Grace Before Meat: Parliamentary Archives, HC/SA/SJ/3/11

The ‘highlight’ of the programme, if it can be called that, was the extract from Maude Kate Smith’s interview about forcible feeding in Winson Green prison, Birmingham: how she was held down and force-fed three times a day; uncooked, unsoftened food was put down the tube down her throat; resisting until she could no more, and became docile; intending not to make a sound until she found she had been screaming; the anguish, pain, colitis, damage done to her nose; wishing that the morning might not come so she would not have to endure it again.

You can Listen Again for the next seven days.

Militant Suffragette incendiary devices, City of London Police Museum

Early City of London Police Box, City of London Police Museum

On a related note I had the opportunity to visit the tiny City of London Police Museum recently and was delighted to find they had two ‘Militant Suffragette incendiary devices, defused in 1913′, made from old food cans including a tin of mustard. The little brown truncheon, also pictured, is the type that used to be given to women police officers.

And it was great fun to see this early City police box, so different to the Tardis from Doctor Who.  This light blue is the original colour of police boxes in the City of London proper (the Square Mile, that is).

Margaret Haig Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda (1883–1958). Palace of Westminster Collection WOA 7177.

The portrait was acquired by the House of Lords Works of Art Committee thanks to the efforts of Baroness Gale of Blaenrhondda and Jessica Morden MP. It’s great that the Parliamentary art collection will now include such a picture, showing Rhondda as a dignified, strong, independent woman. The Lord Speaker, Baroness de Souza, said at the reception that Rhondda had a look of ‘humane determination’, which seems just right to me. The icing on the cake is to know that the artist who painted the portrait is also a woman, Alice Mary Burton (1893-1968).

Angela V John is a great authority on Lady Rhondda and is currently writing a biography of her which I very much look forward to reading in future. Her talk was full of fascinating detail about Rhondda’s fight to take her seat in the House of Lords, and this quote from Lord Birkenhead drew an incredulous gasp from the audience:

We are confronted with a proposal that we should admit a number of privileged ladies—who have simply been given their privilege in order that, physiologically, they may act as the conduit pipe through which the blood of distinguished men may pass from one generation to another…

The audience included Professor Lord Kenneth O Morgan, who actually met Lady Rhondda when he was young, and also descendants of Rhondda’s mother’s family. It was wonderful to learn that the brooch in the painting was given by Rhondda to her goddaughter, and it is still in the family.

The Women’s Library has magnificent women’s suffrage collections, of course. UNESCO has recognised a range of their documents from the 1866 petition which enabled John Stuart Mill to be the first person in Parliament to call for women’s suffrage, to a congratulatory letter from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to Millicent Fawcett on achieving equal franchise in 1928. This banner design is by Mary Lowdnes from her album of designs for the Artists Suffrage League, dated c.1908.

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies banner, The Women’s Library, Artists Suffrage League Archive, 2ASL/11/1

The Parliamentary Archives documents recognised by UNESCO include two contrasting original Acts of Parliament. The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, known as the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act, allowed hunger-striking suffragettes who were released from prison while weak or ill to be re-imprisoned once recovered, while the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 gave women the vote on the same terms as men. Also inscribed from the Parliamentary Archives by UNESCO is a Women’s Freedom League banner, which is my personal favourite because of the story behind it.

Women's Freedom League suffragette banner, Parliamentary Archives HC/SA/SJ/3/1

It was unfurled by suffragettes in the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons on 28 October 1908. They pushed it through the grille covering the gallery window and lowered it into the chamber. Meanwhile two of the women chained themselves to the grille and had to be cut off by authorities in a committee room. One of these women was Australian suffragette Muriel Matters, demonstrating the international nature of the women’s suffrage movement.  The banner was left behind in the House of Commons after the event, and today it stands as both a literal and metaphorical representation of the protests made by women behind the grille.

William Waldorf Astor bought Hever Castle in 1903, and it passed to his second son John Jacob Astor, later 1st Baron Astor of Hever. The ‘Lady Astor’ of the rowing boat pictured is presumably either his wife Violet, or the wife of the 2nd Baron, Irene.

I was intrigued to learn that Irene was a daughter of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and wondered how she might be related to Lady Rhondda, whose mother Sybil was also a Haig (Sybil’s father was George Augustus Haig, 8th son of Robert Haig of Pen-Ithon, and her mother’s mother was a Haig of Blairhill). The Haig family is enormous and complicated, going back through many generations. Having spent some time scratching my head over Burke’s Peerage and Burke’s Landed Gentry, I think Sybil and Irene’s common ancestor is the James Haig, 17th Laird of Bemersyde in the early 17th century, although there could also be other more recent links!

This is the entrance to Hever Castle pictured from the inner courtyard. Hever is a good old-fashioned castle with two moats and, as you can see, a portcullis for its defence. I can’t see a portcullis even on a castle without thinking of Parliament, as the crowned Portcullis is Parliament’s emblem (also see Sylvia Pankhurst’s brooch).

It’s quite apt anyway as the Astor family has excellent connections with both Houses of Parliament. Both John Jacob Astor of Hever and his elder brother Waldorf Astor were first MPs, then members of the House of Lords. And when Waldorf became a peer, the 2nd Viscount Astor, his wife Nancy was famously elected in his place and became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons in 1919. I’ll post more about Nancy next time.

Suffragette Fellowship Memorial by Edwin Russell

It reads:

This tribute is erected by the Suffragette Fellowship to commemorate the courage and perseverance of all those men and woman who in the long struggle for votes for women selflessly braved dersion, opposition and ostracism, many enduring violence and suffering. Nearby Caxton Hall was historically associated with women’s suffrage meeetings & deputations to Parliament.

I took a picture and admired it, then wandered around the back in the hope there might be some more information about it there. To my delight there were also pictures sculpted on the back. Unfortunately it was too dark to get a decent photo (and passers-by must have wondered what on earth I was doing), but the one pictured is Sylvia Pankhurst’s design of a portcullis (the symbol of Parliament) with the suffragette arrow, usually depicted in purple, white and green although here all dark bronze. It’s upside down because the monument is scroll-shaped and this picture rolls over from the top. You can see it a lot more clearly as a brooch design.

Back of Suffragette Fellowship Memorial

Holloway brooch designed by Sylvia Pankhurst: 1909

for twenty-five years women had… been eligible to sit as Members there, and that so far not a single one had been elected.

This was factually wrong. New Zealand had been the first country in the world to give women the vote, way back in 1893; but they were not allowed to become MPs until 1919 (and the first, Elizabeth McCombs, was not elected until 1933). Peto should have cited Australia instead: the Commonwealth legislature in Australia allowed women to stand as candidates from its inception in 1902, but none were elected until 1943 despite the efforts of Vida Goldstein. Goldstein was a great campaigner for women’s rights in Australia and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament five times.

Vida Goldstein

At state level, women were  allowed to vote in Australia from various dates between 1894 and 1908, although only South Australia allowed women to stand to be MPs before 1918 (none were actually elected there until 1959). The first Australian woman MP at state level was Edith Cowan in Western Australia in 1921.

A much better example of successful women MPs was Finland.  J D Rees, one of the Parliamentary Sampsons, spoke of how women had been not only MPs in Finland but ‘filled the most important offices, and I am bound to say they acquitted themselves right well’, adding outrageously, ‘a fact which I have hitherto concealed, until I knew that women got the vote in this country’. Finland was the first country in Europe to give women the vote and also allowed them to be MPs in 1906; this followed demands for universal suffrage from mass labour and temperance movements in which comparatively well-educated women were prominent.

Finnish women MPs in 1907

The Eduskunta (the Finnish Parliament), had no fewer than 19 women MPs elected in 1907, out of a total of 200.  The UK would not reach the dizzy heights of 19 women MPs simultaneously until 1945! By the time the UK Parliament was debating these issues in 1918, there were 24 women in the Eduskunta, 12% of its members. Believe it or not, women didn’t make up as much as 12% of members of the UK House of Commons until 1997.

Emily Wilding Davison. Parliamentary Archives, HC/SA/SJ/10/12 item 66

I was looking at Votes for Women, the newspaper of the Women’s Social & Political Union, recently and came across their report of her census stay from April 1911. The article is headed, ‘A Night in Guy Fawkes’ Cupboard’, and it says:

Armed with some provisions, Miss Davison took up her position in a cupboard of about five foot by six foot. What at first sight appeared to be a mere timber room was in reality a spot of great historic interest, for on the wall were written the words ”Guy Fawkes was killed here”.

This is so terribly ahistorical I groaned aloud. Firstly, Guy Fawkes was not killed in any cupboard; he was executed outside Parliament in Old Palace Yard. Secondly, he was caught in Parliament with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder on 5 November 1605, but in an undercroft beneath the House of Lords, not a cupboard in the crypt chapel. And thirdly, this cupboard didn’t even exist in 1605! - almost the entire Palace of Westminster burned down in a great fire in 1834, and the present building, including the crypt chapel, was built or hugely remodelled after that date. This cupboard actually dates from around 1857.

The article went on to say she remained in the cupboard overnight until she was discovered by a cleaner, and she was overlooked by an MP pointing out the Guy Fawkes inscription to visitors, who failed to notice her hiding behind boxes!  One of her census forms duly records her as ‘Found hiding in crypt of Westminster Hall’.

Emily Wilding Davison census form, The National Archives

Emily was very fond of campaigning in Parliament and you can read about some of her exploits on the Parliament website. You can also take a peek inside the Chapel and see the plaque put up to her by Tony Benn MP on a virtual tour. 

Emily’s action was only one of many taken by suffragettes across the country. The suffrage historian Jill Liddington gave a fascinating talk in Parliament last week about research by herself and Elizabeth Crawford into the extent of the suffragette boycott. You can read about Jill and Elizabeth’s findings in the spring edition of HerStoria, the upcoming spring 2011 volume of History Workshop Journal, and listen to an interview they did (in Parliament’s crypt chapel, of course!) on Women’s Hour.

Also, Emily was also not alone in being a woman in Parliament on census night 1911. My own research into women staff in Parliament shows in addition to her, sixty-five women were resident that night as family members and staff in fourteen households. I will post more about this at some point.

Arnold Ward’s mother Mrs Humphrey Ward (Mary Augusta Ward) was well-known not only as an author but also as the president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Arnold Ward did not stand at the 1918 general election; presumably this family connection would not have helped endear him to new women voters.

Another convert was J D Rees (John David Rees). Rees was a colonial administrator with many years of service in India before being elected to the House of Commons in 1906. He declared:

Before the late Reform Act was passed, women’s suffrage was supported by Radicals, Reformers, Socialists, and Sentimentalists. The last is a large class, for Members incline to fall into the hands of the dangerous Delilah, who is sufficiently strong to shear Parliamentary Sampsons of their sense… The fact is that they opposed woman suffrage on the ground of sex, but, once that bar is removed, there is no further ground, I respectfully submit, for imposing any bar upon the other sex, as to the offices which they should be able to fill in this country.

Rees died a few years later in 1922 at the age of 67 in a rather unusual way; he fell from the London-Glasgow night express train at Chesterfield.  The coroner concluded, ‘He might have awakened, and in a semi-dazed condition, opened the outside door thinking that he was going into the corridor,’ despite the fact he would have had to have turned the lock twice to do so. Lady Rees said that ‘Sir John was singularly unobservant of anything in the way of mechanical contrivances. He always muddled them, and it was quite a joke in the family. He seemed to have no mechanical feeling at all.’  The verdict was accidental death.

The first woman to try and stand as a candidate was Nina Boyle, from the Women’s Freedom League.

Boyle, a great feminist campaigner for women police among other issues, put herself forward at a by-election in Keighley, Yorkshire, in April 1918 as a test case. She warned the Women’s Freedom League conference in February that Parliament might try to bar even women who were elected, recalling the example of Charles Bradlaugh.

Bradlaugh was elected MP for Northampton five times between 1880 and 1885, but was not allowed to take his seat because as an atheist he could not take the Oath of Allegiance. He was arrested in Parliament a number of times, and even spent a night in the Prison Room of the Clock Tower.

Nina Boyle’s test case helped ensure no woman would be in doubt as to whether she could sit in the House of Commons, like Bradlaugh. Her candidacy was refused on a technicality, as her two nominators were not eligible, but the Keighley returning officer was clear he would have accepted it otherwise. Boyle had succeeded in establishing a principle and setting a precedent. A number of other women were then encouraged to put themselves forward as candidates for the upcoming General Election, and this was a large factor behind Herbert Samuel’s motion to put the matter beyond doubt.

Megan Lloyd George image from Liberal Democrat History Group

There was the anomaly of a woman actually elected as an MP despite not being able to vote for herself.  Jennie Lee was just 23 when selected as Labour candidate for North Lanark and 24 when elected in a by-election on 21 March 1929 (before women were allowed to vote at age 21 in the general election later that year). Lee remarked in her autobiography, ‘The Tories could not attack me on account of my youth for all the  political parties were angling for the flapper vote.’

Photograph of Jennie Lee. Parliamentary Archives, PUD/F/1281

Another candidate too young to vote for herself was Margaret Henderson Kidd, who stood unsuccessfully as Unionist candidate in a by-election in Linlithgow on 4 April 1928 at the age of 28. Kidd was already familiar with the Houses of Parliament; her father was an MP and as one of the earliest professional women lawyers,  an Advocate of the Scottish bar, she was the first woman to appear before a Parliamentary Committee in 1927. This provoked a crisis as there were no robing facilities for women counsels in the Houses of Parliament. When she appeared before the House of Lords, the Solicitor General for Scotland allowed her to use his room in the Old Crown Office, and when she appeared before the House of Commons, her father arranged for her to use the room of the Duchess of Atholl.

The Equal Franchise Act 1928 took away the age limit on voting, and women first voted from age 21 in the general election on 30 May 1929.