Chartists performed very poorly at the 1852 election: their one electoral victory at Tavistock in Devon, where Samuel Carter was elected, proved short-lived as Carter was later disqualified for failing to meet the property qualification required of MPs. As the Star commented on 20 March, ‘The Charter is no more to be had now by asking for, than next year’s apples are – like them they must grow and ripen first.’26
By this point, the NCA had been infiltrated by the international-socialist Fraternal Democrats. As ‘Howard Morton’ (probably Helen MacFarlane) wrote in Harney’s Red Republican in June 1850:
Chartism in 1850 is a different thing from Chartism in 1840. The leaders of the English Proletarians have proved that they are true Democrats, and no shams, by going ahead so rapidly within the last few years. They have progressed from the idea of a simple political reform to the idea of a Social Revolution.27
It was MacFarlane who produced the first translation of The Communist Manifesto for publication in the Red Republican. But whereas Harney moved away from socialism during the 1850s, Ernest Jones did not, promoting the ideas of Marx and Engels through his periodicals, the People’s Paper and Notes to the People. However, even the ideologically committed Jones eventually bowed to political pragmatism when, in 1858, he called an NCA conference (the last under the NCA umbrella) to promote cooperation with the middle-class reformers. This resulted in the formation of the Political Reform Union, which in turn contributed to the new liberal reform movement that culminated in the Second Reform Act of 1867. In his last significant political act, Jones stood as an unofficial Liberal in Manchester in November 1868, polling a very respectable ten thousand votes. When he died on 26 January 1869, he was on the brink of being selected as the official Liberal candidate.
The career of Ernest Jones arguably serves as a better indicator of the successes and failures of the Chartist movement than that of the more famous Feargus O’Connor. Ending the narrative in 1848 leaves us with a movement that appears an unqualified failure. However, as the historian Edward Royle has reminded us, in the face of a political system stacked heavily against them and a similar imbalance in firepower when it came to the exercise of physical force, it is fairer to ask how Chartism succeeded for as long as it did. Indeed, looking at it from the perspective of 1867, we can see legacies of ideology and organisation that informed a more successful reform movement, eventually leading to the enfranchisement of at least some of the male working class.
However, as with the history of most of British radicalism, evaluating Chartism on the basis of a simple historical balance sheet of gains and losses tells us very little about the true impact of the movement. This lay in its powerful legacy to working-class historical memory, community and culture. The connections were repeatedly made by later reformers. ‘The blood of the Chartists of forty-eight is the seed of the Reform movement of 1866,’ announced the English Leader, reporting a West Riding reform demonstration addressed by Ernest Jones that year.28 In 1884 the Third Reform Act was celebrated at Maude’s Temperance Hotel, Halifax, by twenty-two former members of the old Chartist Association, as a fulfilment of their political faith. The secret of the movement’s long afterlife was its success in reaching far beyond English radical groups’ traditional roots in London artisan society and out into the towns and villages of the provinces. Here, the role of the Northern Star, which knitted together the local and the national, was crucial. In later life, many Chartists recorded the central importance of reading the Star in their communities. As Ben Brierley recalled, the communal reading of the Chartist paper habitually sparked off excited discussions:
The Northern Star, the only newspaper that appeared to circulate anywhere, found its way weekly to the Cut side, being subscribed for by my father and five others. Every Sunday morning these subscribers met at our house to hear what prospect there was of the expected ‘smash-up’ [revolution] taking place. It was my task to read aloud so that all could hear at the same time; and the comments that were made on the events apparently foreshadowed would have been exceedingly edifying to me were I to hear them now. A Republic was to take the place of the ‘base, bloody, and brutal Whigs,’ and the usurpers of all civil rights, the Lords. The Queen was to be dethroned, and the president of a Republic take her place. This would be a very easy task. Ten thousand trained pikemen would sweep England through; and Hollinwood [a nearby Lancashire town] could furnish a contingent of at least a thousand.29
The Star gave people who had never written before an outlet to discuss their political beliefs. And Chartist meetings were occasions for conviviality as well as serious talk, as Thomas Dunning recalled: ‘we held open-air meetings in Wood Street on evenings during the week, and on Sunday evenings we sang Chartist hymns, and Mr William Cooper delivered political sermons from scriptural texts’.30
If Chartists failed, beyond the election of O’Connor, to secure representation at a national level, they were far more successful in gaining influence in local government – in Sheffield, even gaining control of the council. Even the Land Plan, so often seen as the downfall of the movement, was viewed through rose-tinted spectacles by some old Chartists, Ben Wilson claiming, ‘the scheme was before its time; yet I believe the day is not far distant when it will be successfully carried out’.31 Once, Wilson’s comments might have been dismissed as wishful thinking. Today, smallholdings farmed by family groups are once again being seen as a solution to the global food crisis. This is especially true in the developing world, where farming for cash crops has led to serious environmental damage while, through the inequities of the food distribution system, delivering minimal financial returns to the farmers themselves.32
The achievement of Chartism in etching itself into the memory of local communities is even more remarkable. Chartism lacks a national feast day like that dedicated by the TUC to the Tolpuddle Martyrs.33 Successive political movements, Liberalism and then Labour, attempted to appropriate the memory of Chartism with varying degrees of success: the Chartists’ essentially political ideology and ambivalent relationship with the unions made them harder to incorporate into a narrative of the ‘rise of Labour’.34 In the late twentieth century, the Chartist homesteads were co-opted by the heritage industry with the acquisition of the last unimproved Chartist cottage at Great Dodford in Worcestershire by the National Trust in 1997. As the age of New Labour dawned, the National Trust, that ‘ethereal … holding company for the dead spirit of the nation’, to quote Patrick Wright, was also seeking to change its image, away from a preserver of stately homes, perhaps to a ‘People’s Trust’.35 It was fitting that in the year of Blair’s triumph, the model town of O’Connorville should become, as Paul Barker acerbically put it in the New Statesman, ‘a leafy, Arcadian village, much sought after by the Mercedes-owning classes’.36 Simon Schama’s televised History of Britain (2001) reinforced the image of Chartism as the movement of an urban working-class hankering for a pastoral paradise by using the Dodford cottage as a location, ignoring the grittier filming opportunities in Kennington Park in South London.37
If the media’s use of such chocolate-box imagery threatens to obscure the more complex reality of the movement, an antidote is provided by the longer-standing commemoration of Chartism in the communities where it took strongest hold: South Wales, the North West and the Midlands. Here, local people have fought for and preserved Chartist memorials and celebrated key dates in Chartist history, such as the Newport rising. The success of Chartism at the level of families and individuals is perhaps no better demonstrated than in the growth of societies dedicated to Chartist family history, which has crossed over into cyberspace with searchable Chartist databases and dedicated historical blogs offering more information. A political movement that touched the lives of millions is now being rediscovered by the twenty-first-century ancestors of those ordinary, yet extraordinary, Victorian men and women.38
Some historians have accused Chartism of having become essentially a political anachronism by the 1840s, its constitutionalism
ill-suited either to the increasingly class-based nature of politics in Victorian Britain or to the growing political sophistication of the parties in Westminster, no longer dominated by hard-edged politicians like Liverpool and Castlereagh but by men like Peel, whom O’Connor himself admired as a ‘great man’. Yet this supposedly outdated political movement bequeathed a remarkably resilient historical legacy. Radical liberalism displayed obvious debts to Chartist tactics, personnel and style, as Gladstone took on the mantle of charismatic leadership from O’Connor. Later, the mixture of constitutionalist language and militant action proved a potent combination for radical suffragists, some of whom, including a Manchester barrister called Richard Pankhurst, would trace their political awakening to the influence of Chartists like Ernest Jones.
PART SEVEN
THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION
The true and inner secret of the Militant Movement was that we were an autocracy. No committee ever has, or ever will, run a revolution. Whether that revolution be bloodless like the women’s, or dripping with tears and blood like the Russian, they may say a committee runs it, but probe deeply enough and you will find one head that towers above all others.
Annie Kenney1
18
THE PANKHURSTS, THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND SOCIALISM
In the summer of 1866, following the fall of the reformist Russell–Gladstone administration and the coming to power of the Derby–Disraeli minority Tory government, agitation for the vote threatened to spill over into mass insurrection. The public mood had never been so hostile since the days of the great Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common in 1848. Members of the Reform League, the working-class organisation that had pared down the Chartist programme to the single issue of manhood suffrage, moved for a mass demonstration in Hyde Park on 23 July. The park was then a public space tailored for genteel amusement, designed for leisurely canters in horse-drawn carriages. It was also, unlike rougher, proletarian Kennington Common, closer to Westminster and unprotected by the natural barrier of the Thames. The government’s response was to ban the demonstration, arguing that it was ‘opposed to the purpose for which the parks are open to the public’.1
In the face of vacillation by some of the more timorous members of the Reform League, the majority followed the decision of the atheist lawyer Charles Bradlaugh, who argued that they should proceed to the park and if they were obstructed by the police, lead the procession peacefully towards Trafalgar Square instead. On the day, the way was indeed barred at Marble Arch, by a force of sixteen hundred police and barricades of omnibuses, and the leaders of the procession instructed the crowd to change course and follow them to Trafalgar Square. However, a minority remained and, discovering that the railings around the park were poorly secured, tore them down, circumventing the blockade. With the perimeter breached, contingents from the march were joined by bystanders, the numbers within the park swelling to an estimated two hundred thousand. Stones were hurled at the police and military support was summoned. Wisely, after receiving a deputation from the Reform League headed by the former Chartist John Bedford Leno, the Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, urged police restraint. The crowds were eventually dispersed after speeches announcing another meeting the following day, which passed peacefully, in Trafalgar Square.
Mass meetings agitating for manhood suffrage continued throughout that year, spreading out from the metropolis to other major British cities. The autumn saw crowds of 300,000 in Birmingham, 250,000 in Manchester and an ‘incredible number’ in Glasgow, all pressing for one man, one vote. Now pressure was also now being exerted for the franchise to be extended to women. In Manchester, members of the more middle-class Reform Union, including the former Chartist Ernest Jones, pressed for women’s suffrage. Also on this committee was a young lawyer called Richard Marsden Pankhurst.2
Further reform meetings were staged in the spring of 1867, including another mass demonstration on 1 May in Hyde Park which flew in the teeth of another official ban by the Home Secretary. A week after the demonstration, Walpole resigned, protesting unconvincingly that his decision had nothing to do with his abject failure to prevent the Hyde Park meeting. The park’s reputation as a site for unrestrained political speech, today institutionalised in Speakers’ Corner, had been established. On 20 May in the Commons, J. S. Mill, the philosopher and Liberal MP, gathered a respectable seventy-three votes for his amendment in favour of women’s suffrage, but the motion was nonetheless heavily defeated. In fact, the resulting householder franchise established by the Second Reform Act, if much more radical than anticipated (increasing the number of borough voters by 138 per cent to 1.22 million and county voters by just under 46 per cent to 791,253), actually disadvantaged women householders by making the convenient and cost-effective practice of ‘compounding’ (combining) rates into rent illegal.3
The name Pankhurst is now synonymous with the struggle for votes for women. The reduction of the history of the fight for women’s suffrage into the story of the Pankhurst family (Richard and Emmeline, and their daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela) has been a feature of recent accounts and dramatisations of the movement, both sympathetic and hostile. For some historians, such as June Purvis, Emmeline and Christabel are the true heroines of this story, with Mrs Pankhurst the brilliant political strategist and her beautiful eldest daughter the visionary thinker and captivating public speaker.4 For others, however, such as the journalist Melanie Phillips, Emmeline and Christabel were man-hating harridans whose rhetoric, and the ‘terrorist’ action it sanctioned, was ultimately responsible for the breakdown of the traditional family and, with it, the disintegration of society as a whole.5 For left-wing writers and historians, especially male ones, Sylvia is the star: less hostile to men – indeed, in awe of Richard, her father, the radical lawyer – and, unlike Emmeline and Christabel, a lifelong socialist and peace campaigner.6 Poor, frail Adela, the youngest of the Pankhurst daughters, who emigrated to Australia in 1914, is usually only mentioned in relation to her belated conversion to far-right politics in the 1940s.7
The centenary of the foundation of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union in 2003 was treated largely as if it were the centenary of the suffrage cause as a whole. However, the campaign for votes for women stretched back to the Victorian era.8 As we shall see, the campaigns initiated by Victorian feminists encompassed much more than just the franchise: they also fought for changes to marriage and divorce laws, promoted women’s education and professional development, and attacked the ‘sexual double standard’ that victimised female prostitutes but viewed their male clients as simply relieving ‘natural’ impulses. Moreover, the WSPU was arguably neither the most popular nor the most politically effective women’s suffrage organisation. The ‘suffragettes’ (a term coined by the hostile Daily Mail in 1906 to differentiate the followers of the WSPU from less militant ‘suffragists’) were only part of a much wider movement for female suffrage, including many other groups, most prominently Millicent Fawcett’s suffragist (constitutionalist) National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS).
Portraying the suffrage movement as a Pankhurst personality cult also falsely detaches it from earlier movements for political reform. In fact, both the WSPU and the NUWSS had their roots in nineteenth-century radicalism, specifically the agitation leading up to the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867. Suffragette and suffragist tactics consciously echoed the activities of male reformers in order to confer legitimacy on their actions. As Mrs Pankhurst argued in a speech delivered in New York on 21 October 1913:
The extensions of the franchise to the men of my country have been preceded by very great violence, by something like a revolution, by something like civil war. In 1832, you know we were on the edge of civil war and on the edge of revolution, and it was at the point of the sword – no, not at the point of the sword – it was after the practice of arson on so large a scale that half the city of Bristol was burned down in a single night, it was because more and greater violence an
d arson were feared that the Reform Bill of 1832 was allowed to pass into law.9
Like the Chartists, they used mass petitioning, large-scale public meetings and ‘anti-Parliaments’ as devices to muster support and exert political pressure. The first signs of suffragette militancy, the interrupting of Liberal Party meetings, mimicked the Chartist ploy of invading Anti-Corn Law League gatherings.
Ideologically, the movement for women’s suffrage also shared the radical belief that it was part of a tradition to defend British freedom. For suffragists like Millicent Fawcett, this tradition could be seen to stretch back even to Celtic warrior heroines such as Boudicca. For militants like Sylvia Pankhurst, it was of a more recent vintage, written in the pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, defended in blood at Peterloo and preserved in the hearts of radical republicans and socialists. Like many male radicals, feminist writers often spoke longingly of an Anglo-Saxon ‘ancient constitution’ that guaranteed the rights of freeborn men and women. In a variant on the notion of the ‘Norman yoke’, however, many feminists saw the seventeenth century as a key period when these Anglo-Saxon rights were overridden, when Sir Edward Coke refined the concept of legal coverture – the idea that a married woman’s legal rights were merged with her husband’s – which underwrote Britain’s unequal marriage laws.10 Along with so many radical movements, place as well as history was significant for the advocates of women’s suffrage. As the working-class suffragette and socialist Hannah Mitchell noted, the first act of WSPU militancy took place on the site of the Peterloo massacre of 1819.11
A Radical History Of Britain Page 44