An Examination of Suffragette Violence

English Historical Review Vol. CXX No. 486 © The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1093/ehr/cei119

An Examination of Suffragette Violence*This article attempts to catalogue, analyse and assess the impact of suffragette violence – that is, the bombings and arson perpetrated by members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their sympathizers between February 1913 and August 1914 – and thereby to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the campaign. Before 1911, the WSPU had made only sporadic use of violence, and it was directed almost exclusively at the government and its servants. After 1911, it was directed increasingly at commercial concerns and then at the general public. Early in 1912, there was a symbolic arson attempt.1 In June and July of that year, there were five more serious incidents: the homes of three anti-suffrage cabinet ministers were attacked, a powerful bomb was planted in the Home Secretary’s office and the Theatre Royal, Dublin, was set fire to while the audience was leaving after a performance.2 Some other arson attempts followed before the end of the year. But at this stage, there were still some hopes of achieving the vote for women by constitutional means. A Franchise Bill came before the Commons in the winter session of 1912–13, and was drafted to allow a series of amendments in favour of women’s suffrage – or so its sponsors believed.3 But after an initial debate on 24 January 1913, the Speaker ruled the amendments out of order and the government was obliged to abandon the Bill. Whether or not this ruling came as a surprise is debatable, but the WSPU chose to see it as a deliberate betrayal engineered by the govern-ment.4 Our concern is the bombing and arson campaign that followed.

Since the late 1960s there has been a tremendous outpouring of books and articles about the militant suffragettes, which, if anything,

EHR, cxx. 486 (April 2005)

*I would like to thank the staffs of the various archives and libraries used in researching this article, particularly Beverley Cook at the Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London. This project was begun in collaboration with Dr Douglas Reid, to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for his advice and assistance. Professor Brian Harrison read an earlier draft of this article and I have profi ted from his suggestions, while I am also grateful to Chris Heppa and Lewis Jones for their comments and help in preparing it for publication.

1. E. S. Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London, 1977), 362 [fi rst published 1931].

2. Attacks were made on the homes of Charles Hobhouse, J. A. Pease and Lewis Harcourt. For the attack on Hobhouse’s home, Edward David (ed.), Inside Asquith’s Cabinet: From the Diaries of Charles Hobhouse (London, 1977), 117. For Pease, Manchester Guardian, 20 July 1912, 8. For Harcourt, The Times, 15 July 1912, 7. The most information about the bomb in Reginald McKenna’s offi ce is given in the Manchester Guardian, 8 May 1913, 8, but the incident occurred in July 1912: see cartoon in Votes for Women, 19 July 1912, 678. For the attack on the Theatre Royal, The Times, 20 July 1912, 10.

3. For information on the amendments and some discussion, ‘Women and the Franchise Bill’, The Times 18 Jan. 1913, 7, and ‘Chaos in the Commons’, ibid. 22 Jan. 1913, 6.

4. For contrasting views, Martin Pugh, The Pankhursts (London, 2001), 257–8 and Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, Lloyd George: A Political Life: The Organizer of Victory, 1912–1916 (London, 1992), 54.


AN EXAMINATION OF SUFFRAGETTE VIOLENCE366

has grown even more profuse in recent years. Despite the revisionist scholarship of Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh, which has emphasized the role of the non-militants and drawn attention to the failure of militancy in winning the vote, it is militancy – and, in particular, the violent militancy of 1912–14 – which has continued to attract public attention. But, with few exceptions, this historiography has concentrated on what may be called the ‘personal’ issues of the campaign: biographical work on the leaders and membership of the suffrage societies, their motivations, the violence used against them and their sufferings in prison. The aspect which has attracted little or no attention is the issue of violence on the suffragette side, in particular the number of bomb and arson attacks, how they were organized, who carried them out and whether or not there was a threat to human life.5 The only serious attempts to examine these practical issues have come from two distinguished male historians – Andrew Rosen and Brian Harrison. But although Harrison’s essay ‘The Act of Militancy’ took for granted a degree of violence beyond anything admitted to in feminist accounts, it was a philosophical examination of the campaign rather than an attempt to enumerate the acts.6 Although some regional catalogues have been offered, the only attempt in recent times to provide a national catalogue of the incidents themselves was Rosen’s in his book Rise Up Women!, and this has serious deficiencies.7 The only previous attempt at such a catalogue was that provided by A. E. Metcalfe in 1917.8 This provides details of 104 incidents in 1914 alone, but Rosen’s tabulation gives a total of 100 incidents for the whole period of the campaign. Some of the discrepancies between these figures are easily explainable: Metcalfe tabulated all kinds of suffragette militancy, including attacks on works of art which were almost entirely omitted by Rosen. Also, Rosen did not list the many unsuccessful attacks: his emphasis was on the eco-nomic impact of the campaign and he claimed only to tabulate the ‘major acts of arson’.9 But, even with these provisos, there remains much in Rosen’s selection of incidents that is difficult to explain, and it

5. For example, see June Purvis, ‘“Deeds, Not Words”: Daily Life in the Women’s Social and Political Union in Edwardian Britain’, in Votes for Women, ed. Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (London, 2000), 135–58. Of this article’s sixteen pages of text (135–51), seven are given up to accounts of prison life, while the forms of militancy which put the women there are dismissed in as many lines (137).

6. Brian Harrison, ‘The Act of Militancy: Violence and the Suffragettes, 1904–1914’, in Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), 24–81.

7. Andrew Rosen, Rise Up Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Politi-cal Union, 1903–1914 (London, 1974), see chapters 16 and 18, 189–202, 214–45. Regional catalogues are offered in David Neville, To Make their Mark: The Women’s Suffrage Campaign in the North-East of England, 1900–1914 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1997), and by Leah Leneman, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1995), 274–8.

8. A. E. Metcalfe, Women’s Effort: A Chronicle of British Women’s Fifty Years’ Struggle for Citizenship 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1917), 309–17.

9. Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 191.

AN EXAMINATION OF SUFFRAGETTE VIOLENCE 367


has to be said that his tabulation is not only inadequate but seriously misleading.10

There are very many difficulties in assessing the scale, range and intention of suffragette violence, of which the first and greatest is establishing the number of incidents. Bombings and fires attributed to suffragettes in national and local newspapers could easily exceed 500, but a definitive set of figures could only be arrived at through a major research project. My concern has therefore been to establish a minimum reliable figure, and the basis for this survey is the number of incidents ‘claimed’ by the WSPU, checked, as far as possible, against newspaper reports. From 31 January 1913 The Suffragette almost invariably carried a page – more usually a double-page centre spread – which reported the outrages committed. During the periods when its printers were not actually faced with prosecution, it openly claimed responsibility by threatening headlines and subheadings.11 The weekly issues of the newspaper give a total of 325 incidents. But there were several weeks in which no crime catalogue was published, and at the end of 1913 The Suffragette published an additional selective catalogue entitled ‘A Year’s Record’, which claimed another twelve incidents, giving a grand total of 337.12

So far as it is possible to establish, The Suffragette followed the attributions in the press, although it was selective and sometimes appeared to show a degree of inside knowledge. One of the chief areas of WSPU militancy was Birmingham. On 23 August 1913 the Birmingham Daily Mail reported three fires in the greater Birmingham area, one of which was a garage fire at Handsworth in which the build-ing was gutted and some cars destroyed.13 The newspaper did not at-tribute the incident to suffragettes, and the fire brigade did not suspect arson, but nevertheless this fire was claimed by The Suffragette.14 If the WSPU was making wild claims, it has to be asked why it selected this one incident: why not claim all three fires? In this instance, the most probable explanation is inside information from the perpetrators. It

10. For example, given Rosen’s economic emphasis, it is diffi cult to see why he did not include the destruction of Lord Inverclyde’s yacht Beryl, valued at £40,000, on 21 December 1913. It was attributed to suffragette activity by national newspapers (e.g. Manchester Guardian, 22 Dec. 1913, 10) and claimed by The Suffragette (2 Jan. 1914, 271). At the other end of the scale, Rosen includes some incidents not claimed by The Suffragette nor attributed to suffragettes in national news papers, e.g. the destruction of ‘Bathford’, Bath, on 23 November 1913, which was attributed to a defective fl ue (see Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 271; The Times, 24 Nov. 1913, 6).

11. For example, the headline ‘No Votes, No Peace’, The Suffragette, 12 Sept. 1913, 835. On 19 Dec. 1913, 222–3, the overall headline was ‘Devastating Fires . . . Grave Responsibility of the Government’, and two of the subheadings were ‘Gigantic Fire at Devonport . . . Reply to Mrs. Pankhurst’s Arrest’, and ‘Fire at a Scottish Mansion . . . Protest Against the “Cat and Mouse” Act’.

12. Ibid. 26 Dec. 1913, 258. For an example of an incident claimed in ‘A Year’s Record’ but not in the weekly issues, the burning of Hatcham church on 6 May 1913.

13. Birmingham Daily Mail, 23 Aug. 1913, 4.14. Birmingham Central Library, City Archives, Records of Fires MS1303/187–9. The Suffragette,

29 Aug. 1913, 800–1.



has been alleged that the WSPU claimed every suspicious property fire.15 There is some substance for this allegation in that, at the very beginning of the campaign, the organization claimed several hoaxes and one known insurance fraud.16 However, from about June 1913 such bogus incidents disappeared from the columns of The Suffragette – although hoaxes continued. From that comparatively early date, all the claimed incidents appear to have been seriously intended, and wild claims are conspicuous by their absence. For example, one of the most destructive blazes of the period was the fire at a coal wharf at South Shields in 1914, causing damage estimated at between £30,000 and £60,000.17 The fire started on a January night at about 9 p.m., the cause was not established, and Tyneside had been one of the chief areas of suffragette militancy. It would have been easy for the WSPU to claim it, but the organization did not do so. It did not even acknowledge all the offences against property known to have been committed by its membership. Edith Rigby (the joint secretary of one of its branches) planted a pipe bomb at the Liverpool Exchange build-ing in July 1913.18 She was a genuinely idealistic woman, and her action was a relatively harmless protest which could not have compromised the WSPU in any way, but The Suffragette did not claim Edith Rigby’s bomb. It also failed to claim many incidents in which people had been injured or human life threatened.19 There is in fact a vast shadowy area of incidents that were widely believed to be the WSPU’s responsibility, but cannot be directly linked with the or-ganization. This ‘grey area’ is too large and the issues are too complex to be examined here, and I will return to the subject elsewhere.

Suffragette bombings and arson were not only more numerous than has previously been accepted; their economic cost was far greater. The commonly accepted cost of the damage is about £520,000–£270,000 in 1913 and £250,000 in 1914,20 but the actual total was far higher. Counting only the bomb and arson incidents for which costs were published or are otherwise available in public sources, the total comes to approximately £630,000, but a ‘true’ total, including damage not so

15. A common allegation, but never given any foundation. See for example Leneman, A Guid Cause, 146.

16. For an example of a hoax, the fi ring of the ‘Dudley Cannon’ on 8 April 1913 (actually perpetrated by some young men). For an example of an insurance fraud, the fi re reported at ‘ Welham Green’, The Suffragette, 30 May 1913, 541. For the real circumstances of this incident, The Times, 31 May, 5.

17. Northern Echo, 26 Jan. 1914, 1; Manchester Guardian, 26 Jan. 1914, 9.18. The bomb exploded on 5 July 1913. For a report of the trial and sentence, The Times, 31 July

1913, 8.19. For example, on 11 July 1914 there was an explosion in one of several mail bags being con-

veyed by train from Blackpool, caused by a glass tube containing sulphuric acid and ‘fl ashlight powder’, a typical suffragette device for causing pillar-box fi res. This explosion ‘badly burned’ the train guard about the hands and arms and set fi re to several other mailbags and the railway carriage itself. See Manchester Guardian, 13 July 1914, 9.

20. Harrison, ‘The Act of Militancy’, 26–7. These fi gures include the destruction of works of art and some other incidents not included in this survey.



costed and the many instances in which only slight harm was done, would probably be between £700,000 and £750,000, and this does not include the damage done to works of art or the more minor forms of militancy such as window-smashing and letter-burning, which were still going on throughout 1913 and up to the outbreak of war. Nor does it include the ‘invisible’ costs such as extra police time, additional caretakers and night watchmen hired to protect property, and revenue lost when tourist attractions such as Haddon Hall and the State Apartments at Windsor were closed for fear of suffragette attacks. Such costs can only be guessed at, but it is likely that the WSPU’s campaign, in 1913–14 alone, cost the British economy between £1 and £2 million.

Given that the number of suffragette attacks was much greater than has previously been accepted, and their seriousness underestimated, it is necessary to reconsider whether militancy can be said to have ‘worked’. The consensus of historical opinion is that it did not. Andrew Rosen’s analysis showed that the WSPU signally failed to create the kind of national crisis which might have forced the government into concessions, and Brian Harrison’s examination of the opposition to women’s suffrage showed how delighted the ‘Antis’ were at a militant campaign that had done no more than alienate public opinion and place the suffrage question beyond parliamentary consideration.21 These conclusions echo the overwhelming weight of contemporary opinion in 1913–14: it was generally accepted that WSPU violence had shelved the whole question of women’s suffrage until the organization came to its senses or had disappeared from the scene.22 The only dissentients to that view were the suffragettes themselves.

However, the implied claim that militancy ‘worked’ has been made since the 1930s. Sylvia Pankhurst interpreted the Prime Minister’s willingness to meet a deputation of working women as his first step towards ‘surrender’, and this interpretation was given popular currency by George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England.23 A variation on this theme – that the vote was won by Emmeline Pankhurst’s threat of renewed militancy after the First World War – was first made by Rebecca West in 1933, and the idea has never been far below the surface in popular historiography; for example, Shoulder to Shoulder, the book of the 1974 television series, claims on its front cover that ‘the Militant Suffragettes . . . fought – and won – the battle for the vote’.24

21. Rosen, Rise Up Women! 242–5; Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London, 1978), 181–99.

22. For supporting argument and references, see below.23. Pankhurst, Suffragette Movement, 570–7; George Dangerfi eld, The Strange Death of

Liberal England (London, 1997), 307–9 [fi rst published 1935].24. For the 1933 claim, Rebecca West, ‘A Reed of Steel’, in The Young Rebecca: Writings of

Rebecca West 1911–17, ed. Jane Marcus (London, 1982), 243–62 at 259 [fi rst published in The Post Victorians, 1933]. West accompanied the claim that Mrs Pankhurst won the vote by the threat of renewed violence with the false statement that women gained the vote on the same terms as men in 1917; Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary (Harmondsworth, 1975).



These ideas and implications have been renewed in some recent and more academic feminist writing: Sandra Stanley Holton has suggested that in 1914 ‘the acts of individual militants were becoming ever more desperate . . . Militant demonstrators were also causing increasing inconvenience to the dignity, if not the safety, of the establishment, from the mayor’s parlour to Buckingham Palace. And so . . . the Liberal leadership set about taking a lead once again on the question of franchise reform’.25 June Purvis has argued that assertions about the counter-productiveness of militancy somehow ‘deny or diminish’ the achievements of her heroine Emmeline Pankhurst. Purvis argues that women only gained partial enfranchisement in 1918 because politicians were afraid that militancy would resume after the First World War, though without acknowledging the fact that she is repeating the claim first made by Rebecca West.26 In this specific passage, Purvis does not define what she means by ‘militancy’, but she goes on to support her contention that: ‘Militancy was a necessary step for winning the vote’ by reference to a lecture delivered by Harold Laski. This lecture specifically endorsed political violence, and Laski himself is now known to have planted a bomb in a railway station on the WSPU’s behalf.27

Such open and implied claims of success for militancy depend on a number of assumptions, some of which – such as Purvis’s apparent belief that it was necessary for male politicians to be terrorized into giving women the vote – are highly contentious in themselves, but must remain beyond the scope of this article. So far as the militant campaign itself is concerned, the chief assumptions are that the WSPU had an army of bombers and arsonists to draw on, and that the militant campaign was constant in its severity or actually accelerating up to the outbreak of war. Christabel Pankhurst claimed that the campaign was ‘at its greatest height’ immediately before the First World War, while among more modern commentators one believes that Emmeline Pankhurst’s re-arrest in March 1914 caused ‘another record wave of militancy’ and another asserts that: ‘Through March, April, and May 1914 the damage escalated’.28 These assumptions contradict the contem-porary evidence: in 1913–14 it was widely believed that the WSPU was having difficulty in sustaining the campaign, and that the bombings and arson were the work of a tiny number of people, many of them

25. Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1986), 207.

26. June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002), 308.27. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 361. Laski’s lecture, ‘The Militant Temper in Politics’ was given

to the Suffragette Fellowship in 1932. For his attack on a railway station, see Isaac Kramnik and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (London, 1993), 66–7.

28. Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, ed. Lord Pethick-Lawrence (London, 1959), 286; Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London, 2002), 151; Crawford, Reference Guide, 753.



employed or otherwise paid by the WSPU. To judge these claims, it is first necessary to provide a statistical analysis. Table 1 provides a breakdown of violent acts by month in 1913 and 1914.

It will be seen that although there were some incidents in every month between February 1913 and August 1914, suffragette militancy came in several ‘waves’, with fallings-off in between. The most sustained effort was at the beginning of the campaign, in April and May 1913, although it has to be noted that these figures are augmented by several hoaxes and incidents known only through their mention in The Suffragette. There was then a second ‘wave’ in August, with a sustained effort from then until Christmas, but a marked decline is apparent from the beginning of 1914, when the 1913 totals were matched only in one month, June. There were 232 incidents in the ten and a half months of the campaign during 1913, and 105 in seven months (and one day) in 1914: the average of incidents per month in 1913 (over eleven months) was therefore just over twenty-one, but in 1914 (over seven months) only fifteen. The overall figures support the view expressed at the time, and by later historians, that the WSPU’s violent campaign rapidly tailed off after the autumn of 1913. There was also considerable regional variation, as Table 2 shows.

Besides the general fall in incidents after the summer of 1913, there was also a more general change in the patterns of militancy, in that the violence was tending to move away from southern England into the provinces. For example, 150 of the 337 incidents happened in the three regions of London, South Eastern and Southern Central England, but only thirty-five of these happened in 1914. There were a total of 129 incidents in Northern Central England, Scotland and Ulster, but forty-four happened in 1914. More generally, the WSPU claimed to be a national organization which spoke for women everywhere, but suffragette militancy was a nationwide phenomenon only in a technical sense. There was considerable regional distribution in that every area of the British Isles (including southern Ireland) saw some outrages, but within these regions many districts escaped completely or saw attacks during a limited period of time. The only areas which saw anything like a continuous campaign from beginning to end were London and Northern Central England. The campaign on Tyneside lasted only from March to October 1913; thirteen of the seventeen incidents in Liverpool and Manchester happened during a four month period between August and December that year, after which bombings and arson ceased. Violence in Bristol lasted only from October 1913 to April 1914, and in Bath from December until July 1914. The campaign in Ulster did not begin until March 1914, but there were sixteen incidents from then until 1 August. Seven of the ten incidents in East Anglia happened on the Suffolk and Norfolk coast and took place within two periods which totalled little more than three weeks. Excluding the Birmingham area, there were no incidents in the area I have defined as



‘Southern Central’ England between January and May 1914. I will attempt to explain some of the reasons for these patterns in the second half of this article.

Suffragette violence was an urban – or, more strictly speaking – a suburban phenomenon. There were few incidents in city centres or the ‘deep’ countryside. Of the fifty-seven attacks in greater London, only eight happened in the cities of London and Westminster. Of the same number in Southern Central England, twenty-five were in the greater Birmingham area, with a further five in the Black Country. Of seventy-six in Northern Central England, twelve happened in Nottingham, eleven in Newcastle and its suburbs, ten in Liverpool and seven in Manchester and Salford, with a further ten in the central Lancashire conurbation bounded by Liverpool, Manchester and Blackburn. Ten of the twenty-five incidents in the west of England were in the Bath– Bristol area. In Scotland, Edinburgh saw six attacks, but if the area is extended to cover its outer suburbs – Haddington, Tranent and Dalkeith – there were nine. Glasgow saw only four incidents, but there were another seven in places within easy reach – two each in Balfron and Lanark, and one each at Helensburgh, Wemyss Bay and Gareloch. Of 337 incidents, 146 occurred in nine cities and their suburbs – 43 per cent of the total. If the outer suburban areas are added, the total rises to 166, or 49 per cent. Table 3 gives the statistics.

But, at the same time, many cities and large towns saw few inci-dents or none at all. The Leeds–Bradford conurbation saw only four

Table 1: Number of incidents of bombings and arson, 1913 and 19141913 1914

Month No. of Month No. of incidents incidents

January 0 January 8February 7 February 13March 9 March 13April 32 April 17May 32 May 12June 21 June 25July 16 July 15August 32 August 2September 22 September 0October 23 October 0November 19 November 0December 19 December 01913 total 232 1914 total 105Average per month 21.1 Average per month 15.0



Tab

le 2

: Suf

frag

ette

mili

tanc

y by

reg

ion

and

date

T

otal

Fe

b. M

arch

Apr

il M

ay

June

Ju

ly

Aug

. Se

pt.

Oct

. N

ov.

Dec

. Ja

n.

Feb.

Mar

ch A

pril

May

Ju

ne

July

A

ug.

Lon

57

3 3

8 10

3

0 3

7 4

2 1

2 0

1 2

1 5

2 0

SE

36

2 2

6 4

1 1

3 3

4 1

2 1

1 0

0 1

4 0

0W

es

26

0 1

2 0

1 2

4 0

1 2

3 0

2 3

1 0

3 1

0E

A

10

0 0

1 1

1 0

0 1

2 0

0 0

0 0

4 0

0 0

0SC

57

0

2 3

5 5

3 6

5 6

3 1

2 4

4 0

4 2

2 0

NC

76

2

1 6

6 6

10

7 5

6 8

5 0

2 3

0 2

6 1

0Sc

t 37

0

0 4

5 4

0 2

0 0

0 3

2 4

1 2

3 1

6 0

Wal

15

0

0 1

0 0

0 4

0 0

2 4

1 0

0 1

0 1

0 1

Uls

16

0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

1 7

1 3

3 1

Ire

3 0

0 1

1 0

0 1

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

Oth

4

0 0

0 0

0 0

2 1

0 1

0 0

0 0

0 0

0 0

0

Tot

33

7 7

9 32

32

21

16

32

22

23

19

19

8

13

13

17

12

25

15

2

Key

: Lon

, Gre

ater

Lon

don;

SE

, Sou

th-E

aste

rn E

ngla

nd; W

es, W

este

rn E

ngla

nd; E

A, E

ast A

nglia

; SC

, Sou

ther

n C

entr

al E

ngla

nd; N

C, N

orth

ern

Cen

tral

E

ngla

nd; S

ct, S

cotla

nd; W

al, W

ales

; Uls

, Uls

ter;

Ire

, Sou

ther

n Ir

elan

d; O

th, O

ther

s; I

sle

of M

an o

r un

iden

tifia

ble

loca

tion

s.Sc

otla

nd, W

ales

, Uls

ter,

and

Sou

ther

n Ir

elan

d de

note

the

mod

ern

adm

inis

trat

ive

unit

s. L

ondo

n de

note

s th

e pr

esen

t Gre

ater

Lon

don

area

, and

Eas

t Ang

lia th

e pr

esen

t co

unti

es o

f E

ssex

, Suf

folk

, and

Nor

folk

. The

res

t of

Eng

land

is d

ivid

ed in

to f

our

regi

ons:

Sou

th-E

ast

mea

ns t

he a

rea

sout

h of

a li

ne d

raw

n be

twee

n Lo

ndon

and

Bri

stol

, and

ano

ther

dra

wn

nort

h fr

om S

outh

ampt

on. W

este

rn m

eans

the

are

a w

est

of t

hat

line.

Sou

ther

n C

entr

al d

enot

es t

hat

betw

een

the

line

from

Lon

don

to B

rist

ol a

nd a

noth

er p

assi

ng t

hrou

gh L

eice

ster

and

Shr

ewsb

ury,

whi

le N

orth

ern

Cen

tral

mea

ns t

he a

rea

betw

een

that

lin

e an

d th

e Sc

otti

sh

bord

er.



outrages.29 Teesside and the city of York saw one each. Sheffield escaped entirely, as did Stoke-on-Trent and the ‘Five Towns’. So did other large and important towns such as Hull and Southampton, and nearly all the smaller county towns – Exeter, Dorchester, Winchester, Chichester, Brighton, Canterbury, Colchester, Ipswich, Lincoln, Car-lisle, Lancaster, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester – also escaped completely.

It has been claimed that suffragette violence was always a ‘reactive’ phenomenon; that is, a response to particular acts of repression or brutality on the part of the authorities, rather than blind retaliation or concerted aggression against society as a whole. As part of her argument that militancy should be understood as part of a ‘moral philosophy’, Sandra Stanley Holton has asserted that: ‘militants refused to be provoked into using physical violence against the persons of their opponents, other than purely token acts, or to wage an all-out campaign of terror within the community’.30 When feminist historians mention the progress of the bombing and arson campaign, it tends to be related to the various arrests and imprisonments of Emmeline Pankhurst.31 This emphasis is correct, but only to a limited extent. The first wave of militancy, in April and May 1913, was undoubtedly connected with her arrest and subsequent trial for incitement; the last, in June 1914, was a response to the pitched battle outside Buckingham Palace on 21 May when suffragettes tried to petition the King. But other acts of ‘repression’, such as the trial and imprisonment of Annie Kenney and the rest of the WSPU leadership in June 1913, did not elicit such a response: the number of incidents actually fell in June and July before rising again in August. Suffragette militancy should be seen in terms of a continuous campaign, in which the governing factors were the availability of targets and personnel with which to attack them, rather than as a purely reactive phenomenon.

More generally, the WSPU turned from window-smashing to arson in a calculated political act, not as a response to repression. The Pankhursts’ devoted lieutenant, Annie Kenney, admitted as much by stating that: ‘It was at this time [1912–13] that the burning of empty houses was resorted to. Both Christabel and her mother were against the taking of human life, but Christabel felt the times demanded sterner

29. I have counted as one ‘incident’ a series of fi res in Bradford in early June 1913, in which both men and horses were killed. The fi res were claimed by The Suffragette, but, when arrests were made, the men involved had no apparent connection with the WSPU. I recognize that the responsibility for these fi res must remain doubtful, but in view of the fact that The Suffragette chose to claim them, they must be counted among other incidents so acknowledged.

30. Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst’, in British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Harold L. Smith (Aldershot, 1990), 7–24 at 10, 19.

31. See for example the comments of Paula Bartley cited above; Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 242.



measures, and burning she knew would frighten both the public and Parliament.’32 The only development in the Pankhursts’ thinking between July 1912 and February 1913 was the decision to make the general public bear the brunt of the campaign, rather than specific anti-suffrage politicians. As the WSPU’s Seventh Annual Report (published in April 1913) stated:

That private citizens should be affected is inevitable, for this is war, and in all wars it is the private citizen who suffers the most. It is, in fact, by means of pressure on the private citizen that an opposing force finally achieves its victory. Moreover, in the women’s war for the Vote, the private citizen cannot complain of suffering the pains and penalties of warfare, because there is nobody who can plead innocence and irresponsibility where the question of Votes for women is concerned.33

Whatever the motivation behind individual incidents, the overall intention of WSPU violence was firstly to intimidate and secondly to punish. If the campaign had an ‘official’ rationale, it was to create an impossible situation for the government in which it would be forced to grant women the vote. But there was a powerful secondary motive in the desire, frequently expressed in suffragette rhetoric, to harass and punish anyone who disagreed with their aims or failed to support them. Brian Harrison has attributed this development to 1912 and to ‘a despairing transition from the pursuit of reform to the luxury of retaliating against the society that refused to listen’, but in fact this trend dated back to 1909, when threats

32. Annie Kenney, Memoirs of a Militant (London, 1924), 187.33. WSPU Seventh Annual Report, 1913, 16. Copy in T[he] N[ational] A[rchives] HO45/

10700/236973.

Table 3: Urban areas with fi ve or more incidents

London 57Birmingham 25Nottingham 12Newcastle 11Bristol/Bath 10Liverpool 10Manchester 7Belfast 8Edinburgh 6

Total 146



were made against persons who attended Liberal meetings and suffragettes attacked their fellows in the crowd besides politicians and policemen.34

The most noticeable motivations of suffragette attacks in the provinces were political or royal visits, both to harass the visitors and punish the communities which offered them hospitality. In early July 1913 the King and Queen visited Lancashire. The result was a spate of incidents in which bombs of various sizes were planted at Blackburn, Newton Heath, the Liverpool Exchange and the Brock aqueduct, and Southport pier and Sir William Lever’s ‘Bungalow’ at Rivington were set fire to.35 Any visit by a government minister was likely to invite an attack, but the people most hated by the WSPU were Asquith, Lloyd George and Reginald McKenna. There was an attempt on a football grandstand at Headingley shortly before Asquith was due to visit Leeds in November 1913, and he was ‘ welcomed’ to Manchester the following month by a fire at the Rusholme Exhibition Centre, and the same night there were two other fires at Liverpool.36 In August, Lloyd George was due to speak at a miners’ meeting at Sutton-in-Ashfield (Notts) and a school which he had to pass on his route was fired. At the beginning of November, he went to Middlesbrough, and the racecourse at Stockton-on-Tees was attacked.37 In August 1913 McKenna was due to speak at the Eisteddfod at Abergavenny: he was due to address the assembly in the afternoon and Lord Plymouth in the morning. To avoid interruptions they agreed to change places, whereupon the frustrated suffragettes set fire to a cricket pavilion and a haystack. His home was raided by six women in March 1914, and the church of St John’s, Smith Square was the target of two bombs because it was nearby. Suffragette vindictiveness extended to his family: the Mill House on the Bramsholt estate (near Liphook, Hampshire) was burned because the owner was McKenna’s brother Theodore.38 Other attacks on politicians were more vicarious. In June 1913 some suffragettes were thrown out of a meeting at Trowbridge addressed by Walter Runciman:

34. Harrison, ‘The Act of Militancy’, 47. Verbal threats of injury or death were made and a threatening poster issued by suffragettes before a demonstration outside the Bingley Hall, Birmingham, in September 1909. One suffragette was convicted of having thrown a stone into the crowd when they refused to support her: another, on being sentenced, shouted: ‘We condemn the men who go to the next political meeting to death – to death!’. See Birmingham Daily Mail, 18 Sept. 1909, 2, 22 Sept. 1909, 4; Manchester Guardian, 23 Sept. 1909, 14.

35. All these incidents happened between 5 and 9 July 1913. For Blackburn, Manchester Guardian, 10 July 1913, 7; Newton Heath, Lancashire Daily Post, 9 July 1913, 7; Liverpool Exchange, Liverpool Echo, 30 July 1913, 5; Brock and Rivington, Manchester Guardian, 9 July 1913, 9; Southport, Liverpool Echo, 7 July 1913, 7. All except the Liverpool Exchange bomb were reported in The Suffragette, 11 July 1913, 654, or ibid. 18 July 1913, 674.

36. For Headingley, The Times, 29 Nov. 1913, 12, The Suffragette, 28 Nov. 1913, 152: for Manchester/Liverpool, The Suffragette, 12 Dec. 1913, 206.

37. For Sutton-in-Ashfi eld, Daily Telegraph, 11 Aug. 1913, 7. For Middlesbrough, ibid. 10 Nov. 1913, 9; The Suffragette, 14 Nov. 1913, 108.

38. For Abergavenny, The Times, 7 Aug. 1913, 13. For the arson, Daily Telegraph, 8 Aug. 1913, 11. For the raid, The Times, 6 March 1914, 8. For the bombs, see below; for the attack on the Mill House, The Times, 28 Oct. 1913, 5; The Suffragette, 31 Oct. 1913, 58.



the next day, ‘Elmscross’, a large house at Bradford-on Avon, was set on fire and messages were left relating to the incident.39

A powerful secondary motive was to punish or intimidate individuals or whole communities, unrelated to particular politicians and remote from political power. According to letters sent to the rector, the church at Breadsall (Derbyshire) was burned to punish him for his behaviour towards some women who had held an outdoor meeting in the village.40 In May 1913, the WSPU in south Yorkshire tried to hold an outdoor meeting at Doncaster, to be addressed by Barbara Wylie, one of the organization’s leading speakers. A highly aggressive crowd of about 1,000 people forced the meeting to be abandoned. Two days later, Wheatley Hall, a nearby mansion, was attacked, and nine days after that there was an attempt to burn Westfield House, in the Balby area of the town.41 The motivation for some attacks bordered on the bizarre. In May 1914 the police raided a flat in Maida Vale in which the WSPU ‘Prisoner’s Organizer’, Nellie Hall, was living, and found correspond-ence relating to an attack on Stoughton Grange, near Leicester. According to a letter read out at subsequent committal proceedings, this arson was instigated by the owner’s secretary, because she believed it was the only way to turn her employer from a non-militant sympathizer to an out-and-out supporter of the WSPU.42 To her credit, one notorious militant had refused to perform the arson because of its questionable motivation, but the WSPU evidently found someone less scrupulous because Stoughton Grange was duly set on fire – though the blaze was discovered and extinguished before much damage was caused.43

The chief limiting factor in the effectiveness of the campaign was the choice of targets. Table 4 offers a classification by type, so far as this is possible.

The only generalization that can be attempted is that most militancy was along the lines of least resistance; that is, nearly all targets were the most easily flammable, the most easily accessible, and the least well defended, rather than the most economically important or the most likely to cause large-scale public disruption. For example, most of the ‘industrial’ targets attacked were timber yards: only four were manufac-turing or distribution centres in cities and two were cotton or other

39. The Times, 5 June 1913, 10; The Suffragette, 13 June 1913, 574.40. For the burning of Breadsall church, The Times, 6 June 1914, 8; The Suffragette, 12 June 1914,

149. For the letters, Major William Melville Lee, ‘Second Report’, 3 Jan. 1917, TNA HO144/ 13338.

41. For the abortive meeting, Doncaster Gazette, 23 May 1913, 12; for Wheatley Hall, ibid. 30 May 1913, 12; for Westfi eld House, ibid. 6 June 1913, 12.

42. The raid was on 23 May. For the connection with Stoughton Grange, see Daily Telegraph, 3 June 1914, 14, which prints a letter from ‘May’ [Mary?] Richardson refusing to perform the arson because of its bizarre motivation.

43. For the fi re, Manchester Guardian, 3 June 1914, 3; The Suffragette, 29 May 1914, 123.


mills.44 Previous commentary has noticed the WSPU’s failure to attack targets such as ‘factories owned by wealthy Liberals’, but attributed it to the leaders’ inability ‘to analyse political forces in terms of economic interests’.45 Economic and political illiteracy may have been contributory factors, but the main reason was that such targets were too well defended by police and night watchmen and too difficult to attack even if their security could be breached. For example, a determined assault was made on Rayner’s spinning mill at Ashton-under-Lyne in November 1913, with fires being laid in eight places, but the resulting blaze was extinguished by the sprinkler system and it was estimated that the damage did not exceed £200.46 Of the thirty-one rail-related attacks, twenty-three were against railway stations. But all of these were in coun-try or suburban areas. Militants never tried to attack any major rail junction such as Clapham Junction, Exeter St Davids, Crewe, Newcastle

44. No target of this kind was attacked until October 1913, when there was an incident at Wrigley Head Mill, Failsworth, Oldham: see The Suffragette, 17 Oct. 1913, 7. Next month there was an attack on a spinning mill at Ashton-under-Lyne (see below). There were no more incidents of this kind until a paint store and a dyers and bleachers at Nottingham were set on fi re on 26 and 27 June 1914: see The Suffragette, 10 July 1914, 222. Then in London on 29–30 June a series of three fi res in the Old Kent Road area in London included a scenery painters and a motor body manufacturer: The Times, 30 June 1914, The Suffragette, 10 July 1914, 223.

45. Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 223.46. Manchester Guardian, 21 Nov. 1913, 16; The Suffragette, 28 Nov. 1913, 153.

EHR, cxix. 482 (Month 2005)

Table 4: Types of target attacked by suffragettes

Target type No.

House, hotel, other domestic offi ces 96Haystack, corn or fodder stack, or farm buildings 36Private sports pavilion/boathouse/shelter 34Church 32Railway station or other rail-related target (e.g. goods yard) 31Public building (e.g. post offi ce) 22Public refreshment pavilion or resort building (e.g. pier) 20Sports grandstand 17Industrial premises 17School, university, teacher training college 16Reservoir, aqueduct, canal bank 4Motor car or garage 3Heather fi re 2One each of: fi ring of ‘Dudley Cannon’, newspaper offi ce,observatory, picture gallery, royal visit, steam yacht, unknown 7

Total 337



or Carlisle, where a station or signal-box fire could have paralysed a large part of the rail network. In central London, the only attack on the Underground system was not claimed by the WSPU.47 Such reluctance to attack important targets was not because innocent people might have been present. In October 1913 The Suffragette claimed a fire at Oldbury station that was discovered by a passenger.48 Militants concentrated their efforts against private houses, haystacks, sports pavilions and churches because they combined the best chance of success with the least chance of getting caught.

The chief difficulty in assessing the role of the WSPU’s leadership in the violent campaign is the lack of documentary evidence. Nearly all of the organization’s documents and archives were seized by the police in raids on its various headquarters in 1913–14, and much of this material was used in criminal proceedings such as the trial of the WSPU leadership for conspiracy in June 1913 and the ‘Maida Vale Flat Case’ of May–June 1914. After the trials, the material went into the legal archives and almost all of it was destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s, leaving only the witness depositions in the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) and what can be gleaned from newspaper reports. Opinion is divided as to the extent of the leadership’s control over the activists. The dominant view rejects the idea of any overall control and emphasizes the ‘wild card’ aspects of militancy in which individuals were apparently responsible for escalations in the campaign, subsequently endorsed by the leadership for fear of losing control.49 The breaking of windows, violent attacks on public meetings, the destruction of letters and the arson attacks are all supposed to have begun in this way. But all the evi-dence runs strongly in the opposite direction and suggests that the WSPU kept its militants under very tight control, so it is unlikely that any individual went ahead with any action without being assured of the leadership’s approval. In The Suffragette Movement, Sylvia Pankhurst emphasizes that the leadership – particularly her sister Christabel – took all the decisions and participated in the planning of militant acts, down to the smallest detail, and in practice it can be shown that major opera-tions were invariably carried out or at least led by WSPU employees.50

Two examples may be given from 1912. In the arson attack on Lewis Harcourt’s home, Helen Craggs is said to have been acting on her own

47. A small but deadly quantity of nitroglycerine was discovered at Piccadilly Underground Station in April 1913: see TNA HO45/10700/236973, item 36.

48. The Suffragette, 31 Oct. 1913, 58. I have not been able to confi rm this incident from another source.

49. For example, see the comments of June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 133, regarding the major demonstration outside the Bingley Hall, Birmingham, in 1909.

50. Pankhurst, Suffragette Movement, 316. This relates to the Bingley Hall demonstration. Of the twelve women known to have participated, seven (Laura Ainsworth, Jennie Baines, Hilda Burkitt, Mabel Capper, Gladice Keevil, Charlotte Marsh and Patricia Woodlock) were directly in WSPU employment, and an eighth (Mary Leigh) was drum-major of its fi fe and drum band.



initiative. Elizabeth Crawford denies that the leadership knew about her plans and June Purvis alleges that: ‘this was the first serious act of arson, and neither Emmeline nor Christabel [Pankhurst] knew about it’.51 But Sylvia Pankhurst specifically stated that the 1912 arson campaign was begun on Christabel’s initiative, and Helen Craggs had been in WSPU employment as an organizer since 1910.52 Once again, the expedition to Dublin which ended in the arson attack on the Theatre Royal is said to have been carried out without the Pankhursts knowing what was intended. If this was really the case, one wonders why the four participants (Jennie Baines, Mabel Capper, Gladys Evans and Mary Leigh) were all in WSPU employment or ‘retained’ by the organization, and it is still more curious that those persons were subsequently paid expenses of £17 6s., which included such items as as ‘food and dinner for Miss [Gladys] Evans, coat and scarf for Mrs. Lee [Leigh], and cabs and other expenses’.53 And, in any case, they had been given the equivalent of a papal indulgence in advance, since Christabel Pankhurst admitted that whatever they did: ‘Mother and I were determined to stand by them’.54 To try to imply, as Crawford and Purvis do, that the organization bore no responsibility for the actions of its paid staff is grotesque. Their implication acquits the Pankhursts of complicity in acts of terrorism at the price of convicting them of moral and organiza-tional imbecility. With the example of later terrorist organizations in mind, it looks as though the WSPU leadership was cynically claiming the sort of convenient ignorance which would have allowed it to disavow indi vidual militants if their actions had miscarried and caused bad publi city. In any case, neither the press nor the public appeared fooled: the general perception was that the WSPU leadership was thoroughly in control and responsible for everything that happened: it could turn the violence on and off as though operating a tap.55

Sylvia Pankhurst’s description of the beginning of the arson campaign runs as follows:

When the policy was fully under way, certain officials of the Union were given, as their main work, the task of advising incendiaries, and arranging for the supply of such inflammable material, house-breaking tools and other matters as they might require. A certain exceedingly feminine-looking young

51. Crawford, Reference Guide, 147; Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, 190.52. In Suffragette Movement, 400, 402, Sylvia Pankhurst stated that: ‘in 1912, secret arson began

to be organized under the direction of Christabel Pankhurst . . . The fi rst attempt at serious arson was that to set fi re to . . . the residence of . . . Lewis Harcourt.’

53. Baines had been a WSPU organizer since 1906. Evans and Leigh were on the WSPU’s books as receiving retainers in 1913 (see below), TNA CRIM 1/140/i [Rex v. Kerr, Kenney and others, 1913], 49. This receipt was signed by Jennie Baines.

54. Pankhurst, Unshackled, 222.55. For the tap simile, see the opening speech by Sir John Simon at the conspiracy trial of the

WSPU leadership, reported in the Manchester Guardian, 10 June 1913, 9. It was also used by Christabel Pankhurst: see Unshackled, 229.



lady was strolling about London, meeting militants in all sorts of public and unexpected places, to arrange for perilous expeditions. Women, most of them very young, toiled through the night across unfamiliar country, carrying heavy cases of petrol and paraffine (sic).56

This may have reflected the facts in some circumstances, but, as in so much of Pankhurst’s writing, the facts have been carefully selected and combined with appeals to sentiment that suggest an amateur approach and emphasize the youth and vulnerability of the perpetrators. But the WSPU was – in its organization at least – a highly professional and very wealthy body, and this wealth and organization carried through into the bombing and arson campaign. At WSPU headquarters the staff most closely involved were Flora Drummond and Annie Kenney, acting in consultation with Edwy Clayton. Drummond appears to have chaired a committee which considered proposals made to it by activists and handled applications for funding. Among the material discovered in the police raid of 30 April 1913 was a letter addressed to Drummond but signed ‘in cipher’. It read:

I am very sorry that I have been unable to reply to your letter before now, but as I have only just returned from a short stay at Hove I did not get your letter until yesterday. With regard to the proposal you make therein, it must be obvious that the sum you mentioned is really insignificant compared to the splendid result to our cause if the job comes off all right . . . It will cost not less than £20 besides two men. Although I would love to be the sole villain of the piece, I fear the dockyard police would suspect a lady visitor, and so I propose to be the brains this time and not the hands. At any rate the damage would not be less than £20,000, and I therefore trust that the Committee will approve of the amount I previously mentioned.57

Although the WSPU also received applications from obvious lunatics offering to destroy property on its behalf, this correspondent appears to have been serious and to have been taken seriously by Drummond and her committee.58 Certainly, neither the WSPU leadership nor their lawyers made any objection when the letter was read out at committal proceedings. It offers the clearest known evidence that the WSPU was prepared to use paid mercenaries besides its own activists, and I will attempt to explore this question elsewhere. Both Annie and Jessie Kenney were WSPU employees: Annie received one of the organization’s highest salaries, which allowed them to pay a high rent for the upper floors of a house in Mecklenburg Square. Annie claimed to have in terviewed prospective arsonists and bombers there ‘at midnight’, and

56. Pankhurst, Suffragette Movement, 401.57. Daily News, 6 May 1913, 1.58. For such a lunatic application, see the letter from one ‘Reeve’ in Museum of London,

Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Z6083, 58.



in the raid on headquarters the police found several jerrycans of petrol in her room.59 Proceeding to Mecklenburg Square they found among Jessie’s belongings a letter from Edwy Clayton. He was an ‘analytical chemist’ who had been brought into the campaign by his wife and daughter – his wife was secretary of the WSPU branch in Kew – and further analysis of captured documents revealed that Clayton had made detailed suggestions for arson materials and possible targets, including the National Health Insurance Commission.60 The police were also aware that the WSPU’s motor cars were being used for arson attempts – embarrassingly aware, because they did not possess a vehicle able to keep up with them. The authorities tried to press into service a member of the Special Branch who owned a motorcycle, but this machine proved temperamental and the police were unable to resolve the problem – a situation which casts some interesting light on the value placed by governments on the security services before 1914.61

The raid of 30 April taught the WSPU the folly of concentrating evidence in one place for the police to find. After that, the command structure became looser, with individual officers using their own homes as headquarters and being allowed substantial funds to dispense on their own authority. To this period probably belongs Sylvia Pankhurst’s description of an ‘exceedingly feminine-looking young lady . . . strolling about London’. It may now be possible to give her a name – Grace Roe, who took over from Annie Kenney when she was arrested. In May 1914 Roe and Nellie Hall were arrested after simultaneous raids on WSPU headquarters and Hall’s flat. Evidence produced at committal proceed-ings showed that Roe had been receiving a salary of £2 a week, later £2 10s. Hall was receiving £2. But, in fourteen months between March 1913 and May 1914, Roe had been paid some £253, roughly double her official salary. Hall had received no less than £179 in twelve weeks.62 It is probable that Roe and Hall received these disbursements to fund indi-vidual activists in their career of destruction: the alternative explanation is that the amounts were personal rewards for their part in organizing it.

To what extent was the leadership able to direct events and co- ordinate the attacks? A claim has been made that individual targets were selected and specific people briefed to attack them, but this appears in the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.63 More convincing is the evidence relating to Stoughton Grange discovered at Nellie Hall’s flat. The arsonist was offered materials, accommodation in a nearby ‘safe house’ and a motor car ride to London: even the local

59. Annie was being paid £4 4s. per week. For ‘at midnight’, Kenney, Memoirs of a Militant, 187.

60. For Clayton’s background, see Crawford, Reference Guide, 115. For his proposals to destroy property, Birmingham Daily Mail, 2 May 1913, 6.

61. Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 216–17.62. Daily Telegraph, 3 June 1914, 14.63. See Mary Richardson’s account of her attack on ‘The Elms’, Hampton-on-Thames

(on 4 October 1913) with ‘Millicent’, in Laugh a Defi ance (London, 1953), 177–86.



policeman’s beat had been plotted so as to minimize the risk.64 There is also the evidence of co-ordination offered by the conjunction of WSPU propaganda in East Anglia in April 1914 and a series of arson attacks in the same area, carried out by paid staff (see below). But perhaps the best overall witness to the central organization’s role is the silent one of what happened after the authorities ‘decapitated’ it by the raid of 30 April and the subsequent trial for conspiracy, which concluded on 18 June. The number of bomb and arson incidents was thirty-two in May but fell to twenty-one in June and sixteen in July, before rising again in August. The WSPU is said to have operated on a ‘shadow’ system whereby all its officials could be replaced if they were arrested, but in practice the organization clearly took some time to recover. In the absence of any clearer and more detailed evidence, the safest assumption seems to be that the central organization could direct events in London and south-eastern England, or when provincial activists required considerable sums of money to carry out a particular attack. In the light of the letter to Drummond read out in court, which appears to propose an attack on a royal dockyard, it is a chilling reflection that seven months later, in December 1913, there was a disastrous fire at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard in which two men were killed. The cause was never established, and it was widely believed that suffragettes were responsible. The Suffragette referred to the fire but did not ‘claim’ it.65

In the provinces, the persons most clearly responsible were the thirty-eight district organizers, paid employees who received between £2 and £2 10s. per week, which was roughly equivalent to the salary of a woman headteacher. Suffragette historiography has recognized their role in dir ecting militants and supplying materials, but has persistently denied that they were personally involved in bombings and arson. One former organizer, Olive Bartels, admitted to having provided the materials for an attack on some houses in Cambridge, actually carried out by others, but denied that WSPU employees were allowed to perpetrate militant acts, giving as the reason that ‘if they were caught it would be said that the WSPU had to rely on paid activists’. Elizabeth Crawford’s entry under ‘Organizers’ reads:

At all stages of the militant campaign WSPU headquarters had difficulty in restraining organizers from volunteering for deputations or demonstrations that might attract imprisonment. In the last phase of the militant campaign very clear instructions were issued requiring organizers to stay at their posts and allow activists . . . to commit acts of terrorism.66

64. For the full story, TNA HO144/1318/252288. Some of the press reports garble the story and suggest that the ‘safe house’ (‘Fernleigh’) was another target.

65. For the Portsmouth fi re, Portsmouth Evening News, 22 Dec. 1913, 5. For repeated and pointed questions by the coroner and the inquest jury, The Times, 1 Jan. 1914, 15, 7 Jan. 1914, 11.

66. For Bartels, Crawford, Reference Guide, 37; for ‘Organizers’, ibid. 478.



If such ‘very clear instructions’ were ever issued, they were always honoured more in the breach than in the observance, with – apparently – the WSPU’s full support and approval. Some organizers did indeed restrict themselves to supplying materials to travelling militants or giving them hospitality, but others had been participating in violent militancy since 1909. It can only be said that Olive Bartels was remark-ably ignorant about the organization she worked for, while Elizabeth Crawford is ignoring abundant evidence, some of which is available in her own book.

Besides the organizers, the WSPU could also draw on a further range of paid staff who received their expenses, or ‘retainer’ payments besides expenses. The WSPU had a very large staff, far larger than its membership and activities required. In 1913, there were ninety-one people on the payroll and it amounted to £6,321. Some of these people received retainers of £1 5s. or £1 10s. per week for duties that were never specified, and among them were some known arsonists. During the raid of 30 April, Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans (both among the Dublin arsonists in 1912) were discovered inside WSPU headquarters and both were on the books as receiving retainers.67 Militants could go from employment as organizers to retained status as travelling militants and back again: some even seem to have received both types of payment at once. As evidence, and to show how the militant campaign depended on leadership and participation by WSPU staff, I have analysed operations in five urban areas: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Greater Birmingham area, Bath and Bristol, Ulster (particularly Belfast) and the Liverpool– Manchester area.

Tyneside was among the first areas to join the violent campaign, and between March and October 1913 there were eleven incidents in Newcastle, its suburbs and its satellite towns. The Newcastle group tended to attack public rather than private property and to make more use of bombs than usual. Then on 20 October the police (acting on a tip-off) surprised two or three women at a new school at Whitley Bay. One was arrested, and she proved to be Cissie Willcox, who had two previous convictions for militancy. Her solicitor badgered the magis-trates with legal quibbling, and they – either not wanting to make a martyr, or because the intention to commit arson was so difficult to prove – let her off very lightly with a £1 fine.68 Nevertheless, militancy on Tyneside abruptly ceased and was not renewed. The only subsequent attacks in north-eastern England claimed by the WSPU – at Stockton- on-Tees on 8 November, and at Cocken Hall (Co. Durham) in July 1914, were probably the work of individual activists rather than the

67. TNA CRIM 1/140/1, 180, 190–1. Both women gave false names but were recognized by detectives.

68. Manchester Guardian, 22 Oct. 1913, 10, 30 Oct. 1913, 12.



Newcastle group.69 It has to be significant that the WSPU organizer in Newcastle until July 1913 was Lilias Mitchell, who is said (albeit, by an unreliable witness) to have been personally involved in a bomb attack in Birmingham.70 Her replacement is not known to have been involved in violence, and, without clear leadership from the WSPU, the campaign on Tyneside ended after a single arrest and a token punishment.

Lilias Mitchell was transferred to Birmingham on 25 July. Her predeces-sors as organizers in the city were Dorothy Evans until May 1913, then Gertrude Francis until Mitchell took over.71 Also in the Birmingham area, until she was arrested on suspicion of complicity in a fire at Selly Oak in July 1913, was Nellie Hall, subsequently arrested for (amongst other things) complicity in the arson attack on Stoughton Grange.72 Although Birmingham, like Newcastle, had a considerable history of suffragette militancy, violence in the city got off to a slow start. There was an arson attack on a boathouse in Handsworth Park on 21 April, but the main assault did not begin until 18 June, when an attempt was made to blow a hole in the embankment of the Birmingham–Stratford canal at Yardley Wood, an incident which could have had very serious consequences.73 Over the next twelve months to July 1914, there were a further twenty-three incidents, the most in any single urban area outside London. The great majority of these were carried out while Lilias Mitchell was organizer in the city. Gertrude Francis was transferred from Birmingham to Bath, and, in October, she was joined by Dorothy Evans in Bristol. After the raid of 30 April, an Information was sworn against Evans, but she apparently escaped to France. She is then said to have returned as a travelling militant, taking part in arson attacks all over the country, until she reappeared in public and was reappointed as organizer in Bristol.74 Arson attacks there began almost immediately with the burning of Bristol University’s sports pavilion on 23 October (an action spectacularly revenged by undergraduates on the WSPU office in the city), and there were another four attacks be-fore Evans was transferred to Belfast in March 1914.75 After she left, there was only one further incident in Bristol, in April, when a haystack was burned. Attacks in Bath began in December, and there were four incidents

69. For the Stockton incident, Northern Echo, 10 Nov. 1913, 1; The Suffragette, 14 Nov. 1913, 108. For Cocken Hall, Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1914, 9; The Suffragette, 24 July 1914, 258.

70. For ‘Lilian’ Mitchell’s alleged participation in a bomb attack at Birmingham, Richardson, Laugh A Defi ance, 139–46.

71. Crawford, Reference Guide, 210, 417; for Gertrude Francis, Michelle Shoebridge, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Birmingham and District, 1903–1918’, MA dissertation, Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1983), 36, 38.

72. Crawford, Reference Guide, 259.73. For Handsworth, Daily Telegraph, 23 April 1913, 15; The Suffragette, 25 April 1913, 470. For

Yardley Wood, Birmingham Daily Mail, 21 June 1913, 5; The Suffragette, 27 June 1913, 621.74. TNA CRIM 1/140/1: Information dated 3 May sworn by Henry Fowler, Chief Inspector,

New Scotland Yard. For an alternative story and Evans’s subsequent career, see Crawford, Reference Guide, 210.

75. For the sports pavilion, The Times, 24 Oct. 1913, 10; The Suffragette, 31 Oct. 1913, 58.



until July 1914, when Gertrude Francis was arrested for setting fire to some haystacks at Inglesbatch, near the city. Messages left at the scene linked her to another haystack fire, also near Bath, in March.76

Dorothy Evans was sent to Ulster for a particular purpose. Since 1912, a major irritant to the WSPU was the existence of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and the alleged disparities between the treatment of militant women and militant men formed a major part of its propaganda. In March 1914, a decision was made to force the issue by confronting Sir Edward Carson and demanding to know whether women would have the vote in an ‘excluded’ Ulster. Evans led the WSPU deputation, and when Carson told them he could not give a commitment because of divisions among his colleagues, Evans issued a ‘declaration of war’ against him and the UVF. The first attack was on 27 March, directed against ‘Abbeylands’ (or ‘White Abbey’), a mansion which the UVF had been using for drills, and over the following four months there were fifteen further attacks. Dorothy Evans was held personally responsible for at least three, and was arrested and re-arrested over and over again.77 Her staff at the WSPU office in Belfast included Florence McFarlane (or ‘Madge Muir’), the branch secretary whose previous post was in Birmingham, and Mary Larmour, who came from Scotland. MacFarlane had already been arrested once, in April, before she and Larmour were caught leaving a burning building in June. Among their local collaborators was Lilian Metge, who lived in Lisburn. One of the attacks was on Lisburn Castle, and another (on the last day of the campaign, 1 August) was a bomb explosion outside Lisburn Cathedral.78

The final example, that of the Manchester–Liverpool area, shows how leadership could pass from a WSPU organizer to a travelling militant. Manchester, like Newcastle, had been among the first areas to join in the violent campaign, with the attack on the ‘Old Manchester’ golf club in February 1913. Then there were bomb attacks on the Free Trade Hall on 23 April, and on a railway carriage at Newton Heath on 8 July. At about the same time, there was another, more shadowy incident in Salford which was never fully reported. As we have seen, Jennie Baines had been among the Dublin arsonists in 1912 (she had been in WSPU employment since 1906).79 In 1913, she was back in Manchester with her family, and after the Newton Heath explosion they were arrested and brought before committal proceedings with Kate Wallwork, secretary of the WSPU branch in the city. According to police evidence, Baines’s name

76. Manchester Guardian, 27 July 1914, 7; The Suffragette, 31 July 1914, 285.77. Crawford, Reference Guide, 210. Crawford is, however, wrong in attributing some of these

attacks to 1913.78. For the arrests, Daily News, 4 June 1914, 1; The Suffragette, 12 June, 148. For Lisburn Castle,

Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1914, 5; The Suffragette, 10 April, 596. For the cathedral, Manchester Guardian, 3 Aug. 1914, 6; The Suffragette, 7 Aug. 1914, 304.

79. For the Free Trade Hall, Manchester Guardian, 24 April 1914, 9; The Suffragette, 2 May 1914, 490. For Newton Heath, Liverpool Daily Post, 9 July 1913, 7; The Suffragette, 18 July 1913, 674. For Salford, The Suffragette, 25 July 1913, 704. For Baines generally, see Crawford, Reference Guide, 25.



appeared in one set of WSPU books as an organizer being paid £2 per week, and in another set as receiving a retainer of £1 5s. per week. She had also been made a payment of £20 early in 1913. Wallwork had received a retainer in 1910–11, and early in 1913 she had been made a substantial cash present of £15.80 Wallwork was discharged because of insufficient evidence, but through clever intelligence work the police were able to show that Baines had been responsible for the Free Trade Hall bombing, and when her home was raided they found a formidable arsenal of guns and bomb-making materials.81 Baines did not care to face trial, and she skipped bail to go to Australia with her family, a journey assisted by Keir Hardie and John Scurr. It has to be said that the authorities would probably rather have seen Baines go where she could not do any further harm, than have another hunger-striking suffragette in gaol. After Baines’s arrest, nothing further happened in Manchester until early October, when there was a fire at a timber yard in Trafford Park. However, arson in the Liverpool area began with the burning of a haystack at Knowsley on 13 August, and a sports pavilion at Wavertree was fired three days later.82 Between September and December there were a further eleven bomb and arson attacks in the two cities.

The fires in the Liverpool–Manchester area heralded the arrival of ‘Kitty Marion’, the WSPU’s most destructive professional travelling militant. ‘Kitty Marion’ came from Dortmund, Westphalia, and her real name was Katherina Schafer. She had lived in Britain since 1886 and from 1889 had made a career as an actress and ‘refined vocal com edienne’, but had been involved with the WSPU since 1908 and had endured a long succession of arrests and imprisonments from 1909 onward.83 In 1913 she joined the violent campaign as a professional militant. Initially, her companion was Clara Giveen. Both Marion and Giveen were receiving retainers and/or expenses from the WSPU: when Giveen was arrested a petty cash book was found in her room with a record of disbursements at Hastings, Bexhill and other places where militancy had occurred.84 They were responsible for burning ‘Levet-leigh’ at St Leonards on 16 April 1913, a house recently tenanted by the town’s MP. Messages left at that fire linked the perpetrators with another in a line of railway carriages at Teddington on 26 April, while the reference to Bexhill in Giveen’s cash book is likely to have been con-nected with another fire at some bungalows owned by Earl De La Warr on 6 May. The Hurst Park racecourse grandstand was fired on 8 June, and Marion herself recorded a suggestion to her that it ‘would make an

80. For the £20 payment to Baines, TNA CRIM 1/140/1, 131. For salary and retainer payments to her and Wallwork, Manchester Guardian, 29 July 1913, 5.

81. For clever intelligence gathering, ibid. For the arsenal at Baines’s home, ibid. 11 July 1913, 8.82. For Trafford Park, The Suffragette, 24 Oct. 1913, 26; for Knowsley, The Times, 18 Aug. 1913,

3. For Wavertree, Daily Telegraph, 18 Aug. 1913; both in The Suffragette, 22 Aug. 1913, 784–5.83. For Marion generally, Crawford, Reference Guide, 377–8, typescript autobiography,

Suffragette Fellowship Collection, Museum of London.84. For Marion, ‘Autobiography’, 272. For Giveen, The Times, 22 June 1913, 13.



appropriate beacon’.85 She and Giveen were arrested at the home of a sympathizer, Dr Casey, whose daughter Eileen became a professional travelling militant. Both went on hunger-strike, but at this time forcible feeding was not being used, so they were released under the Cat and Mouse Act. Both then eluded re-arrest: Marion went to western Somer-set, and it may be significant that the family of Olive Wharry (another ‘retained’ militant) lived at Holsworthy.86 Marion is said to have been responsible for the fire at ‘Hollerday’, a large house belonging to Sir George Newnes near Lynton, Devon, on 5 August 1913, and the person or persons responsible for this arson were almost certainly the perpetrators of two other fires the next day. One was started among the heather of Dunkery Beacon, opposite Cloutsham, where a large number of people had gathered to watch the opening meet of the Devon and Somerset staghounds. While that fire was burning, a farmer at Stringston found his haystacks on fire: Stringston is about eight miles from Dunkery, on the road to Bridgwater, and it seems likely that Marion was making her escape from Somerset, probably in a sympathizer’s car. 87 Apart from the incidents in Bath and Bristol, the only subsequent arson attacks in north Somerset and Devon were the burning of a room in Lynton Town Hall and a possible attack on a bowling club pavilion at Bideford: both events happened in June 1914.88

Marion is then said to have gone to the Liverpool–Manchester area, and Elizabeth Crawford attributes to her presence three incidents of bombings and arson in 1913 – the fire at Seafield House, Seaforth, near Liverpool, on 23 September, the bomb attack on the cactus house in Alexandra Park, Manchester, on 11 November, and a similar attack on the palm house in Sefton Park, Liverpool, four days later.89 However, if Kitty Marion was indeed active in Liverpool and Manchester from the time of her escape from Somerset on 6 August, and if she was involved in the destruction of Seafield House, it is likely that she also had a hand in all the other incidents between the Knowsley haystack fire on 13 August and the burning of Aigburth Church, Liverpool, on 16 December.90 Marion is then said to have gone to spend Christmas with friends on the east coast, and she was arrested while passing through

85. For ‘Levetleigh’, Daily Telegraph, 16 April 1913, 13; The Suffragette, 18 April 1913, 452–3. For Teddington, Daily Telegraph, 28 April 1913, 9; The Suffragette, 2 May 1913, 490. For Bexhill, The Times, 8 May 1913, 9; The Suffragette, 16 May 1913, 516–17. For Hurst Park, Crawford, Reference Guide, 378.

86. For Wharry’s location and her family’s evident sympathy with her activities, Western Daily Mercury, 9 May 1913, 6.

87. For ‘Hollerday’, The Times, 6 Aug. 1913, 11; The Suffragette, 8 Aug. 1913, 746. For Dunkery and Stringston, Daily Telegraph, 7 Aug. 1913, 11; The Suffragette, 15 Aug. 1913, 764–5.

88. For Lynton and Bideford, Western Daily Mercury, 17 June 1914, 4, 22 June 1914, 8; The Suffragette, 26 June 1914, 182. The Western Daily Mercury did not attribute the Bideford fi re to suffragettes.

89. For Seafi eld House, The Times, 24 Sept. 1913, 8; The Suffragette, 26 Sept. 1913, 182. For Alexandra Park, The Times, 12 Nov. 1913, 10; The Suffragette, 14 Nov. 1913, 108. For Sefton Park, The Times, 17 Nov. 1913, 5; The Suffragette, 21 Nov. 1913, 128.

90. For Aigburth Church, The Times, 17 Dec. 1913, 10; The Suffragette 19 Dec. 1913, 222.



London on 6 January 1914. This time, the authorities were determined to keep her in prison, and she was forcibly fed until ill-health forced her release in April. It is very noticeable that bomb and arson incidents in the Liverpool–Manchester area ceased after her departure, and that there was no further militancy in those cities during the remaining eight months of the campaign.

Other travelling militants did not use such fixed bases and never remained for so long in one area. Like Kitty Marion, Lilian Lenton is said to have made a career on the stage, as a professional dancer (other accounts say she trained as a teacher). She had not joined the WSPU until 1912, when she was twenty-one, but then immediately joined in the window-smashing campaign. Initially, she worked with Olive Wharry, and they were responsible for two of the initial attacks – those on the tea houses in Regent’s Park and Kew Gardens.91 They were arrested after the Kew Gardens fire, but Lenton hunger-struck her way out of remand and disappeared. She was in Doncaster at the end of May 1913, staying with the local WSPU organizer, and, with Harry Johnson, was arrested and charged for an unsuccessful arson attempt on Westfield House. Lenton once again hunger-struck, was released under the Cat and Mouse Act, and disappeared. The Yorkshire regional press later published a highly coloured account of her travels which alleges that she went to Harrogate, on to Scarborough, and from there to Scotland, where she took part in the burning of Leuchars Junction railway station on 30 June. She is then said to have travelled to Cardiff, and from there (disguised and in company with a sympathizer) to London and the south coast, and on to France by steam yacht.92 She was arrested once again at Paddington Station in October and once again released, only to reappear at Cheltenham in December, when, with another militant, she was arrested after an arson attack on Alstone Lawn, a large house. The women refused to give their names and so were known to the magistrates as ‘Red’ and ‘Black’, but ‘Red’ was identified as Lenton. They hunger-struck and were released under the Cat and Mouse Act, Lenton to the home of a sympathizer in Birmingham. But it seems likely that she returned to Cheltenham to assist in the attack on the Alstone swimming baths on 6 January, and the destruction of one wing of the St Paul’s teacher training college two days later.93 Lenton then evaded arrest until May.

The greatest and most authoritative detail for the career of travelling militants comes from the witness depositions for the trial of Hilda

91. For Lenton and Wharry generally, Crawford, Reference Guide, 341–2, 707. For Regent’s Park, The Times, 13 Feb. 1913, 4; The Suffragette, 21 Feb. 1913, 292–3. For Lenton’s and Wharry’s responsibil-ity for this attack, see transcript of 1960 interview with Lenton and others, Suffragette Fellowship Collection 61.218/2, 3. for Kew, Daily News, 21 Feb. 1913, 1; The Suffragette, 28 Feb. 1913, 310–11.

92. For Westfi eld House, Doncaster Gazette, 6 June 1913, 12; The Times, 23 July 1913, 10. For Lenton’s escapades, Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1913, 10, and 18 July 1913, 10, quoting accounts in the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.

93. For Alstone Lawn, The Times, 23 Dec. 1913, 5; The Suffragette, 2 Jan. 1914, 270. For Alstone Baths and St Pauls College, Gloucestershire Echo, 8 Jan. 1914, 5; The Suffragette, 16 Jan. 1914, 307.



Burkitt and Florence Tunks, and at the same time their career shows how the WSPU organized and co-ordinated a policy of ‘carrot and stick’, combining publicity and persuasion with terrorism. Burkitt had been in WSPU employment since 1908, and is said to have been the first suffragette hunger-striker to be forcibly fed. She became a retained travelling militant in March 1913, receiving a payment of £1 10s. per week from the WSPU, almost certainly supplemented by expenses payments.94 She was arrested with Clara Giveen while trying to set fire to the football grandstand at Headingley in November 1913: both women hunger-struck, were released to the homes of sympathizers, and both disappeared.95 In the spring of 1914, Burkitt was joined by Florence Tunks, a new recruit, who until a few weeks before had been living with her parents in Cardiff. She then left, telling them that she was going to work for the WSPU in Belfast. Also in the spring of 1914, the WSPU staged a major propaganda campaign on the east coast to coincide with the National Union of Teachers (NUT) Easter conference at Lowestoft. WSPU members and other suffragists repeatedly tried to get the NUT to adopt women’s suffrage as its policy, and were repeatedly defeated by those who felt that such political aims were not the proper business of the Union.96 The suffrage debate was on 16 April. The night before, the WSPU held a large public meeting at the Lowestoft Hippodrome at which Mrs Pankhurst was billed as the main speaker.97 When the NUT conference once again rejected the suffragist demand, and after the departure of the WSPU’s captains and kings, it was the turn of the arsonists. Burkitt and Tunks had arrived at nearby Great Yarmouth on 11 April 1914, where they took rooms for a week, and left the day after the fire which destroyed the town’s Britannia Pier (on 17 April), travelling to Ipswich where they again took rooms for a week. On the 24th they cycled out to Nacton (Suffolk) and set fire to two wheat stacks, being seen to ride off in the direction of Ipswich. Next day they moved on to Felixs-towe, and on the 26th they cycled to Trimley St Martin and fired a fodder stack. Besides taking rooms, Burkitt and Tunks also hired a ‘Beach Tent’, which served as their advance base for the main target, the Bath Hotel, which was burned on the 28th.98 But by that time local people and the police had put two and two together: they were arrested the same day and tried at Ipswich for the Bath Hotel fire, though the police also gathered

94. For Burkitt generally, Crawford, Reference Guide, 87–8. For her retainer, East Anglian Daily Times, 30 May 1914, 4.

95. For the incident and Giveen’s identity, Leeds Mercury, 25 Nov. 1913, 5, 3 Dec. 1913, 5.96. For coverage of the conference, East Anglian Daily Times, 14 April 1914, 4, 15 April 1914, 5,

16 April 1914, 7, 18 April 1914, 8. For some comment on the suffrage debate within the NUT, Alison Oram, ‘Women Teachers and the Suffrage Campaign: Arguments for Professional Equality’, in Votes for Women, ed. Purvis and Holton, 203–25.

97. For the WSPU’s ‘huge campaign’ to coincide with the NUT conference, Suffragette, 10 April 1914, 588. In the event, Mrs Pankhurst did not appear and Annie Kenney was the main speaker.

98. For Burkitt’s and Tunks’s career in East Anglia generally, witness depositions, Suffragette Fellowship Collection 50.82/1130; for the Britannia Pier, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 1914. For the Bath Hotel, The Times, 29 April 1914, 10; The Suffragette, 1 May 1914, 67.



evidence about the other incidents, and among Burkitt’s possessions was found a diary which listed ‘six or seven’ acts of arson. There is a tenuous link between her and the previous three incidents in Great Yarmouth, because a message picked up near the ruins of the Britannia Pier was apparently in the same hand as a few words scrawled on the town’s ‘scenic railway’ when an arson attempt was made the previous October.99

Some other militants stayed in one area. Of the ten incidents in London between March and July 1914, six were bombs planted in a series of well-known churches and chapels. The first and last were at St John’s, Smith Square, doubtless because Reginald McKenna’s home was nearby. The others were at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Metropolitan (‘Spurgeon’s’) Tabernacle at Stoke Newington and St George’s, Hanover Square.100 Eventually, Annie Bell was arrested and charged with two of these offences, but similarities in the nature of the attacks, the construction of the bombs used and the descriptions of the perpetrator make it virtually certain that she was responsible for all six incidents. Annie Bell was familiar to London policemen and courts of law through a number of bizarre incidents: on one occasion she was arrested while carrying a loaded revolver, with which she intended to shoot any man who molested her; while on another she sued her father for false imprisonment.101

This journey through the WSPU’s militant campaign has explored the careers of seventeen militants: in order of appearance, Cissie Willcox, Lilias Mitchell, Dorothy Evans, Gertrude Francis, Nellie Hall, Florence MacFarlane, Mary Larmour, Lilian Metge, Jennie Baines, Kitty Marion, Clara Giveen, Lilian Lenton, Olive Wharry, Harry Johnson, Hilda Burkitt, Florence Tunks and Annie Bell. On the basis of dir ect responsibility – personal claims, arrests and attributions in suffragette historiography such as Elizabeth Crawford’s Reference Guide – these seventeen caused about forty-four incidents of bombings and arson. But any reasonable assessment must place the burden of respon-sibility much more heavily. Dorothy Evans and her staff in Ulster may have had local collaborators such as Lilian Metge, but those collaborators had done nothing before March 1914, and it is highly unlikely that there would have been any bombings and arson in Ulster but for the presence of the WSPU mission sent to the province for that precise purpose. On that basis, Evans, with Florence MacFarlane and Mary Larmour, were responsible for all sixteen incidents in Ulster rather than the four directly attributable to them. Likewise, arson in the Bristol area began when Dorothy Evans arrived in the city and (except for one incident) ceased when she left. It was physically impossible for Kitty Marion to have

99. For Burkitt’s ‘six or seven’ attacks, East Anglian Daily Times, 30 May 1914, 4. For the possible connection with previous attacks, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 1914, 11–12.

100. See The Times, 3 March 1914, 8, 6 April 1914, 8, 11 May 1914, 8, 15 June 1914, 8, 13 July 1914, 8.

101. For the revolver incident, Daily Mail, 11 April 1913, 5. For the suit against her father, The Times, 28 May 1913, 3, 29 May 1913, 3.



been present at all the thirteen attacks in Liverpool and Manchester between August and December 1913, but they began when she arrived and ceased when she left. Except for the unreliable testimony of Mary Richardson, Lilias Mitchell cannot be held directly responsible for any incident; but nevertheless political violence followed her from New castle to Birmingham, and perhaps the best witness to her role is what happened and failed to happen when she was not in the city.

In March 1914, suffragettes desecrated Birmingham Cathedral, and, shortly afterwards, Mitchell made an inflammatory speech. The author-ities contemplated her arrest for incitement, but it took time to prepare a case and before any action could be taken Mitchell had disappeared. According to the local newspaper, she went first to East Fife (where Asquith was offering himself for re-election) and then to Ulster, not returning to Birmingham until the second week in May. Asquith was returned unopposed on 8 April. Between 9 April and 4 May there were no fewer than seven attacks in Ulster. But while in Birmingham there were four arson incidents in the city (plus one not claimed by the WSPU), in March – the last on the night of the 28–29 – no more followed until 14–15 May, after Mitchell was back in Birmingham. She was arrested on 15 May, and after a hunger-strike and another disappear-ance was committed to prison on 13 June after she refused to be bound over.102 After 15 May, there were only two further incidents in Birmingham, on 17 May and 23 July. Such a chain of circumstantial evidence places Mitchell’s role beyond reasonable doubt.

On this basis of ultimate responsibility, the seventeen named militants were responsible for more than 100 incidents, nearly one-third of the total. Of these seventeen, perhaps three – Johnson, Metge and Willcox – deserve to be called ‘rank and file’ militants who were in the campaign for love (in Johnson’s case literally so, since his girlfriend was the servant/companion of the local WSPU organizer). Of the rest, five – Baines, Evans, Francis, Hall and Mitchell – were directly employed as organizers while the campaign was in progress. A further four – Burkitt, Giveen, Marion and Wharry – are known to have received retainers and/or expenses payments, and it is beyond doubt that others did so as well. Tunks had no income except a ‘few shillings’ sent by her parents from time to time, and Lenton cannot have earned her living during seventeen months on the run or in prison. Likewise, Annie Bell and Dorothy Evans’s office staff in Belfast were in and out of prison too often to have been in gainful employment. It is possible that these figures and circum-stances were untypical: that, in other areas, the command structure was looser, or that other WSPU organizers were able to draw on larger num-bers of committed activists. But, where the evidence is available, that is

102. For the progress of events since March, Birmingham Daily Mail, 15 May 1914, 4. For the fi re at the Oratory Cricket Club pavilion, Harborne, ibid.; The Suffragette, 22 May 1914, 114. For Mitchell’s re-arrest and commitment, Birmingham Daily Mail, 13 June 1914, 6.



not the impression given. In Scotland, for example, eight or nine of thirty-nine incidents (thirty-seven claimed by The Suffragette, plus two unclaimed), were the direct responsibility of five people. One person (Ethel Moorehead) took part in five or six attacks, some of them in collaboration with a WSPU organizer, while another activist arrested for one attack was subsequently appointed as an organizer.103

‘Terrorism’ has become a difficult and emotive word to use because of its modern association with individual or mass murder. It is accepted in some feminist writing (and excused on the ground that the WSPU was fighting a ‘just war’) but denied or shied away from elsewhere, on various grounds including claims that the WSPU did not have direct control over its militants, or that there was no threat to human life.104 As this article has shown, the role of the central organization was essential. The claim never to threaten human life was not believed by contemporaries and can be factually disproven, but is too big a question for consideration here.105 The intention of the campaign was certainly terrorist in terms of the word’s definition, which according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990 edition) is ‘a person who uses or favours violent and intimidating methods of coercing a government or community’. The intention of coercing the community is clearly expressed in the WSPU’s Seventh Annual Report, and, according to Annie Kenney, that of coercing Parliament was endorsed by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst themselves. The question is therefore not whether the campaign was terrorist, or whether the WSPU (in 1912–14) can be called a terrorist organization, but whether its terrorism worked.

The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support, even within the WSPU. Suffragette bomb-ings and arson may have been much more numerous, and much more costly, than has previously been appreciated, but, as the Home Secretary pointed out, they were still no more than ‘a mere drop in the ocean’ compared with ordinary, accidental damage. In 1913, the total fire dam-age in the London County Council area was actually less than in any of the preceding fifteen years.106 Reginald McKenna did not have national

103. This is the number attributed by Leah Leneman to Moorehead under her various aliases of ‘Margaret Morrison’ and ‘Rhoda Robinson’. These include two attacks (at Glasgow on 21 July 1913, and in Renfrewshire some time in February 1914) which were not claimed by The Suffragette: see A Guid Cause, 274–8. One of these attacks was carried out in collaboration with Frances Parker, WSPU organizer in Dundee. Arabella Scott, imprisoned for an attack on Kelso racecourse in 1913, subsequently became an organizer under her alias of ‘Catherine Reid’: see Crawford, Reference Guide, 525, 621.

104. For an acceptance that the WSPU’s campaign was terrorist, Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, The Transfi guring Sword: The Just War of the Women’s Social and Political Union (Tuscaloosa, 1997), 2–13.

105. In 1913–14 there were between twenty and thirty-fi ve incidents of suffragette bombings and arson in which human life was threatened, their number depending on how such a threat is defi ned. I intend to explore this question elsewhere. For one example (the arson at Abercuhill Castle, Perthshire, in February 1914), see Leneman, A Guid Cause, 173.

106. Reginald McKenna, House of Commons, 11 June 1914, quoted in The Times, 12 June 1914, 14.



statistics at his disposal, and may have been speaking for propaganda effect, but his statement is supported by recent writing which cites a specialist study to conclude that: ‘the insurance companies’ records, while occasionally apprehensive of what might happen next, do not indicate that they were unduly worried by the suffragette fury’.107 It has long been recognized that the militant campaign was the work of a tiny number of people, but it is doubtful whether it has been appreciated just how small the body of militants was. It is quite possible that the number of those who actually planted bombs and laid fires was about 100 or even less.108 Of course, these militants could draw on a larger number of sympathizers willing to accommodate them, facilitate their destructive efforts and assist their evasion of the authorities, but even including these sympathizers, it is not likely that the numbers who participated in the militant campaign exceeded 300 or 400. It was also recognized that militancy was largely a ‘professional’ operation organized and carried out by paid staff. Although there was a degree of rank-and-file participa-tion, the evidence is that WSPU leadership was essential, and that organizers and retained militants had to lead from the front by personal involvement. If these paid staff had not been available, or – as suffragette historiography has claimed – they had restricted themselves to co- ordination and the supply of materials, bombings and arson would still have happened, but on a very much smaller scale. Indeed, the use of organizers and retained militants from the start of the campaign, in February–March 1913, seems to indicate that the WSPU did not actually trust its rank and file to make the militant effort demanded by the Pankhursts. In comparing its militancy to the mass violence of 1831–2 and 1866–7, and in its belief that it could cause the same kind of political crisis as that precipitated by the Ulster Unionists, the WSPU deluded itself, since both it and its critics knew that militancy had no popular support. As the Liberal MP Harold Cawley said during the debate on Willoughby Dickinson’s Bill in May 1913 (the last time the Commons debated women’s enfranchisement before the outbreak of war):

These outbreaks [suffragette militancy] are carefully calculated, stage managed, cold-blooded crimes committed by a very few members of the public and directed by a few well-paid and highly advertised leaders. It may be right to yield to the violence of the many, but I am perfectly certain that it is bad policy to yield to the violence of the very few.109

A year later, with the resources of the Home Office behind him, McKenna told the Commons that most of the bombings and arson

107. David Mitchell, Queen Christabel (London, 1977), 241, citing Aubrey Noakes, ‘The Suf-fragette Movement as Viewed from the Windows and Records of the Insurance Companies’.

108. For example, ibid. 242, states that ‘By 1914 front-line militants numbered only a few hun-dred at most’. I have not seen any material which would substantiate Mitchell’s accompanying assertion that some of them were ‘well-born agents provocateurs infi ltrated by the police’.

109. Quoted in Harrison, Separate Spheres, 185.



were the work of paid staff, and even accused the WSPU of deliberately employing physically frail people so that their lives would be sooner put at risk by hunger-striking or forcible feeding.110 The government, the press and public opinion might have had to take notice of the great national uprising on the part of outraged women which the WSPU claimed to be leading, but it could ignore the activities of a few hundred militants, in which the most important were paid agents, and treat them as a law-and-order problem rather than one requiring political reform. Far from being ineffective, the government’s ‘repression’ was working as the process of attrition reduced the number of militants, and the final blow against the WSPU was about to be struck by the prosecution of the few wealthy subscribers who provided most of its funding.

Far from forcing the government to the negotiating table, all the evidence is that, by the summer of 1914, militancy had placed the question of women’s suffrage outside the pale of political discussion. Writing in June 1913, Lloyd George stated that the behaviour of the militants had become the chief barrier to enfranchisement, and in October he told a non-militant deputation that he could hold out no hope of legislation in the present Parliament because the minds of his fellow MPs had become ‘poisoned’ on the question of women’s suffrage.111 In a thoughtful article published in December 1913, Philip Snowden agreed that: ‘Mr. Lloyd George is absolutely right when he says that militancy has turned a good deal of indifference into outright hostility’, and went on to discuss the obvious dangers of yielding to ‘ unlawful threats’ in the context of industrial unrest and what was happening in Ulster. Though a convinced suffragist, Snowden did not change his mind: facing suffragette heckling in June 1914, he told his audience that ‘the women’s actions during the past year had so set the clock back that the suffrage question was temporarily as dead as Queen Anne’.112

The claims made since the 1930s that the government was close to ‘ surrender’ or was at least softening its attitude by the summer of 1914 have never had any substance.113 With the possible exception of the anti-suffragists, no one enjoyed the situation created by the militants, but there was no sign that the government was willing to resolve the situation on any terms other than those favourable to itself. More recently, Martin Pugh has suggested that the threat of being outflanked by the Conserva-tives might have forced the Liberals into committing themselves to a women’s suffrage bill, but this view is not endorsed by Lloyd George

110. The Times, 12 June 1914, 14.111. David Lloyd George, ‘Votes for Women and Organised Lunacy’, Nash’s Magazine, July

1913, quoted in the Western Daily Mercury, 21 June 1913, 7. For the deputation, see the article by Philip Snowden cited below.

112. Philip Snowden, ‘The Present Position of Woman Suffrage’, The Englishwoman, 60 (Dec. 1913), 241–8 at 244–5. For 1914, speech to the Christian Fellowship, 13 June, quoted in Birmingham Daily Mail, 15 June 1914, 3.

113. For a devastating critique of these interpretations (and particularly of George Dangerfi eld), Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 237, 242–5.



or by Snowden.114 Lloyd George believed that women’s suffrage could not be a party measure because both main parties were divided on the issue: Snowden believed that ‘there is no likelihood of getting woman suffrage in this generation, except from a Liberal Government’.115 Perhaps most fatally of all, from the party political point of view, was that the issue could not be seen as a vote winner. On the only occasion when the matter had been put directly before the voting public, in a straight fight between the suffragist George Lansbury and an anti- suffragist Conservative, Lansbury had lost.116 In addition, the minimum condition for negotiations would have been the cessation of militancy, and there was absolutely no sign, in 1914, that the WSPU was prepared to comply. Lloyd George may have been willing to negotiate with Sylvia Pankhurst, but these negotiations were rejected and ridiculed by Christabel in two Suffragette editorials which insisted that the violent campaign would go on until a women’s suffrage bill was introduced as a government measure.117 If the Liberals had won the general election due in 1915, there could not have been any negotiations on this basis. If the Conservatives had won, the question would have been whether the WSPU was prepared to give up militancy on any terms they were prepared to offer – and, given the doubts expressed by Lloyd George and Snowden – the auguries were not hopeful. Perhaps the greatest chimera of all is the idea that the vote was won by the threat of renewed violence after the First World War. Even if the WSPU had not been disbanded and replaced by the Women’s Party, it would still have been fundamentally divided by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s fervent support for the war and strident anti-Germanism, plus the vexed question of what had happened to the organization’s funds. It has to be doubted whether the Pankhursts would have wanted to continue employing Kitty Marion, even if she had not gone to America. They denounced Mary Leigh and Annie Bell as pro-Germans and barred them from their meetings, while Dorothy Evans had made an unexpected conversion to pacifism on the outbreak of war.118 Further, wartime con-ditions had led to the vast expansion of the Special Branch and the secret services and done much to break down the libertarian attitudes and legal practices which had prevented more effective official action against the suffragettes before the outbreak of war.119 Even if the Pankhursts had been able to reassemble their troops and revive militancy, the conditions

114. Pugh, The Pankhursts, 294–5.115. Lloyd George, ‘Votes for Women’; Snowden, ‘Present Position’, 247.116. Rosen, Rise Up Women!, 182.117. ‘Votes for Women Now!’, The Suffragette, 3 July 1914, 200, and ‘Down with Negotiation!’,

ibid. 24 July 1914, 260.118. For Evans and Marion, Crawford, Reference Guide, 210, 378; for Bell and Leigh, Purvis,

Emmeline Pankhurst, 283.119. The Special Branch expanded from 80 staff before the war to 700 in 1918: MI5 grew similarly

from 14 to 844: see Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London, 1987), 179–80.



which made it possible for the WSPU to sponsor terrorism while simul-taneously maintaining a quasi-legal existence had disappeared by 1918.

Suffrage historians may be right in the contention that militancy was essential for gaining the vote in that it brought the subject to public attention and to the forefront of political debate. But the violence in which the WSPU indulged from 1912 onwards, and particularly the arson and bombing campaign of 1913–14, cannot be seen as anything other than a blunder which might easily have delayed votes for women for a decade or even twenty years. As generations of historians have pointed out, the First World War did not only rescue governments from an impossible situation; it rescued the Pankhursts and the suffrage cause as well, and made possible an outcome in which Emmeline gained a (deserved) public statue and her daughter a DBE, rather than a reputation as failed terrorists.120

University of Hull C. J. BEARMAN

120. For example, Harrison, ‘The Act of Militancy’, 59.

An Examination of Suffragette Violence

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