The two months of the summer of 1913 which were spent with my daughter
in Paris were almost the last days of peace and rest I have been
destined since to enjoy. I spent the days, or some hours of them, in the
initial preparation of this volume, because it seemed to me that I had a
duty to perform in giving to the world my own plain statement of the
events which have led up to the women's revolution in England. Other
histories of the militant movement will undoubtedly be written; in times
to come when in all constitutional countries of the world, women's votes
will be as universally accepted as men's votes are now; when men and
women occupy the world of industry on equal terms, as co-workers rather
than as cut-throat competitors; when, in a word, all the dreadful and
criminal discriminations which exist now between the sexes are
abolished, as they must one day be abolished, the historian will be able
to sit down in leisurely fashion and do full justice to the strange
story of how the women of England took up arms against the blind and
obstinate Government of England and fought their way to political
freedom. I should like to live long enough to read such a history,
calmly considered, carefully analysed, conscientiously set forth. It
will be a better book to read than this one, written, as it were, in
camp between battles. But perhaps this one, hastily prepared as it has
been, will give the reader of the future a clearer impression of the
strenuousness and the desperation of the conflict, and also something of
the heretofore undreamed of courage and fighting strength of women, who,
having learned the joy of battle, lose all sense of fear and continue
their struggle up to and past the gates of death, never flinching at any
step of the way.
Every step since that meeting in October, 1912, when we definitely
declared war on the peace of England, has been beset with danger and
difficulty, often unexpected and undeclared. In October, 1913, I sailed
in the French liner, _La Provence_, for my third visit to the United
States. My intention was published in the public press of England,
France and America. No attempt at concealment of my purpose was made,
and in fact, my departure was witnessed by two men from Scotland Yard.
Some hints had reached my ears that an attempt would be made by the
Immigration Officers at the port of New York to exclude me as an
undesirable alien, but I gave little credit to these reports. American
friends wrote and cabled encouraging words, and so I passed my time
aboard ship quite peacefully, working part of the time, resting also
against the fatigue always attendant on a lecture tour.
[Illustration: MRS. PANKHURST AND CHRISTABEL IN THE GARDEN OF
CHRISTABEL'S HOME IN PARIS]
We came to anchor in the harbour of New York on October 26th, and there,
to my astonishment, the Immigration authorities notified me that I was
ordered to Ellis Island to appear before a Board of Special Inquiry. The
officers who served the order of detention did so with all courtesy,
even with a certain air of reluctance. They allowed my American
travelling companion, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, to accompany me to the
Island, but no one, not even the solicitor sent by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont
to defend me, was permitted to attend me before the Board of Special
Inquiry. I went before these three men quite alone, as many a poor,
friendless woman, without any of my resources, has had to appear. The
moment of my entrance to the room I knew that extraordinary means had
been employed against me, for on the desk behind which the Board sat I
saw a complete _dossier_ of my case in English legal papers. These
papers may have been supplied by Scotland Yard, or they may have been
supplied by the Government. I cannot tell, of course. They sufficed to
convince the Board of Special Inquiry that I was a person of doubtful
character, to say the least of it, and I was informed that I should have
to be detained until the higher authorities at Washington examined my
case. Everything was done to make me comfortable, the rooms of the
Commissioner of Immigration being turned over to me and my companion.
The very men who found me guilty of moral obloquy--something of which no
British jury has ever yet accused me--put themselves out in a number of
ways to make my detention agreeable. I was escorted all over the Island
and through the quarters assigned detained immigrants, whose right to
land in the United States is in question. The huge dining-rooms, the
spotless kitchens and the admirably varied bill of fare interested and
impressed me. Nothing like them exists in any English institution.
I remained at Ellis Island two and a half days, long enough for the
Commissioner of Immigration at Washington to take my case to the
President who instantly ordered my release. Whoever was responsible for
my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident.
My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for
England late in November with a very generous American contribution to
our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver
in person.
The night before the White Star liner _Majestic_ reached Plymouth a
wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had
decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very
dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came
to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually
so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in
the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the
steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment
or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in
speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a
fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly
under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched,
stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the
women called out to me: "The Cats are here, Mrs. Pankhurst! They're
close on you--" Their voices trailed away into the mist and we heard no
more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship's boy appeared on deck
and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his
office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and
next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that
I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from
Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a
sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship
anchored two miles out at sea.
Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the
infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up
and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up
the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a
Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car
was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and
Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not
unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from
the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and
kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only
because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at
Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a
welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following
my arrest, and the great sum of L15,000 was poured into the coffers of
militancy. This included the L4,500 which had been collected during my
American tour.
Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to
confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to
open, returning to attend a W. S. P. U. meeting on the day before my
license expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I
travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two
detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making
tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the
window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest.
We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of
attack.
The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the
part of the police of the body guard of women, just then organised for
the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the
police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women
who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly
had it on this occasion, for knowing that the body guard was waiting at
Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the
arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not
a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried
across the arrival platform between a double line of police and
detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within
by two plain clothes men and a wardress, and without by three more
policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxi-cabs filled with plain
clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not
to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police
department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points
ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.
Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the
reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion.
When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to
tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined,
saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full
responsibility for my condition. "I refuse to be examined by you or any
prison doctor," I declared, "and I do this as a protest against my
sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a
prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have
withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to
recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it
impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have
imposed upon me."
Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so
carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a
concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed
on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening
my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I
was kept in prison until the following Wednesday morning. During all
that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep
strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all
sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor,
resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. "You
are not a doctor," I told the man. "You are a Government torturer, and
all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to
die." The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and
looked extremely unhappy. "I suppose you do think that," he mumbled.
On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I
presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as
much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To
the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave
prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him
that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but
should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from
exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the
narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following
morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and
fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor
ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had
been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the coldness of the
Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days
before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.
These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known
that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon
as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke
out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Devenport, and an acre and a
half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to
the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the
neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of the
_Suffragette_ and to another railing two cards, on one of which was
written a message to the Government: "How dare you arrest Mrs. Pankhurst
and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law to go free?" The second
card bore the words: "Our reply to the torture of Mrs. Pankhurst, and
her cowardly arrest at Plymouth."
Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine
residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St.
Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many
pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In
churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by
interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners
who were suffering for conscience' sake. The reader no doubt has heard
of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking
women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating
riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what
does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my
arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at
Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: "God save
Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her,
spare those who suffer for conscience' sake. Hear us when we pray to
Thee." They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man,
who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian
intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before
the vergers came.
Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most
barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In
other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been
allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some
clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these
prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have
voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has
undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for
women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During
the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities,
the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some
of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury,
refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the
answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal
residence until surrender followed--as it invariably did.
As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited
by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself
should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the
proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see
them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of
his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of
the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the
Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of
torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak
of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of
the iniquity which the Bishop of London was manoeuvred by the
Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself
by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more
because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote
in the _Suffragette_, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as
telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a
cinder in her eye. "The principle," declared Miss Richardson, "is the
same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of
the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not
to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another
reason--a moral reason--for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as
well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would
give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One's whole nature
is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable."
I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked
in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps
heard of Suffragette "insults" to King George and Queen Mary, and it is
but just that he should hear a direct account of how these "insults" are
offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to
the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament,
and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter
occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by
one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.
We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the king because
we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his
Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government,
we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence
in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the
Monarch. Late in December, 1913, while I was in prison for the second
time since my return to England, a great gala performance was given at
Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d'Arc of Raymond Roze. The
King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was
expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of
the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the
year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was
occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had
managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and
barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the
orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the
aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the
impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women
were to-day fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human
liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured
and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church,
and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established
Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army
of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King's
authority.
The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and
amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was
finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the
house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been
sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained
suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below. It was fully
three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers
could go on with the opera.
The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to
make a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early in
January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would
personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed
with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women
volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest
against three things--the continued disfranchisement of women; the
forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were
fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the
Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing
perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who
openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely
of attacking property, but of destroying human life.
I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him "the respectful and loyal
request of the Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will
give audience to a deputation of women." The letter went on: "The
deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the
Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous
industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and
guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women's
equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.
"The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the
mediaeval and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty's
Ministers are seeking to repress women's revolt against the deprivation
of citizen rights--a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and
purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride
of the British race.
"We have been told by the unthinking--by those who are heedless of the
constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an
audience of Your Majesty in person--that our conversation should be with
Your Majesty's Ministers.
"We repudiate this suggestion. In the first place, it would not only be
repugnant to our womanly sense of dignity, but it would be absurd and
futile for us to interview the very men against whom we bring the
accusations of betraying the Women's Cause and torturing those who fight
for that Cause.
"In the second place, we will not be referred to, and we will not
recognise the authority of men who, in our eyes, have no legal or
constitutional standing in the matter, because we have not been
consulted as to their election to Parliament nor as to their appointment
as Ministers of the Crown."
I then cited as a precedent in support of our claim to be heard by the
King in person, the case of the Deputation of Irish Catholics, which, in
the year 1793, was received by King George III in person.
I further said:
"Our right as women to be heard and to be aided by Your Majesty is far
stronger than any such right possessed by men, because it is based upon
our lack of every other constitutional means of securing the redress of
our grievances. We have no power to vote for Members of Parliament, and
therefore for us there is no House of Commons. We have no voice in the
House of Lords. But we have a King, and to him we make our appeal.
"Constitutionally speaking, we are, as voteless women, living in the
time when the power of the Monarch was unlimited. In that old time,
which is passed for men though not for women, men who were oppressed had
recourse to the King--the source of power, of justice, and of reform.
"Precisely in the same way we now claim the right to come to the foot of
the Throne and to make of the King in person our demand for the redress
of the political grievance which we cannot, and will not, any longer
tolerate.
"Because women are voteless, there are in our midst to-day sweated
workers, white slaves, outraged children, and innocent mothers and their
babes stricken by horrible disease. It is for the sake and in the cause
of these unhappy members of our sex, that we ask of Your Majesty the
audience that we are confident will be granted to us."
It was some days before we had the answer to this letter, and in the
meantime some uncommonly stirring and painful occurrences attracted the
public attention.