by Simon Webb
When the letter bomb failed to kill Sir Henry, more direct methods were adopted. A few days after being sent the lethal package, Sir Henry was walking along the cliffs near Margate, in Kent. Two women walked towards him. He did not realise his danger until one of the women shoved him hard, trying to knock him off balance, and the second then grabbed hold of him and attempted to push him off the top of the cliff. He was very shaken by this experience, after which he was assigned detectives who accompanied him everywhere.
The bomb attacks and arson continued throughout the rest of the month. It would be tedious simply to list these many and various acts of terrorism. Most were relatively minor incidents of fire-raising: the burning of haystacks, wood yards and other locations where a mass of combustible material would make a good blaze. These days, terrorism is far more often associated with guns and explosives than arson, but there is a long tradition in this country of fire being used as a tool of political violence. For angry and discontented people without access to explosives, arson is a very public way of drawing attention to their grievances. During the Swing Riots in 1830, for instance, haystacks were routinely torched in England as a political protest.
The IRA was at one time very fond of using arson as a terrorist weapon. They often tended too, just like the suffragettes, to focus their attention upon commercial premises. In fact, the IRA were so keen on starting fires, particularly in shops, that it seems very likely that they picked up the idea from the suffragettes. We can see this connection very clearly in the first IRA campaign on mainland Britain, which began in 1920, just six years after the suffragette arson campaign came to an end. This terrorist campaign, just like that of the suffragettes a decade earlier, has also largely disappeared from memory.
A small bomb was planted by suffragettes outside the National Gallery in London on 15 May. It failed to go off. The next day, there were other bombs in locations as far apart as a library in south London, a church in Hastings and an hotel in Brentwood. One bomb was aimed again at the railways. Beneath the footbridge at Westbourne Park Station, a package was found which had been placed there with the intention of setting fire to the bridge. It was made of live cartridges, explosives and oil-soaked cotton wool. The fuse had been lit, but later gone out.
As the committal proceedings of the prominent suffragettes facing conspiracy charges continued at Bow Street Magistrates Court, more information was emerging to shed light on the practical consequences of the WSPU’s campaign of violence. As already asserted, it is often suggested today that the suffragette militants took great care to harm only property. The burning and destruction of letters is sometimes cited as an example of this – nobody could be hurt by fires taking place in iron pillar boxes. At worst, it would surely cause no more than a little inconvenience to the intended recipients of the letters that were destroyed.
A postman was summoned to give evidence at Bow Street about the injuries he had received from a fire started in a pillar box. It emerged that he and a number of other workers had been burned by fires started by suffragettes in letter boxes. It is intriguing to see how this aspect of the suffragette campaign is now presented by modern historians in a completely different light than it was viewed at the time.
Not all the arson attacks on houses in 1913 were against castles and grand mansions. Some suffragettes were burning down the homes of ordinary people who had nothing at all to do with their cause. On the night of 16 May, Miriam Pratt, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Norwich, went to Cambridge with two fellow suffragettes and set fire to two houses. There was nothing remarkable about these houses; they were empty because they were being decorated. After breaking into one of the properties in Storey’s Way and setting fire to it, they crossed the road and splashed paraffin about in another house and torched that one as well. Miss Pratt had the misfortune to be living with her uncle, who was a police sergeant. When he found out what they had done, he was so horrified that he turned them over to the police in Cambridge. It is evident, therefore, that the activities of the militant suffragettes were not restricted to those whom they saw as their enemies. Anybody at all was fair game, even ordinary householders whose homes were being decorated.
On the day after the houses in Cambridge were burned, came a bomb attack in Scotland. On 17 May, a bomb containing 12 lbs of gunpowder was placed in St Mary’s Church at Dalkeith Park. The fuse was lit, but went out. Four days later, the bombers were more successful when they attacked the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. It is impossible to be sure of the reasons for this – perhaps the fact that the complex of buildings was perched high above the city of Edinburgh on Blackford Hill, and so the sound of the explosion would reverberate across the whole city, that made the observatory seem like a suitable target.
More likely is the fact that there was a precedent for such an action – London’s Royal Observatory had suffered a similar attack less than 20 years earlier when 26-year-old Frenchman Martial Bourdin decided that he wished to blow up the observatory at Greenwich. He attempted to do so on 6 February, 1894, but his plans were unfortunately thwarted in the most gruesome way imaginable. His chosen explosive was nitroglycerine and, as he made his way up Greenwich Hill to the Royal Observatory, he must have stumbled and dropped his bomb. Nitroglycerine reacts badly to being shaken or banged and the can full of the oily liquid went off at once. Splashes of blood and fragments of Bourdin’s body, including a two-inch-long piece of bone, were found more than 60 yards from the site of the explosion. Over 50 pieces of the unlucky terrorist were later collected from a wide area of Greenwich Park.
Professor Ralph Allen Sampson had been appointed Astronomer Royal for Scotland in 1910. He and his wife lived ‘over the shop’ in a house next to the building which held the telescopes. At 1.00am on 21 May, Professor Sampson was woken up by a loud noise, which he took to be a door being slammed somewhere. In the morning, he found that a bomb had gone off inside the main building of the observatory. The terrorists had got in by breaking a pane of glass in an external door and making their way down a spiral staircase to the chronograph room.
None of the telescopes or other scientific instruments were harmed by the bomb, which caused only a certain amount of structural damage, blowing out windows, bringing down a ceiling and chipping brickwork. The clock that drove the 24-inch reflecting telescope was housed in the room where the blast occurred, but had only been covered in plaster. It was still working.
That the suffragettes had been responsible for the bomb outrage was beyond doubt. A woman’s handbag was left behind and also some biscuits. Two pieces of paper were also deliberately placed at the scene. One of these said, ‘How beggarly appears argument, before defiant deed! Votes for women’. On the other, was written, ‘From the beginning of the world every stage of human progress has been from scaffold to scaffold and from stake to stake’.
Incidents like the attack on the observatory in Edinburgh were causing resentment to build up against the suffragettes for the escalating terrorism. Unfortunately, this was manifested in hostility towards even the non-militant suffragists of the NUWSS. It seemed that any mention of female suffrage was now associated with arson and explosions. Even those who had been in favour of women being granted the parliamentary vote were now changing their minds. The entire movement was being tainted by the mad actions of a handful of fanatics. It was becoming hazardous now for any meetings to be held by either suffragettes or suffragists. This was neatly illustrated by the events in the coastal town of Hastings on 20 May 1913.
One of the largest and most important houses in Hastings had been razed to the ground by the suffragettes the previous month. This was Levitsleigh, formerly the home of the town’s MP. Many people in Hastings were angry about this act of wanton destruction and it became risky for the local branch of the WSPU to meet in public. The information appearing in the newspapers about the apparently vast amounts of money at the disposal of the suffragettes did nothing to help matters and when on 20 May, the WSPU announced that they would be holding
an open air meeting at Wellington Square, there were rumours that a counter demonstration was planned by residents of Hastings, with the intention of showing the suffragettes exactly what people thought about their behaviour. Following the advice of the police, who were naturally keen to avoid a riot, the WSPU cancelled their meeting.
By ill coincidence, there was a meeting that night of the local branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, an organisation that rejected militant action in favour of constitutional methods. This was too fine a point for the angry crowds who had gathered to oppose the suffragettes in Wellington Square and so they transferred their attentions to the Suffrage Club in Havelock Street, throwing eggs and stones at the building. When the women tried to leave, they were manhandled and abused. Some took refuge in a nearby hotel, with the result that the crowd smashed the windows. Some witnesses said that there were as many as 3,000 people outside Green’s Hotel, baying for the blood of the suffragists.
Similar scenes were enacted a few days later in London, when Sylvia Pankhurst tried to hold a meeting in Victoria Park in the East End of London. The rally was to have been a large one, with 15 wagons for the members of the WSPU and Labour Party to speak from. Many East Enders though had different ideas and the suffragettes were mobbed. The police had to step in and escort the suffragettes to safety. The crowd were angry, not at the idea of equal suffrage but because of the bombs which were going off almost every day. Partly due perhaps to the press coverage of the committal proceedings of the WSPU leadership, the feeling was growing among working-class men and women that these women did not represent people like them at all.
Sylvia Pankhurst’s abortive rally in the East End took place on Sunday, 25 May. Two days later came a suffragette attack that was even more irresponsible than usual and which could have had terrible consequences. As the Bristol Express passed through Reading Station on 27 May, a bomb was thrown from a window of the train onto the platform. At the same time, suffragette literature was also thrown from the train. The bomb exploded without causing too much damage, but it was a foolhardy and dangerous action.
Throughout June, the trial took place at the Old Bailey of those arrested during the raid on Lincoln’s Inn House. The six women and one man, Edwy Clayton the chemist, were charged with ‘conspiring together and with others to inflict damage on property and inciting other members of the WSPU to damage property’. The bombings continued during the trial.
On 11 June, a bomb exploded at the new wing of the post office in Newcastle-on-Tyne. On 15 June, a bomb was found in the waiting room at Eden Park Station, near Beckenham. The clockwork mechanism which had been meant to trigger the device had stopped. Two days later, there was another explosion in central London. At 4.00pm on Tuesday, 17 June, there was an explosion near Blackfriars Bridge. The bomb had been thrown from the bridge and exploded as it hit the surface of the Thames. A plume of water shot up and a cloud of blue smoke rose into the air. The railway bridge was shaken by the explosion and railway workers rushed to the scene to check that no damage had been done to the bridge. Whoever had thrown the bomb had disappeared.
Although it had not been long in force, the notorious ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ was already making a nonsense of the law. At the conclusion of the suffragette conspiracy trial, there were a number of prison sentences, including one of a year and nine months for Edwy Clayton. Clayton, it will be remembered, had been suggesting targets for the terrorists and also making explosives for them. Given the evidence, he might very well have thought that a year and nine months imprisonment was a light-enough punishment. In fact, he was freed after just 15 days, having gone on hunger strike. As soon as he was out of prison, he left the country. It was becoming very apparent that there was little point in sending suffragettes and their supporters to prison, because they would be back on the streets in a matter of days.
On the same day as the bomb at Blackfriars Bridge in London, came an attack which could have been catastrophic. On the morning of Wednesday, 18 June, John Sales, who lived near Birmingham, was walking along the towpath of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal, which runs south of Birmingham. Sales, who lived at Warstock, now a suburb of Birmingham, was horrified to find that the canal bank had almost been breached by what looked like the crater of a very large explosion. At this point, near Alcester Road, the canal runs along some high ground, above fields and farmhouses which lie in a valley below.
On investigating, it was found that a hole five feet wide had been blown in the embankment and that the lip of this crater was only three inches from the edge of the water. A spade lay nearby and also the charred remains of a long fuse. A piece of cardboard was propped up, not far away, on which were the words, ‘Votes for women. Mind your canals’. There were no locks for 11 miles on that stretch of the canal and so if the wall had been breached at this high point, then 11 miles of water would have been emptied into the farmland below, with inevitable loss of life. It was a very narrow escape indeed for those living in the cottages beneath the embankment.
There were two more incidents the following weekend, one aimed at a church and the other at a university. Just after dawn on the morning of Saturday, 21 June, fishermen at sea off the coast of St Andrews, on Scotland’s east coast, saw smoke rising from the university in the town. They returned to shore and notified the coastguard, who then called the fire brigade. Somebody had broken into the Gatty Marine Laboratory at St Andrews University and spread inflammable liquid about the place. The east wing of the laboratory, which housed many scientific drawings and other materials, was gutted by the fire. This wanton destruction caused a lot of anger in the town against the vandals responsible.
At the other end of the country, in Southend, Essex, an attempt had been made to burn down a local parish church. When the verger entered the church early on Saturday morning, he found that the door to the organ was open, which was unusual. Inside was a collection of live cartridges, oily rags, paper and other inflammable material. A wax taper had been lit and placed so that it would act as a fuse. Fortunately, a draught seemed to have blown it out and saved the church from destruction.
The fire at St Andrews University was one of many such attacks in Scotland, which for a time bore the brunt of the suffragette ‘arson squads’. Although many of the fires started caused only minor damage, others threatened life and were hugely costly to either the owners of the properties or the companies which insured them. Two examples from the end of June illustrate this point. Both took place in the early hours of 30 June.
What The Times described as ‘the most disastrous fire that has occurred in Stirlingshire for many years’ broke out at Ballikinrain Castle, a huge country house which contained over a hundred rooms. The fire was started at about 3.00am and although the fire brigade were called, there was no ready supply of water for them to work with. The entire building was completely destroyed. The fire had been deliberately started and two women cyclists had been seen in the vicinity a few hours earlier, with packages.
At the same time that Ballikinrain Castle was being burned down, the railway station at Leuchars Junction, near St Andrews was also going up in flames. Tins of inflammable material were found near the fire, along with suffragette literature. The combined cost of these two fires alone came, in modern terms, to millions of pounds.
The bomb attacks and arson continued unabated through July 1913. On the night of Saturday, 5 July 1913, a bomb exploded in a passageway beneath Liverpool Cotton Exchange. The Cotton Exchange, an office building erected in 1906, was the centre for the city’s cotton trade and was linked to the world by a state-of-the-art system of telegraph and telephone lines. There were no clues, but the bombing was generally attributed to the suffragettes.
The following Wednesday, the wife of a local doctor approached the police and admitted that she was the one who had detonated the bomb. Edith Rigby was well-known to the police, having been arrested a number of times for her actions at protests in Liverpool. When she appeared in court the following day,
Mrs Rigby gave as her justification for the bombing, the passing of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. We catch a glimpse in her speech to the magistrate of the adoration that Emmeline Pankhurst awoke in her followers. She said in court, ‘Under this Act, one of the greatest women in the land is going to be done to death… I do not think the government realises that it is literally going to kill that woman’. The magistrate’s response was to remand her until the following Monday. Before she was taken from the dock, Edith Rigby suddenly announced that she wished to claim responsibility for another attack, the destruction by fire of a house belonging to Lord Leverhulme, which had taken place on the Monday after the bomb at the Cotton Exchange. The cost of rebuilding the house had been estimated at some £20,000.
On 8 July, a fire was started at Southport Pier. Fortunately, two fishermen saw the flames and bravely tackled the fire themselves. Empty bottles of paraffin were found and a woman had been seen leaving the scene of the fire shortly before it was discovered.
As already noted, the same names crop up again and again when examining the terrorist actions of the WSPU. Many of these familiar names belong to women who were paid employees of the WSPU, such as those responsible for trying to burn down the theatre in Dublin 1912. Not only were they not thrown out of the WSPU for their actions, but they were still being paid a year later when the police raised the headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn House. Indeed, two of them, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans, were actually present during the raid. The third of the women who so very narrowly avoided committing mass murder on that occasion, Jennie Baines, was also retained by the WSPU as a paid organiser. She had been sent to prison for seven months for her part in the attack on the Theatre Royal, although of course she had not served anything like that, due to going on hunger strike. Her experiences in Dublin seem to have taught her nothing, because in July 1913, she was on trial again, in connection with explosives and firearms.