Nineteen hundred and six was the year of Liberal triumph, but the Pankhursts placed no hope in the new government. Their pessimism was confirmed by the Government’s failure even to mention women’s suffrage in the King’s Speech. They reacted first by requesting a meeting with the new Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and then, when it was refused, by holding a protest meeting in Downing Street. Suffragists got inside both the official residence and the official motor car and were, in consequence, arrested. They were released on the specific instruction of Campbell-Bannerman. The women were, he said, ‘seeking notoriety which would be successful if they appeared before a magistrate’.22 He did, however, agree to meet a delegation of what, by then, had become ‘suffragettes’ rather than ‘suffragists’.
The description ‘suffragettes’ – originally used by the Daily Mail as a term of abuse – was taken up by the Daily Mirror because it made the women sound young and irrepressible. The women themselves were delighted that the newspapers at last regarded them as sufficiently important to be called names, and the Prime Minister’s agreement to meet them further confirmed that they had become a force to be reckoned with. To the suffragists’ delight Campbell-Bannerman told the delegation, ‘You have made before the country a conclusive and irresistible case.’ But their joy was diminished by the explanation that he could not promise to translate their irrefutable arguments into legislation. The rallies and the protest meetings grew more menacing. The Daily Mirror, now finally on the suffragettes’ side, wrote that ‘parliament has never done anything without being bullied’23 and the saintly Keir Hardie told a rally of 7,000 supporters in Trafalgar Square, ‘patience, like many other virtues, can be carried to excess’. By the end of the year there were twenty-one suffragettes in prison. Most of them were middle class and had been awarded the status of ‘first-class prisoners’ which spared them the indignity of broad arrow uniforms.
Disturbance was not, however, the only strategy. The movement was attracting members with money. As a result it could afford to improve its organisation. Christabel moved to London, and the flat in which she lived with the Pethick-Lawrences (a perfect caricature of a Fabian marriage) became its headquarters. She became chief organiser (on a salary of two pounds a week) with three paid assistants to help her. ‘Women’s Parliaments’ were held to coincide with great occasions in the House of Commons, in the belief that they would exhibit the power of female reason and logic. Demonstrations continued outside Parliament (and inside when the attention of the police and the custodians could be distracted), but they were aimed in a new direction. Christabel had begun to turn her attention away from the Liberal and Labour Parties towards the Tories. At first her change in allegiance amounted to no more than a refusal to support Liberal by-election candidates. Then she openly asked for the support of Arthur Balfour. Like every other political leader, he was vaguely sympathetic but unable to make any specific promise. His trustworthy lieutenants, Austen Chamberlain and Lord Curzon, adopted a more positive approach. They formed the League Opposing Women’s Suffrage.
The annual Labour conference of 1907 rejected (by a majority of three to one) a motion calling for female suffrage. The vote was in part a reflection of the view that was strongly held by Arthur Henderson, who had succeeded Keir Hardie as leader of the party. The principle of votes for women was undoubtedly right, but some of the proponents were intolerable. Two of the people Henderson had in mind – Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst – resigned their Labour Party membership.
Christabel grew increasingly autocratic, an attitude which Mrs Pethick-Lawrence tried to justify by describing the suffragist movement in familial terms. Christabel ‘could not trust her mental offspring to politically untrained minds’.24 The metaphorical mother did, however, seize the opportunity to increase her hold over the Women’s Social and Political Union. A new committee, nominated by Christabel, took office without an election. Members were asked to sign a declaration promising not to support the candidates of any party which was not in formal agreement with the WSPU’s aims. Christabel’s leadership – its style as well as the method of its assumption – was accepted without question by her mother, but other members were less tolerant than Emmeline. A breakaway organisation, the Women’s Freedom League, was formed.
Christabel was supported and, when necessary, physically protected by a group of devoted followers who called themselves the Young Hot Bloods and gloried in the performance of dangerous duties – activities which, under Christabel’s leadership, became an increasingly important part of the WSPU’s work. Indeed she planned for illegal acts to become so extensive that the leadership of the movement was instructed not to take part in any demonstration which was likely to lead to prosecution, conviction and imprisonment. Only the volunteers should risk incarceration. The high command must remain free to plan more demonstrations of female determination.25
The peaceful work went on side by side with the civil disobedience and violence. The Pethick-Lawrences founded a weekly paper, Votes for Women. By May 1909, eighteen months after the first issue was published, it had a circulation of 22,000. There was a self-denial week, during which John Galsworthy and Laurence Housman sacrificed luxuries and contributed their cost to the WSPU. Then, in February 1908, there was another of the House of Commons votes on a private member’s bill which proposed an extension to the franchise. It ended in the usual frustration – a majority of 273 to 94 in favour on the Second Reading but the knowledge that it would progress no further towards the statute book. The real significance of the debate was the Home Secretary’s thoughtless speech. ‘The predominance of argument alone … is not enough to win the political day. Men have learned this lesson and know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movements and for establishing the force majeure which activates and arms a government for effective work.’ To Christabel Pankhurst, that sounded like an admission that she would only win the day by sustained violence.
When, in April 1908, Asquith became Prime Minister, Winston Churchill was promoted to President of the Board of Trade. Before the First World War, a ministry was regarded as an ‘Office of Profit Under the Crown’ which automatically disqualified the holder from Membership of the House of Commons. Churchill was therefore required to fight a by-election in the Manchester seat which he had won a month earlier. He lost, but was returned to the House of Commons shortly afterwards as Member for Dundee. As a result he escaped the attentions of north-western suffragettes whose militancy was increased by the knowledge that the new Prime Minister was likely to be even less sympathetic to their cause than the old. Emmeline again suggested to Balfour that he might take up her cause, arguing that he could ‘outflank’ the Liberals. Once more he courteously declined. A huge rally and march was planned for Hyde Park to demonstrate the extent of popular support.
The objective was magnificently achieved on Sunday 21 May 1908. Thirty-six packed railway trains brought the provincial marchers to London. Together with their comrades from the capital, they formed up at seven different starting points. Thirty thousand men and women, bearing seven hundred banners, then set off to Hyde Park, passing on their way twenty platforms from which what would now be called ‘celebrities’ wished them well. H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw and Israel Zangwill were all en route to lend their support.26 Estimates of the size of the crowd varied from 300,000 to 500,000. Christabel entranced them. ‘Rising to speak’ she became ‘a different being … Her whole being lit up with fire.’27
Buoyed up by their triumph, the suffragettes again asked to meet the Prime Minister. Once again their request was refused. The WSPU was fast approaching the point at which even John Locke and Thomas Hobbes would have accepted that direct action was justified. They did not possess the political rights necessary to bring about democratic change. Indeed, it was those rights which they were demanding. Parliament constantly supported their claim, but the executive refused to implement the will of the legislature. Usually the Prime Minister refused even to mee
t their leaders. Asquith’s refusal on 30 June so incensed Mary Leigh and Edith New that they took a taxi from the House of Commons to Downing Street and threw stones through the windows of Number 10. ‘It will be bombs next time,’ said Mrs Leigh. A new and more violent phase in the war for women’s right to vote had begun.
The violence did not come from the suffragettes alone. When Emmeline Pankhurst spoke in the Newcastle by-election – on behalf of women’s suffrage, not one of the candidates – her platform was overturned and she only escaped serious injury because of police protection from the violent mob. But the Pankhursts could always exceed the excesses of their enemies. In the autumn of 1908 they issued a pamphlet headed ‘Help the Suffragettes to Rush the House of Commons on October 13’. Six thousand people crowded into Trafalgar Square on the previous Sunday to learn the plan of attack. Emmeline and Christabel were summonsed for behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. They gave themselves up too late in the day to be bailed. Their night in the cells was made slightly more acceptable by a Scottish Liberal called James Murray who sent them an evening meal from the Savoy Hotel.
Christabel – who had completed her LLB studies and been awarded a first-class honours degree – defended herself. When she discovered that Lloyd George (by then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Herbert Gladstone (the Home Secretary) had been in Trafalgar Square on 11 October, she subpoenaed both ministers. Told by the presiding magistrate that she could not cross-examine her own witnesses, she first quoted precedent and then performed in a way which left Max Beerbohm, in the public gallery, marvelling at the ‘contrast between the elation of the girl and the depression of the statesman’.28
CP You were not alone, I think.
LG No I had my little girl with me.
CP How old is she?
LG She is six.
CP Did you think it safe to bring her out?
LG Certainly. She was amused not frightened.
Despite Christabel’s forensic triumph, she and her mother were both convicted. Emmeline was sent to gaol for three months and her daughter ten weeks. The public outcry against the severity of the sentence was increased by the decision that, as they were to be treated as common criminals, they would be subject to the rule which obliged the early weeks in prison to be passed in solitary confinement. The Home Secretary was unsympathetic. With some justification, he told C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, that ‘these ladies’ do all they can to make sure that they are sent to prison and ‘when they get there want to be relieved of its main inconvenience’.29
Naturally the suffragettes exploited their suffering. The 1909 Women’s Exhibition at the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge included (as well as the first soda fountain to be seen in England) two replicas of the cells in which Emmeline and Christabel had served their sentences. Respectable opinion began to speak out in their favour. Lady Lytton, sister of the painter, poet and aesthete, appeared on suffragette platforms with Christabel for reasons which she explained without embarrassment. ‘There is a social layer which will be drawn by my name who would not be drawn by hers.’30 Big London stores began to advertise in Votes for Women. The annual WSPU income rose to £33,000.
Old habits persisted. Throughout 1909, attempts were made to meet the Prime Minister, protest meetings which began with rhetoric ended in violence, women were imprisoned. Marion Wallace Dunlop painted a message on the wall of St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster. She was sentenced to four weeks’ imprisonment, but released in less than four days after she refused to eat prison food. Christabel told C. P. Scott, ‘We feel that the new policy of hunger strikes has given us the means of entirely baffling the government. They cannot imprison us … unless, of course, they prefer that we should die in Holloway prison.’31
On 17 September Asquith spoke at a public meeting at Bingley Hall in Birmingham. Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh climbed on to the roof and bombarded, with tiles and slates, the police who were protecting the Prime Minister. On conviction for assault, they were sentenced to three and two months’ prison respectively. In Winson Green prison, both women refused food. After four days of starvation, Mary Leigh was forcibly fed. Two doctors were assisted in the procedure by eight wardresses. ‘While I was held down, a nasal tube was inserted. It is two yards long with a funnel at the end … Great pain is experienced during the process, both mental and physical … The tube is pushed down twenty inches … About a pint of milk, sometimes eggs and milk, is used … I was very sick on the first occasion after the tube was withdrawn.’32
Adela Pankhurst might have been the second victim of forced feeding. Desperately unhappy because her brother’s illness had been diagnosed as terminal, and driven to even greater despair by the fear that Annie Kenney was beginning to take her place in the affection of her mother and sister, she decided to play an independent part in the campaign and spoke at a WSPU meeting in Aberdeen. She was physically assaulted and her car damaged in sight of a police officer who chose not to intervene. She then heard that Winston Churchill, the family’s old foe, was speaking nearby at Kinnaird. The road outside the meeting hall was closed, but Adela led half a dozen volunteers in a charge against the barricade. A week later she was sentenced to ten days in gaol. The prison doctor classified her physically and mentally frail, allowing the Secretary of State for Scotland to discharge her before the question of forced feeding arose. That became the Scottish pattern of crime and punishment – brought about equally by the judges’ abomination of the way the women were treated in England and the fear that Scottish nurses would not perform an essentially unmedical task. In England, the Lord Chief Justice ruled that forced feeding was necessary to prevent the crime of suicide. In 1909, as thereafter, London and Edinburgh saw life very differently.
In the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, with a constitutional crisis to overcome, unwittingly gave the suffragettes hope. The House of Lords had rejected Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’. As part of the campaign of threat and counterthreat, Asquith had floated the idea of an Act of Parliament which would give the vote to disenfranchised men. Asked if it would be susceptible to an amendment that extended the suffrage to women, he could only reply that it would. His behaviour hardly amounted to a conversion, but it was enough to offend the King. The suffragettes did not occupy much of Edward’s attention. His view on the role of women in society was quite different from theirs. But he did, from time to time, mention them in passing to other business. In March 1907 he had ended a letter congratulating Campbell-Bannerman on ‘putting his foot down regarding the Channel Tunnel’, on a note of regret. ‘I only wish you could have done the same regarding Female Suffrage. The conduct of the so-called Suffragettes has really been outrageous and does their cause (for which I have no sympathy) much harm.’33 A couple of years later Knollys, expressing royal regret that in a moment of impulse the King had made the German Kaiser an Admiral of the Fleet, ended with a terse postscript. ‘The King deplores the attitude taken up by Mr Asquith on the Women’s Suffrage Bill.’34
The suffragettes, who were by then picketing Parliament night and day, did not share the King’s apparent view that Asquith was beginning to support their demands. One of Herbert Gladstone’s last acts before leaving the Home Office was the transmission of a warning sent, through him, from the police to the Prime Minister. Women were practising pistol shooting in Tottenham Court Road.35 Gladstone judged that ‘there is now definite ground for fearing the possibility of the PM being fired at by one of the pickets at the entrance to the House’. The police were confident that they could restrain the would-be assassin before she ‘damaged’ the Prime Minister. But should the pickets be forcibly removed? Asquith said no.
The Pankhursts hoped that the ‘Peers versus People’ election of 1910 would result in a Liberal defeat. Their wish was very nearly granted. Asquith’s majority was so reduced that he was forced to rely on Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs to secure the passage both of his budget and the House of Lords reform. As pa
rt of a whole series of penal reforms Churchill, the new Home Secretary, instructed that suffragettes be treated as ‘political prisoners’ – an innovation in English law. But the concessions did not bring peace. On 18 November 1910, ‘Black Friday’, heavy-handed police reaction to a Trafalgar Square demonstration provoked six hours of street fighting. There were two hundred arrests. On the orders of Churchill, most of the women in custody were released without charge. That, the suffragettes said, was clear evidence that the police dare not risk their brutality being exposed in court. When, four days later, a group of women invaded Downing Street, Churchill identified the ring leader and told the police, ‘Take that woman away.’ He was accused of personally directing the anti-suffragette brutality.36
Sympathy for the ‘brutally treated’ women took many forms. Wealthy supporters gave recently released suffragettes holidays in country houses so they could recover from the rigours of prison life. The composer Ethel Smyth threw her considerable weight behind the peaceful campaign which, after the eruption of Black Friday, seemed to offer hope of more dialogue and less damage. Smyth, large, aggressive and dressed in manly tweeds, was every reactionary’s idea of a radical lesbian. Gay relationships were common among the suffragettes. Annie Kenney, after a number of brief associations, settled down first with Mary Bathurst (the daughter of a West Country philanthropist) and then with Grace Roe who had once hoped (almost certainly without success) to partner Christabel Pankhurst. Ethel Smyth had been more overt in her affections. Shortly after meeting Emmeline Pankhurst she had written, I knew that before long I should be her slave.’37 The Pankhursts themselves, concerned only with serious business, examined proposals for a Conciliation Bill with a combination of hope and alarm.
The bill was the idea of a group of MPs (25 Liberal, 17 Conservative, 6 Labour and 6 Irish Nationalist) who hoped that politicians and protestors would compromise around giving the vote to women whose property had a rateable value of ten pounds or who were independent householders. Suffragettes were always split over offers of compromise. Some saw them as victories, others as defeats. It was then that Lloyd George and Churchill began to develop the same doubts as those which had prejudiced the Independent Labour Party and the TUC against an extension of the suffrage that simply gave women the same rights as men. A limited extension would increase the size of the Tory vote. Lloyd George made private enquiries about the scope of the bill being extended and was told that the ‘long title’ (which set out its general aims) made extension impossible. On 7 July 1910, the Second Reading of the bill was carried by 298 votes to 189, and it was then ‘sent to a Committee of the whole House’. The decision to allow every Member to examine every clause meant that there was no hope of the full legislative process being completed by the end of the parliamentary session. The Conciliation Bill would be lost.
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