Dan Snow's History Hit - The Violence of the Suffragettes

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Today we remember the suffragettes as a peaceful movement, but in the years before the First World War, the WSPU launched one of the most shocking terrorist campaigns the British mainland has ever seen. Dan talks to Fern Riddell about Kitty Marion, one of the most militant suffragettes, and her struggles.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. You join me at a time when i'm feeling a bit emotional i've just i've just received pictures and videos of my dad walking in walking into a clinic surrounded by

volunteers and health care professionals seeing to his every need making sure he's comfortable and confident and administering the first covid vaccine it feels both very recently and also like a long time ago in March when I went around to mum and dad's house with a load of tuna and pasta and told them that's it. No more going outside. We were locking down. I'm so happy that we're getting towards the point at which we can see light at the end of the tunnel. I want to say a huge thank you to all the scientists and healthcare professionals involved in the creation and administration of this vaccine. This podcast is one of the classics from the archive.

The wonderful Dr Fern Riddell, she is a historian. She's written fantastic books about Victorian sex, Death in Ten Minutes, about the political violence of the suffragette movement. She's been on TV. She writes, she advises, she presents. She's a podcaster. She's everything. She's a great writer.

And it's always a terrific pleasure to hang out with her. She is here talking about the women's suffrage movement. It was this week in 1918 that women in Britain, or some women in Britain, were given the vote in national elections for the first time they had to have property qualifications they were of a certain age it was a start of a process that would see women given political equality with men over the next generation if you want to get a history.com shop you get your fun christmas present for anyone who loves history those difficult to buy for members of the family

who all your problems are now solved and you can gift them tickets to live tour next year you can give them subscriptions to history hit tv it's all brilliant incredibly proud to say that history hit tv has got the premiere of our winter truce documentary exclusively history original content of course as so much of our content is we filmed it over the last few months we've got some of the best historians we've uncovered new archival material uh all about this remarkable christmas truce of 1914 a drama documentary please go and check that out only on history hit tv if you use the code pod1 pod1 you get a month for free and your second month just one pound a year or dollar i mean it's just you can basically watch this for free sweet and

then we've got an audio version extended interviews with some of those historians some of the actors reading out the accounts on this podcast on the 23rd and 24th of december so just super exciting and all in all feels feels like a seismic day so forgive my emotion everybody here is dr Fern Riddell. Enjoy. Fern, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Good to have you on this time to talk about your fabulous book. I'm super excited. Tell everyone, it's such a cool premise, tell everyone the idea behind this book. So my book is called Death in 10 Minutes, Kitty Marion, arsonist, activist and suffragette. And it's the story of Kitty Marion, who was an incredible woman. We know so little

about our women's history. And this is someone who links both the birth control movement and the fight for the vote, the two most important aspects of feminist history in the last 150 years. And Kitty was a German child immigrant. She was an actress in the musicals in England. And she found that she was kind of getting casting character syndrome. And so she was being abused and assaulted by actors and managers. And she thought that was awful. And no one would listen to her. No one would change. The government wouldn't change. Politics wouldn't change. And at that moment, the suffragettes appeared. And she found this organization that were really fighting for exactly what she was. philosophy kind of driving people to it. But actually, it's interesting, you found an example of someone who's experiencing the patriarchy, experiencing abuse day to day, and it's getting a vote that is actually a way of changing her own life and her own circumstances.

Very much so. And I think we never talk about this with suffrage. We always think that all they ever wanted was the vote for kind of grand philosophical reasons. And for many women, it was that actually they were finding terrible abuse within their own lives, whether that was domestic or economic, and were trying to maintain their independence and maintain their right to work and be free and not be indentured to anyone, whether that was through marriage or through anything else. And the vote represented a way to represent their views, to have their voices heard, and to make sure that legislation was in place to protect themselves. I mean, it's a great, it's a lovely example of high politics and actual people's everyday lives.

Very much so. But I think what was so surprising about this for me wasn't that I'd found a woman who was fighting for the things we're still fighting for today, but someone who was conducting a bombing and arson campaign. I'm going to come on to that. That is particularly exciting. Can I ask how we know so much about her? We don't know anything about her. She's been really only in occasional suffrage histories. She's been in a list of names of suffragettes.

Let me change the question. How do you know so much about her? How do you know about her circumstances and her journey towards the suffrage movement? So Kitty was really the focus of my PhD, which I had been doing for a number of years. And I was sitting in the archive at the Museum of London and I was working on the musicals and women and looking for how cool and amazing women were at that time in that they were in and looking for how kind of how cool and amazing women were at that time in that they were absolutely on top of objectification and how to manipulate it for their own economic safety and security and I was really fascinated by that and I was sitting in the archive at Museum of London and Beverly Cook who's the senior curator there brought in this two type bound manuscript and

said I've got this autobiography for you. It was written by a woman who was on the music halls, but was also a suffragette, you might be interested. And I thought, oh, I don't I don't want this. I don't want the suffragettes. It feels like a trap as a young female historian to be working on that aspect of women's history. It feels like that's what I'm supposed to do. And that's what we're supposed to be interested in. And I've never been interested in that. Because I've always had that kind of arrogance of someone who's grown up with all of those rights, I wasn't interested in how we got them. And I sat there with this manuscript. And after about five pages, I couldn't leave. And I've never had that experience before in all of the source material that I've worked on.

And I've worked on some really cool things. But she was just this incredibly passionate, explosive voice who could write about her life and her world in a way that made you live it with her. So it's unpublished. Yes. Until now. Forgotten, hidden, lost story. Yeah. So you've explained on how she became, she got interested in the suffrage movement. What did she then, how did she contribute?

I don't know if contribute is a fair term, but she became one of the, this really is the history that we don't know of suffrage. And for many of us, that history has been completely sanitized. It's been really just told as a history of women who marched, or maybe chained themselves to railings, or maybe broke a few windows. And the reality of what the WSPU, which is the Women's Social and Political Union, were actually doing at this time, is vastly different. This is the most dangerous terrorist organisation operating in the United Kingdom at this time, conducting the largest bombing and arson campaign

that we have ever witnessed in our entire history. Now, would you ever think that that was the case with the suffragettes? No-one does. No-one knows that. And one of the joys and one of the things I became incredibly fascinated with was unpicking the reality and the scope and scale of this nationwide bombing and arson campaign, which was orchestrated by Christabel Pankhurst and her lieutenants. Well, tell me about the scope. First of all, why did they turn, why did they create the biggest arson and bombing campaign in the history of Britain?

Why did they turn to those extreme methods? Well, between the 1860s and when we started to get the vote in 1918, over 16,000 petitions came before government asking for women's suffrage. And none of them were heard, none of them were passed. So the fight for getting either universal enfranchisement, both working men and women and men and women, everyone the vote in our democracy, had been going for a really long time. And it had been a campaign of words, really passionate, very powerful

words. Millicent Fawcett says, courage calls to courage, you know, incredible kind of quotes and speeches and language. But it hadn't got anywhere. It had failed over and over again. And whichever government was in charge, lost interest, didn't think it was important, was worried that enfranchising women over working men wouldn't work, that you had to enfranchise working men first. And it just, it just wasn't going anywhere. And after 50 years of campaigning, Emmeline Pankhurst created the WSPU, whose motto were deeds, not words, because they had had enough of talking. And they knew in 1903 that something had to change. And within about five to ten years, they had begun and enacted and put in place their new campaign, which started with disrupting political meetings, sort of standing up and speaking when women weren't supposed to,

to window smashing, to training themselves to railings. And then from 1912 onwards was the arson and bombing campaign, because the government weren't listening. Over and over again, they were rejecting bills. They were also very proudly claiming to have torpedoed bills for female franchise. So it was constantly shutting down any chance to give women the vote, to give anyone the vote other than the people that they wanted to have it. And do we need to think about this in the context of Irish nationalist violence, anarchist violence in Russia? I mean, talk to me about where this campaign of terrorism came from in the late 90s, early 20s century.

Well, so that's really fascinating because no one's, this research is so new. I am the only living historian doing it. And we only have one single journal article in our entire historiography on suffragette violence, the extreme suffragette violence, which was written by CJ Bierman about 10 to 15 years ago. And nothing's been done before or since. So this is completely unknown. So we have a lot of questions that need to be looked at. And the interplay between Ireland and Russia is a fascinating one. Because we know that some of the suffragettes, Kitty herself, goes to see James Connolly speak. And the very first suffragette serious, vicious, violent attack happens in Dublin,

when four English suffragettes are sent by Christabel Pankhurst over to Dublin to bomb and burn down a packed theatre, the Theatre Royal, in 1912 whilst Herbert Asquith is speaking. And earlier in the day they chuck a hatchet at the MP John Redmond, who's the Irish MP who's arguing for Home Rule there, because he'd refused to allow a clause for women's franchise to be included in his arguments for Home Rule there, because he'd refused to allow a clause for women's franchise to be included in his arguments for Home Rule. So there's actually a massive interplay between all of these civil rights movements

and how they were all trying to fight to be heard. You know, you have to look at it and that every single civil rights movement that we have has had an extremist element. And the suffragettes are that for the women's movement. has had an extremist element. And the suffragettes are that for the women's movement. I'm with Dr Fern Riddell.

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and this suffragette you're talking about is the extreme she's on the extreme flank of the extremists well so kitty is one of the leading i call her edwardian england's most dangerous woman because she is one of the leading figures and she's sent not only is she responsible for numerous attacks but she's also sent across the country to help advise other branches of the WSPU in how to commit these arson bombing campaigns. And she burns down Lewis Harcourt, who's the MP for Hastings. She burns down his house with a big arson attack. And that film, The Aftermath, is on Pathé on their website. is on Pathé on their website and it's kind of the most incredible if you want to get a sense of the scale of destruction the burning gutted how huge mansion house that the women are responsible for is an incredible site and all the people milling around you can see it online.

But Kitty is someone who is leaving pipe bombs from Manchester to Portsmouth, who's conducting burning down railway stations. I mean, to kind of get a sense of the violence, we're talking chemical attacks on post boxes, bowling greens, golf greens, the sending of chemicals in the post that, when you open it, irritate your eyes, nose and throat. That's intensely serious. And then we're talking bombs that the one that they send

to the Southeastern Post Office has enough nitroglycerin to destroy the entire building and kill all 200 people inside. You know, these are huge things. And we've never understood that aspect of the suffrage movement. And Katie's got a huge hand in it. She's also very close to Emily Wilding Davison, who we know very little about. And the research that I've done and what it all brings together

is that Emily Wilding Davison is actually the one responsible for the bombing of Lloyd George's cottage. That's good to hear. My great-grandfather, lucky to get away with his life. Well, he wasn't there at the time, luckily.. Well that's the thing that I should ask about because there's a there's a perhaps a myth that there was suffragette violence but they were very careful they bombed empty houses they only are that they were committing arson against properties they need to be empty it doesn't sound like that's true. It is I would agree with you it's a myth but it's a myth that the

suffragettes themselves created. Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst were very always gave these great speeches about how there was no threat to life and no harm to life. Well, that's very noble when you're not the person leaving the bombs, but when your followers are, and many of these are on timed devices, those empty houses at 1am that you sneak in to leave a bomb in, to leave an incendiary device to set a fire,

may not be empty three hours later. And I have certainly found reports of bombs on packed commuter trains that go off later down the line once the third class carriage is empty. Well it was packed at the time the bomb was left and we know that many of the postmen who deal with the chemicals being sent through the post which are often very flimsy vials of phosphorus which is a chemical ideally designed that they will smash and break in the interaction of the post box itself and set everything and burst into flames because that's what phosphorus does once it meets air. And those postmen, if they either find an

unbroken vial and don't realise it in an envelope or are moving it into post bags and everything explodes, are covered in horrific burns. So this idea that we have that the suffragettes didn't hurt anyone is very much a myth of their own creation, and I would disagree. Have we got a figure for the number of people killed and maimed? There wasn't anyone killed, at least that I haven't found yet. But again, if you're arguing whether or not suffragette ideology killed anyone, of course we have Emily Wilding Davison, who sacrificed her life in the fight for the vote. So they were burning down houses and setting bombs and just by chance, none of them killed anyone.

I think when we're looking from 1912 to the outbreak of the First World War, we're seeing an extreme escalation. So it starts out with maybe a couple of bomb attacks a month, a couple of sort of arson attacks across the year. Then throughout 1913, it becomes very extreme. In May alone, there are 52 attacks, including serious bombs and severe arson attacks, you know, in one month alone. And that grows throughout 1913, grows into 1914, when we start to see the inclusion of guns being used by the suffragettes. And there's an amazing moment where Emmeline Pankhurst appears on a stage, I think in Glasgow, it's up in Scotland, and she's been on the run for the police. She's there to speak and the police are waiting outside to try and seize her. And she manages to find her way onto the stage and the hall erupts in kind of a wild cheer. The policemen try and rush in.

And as the policemen try and rush in from the side of the stage, up hall erupts in kind of a wild cheer the policemen try and rush in and as the policemen try and rush in from the side of the stage up stands a woman in a beautiful black evening gown who draws a gun and fires at the first policeman and he falls back because as far as he is aware that's a loaded gun that's gone off it that him it at that stage was fitted with a blank but you're starting to see the guns being used. And when Jenny Baines, who's another suffragette, who's conducting the Aston bombing campaigns, when she's arrested for blowing up a railway carriage, I think in Yorkshire, with her husband and her son, at home is found another half-made bomb, a fully made bomb, a loaded revolver, and a loaded gun.

So to be honest, what we're seeing is the grand escalation of this campaign, that by pure blind luck, doesn't result in the death or serious injury of anyone by the outbreak of World War One. But if war hadn't happened, I really don't know where we would be. So let's, let's ask the old A-level question. What was the response of the British public to this escalation? Well, that's a really interesting one. And you see there are some amazing kind of campaigns against the violence, obviously. And Emmeline Pankhurst states very clearly that the motivation for the violence is to terrorise the British public into forcing the government's hand. And she's very clear that's what she wants to do. And the

British public seem to kind of object very seriously to all of these and the newspapers start to run weekly columns rounding up all of the violence across the country, what's happened and where. But there seems to be silence as far as the historical record is currently concerned with understanding what happens then. Because we've ignored suffrage violence, because there has been a determined campaign to sanitise this history and ignore what was happening, we don't have an understanding of people's reactions to it yet. We know that the suffragettes that Christabel was publishing in the Suffragette, which was her weekly magazine, double page spreads of every single attack, including photographs that were taken underneath headlines like Reign of Terror. You know, she's not shying away from what's

happening. And she's wanting to see it communicated to the British public, to scare, to intimidate, to draw people to her cause who feel as angry, as disenfranchised, are looking as much to become part of a civil war, which is what they're trying to cause, is what they believe in, what they state is happening. And we laugh, you know, when we look at the arguments of the suffragettes and the issues between people who think women should be equal and people who don't.

And I don't mean women who think they should be equal against men. I don't mean that as a gender war. I mean this as a war of ideas. That is how it was. It was absolute warfare. I suppose it's the ultimate subversion of the Edwardian feminine ideal is saying, no, we're warriors and we're trying to start a war. This is violent revolution. Exactly that. And Christabel actually says exactly that.

She's in Paris in 1913. And she states very clearly, if men use bombs, that's called a glorious and heroic deed. Why shouldn't women use the same? We're fighting for revolution. So she's absolutely, they always are completely clear cut about what the violence is, what was happening, and why. And yet in the last 90 years, we have forgotten this completely and the suffragettes have become nice women who chain themselves to railings and occasionally through a nodstone. And the reality is far more exciting, far more violent, far more radical. And it's history that we should have because it tells us so much about where we are today. Now, I don't want to ruin the book, but let's talk about, let's come back to your story, Kitty. What's her, how does her journey go?

So she has this kind of incredible life and she's an actress in the musicals. She fights to try try and get safety for women like her doesn't get anywhere joins the suffragette becomes an arsonist and a bomber and at the outbreak of war because she's german by birth even though by this point she spent the majority of her life in england the government seizes on an opportunity to try and get rid of one of their most dangerous women by trying to deport her back to Germany because by that point we were we were really driving out anyone who was who was German even British women who were married to German husbands and so if you're thinking kind of around London or any port city that could be incredibly destructive so she they try to get rid of her and try and throw her out of Germany.

There's an accusation that she's a spy and a whole investigation, which is really exciting. And she's kind of escorted to Liverpool, escorted onto a boat, and she manages to get away instead to New York. Because that's another place that's arguing for suffrage and has a lot of kind of women's movements in it. another place that's arguing for suffrage and has a lot of kind of women's movements in it and once in New York there's kind of this moment of wilderness where she's alone and forgotten and abandoned and the New York suffragettes want nothing to do with her because she's a well-known violent militant and she kind of she kind of disappears for a year and a journalist finds her working as a maid in this big posh house in downtown New York and she's kind of regretting everything and sort of going oh but you know maybe maybe women

shouldn't have the vote and that's not you know maybe everything I'll just ignore it and he kind of brings her back to life a bit I don't know if it's because seeing her name in print was something to do with it but she suddenly realizes that this secret life she's built for herself is pointless and useless. And it's not, it's not what she had committed to and what she wanted. So she joins the birth control movement with Margaret Sanger at that time, and becomes the only person selling the birth control review on the streets. What's fascinating is that Margaret Sanger's birth control campaign becomes Planned Parenthood very quickly so that's a well-known name that a lot of people would recognize now as one of the

leading birth control organizations in the world in the country in the US across everywhere so this is one woman who is in the court at the foundation of two of our most important feminist movements and no one knows her name we should know her name like we know emeline pankhurst's name or margaret sanger's name and yet we don't and i think that's because often when we're talking about women's history they have to be perfect they have to be idolized they have to be idols for us and kitty because she's so complex and she's so flawed and she's so flawed and she's talking about rights to sex rights over your own body rights to birth control the freedom for women to have sex the freedom for women not to be abused to have very happy healthy sex lives

that don't mean marriage and she wants to protect that through then an arson and bombing campaign you know this is this is someone that we have been taught not to who's using behavior we've been taught not to idolize well actually our heroes can be flawed and knowing about them and listening to their stories as they tell them firsthand i think helps change our society and our culture far more than pretending everything is perfect and that history should be comfortable. Provocative stuff, Fern. I love it. Give us the name of the book again. It's Death in Ten Minutes, Kitty Marion, activist, arsonist, suffragette. Lovely. Edwardian Britain's most dangerous woman. Good luck with it. Thank you, 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 Lundy. 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'd 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. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.