The Suffragette

  Of course the W. S. P. U. was, as usual, much blamed for what had taken place. The heckling of Mr. Lloyd George was declared to be both foolish and wrong; nevertheless many newspapers protested strongly against the behaviour of the stewards of the meeting. The Liberal Manchester Guardian said that the ejections were effected “with a promptness that gave the chairman no opportunity for intervening,” and in many instances “with a brutality that was almost nauseating.” The Special Correspondent of the Standard spoke of the “grossly brutal conduct” of the stewards, declaring that “some of the worst acts of unnecessary violence took place within ten yards of the chairman’s table, and therefore right under the eyes of Lady M’Laren and Mr. Lloyd George. The men responsible for the acts were stewards wearing the official yellow rosette. That I am prepared to swear to.” At the same time the Manchester Guardian, in its leading article, though it condemned our action, admitted that Mr. Lloyd George’s repetition of Mr. Asquith’s promise was entirely unsatisfactory from the Votes for Women point of view. Many others took the same line, and the Conservative Globe said, “We see very genuine grounds for the impatience displayed by the Suffragettes at the Albert Hall. Mr. Lloyd George must have known that the declaration he had to make would have infuriated any body of men.” But the matter did not end with newspaper discussions. We had realised from the first time that we should be made to suffer in many ways. Again and again attempts had been made to break up meetings addressed both by Suffragettes and Suffragists, but the women were hardly ever afforded the protection of the police and, as their meetings were almost entirely officered by women stewards they were obliged to rely upon their own powers of persuasion and magnetic force of will to control their audiences. This the Suffragettes have always been prepared to do, but it was not always done without difficulty.

  Already, at a meeting in Birmingham, Christabel had been assaulted with the bodies of dead mice and, on live mice being let loose at one of our meetings, a well-known Glasgow daily paper had suggested that rats or even ferrets might suitably be employed.

  After Mr. Lloyd George’s Albert Hall meeting, such outbreaks of violence against us became for a time exceedingly frequent. At a meeting which I addressed just then for a Women’s Suffrage society in Ipswich there was abundant evidence to prove that well-known Liberals in the town had bought shilling tickets of admission for a number of men whom they paid a further shilling each to create a disturbance and, as soon as I rose to speak, I was assailed by shouts and yells, the singing of a song especially composed and printed with this object, which had been distributed broadcast throughout the town, the rattle of tin cans and the ringing of bells. During my speech several free fights took place in the hall. Walking sticks and other missiles were sent flying through the air and an offensive smell of sulphuretted hydrogen was let out. The women who had promoted the meeting, whilst anxious that I should stand my ground, were in despair at the damage which they saw was being done to the hall, but, when they sent for the police to quell the disturbance the Chief Constable of the town declared that he had no power to act. His statement sounded strangely to Suffragettes who had seen the police always massed around the meetings of Cabinet Ministers, and had also frequently seen them brought in to eject women interrupters.

  The Chelmsford Bye-Election

  A few days after the Albert Hall meeting Helen Ogston herself spoke at Maidenhead, where a gang of men, some of them made up as guys and dressed in women’s clothes, waved whips at her and finally drove the speakers from the platform. The only thing that the police could suggest was that the women should fly.

  At this time a by-election was in progress at Chelmsford and, in organising our campaign there, we had at first to contend with great disorder. On the opening night of the election the members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies were entirely swept from their platform in the Market Square, whilst a mob of hooligans surrounded the lorry from which we were speaking and dragged it down a hill into the darkness away from the street lamps. Though, aided by steadier sections of the audience, we still succeeded in maintaining a semblance of order, as soon as we descended from the cart the rowdies crushed and jostled us so unmercifully that had it not been for some men who fought for us and who were seriously bruised in the struggle, we should have been trampled under foot. We were at last dragged for safety into the entrance hall of the Municipal buildings where a banquet was being held. The head waiter, who stood at the door, was exceedingly anxious to get rid both of us and the noisy crowd that remained clamouring outside, and we were therefore taken by an underground passage to the Police Court, and kept waiting there for an hour.

  This sort of thing did not continue long in Chelmsford, for, as has invariably been the case, as soon as the Suffragettes became known to the people, the hostility which was at first manifested towards them entirely disappeared. Mrs. Drummond was the heroine of this election, for the W. S. P. U. campaign was entirely organised by her. In the illustration she is shown distributing leaflets to the farmers in the Chelmsford Market Place at the close of her speech to them. The result of the poll was a fall of nearly twenty per cent, in the Liberal vote, and a piling-up of one hostile majority against them from 454 to 2,565, which was generally acknowledged in the constituency to be largely due to the Suffragettes.

  The violence of the rowdies met with little rebuke from political leader writers and under the heading, “Sparrows for Suffragettes,” the Westminster Gazette stated, “Essex has just provided two amusing Suffragist Incidents,” and described in the same spirit the letting loose of a flight of sparrows inside a hall where the women were speaking and the breaking up of a Suffragist meeting by boys who had rushed the speakers, and cast carbide on the wet roads.

  Consider the action of a body of women who, in order to obtain a share in the constitution, deliberately decide to attend the meetings addressed by the members of a Government that has the power to grant them what they desire but withholds it. Consider also that these women are deprived by their sex of the principal constitutional means of pressing their claim and that their action is taken at great personal risk. Then contrast the action of these women with that of a crowd of men who, absolutely careless of injuring either persons or property, and merely because they imagine that their victims are unpopular or opposed to those whom they believe to be their own political friends, deliberately set out with the intention of breaking up the meetings of women who are withholding no man’s rights from him and who have no power to give rights to anyone, but who are merely struggling to obtain the franchise which their assailants themselves possess. Surely no one with an unprejudiced mind could consider that there is a parallel between the case of those particular women and those particular men. Party politicians had before them frequent examples of the two cases and they decided that there was no parallel. They decided that the action of the men was excusable, but that the action of the women must be condemned in the most emphatic terms and must be sternly repressed at any cost.

  The human letters dispatched by Miss Jessie Kenney to Mr. Asquith at No. 10 Downing Street, Jan. 23, 1909

  A measure called the Public Meeting Bill providing that any person who acted in a disorderly manner in order to prevent the transaction of the business for which a meeting had been called together should be rendered liable to a fine not exceeding £5 or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding one month, was therefore laid before Parliament by Lord Robert Cecil. As the slightest interjection or the most pertinent question by a Suffragette had now become the signal for a scene of disturbance, it was clearly apparent that they would not be able to raise their voices at the meetings of Cabinet Ministers without rendering themselves liable to the suggested penalties. Though the Bill was introduced but a few days before the end of the Session, the Government at once provided for it the facilities which had been denied to that equally short measure to enfranchise the women of the country, and it was quickly rushed through the two Houses and became law before the end of the year.


  Party feeling on the one hand, and public indifference on the other, veiled for the time being the serious and revolutionary nature of this measure and allowed it to be placed on the statute book with scarcely a word of discussion or protest. Nevertheless it struck at one of our most ancient and fundamental national customs. Describing the ancient governmental assemblies of the Saxon peoples Tacitus explains that though, as a rule, only the more distinguished members of the community put forward new proposals, all had a right to be present and the bystanders at once expressed their opinion in regard to all suggestions. He says:

  The eldest opens the proceedings, then each man speaks according as distinguished by age, family, renown in war or eloquence. No one commands, only the personal dignity residing in him exercises its influence. No distinction of rank exists; the Assembly determines and its determination is law. Proposals, when deemed acceptable, are hailed with loud acclaim and clash of arms. A loud shout of dissent rejects what appears to be unacceptable.

  Our present system of Government is, after all, the direct descendant of these ancient assemblies. Largely owing to the distinctions of class which have sprung up and have grown more and more complex and at the same time more deeply marked because of the constant struggling of those who already possess advantages of property and of education to add to these advantages a greater political power than their fellows by restricting the rights of those who are poorer and weaker than themselves many changes have been wrought. It has come about that our modern Parliament is elected by only a section of the people; and that almost the whole of the business transacted by Parliament is carried on by a small Cabinet of persons nominated by one man, himself pitch-forked into power by a possibly transient wave of popularity. Moreover, our existing system of party Government renders this small Cabinet almost all-powerful during its term of office and the strong party prejudice, obtaining both amongst Private Members of Parliament and the Press of the country, secures that the Cabinet shall remain almost exempt from criticism, except by the followers of the opposing party. This criticism loses in influence and value because, for party purposes, it is directed almost without exception against every act of the Cabinet, whether the act be in itself worthy or unworthy. The section of the people who are entitled to vote and who elect the majority that makes the power of the Cabinet possible may, it is true, dismiss them at the next general election if they disapprove of the way in which their stewardship has been fulfilled ; but they cannot insist upon an election when they will and they have no power to decide that their representatives have done well in one respect and badly in another. It is only possible eithef entirely to accept what the representatives have done or to reject them altogether.

  Procession to welcome Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel and Mrs. Leigh on their release from prison, December 19th, 1908

  There exists also the right of every section of the people to carry resolutions embodying their opinion in regard to matters of Government, which may either be published broadcast or presented in the form of petitions for redress of grievances to those in power. But what usually happens to resolutions and petitions put forward by those who have no political power is aptly expressed in the words of Mr. Serjeant Hullock, the Counsel who spoke for the Coercionist Government in one of the cases arising out of the massacre of Peterloo, which took place in 1819, prior to the passing of the first reform Act. “If deliberation had been their object,” he said, “could they not have settled their petition in a private room and then have sent it to the House of Commons, where it would have been laid on the table and never heard of again?” Nevertheless the old right of the by-standers, the right of the whole people to express their opinion in regard to suggestions put forward by powerful folk and to receive them either with shouts of approval or equally loud cries of dissent still exists and it exists — if it has not been altogether destroyed by the Public Meeting Bill — not merely for men, but for women. This right is constantly exercised when a member of the Government, and, to a lesser extent, a private Member of Parliament appears before a public meeting of the people to make proposals for fresh legislation and to give an account of his stewardship in the past. When he comes forward thus, the people, women as well as men, have the right to express assent or dissent with what he has done or with what he has left undone, with what he proposes and what he has omitted to propose. They have the right to question him and to demand an answer, to heckle him during his speech if they will, and if they will to cry out and refuse to let him speak until he has dealt with the thing which they have at heart, and if they believe that he has not dealt justly with that thing they have the right to decide that he shall not be heard. How else can he know the mind of the country? How else can those who are without the Parliamentary franchise express their will? There is no other way and this right is one of those upon which the people of these Islands have always insisted. Those who have said that if this right be exercised the right of free speech will be endangered do not realise what the right of free speech is. The right of free speech is the right of everyone to speak publicly and without penalty or restraint, of what seems important, and this old right to question and to express assent and dissent is included in it. It is the only refuge of those who have no political power. The right of members of the Government to speak freely can never be endangered, for they have Parliament to speak from, the police and military at their beck and call to protect them and enforce their wishes, and the Press of the country all waiting to note down their words and publish them broadcast throughout the land. The right of poor and vote-less people to be heard has been endangered by this Bill and so long as it remains on the Statute Book it is a standing menace to our ancient popular liberties.

  Happily, up to now, the Bill has been practically a dead letter, but none can be sure that an instrument of coercion which exists will not be put into force. Had the movement for Women’s Enfranchisement been a movement solely of poor women with others dependent upon them, as might have been the case, the new Bill might have proved a serious menace to the movement, but, as it happened, there was fortunately no lack of women who were able and willing to risk imprisonment. Therefore this Bill could make no difference to us.

  Nevertheless, though our members might not have left a crowd of starving children behind them, we well knew that their going to prison entailed many sacrifices and we always waited impatiently for their release and welcomed them back amongst us with the greatest joy. During the summer and autumn bands of women in white dresses had flocked to the gaol gates, had unhorsed the carriages provided to carry the prisoners to breakfast, and with purple, white and green ribbons had drawn them in triumph through the streets. With Scotch tartans and Scotch heather the Scotch women had been welcomed; four Irish colleens and an Irish piper and a jaunting car met Mrs. Tanner, an Irish woman, and women in prison dress marched from the station with Mrs. Baines on her return to London. When Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Leigh and Christabel were released, earlier than had been expected, on December 19th, women on white horses drew their carriage, and behind and before there marched long lines of W. S. P. U. members wearing white jerseys, purple skirts, and gaiters, green caps, and “votes for women” regalia.

  In the evening a meeting of welcome was held in Queen’s Hall, and as Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel, and Mrs. Leigh appeared all the organisers of the Union in their white dresses lined up and saluted them with tricolour flags, whilst the great audience of women sprang to their feet and cheered and waved and cheered again as few but Suffragette audiences can. Then Annie Kenney stepped forward holding in her hand a purple, white and green silk standard with an aluminum staff, bearing a gilt shield inscribed with the great dates in Christabel’s career.

  When Christabel spoke she recalled the many thousands of Women’s Suffrage meetings that had been held in this country and the work of the pioneers who had begun the agitation more than forty years before. These women had laboured well and devotedly, yet they had not succeeded in gaining for women the Parliamen
tary vote. She believed the reason for this to be that they had relied too much upon the justice of their cause and not enough upon their strong right arm, for an idea had only life and power in it when it was backed up by deeds. What had been wanted was action and it was for this reason that the militant tactics had achieved so much already and would in the end succeed. The old methods of asking for the vote had proved futile, and not only were they futile, but they were humiliating and unworthy of women. “I say to you,” she said, “that any woman here who is content to appeal for the vote instead of demanding and fighting for it is dishonouring herself.” The women who came into the militant movement did not fear suffering and sacrifice; they felt, not that they gave up anything for the movement, but that they gained everything by it. “Why,” she cried, “the women of this Union are the happiest people in the world. We have the glorious pride of being made an instrument of those great forces that are working towards progress and liberty.”