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You need Indeed. This

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is a History Extra production. You

0:55

found me in Parliament Square, and it's

0:58

a scene that you probably would recognise

1:00

from the evening news. Just over there

1:02

is where the political correspondents file their

1:04

reports on the latest happenings from Westminster.

1:07

And behind me is Big Ben and the

1:09

Houses of Parliament. But it's

1:11

also the site of one of the darkest

1:14

episodes of suffragette history. On

1:16

the 18th of November 1910, a

1:19

date which became known as

1:21

Black Friday, 300 suffragettes marched

1:23

on Parliament. Arriving

1:26

here at Parliament Square just after 1

1:28

o'clock, they had an axe to grind.

1:31

Earlier that year, a bill had been floated in

1:33

Parliament, which if passed would

1:36

grant some women the right to vote. And

1:39

this was a bill that would have aimed

1:41

to enfranchise around a million women. It's

1:43

a bit of a drop in the

1:45

ocean, but it's nonetheless a step in

1:47

the right direction. But just as things

1:49

were looking promising, Prime Minister Asquith called

1:51

an election, squashing any chance

1:54

of the conciliation bill being passed.

1:57

And Mrs Pankhurst was

1:59

furious. She said, right, we

2:01

are going to take action. So she

2:04

led a group of 300 women

2:06

from Paxton Hall in Westminster

2:08

to the Houses of Parliament.

2:10

Suffragette Annie Kenny expressed the mood

2:12

here that day when she said,

2:15

there was a great storm burst.

2:17

All the clouds that had been

2:19

gathering for weeks suddenly broke, and

2:21

the downpour was terrific. But

2:23

when they reached this spot in Parliament Square

2:26

and headed across to the House of Commons,

2:28

the protesters were met with

2:30

hostile crowds and police from

2:33

across London. And

2:35

that's when things began to turn

2:37

very ugly. There were officers

2:39

who were drafted in from

2:41

the East End of London and

2:44

places where they had to deal

2:46

with more hardened criminals, and they

2:48

treated the women as such. And

2:50

I've got some descriptions, actually, of

2:53

the violence that Suffragette's experienced, reported.

2:56

I was beaten about the body, thrown

2:58

backwards and forwards from one to another,

3:00

until one felt dazed with the horror

3:02

of it, often seized

3:04

by the coat collar, dragged out of

3:07

the crowd, only to be pushed helplessly

3:09

long in front of one's tormentor into

3:11

a side street, while he

3:13

beat one up and down one's spine

3:15

until cramp seized one's legs. When

3:17

he would then release one with a vicious shove with

3:20

insulting speeches, such as, I will

3:22

teach you a lesson. I will

3:24

teach you not to come back

3:26

anymore. I will punish you, you

3:28

dash, you dash, you dash. And

3:30

those words aren't published. Mrs.

3:33

Pankhurst's sister Mary was trying to get

3:35

to her, and her arms

3:37

were twisted. She was thrown about.

3:40

I was thrown with my jaw against a

3:42

lamppost with such force that two

3:44

of my front teeth were loosened. What

3:47

I complain of on behalf of

3:49

the sword is the long-drawn agony

3:51

of the delayed arrest and the

3:53

continuous beating and pinching. That's

3:56

one suffragette who was present,

3:58

and this was her excellency. of

4:01

the riot really at Black

4:03

Friday. One of the

4:05

suffragettes here that day was Mae Billinghurst

4:07

who used a wheelchair. Police

4:09

threw her out of that wheelchair before

4:12

taking her down one of these side

4:14

streets and leaving her in the middle

4:16

of what she called a hooligan crowd

4:18

where her wheelchair was broken. She

4:20

was left so badly bruised that she

4:22

couldn't leave bed for days afterwards. 150

4:26

suffragettes were physically assaulted, but

4:29

within that 150 there were about 39 or 40 who

4:33

were sexually assaulted. Women

4:35

were subject to the most awful

4:37

sexual attacks, not only

4:39

perpetrated by police, but also plain

4:41

clothes officers and men purporting to

4:44

be sympathizers of the suffragettes wearing

4:46

the men's pro-suffrage colours and

4:48

so nobody knew who to trust. Several

4:51

times constables and plain clothes men

4:53

who were in the crowds passed

4:56

their arms around me from the

4:58

back and clutched hold of

5:00

my breasts in as public a manner as

5:02

was possible and men in

5:04

the crowd followed their example. I

5:07

was also pummeled on the chest. My

5:09

breast was clutched by one constable from

5:11

the front. My skirt was

5:13

lifted up as high as possible and the

5:15

constable attempted to lift me off the ground

5:17

by raising his knee. This

5:20

he could not do, so he threw me

5:22

into the crowd and decided the men to

5:24

treat me as they wished. So

5:27

I think that's really powerful,

5:29

powerful testimony about the nature

5:31

of policing. For years after

5:33

the campaign was over, suffragettes

5:35

would memorialise Black Friday as

5:37

being a very dark day

5:39

in their calendar. I'm

5:42

Ellie Corthorn and welcome to Deeds

5:45

Not Words, a History Extra podcast.

5:47

This is episode four, Cat

5:50

and Mouse. Today, we're

5:52

delving into the acrimonious relationship between

5:54

the suffragettes and the men. for

6:00

jets and the British authorities, exploring

6:02

how the activists sought to defend themselves

6:05

and looking at the desperate lengths they

6:07

went to to fight for their cause

6:09

behind bars. But let's

6:12

linger for a moment on that fateful Black Friday

6:14

in 1910, as

6:16

Emily Godfrey, author of Mrs. Pankhurst's Bodyguard,

6:18

tells us more about its impact on

6:20

the women who were there that day

6:23

and their feelings about the

6:25

British establishment. The first

6:28

thing that Black Friday changed in terms

6:30

of the relationship with the police and the change

6:32

of tactics was that there

6:34

was a, this extra suspicion towards

6:36

the officers and it raised an

6:38

antagonistic attitude towards the officers quite

6:40

understandably. So we do know who

6:42

to trust. Mrs. Pankhurst had

6:44

this understanding with one or two officers that,

6:46

you know, if she pretended to slap them

6:48

in the face, likely they would arrest her.

6:51

And then there was this kind of acknowledgement

6:53

between the two of them. There was none

6:55

of that at Black Friday. So

6:58

you had around 150 women who were arrested.

7:02

Now, of course, they got arrested after so many attacks

7:04

were allowed to happen. So instead of just arresting

7:06

them, getting them off safely, this was allowed to

7:09

go on for hours and hours. And the

7:11

next day, Winston Churchill, she

7:13

said, oh, just released them all. So the women

7:15

had been through a horrific ordeal and

7:18

then they were denied the opportunity to

7:20

say what had happened to them in court. So

7:23

the Wispoo and Mrs.

7:25

Pankhurst's double, this was dodgy

7:28

tactics on the behalf of Winston Churchill.

7:30

Diane Atkinson, author of Rise Up

7:33

Women, also sees Black

7:35

Friday as a defining moment in

7:37

the relationship between the suffragettes and

7:39

the police. There were

7:41

various protests about Black Friday

7:43

by the suffragettes that lasted

7:45

a week, more riots. And

7:47

that's the point when it's felt to be

7:49

too dangerous for women at the hands of

7:51

the police. And Mrs. Pankhurst says, this

7:54

is too dangerous for our women. Somebody will

7:56

die. And she decided she

7:58

would change policy. we're not going

8:00

to go to parliament. These deputations are too

8:02

dangerous. We will go underground

8:05

and campaign and wage guerilla

8:08

warfare against this government. And guerilla warfare

8:10

were her exact words. So it's a

8:12

real tipping point. Time

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10:00

while Black Friday may have been the

10:02

most egregious example of police brutality towards

10:04

the suffragettes, it was far from

10:06

the only one. In fact,

10:09

this was something they braced themselves

10:11

for in all public action. When

10:13

suffragettes went out in public to

10:15

march along or to have meetings

10:17

on St Hampstead Heath or Wimbledon

10:20

Common or Heaton Park in Manchester,

10:22

they always had to be prepared

10:24

for trouble. And trouble

10:26

came from members of the Crown, members

10:28

of the public, jeering and perhaps jostling

10:30

and physical stuff. But also

10:32

when they were trying to get into

10:35

Parliament, they knew that they were going

10:37

to be handled quite roughly because the

10:39

police were fed up with having to

10:41

handle women who were demanding

10:43

something they didn't agree with. So it

10:46

can get ugly. The police can be

10:48

very rough with them. They

10:50

can just push and shove. And they will

10:52

round up lots of women who aren't really

10:54

doing anything wrong. They're just there. And

10:57

they're just a nuisance. They're visible. They're audible.

10:59

And they could be rounded up

11:01

and arrested for really having done

11:03

nothing wrong at all. So there's

11:05

that vindictiveness. There's no gentle policing.

11:08

There's no sensitive policing at all.

11:10

It's irritable. It's angry. The

11:12

police are often affronted by the women

11:14

who dare to be out and making

11:16

these demands and dare to try and

11:18

get into Parliament. So it could be

11:20

really rough. And that just

11:22

gets worse as the days

11:25

and months roll by. They feel

11:27

justified and vindicated in handling

11:29

women in this very rough and ready

11:31

kind of way. This heavy-handed

11:34

approach to dealing with suffragette

11:36

protesters is perfectly encapsulated

11:38

in one of the most famous

11:40

photos of the suffragette leader, Emmeline

11:42

Pankhurst. It shows her being

11:44

arrested by the gates of Buckingham

11:46

Palace, lifted off the ground

11:48

entirely by a uniformed policeman grabbing her

11:51

around the waist and carrying her away.

11:54

In comparison to the arresting officer, the

11:56

indomitable suffragette leader looks tiny, her feathered,

11:59

happy, and happy. tickling the policeman's face

12:01

as she shouts or cries out and

12:03

struggles to get away. But

12:06

according to Emily Godfrey, there's

12:08

more nuance to this story than it might

12:10

initially seem. Pravail attitudes

12:12

towards the supprogettes within the

12:14

police force, I think was

12:17

fairly mixed, but from

12:19

what you can judge from memoirs

12:21

and reports of the time, was

12:23

that a lot of officers felt they

12:25

just had to do their job. So

12:27

for instance, some of them

12:30

had a real respect for both women, and in

12:32

fact there were some examples of them actually asking

12:34

the ladies for the colours when

12:38

they arrested them and then they put them inside

12:40

their hats. What's also interesting to

12:42

remember is that many of the officers

12:44

would not have had the vote either.

12:47

And a lot of the time there was this

12:49

kind of, oh, this officer treated me very nicely.

12:51

Of course Black Friday was a bit of a

12:53

contrast to that, but there were these isolated incidents.

12:56

And officers themselves felt, well, unfortunately,

12:59

whilst they agreed with the votes

13:01

for women, they nonetheless

13:03

found themselves on the other side of the

13:05

law having to deal with them. So they

13:07

had to arrest the ladies to do their

13:09

job. And ever the

13:11

opportunists, the suffragettes used these chinks

13:13

in the police forces armour to

13:16

their advantage. There's

13:18

one incident of Mrs. Pankhurst and

13:20

a couple of her other friends from

13:22

the Wispoo, and she says, okay, well,

13:24

you can come and arrest me, but

13:26

I will come downstairs at X time

13:29

and you can come and arrest me then. Oh, yes, thank you very

13:31

much. And so the officer had to

13:34

kind of do this sort of a little bit

13:36

of a game of politics with her. When was

13:38

a convenient time to be arrested? And they'd go

13:40

through that. And then she'd go off to jail

13:42

with a nice publicity photograph. So

13:44

they had this real understanding sometimes too.

13:46

And I think the officers find it

13:48

a bit of a challenge, but an

13:50

interesting challenge too. And some of them

13:52

actually just literally said London was absolutely

13:54

crazy. You couldn't trust anybody

13:56

wearing a skirt. distrust.

14:01

The suffragettes turned to new ways to

14:03

protect themselves on the streets. And

14:05

some of their methods might surprise you. The

14:09

very early tactic was just to wear

14:11

cardboard armour. And cardboard

14:13

armour could be affixed, you know,

14:15

with elastic, various fastenings, and you'd

14:17

fix it like a corset, so

14:20

tight to the chest. And often they would

14:22

stand in the bath, or somewhere like

14:24

that, to gather the material around, because a

14:26

lot of it would just crumble. And

14:29

especially after a confrontation, you realised how

14:31

much they were being pushed around. When

14:33

they come back, they sort of talk about,

14:36

oh, there was just dust everywhere. Interestingly

14:39

enough, some of the officers themselves made

14:41

their own clothing, if

14:43

you like, so their own tuppence hats

14:46

in response to that as well. Alongside

14:48

this makeshift cardboard armour came

14:51

some even more surprising defensive

14:53

skills. Inspired by a

14:55

new craze that had recently swept

14:57

Britain. Japanese jiu-jitsu.

15:00

Japanese martial arts had really come to Britain

15:03

by the late 19th century.

15:05

So, judo had been founded, kodokan

15:07

judo, by Jigoro Kano in Japan

15:09

in the 1880s. By

15:12

the time we see it employed in

15:14

the suffrage movement, it's really become a

15:16

national phenomenon. It was featured in magazines.

15:19

Actually, there was a health and strength

15:21

magazine that said, oh, I wonder what

15:23

this would happen if women started using

15:25

martial arts and they had little cartoons

15:28

of sort of police officers doing this, you

15:30

know, and the women kind of were coming at

15:32

them doing that. So the idea was already in

15:34

the public consciousness. One

15:36

of the early adopters of

15:38

this dynamic new martial art

15:40

in Britain was Edith Garrett,

15:42

a playwright, physical education enthusiast,

15:44

and most crucially, an advocate

15:46

of women's suffrage. Edith

15:48

Garrett was one of the pioneers

15:51

teaching jiu-jitsu to the women's freedom

15:53

league and the wispoo. And

15:56

she had various dojos, one

15:58

of them a dojo's school. One

16:00

of them was actually in central London,

16:02

very close to Liberty's department store. So

16:05

it was great because the women could

16:07

go shopping and then after it's going

16:09

to have a martial arts lesson. Or

16:11

they could break a few windows, then they'd

16:13

run over, they'd meet Mrs. Garrett's studio, and

16:16

then they would get changed and the officer

16:18

would knock on the door, oh, what's going

16:20

on in here? Oh, we're just having a

16:22

quiet jiu-jitsu ladies lesson. Nothing to see here.

16:26

Incredible photos still exist of

16:29

Garrett demonstrating her formidable jiu-jitsu

16:31

skills at her London dojo.

16:34

At just 4'11", and despite wearing a

16:36

large hat and long formal coat, the

16:39

photos show her putting a large man

16:41

dressed in police uniform in an arm

16:43

lock before tackling him to

16:45

the ground using a very

16:48

impressive looking leg manoeuvre called the

16:50

scissors. It's a very surprising

16:52

image seeing ladies doing a jiu-jitsu when you

16:54

consider that the Hubble skirt was in fashion

16:56

in 1910, which

16:59

is the same time that he did

17:01

Garrett became more public with her knowledge

17:03

of Japanese martial arts and

17:05

her energy to convey this to the public.

17:10

Unsurprisingly, the press lapped up

17:12

the idea of high-kicking martial

17:14

arts trained women. With

17:16

Health and Strength magazine joking, it

17:46

was a somersault in the air. And

17:50

on top of the new training and defensive skills,

17:53

it was decided that the suffragette top

17:55

brass needed an extra level of protection.

17:58

Mrs. Pankhurst needed. a

18:00

bodyguard. The bodyguard

18:02

itself was, it's only come

18:04

to light recently, was actually

18:06

organized in two categories. So

18:09

you had around 30 women who were

18:11

given the task of protecting Mrs Pankhurst

18:14

from re-arrest. So she had a wrong

18:16

bodyguard team and it was divided into

18:18

category A and category B. Category A

18:21

was like the elite team. So you

18:23

have people like Lillian Lenten who started

18:25

fires all across the UK and

18:28

she was called Tiny Wily Pimpanell because she

18:30

was so small, very, very difficult to catch

18:32

her. So she would have

18:34

been in team A. And then

18:36

you had team B, so slightly older

18:38

ladies in their late 30s, 40s and

18:41

you would have

18:43

had the likes of Kitty Marshall

18:45

in category B. And she was

18:47

a very important figure because she

18:49

was not only a member

18:51

of her bodyguard team, Mrs Pankhurst's bodyguard team,

18:53

but she was also a friend to Mrs

18:55

Pankhurst until the end of her life. Her

18:58

husband, Arthur, was the main

19:00

lawyer that the suffragettes would turn to when

19:02

they were arrested. They also

19:04

offered Mrs Pankhurst their houses of

19:06

sanctuary. There are accounts of them

19:09

escaping the clutches of the police and ending up

19:11

in her house in Essex and you're drinking a

19:13

cup of tea and a sundry. Ah, we outwitted

19:15

the police. So she was

19:18

in category B, but both categories had

19:20

to drop everything at a moment's notice.

19:23

And if you failed in your

19:25

duties to be unbelievably active in

19:27

category A, then you became category

19:29

B. So there was this sort

19:31

of competition, I think, within the

19:33

bodyguard itself. But despite all

19:36

the defensive measures they employed, it

19:38

wasn't always possible to evade the clutches of

19:40

the police. Over the years

19:42

of their campaigning, some suffragettes

19:44

were arrested for fairly trivial reasons,

19:47

causing disturbances on the streets during

19:49

protests or minor acts of mischief.

19:52

Perhaps breaking windows or,

19:55

if you were Kitty Marshall, throwing a potato

19:57

at the home of Winston Churchill. The

20:00

charges against others were much more

20:02

serious, and that's something we'll come

20:04

onto in more depth in next episode. But

20:07

either way, after their

20:09

arrests came a grueling process of

20:12

incarceration, designed to demolish

20:14

the suffragette's morale. The

20:30

charges were very serious, and they would be

20:32

undressed by the mortises,

20:35

they'd be dumped into a bath,

20:37

which several other women had been

20:39

into already. So it's all about

20:41

humiliation, it's all about

20:43

causing maximum embarrassment, it's all about

20:45

taking away identity and character and

20:48

demeaning the women. And

20:50

then they'd be given prison clothing, which

20:52

was horrible and scratchy and didn't fit,

20:54

and be given prison boots, which were

20:56

often the wrong size or odd one.

20:58

So it's all about degradation, really. And

21:01

things weren't much better when they reached

21:03

their cells. They were dark and

21:05

damp and very smelly. Very,

21:07

very cold, very, very hot. The women

21:09

would have to smash windows just to

21:11

be able to breathe. And they

21:14

would often have no light in them, or

21:16

the windows were at the top of the

21:18

cell. There was a

21:20

slot bucket. The conditions were

21:22

awful. The food was awful. Kitty

21:24

Martian, who was Mrs. Pankhurst's bodyguard.

21:26

That's Kitty of potatoes throwing fame. I

21:29

found that she had to eat these

21:31

unbelievably awful potatoes. They

21:33

were blue, and there was this meat, and she just

21:35

said, I don't know what it was, and it stuck

21:37

to her for three days. And

21:39

it was just too deter them from ever

21:41

coming back. And it's amazing that so many of

21:44

them did commit crimes, knowing they would go back

21:46

to prison, but that's what they decided to

21:48

do. And for many of these women,

21:50

the challenges of incarceration were not

21:53

just physical, but mental too. Your

21:56

time was of your own. If you have

21:58

no control over what time of day it

22:00

is, what time of... night, you have the

22:02

sense of kind of slipping mentally. Kitty Martian,

22:05

she used her artistic experience to create a

22:07

little flock and she put little twigs all the

22:09

way around it. And every time a make-through came

22:12

in and told her what the time was, she

22:14

would sort of update it for us to a

22:16

plot. And that would give her a sense of

22:18

control over things. And she

22:20

also created this little set of patience

22:22

cards, little bits that she

22:24

would steal here and there from

22:26

a book or some notepaper she'd

22:29

get. And that was kind of

22:31

her way of keeping sane in

22:33

prison. So a number of women

22:35

would smuggle these art influences in

22:37

pencils, anything like that. And you

22:39

even had some writing within books

22:42

of poetry. Or today I saw

22:44

Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Kitty Marshall

22:46

walking down straight past underneath my

22:49

window. Whenever a prisoner

22:51

would spot Mrs. Pankhurst or other prominent

22:53

figures out of their cell window, they

22:56

would know that they were not alone in their fight.

22:59

And that sense of camaraderie was

23:01

essential for helping the suffragettes keep

23:03

their sanity behind bars. The

23:06

movement's leadership knew how important this

23:08

sense of connection and common experience

23:10

was in times of hardship. They

23:13

even issued medals engraved with cell numbers

23:15

for those who had served time, rebranding

23:18

demoralized prisoners into courageous

23:21

political freedom fighters. And

23:24

this leads us onto one of the key issues

23:26

facing the suffragettes in prison. Because

23:28

while the authorities treated them like

23:30

common criminals, the activists

23:32

believed that they should be

23:35

granted special status as political

23:37

prisoners. Political prisoners

23:39

have what's called first division status. It

23:41

means they're allowed to wear their own

23:44

clothes and they can have

23:46

visits, they can have their own food

23:48

brought in and they can have books

23:50

and newspapers provided sent into

23:52

them. They said, look, men fought for this

23:55

and they were given this these rights in

23:57

the 19th century. When political campaigners are ambitioning

23:59

to be a citizen, entirely political. We

24:01

demand the same rights. And

24:04

the government said, well, no, you're

24:06

not political campaigners, you are common

24:08

criminals, and you will be treated

24:10

as common criminals. And

24:12

so in order to assert their status

24:14

as political prisoners, the incarcerated

24:16

suffragettes decided to take drastic

24:18

action. So they went on hunger

24:20

strikes starting in 1909. The

24:23

first suffragette to go on hunger strike

24:25

was a woman called Marianne Wallace Dunlop.

24:28

Sentenced to a months incarceration for refusing

24:30

to pay a fine after censoring a

24:32

message on the walls of the Palace

24:34

of Westminster. Dunlop had not

24:36

been instructed to stop eating by

24:38

the WSPU leadership. In

24:40

fact, Christabel Panker stated that she

24:43

acted, quote, entirely on her own

24:45

initiative. But Dunlop's actions

24:47

unnerved the prison authorities so

24:49

much that they released her after 91

24:52

hours of fasting. Her

24:54

idea soon caught on as

24:57

the suffragette leadership recognised the power

24:59

that refusing to eat could give

25:01

prisoners in an otherwise powerless position.

25:05

Emmeline Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst would all

25:07

go on to take part in hunger

25:09

strikes, which as Emmeline Pankhurst later stated

25:11

in 1913, were intended to, quote, put

25:16

the enemy in the position where they

25:18

will have to choose between giving us

25:20

freedom or giving us death. But

25:24

when faced with this choice, the authorities would

25:26

come up with another way of dealing with

25:28

the issue. It's

25:52

described quite accurately, I believe at the time

25:54

as torture. The only people who were force

25:56

fed were asylum patients who wouldn't eat. So

25:58

this is a real kind of of

26:00

breaking with tradition. Force feeding

26:02

could be administered in several different ways.

26:05

One way was just to tie a suffragette

26:07

to a chair, tip her back, force

26:10

her mouth open and force food into her

26:12

mouth and then cover her mouth to

26:15

make sure that she swallowed it and didn't spit

26:17

it out. So there's that way of force feeding.

26:20

The second way was the nasal tube

26:22

and this was something that was administered

26:24

by the prison doctor and

26:26

it was a funnel and a

26:28

long rubber tube which was inserted

26:30

into the suffragette's nose and down

26:32

the funnel, down the tube was

26:34

poured perhaps raw egg and

26:37

that was the nutrition that was

26:39

going to sustain suffragettes so they

26:41

couldn't starve to them. So imagine

26:43

being tied to a chair held

26:45

down by four prison wall dresses

26:47

and this food being poured into a tube

26:49

that's going up your nose and it's going

26:51

to drip down into your throat and into

26:53

your stomach. There was another method

26:56

which was the stomach tube, again the

26:58

same funnel, the same tube, the same

27:00

kind of food but the tube was

27:02

pushed down the throat, down

27:04

to the top of the stomach so

27:07

food is being poured down the funnel,

27:09

down the tube, straight

27:11

into the stomach. It's

27:13

a grotesque and gruesome form

27:16

of torture and of

27:18

course suffragettes resisted, it made

27:20

them gag, they felt they were

27:22

choking, sometimes the food went into

27:25

the lungs so it's

27:27

traumatic, it's dangerous, it's

27:29

unpleasant, it's painful. Interestingly

27:32

the authorities never dared to

27:34

force-feed Emily in Pankhurst, presumably

27:37

aware of how easily it could turn

27:39

into a public relations disaster but

27:42

they did force-feed her daughter Sylvia

27:44

whose harrowing account of the ordeal

27:46

highlights how its impact was psychological

27:48

as much as physical. Sylvia reflected

27:50

that in the aftermath of force-feeding

27:53

quote, often I

27:55

had a wild longing to scream

27:57

and after they had gone I

27:59

used to cry to terribly with

28:01

uncontrollable noisy sobs. Sometimes

28:04

I heard myself as if it was someone

28:06

else, saying things over and

28:08

over again in a strange high

28:10

voice. Infinitely worse

28:12

than any pain was the sense

28:15

of degradation, the sense that the

28:17

very fight that one made against

28:19

the repeated outrage was shattering one's

28:22

nerves and breaking down one's self-control.

28:24

And there were serious and long-term

28:26

health risks involved too. There

28:29

was damage to the garments, the teeth,

28:31

damage just in the view of the

28:33

number of people holding them down too.

28:35

One of the arrests of

28:38

forcible feeding was that the nasocastric tube would

28:40

go within the wrong place, so into the

28:42

lung rather than into the stomach. And when

28:45

women were fighting against that, it was

28:47

more likely that things could be misplaced

28:49

as well. Ethel

28:51

Morehead, in prison, in Calton prison

28:53

in Scotland, developed double

28:55

pneumonia when food entered her lungs

28:58

during repeated force feeding. It

29:00

was really difficult and dangerous. Sometimes

29:03

the struggle to feed them meant

29:05

that suffragettes lost teeth or their

29:07

vocal cords were damaged or they

29:09

were psychologically traumatised and physically damaged

29:11

by this process. But hundreds of

29:14

women did it and some women

29:16

did it on multiple occasions. And

29:18

it's astonishing to think that they

29:20

would go back to prison time

29:23

and time again and be prepared

29:25

to hunger strike and

29:27

be force fed on perhaps

29:29

three times a day for often quite

29:31

long sentences. There's an extraordinary example of

29:34

Kitty Marion, who is a theatre performer,

29:36

who in 1913 alone was force fed

29:38

230 times, which is astonishing. Keenly

29:45

aware of how badly this brutal regime

29:47

of force feeding reflected on the British

29:49

authorities, the suffragettes were eager

29:52

to publicise what was happening to them

29:54

behind bars. The public

29:56

were fully aware of force

29:58

feeding because Suffragettes designed

30:00

a couple of different posters,

30:02

huge posters, which were plastered

30:05

everywhere on walls, of buildings,

30:07

on premises. They were pinned

30:09

up on trees, they were

30:11

pinned around trees, they were

30:13

there. And that showed

30:16

graphically what force feeding

30:18

involved. So nobody could really say

30:20

they didn't know what's force feeding

30:22

involved because the suffragettes plastered every

30:24

surface they could with this poster.

30:27

So there's no way people said

30:29

we didn't know about it or we didn't hear about

30:31

it. It was there in front of you for those

30:33

people who were prepared to look. Faced

30:35

with public opprobrium over the issue of force

30:37

feeding, in 1913 the government turned

30:41

to a new tactic to deal with the hunger

30:43

strikes, with a piece of legislation that

30:45

would come to be known to the suffragettes as

30:48

the Cat and Mouse Act. The

30:50

Prisoners' Temporary Discharge for Ill

30:52

Health Act. Bit of

30:55

a mouthful. It's rushed through in

30:57

1913 in April by the Home

30:59

Secretary because the suffragettes are getting

31:01

far too much public support.

31:03

I mean, the public don't like votes

31:06

of women mostly, but they don't like

31:08

women being tortured in prison. And

31:11

so they decide to rush this act through

31:13

so that suffragettes who are

31:15

in prison, they can starve

31:17

themselves if they want for a bit. They

31:20

won't force feed them and they'll

31:22

release them on a special license when

31:24

they're very frail and unwell. And

31:27

they will release them to a designated

31:29

address. They'll put police on

31:31

duty outside the front door while they're there.

31:33

And they will always plan to go back

31:36

and re-arrest them and weigh them and take

31:38

them back to prison to carry on the

31:40

sentence. So the government is playing a game

31:42

of cat and mouse. The cat

31:44

is the government, the authorities, the

31:47

state. The mouse is

31:49

the suffragette. The poor little mouse is running

31:51

away and the cat will pounce, put it

31:53

in its mouth and put it back down

31:55

again. So it's a clever way of describing

31:57

how the act is actually implemented. But

32:00

in typical fashion, the suffragettes were not going

32:02

to play by the rules of this game

32:04

that the government had laid out. Because,

32:07

as anyone who's ever had a mouse in

32:09

their house knows all too well, mice

32:12

can be very hard to catch.

32:15

But the suffragettes were brilliant at

32:17

going on the run. They would be

32:20

sent to an address and they would escape

32:22

through the back door. They'd get out the

32:24

building somehow. They sent in body doubles sometimes.

32:26

And even though the police at the front

32:29

door, a suffragette would go in

32:31

as a visitor or should be dressed up

32:33

perhaps as the baker delivery boy. And

32:36

the same size kind of suffragette would

32:38

come out dressed in that person's clothes

32:40

and get into the van and drive

32:43

off. There are some really interesting and

32:45

exciting daring escapes. One of

32:47

them involved two suffragettes and one of

32:49

them is Leonora Cohen. So she had

32:51

actually thrown a bar over the head

32:53

of groups of schoolboys to attack a

32:55

piece in the Tower of London. There

32:58

was a time when she opened a

33:00

guesthouse called Pomona and one of her

33:02

friends, Lydia Lenton, you know, young, fit,

33:04

ready to go at a moment's notice, keen

33:07

to start fires. So she

33:09

turned up on her house, the police were on

33:11

to her, it was the house of the Captain

33:13

Mouse Act. And in fact, people knew, oh, she's

33:15

going to turn off Pomona. So

33:17

they were all standing around officers, members of

33:19

the public, they were doing knitting to pass

33:22

the time. So she

33:24

can treat them there and she's got to

33:26

dress as Leonora Cohen's younger son, Reginald, he's

33:28

about 10. She's so tiny

33:30

she can actually borrow his clothing. And somebody

33:32

managed to get her out via a coal

33:35

chute. So she gets out through

33:37

the chute and then she bolts and jumps through

33:39

buildings, those handily gardens and walls and she gets

33:41

to the safe house the door has been left

33:43

open. After these wily

33:45

suffragettes, frequently including Emmeline Pankhurst herself,

33:48

had slipped under the noses of

33:50

the police and made their way

33:52

to safe houses. They would

33:54

be nursed back to health, ready to return

33:56

to the front line. And

33:58

before long, their ability to... it

34:00

continually outwit the authorities, demonstrated

34:03

that the Cat and Mouse Act

34:05

was in tenable. So

34:07

a lot of them were actually escaping under

34:09

the noses of the police. They

34:12

went away, they recovered and

34:14

they carried on performing militant

34:16

acts. So it was

34:18

a disaster. It didn't work at all. They

34:20

didn't understand the mindset of suffragettes who would

34:22

not just sit there and wait to be

34:24

arrested. They would get out however they could

34:26

and go off somewhere else and

34:28

do more suffragette militancy. And the

34:30

act was introduced in April 1913 and

34:33

it was really seen

34:36

to be a failure by the end

34:38

of the year. And then force feeding

34:40

was reintroduced, as had been

34:42

happening, before the Cat and Mouse Act

34:44

had been rushed through. So they were

34:46

very brilliant actually overcoming this

34:48

particular police restriction and actually

34:50

were motivated really to go

34:53

off and do perhaps more

34:55

intense campaigning. Next

34:57

time we'll be focusing in on

34:59

that intense campaigning as

35:01

we examine how the suffragette campaign

35:04

became increasingly militant, turning

35:06

to property damage, arson and

35:08

planting bombs. Thanks

35:15

for listening. This podcast series is

35:17

researched and written by me, Ellie

35:19

Cawthorn. The producer is Jack

35:21

Bateman with additional checks by Rob Attar

35:24

and Felicity Day. Many thanks

35:26

to all the experts who appeared in the series

35:28

and shared their expertise with me. Diane

35:31

Atkinson's excellent book Rise Up Women

35:33

has been especially useful. If

35:35

you want to learn more about

35:37

the suffragettes then there's a host

35:40

of bonus content to complement this

35:42

series at historyextra.com/ suffragettes.