My Own Story Part 17

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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sengers 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 anch.o.r.ed two miles out at sea.

Following my firm resolve not to a.s.sist 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 15,000 was poured into the coffers of militancy. This included the 4,500 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 pa.s.senger 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 a.s.sume 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed 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 t.i.the 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 sanct.i.ty of religious services, and creating riot in the House of G.o.d. 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: "G.o.d 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 a.s.sault as well as a painful physical one, and to remain pa.s.sive 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 pet.i.tions 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 pet.i.tion was a.s.saulted by one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.

We finally resolved on the policy of direct pet.i.tion to the king because we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful pet.i.tioning 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-a.s.sembled, 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 disfranchis.e.m.e.nt 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 n.o.ble 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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.

"Const.i.tutionally speaking, we are, as voteless women, living in the time when the power of the Monarch was unlimited. In that old time, which is pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x, 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.

CHAPTER VIII

For months before my return to England from my American lecture tour, the Ulster situation had been increasingly serious. Sir Edward Carson and his followers had declared that if Home Rule government should be created and set up in Dublin, they would--law or no law--establish a rival and independent Government in Ulster. It was known that arms and ammunition were being shipped to Ireland, and that men--and women too, for that matter--were drilling and otherwise getting ready for civil war. The W. S. P. U. approached Sir Edward Carson and asked him if the proposed Ulster Government would give equal voting rights to women. We frankly declared that in case the Ulster men alone were to have the vote, that we should deal with "King Carson" and his colleagues exactly in the same manner that we had adopted towards the British Government centred at Westminster. Sir Edward Carson at first promised us that the rebel Ulster Government, should it come into existence, would give votes to Ulster women. This pledge was later repudiated, and in the early winter months of 1914 militancy appeared in Ulster. It had been raging in Scotland for some time, and now the imprisoned Suffragettes in that country were being forcibly fed as in England. The answer to this was, of course, more militancy. The ancient Scottish church of Whitekirk, a relic of pre-Reformation days, was destroyed by fire. Several unoccupied country houses were also burned.

It was about this time, February, 1914, that I undertook a series of meetings outside London, the first of which was to be held in Glasgow, in the St. Andrews Hall, which holds many thousands of people. In order that I might be free on the night of the meeting, I left London unknown to the police, in a motor car. In spite of all efforts to apprehend me I succeeded in reaching Glasgow and in getting to the platform of St.

Andrews' where I found myself face to face with an enormous, and manifestly sympathetic audience.

As it was suspected that the police might rush the platform, plans had been made to offer resistance, and the bodyguard was present in force.

My speech was one of the shortest I have ever made. I said:

"I have kept my promise, and in spite of His Majesty's Government I am here to-night. Very few people in this audience, very few people in this country, know how much of the nation's money is being spent to silence women. But the wit and ingenuity of women is overcoming the power and money of the British Government. It is well that we should have this meeting to-night, because to-day is a memorable day in the annals of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. To-day in the House of Commons has been witnessed the triumph of militancy--men's militancy--and to-night I hope to make it clear to the people in this meeting that if there is any distinction to be drawn at all between militancy in Ulster and the militancy of women, it is all to the advantage of the women. Our greatest task in this women's movement is to prove that we are human beings like men, and every stage of our fight is forcing home that very difficult lesson into the minds of men, and especially into the minds of politicians. I propose to-night at this political meeting to have a text. Texts are usually given from pulpits, but perhaps you will forgive me if I have a text to-night. My text is: 'Equal justice for men and women, equal political justice, equal legal justice, equal industrial justice, and equal social justice.' I want as clearly and briefly as I can to make it clear to you to-night that if it is justifiable to fight for common ordinary equal justice, then women have ample justification, nay, have greater justification, for revolution and rebellion, than ever men have had in the whole history of the human race. Now that is a big contention to make, but I am going to prove it. You get the proof of the political injustice--"

As I finished the word "injustice," a steward uttered a warning shout, there was a tramp of heavy feet, and a large body of police burst into the hall, and rushed up to the platform, drawing their truncheons as they ran. Headed by detectives from Scotland Yard, they surged in on all sides, but as the foremost members attempted to storm the platform, they were met by a fusillade of flower-pots, tables, chairs, and other missiles. They seized the platform railing, in order to tear it down, but they found that under the decorations barbed wires were concealed.

This gave them pause for a moment.

Meanwhile, more of the invading host came from other directions. The bodyguard and members of the audience vigorously repelled the attack, wielding clubs, batons, poles, planks, or anything they could seize, while the police laid about right and left with their batons, their violence being far the greater. Men and women were seen on all sides with blood streaming down their faces, and there were cries for a doctor. In the middle of the struggle, several revolver shots rang out, and the woman who was firing the revolver--which I should explain was loaded with blank cartridges only--was able to terrorise and keep at bay a whole body of police.

I had been surrounded by members of the bodyguard, who hurried me towards the stairs from the platform. The police, however, overtook us, and in spite of the resistance of the bodyguard, they seized me and dragged me down the narrow stair at the back of the hall. There a cab was waiting. I was pushed violently into it, and thrown on the floor, the seats being occupied by as many constables as could crowd inside.

The meeting was left in a state of tremendous turmoil, and the people of Glasgow who were present expressed their sense of outrage at the behavior of the police, who, acting under the Government's instructions, had so disgraced the city. General Drummond, who was present on the platform, took hold of the situation and delivered a rousing speech, in which she exhorted the audience to make the Government feel the force of their indignation.

I was kept in the Glasgow police-cells all night, and the next morning was taken, a hunger and thirst striking prisoner, to Holloway, where I remained for five memorable days. This was the seventh attempt the Government had made to make me serve a three years' term of penal servitude on a conspiracy charge, in connection with the blowing up of Mr. Lloyd-George's country house. In the eleven and a half months since I had received that sentence I had spent just thirty days in prison. On March 14th I was again released, still suffering severely, not only from the hunger and thirst strike, but from injuries received at the time of my brutal arrest in Glasgow.

The answer to that arrest had been swift and strong. In Bristol, the scene of great riots and destruction when men were fighting for votes, a large timber-yard was burnt. In Scotland a mansion was destroyed by fire. A milder protest consisted of a raid upon the house of the Home Secretary, in the course of which eighteen windows were broken.

The greatest and most startling of all protests. .h.i.therto made was the attack at this time on the Rokeby "Venus" in the National Gallery. Mary Richardson, the young woman who carried out this protest, is possessed of a very fine artistic sense, and nothing but the most compelling sense of duty would have moved her to the deed. Miss Richardson being placed on trial, made a moving address to the Court, in the course of which she said that her act was premeditated, and that she had thought it over very seriously before it was undertaken. She added: "I have been a student of art, and I suppose care as much for art as any one who was in the gallery when I made my protest. But I care more for justice than I do for art, and I firmly believe than when a nation shuts its eyes to justice, and prefers to have women who are fighting for justice ill-treated, mal-treated, and tortured, that such action as mine should be understandable; I don't say excusable, but it should be understood.

"I should like to point out that the outrage which the Government has committed upon Mrs. Pankhurst is an ultimatum of outrages. It is murder, slow murder, and premeditated murder. That is how I have looked at it....

"How you can hold women up to ridicule and contempt, and put them in prison, and yet say nothing to the Government for murdering people, I cannot understand....

"The fact is that the nation is either dead or asleep. In my opinion there is undoubted evidence that the nation is dead, because women have knocked in vain at the door of administrators, archbishops, and even the King himself. The Government have closed all doors to us. And remember this--a state of death in a nation, as well as in an individual, leads to one thing, and that is dissolution. I do not hesitate to say that if the men of the country do not at this eleventh hour put their hand out and save Mrs. Pankhurst, before a few more years are pa.s.sed they will stretch out their hand in vain to save the Empire."

In sentencing Miss Richardson to six month's imprisonment the Magistrate said regretfully that if she had smashed a window instead of an art treasure he could have given her a maximum sentence of eighteen months, which ill.u.s.trates, I think, one more queer anomaly of English law.