How the suffragettes conducted the first terrorist campaign in twentieth-century Britain

Shortly before the First World War, a wave of bomb attacks took place in Britain, coordinated and carried out by an organisation determined to restrict the franchise to property-owners

History has been kind to the suffragettes. Over a century after their activities ended, they are almost universally regarded as having been heroic fighters for a noble and just cause. Hunger strikes, chaining themselves to railings, smashing windows, dying under the hooves of the King’s horse at Epsom; these are the images which we associate with the suffragettes. There was another side to their struggle though and it is one which has been almost wholly forgotten. In addition to their legitimate political activity and more boisterous protests, they also conducted a widespread and sustained bombing campaign against targets throughout the entire country. These included the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, theatres in Dublin and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh; as well as other places as varied and disparate as the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, the Glasgow Botanic Gardens and a barracks in Leeds. The bombings reached a climax in the summer of 1914 with explosions at Westminster Abbey in London, Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and a cathedral in Ireland. The combination of high explosive bombs, incendiary devices and letter bombs used by the Suffragettes provided the pattern for the IRA campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the first terrorist bomb to explode in what is now Northern Ireland in the twentieth century, at Lisburn’s Christ Church Cathedral, was detonated not by the IRA, but by the Suffragettes in August, 1914.

     Criticising the suffragettes makes many people feel uncomfortable.  They were so obviously justified in their anger at being deprived of the vote, that it may seem a little small-minded, a hundred years later, to be quibbling about the finer details of their methods. After all, the predominant image which we have today of the suffragettes is of dedicated women suffering and even being prepared to die for a principle in which they believed, a principle which is today almost universally accepted; that men and women should have equal rights in a democratic society.

      At the heart of the popularly accepted narrative about the suffragettes lie two intertwined, and wholly false, ideas. The first is that the suffragettes were instrumental in helping British women to gain the vote. The second is that they did this by unconventional, but almost entirely non-violent means. The myth runs that the Pankhursts and their acolyte, Emily Davison, endured hardship and pain themselves in order to draw attention to the injustices of the society in which they lived. They are Victorian women who triumphed in the end by maintaining their femininity and ensuring that it was they, rather than their opponents, who suffered. They sacrificed themselves for the greater good. True, they and some of their more enthusiastic followers might have broken a few windows or trashed pillar boxes, but this was pretty harmless stuff; they wouldn’t have dreamt of hurting anybody. When we think of them, it is usually as victims, rather than aggressors.

     Open any book mentioning the suffragettes or visit a museum with a display about them and you are sure to encounter at least two images which epitomise how we view these women today. The first shows a hunger striker being force fed and the second, a lifeless woman in the mouth of a cruel animal. There is no doubt that these are  brilliant pieces of political propaganda; both posters intended to show women as helpless, cruelly mistreated creatures. These are women to whom things are done.  

      The general feeling now is that although these women may have shouted, thrown things, damaged letter-boxes and made a nuisance of themselves, it was they themselves who suffered, they who were the objects of violence and oppression.  It was the police who were violent towards them, the prison authorities who tortured them by force-feeding, the rough crowds of men who taunted and sometimes manhandled them at their public rallies and the government who played cat and mouse with them.

      This archetype of woman as suffering martyr is appealing, in a mawkish and sentimental way, with its selfless heroines who never need to resort to the masculine devices of violence and aggression to get their way; a harmless enough fairy tale, as long as we bear in mind that it bears little or no relation to the truth. The reality is very different. Not only were the suffragettes representatives of a profoundly undemocratic and arguably proto-fascist terrorist organisation, it is very likely that their actions delayed, rather than hastened, votes for women.

      That the suffragettes were prepared not only to suffer themselves, but also to inflict suffering upon others, seems a strange idea, running counter to all that we think we know about the campaign for women’s votes. So deeply embedded in the national psyche is the notion of suffragettes as tireless campaigners and sometimes selfless martyrs, so powerful is the mythology surrounding them, that one feels instinctively that they could not really be described as “terrorists“. This is certainly the view of almost every modern author who mentions the suffragettes. Andrew Marr, for instance, writing in The Making of Modern Britain, mentions one relatively innocuous bomb attack, upon an unoccupied house belonging to Lloyd George, and then on the next line claims that the suffragettes, “were not terrorists in any serious modern sense.”

     It would be interesting to know what people in London’s West End would have made of the above assertion, if they were among those who happened to be in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square on April 5th, 1914. At half past ten that evening, a bomb planted by the suffragettes in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields exploded, blowing out the windows and showering passers-by with broken glass. The explosion started a fire inside the church and hundreds of people soon flocked to the scene, many voicing their anger at the suffragettes who had carried out this attack.  

     The best way to consider the true nature of suffragette activity in the years leading up to World War I is to take a few random incidents from that time, transplant them from Edwardian Britain to the present day and then see what we would think of them now.

     Imagine for a moment that the leader of a militant group has been jailed. Comrades on the outside decide to mount a protest against the imprisonment by placing two powerful charges of dynamite against the wall of the prison in London where their leader is being held and then detonating them without warning. The only damage to the prison is the partial demolition of a surrounding wall, but nearby houses have all their windows blown out. Jagged shards of broken glass narrowly miss two young children, asleep in their beds. Is this terrorism?

      Or consider this; a bomb is planted in an empty train which is standing beside a busy railway line. It explodes as another train is passing. The force of the explosion blows apart the carriage in which the bomb had been placed and a beam of wood is hurled into the cab of the other train, nearly killing the driver. Is this terrorism?

     A final example should be enough to make the point. Petrol is splashed around the carpets and curtains of a crowded theatre and set alight. At the same time, a bomb is detonated inside the building. Fortunately, the fires are extinguished before they get too great a hold; disaster is averted, but it is a close thing. Terrorism?

     These were not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated campaign of bombings and arson designed to put pressure on the government in Westminster. Such attacks were instigated by the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members were commonly known as the suffragettes.  Paid workers from the organisation were involved in acquiring explosives, transporting them about the country and constructing bombs.  It is hard to know what this could possibly be called, other than terrorism.

     Looking at the definition of terrorism currently used by the British government might help us decide how to describe the activities of the suffragettes. According to this definition, taken from the Terrorism Act 2000, terrorism is;

     The use or threat of action designed to influence the government…to

     intimidate the public or a section of the public; made for the purpose of

     advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause

     and involving serious violence against a person, serious damage to 

     property, a threat to a person‘s life, or a serious risk to the health or safety

     of the public.

     This seems straightforward enough and if you count the planting of bombs in public places, attempts to sabotage the water supply to cities and the destruction by fire and explosives of various churches, railway stations and houses as being serious violence against property undertaken to advance a political course of action; then you will probably accept that some suffragettes were terrorists. When we discover that Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragettes, was convicted at the Old Bailey of inciting others to explode a bomb at the house of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she was in fact the leader of a terrorist group.

      The real question to ask is why the first organised terrorist campaign in twentieth century Britain seems to have been airbrushed from history. From attacks on the transport infrastructure and water supply, to the explosion of a bomb at a public hall in Manchester, from letter bombs to politicians and judges, to the attempt to flood a valley in the Midlands; this was a ruthless and determined strategy, designed to force political change by the constant threat of violence.  Books on the suffragettes invariably skim over this aspect of the movement, usually making only brief mention of fires in pillar boxes and the breaking of windows. We read about the slashing of a painting in the National Gallery, but know  nothing about the planting there of a  bomb; we have all read  about Emily Davison falling beneath the King’s horse at Epsom, not everybody knows that she initiated a campaign of arson and  had earlier that year set off the first terrorist bomb to be exploded in England in the twentieth century.

      This ignorance of the true nature of suffragette activity permeates our society. Danny Boyle, the man who choreographed the historical pageant at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, said that the entire thing was inspired by Emily Davison. It is probably fair to say that hardly any of the twenty five million or so people in this country, as well as the hundreds of millions in other parts of the world,  who watched this spectacular exhibition knew  that the aim was, in part, to glorify the life and death of a suicidal terrorist bomber!

      The result of such ignorance is  that we are left with a bowdlerised version of history, with many of the suffragettes’ activities completely hidden from view. This is a strange state of affairs and it almost seems that every historian in the country is determined to cover up as much as possible when it comes to the fight for female emancipation in this country.

      Some readers might have been taken aback to see the suffragettes described above as an undemocratic and possibly proto-fascist group. This is because just as many of their actions have now been conveniently forgotten, so too has the essential nature of their organisation and the details of what they were actually fighting for. For instance, the Women’s Social and Political Union, whom we generally know today by the nickname of “suffragettes“, were certainly not hoping to see the vote given to all women. In their literature, they specifically denied that this was their intention and made it clear that they only wanted female ratepayers, property owners and university graduates to be given the right to vote. They were not fighting so  that working class women should be included in the franchise. Such views bring into question the extent to which we can accept that the suffragettes were fighting for democracy, at least  as we think of it today. After all, what would we think of a modern, British political movement  whose stated aim was to restrict voting to men and women who owned their own homes or were well educated? Would we think of this as a group fighting for democracy?

         One of the commonest, and strangest, misconceptions about the suffragettes is that they were struggling for the right of all women in the United Kingdom to be able to vote in parliamentary elections. This was not at all what they wanted. In fact, as they made very clear in all the booklets, newspapers and pamphlets which they published, they wanted the vote to be limited only to middle and upper-class women; those who owned property, paid rates or who had attended university. Gaining the vote for working class women was never their intention. Some socialists at the time, who were working to gain the vote for every adult in the United Kingdom, regardless of gender or social class, remarked that the suffragette slogan should have been not, “Votes for Women”, but rather, “Votes for Ladies”!

     In the front of their publications, the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose militant members were known as suffragettes, printed a brief outline of their aims. This began with the firm declaration that:

     The Women’s Social and Political Union are NOT asking for a vote for

     every woman, but simply that sex shall cease to be a disqualification for

     the franchise.

     This could hardly be plainer. The suffragettes were not interested in extending the franchise to working class women who did not fulfil the property qualifications necessary at that time to be included on the electoral register; they simply wished for those in their own social class to be allowed the vote. It must of course be borne in mind that the situation with voting in Britain at this time was not a simple one of men being able to vote, but not women. Following the Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1884-1885, the right to vote in parliamentary  elections had been granted to some men in the United Kingdom; those who fulfilled certain property and residence qualifications or who had attended university. What this meant in practice was that over a third of men in England and Wales did not have the right to vote in general elections when the Pankhursts set up  the Women‘s Social and Political Union. In Scotland, the proportion unable to vote was higher; around 40% of men in that country could not vote in general elections. The state of affairs in Ireland was worst of all, with only half of all men being entitled to vote.

     Now although women could not vote  in general elections, some  had been able to vote in local elections since the passing of the 1869 Municipal Franchise Act. The following year, women became eligible to vote for and serve on the new School Boards. From 1875, women could be Poor Law Guardians and when County Councils were established in 1888, women were also able to vote in those elections. In 1892, it was ruled that women could be elected to County Councils; the word “man” in the relevant legislation being held to refer also to women.

     By the turn of the century in 1900, around fifteen hundred women held elected office in England and Wales; a thousand as Poor Law Guardians, three hundred as members of School Boards and perhaps two hundred district councillors.

     As can be seen, the position regarding the franchise was far more complicated than is often thought. Some women were able to vote and hold office, while conversely over a third of men were unable to do so. Actually, the voting system contained even more startling anomalies than those which denied over a third of men, as well as all women,  the vote in parliamentary elections. While many men had no vote; others had two! Plural votes were not finally abolished in this country until after the Second World War. Take the MPs for the older universities, for instance.  Both Oxford and Cambridge university each returned two MPs and  those who had attended the universities were able to vote there as well as in the constituency in which they lived. This meant that a man might be able to cast two votes and be represented by no fewer than three MPs. Plural voting of this sort lingered on until 1950.

     Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union, was herself able to vote in local elections, while many working-class men in the same area where she lived could not. The suffragettes were a middle-class movement who were campaigning not for the right of every man and woman in the country to be able to vote, but rather for women of their own class to be enfranchised. They had no interest at all in the working-class men and women who were currently without the vote.

     It is curious that after all these years, the image of the suffragettes should have remained pretty much as they themselves wished to be remembered. They have, in effect, created their own myth, and there is something resembling a conspiracy of silence to ensure that this false narrative is cherished and accepted.  There certainly seems to be little interest today in looking too closely into the history of this, the first terrorist campaign of the twentieth century in Britain to be waged with bombs.