Dan Snow's History Hit - Sylvia Pankhurst

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Rachel Holmes joined me on the podcast to discuss the life of British suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst. Sylvia found her voice fighting militantly for votes for women. The vote was just the beginning of her lifelong defence of human rights, from her early warnings of the rise of fascism in Europe, to her campaigning against racism and championing of the liberation struggles in Africa and India. Sylvia's adventures in America, Soviet Russia, Scandinavia, Europe and East Africa made her a true internationalist. She was one of the great minds of the modern era, engaging with political giants, including Churchill, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, George Bernard Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois and Haile Selassie.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We got a character on that you'll have heard of today, Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the great champions of women's suffrage, but you don't know the half of it. You don't know the half of it. This blew my little mind and I hope it's going to do the same for you guys. Rachel Holmes has written a wonderful biography of Sylvia Pankhurst. It sounds completely exhausting. Sylvia was clearly an absolutely exhausting subject for this biography. She never took a moment's rest, that woman. She took on entrenched interests and she fought them from the UK to Ethiopia and everywhere in between. So she's a remarkable woman and I'm glad this

biography will do more to place her up in the pantheon of British 20th century national treasures where she belongs. If you wish to watch TV shows, if you wish to enjoy hundreds of hours of documentaries, and in fact a brand new drama documentary is coming. I can't tell you how excited I am. We're commissioning our first big expensive drama documentary on the First World War. I will tell you more when it comes out. It's going to be out in the next few weeks. We're filming it at the moment. If you want to watch that on History Hit TV, you go over there, you do that right now. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free and your second month is one pound, euro or dollar. That means you can watch this amazing drama documentary for free when the time comes. Very exciting. So please head over there and do that. But in the meantime,

enjoy Rachel Holmes. Rachel, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Let's start with where she was born. You say she was a natural-born rebel. Was that evident from her earliest days? Yeah, I think even from before she was born, it was in her DNA. Sylvia Pankhurst was born in 1882 in Manchester, radical Manchester,

and therein, I think, lies at least part of the story of the rebellion her descendants both on her maternal and her paternal sides were chartists protesters against the corn laws and her father was a radical barrister in fact he was so radical he was known as the red doctor he was a republican stood on a socialist ticket and inevitably doomed to fail in those days but I think she inherited it in her DNA. It wasn't just a matter of disposition. It was the context in which she grew up. And in the Pankhurst family, both when they lived in Manchester and when they came down to London for a while to live in London, when they were pursuing Richard Pankhurst's parliamentary

prospects, they had just this enormous diversity of people who were political, whether they were people working in the incipient Indian nationalist movement, whether they were abolitionists, whether they indeed, of course, were feminists. And so there was sort of, I think, all of that sort of set her on course along and she was the second of the sisters. Christabel's the eldest, and then comes Sylvia, the one in between. I think there's probably something in the fact that she's the middle sister as there often is with middle sisters or middle siblings. And then there's the younger Adela who ended up being shipped off to Australia but made a great deal of trouble there.

And then there were a couple of brothers. One very, very sadly died young. But Harry, who survived only until 20, was very much adored by Sylvia and a really significant young suffragette activist in his own right, chalking pavements and heckling and so on. When does her activism start? I would say when she's about six years old, because it's a combination of putting out leaflets on chairs when they have these sort of family salons and meetings. But she used to go on Saturdays and Sundays with her father,

who used to make her speeches outside factory gates. And so she would go with him while he stood on a chair standing in the rain and she would listen to him. And I think that it really begins when she's young, but she becomes a teenage militant suffragette, like a lot of the young suffragettes. And I think that's quite an important context. And it's something I really try and bring out in the book is that her mother and all the others were part of a generation who'd been fighting for women's suffrage, who'd been fighting across general human rights and feminist causes right back indeed to Mills' earlier petition 50 years before, and the Married Women's Property Act,

which Sylvia's own father was involved in drafting, that the mothers saw that the constitutional movement, if you like, had become a bit moribund, a bit flat. And the youngsters, their daughters, were really sort of encouraging them, I think, to help them mix it up. So Sylvia becomes an activist initially in what is called the Family Party, the Women's Social and Political Union. And the fact that it's called a union is really important because the model is union. And that struggle lasts in one shape or another, right up until 1914 to the declaration of the First World War. She was obviously highly educated. Was that even that unusual at the time? Even that unusual at the time. Highly educated. That's interesting. I mean, I suppose she was.

It's a really interesting question, isn't it? And actually, it really drives to the heart of the matter of what Sylvia is about, because education was as much a question of class as it was a question of gender. So that we know that even by the 1880s, there was a certain group of women, but it was very class-based. There was a sort of blue-stocking intelligentsia. The P Pankhurst wouldn't have fitted into that class she did go in and out of schools it should be said that Emmeline Pankhurst the mighty mother of the movement the militant movement was very again formal education it's tricky because I have some sympathy with her because there was no doubt that girls even at somewhere like Manchester

Girls School which still exists which was the school that Sylvia and Christabel and Adela went to for a short period of time, there were always issues about money and moving around and so on. But they did go there and it's still there in a very good school. But even then, there was clearly a sense that by and large, women were getting a second class education, even when they were getting one. But she was highly educated, as you aptly put it, very much by her family, by her parents, her father, who was an incredible bibliophile, pretty much like Eleanor Marks and Engels, actually, and indeed her own father, Karl Marx, whether it was Blake, whether it was Shelley, whether it was Shakespeare. So I think it's a combination of the

fact that, yes, you're right, they did get more schooling, certainly because they were middle class. They came from that background and they had literate ancestors and women on both sides. But equally, there was a lot of education that came through their political engagement with the early ILP, the Independent Labour Party, which her parents were both founding members of and the WSPU came out of, and indeed through broader aspects of the movement. So let's get her to sort of 1910-ish. So she's in her late 20s. This is the peak battle for suffragism. And she is, you know, she's famously in prison. I once remember reading a description

that she gave of being force fed, which she describes as torture. Yes. How could one describe it any other way? I think that's exactly correct, that the peak of the militant struggle starts really around 1908. So by the time you get to 1910, it's really, really building up. And it's not a claim to fame one really wants to have, but she was the most arrested, tortured, force-fed of them all. And there was a period during the so-called cat and mouse, the temporary discharge, which was a piece of legislation that was really designed to stop causing the suffragettes becoming martyrs when the hunger striking began.

So women would be arrested, they would go on hunger strike. In Sylvia's case, she also engaged in other kinds of sleep striking. So she would walk up and down her cell for hours, you know, until she dropped. And so other forms of resistance. But what the authorities, what the government decided to do, it it has to be said with not a whole lot of popular support except from the king who was quite for it was to when the women look very weak and in danger of collapsing they would release them with a license to say they had to come back to prison to serve out the rest of their term

when they were strong enough and Sylvia on many occasions like a lot of other women would then elude and hide and run away from the authorities when they were trying to catch her in order to give meetings and so on. This episode of force feeding, and not only the force feeding, but in other forms of physical violence and assault across the suffragettes and the women's movement in general on the streets, the Brailsford inquiry showed the kind of violence that had taken place, but not only from the police, but from organiser agent provocateurs, which I'm afraid did include being dragged down side streets and raped. But there were all sorts of other forms of indignities, whether the women were pulled by their hair, when they were arrested and thrown into the vans,

they were made to pull up their skirts and tie them over their heads, thus revealing that underclothes other forms of indignity. But in terms of the force feeding that took place in Holloway and in various other prisons, women's prisons around Britain, the details for a very long time didn't come out. And it's interesting that you note, remember reading her, Sylvia's report, because she was one of the first to write about it at the time that it happened. And it's worth bearing in mind that as in a couple of other occasions where you might think it unexpected, the Daily Mail were on the right side of this argument. They were very, very against torture. They regarded it as torture. They thought this was very un-British. It shouldn't be happening. And when people like George Bernard Shaw and various other people, and indeed, of course, Keir Hardie, the leader of the Labour

Party, protested about this treatment of Sylvia and all the other suffragettes who were being force-fed. The Daily Mail took their part, and Sylvia published her accounts, in fact, in reports in the Daily Mail. Many other suffragettes, quite understandably, did not write their accounts about the torture until many years later. And I think that's understandable because of the trauma it caused, and also because, as Sylvia writes very clearly she likens it and unfortunately when you read the accounts there is no other way of interpreting it as a form of rape mostly it was oral but unfortunately we now know that there were other inappropriate forms of force feeding in other orifices which hasn't been written about

so much she's so fearless it's terrifying I mean reading those accounts of how when she knows she's going to be force-fed how she barricades herself in and then she realizes it's hopeless and she's going to just have to deal with it the accounts of how they used to deliberately bring nice food so chickens and fruits and vegetables and of course Sylvia was an artist so she has an artist's eye and they put these plates out to try and tempt her. And she learned how to deal with it. The first night she put it underneath the bed. And this is a mark of the kind of person and her resistance she is. She realised the next day that she needed to turn it back round. Thereafter, she made sure that she left the food right on the table to show to the guards that she would cope with that.

An ignominious chapter in the British history of human rights and perhaps not quite often enough remembered. Many suffragettes suffered long-term health conditions, Sylvia herself included, and many died. Her own aunt, Mary Ann Clark, died of a brain aneurysm as a result of imprisonment and many others died either at the time or subsequently. So I think that her resilience and the fact she then goes on to live for so long, so actively, is a mark of her resilience. This is History Hit. You're listening to Rachel Holmes telling us about Sylvia Pankhurst.

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I mean, you're so right, because this is the British Empire. We still talk about the patriarchy today. We talk about the British establishment, the state today. All of that is still, of course, the patriarchy today, we talk about the British establishment, the state today, all of that is still, of course, true, but a pale shadow of what it would have been in 1910. This was, it looked like an immovably powerful presence in the world. And she was here just taking it all on. I mean, she would then go on and do that in the First World War as well. She must have been extraordinary. That bravery is mind-blowing. It is. And as you say, she persistently goes on and does it. And in terms of the empire, this is so close to home. Her involvement with Ireland and the Easter uprising, she actually went in 1916 and she spoke in Smock Alley Theatre.

But she also sent a young 16-year-old journalist, a cub reporter, to get into Dublin, Irish herself, to see what was happening on the ground. But Sylvia was great friends with Jim Connolly. He was a very close personal friend, as well as a political ally. And interestingly, Connolly was a great supporter of the suffragettes. The Sylvia standing by him on a platform in the Albert Hall, which was a rally in support of the Dublin lockout, which her sister Christabel said, you will not go to this because we are not associating the suffragette movement with the Irish Republican struggle. And Sylvia

was like, well, I'm afraid I am. And that was the first time that she got the warning shot across the bows that she would be, if you like, excommunicated from the family party. But Sylvia's argument around where the empire begins and ends, I mean, you talk about her participation in the First World War. Well, yes, she went with a friend, she did indeed go to France, and she went to inspected hospitals and met young lads who'd come back from the front, interviewed them. But more than that, she'd moved to East London by this time. So in 1912, famously, she sets up the East London Federation of Suffragettes with other groups, because she, unlike her mother and sister, is insisting that the women's vote is meaningless unless it's not class-based. So it should include all women and

all working women. But during the war, she works on what she calls the home front, which she writes one of her great big books about. But that organising was about how the impact of the empire, as you put it, the war was affecting how the women at home were. And of course, those years she was spending organising about, you know, immediate loss of income when you get mobilisation, women not getting their war allowances. So she's literally organising her cost price restaurants, milk for kids, and all those kinds of community infrastructure, which often get hidden from us, I think, in the accounts of the suffering that was taking place on the ground for the vast majority of working people in Britain, particularly during those early years of the First World War, which Sylvia was a

pacifist. Like Keir Hardie, she believed that that war was an unjust war. Unlike her mum and one of her sisters? Remind me how the family broke down on that subject. Very much unlike her mum and her elder sister, Christabel. And Christabel was the iconic leader of the movement. She'd been in exile in France while Sylvia had been in prison in London. I think there's something to be said for that. She was a general. She was coordinating the troops, if you like.

And she used to run the movement from Paris. But significantly, she comes back and she speaks. And her first speech when she comes back to London, having been in exile, is in favour of the war. And it's kind of unimaginable now, but on the cusp of the outbreak of the war, she stands up and she says, we must support this war. We don't want nasty foreigners and Germans and undesirables in our country. And we must suspend the fight for the women's vote. And we must put our patriotic might behind this war. And women and men who were from the men's wing of the suffragette movement,

because, of course, they organized their own, as you know, said, what about votes for women? And Christabel literally from the platform says, we don't have time to talk about that now. So there's a very, very dramatic shift in that way. And the Suffragette, which was the Votes for Women magazine newspaper, immensely successful, very widely distributed, for which Sylvia and Christabel obviously wrote, changed its name to Britannia. And its first edition had a picture of Boudicca on the front and a Union Jack, and very explicitly said, we are patriots who will support the war.

And that was the absolute, as you say, and final break point. It was also the thing that broke Keir Hardie. Isn't it fascinating that in 1914, you've got Irish nationalism with John Redmond, the famous Irish parliamentary leader, he supports the war effort. famous Irish parliamentary leader. He supports the war effort. And then you've got your James Connolly, obviously not doing so, and eventually executed by the British government after the uprising brutally and leading the Dublin unit in that uprising. And then you've got the Pankhurst family splitting apart as well. It must have been an extraordinary time on the sort of radical Irish nationalist left, if that's the right way to describe them. You can see how really the country is at war. I feel that Britain is at war before 1914, because not only have you got the Irish situation in question, but you've got mass industrial unrest, particularly from 1911 and through to 14, massively contributed towards the sense of that anxiety, as you were saying, about control of the empire, not only abroad, at home, and in what direction that might go, particularly given the

success of the rise of socialist and indeed communist movements in other parts of Western Europe, never mind beyond. But I think one of the things that is really key about Sylvia is that we tend to remember her, and isn't this something about how political women get pigeonholed and the history gets pigeonholed, we remember her as the fighting socialist suffragette. But really, that's just the early part of her career. Her long term life partner, Silvio Corio, and her soulmate and father of her only child, Richard Pankhurst, is Italian. He's an anarcho-syndicalist Italian exile who ends up in Britain. And from him and his metier of Italian exiles, communists, socialists, Sylvia's right in early knowing about what's happening in Italy.

And indeed, she goes with Corio and herself is involved in a skirmish with Squadristi with black shirts in Bologna and so she knows very early on what's happening with Mussolini that is why she is absolutely right in there at the beginning with the issue over Mussolini's intentions for his empire in the sun and to get his revenge for Italy's defeat in Ethiopia at the Battle of Adwa. Famously, of course, as we always remember, Ethiopia is the only independent African nation, it's not been colonized, and it whacks the Italians and the Italians never, as a European power, there's a certain quarter of which Mussolini represents, which is we have to get revenge for the fact this African nation defeated us.

And so Sylvia is at the train station when Haile Selassie arrives in London. They become friends and colleagues and she becomes a very, very active supporter. And there's a rather nice moment at their first meeting. She says, you know, I don't support you because you're an unelected hereditary monarch of thousands of years standing, but because you represent human rights and a just cause. And the story goes that Haile Selassie very quietly said, I know. But that marked the beginning of an alliance and a support which proceeds for the remainder of her life.

And she warns repeatedly about, in a nutshell, if you let Mussolini get away with his racist, fascist war in Ethiopia, Hitler will be next, because she very much sees that Hitler is Mussolini's pupil, if you like. She then starts another newspaper, because of course, the other thing about her that would be another book in itself is the fact that she is a tremendous newspaper editor and writer and at different points of her career runs newspapers even as a child the home news and universal mirror then of course there's the dreadnought and the workers dreadnought and then the new times and ethiopian news which becomes internationally a really important newspaper but that war against the italian ethiopian war then becomes a question again about British colonialism,

because, of course, she's at the centre and has a great impact on trying to persuade the British state not to effectively form a protectorate and colonise Ethiopia by the back door. You know, Mussolini actually broadcast against her because he was so cross with her. He broadcast on the radio against her. During the war, she's on the Gestapo list, on Hitler's list for people to knock out. She's very, very thereafter, she becomes involved in the decolonisation liberation struggles. And that continues with interest in Ethiopia, but also in Kenya and various other countries. And her home in Woodford became known as the village because there were so many young African exiles, students, activists in Krumah, Kenyatta, various people who

she knew, who later then went back to run and be part of the process of transition in their countries. And then, as you say, as an older lady, when Sylvia Okorio has died, her son has grown up, still living with her, they're running the newspaper. Haile Selassie, who has always said on behalf of the Ethiopian state, you're an Ethiopian patriot. You always have a home here if you want to come and live here. And finally, she decides that she will. And she spends the last seven years of her life until her death in 1960 in Addis Ababa, living and working there, not stopping working. She's got meetings about her women's hospital and women's rights in Ethiopia

the very day that she dies. Did she feel happy with her legacy? Because she's a rebel, because she always stands up to authority, because she is never frightened of speaking truth to power. up to authority because she is never frightened of speaking truth to power she seems she sounds to us whether she's arguing with Churchill and they had a physical skirmish by the way whether it's arguing with Churchill whether it's arguing with Lenin whether it's arguing with Shaw whether it's working with Haile Selassie whatever she's doing one gets this sense that she's as some people saw her as strident as you didn't want to be on the wrong side of her. But in actual fact, that was only when she was doing what she thought she was supposed to do, which was to stand up to injustice, to speak truth to power, to take on authority.

In fact, the people that knew her and in her everyday activist and working life, she's actually very much, she's a very modest person. She was by vocation and training an artist, a highly talented artist. She got scholarships to the Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She had to give that up because of her politics and the movement, but she did sort of take it into, if you like, becoming the artist of the movement. But I think that there was something that goes back to her father, and it was about if you do not live your life for others, you will not have

been worth the upbringing and that sounds very harsh it sounds quite sort of a bit sort of stentorian victorian and exacting but there really was this sort of sense of collective responsibility doing your bit always organizing sylvia would have thought about her legacy not in terms of herself but actually in terms of the next generation and what's really interesting interesting, really interesting throughout her career, I mentioned to you that 16 year old journalist, Irish journalist who went into Dublin, who later then went on to become a novelist, a well known journalist and a novelist in her own right. But Sylvia always mentored younger people. And that was part of what her relationship with the African consciousness movement was. There are many stories of people, I mentioned Kwame Nkrumah earlier, Kenyatta, various other people who would

ask Richard Pankhurst, how's your mother? And you know, she was so great to us when we were young. I think she would have felt happy or content that her legacy was that there was a next generation. There's a story towards the end of her life, she used to go on these journalistic safaris, I call them, perhaps a bit naughtily inine Ethiopia because she would go around cement factories or coffee farms or she'd go to schools and she went to the school for young boys they were sort of 12 to 14 years old and they organized a debate with her and they interviewed her and at the end of it they presented her with a plaque it just had four others written on it and she kept that on her desk until the end of her life. And I think that sums her up.

Thank you very much. The book is called? The book is called Sylvia Pankhurst, Natural Born Rebel. Rachel, that is just such, it's a tour de force. So thank you very much for joining me. Thank you very much, Dan. hi everybody just a quick message at the end of this podcast i'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the bristol channel called landy i'm here to make a podcast i'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys in return I've got a little tiny favour to ask if you could go to wherever you get your podcasts

if you could give it a five-star rating if you could share it if you could give it a review I really appreciate that then from the comfort of your own homes you'll be doing me a massive favour then more people will listen to the podcast we can do more and more ambitious things

and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.