lit fuse protruding from it. Attached to the side was a card, bearing the inscription, ‘Votes for Women’. The constable extinguished the fuse and then picked up the bomb and placed it on a traffic island in the road. Then he went in pursuit of Ada Ward. When he found her, she denied having been near the Grand Hotel and PC 728A took her back there, only to find that the bomb had been removed by somebody.
When Ward was brought to court the following day on a charge of being a suspected person, both the magistrate and the solicitor acting for the police drew the same conclusion about the vanishing b
omb. Mr Dickinson, the magistrate, said that it seemed to him that somebody must have been watching Ada Ward and that she was hardly the sort of woman one would expect to be involved in political activism of this sort. In the end, Ada Ward was remanded in custody so that the police could make further enquiries. That night, the terrorists turned their attention to another church, possibly the most famous in the entire country.
Having decided that the Anglican Church was an appropriate target for their anger, the WSPU must have thought that there was no reason to fiddle around with little parish churches. Why not strike a blow at the very heart of this establishment proxy? On the morning of 7 May, a verger at St Paul’s Cathedral in London was passing the bishop’s throne, when he heard a loud ticking. He traced the source of the noise to a brown paper parcel which had been hidden beneath a chair in the choir. The verger plunged the parcel into a bucket of water and called the police. When they undid it, they found that the parcel contained a bomb, which was to have been detonated by a clock and two batteries. The police later described the device as, ‘small, but fiendishly powerful’. An interesting circumstance was that the explosive used in this bomb was not gunpowder or dynamite, but the far more dangerous nitroglycerine.
Nitroglycerine is liable to explode when banged or splashed. For that reason, it had since the 1860s been used in the form of dynamite, which consists of nitroglycerine that has been absorbed by a form of porous clay called kieselguhr. It is easy enough to manufacture nitroglycerine in a laboratory, or even at home, but there are two chief difficulties with making nitroglycerine – one is the amount of heat generated by the process and the other is ensuring that the proportions are precisely correct. Failing to take into account either of these factors can result in the substance exploding during manufacture.
During the raid on the WSPU headquarters, a letter was found from the analytical chemist Edwy Clayton, in which he referred specifically to the problem with getting the quantities right for some substance he was preparing for the use of the militant suffragettes. In view of the fact that nitroglycerine was only used in a small number of bombs planted in the month following Clayton’s arrest, it is reasonable to assume that he had previously made some nitroglycerine and passed it on to the bombers.
That same morning that the bomb was found in St Paul’s Cathedral, the cricket pavilion at Bishop’s Park in Fulham was burned to the ground and a fire was started at a woodyard in Lambeth. An unoccupied house in Hendon was also set alight by an incendiary device. Close examination of the bombs recovered, which had failed to explode, showed that they had been well-made, but suffered from minor defects such as broken connections in the firing circuits. Some of these related to the soldering of electrical connections, indicating that those using the soldering irons might not have had much experience. It was the ineptitude of the bombers which was responsible for the failure of their devices to go off, not a reluctance to cause explosions in public places.
On 10 May, the suffragette bombers turned once again to men’s sport. In perhaps the most bizarre bomb attack ever carried out in this country, the changing rooms at the football ground of Cambridge University were damaged by an explosion. As in similar attacks, cans of petrol and other combustible material was placed near the seat of the explosion, but they had not caught fire. Other bombs were also planted that day, including one at the waiting room at Lime Street Station, in Liverpool. Although not large, it had been surrounded with iron nuts and bolts, obviously to increase the chances of causing injury or damage. The timing mechanism here was primitive – an oil-soaked fuse which had been lit before the bomber made herself scarce. Luckily, it had gone out, but the intention had definitely been to cause an explosion in a busy railway station.
It was apparent that arresting the leadership of the WSPU had had the opposite effect to that intended – rather than a reduction in terrorism the violent attacks seemed to be increasing day by day. Nor was this new wave of bombings limited to England. On the same day that the bombs had been left at the station in Liverpool and the Cambridge football ground, a device was found in a lavatory at the Empire Theatre in Dublin.
During the Saturday afternoon performance at the Empire Theatre, a woman obtained the key to the lavatory from one of the attendants. When she entered, she discovered a bomb made up of 24 cartridges of gunpowder. The fuse was burning. Showing great presence of mind, the woman plunged the bomb into a washbasin full of water. Once again, those lighting the fuse of such a device showed a complete disregard for the safety and welfare of the public.
On the same day, Farington Hall, a country house near Dundee, was destroyed. Fires had been started simultaneously in half a dozen places. Back in England, an alarming development was the sending of explosives through the post. Ticking was heard from a parcel at Reading post office. It was addressed to a municipal official in the town. The police were called and found that the parcel was a time bomb, containing both gunpowder and also a quantity of nitroglycerine.
The wave of bombings did nothing to help the cause of the suffragettes, who were fast becoming extremely unpopular with the public. Their reputation was hardly enhanced by the evidence produced at the committal proceedings for those arrested during the police raid on Lincoln’s Inn House. Before the case was sent to the Old Bailey, preliminary hearings were held at Bow Street Magistrates Court, to establish if a prima facie case could be made out against them. They were charged with ‘Conspiring together and with others maliciously to cause damage, injury and spoil in and on property belonging to tradesman and others, contrary to the Malicious Damage Act 1861’.
The hearings which took place in May were conducted before Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, the chief metropolitan magistrate. He made no secret of his feelings about the man – Edwy Clayton – and women in the dock and was soon a figure of hatred for the suffragette movement. When an application for bail was made on behalf of Flora Drummond, on the grounds that her health was bad and that she was suffering from an ‘internal complaint’, Sir Henry remarked sourly, ‘She’s suffering from extensive bad behaviour’.
The newspapers reported details of the WSPU’s financial arrangements which must have made many people ask what was going on. The sums of money mentioned were so enormous that one wonders what the average working person made of it all. To give just two examples, it was mentioned that a cheque from one of the WSPU’s bank accounts had been drawn in favour of Beatrice Saunders, an officer of the organisation, for the sum of £3,706 2/6. There was a good deal of speculation in the press as to what Miss Saunders could have been doing to receive such a huge sum. Working-class women who had paid their shillings to join the WSPU would typically have to have worked for a hundred years to earn this much money!
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that information like this was being produced in court because it was precisely the kind of thing that the newspapers would pick up on. There was no suggestion that any of the figures being bandied about during the hearings at Bow Street were untrue. At any rate, neither the women in the dock nor their lawyers challenged any of it.
Another titbit that found its way into the papers was that Christabel Pankhurst, who had for over a year been living in Paris, was paid £175 over four months in salary and expenses. This would have worked out at over £500 a year, ten times as much as the average person was earning at that time. What Christabel Pankhurst was spending this salary on, we do not know, though it is possible that some of it went towards entertaining foreign royalty.
Even the minor expenditure of the WSPU was lavish. It was the custom to give members badges and medals for various acts, such as going on hunger strike. According to the papers seized by the police during their raid on the headquarters, £90 had been spent with one firm alone on such trinkets. This represents two or three years’ wages for a female textile worker at that time.
If the intention of reading out details of the WSPU’s financial dealings in open court was to blacken them in the eyes of the public, then it probably succeeded
. So steep was the decline in applications for membership after that month that the WSPU soon stopped publishing the figures. The overall impression was of a bunch of very highly-paid people for whom money was no object.
Another bomb attack was carried out against a sporting target on 12 May and even by the odd standards of the suffragettes, it was a very strange place to plant a bomb. At 5.30 am, George Cook, caretaker of the premises of the Oxted Badminton and Lawn Tennis Club, arrived to work and at once became aware of an ominous ticking when he entered the clubhouse. It was coming from a metal canister with a clockwork mechanism attached to the top. He put it in a fire bucket full of water and then called the police. The bomb turned out to contain nitroglycerine. A card was later found in the grounds of the club, upon which was written, ‘Votes for Women’.
Perhaps it was because of the bad publicity that was generated by the committal proceedings, this publicity being encouraged by the magistrate, that some of the suffragettes decided to try and assassinate Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett. On 14 May, a parcel was sent to him at Bow Street. It aroused the suspicions of staff there and they called the police. The package was an ingenious letter bomb – a tin full of gunpowder had a round of ammunition fixed, so that it pointed at the explosive charge. A nail was held in place over this, with the point resting on the percussion cap of the cartridge. A sharp tap would have been enough to detonate the device.
We tend to think of letter bombs as a weapon of modern terrorists, but actually it was the suffragettes who first devised them. Later on, more sophisticated letter bombs were made, using phosphorous. Lloyd George was the intended recipient of one of these lethal packages.