43 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 202–3.
44 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, p. 5.
45 Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes, p. 119. As usual, Raeburn gives a very good account of the events that followed.
46 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, p. 5.
47 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 210.
48 Constance Lytton to Arthur Balfour, 8 October 1909, in the Arthur Balfour Papers ADD/49793/148.
49 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 205.
50 Henry Brailsford, The Times, 19 October 1909.
51 Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled, p. 141.
52 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 211.
53 Votes for Women, 15 October 1909, Vol. 3, p. 35.
54 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 217.
55 The Times, 11 October 1909.
56 Both letters were published in The Times on 14 October 1909.
57 11 October 1909, Suffragette Fellowship Collection 50.82/1119.
58 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 11 October 1909, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD/433/2/339/24–5 and Constance Lytton to Edith Lytton, October 1909, GD/433/2/339/33–5.
59 Constance Lytton to Betty Balfour, 11 October 1909, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD/433/2/339/24–5.
60 Humane staff, Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, pp. 228–9; slept on a plank, Constance Lytton to Edith Lytton, October 1909, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD/433/2/339/33–5; wrote to Gladstone, Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 227.
61 Constance Lytton, Prisons and Prisoners, p. 230.
62 Constance Lytton and Jane Brailsford, The Times, 15 October 1909.
63 Quoted in Joyce Marlow, Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes, p. 100.
64 Evening Dispatch, 23 October 1909.
65 Joyce Marlow, Votes for Women, The Virago Book of Suffragettes, p. 103.
66 Henry Brailsford, The Times, 19 October 1909 and George Bernard Shaw, The Times, 23 November 1909.
67 Hansard, 27 October 1909, Vol. 12, cc. 1001–3, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1909/oct/27/
suffragist-prisoners-forced-feeding, accessed 1 June 2013.
68 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, 19 October 1909 and Edith Lytton to Adela Smith, 20 October 1909, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 180 and p. 182.
69 Margot Asquith to Frances Balfour, October 1909, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/338/36–8.
70 Olive Schreiner to Constance Lytton, undated but assumed to be at this time, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/338/39.
71 Anonymous to Constance Lytton, 24 October 1909, Balfour Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD433/2/339/42, http://www.scottisharchivesforschools.org/suffragettes/
ladyConstanceLytton.asp, accessed 10 February 2015.
72 Constance Lytton to Teresa Earle, 6 November 1909, in Betty Balfour (ed.), Letters of Constance Lytton, p. 182.
73 Betty Balfour to Arthur Balfour, 20 November 1909; Betty’s speech reported in The Times, 20 November 1909.
74 Constance Lytton to Edward Marsh, 5 December 1909, Knebworth Archive, 41945.
75 Kitty Marion, unpublished autobiography, p. 197, 7/KMA, LSE Library Collections.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BECOMING JANE
‘When great wrong is being done, when injury, harm, misery and death result from that fundamental injustice then no matter even if we can do nothing to effect a change, we should still make our protest.’1
A general election was held in January 1910 and Constance was sent north for the campaign. She began in Edinburgh, then went to Manchester and Liverpool to campaign against the government. In Manchester, Constance came face to face with truly appalling, grinding poverty for the first time. But the women she addressed were enthusiastic about the cause and the meetings were packed. Despite her undoubted empathy, Constance couldn’t help patronising them. ‘How eagerly and intelligently they listened, and what a wonderful light came into their eyes as the hope dawned in their minds!’ Like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, Constance saw suffrage as ‘a woman’s question, not a class question,’ and she believed these women felt the same way.2 She was dismissive of women with property who wanted the vote for themselves but were nervous about sharing the privilege with working women: she believed in votes for all women.
On 3 January, Votes for Women described in graphic detail the treatment of Selina Martin, a prisoner on remand in Liverpool.
She was kept in irons. Next day, her cell was entered, she was seized, thrown down, rolled over with her face upon the floor. In this position, face downwards, her arms were dragged up behind her till she was lifted from the ground … She was ‘frogmarched’ up the steps to the doctor’s room, her head bumping on the stone stairs. In the doctor’s room the operation of forcible feeding was performed – causing intense suffering – and then this tortured girl, in a terrible state of physical and mental distress, was handcuffed again, flung down the steps and pushed and dragged back into her cell.3
Constance discussed the case with Mary Gawthorpe, the WSPU’s Liverpool organiser. ‘These women are quite unknown – nobody knows or cares about them except their own friends. They go to prison again and again to be treated like this, until it kills them,’ Mary wept.4
This was exactly the sort of heartfelt emotional appeal that Constance could never resist. She was not ‘unknown’. Her name and her testimony would automatically carry weight with the public. If she could bear witness to the horrors of force-feeding, perhaps she could win public sympathy to their plight. But how could she do this when the authorities refused to force-feed her?
The answer was obvious. She would have to go to prison in disguise. She could then experience force-feeding for herself, stand up for her suffragette sisters and expose the double standards which seemed to be rife in British prisons.5
Suffragettes often took action in disguise. Dressing up – or, like Constance, dressing down – became more common as the police got wise to their tactics. The suffragettes dressed as messenger boys, waitresses, cleaners and charwomen, which allowed them to slip into a meeting hall unnoticed before heckling an unsuspecting Cabinet minister. But Constance took this to another level.
First, she joined the WSPU again under the name of Jane Warton. ‘Jane’ was a nod to Joan of Arc, patron saint of the suffragettes. ‘Warton’ was a contraction of ‘Warburton,’ the name of a supporter who had written her a sympathetic letter. Then she set out around the shops of Manchester to find ‘Jane’ suitable clothes. She had her hair cut off, bought itchy woollen gloves and a scarf, and wrapped herself in a green tweed coat, topped off with an unfashionable cloth hat. Brooches with portraits of the suffragette leaders, and thick plain glasses which pinched her nose, completed her new look. Constance was always useless when it came to practical matters, but the stress of traipsing round an unfamiliar city on a furtive mission made her even more hopeless than usual. She bought the wrong dye for her hair, wasted hours on a fake eye test to get her glasses, and even had to hide from other suffragettes. Nevertheless, Constance/Jane was pleased with the result. It was not enough to become a different person: she wanted to become ugly and ridiculous too, as vulnerable and powerless as possible. She succeeded. The shop assistants could barely keep straight faces when they were serving her, and she was followed home by a trail of schoolboys jeering at her ugliness.
Her final task was to set her mother’s mind at rest. She sent a breezy letter home, saying, ‘We had the most splendid meeting yet had in Manchester. A large Town Hall simply packed, understanding and wildly enthusiastic,’ adding in an offhand way, ‘fear no time to write for several days to come but you will be on the move and will not miss my letters.’6
Jane arrived in Liverpool on 14 January 1910 a
nd went straight away to study the prison walls and plan her actions. Somewhere beyond the anonymous grey walls, Selina Martin was still in jail. Perhaps even at that very moment she was being forcefed again. It gave Jane a sense of grim determination.
When suffragettes visited other towns to speak or campaign, they were usually hosted by sympathetic families to save valuable funds. Jane was being put up by the Ker family, two daughters and their mother, Alice, a doctor. There was a letter waiting at the Ker house from Ada Flatman, the Liverpool organiser. ‘Just a line to welcome you to Liverpool, thought you would like to know we are holding a demonstration at Walton Gaol tonight at 7.45, if you can join us there, we shall be glad as we want our protest to be heard by the brave women inside.’7 Dr Ker fed her a dish of stewed pears. Jane thought of those pears often in the days ahead. She selected some large stones from their garden in case they would come in handy later.
Back at the gaol, several hundred people were listening to passionate speeches by the local organisers. Most of the crowd were there out of morbid curiosity rather than outraged support, and Jane was afraid they would leave before she could get herself arrested. So she took over the protest, calling on the crowd to follow her to the prison governor’s house, where they could demand the release of the suffragette prisoners. Rather to her surprise, people began to follow her. That would probably be good enough to get her arrested: just to make sure, she half-heartedly threw her stones at the governor’s house. That did it, and she was taken to the police station to await her trial.
Jane had planned to go to prison by herself, unwilling to ask another woman to put herself through the torment ahead, but two women, Elsie Howey and Mrs Nugent, also had themselves arrested so that Jane wouldn’t be alone. Jane noted that the policemen were as kind as they could be. The three women were kept in a cell together and were given sandwiches and a newspaper. Around midnight, Mrs Nugent’s husband arrived, causing a stir among the officers because he was a well-known local magistrate. Perhaps the police were on their best behaviour as a result. At three in the morning, the women were lined up against the wall to report their details. When Jane stood up, her ridiculous appearance now wonky and dishevelled, the other prisoners began to laugh.
They were then taken to another police station. Elsie and Jane held hands in the police van as it thundered around the streets of Liverpool picking up drunks: some young and laughing it off, others yellowed with addiction. The suffragettes spent what little was left of the night together in one cell. The next day, Saturday 15 January, they were taken before the magistrates for sentencing. Mrs Nugent was let off, though Elsie was a repeat offender and got six weeks. Jane was sentenced to a fortnight.
Jane and Elsie were taken to prison and made to wait, lined up against a wall, before they were formally admitted. Elsie announced that the pair would be hunger striking and that they would refuse to obey the prison rules. She apologised if it would give the prison officials any trouble and made clear that their quarrel was with the government, not them.
Asked to undress and put on prison clothes, Jane suddenly realised she was carrying a reel of cotton and a handkerchief marked as belonging to Constance Lytton. Such a giveaway would destroy all her plans in an instant. She somehow managed to throw them in the fire unnoticed: the wardresses were too busy laughing at the way she looked. She was stripped of her own clothes and given a prison gown and boots that were much too small.
Then Jane was taken, alone, to her cell. Here she was neither Constance Lytton nor Jane Warton but simply prisoner 204. She was immensely tired.
The matron came to try to persuade Jane not to go ahead with her threatened hunger strike. This gave Jane the opportunity to rehearse her arguments about how the government had left the suffragettes with no choice. The matron didn’t stay for much of the lecture. The doctor, the governor, the senior medical officer and the chaplain all came to see her over the next few days: none of them were able to change her mind. Meals were brought and refused. Jane washed her mouth out with water but neither drank nor ate. At night she dreamed of melons, peaches and nectarines.
Jane Warton wasn’t bound by the same conventions as Constance Lytton. She could do anything she wanted and proved it by breaking every petty rule she could. She wouldn’t wear her hat. She wore the skirt of her dress around her neck like a cloak, trying to keep warm. She lay on her bed in the day. She wouldn’t do her needlework. For this she was sentenced to three days on bread and water; a meaningless punishment since she was not eating anyway. She scrawled political and religious slogans across the walls, making ink out of soap and dust. One was a quote from Thoreau: ‘Under a Government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man (or woman) is also a prison’, and the other was from the Bible: ‘Only be ye strong and very courageous.’ She tried communicating with her neighbours by tapping out the signal for ‘No Surrender’ on the wall, but was never sure if the answering taps she heard were imaginary.
On the fourth morning, the prison doctor came to inspect her and decided to force-feed her at once, though Jane was actually left alone for the rest of the day in a state of nervous excitement. The doctor did not come back until six in the evening, accompanied by five wardresses. He had one more go at persuading her to eat: she told him that was out of the question. That was her last chance. Now Jane felt an odd thrill: ‘I had looked forward to this moment with so much anxiety lest my identity be discovered beforehand, that I felt positively glad when the time had come.’8
It is no exaggeration to describe force-feeding as torture. The violation of their bodies was understood by the suffragettes, though few used the word, as rape; all the more traumatising because it was state-sanctioned. Unsurprisingly, force-feeding had terrible consequences for the women’s health. Nearly all became severely constipated and most continued to lose weight. Few suffragettes could stop themselves struggling, and this made their minor injuries worse: chipped teeth and bruised limbs were common,9 to say nothing of the mental suffering caused by the anticipation of torture.
Jane knew all this, both from lurid accounts in the press and from suffragette testimony in Votes for Women, and must have imagined all sorts of horrors. Even so, the actual experience was beyond her worst nightmares. To do it justice, it is worth quoting her testimony at length:
Much as I had heard about this thing, it was infinitely more horrible and more painful than I had expected. The doctor put the steel gag in somewhere on my gums and forced open my mouth till it was yawning wide. As he proceeded to force into my mouth and down the throat a large rubber tube, I felt as though I were being killed; absolute suffocation is the feeling. You feel as though it would never stop. You cannot breathe, and yet you choke. It irritates the throat, it irritates the mucous membrane as it goes down, every second seems an hour, and you think they will never finish pushing it down. After a while the sensation is relieved, then the food is poured down, and then again you choke, and your whole body resists and writhes under the treatment; you are held down, and the process goes on, and, finally, when the vomiting becomes excessive the tube is removed.10
Now Jane knew just how bad it was, her hours became ‘a nightmare of agonised dread’.11 The food was a mixture of milk, gruel, eggs, brandy, sugar and beef tea – Jane, of course, was a vegetarian and this added insult to injury. She was violently sick each time and then, when she was sufficiently recovered, cleaned up the mess herself. The alternative was that another female prisoner would have to do it, and Jane could not bear to see another woman suffer the humiliation. She was humiliated enough herself by the wardresses who watched and criticised her: ‘Look at her! Just look at her! The way she’s doing it!’ Jane’s general behaviour made the prison officials angry and afraid. The head wardress scolded her like a child for breaking the gas jet which served for heating, and for ‘all that writing scribbled all over your cell.’ The doctor went one better: ‘I suppose you want to smash me with one of these?’ Jane seized her chance to retaliate and asked him hau
ghtily not to slap her again. He ignored her, and went ahead with the force-feeding in silence. Afterwards, she was uncontrollably sick on him. ‘If you do that again, I shall have to feed you twice,’ he said.12
Jane had decided to make exactly the same decisions as Constance had done in Newcastle. This was part of the test for the authorities. That meant she refused to answer medical questions but wouldn’t resist medical tests. But there were no tests. Her pulse was not taken and her heart was not examined until the third time she was forcefed, when she had ‘a sort of shivering fit’.13 The doctor was alarmed and called in his junior, who gave her a perfunctory examination and pronounced her fine. The senior doctor was unconvinced and begged her to give in. Jane refused. After the feeding, she lay on the bed, utterly broken. She felt she could go on no longer. She tried recalling to mind all the women she had known or been inspired by, but it was no use. She was finished. Then, she had a spiritual hallucination in which the window frame became Christ’s cross. Outside the window, she saw a woman with a baby, framed by the dying evening light. Somehow this image did what nothing else could: it gave her the strength to endure.
She pleaded with the authorities to make the feeding less painful, asking for different food, less food, a smaller tube. All were refused. Most suffragettes were fed by the doctor sitting behind the suffragette: this one chose to sit on her knees. The torment was unbearable. But the mental torment was even harder to bear than the physical suffering. ‘Infinitely worse than the pain was the sense of degradation, the very fight that one made against the outrage was shattering one’s nerves and one’s self-control.’ Jane felt there was no kindness in this gaol. ‘Prisoners are made to feel in the presence of nearly every prison official that they are the scum of the earth,’ she wrote, ‘suspected of deceit, prejudiced and found wanting.’14 She had to close her eyes so as not to see the people who came to torment her: she could not even bring herself to call them ‘people’ and instead described them as ‘beings’, utterly corrupted by an utterly corrupt system.15 One of her great regrets was that she was unable to hide the fear she felt in the face of such inhumane brutality. She hoped that her evident terror gave her tormentors some satisfaction.16
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