The second question was answered by Emmeline becoming Registrar of Births and Deaths for the Rusholme District of Manchester and re-establishing, as a serious source of income, Emmersons’, the ‘fancy goods’ business which she had run in London when selling William Morris prints had been no more than a diverting pastime. But economies were still necessary. Adela was sent to a ‘dirty board school’4 where she acquired head lice. Harry, a chronic invalid, was denied the spectacles he obviously needed. Christabel, who had spent the summer of her father’s death in Geneva, returned to England with neither ambition nor energy. She declared herself suitable for a job which began at ten in the morning and ended at four in the afternoon. Her mother set her to work in Emmersons’. The one ray of light in a dark year followed the visit of an art dealer who called on the Pankhursts to value pictures which they were forced to sell. He noticed some of Sylvia’s sketches and suggested that she had enough talent to win a scholarship to Manchester School of Art. He proved to be a good judge and she took up her place the following September.5
Still depressed, Emmeline looked for a diversion from her sorrow and an outlet for her still boundless energy. She found it in the Independent Labour Party. In 1899 she was elected a member of the National Administrative Council and the following year won a place as an ILP nominee on the Manchester School Board. When the Education Act abolished the school board system, she was co-opted on to the Manchester Local Education Authority. In 1901 she attended the ILP’s annual conference, held that year in Leicester. Sylvia and Christabel went with her.
The excitement of the event brought Christabel Pankhurst back to life. At Keir Hardies suggestion (and undoubtedly with his help) she spoke against the organisation of passive resistance to the education reforms which Nonconformists claimed affronted their consciences by subsidising Church of England schools from public funds. But the call to rely on politics and Parliament, rather than direct action, did not mark her permanent re-awakening. That came about as a result of her meeting Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth – two crucial figures in radical north-western politics. Eva Gore-Booth (sister of Constance, the Irish nationalist) came to Manchester to work in the University Settlement which Esther Roper had helped to found. Esther Roper was the daughter of a missionary. Her mother had died of anaemia, which was attributed to far too frequent pregnancies, and Eva had been brought up in the austerity of a Church of England home. She was one of the first women to obtain a degree from Manchester’s Victoria University. Christabel, whose lack of interest in men in general and marriage in particular was a constant source of surprise (and often the occasion for concern) to her parents, no doubt felt at home in the company of two women who were sufficiently liberated to live in an irregular union. They came into Christabel’s life shortly after Esther had become joint secretary of Salford Women’s Trade Council, an organisation devoted to improving women’s wages and conditions of work.
Christabel met her two mentors at the end of a Manchester University ‘extension’ lecture which she attended, with some reluctance, at her mother’s suggestion. It was her nature – as she had demonstrated in Leicester at the ILP Conference – to participate rather than to observe. So, although she could have known very little about politics and poetry, she asked the lecturer a question. Esther Roper, who had chaired the occasion, was deeply impressed – or at least claimed to be. After the lecture was over, she took Christabel back to her house to meet Eva Gore-Booth. Christabel became part of their circle and they suggested that she should attend law lectures in the University. They then persuaded her to apply for membership of Lincoln’s Inn. They knew, or should have known, that women were not allowed to practise either as solicitors or barristers. So her request ‘to eat dinners’ in preparation for joining the Bar was refused. Resentment combined with what almost amounted to infatuation. Christabel Pankhurst became a suffragist of a special stripe. Much of the movement at the turn of the century was essentially middle class. Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth worked amongst the factory girls of Lancashire. As a result, their instinct was for militancy rather than respectability.
In 1902, Christabel, Eva and Esther went on holiday together in Venice. That was the year in which Emmeline began to complain that her daughter was never at home but spent all her time either campaigning for women’s suffrage or in a variety of intellectual pursuits with the two older women who had ‘taken her up’. Emmeline had other causes for concern. Christabel spent hours massaging Eva’s head and neck in an attempt to relieve her neuralgia, although ‘she had never been willing to act as nurse to any other human being’.6 The author of the joint biography of Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper concludes that neither woman had a lesbian relationship with Christabel,7 and the biographer of the Pankhursts urges readers not to judge the friendship of the three women against the standards of modern Britain. In Edwardian England women often lived together in affectionate celibacy.8 But if the triangular partnership was not physical, it was certainly highly emotional. Without the passion it engendered, Christabel would never have shaken off her adolescent torpor. With Eva and Esther as her inspiration she devoted thirteen years, between the ages of twenty and thirty-four, to the suffragist cause. That, she said, was why she never married. One thing is certain. A deeply complex woman was inspired by a profoundly complicated relationship to become a central figure in one of the most emotive as well as the most bizarre episodes in the history of Edwardian England.
The Edwardian suffrage movement moved gradually – and, in the case of some members, reluctantly – from politics to direct action. Emmeline Pankhurst, her faith in politics restored, played a major part in the parliamentary campaign with which the twentieth century began. At the Leicester ILP 1901 Conference she had been content to entertain the delegates on the piano while Christabel made the speech. At the Conference a year later she moved the crucial suffrage resolution: ‘In order to improve the economic and social condition of women, it is necessary to take immediate steps to secure the granting of the suffrage to women on the same terms as it may be granted to men.’
The resolution was carried unanimously. So was a motion calling for complete adult suffrage and the enfranchisement of the millions of men who were still denied the vote because they did not fulfil the property requirement. The second resolution was given priority over the first. Keir Hardie was instructed to prepare an adult enfranchisement bill and introduce it in the House of Commons. ILP members were engaged in the first battle in what was to become a long conflict between the demands for gender and class equality. Philip Snowden – national chairman of the ILP and, twenty years later, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Labour government – explained that to extend the franchise ‘on the same terms’ as applied to men, before complete adult suffrage was achieved, would extend the voting power of the upper and middle classes.* His logic was impeccable but the Pankhursts were infuriated. It was not their way to hide their feelings. The bitterness of their complaints antagonised even close friends. John Bruce Glasier (who had spoken at Richard Pankhursts funeral) became a particular target for their scorn. He had become chairman of the ILP and was, in consequence, held responsible for the party’s reluctance to elevate women’s suffrage above all other issues. Because of his annoyance at their habit of ‘belabouring’ him, he began to question both their public commitment and their personal conduct. ‘Really the pair are not seeking democratic freedom but self-importance.’9 What was worse, ‘Christabel paints her eyebrows grossly and looks selfish, lazy and wilful’.10 His damning conclusion was that ‘they want to be ladies not workers and lack the humility of real heroism’. Glasier grew increasingly impatient with what he regarded as the Pankhursts’ essentially bourgeois view of female suffrage and his criticisms were extended from Christabel to Emmeline. ‘Her idea is that women should be relieved of all work and have rest and intellectual delights. I told her that work was good and that, under socialism, she would likely have to do more than she now does seeing she has other people’s daught
ers acting as her private servants.’11
For a few months more the Pankhursts remained members of the Labour Party, very largely because of their close association with Keir Hardie who was devoted to the whole family. But in the spring of 1903 Christabel resigned. In what must have been an act of calculated bridge-burning she wrote to the Labour Leader, Keir Hardies paper, with the complaint that the party was neglecting women’s interests.12 ‘Never in the history of the world have the interests of those without power to defend themselves been properly defended by others.’ It was the beginning of a strategy which was to characterise the rest of the suffragists’ campaign. The attacks were directed not towards opponents but negligent supporters. There was ‘nothing to choose between an enemy and a friend who does nothing’13 – except, in the slightly cynical view of the Pankhursts, that an indolent friend was more likely to be bullied into providing active assistance.
During the summer of 1903, Sylvia Pankhurst completed the murals that had been commissioned to decorate the Manchester meeting hall which the ILP proposed to dedicate to her father. Emmeline, who visited the hall to watch her daughter at work, was distressed to discover that it was regularly used by a branch of the party that did not admit female members. When Bruce Glasier and Snowden arrived for the opening ceremony, Christabel refused to speak to them. Emmeline withdrew her contribution to the wage fund by which Labour Members of Parliament, including her friend Keir Hardie, were paid and began to talk about forming an independent women’s movement.
Initially Emmeline intended to call her new organisation the Women’s Labour Representation Committee – a reflection, which some loyalists found offensively reminiscent, of the conference that came together to form what became the Labour Party. Her second choice was the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a grandiose title for what was a very small organisation. Its weekly meeting, initially held in the Pankhursts’ house, rarely attracted two dozen members. One member – Tessa Billington, a school teacher who had approached Emmeline years before in the hope that the Manchester School Board would absolve her from the obligation to give religious instruction – was asked to write a constitution. The tedious business of administration did not appeal to the Pankhursts and their followers. They wanted action. An ideal opportunity arose in the early weeks of 1904.
Winston Churchill, Tory Member of Parliament for Oldham, until he had crossed the floor of the House of Commons in protest to the government’s abandonment of free trade, had to find a new seat. In the hope of contesting Manchester North-West as a Liberal, he spoke at a meeting in the Free Trade Hall. Somehow Christabel obtained a ticket which entitled her to sit on the platform. Churchill had spoken for about ninety minutes and was proposing a rhetorical resolution supporting free trade when Christabel rose to her feet and moved that it be amended to include a declaration of support for women’s suffrage. The chairman appealed to her sense of reason and order. Her proposition was, he said, contentious and the object of the meeting was to obtain a unanimous majority against the imposition of import duties. Christabel, to her own surprise, subsided. But she almost immediately regretted her moderation. She never made the mistake of being reasonable again.
Churchill was an ideal, as well as a convenient, target. He was young, controversial and therefore constantly in the news, clearly a rising star of whichever party he favoured at any one time and, perhaps most important of all, in support of women’s suffrage. But he was not sufficiently devoted to the cause to escape the Pankhursts’ classifying him as a friend who was no better than an enemy. By 1905 the Pankhursts were looking for ways of publicising the cause in the country. Parliament would, they were sure, betray them.
The Labour Representation Committee had failed them already. At the 1905 Conference John Husband of the Engineers had moved a resolution which supported votes for women ‘believing it to be a step towards adult suffrage’. But Henry Quelch of the London Trades Council had proposed an amendment which the comrades and friends overwhelmingly accepted. ‘Any women’s franchise bill which seeks merely to abolish sex discrimination would increase the power of the propertied classes … Adult suffrage is the only reform which merits any support from Labour MPs.’ Quelch was motivated by more than the electoral logic of his agreement. Like many trade unionists, he saw female suffrage as an essentially middle-class cause promoted by middle-class women – some of whom numbered among the worst employers in the country.14
Emmeline, perhaps in memory of her husband’s ambition to enter Parliament, sustained hope that the democratic process might provide the answer. And when a private member’s bill (which proposed a limited extension of the suffrage) was ‘talked out’, she actually approached Arthur Balfour with a request for the government to provide time for another bill to complete all its stages. The Prime Minister courteously refused to oblige. But the private member’s bill was not moved in vain. On the day of its brief discussion, members of the Women’s Co-operative Guild met outside the House of Commons. One of them, a grandmother of seventy-three, climbed on to the plinth of Richard the Lionheart’s statue in the forecourt of the House of Lords. When the police intervened, Keir Hardie led the protesters to a nearby side street and addressed them from the pavement edge. The resulting publicity was, to Christabel, more evidence of the importance of making trouble.
Churchill provided constant opportunities for causing disruption. On 13 October 1905, Sir Edward Grey (soon to be Foreign Secretary) addressed a public meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Churchill was the supporting speaker. Christabel Pankhurst, in the audience, was supported by Annie Kenney, a factory worker from Oldham, who had been virtually adopted by the Pankhursts. As soon as Churchill rose to speak, Annie Kenney asked him if, once they came to power, the Liberals would ‘make women’s suffrage a Government measure’.15 Churchill did not answer. Both women began to chant the question, sometimes in turn, sometimes in unison. The Chief Constable of Manchester, unaccountably in the audience, persuaded them to write out their request and he handed the scrap of paper to the platform. When there was still no answer, they began to chant again. The police then led them to an anteroom where Christabel gratuitously struck and spat at a constable. A senior officer urged the two women ‘to behave like ladies’. Christabel spat in his face and hit, for a second time, the unfortunate constable who had been the victim of her first assault. The police were left with little option other than to charge both women with disorderly behaviour and assaulting a police officer. Christabel was fined ten shillings with the option of seven days’ imprisonment, Annie Kenney five shillings with a three day option. To Emmeline’s consternation, the two defendants chose prison. Churchill, asked to comment on Christabel’s sentence, said that he ‘hoped the quiet and seclusion may soothe her fevered brain’.16 It had quite the opposite effect. Annie told Christabel, We got what we wanted.’ Christabel agreed. ‘I wanted to assault a police officer.’17 The militant wing of the still infant movement regarded the whole episode as a triumph. Wiser supporters, Emmeline among them, were not so sure. The suffragist movement could only achieve its objective when it was supported in Parliament by the sort of men its activists alienated.
Churchill’s advice to his agent illustrated the risks that the militant suffragists ran. ‘You should attempt to come to some understanding with them and point out how damaging their action is to their own cause. I am certainly not going to be henpecked into a position on which my mind is not fully prepared, and if I am subject to any further annoyance I shall plainly say that I do not intend to vote for female suffrage in the next parliament.’18 Of course, the alternative view – ‘Twenty years of peaceful propaganda has not produced such an effect’19 – prevailed. Suffragists disrupted a Churchill election meeting in January 1906. As a result, he announced ‘Nothing would induce me to vote for giving votes to women.’20 The campaign continued. Yet, as late as 1910, Churchill was still claiming to be agnostic but open to persuasion – ‘still of the opinion that sex disqualification [from voti
ng] was not a true or logical disqualification … He was, therefore, in favour of the principle of women being enfranchised but declined utterly to pledge himself to any particular bill.’21 At one of his worst gadfly moments, he argued the merits of holding a national referendum on whether or not women should be enfranchised. Only men would have been allowed to vote. The suffragists’ attempt to dislodge him from the fence took the form of a young woman with a horsewhip who assaulted him on Temple Meads station in Bristol.
For Christabel life was full of excitement. Sylvia, on the other hand, was happy neither with the WSPU nor with her chosen career. In 1904 she had won a second scholarship, but within weeks of arriving at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, she became convinced that the Principal discriminated against women in the distribution of internal awards. Outraged, she approached Keir Hardie and asked him to put down a parliamentary question on the management of the Royal Colleges. It was a strange request, but Hardie agreed. The great puritan had a weakness for young ladies.
Sylvia, far from home and lonely, began to visit Keir Hardie in his humble flat. At first it was the relationship of father and daughter. She cooked simple meals while he read aloud. Then they grew more adventurous and went regularly to the theatre together and occasionally even to restaurants. At some time during 1906 the twenty-one-year old student and the forty-seven-year-old married Labour MP became lovers.
The Edwardians Page 24