Also by Jane Robinson

Wayward Women

Unsuitable for Ladies

Angels of Albion

Parrot Pie for Breakfast

Pandora’s Daughters

Mary Seacole

Bluestockings

A Force to be Reckoned With

In the Family Way

title page for Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote

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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Jane Robinson 2018
Cover illustration Susan Burghart
Art direction by Sarah Whittaker/TW

Jane Robinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Bruce,

Heart and Mind

Missing Image
A blank poster issued for NUWSS meetings.

Acknowledgements

MANY OF THE people who feature in this book were not thought important enough to record in official chronicles of the fight for the vote, or were too modest to imagine anyone being interested in who they were. It has not always been possible to acknowledge those individuals by name. There is nothing I can do about that except wait for serendipitous discoveries from readers. What I can do is acknowledge the support I have had in bringing their stories to light. Information, time, family histories, expertise, research tips, encouragement and inspiration have all been offered to me with generosity and enthusiasm, and I am enormously grateful.

Particular thanks must go to archivists and staff at the following cities, counties, museums and places of learning: Angus; Ashburne Hall at the University of Manchester; Birmingham; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library at Boston Spa and in London; Cambridge University Library; Cambridgeshire; Cheshire; Columbia University, New York (Rare Book and Manuscript Library); Cornwall; Cumbria; Duke University, North Carolina (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library); East Sussex; Elizabeth Roberts’ Working Class Oral History Archive, Regional Heritage Centre, Lancaster University; Essex; Girton College, Cambridge; Guernsey; Houses of Parliament; Huddersfield (Kirklees); Ipswich; Lancashire; University of Leeds; Museum of London; The National Archives; Newnham College, Cambridge; Nottinghamshire; Oldham; Orkney; Portsmouth; Royal Albert Hall; Royal College of Physicians; Scotland at Edinburgh; Somerville College, Oxford; Southampton; Teesside; Walsall; Wolverhampton; and LSE library staff for access to The Women’s Library collection.

Extracts detailed in my notes and references are reprinted courtesy of Birmingham Archives and Heritage; the Bodleian Library; Cambridgeshire Archives; Cornwall Record Office; Elizabeth Crawford with Francis Boutle Publishers and Routledge; Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle; Essex Record Office; Island Archives, Guernsey (Tooley Collection); Lancashire Archives; Museum of London Suffragette Collections; The National Archives; Newnham College, Cambridge; Nottinghamshire Archives; Oldham Local Studies and Archives; Parliamentary Archives; Portsmouth Library and Archive Service, Portsmouth City Council; David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Baskin Collection), Duke University, North Carolina; by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford; Suffolk Record Office; West Yorkshire Archive Service, Kirklees; and Wolverhampton City Archives. While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, the publishers would be pleased to hear from any not here acknowledged.

So many people have contributed to the book, one way or another, including Barbara Andrew, Kath Ashcroft, Neil Ashcroft, Peter Barratt, Lisa Baskin, Michael Blackamore, Anne Blunt, Kathleen Boet, Liz Carter, Rev. Colin Cartwright, Simon Colbeck, Beverley Cook, Elizabeth Crawford, Joe Davies, Minty and Binks Day, Dr Anne Dingsdale, Anne Blessley Evans, Roddy Greig, Sheila Griffiths, Catherine Harkin, Helen Howell, Anne Hughes, Victoria Iglikowski, Jess Jenkins, Jenny Kendall-Tobias, Dr Simon Murray, C. Oates, David Patrick, Lucy Pollard, Neil Preston, Alastair and Duncan Rabagliati, Josette Reeves, Stephen Robertson, Ruth Rowling, Caroline Rutter, Caroline Schimmel, Deborah Scriven, Diana Spence, Pat Stevens, Margaret Stewart, Dr Mari Takayanagi, Melanie Unwin, Brenda Updegraff, Valerie Warrior, Marie-France Weiner, Richard White, Catherine Wood and Neil Worthington. I should have got absolutely nowhere without them.

There is always a danger of getting carried away with acknowledgements: I feel like a best-supported actress flailing her arms in the spotlight and anxious not to leave anyone out. If I have neglected to name those I should have named, I apologize. And if I have made factual mistakes, it is my fault and no one else’s. Before I am tempted to put on a sparkly dress, look for the kindest camera-angle and start sobbing with gratitude, I must just thank Dr Anne Manuel, Kate O’Donnell, Sue Purver and Matthew Roper, my colleagues at Somerville College, Oxford, who have been forced to listen to the book’s progress week by week over morning coffee and biscuits; my peerless agent Veronique Baxter at David Higham Associates and editor Susanna Wadeson at Transworld; and finally Richard, Ed and Bruce, who are my heroes.

Introduction

Status incompatible with gender

THIS IS A book about ordinary people doing extraordinary things for the sake of democracy. At its heart is one of the most inspiring and neglected episodes in British history: a six-week protest march undertaken just before the First World War by thousands of suffragists, or non-militant supporters of votes for women, which changed their world and ours. They called it the Great Pilgrimage.

Mention ‘votes for women’ to most people and a succession of stock images inevitably leaps to mind. In a haze of green, white and violet, a group of determined-looking Edwardian women strides towards us wearing sashes and top-heavy hats or the aprons and clogs of the factory floor. They carry placards – ‘Who Would be Free Must Strike the Blow’ – or bricks; a few of them are being manhandled by policemen while the others raise their fists in protest. Ethel Smyth’s ‘March of the Women’ is playing in the background. Alternatively, we see a young prisoner with wild eyes and loose hair, strapped down in her cell and being forcibly fed through a tube, or Emily Wilding Davison lying on the Epsom turf with her broken head wrapped in newspaper. 


Ah yes, we say. Votes for women? It’s all about the suffragettes.

It is more complicated than that. Firstly, not all suffragettes – militant campaigners, in other words – were the glorious or tragic heroines we imagine them today. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the press and cartoonists caricatured them as lunatic harridans. One of them wryly described her own species in a suffragette journal: ‘a gaunt, unprepossessing female of uncertain age, with a raucous voice and a truculent demeanour, who invariably seems to wear elastic-sided boots and to carry a big “gampy” umbrella which she uses as occasion demands either to brandish ferociously by way of emphasising her arguments, or to belabour any unfortunate member of the opposite sex who happens to displease her.’1 The ‘gampy’ reference is to Charles Dickens’s grotesque and laughable anti-heroine in Martin Chuzzlewit, Nurse Sarah Gamp, who was rarely seen without her battered brolly.

Being a suffragette did not necessarily mean that you were an extremist, or even a rebel. Victoria Liddiard was a proud follower of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, but she would never have dreamed of going on hunger strike, because her mother said she mustn’t. Her colleague Grace Roe was appalled at the bra-burning antics of women’s libbers in the 1960s. She considered first-wave feminism – the fight for the vote – to be a spiritual campaign. This did not preclude violence, but did at least lend it the gloss of evangelism. According to her, it was simply bad taste to show off.2

Secondly, and much more importantly, this movement was not all about the suffragettes. They played a vital part and, as we shall discover, some lost their health, families, even their lives in defence of their beliefs. But they were a minority, the ones who caught the headlines. Their confrontational approach distracted public attention from the imaginative and quietly courageous work done by tens of thousands of others across Britain, dressed not in amethyst and emerald but in their own uniform of berry-red and leaf-green; not singing Ethel’s anthem about battle and strife but Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ instead. They were the suffragists, who were just as determined about emancipation as their suffragette sisters, but more persuasive.

Some say victory might have been won much sooner had it not been for the militants, and if someone in your family fought for the vote, they are far more likely to have been a ‘’gist’ than a ‘’gette’. Many men campaigned for women’s suffrage too, and plenty of women opposed it. So as well as being a people’s history, based on contemporary first-hand and largely unpublished accounts, this – like all my books – is also an exercise in shattering stereotypes.

Recently I met a retired academic who told me a story. In the early 1990s she moved house, which meant registering with a new doctor. She went along to the surgery and provided her details to the receptionist, who entered them straight into the practice’s shiny new computer. When my friend gave her title – Professor So-and-so – the computer stopped in its tracks. Up flashed a message on the screen: ‘status incompatible with gender’.

My friend sighed in exasperation. She had hoped the ‘but only men do that!’ response to her job was history. There were very few no-go areas for women, in theory at least, when her GP’s computer said ‘no’ at the end of the twentieth century, and there are even fewer now. But in her mother’s day the story was different. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth, women were defined by low expectation and limited opportunity. Traditionally they acquiesced while the powerful debated; looked down while the educated scanned the horizon; did what they were told. Without a vote, they had neither the influence nor the authority to challenge the domestic stereotype. They were voiceless; locked out of the system, like my friend.

The campaign to change all that began in earnest in 1866, when Parliament received a massed women’s petition demanding political enfranchisement. It continued after the first (few) women voted in a General Election in 1918, until universal suffrage was achieved at last in 1928. During the turbulent years between, it was not the cartoon characters of popular history who turned the world upside down, but our own families: our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-aunts and their male friends. Some shouted and were angry, but most of them spoke with grace, infectious good humour, and utter conviction.

Theirs are the voices you are about to hear.

An anti-suffrage ‘sandwich man’ joins a deputation in 1910
An anti-suffrage ‘sandwich man’ joins a deputation in 1910.

Suffrage Organizations

Main organizations

MOST SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGNERS belonged to one, or sometimes both, of these two organizations:

NUWSS – National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1896–1918) The non-militant or ‘constitutionalist’ NUWSS was set up after a conference in 1896 to consider amalgamating a growing number of separate women’s suffrage societies around the country. Its leader was Millicent Fawcett. Members of the NUWSS were suffragists, not suffragettes; that is, they believed in the power of peaceful demonstration and persuasion rather than in forcing the issue by violence. The majority of campaigners for votes for women were members of the NUWSS; by 1914 there were six hundred branches with tens of thousands of members and an annual expenditure exceeding £45,000. Constituent societies were arranged into nineteen geographical federations with a central office in London. Members took part in some of the most spectacular processions of the age, and were responsible for the Great Pilgrimage of 1913 – a protest march in favour of votes for women and against militancy – which was arguably the single most influential event in the fight for the vote.

WSPU – Women’s Social and Political Union (1903–17) Emmeline Pankhurst was a disaffected suffragist when she set up the WSPU in Manchester, angered by the campaign’s forty-year history of what she considered to be fruitless agitation for the vote. It was originally designed to be a ginger-group within the Independent Labour Party, but soon developed into a society in its own right. The organization’s headquarters moved to London in 1906, where its members were christened ‘suffragettes’ by a journalist on the Daily Mail. Inspired by the violence of past campaigns for men’s suffrage, the suffragettes turned to militancy to counter the perceived complacency of the NUWSS and to force the government’s hand. Over one thousand were jailed, not as political prisoners but as common criminals; many went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed. Despite this, and various high-profile personality clashes, few lost their commitment to the Cause. Although the WSPU was a smaller organization than the NUWSS in terms of membership, branches and revenue, its members remain icons of the campaign for the vote and their slogan, ‘Deeds, not Words’, is one of the most enduring in British politics.

Other major pro- and anti-suffrage organizations

Langham Place Group (1857–66) Founded by dissenters Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and her friend Bessie Rayner Parkes, this largely middle-class organization campaigned on several fronts for an improvement in the lot of women. Members lobbied for political enfranchisement together with access to higher education and better employment opportunities, legal rights and working conditions. They helped make Victorian feminism respectable. Running the group’s activities gave invaluable experience to those members who later became officers of women’s suffrage societies.

MLWS – Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (1907–18) Though largely opposed to direct action, members of this organization supported the militant suffragettes of the WSPU as well as the NUWSS and the WFL. Its members – who belonged to all political parties and none – concentrated on propaganda, public protest and lobbying.

MPU – Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement (1910–c.1918) Victor Duval, whose wife was a suffragette, founded the militant MPU as a counterpart to the WSPU, which was exclusively for women. Several of the first members, dubbed male suffragettes, belonged formerly to the non-militant MLWS. Branches soon spread from London throughout the country. Activist and hunger striker Hugh Franklin was an organizer and Henry Nevinson a committee chairman.

NLOWS – National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (1910–18) This was the flagship organization of the anti-suffrage campaign. It developed from two earlier groups, the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League and the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, both of which were founded in 1908. The NLOWS had a high-profile executive, including the best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, Lords Curzon and Cromer, and fashionable medical man Sir Almroth Wright. They based their opposition to female enfranchisement on the grounds that it would degrade Britain’s imperial power, its constitution and political system, its national safety, family harmony, and the feminine charms of its womenfolk. Ladies were not considered fit to vote because of their innately sentimental nature and because menstruation was deemed to render them physically and mentally incapable for at least a week a month.

NUSEC – National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (1919–28) After partial enfranchisement was won in 1918, the NUWSS changed its name to this under the leadership of Eleanor Rathbone and campaigned for universal suffrage, eventually achieved in 1928.

SWH – Scottish Women’s Hospitals (1914–19) This medical unit was founded by suffragist Dr Elsie Inglis on the outbreak of the Great War, and supported by NUWSS fundraising. Medical staff at Scottish Women’s Hospitals in France, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Corsica and Russia were all women (though not all Scottish). Most of them were also NUWSS members, although some were suffragettes. Conditions were terrible – several SWH workers lost their lives – and the women’s experience of field medicine was negligible, yet these units were among the most progressive, efficient and successful of all field hospitals during the war.

WFL – Women’s Freedom League (1907–61) This group was created by three dissident WSPU members, Charlotte Despard, Teresa Billington-Greig and Edith How Martyn, who felt unable to support the Pankhurst regime after 1907. They – and those who defected with them – disagreed with Emmeline Pankhurst’s growing opposition to the Labour Party, her autocratic mien and the increasing violence of WSPU protests. The WFL still termed itself a militant organization, but for its members militancy meant disruption and civil disobedience, demonstrated by the Census boycott of 1911. Like the Langham Place Group, the WFL declared an intention to campaign beyond political enfranchisement. It was the longest-running of all women’s suffrage organizations.

Women’s Franchise League (1889–97) Richard Pankhurst and his wife Emmeline were both members of this short-lived group, formed ‘to establish for all women equal civil and political rights with men’ in opposition to those suffrage campaigners who thought that married women should be excluded from the franchise. It was dissolved on the creation of the NUWSS in 1897.

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1. The NUWSS logo, suggesting the Tree of Life – or perhaps the Tree of Knowledge.
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2. The frippery of the female mind as depicted in an early-twentieth-century anti-suffrage postcard.
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3. A riposte published by suffrage campaigners, showing the inexorability of political change.
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4. ‘A woman’s place is in the home.’ When she leaves for the polling booth, domestic ruin will ensue.
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5. Bertha Newcombe’s unlikely painting of Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett delivering the 1866 petition to John Stuart Mill.
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6. This American envelope was kept by Selina Cooper as a reminder of her days as a grassroots suffrage campaigner.
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7. The NUWSS issued maps detailing each route of the Great Pilgrimage. The Watling Street route was one of the longest.
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8. An enamelled badge in ‘the colours’, worn by members of the NUWSS.
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9. Medals were awarded to those members of the WSPU who were imprisoned, with bars and a medallion for hunger strikers.
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10. This magnificently embroidered banner is the one shown in the photograph here, proudly carried by Cambridge alumnae on the Pilgrimage.
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11. Vera Chute Collum leads the pilgrims from Oxford towards Thame. Note the elderly couple in the fourth row.
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12. Eda Sharples (left) and Marjory Lees (right) are helped with the washing-up outside the Ark.
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13. A local newspaper published this photograph of smiling pilgrims marching through the Lake District with heads held high.
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14. Suffragists – including men – from the north-west of England and their banners. This photograph is in the collection of Birkenhead pilgrim Alice New.

1

BREAD AND ROSES

1913

It is more important that a woman should possess a voter than a vote.1

MARJORY LEES WAS off duty. Some of the others had cut along an alleyway leading from the recreation ground to the market place to hold another open-air meeting, but Marjory, Milly Field, Eda Sharples and Mary Siddall had done more than their bit yesterday and were stood down. It was a peaceful Monday evening in July 1913. The view of the Chiltern Hills was much gentler than the Lancashire fell Marjory and her friends were used to; the air was soft, dusk was drawing in, and after two weeks on the road the women felt ready for a rest.

They had left Oxford at 9.30 that morning in a strange procession of around seventy women, many of whom were unfashionably tanned, some carrying slightly grubby banners, several on bicycles and one even riding astride a horse and shockingly dressed in khaki trousers. A few men marched with them, including an elderly fellow who had walked all the way from Carlisle and a handful of Oxford undergraduates so entranced by this curious company of women that they had decided, there and then, to go with them to London. One of the lads was six foot seven inches tall: a useful attribute when scanning the crowds for trouble in the Badlands of the Home Counties.

Everyone paused at Headington, a suburb of Oxford, for a group photograph to be taken with an elderly lady who – it was said – had signed that famous suffrage petition to Parliament way back in 1866. They arrived at the village of Wheatley, five miles down the road, at noon. The scheduled luncheon at the Merry Bells did not go entirely to plan: when the innkeeper saw how many of them there were he blanched. He had only seven cutlets and a few hardboiled eggs available. It was a little like the parable of the loaves and fishes but without the happy ending. He refused to cook them anything else, so many went hungry. But they were used to that by now, and at least they weren’t chased off the premises or pelted with stinking, rotten potatoes.

The vicar’s wife at the next village tried her best, but the open-air tea she had prepared didn’t quite stretch far enough either. Still, she was apparently a doctor as well as a clergy wife and drove her own motor car. That was inspirational enough, without tackling mass catering too.

Now they had arrived at Thame, Marjory could feel herself relaxing. This was a lovely spot. She and her friends sat mending their increasingly tattered linen and giggling about a picnic near Banbury a couple of days ago when Mrs Fletcher ate so much toasted cheese that her deckchair collapsed; then someone dropped a plate of cakes on people’s heads while trying to negotiate the steps of the Ark – their nickname for the caravan that had been their home since leaving Oldham – and Annie Davies sat on her hat, after warning everyone else not to, and flattened it.

The weather was so fine at Thame that the groom, Scholes, pitched a tent on the recreation ground for Miss Field and Miss Sharples before leaving for a local inn with the horses, so they had no need to cram themselves into the Ark tonight with Marjory and Mrs Siddall. It was eight o’clock. They could hear the faint sounds of people singing (not very well) and high-voiced rhetoric floating across from the town centre: all was well.

Marjory Lees (far right) with the Ark and other caravans in Thame.
Marjory Lees (far right) with the Ark and other caravans in Thame.

There were three wooden caravans parked in Thame that night. Two belonged to the Oldham contingent – the Ark, drawn by a horse called Noah, and the Sandwich, drawn by Ham – and the third to a group from Birkenhead, pulled along by Polly. The Ark’s comforts were limited: the bunks were surrounded by tins of food, boxes of pamphlets, a change of clothes for everyone, spare hats (luckily), countless jars of marmalade, crockery, washing basins, books and fold-up furniture. Given the space available, it was a relief that two of the friends would be sleeping outside. The women bade one another goodnight and were just beginning to get undressed when the tone of the music and speeches they had been half aware of in the background began to change. They heard jeering and shouting, women screaming and someone blaring a hunting horn, over and over. The noise grew louder. By now it was dark. Two voices approached the tent: a couple of breathless policemen had hurried from the market place to warn the women that trouble was on its way. The meeting had broken up in chaos and a gang of hooligans was making for the recreation ground.

Milly and Eda immediately crept out of the tent and into the Ark. Marjory snuffed out the candles, barred the door of the caravan and barricaded the windows with cushions. The clamour of the crowd hooting and shouting obscenities swelled terrifyingly as the four women pushed themselves as far to the back of the vehicle as they could and tried to sit perfectly still. It was difficult to know how many men were outside; certainly over a hundred. The noise went on for about twenty minutes (though to Marjory it seemed much longer) and then began to die away. But the women became aware of different sounds now: the muttered oaths of men tripping over guy-ropes and a weird, repeated rasping which they realized with horror was the sound of matches being struck. The policemen had retreated, overwhelmed; the Oxford undergraduates were nowhere to be seen; and Scholes was probably nursing a well-earned pint in the Spread Eagle.

Once alight, the Ark would burn like tinder.

ornament image

How did these four respectable women find themselves in an Oxfordshire field, in the last long summer before the war, in fear of their lives? They were far from home at a time when few people strayed from their own corner of the country and ladies rarely travelled without a gentleman, rather than a mere man like the groom Scholes, to part the waves for them. Even though they were out on the streets accosting people every day, just as common prostitutes did, they were hardly women of ill repute. They had abandoned their families and factories, professional commitments and domestic duties deliberately to put themselves in danger, but they were neither mad nor reckless. Yet here they were at an unknown town, cowering from a mob of ordinary British citizens threatening to kill them.

It was all for the sake of the vote. Marjory and her companions were suffragists; not suffragettes but suffragists. They were on a mission, taking part in one of the most successful and largest-scale public demonstrations this country has ever known, the ‘Great Pilgrimage’ of 1913. At a time when the unpopular militant campaign was at its height, this was an orderly and dignified crusade. It was a march that would change lives.

The Pilgrimage involved crowds of women and a number of men setting off from all across the country: from Newcastle and Carlisle in the north, Cromer and Yarmouth in the east, Bangor in Wales and Land’s End, Portsmouth, Brighton and Margate in the south. There were six major routes, with further routes feeding into these main ones like tributaries, all flowing to the capital city. Following carefully planned timetables, people joined in or dropped out along the way, everyone sparing as much time as possible from the ordinary round of daily life. Many stayed the whole course, travelling as much as three hundred miles between the middle of June and the end of July.

Most of the pilgrims walked. They were expected to cover up to twenty miles each day, day after day, in rain as well as full sun. One bemused journalist noted how strong and confident they looked: not like ladies at all. Others rode in caravans like the Ark, on horseback, in the occasional motor car or charabanc, and on bicycles. The cyclists were particularly useful in pedalling ahead to arrange meals or extra beds at the next destination.

They were a motley lot. Pilgrim Lady Rochdale commented afterwards that she had been privileged to meet all sorts of women on the road, from duchesses to fishwives. By the end of the march she considered herself indistinguishable from a fishwife herself: ‘hot and smelly’ and proud to be so. Some marched for themselves, to demonstrate their personal support for the enfranchisement of women; others represented sympathetic friends too busy or frail to take part, or commemorated strong-minded mothers and grandmothers. A young woman from Kent took her children with her, while a suffragist daughter accompanied her eighty-year-old father, and an elderly married couple lifted everyone’s spirits as they strode along together. ‘Are we fools or heroes?’ one of them asked a friend. ‘A little bit of both,’ he replied.

They were often cheered by onlookers. In Bangor two hundred quarrymen just off shift turned out to line the road, and pupils filed out of schools to wave flags and sing them bracing songs. One woman in Nottinghamshire, though she had neither the money nor the time to join them herself, saved up scraps of her family’s food to offer the pilgrims a tiny packed lunch as they passed by: that was her precious contribution to the fight for the vote. In Durham, when a crowd of snooty theological students who should have known better started making trouble, local coalminers hefted the young men away and dunked them in the River Wear.

But sometimes they went hungry, as at Wheatley when the local innkeeper refused to serve them or when no farmer would sell them food. Danger was never far away. Pilgrim Harriet Blessley from Portsmouth overheard a Guildford publican wishing that someone would ‘dig a big ’ole’ and bury these feckless women alive, what with their racing all over the country … Why were they not at home like good little wives, mending stockings or their husband’s shirts? When a banner carried from Keswick to London was rediscovered in a local archive recently, pellets of lead shot rolled out from its folds, presumably fired at the pilgrims by a furious onlooker mistaking them for militants or just looking for some easy entertainment.

The purpose of the Great Pilgrimage was peaceful. It was organized by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) to demonstrate to Parliament and the people how many ‘quiet, home-loving’ women of Great Britain wanted the vote. It was important that the pilgrims should be non-threatening and disciplined, so that people wouldn’t confuse them with the violent suffragettes; in this it was as much a march against militancy as it was for women’s rights. They wore a neat and serviceable skirt and coat in black, grey or navy blue (violet was strictly banned) with a white blouse, a simple hat in a matching colour with a traditional cockleshell badge, a sash and a threepenny rosette in the NUWSS colours of red, green and white. Optional extras were knapsacks in red oilskin edged in green and white, a printed band advertising the name of the route being taken – the Watling Street route, perhaps, or the Pilgrims’ Way in Kent – and, of course, a large umbrella.

The Pilgrimage was no mere show of solidarity. As though wearing out multiple pairs of boots in a month or rarely being able to wash properly were not enough, those taking part were expected to hold several meetings a day at which a resolution to persuade Parliament to enfranchise women was democratically put to the vote, with attendant speeches. It was not always possible to gauge what the level of public support was likely to be. On one occasion Marjory Lees’s contingent turned up at the appointed place and time with an audience no more numerous than a gaggle of rude little boys and a dog. ‘Mrs Fletcher spoke to the children about citizenship’ (they weren’t impressed), ‘and a kind lady gave everyone tea in her garden,’2 whether out of sympathy with the children or the suffragists is unclear.

Accidents were common, from traffic, recalcitrant horses fed up of towing caravans, stumbles into potholes or heavy mud. Some women’s health broke down, and worried relatives were occasionally dispatched to collect wayward wives or daughters and bring them home, having had their fun. The pilgrims’ most serious problem, however, stemmed from their supposed association with the unruly suffragettes. Anywhere they went they were likely to be kicked and trampled by crowds who assumed them to be arsonists and stone-throwers. To counter this, pilgrims’ banners, while still attempting to rouse support, were gracefully conciliatory, with elaborately embroidered slogans like ‘By Faith Not Force’, and ‘Better is Wisdom than Weapons of War’. Gertrude Jekyll’s design for Godalming’s banner was swathed in bountiful swags of silken garden flowers. The one from Keswick, targeted by a rifle, could hardly have been less provocative, saying simply ‘Keswick Urban District Council Prays for Women’s Suffrage’.

All pilgrims were encouraged to be unfailingly polite and tactful. When a woman in a Potteries village outside Stoke-on-Trent told Marjory she was a disgrace to her sex and ought to be ‘drownded’, Marjory cheerfully explained that this lady sounded suspiciously like a militant herself, ‘at which she had to laugh.’ Before they left the Potteries, the pilgrims were presented with new crockery to replace anything broken in attacks on their caravans, and with much good will. It was crucial to be ladylike at all times, both to belie the stock images of anyone campaigning for the vote (a hook-nosed harridan, a withered spinster or a battleaxe) and in the canny acknowledgement that men were as likely to support them out of chivalry as political conviction. This was possibly politically incorrect in feminist circles even then, but it worked. Harriet Blessley was presented with a fulsome bunch of sweet peas by an admirer in Kingston upon Thames, which would have been lovely had they not all been purple and white. She had to hide them away for fear of being taken (yet again) for a suffragette.

As well as the odd bouquet, pilgrims were regularly gifted addled eggs specially saved up by hostile shopkeepers and sold to protestors as ammunition, mouldy vegetables, dead rats, elderly herring, pebbles, rocks, cow pats, even bottles of hydrogen sulphide, a poisonous gas. Most of these were hurled at them as they tried to hold open-air meetings: the Pilgrimage was no picnic.

A vociferous anti-suffrage campaign ran parallel to the fight for women’s votes. Its supporters, nicknamed ‘antis’, were comparatively few in number and some of their tactics somewhat crass – employing men in top hats to wander about sporting sandwich-boards with ‘Women Do Not Want the Vote’ printed on them, for example – but at its head were some highly respected names, and no history of the suffrage movement would be complete without them. Queen Victoria’s splenetic attitude to enfranchising women is well known. As early as 1870 she declared herself ‘anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights,” with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.’3 For good measure, she added that Lady Amberley, a flamboyant and unconventional member of the suffrage campaign, ‘ought to get a good whipping.’

Gertrude Bell is celebrated as one of the bravest and most influential explorers of the Edwardian age, travelling alone through the empty quarters of the Middle East and eventually settling in Iraq as a political advisor to King Faisal. Yet she staunchly upheld her right not to be allowed to vote. Parliament, she said, was no place for ladies. Even more unlikely is the position of novelist Mrs Humphry Ward as president of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (NLOWS). She was a founder of Somerville College for women in Oxford, surely one of the most important institutions in the history of British feminism.

Her friend Lord Curzon was Viceroy of India between 1899 and 1905, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and perhaps the most ardent of the antis. In 1909 he published Fifteen Good Reasons Against the Grant of Female Suffrage, summing up the opposition’s arguments. Firstly, he said, political activity would take women away from their ‘proper sphere and highest duty’, which is motherhood. If we give women the vote their political opinions might differ from those of their husbands, which will ‘break up the harmony of the home.’ Women as a sex or class are not blessed with the ‘calmness of temperament or the balance of mind’ necessary to exercise a vote, nor have they any training in political judgement. Besides, there is no evidence that the large majority of women want the vote. Even if they did get it, their innate volatility would render it useless. ‘If the vote were granted,’ he pontificated, ‘it is probable that a very large number of women would not use it at all. But in emergencies or on occasions of national excitement, a large, and in the last resort, owing to the numerical majority of women, a preponderant force might suddenly be mobilised, the political effect of which would be wholly uncertain.’4 As a distinguished ornament of Empire, Curzon was gravely concerned that admitting women to the electorate would weaken Great Britain in the estimation of foreign powers and diminish its hold over India. And where would it end, this enfranchisement business? ‘The vote once given, it would be impossible to stop … Women would then demand the right of becoming M.P.s, Cabinet Ministers, Judges, &c. Nor could the demand be logically refused.’5 It was his opinion that no one should be allowed to make a law who is incapable of enforcing it, and as women cannot possibly become soldiers, sailors or policemen – the very thought! – they should not become law-makers either: ‘They are incapacitated from discharging the ultimate obligations of citizenship.’

With this last point he was getting to the nub of the matter. According to anti-suffragists, women were not only intellectually incapable of meaningful political activity; they were physiologically and emotionally a mess and this could be calamitous. Just as the eminent Dr Henry Maudsley claimed in 1874 that if women used their brains too much their wombs would wither,6 so Sir Almroth Wright wrote some forty years later that ‘no doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies … there is mixed up in the women’s movement much mental disorder.’7 According to Sir Almroth, peace would not ensue when a woman got the vote; on the contrary, it would be achieved only when she gave up, calmed down, accepted her ‘natural disabilities’ and stopped picking on men; when she ceased to resent the fact ‘that man cannot and does not wish to work side by side with her.’

In a diatribe that even at the time seemed extreme, Sir Almroth (another medical doctor, incidentally) went on to state that only ‘unfledged girls and the sexually embittered’8 were likely to be moved by arguments in favour of women’s suffrage; that women didn’t deserve the vote because they didn’t earn enough money; and that they only wanted it in the first place because they were (naturally) jealous of men. Then he pulled out his trump card: the world was fashioned by men and therefore men should have sole dominion over it. It wouldn’t be fair if women muscled in, now the job was done.

It is a mistake to think that everyone opposed to giving women a vote thought in the same terms as Sir Almroth Wright. The popular argument was that women had their proper sphere, the home, and that their strengths were more spiritual than political. They could and should exercise influence solely through bringing up the family in piety and economy, and supporting their menfolk in all things. Everyone knows that behind every successful man there stands a woman, after all, and it is better to possess a voter than a vote. Be satisfied, ladies, with that.

Nevertheless, there were plenty who agreed that women were somehow the common enemy of the electorate. A gentleman in Guernsey, Harold Augustus Tooley, wrote an unpublished essay in 1909 with the title The Militant Suffragette. His was not an unusual point of view. He called her ‘the man-woman or the woman-man’, a particular class of person who expressed a stubborn resistance to the laws of nature and the will of God. ‘It may be taken fairly for granted that the suffragette is a disappointed woman … She is a mistake that sooner or later will, by the laws of nature, be rectified.’9

Disappointed they certainly were. Not necessarily sexually disappointed, which was Tooley’s implication, but deeply frustrated by the calibre of arguments against suffrage. ‘Ought Women to be Abolished?’ asked a sardonic pamphlet published in response to Sir Almroth Wright’s invective:

Is she fit to live? Obviously on her merits (if she can be said to have any merits) she is not. I find that she is subject to periodically recurring phases of hypersensitiveness, unreasonableness, and loss of a sense of proportion. In fact she is mentally unbalanced for the greater part of her adult life, till she arrives at the period when she ought to be shut up. What can you do with a sex that is first unsound and then insane?10

Sir Almroth’s book, The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, was dismissively reviewed by suffragist Ethel Williams in the Common Cause, the organ of the NUWSS. She cheerfully confessed that reading it made her feel as though the cause of anti-suffrage was ‘such a very dead donkey’ it was ‘unseemly, if not an unsavoury task to kick it.’11 What both suffragettes and suffragists preferred to do was explain why women should have the vote, one group famously with deeds, not words, and the other with both. They declined to waste too much energy countering the likes of Lord Curzon and Sir Almroth Wright, taking their justifications to the heart of government instead.

A popular pro-suffrage argument centred on the improving moral influence of women: the very same argument used by the antis to dismiss the idea of enfranchisement. It went something like this. Parliament runs the country as though it were some hidebound bachelor establishment; without the input of women, men lack the checks and balances to create a just legislature. Much of that legislature should concern the treatment of women and children by men in law and in person. Think of the Custody of Infants Act, so fiercely argued by Caroline Norton in the 1830s; centuries of legislation denying women rights in divorce cases; the double standard of the Contagious Diseases Acts, subjecting any woman suspected of prostitution to medical examination and incarceration but ignoring the men who infected them. Shouldn’t women have a hand in shaping the moral and material reform of laws in which they have such a vested interest? Besides, women are habitually more temperate, more conscientious than men. They are by nature loving, gentle, sociable, modest and intuitive. Give them a chance to share those complementary qualities with men at the highest possible level, and to enshrine them in law.

These points were all valid, but rather abstract and a little wishy-washy. They are reminiscent of a letter written by a lady advising young emigrants how to conduct themselves with propriety in the immoral society of 1850s New Zealand. Always keep a mannequin of a lady ‘carefully draped’ in your sitting room, she suggested, ‘and behave before it as if it were your mother, or some other dignified lady’.12 It’s as though some women wanted the vote only in order to remind men of their mothers and embarrass them into playing nicely together.

A little more robust were the arguments based on logic. By 1913, women already had the vote in New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and in a dozen states of America. Chaos had not ensued, so why not try it in Britain? It was nonsensical that a farm labourer might have the franchise but not the female farmer who employed him. The best way to educate a woman about politics was to involve her; the best way to teach responsibility was to confer it. Historically, women had wielded political power with wisdom and acuity – medieval businesswomen, aristocratic matriarchs, queens – so the precedent was there. Even though Queen Victoria did not like the idea of ladies sullying themselves in the polling booth, in practice she was a consummate stateswoman. And if the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world anyway, why not dignify the nation’s mothers, sisters and daughters with a vote? Especially now that they were admitted to universities and medical schools.

In January 1913 a deputation of working women organized by the suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) appeared before the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and other members of Parliament to present the strongest case for women’s suffrage they could think of. Women had been at the heart of the manufacturing powerhouse driving the Empire forward since the Industrial Revolution. They frequently outnumbered men in factories, in the coalfields, in workshops, schools and now in hospitals, yet because they lacked political influence, in most cases their hours were longer and their pay lower. This was fundamentally unjust.

Miss Bonwick, the headmistress of a large school in London, was the first to appear before Lloyd George and his august, moustachioed panel. She explained that she earned two thirds of the salary commanded by the male teachers under her authority. Next came Sister Townsend, a night nurse who worked a seven-day, eighty-eight-hour week. She owned her own home and paid taxes, but had no vote. Nor a lunchbreak, she added. Not only would she improve her own working conditions if she could, she would introduce a nursing register so that the entire profession was regulated and reformed.

Mrs Wood worked in a sweatshop in the East End of London for 1s 3d a day, machining pinafores for which she had to provide her own cotton thread and source of light. The average wage for men at the time was £3 a week; hers was 9s. Mrs Bigwood was another East End worker whose sister, she said, was contemplating going on the streets to earn a living wage. ‘I am not here as a cat’s paw for the middle class,’ she assured Lloyd George, ‘I am here for the working classes. I think if you give us our votes we should get on much better. So do it at once. Be gentlemen.’13

Even though Alice Hawkins from Leicester was a member of a trade union for boot- and shoemakers, her wages were still lower than those of men doing the equivalent – or less – work. She had brought two sons into the world who were likely to get the vote before her; it was as though she couldn’t be trusted, she said, and that hurt. She took the lack of a vote personally. Mrs Ward Brown was a laundress. Ironers where she worked got tuppence for every dozen collars they pressed, or sixpence for 144 collars washed: ‘Gentlemen, think of that.’

Mrs King had travelled four hundred miles from Newhaven near Edinburgh to join the deputation (subsidized, like the others, by the WSPU – and with no guarantee of keeping her job once she returned). She was a fishwife. ‘Grant us the vote and let me take it home to Scotland,’ she pleaded. And so it went on, with contributions from a weaver, a pit-brow girl, a tailoress, a cotton-mill operative and a shop assistant. ‘We are absolutely helpless,’ said one of them. Suffragist Beatrice Chapman put it well when she wrote to her local paper in Kent:

Some people may be asking why the women of England are taking so much trouble to get the vote. Well, they do not ask for it as they would ask for a new hat, a Sunday dress or a piano to put in their front parlour. They do not want it as a trophy. They want it as an instrument of reform, and in nine cases out of ten they want it to make the home life of the working people better and easier and more decent. ‘Bread for all, and roses too.’14

2

SILENCE IS REQUESTED

Campaigning before 1903

Most of us who were married found that Votes for Women were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners.1

ONE OF THE most potent arguments for women’s suffrage was also the most consistent: people had been seeking it for centuries, asking politely, angrily, demanding or wheedling, singly and in crowds of solidarity. Historians like to date the orchestrated campaign for female enfranchisement back to the publication of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, but women were involved in activism long before that. Over the centuries, almost 16,500 petitions had been presented to Parliament before partial victory in 1918.2