Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

‘A thrilling and inspiring read! For too long these extraordinary women have been hidden from history. Rise Up Women! should be a standard text in all schools and will be a treasured handbook for today's feminists’ Harriet Harman MP

‘Atkinson chronicles the deeds and sufferings of more than 100 women in Edwardian Britain who clashed with the authorities in the pursuit of Votes for Women … The moral courage of these people is humbling’ Daily Telegraph, Summer Reading 2018

‘Excellent’ Rachel Cooke, Observer, The year ahead in Non-fiction

‘This is the untold story of the women's suffrage movement at last revealed in glorious 360 degree detail. Rise Up Women! is heartbreaking, inspiring and incredibly rewarding to read’ Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana

‘Atkinson rightly dedicates much of her book to the many hundreds of less celebrated figures ... What stays in mind is the bloody-minded determination and courage of a large number of these campaigners’ Caroline Moorehead, Guardian

‘Substantial and impressive … Surely destined to become a key general text, ranking alongside classic tomes … Atkinson’s book provides an accessible, captivating, chronological account that incorporates recent developments as well as first-hand accounts’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Patiently, skilfully and empathetically, Diane Atkinson gives us the fullest, most insightful history yet of the suffragette movement and the courageous women who drove it forward to eventual fruition’ David Kynaston, author of Austerity Britain

‘In a new biography of the suffragette movement, Diane Atkinson has written not just a useful guide, but a terrific page-turner. It reads at times like a novel, but with characters and events you couldn’t make up. As you would expect, the Pankhursts are here in force, but so too are the music hall star Kitty Marion, weaver Dora Thewlis, clerk Jessie Stephenson, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and more, showing a movement much broader than its commonly presented image … Atkinson’s tour de force shows the campaign was no genteel hobby, but an all-out war in which the bravest and most indomitable warriors were, without doubt, the suffragettes’ Louise Raw, Prospect

‘Rise up and buy this book! Diane Atkinson has produced an instant classic of feminist history. All the spectacular drama and intrigue of the decade long militant campaign for the women’s vote is staged in this immensely readable suffragette epic’ Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx

‘A shocking and yet curiously exhilarating history of a group of women from all classes who simply refused to be crushed … Atkinson makes us feel so proud of that fight’ Miranda Seymour, author of Noble Endeavours

‘Diane Atkinson explores the lives of more than 100 militant campaigners and highlights the large part working-class women played in the struggle’ Tablet

‘An exclusive and captivating story of this remarkable movement’ Hannah Beckerman, Sunday Express

‘Covers the lives of more than 200 Suffragettes, not just Pankhurst and the names everybody knows’ Herald

‘A comprehensive biography of over 200 suffragettes and the roles they played’ Mslexia

‘Her sparse style in letting facts speak for themselves lends greater poignancy to her in-depth account … The author’s determination to give the lesser-known their due in this ‘collective biography’ makes up the backbone of the book … Historian Atkinson is a masterful and subtly witty arranger of the facts’ The Hindu

For Patrick Hughes

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Funny Girls: Cartooning for Equality

The Suffragettes in Pictures

Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick

Elsie and Mairi Go to War: Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

RISE UP, WOMEN!

The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes

Diane Atkinson

We hand the key to the coming generations to unlock the door to Freedom and Equal Opportunity. It is for them to campaign for and bring to glorious fruition the great reforms we dreamed of, but being voteless women, were unable to negotiate.

Jessie Stephenson typescript, ‘No Other Way’ (1932)

Contents

Preface

Map

Introduction

1 62 Nelson Street, Manchester

2 ‘Deeds Not Words’

3 ‘Rise Up, Women!’

4 Purple, White and Green

5 Window-smashing and ‘Rushing’ Parliament

6 Stalking Liberals and the Bill of Rights Demonstration

7 Starving Suffragettes

8 Promise and Betrayal

9 ‘Black Friday’

10 ‘The March of the Women’

11 Breaking Windows

12 ‘The Argument of the Broken Pane’

13 The Great Conspiracy Trial

14 The Expulsion of the Pethick-Lawrences

15 The Arsonists

16 ‘That Malignant Suffragette’

17 The Failure of the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act

18 ‘Slasher Mary’

19 The Deputation to See King George V, 21 May 1914

20 The Vote at Last!

After-lives of the Suffragettes

Appendix I: Chronology

Appendix II: Money and Value

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Index

Preface

Rise Up, Women! is a collective biography of the suffragette movement, illuminating the lives of more than a hundred women who took part in the militant campaign for votes for women in Great Britain between 1903 and 1914. It explores who the suffragettes were and what they brought to the most daring political campaign of the twentieth century.

For a long time the campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) has been dismissed as a hobby for self-interested middle-class women, but here we read what a large part working-class women played in the struggle for the right of women to vote. Despite danger, considerable suffering and public opprobrium, these women persisted unwaveringly in their aims.

Among them we meet, of course, the well-known Pankhurst family, Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela; mill girl Annie Kenney, the WSPU’s poster girl from Oldham; Emily Davison, whose deathly dash at the Derby in 1913 was captured on film; and Lady Constance Lytton, who adopted the alias ‘Jane Warton’ to experience how ordinary suffragettes were treated when they were sent to prison. But we also meet many lesser known figures such as Edith Rigby, a Preston doctor’s wife whose unique dress sense declared her unconventional views and earned the enmity of her neighbours who tried to drive Mrs Rigby and her family out of town; or Dora Thewlis, a weaver, who was sixteen when she came from Huddersfield to be arrested in Westminster; bootmakers Alice Hawkins and her husband Alfred, who kept the WSPU’s tricolour flying in Leicester during the militant campaign; Minnie Baldock, a shirt machinist, who founded the first WSPU branch in Canning Town, east London, in 1906, and recruited many women from Poplar, Custom House and East and West Ham; Charlotte Drake, a mother of four from Custom House, who went to work with Sylvia Pankhurst in the East End; Ethel Moorhead, an artist from Dundee, who threw herself into the Scottish struggle on the death of her father; Grace Marcon, a clergyman’s daughter from Norfolk, who was a masseuse and gymnastics teacher and joined the WSPU in 1910; music-hall artiste Kitty Marion, who started on stage in panto in Glasgow in 1890 and whose career and health were both undermined by her activism (in prison in 1913 she was force-fed more than 200 times); Mary Gawthorpe from Leeds who was apprenticed as a pupil teacher at thirteen; ‘Tough Annie’ Cappuccio, who lived in Stepney, where her father owned a sweet shop; Hannah Mitchell, a dressmaker from a poor farming family in Derbyshire, who escaped from her violent mother and joined the WSPU when disillusioned with the Independent Labour Party; Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, and England’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who were both in their seventies when they walked with the suffragettes to Parliament and were roughly handled by the police; sisters Annie, Florence, Minnie, Irene and Dora Spong, tunic-wearing, sandalled, vegetarian suffragettes, who were artists in music, dance, painting and weaving (Dora was also a midwife in the slums of Battersea and Tottenham); the ‘Murphy’ sisters (Leila and Rosalind Cadiz), who came to London from Dublin in 1911 to join suffragette protests and in 1912 smashed windows in their home city; bank manager’s daughter May Billinghurst, who pushed herself around in an invalid tricycle; Ethel Smyth, who composed the suffragette battle anthem ‘The March of the Women’; debutante and drug addict Lavender Guthrie, who committed suicide in 1914; the noble Fred and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who gave the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds of their own money to bankroll the campaign, only to be purged from the organisation in 1912, and yet who refused to reproach Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel for their callous behaviour; and from the USA, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who were studying in London when they became suffragettes, and left the United Kingdom with prison records, and who transplanted WSPU tactics to invigorate the American women’s suffrage campaign. The lives of all these remarkable women, and a great many more who feature in this book, together make up the extraordinary story of the militant campaign for Votes for Women.

*

Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Suffragette Movement, published in 1931, is a detailed account of the suffragette campaign and about the Pankhurst family’s role. Underlying family tensions – of which there is no mention in Mrs Pankhurst’s My Own Story, published in 1914, and Christabel’s autobiography, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959) – boiled over in the early days of 1914 when Sylvia was summoned to Paris to be admonished about her relationship with the Labour Party. Sylvia Pankhurst suffered much for the campaign – weeks of hunger- and sleep-striking, which gave her mother immense pride. Christabel disliked all politicians, not just Labour men: she was of the view that no politician could be trusted, and disapproved of Sylvia’s close ties to her intimate friend Keir Hardie. In 1907 Christabel had said that Liberal politicians – many of whom professed to support women’s suffrage – were ‘as wily as serpents’; her opinion would harden as the lies piled up.

The militant campaign for the female vote was like a drama that ran for more than ten years: it had constant stars, scores of supporting actors, hundreds of walk-on parts and a vast chorus who created successful spectacles. These performances were written, directed and played out by a fluid group of politically motivated women, sometimes helped by men, who sacrificed and made friendships, reputations and employment in the struggle.

Mrs Pankhurst discovered, from hearing about ‘the Battle of Peterloo’ in Manchester in 1819, that you need a huge performance in front of a big audience to effect large political change. She knew the value of events that would later be broadcast via the newspapers to politicians, the voters and supporters.

The suffragette campaign was a defiant panorama of first nights, long runs, tragedies, comedies and coups de théâtre. The suffragettes, unlike the quieter, more staid suffragists of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), practised street theatre, chalking pavements, mass demonstrations, arson and fire-bombing pillar boxes. Their pageants and interruptions of meetings all too often ended in the prison cells.

One hundred years after the historic moment when the vote was granted to some women it is time to take a fresh look at the daring and painful struggle that eventually achieved political representation for all British women, to reflect on what we would have done in their situation and, above all, to salute them.

Diane Atkinson,

London, May 2017

Introduction

This illustration in the WSPU’s Votes for Women newspaper shows that by 1913 nineteen countries and states had given women the vote.

In 1832 the Great Reform Act extended the franchise to give the vote to ‘male persons’ over the age of twenty-one who lived in the counties, and for the first time included small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers, and householders living in the boroughs who paid a yearly rental of £10 or more.¹ It enlarged the existing electorate of half a million men by 300,000 new voters. The insertion of the word ‘male’ was the first statutory bar to women having the vote, and was the catalyst for the founding of the women’s suffrage movement.² Mary Smith, a Yorkshire ‘lady of rank and fortune’, was dismayed by the terms of the Act, which enfranchised many men and no women. She asked Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, the radical MP for Preston, to present a petition to Parliament, the first from a woman asking for the vote. Henry Hunt had opposed the Great Reform Bill on behalf of working men who were disenfranchised by its property qualifications. In the House of Commons on 3 August 1832, Hunt cited ‘several excellent reasons why every unmarried female possessing the necessary pecuniary qualification’ should be entitled to elect a Member of Parliament. Hansard reported that Hunt introduced the petition ‘which might be a subject of mirth to some Hon. Gentlemen, but which was deserving of consideration’. The female petitioner stated that:

she paid taxes and therefore did not see why she should not have a share in the election of a Representative; she also stated that women were liable to all punishments of the law, not excepting death, and ought to have a voice in the making of them … She expressed her indignation against those vile wretches who would not marry, and yet would exclude females from a share in the legislation. The prayer of the petition was that every unmarried female, possessing the necessary pecuniary qualification, should be entitled to vote for Members of Parliament.³

After the briefest of discussions the petition was rejected. The MP for Oldham, William Johnston Fox, pointed out the ‘egregious anomaly’ that women were not enfranchised and yet a woman was likely to inherit the throne in the near future.⁴

Chartism, a working-class movement for political reform, was founded in 1838 and demanded manhood suffrage; annual parliaments; equal electoral districts; the abolition of property qualifications for MPs; the payment of MPs and the secret ballot.⁵ Women played a significant role in Chartism and wished for legislation to reflect the needs of women and children.⁶ A draft of the Charter had included a demand for female suffrage, but this was reduced to more votes for men.⁷

In 1851, Chartists Mrs Abiah Higginbotham and her husband, and Miss Anne Knight, a Quaker with pro-Chartist views, founded the Sheffield Female Political Association. An anonymous leaflet published in England in 1847, the year before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in the United States, is thought to have been written by Anne Knight. It declared: ‘Never will the nations of the Earth be well-governed, until both sexes … have an influence and voice in the enactment and administration of the laws.’⁸

The Sheffield Female Political Association, the first organisation for women’s suffrage in Britain, petitioned the House of Lords to ‘take into consideration the propriety of enacting a law to include adult females within its provisions’. The SFPA was Higginbotham and Knight’s response to being prevented – because of their gender – from speaking at an Abolition of Slavery meeting in London. Mrs Higginbotham chaired the Society’s first public meeting at the Democratic Temperance Hotel in Queen Street, Sheffield, and signed a petition on behalf of the female inhabitants of Sheffield asking ‘that the Houses of Parliament take into serious consideration the propriety of enacting a law which should include females within its provisions’.⁹ The Sheffield Independent reported:

Women arise in their might and say: ‘Seeing that the Queen is in the enjoyment of her prerogative as a woman, this meeting is of the opinion that until the enfranchisement of women is conceded, justice will not be done … and resolves to petition both the Houses of Parliament for the enactment of a bill which will enfranchise the whole female adult population of this empire.’¹⁰

A year after the SFPA was formed, it was agreed that a National Woman’s Rights Association be established. However, it collapsed with the demise of Chartism in the late 1850s.

The Langham Place Group, which was active between 1858 and 1866, was made up of a number of determined middle-class women who campaigned on a variety of liberal and feminist issues to improve women’s lives. Moderate and respectable, the group was led by childhood friends Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, born in 1827, and Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Rayner Parkes, who was two years younger. The group named itself after the address of the English Woman’s Journal, at 19 Langham Place, London, which had been launched in 1858.

At first, Bessie Parkes was nervous of confronting such a contentious issue as women’s suffrage, but by 1864 opinions within the Group shifted and the English Woman’s Journal printed extracts from ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’, an article by Harriet Taylor. Miss Taylor was the stepdaughter of John Stuart Mill, the newly elected Liberal MP for the City and Westminster, the first politician to mention women’s suffrage in his election campaign of 1865.¹¹ In November 1865 Emily Davies, secretary of the Kensington Society, a ladies’ discussion group of sixty-eight members founded earlier in the year, wrote to a friend that ‘some people are inclined to begin a subdued agitation for the franchise’.

The Kensington Society included leading campaigners of the day: Miss Beale and Miss Buss; Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy; Frances Power Cobbe; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Barbara Leigh Bodichon. They debated topics of common interest of which women’s suffrage was a strand, and many members shared a history of working for women’s property rights in marriage and female education. Practice in formal debating in private drawing rooms gave women confidence in public speaking.¹²

The Kensington Society established the women’s suffrage movement. On 7 June 1866 the Society delivered a petition of 1,500 signatures, entitled the ‘Ladies’ Petition of Barbara Leigh Bodichon and Others’, asking for women’s suffrage when Parliament was debating the 1866 Reform Bill: ‘Your Petitioners humbly pray your honourable House to consider the expediency of providing for the representation of householders, without the distinction of sex, who possess such property or rental qualifications as your honourable House may determine.’ A cross-section of women signed the petition, including schoolteachers, butchers’ and blacksmiths’ wives, dressmakers, shopkeepers, and women of means and leisure. Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson took the petition and, to avoid attention, hid it under the cart of a woman selling apples in Westminster Hall, from whence John Stuart Mill retrieved it. On 17 July 1866 he presented the large petition to the House of Commons, arguing that its value was that it had been organised and signed exclusively by women, and demonstrated clearly for the first time that women wanted the vote.¹³ It was rejected.

On 20 May 1867 John Stuart Mill proposed an amendment to the Second Reform Bill, ‘to strike out the words which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males’. His central argument that ‘taxation and representation go hand in hand’ continued for the next fifty years of women’s suffrage campaigning.¹⁴ The 1867 Reform Act doubled the electorate of one million male householders to two million out of a total population in England and Wales of twenty-two million.¹⁵

John Stuart Mill was pleasantly surprised at the seventy-three votes cast in favour of his amendment; 196 voted against it in the brief debate. One of the votes in favour was that of a professor of political economy, Henry Fawcett, Liberal MP for Brighton since 1865. Fawcett had recently married Millicent Garrett, who went on to play a prominent part in the efforts of the moderate law-abiding suffragist campaign, and, indeed, lived to see all women over twenty-one get the vote in 1928. Mill helped found the London National Society of Women’s Suffrage in August 1867; Lydia Becker had already founded the Manchester Committee for Women’s Suffrage in January 1867; the Bristol Women’s Suffrage Committee started in January 1868.¹⁶ Their campaigning style was to collect signatures for petitions, hold drawing-room meetings and lobby MPs, mostly in private, but sometimes daring to hold meetings in large venues, such as the Great Meeting in favour of women’s suffrage in Edinburgh’s Music Hall, in January 1871.

Despite being ridiculed in the House of Commons, Mill persisted and in 1868 asked the science and mathematics writer Mary Somerville to be the first name on a new petition which eventually secured 21,000 signatures.

The barrister Richard Pankhurst had been working for women’s suffrage with Elizabeth Wolstenholme and Lydia Becker in Manchester for a decade when he married Emmeline Goulden in 1879. He had spoken at the first public meeting calling for women to have the vote in Manchester in 1868. Shortly after their wedding Emmeline Pankhurst joined the executive committee of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Before becoming the militant suffrage leader, Emmeline had been a moderate suffragist.¹⁷

Following John Stuart Mill’s intervention, private members’ bills or resolutions in favour of women’s suffrage were presented to the House of Commons almost every year between 1870 and 1914. And 12,000 similar petitions were taken to the Commons between 1866 and 1914, and hundreds more to the House of Lords. Fearing that enfranchised women would vote for the opposition, no Conservative or Liberal government in office during those years was prepared to introduce its own bill, or allow the necessary time for a private members’ bill to pass. Although women were excluded from the parliamentary franchise, those who paid rates on their property could vote in local municipal elections, and stand for election as Poor Law Guardians and on School Boards.¹⁸

Supported by her husband, Mrs Millicent Fawcett began campaigning for women’s suffrage in the 1870s, and in 1897 became the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), a federation of seventeen local suffrage societies in London, south-west England, Scotland, Kent, the Midlands, Lancashire and East Anglia, whose policies were decided by the members. In 1870 the women who demanded the vote were dubbed ‘the shrieking sisterhood’ by the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton.

The insistent campaigning of the suffragist and feminist agitation of the 1880s intensified after the 1884 Reform Act enfranchised a further three and a half million men who were householders paying an annual rent of £10 or more for unfurnished lodgings. The best-selling novelist Mrs Humphry Ward organised a petition in 1889 signed by the ‘great and the good’ women of Victorian society against female suffrage, to be presented to Parliament ‘to appeal to the common sense and the educated thought of the men and women of England against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women’.

By this time women in other parts of the world had already begun to be enfranchised: in the United States in Wyoming in 1869 and Colorado in 1893; in New Zealand also in 1893. In 1902, South Australia, Utah, Western Australia and New South Wales would follow.

By the turn of the century within the NUWSS there was a group of radical suffragists, mill workers from the cotton towns of Lancashire, who held meetings at factory gates and street corners demanding the vote. The best-known radical suffragist was Selina Cooper who had gone to work in a mill at the age of ten.¹⁹ In 1902 Christabel Pankhurst’s first contact with the struggle for the vote was with radical suffragists in Manchester, to whom she was introduced by the poet and radical suffragist Eva Gore-Booth, and her intimate companion, Esther Roper.

The Conservative Party had been in office since 1895 and in 1902 Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was succeeded by his nephew Arthur Balfour.²⁰ In 1884, when in opposition, Lord Salisbury had expressed pro-women’s suffrage views, but when he became prime minister in 1895 his sentiments were lukewarm. Arthur Balfour was privately and publicly supportive of the demand, but the strength of backbench opposition gave him the excuse to do nothing to make it happen.²¹

Imperial politics had other matters on its mind: the growing threat posed by Germany as an industrial and naval rival; awareness of the widespread poverty of the nation and concerns about social and industrial unrest; the persistent demand for Home Rule in Ireland; and the shocking revelation that at least a quarter of the young men who volunteered to serve in the Boer War were unfit to fight. This resulted in the Interdepartmental Committee Report on Physical Deterioration, published in 1904. Politicians and newspapers worried about the quality of working-class motherhood and its impact on Britain and the Empire, and found expression in the insistence that working-class mothers who did sweated work at home had undermined the health of the nation’s sons and put the Empire at risk.²²

During the 1890s British trade unionism expanded and joined forces with the Independent Labour Party. In 1901 there were two million trade union members, and four million by 1913. Forty per cent of the adult male population were still unenfranchised,²³ and neither the trade unions nor the burgeoning Labour Party had any intention of helping women get the vote, whom they assumed would be well off and would vote Conservative or Liberal.²⁴ The growing power of trade unionism, best demonstrated by the dock strike of 1911 and the first general rail strike in 1911, which Lloyd George managed to defuse, and then the London Dockers’ strike in 1912, were grave concerns which the Liberal government was happy to be distracted by, instead of doing anything which might enfranchise women.

The struggle for Home Rule, an ambition of Liberalism and Irish Nationalism, suffered a setback during the years the Conservatives were in office in the 1890s leading up to the Liberal landslide of 1906. From 1910 the Liberals would increasingly rely on the Irish Nationalists to govern with their slim working majority and this arrangement would prove disruptive to the women’s suffrage bills during Asquith’s government in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.²⁵ The Irish Nationalists were susceptible to the Liberals’ argument that if women’s suffrage succeeded the Home Rule Bill would fail.

The demand for votes for women continued to be easily brushed aside during the seven years from 1895 that a Conservative government was in power under Lord Salisbury. But then, in 1903, the foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union ensured that women’s political campaigning would never be the same again. This is where our story begins.

1

62 Nelson Street, Manchester

The Launch of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903–5

Sylvia Pankhurst’s loyalties to the Independent Labour Party are clear in the membership card she designed for the WSPU in 1906.

‘It was in October, 1903, that I invited a number of women to my house in Nelson Street for purposes of organisation. We voted to call our new society the Women’s Social and Political Union, partly to emphasise its democracy, and partly to define its object as political rather than propagandist. We resolved to limit our membership exclusively to women, to keep ourselves absolutely free from any party affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action on our question. Deeds, not words, was to be our motto.’¹

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, a forty-five-year-old widow, was the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Chorlton, and had a shop, Emerson’s and Co., at 30 King Street, Manchester, which sold Liberty-style Arts and Crafts furniture and soft furnishings. Much of the stock had come from an earlier endeavour when she had opened the same kind of shop in various parts of London where the Pankhurst family had lived from 1886 to 1893,² but Mrs Pankhurst had no head for business and the ill-starred venture eventually closed in 1906. She had three daughters, Christabel, aged twenty-three in 1903, Sylvia, twenty-one, Adela, eighteen, and a son, Harry, then fourteen.

Emmeline Pankhurst often said she was born on the same date as the fall of the Bastille; in fact, she was born the day after, but it was too good a story to let a day spoil it. Her grandfather told Emmeline about the Battle of Peterloo, the great franchise demonstration on St Peter’s Fields in 1819, when the Manchester justices had called out the troops to attack the people, and how he had ‘barely escaped alive’.³

When she was five Emmeline was taken to her first political meeting by her mother, who was active in the abolition of slavery movement. Emmeline tottered round the room with a ‘lucky bag’ collecting pennies for the newly emancipated slaves. In 1872, when Emmeline was fourteen, her mother took her to a woman’s suffrage meeting to hear Miss Lydia Ernestine Becker speak. Lydia Becker was the secretary of the recently founded Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage and friends with leading radicals, including Dr Richard Pankhurst, whom Emmeline married in 1879 when she was twenty-one.⁴

Red-haired and bearded, Richard Pankhurst, known as ‘the Red Doctor’, was twenty-three years older than his wife. He was the son of an auctioneer, and in 1867 he became a founder member of the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage. He stood for Parliament three times: in Manchester in 1883 as an independent radical Liberal; in Rotherhithe in 1885 as a radical; and in Gorton, Manchester, in 1895 as a candidate for the Independent Labour Party. He failed each time. Lydia Becker described him as ‘a very clever little man with some extraordinary sentiments about life in general and women in particular’.⁵

In 1886 the Pankhursts left Manchester with their four children and moved to London where they hoped Richard’s earnings as a barrister would support them, and that he might get elected to the House of Commons. The Pankhursts moved in Fabian and free-thinking circles, their Liberal views turning pink and then red.

Richard and Emmeline were present at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riot on 13 November 1887 in Trafalgar Square, a protest against high unemployment and the draconian enforcement of law and order in Ireland. After his experience of being in a peaceful protest policed by 2,000 police constables and 400 troops, Richard Pankhurst joined the Law and Liberty League to defend the right to free speech and demonstration. The couple also joined the Women’s Franchise League when it was founded in 1889. Trade union leaders Ben Tillett, Tom Mann and Keir Hardie (the first working man to become a Member of Parliament) were regular visitors to the Pankhursts’. Their visitors’ book included some of the leading thinkers and activists of the day: the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta; the Russian political refugee Peter Kropotkin; William Lloyd Garrison, an advocate of women’s suffrage whose father had been a leading American slavery abolitionist; Dadabhai Naoroji, later the first Indian member of the House of Commons; the visionary socialist William Morris; and Annie Besant and Herbert Burrows, organisers of the Match Girls’ Strike of 1888.⁶

The Pankhursts returned to Manchester in 1893, where Richard joined the Independent Labour Party and by 1895 he was on the national executive. In 1894 he began the legal battle to prevent the Duke of Devonshire, landowner of the Kinder Scout footpath in the Peak District, from closing public access. The campaign partly succeeded in 1897, but was only completely successful – despite a mass trespass in 1932 – as late as the 1960s. When he died in 1898 from a ruptured stomach ulcer, Richard left more debts than money.⁷

After his death, Mrs Pankhurst resigned as a Poor Law Guardian and looked for a salaried position. The family left their house in the suburb of Victoria Park, and moved to Nelson Street, a more modest address.⁸ She got the job as the local Registrar of Births and Deaths, where infant mortality rates were twice the national average. ‘It was touching to see how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to go to … I was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies. In many cases I found that the child’s own father or some male relative was responsible for her state.’⁹ The Independent Labour Party offered to raise a subscription for Richard Pankhurst’s widow, but Mrs Pankhurst rejected the idea and suggested instead that they build a hall in her husband’s memory. The Pankhurst Hall was opened in Salford in October 1900 with murals painted by eighteen-year-old Sylvia Pankhurst. On 10 October 1900 Keir Hardie delivered the inaugural lecture.¹⁰

When the Pankhurst Hall opened Emmeline and her daughters were appalled to learn that women were prohibited from joining the local branch of the Independent Labour Party which would use the Hall as its headquarters,¹¹ so Mrs Pankhurst invited the wives of ILP members, after the leadership had denied them access to the Pankhurst Hall, to meet at her house in Nelson Street.

*

Christabel Pankhurst, born in 1880, was by 1900 in the family business of politics. She was taking classes in logic at Owen’s College (now Manchester University) and had gone to a meeting of the Women’s Debating Society. Christabel met the radical suffragists Esther Roper, a clergyman’s daughter from a working-class background who was secretary of the North of England Society of Women’s Suffrage (NESWS), and her companion, Eva Gore-Booth, daughter of the Arctic explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth. Esther was impressed by Christabel’s contribution to the debate. Esther, Christabel and Eva became friends and for several summers holidayed together. Miss Roper and Miss Gore-Booth easily persuaded Christabel that the working woman needed the vote, as a weapon of self-defence, just as much as the working man. Christabel Pankhurst wrote: ‘It was the sharp contrast between practical suffragism in our home circle and the inequality I saw meted out to women in general in the outer world that made me see in the suffrage cause one, not of merely academic interest, but of stern practical importance.’¹²

Christabel and her sister Sylvia had always been allowed to attend political meetings. ‘The big double drawing-room housed a considerable company, and meetings and conferences would be held on industrial and social questions and women’s suffrage.’¹³ In her autobiography, Christabel describes how, when she was eleven, she recorded that ‘Dr Pankhurst, as Chairman, said in his speech that if the suffrage was not given to women, the result would be terrible. If a body was half of it bound, how was it to be expected that it would grow and develop properly?’¹⁴ One day Christabel startled her mother with the remark: ‘How long you women have been trying for the vote. For my part, I mean to get it.’¹⁵

Esther Roper suggested Christabel read for a law degree at Owen’s College and also join her and Eva in their campaigning work among factory women. A few days after her mother founded the WSPU, Christabel enrolled at Owen’s College. Christabel’s choice was pragmatic: ‘it seemed that a knowledge of the law might prove useful in work for woman suffrage, and useful it was indeed to prove’.¹⁶

In 1903 Sylvia Pankhurst completed her studies at Manchester Art School, but she was tasked with running the struggling shop while her mother kept her day job and Christabel started her law degree. Then, in 1904, she took up her scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in Kensington and, soon after, started a love affair with Keir Hardie, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil, which would last until his death in 1915. Hardie was thirty years older, estranged from his wife, and a family friend. Sylvia designed the WSPU membership card which showed working women, aproned and shawled, with a rippling banner demanding ‘Votes’, and a mother carrying a child. The image of working-class women walking shoulder to shoulder sent out a clear signal.¹⁷

An early member of the new organisation was Elizabeth Wolstenholme, a pioneer of all the feminist struggles of the previous forty years. Born in Manchester in 1833, the daughter of a Methodist minister, Elizabeth resembled a character from the pages of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford, her severe parting and old-fashioned dress looking quaint among the swept-up hairstyles of the new century. She and her lover, Benjamin Elmy, a silk manufacturer, were keen Secularists and they believed in ‘free love’: that couples should be able to live together without stigma and not have to marry. They grudgingly married in 1874 when Elizabeth was forty-two years old and six months pregnant. When Ben Elmy’s business collapsed in the late 1880s, Mr and Mrs Elmy were forced to rely on handouts from ‘the grateful fund’ which her friends collected.

Mrs Elmy was seventy when she joined the Pankhursts’ campaign. She pushed for the Cambridge Higher Examinations for women and for a programme of advanced lectures for women, which eventually led to the establishment of Newnham College, Cambridge. In the 1860s she was honorary secretary of the Married Women’s Property Committee and campaigned for the right of married women to retain their own property, which otherwise passed to their husbands on the day they married. Her work had some success in the 1870 and 1882 Married Women’s Property Acts.

In 1869 Elizabeth Wolstenholme urged Josephine Butler to join the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts which allowed women suspected of working as prostitutes to be arrested, imprisoned and forcibly treated for venereal diseases. This notorious legislation was repealed in 1886. She was also the paid secretary of the Women’s Franchise League founded in 1889.¹⁸

By the turn of the century only a tiny minority of the British population wanted women to have the vote. Conservative MPs believed in maintaining the status quo. They feared that if women were enfranchised many would vote for the Liberals or for the new Independent Labour Party. Some Liberals believed that women should have the vote, but in turn were afraid that their opponents might benefit. While some Liberal MPs supported women’s suffrage, the prime ministers Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his successor Herbert Asquith opposed it. Asquith was a diehard critic and many of his Cabinet colleagues would follow suit. The Independent Labour Party, founded in 1892 to represent the interests of working men, believed that if property-owning women and not working-class women got the vote, the Conservative and Liberal parties would gain an important advantage. Many in the ILP were committed to votes for everyone, but most believed that men should have the vote first, and women afterwards.¹⁹

With the arrival of Mrs Elmy in the group Mrs Pankhurst turned to London, the capital of the Empire and the home of the mother of parliaments. In the autumn of 1903 Mrs Pankhurst joined a small deputation of members of the NUWSS to interview Sir Charles McLaren, Liberal Member of Parliament for Bosworth, Leicestershire, and other colleagues in the House of Commons, about their intentions.²⁰ As the meeting drew to a close, Emmeline Pankhurst, who had not been asked to speak, blurted out the question that hung in the air. ‘Will Sir Charles McLaren tell us if any member is preparing to introduce a bill for women’s suffrage? Will he tell us what he and the other members will pledge themselves to do for the reform they so warmly endorse?’ When she seized the moment it did not go down well. McLaren was livid to have been put on the spot and the women left ‘in confusion and wrath’. Mrs Pankhurst was reminded that she was an ‘impertinent intruder’ who had not been asked to speak and had no right to ‘ruin the good impression they had made’.²¹

In February 1905 Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst lobbied for eight days leading up to 13 February, when the result of the private members’ ballot would be announced. The successful member was permitted to introduce a bill of his choice. The Pankhursts spent their time in the Strangers’ Lobby trying to persuade members who had pledged to support women’s suffrage in the past to agree to give their slot to a women’s suffrage bill, if their names were drawn in the ballot. It was Sylvia’s first experience of lobbying: ‘it would be an uphill task but I had no conception of how hard and discouraging it was to be. Members of Parliament gave all sorts of excuses for refusing to help, that they had some other measure in which they were interested, or said they preferred to wait until they had more experience before balloting for any kind of a bill.’²² When the results of the ballot were announced Sylvia and her mother were the only women in the Lobby. ‘We sat there on the shiny black leather seats and at last we saw with relief Mr Keir Hardie come hurrying towards us. He was so kind and helpful, the only kind and helpful person in the whole of Parliament it seemed.’²³ Emmeline and Sylvia tracked down the fourteen men whose names had been drawn. They all said ‘No’, except the recently elected Liberal Member of Parliament for St Albans, John Bamford Slack, a Methodist lay preacher whose wife Alice was a suffragist. John Slack had drawn the last of the fourteen places in the ballot. They put the date of Friday 12 May, when private members’ bills were to be debated, in their diary and set to work again.²⁴

John Slack’s women’s suffrage bill was the first to be debated in eight years. Mrs Pankhurst noticed ‘a thrill of excitement animated not only our ranks but all the old suffrage societies’.²⁵ For the first time the established women’s suffrage societies, which traced their lineage back to the 1860s, and the WSPU, the cheeky newcomers, worked together to get a big female presence inside and outside Parliament on 12 May. Mrs Nellie Martel, who had arrived in England from Australia where she already had the vote as well as political experience, was a new member of the WSPU and brought working women from the East End of London to the demonstration.²⁶

Large numbers of suffragists and 400 working women entered the Lobby of the House of Commons and milled about on the terrace and in the passages leading off the Lobby. Mrs Pankhurst, Mrs Elmy and Mrs Martel were not hopeful and their fears were well-founded. The bill was deliberately ‘talked out’: parliamentary time was eaten up by a debate about carts travelling along public roads at night needing to carry a light at the rear as well as at the front. MPs laughed and applauded when the debate ended with only half an hour of business remaining.

Mrs Pankhurst seized her moment – something at which she excelled – and asked her companions to follow her outside. The police rushed to disperse them but the women headed for the statue of Richard the Lionheart, and Mrs Pankhurst helped hoist the tiny Mrs Elmy on to the plinth where she addressed them. Keir Hardie persuaded the police to let the women gather at the gates of Westminster Abbey; speeches were made and a resolution condemning the Conservative government was passed. The police took the womens’ names but none were arrested.²⁷

In 1903, when the WSPU was born, Annie Kenney was a ‘card-room hand’ in an Oldham cotton mill. It was poorly paid and dangerous work which employed thousands of young women in the north-west of England. Mill girls might suffer from a persistent cough and byssinosis caused by inhaling the cotton dust that thickened the air in the poorly ventilated mills. Her sisters Alice and Jane were also card-room hands, while Jessie was a ‘reeler’ who wound thread on to bobbins. Annie sang with the Clarion Vocal Union founded by Montagu Blatchford, co-founder of The Clarion, a socialist weekly. His brother Robert was the most influential man in Annie Kenney’s life and political education.²⁸

In her 1924 memoir Memories of a Militant, Annie Kenney remembered the impact Robert Blatchford’s articles on socialism, philosophy and poetry had on her. Thousands of men and women in the Lancashire factories owed their education to him.

‘He introduced us to Walt Whitman, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, John Ruskin, Omar Khayyam, the English poets, Emerson and Charles Lamb … the reading of books made me more serious and at last I decided to join the Oldham Clarion. I could not sing, but I thought the practice would be good for me, and I felt I should like to meet others whose ideas were very much like my own … On Sundays if a celebrated Labour man was speaking we were invited to sing at the meeting.’²⁹

Annie’s mother Ann Kenney imbued in her children a love of learning. She read stories which ‘all seemed to be about London life among the poor … on Sundays we would be allowed to invite any friends we liked to tea, I remember we had an urn; teapots were no good there were so many of us. When we assembled round the large table discussion would begin.’³⁰ Her parents and the older children read Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. ‘Mother would be as interested as we were until the arguments got so heated that she felt it was wise to close the discussions because of the younger children.’³¹ These discussions ‘made me unwilling in later life to accept statements without proof’.

The Kenney family were materially poor, but rich in their upbringing. Annie was adamant that her kindly father and strong mother had made her who she was: ‘to my mother I owe all that I have ever been, or done that has called upon courage or loyalty for its support’.³² Three of the daughters became teachers, one son was a respected businessman, and in 1912 Rowland Kenney became the first editor of the Daily Herald.³³

In 1889, aged ten, Annie Kenney ended her full-time schooling to work as a half-timer in Henry Atherton and Son’s textile mill in Lancashire. She worked from six in the morning until half past noon and then went to school until five o’clock in the afternoon. Annie was proud to be earning money to help the family finances. ‘I wore a shawl and bright clean clogs. When I arrived at the factory I was met by a group of girls, half-timers and full-timers, who all stood round the door and stared at me … Your clogs were examined; thick or thin leather made a difference; your petticoat, your pinafore, the quality, the colour, stamped you accordingly.’³⁴

When Annie was thirteen she became a full-timer, working until half past five in the evening, her formal education ended. ‘My school knowledge was nil. I could not do arithmetic, I was a bad writer; geography was Greek to me; the only thing I liked was poetry.’³⁵ The Kenney children were exposed to a richer curriculum at home than at the village school.

Annie Kenney’s journey to women’s suffrage began when her mother died in January 1905 at their back-to-back house at 71 Redgrave Street, Oldham. Ann Kenney was fifty-three, had been a wife for twenty-two years and had borne eleven children. Annie and six of her siblings were still living at home. Their father was ‘a born nurse, no hand was more tender than his in illness’.³⁶

Annie found a new family when she met Christabel Pankhurst. Annie and Jessie and Jennie went to a meeting where they heard Christabel Pankhurst and Teresa Billington speak about women’s suffrage.

I had never heard about votes for women … I had never read any newspaper but The Clarion … Miss Billington used a sledge-hammer of logic and cold reason – she gave me the impression that she was a good debater. I liked Christabel Pankhurst: I was afraid of Teresa Billington … It was like a table where two courses were being served, one hot, the other cold. I found myself plate in hand, where the hot course was being served.³⁷

Annie found herself promising to work up a meeting among the women factory workers of Oldham. Annie and Christabel walked together to the railway station and Annie was invited to the Pankhursts’ house the following Saturday, after her half-day’s work at the mill. ‘The following week I lived on air; I simply could not eat … It was as though half of me was present; where the other half was I never asked … I instinctively felt a great change had come.’³⁸ On Saturday Annie finished her shift, changed her working clothes and went to the station. She was shown into the ‘very artistically furnished’ drawing room, where Christabel introduced Annie to her mother. Miss Kenney was a pale, blue-eyed woman of twenty-five, five feet four inches tall. One finger was missing on her left hand, severed by a whirling bobbin.³⁹ They arranged a WSPU meeting in Oldham. Christabel wrote the copy for a handbill and Annie and Jessie handed them out in the town. Very few turned up, only one of Annie’s sisters, her school pal Alice Hurst and one more woman. But Annie was dauntless and every Saturday afternoon she returned to the Pankhursts to be trained for her first public speaking engagement, off Market Square in Manchester. Annie was terrified at the prospect but her new friends waved her concerns aside. ‘I found myself at seven o’clock at night addressing a crowd. What I said I do not remember. I suppose I touched on labour, the unemployed, children, and finally summed the whole thing up by saying something about votes for women.’⁴⁰

Annie became friends with Nellie Ellis, a twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher, and her younger sister Alice, a machinist, from Preston, and they visited mill towns all over Lancashire helping Annie hold street-corner meetings, and getting women to join the WSPU. Nellie remembered, ‘Annie Kenney would do the speaking and my sister and I would stand there gazing at her and that attracted a few people. Annie had a very good speaking voice and people could hear it … the streets in Lancashire are packed and the houses were packed close together … We got imbued with a sense of duty, something that’s got to be done.’⁴¹

Annie Kenney had the idea to take her WSPU comrades to follow the ‘Wakes’, travelling fairs, all over Lancashire during the summer weekends of 1905. Alongside the Salvation Army, the quack doctors, the tooth-drawers and the ‘bearded lady’ booths, they made suffrage speeches and some valuable new friends.⁴²

Teresa Mary Billington was an early member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Her parents’ unhappy marriage meant she had an unhappy childhood. When she was seventeen she clashed with her parents over their determination to stop her becoming a writer ‘campaigning for great causes’, and she ran away to live with her maternal grandfather, John Wilson, in Preston. Teresa studied at night school for her teaching certificate, hoping to earn a living from her pen in her spare time. She qualified and began a course which eventually gained her a B.Sc. from the University of London. By the time she joined the Ancoats University Settlement in Manchester in 1903 she was a twenty-seven-year-old elementary schoolteacher and a member of the Independent Labour Party.

In 1903 she refused to teach a religious education class, but was helped by Emmeline Pankhurst, a member of the Manchester School Board, who got her a transfer from a Catholic to a Jewish school. When Teresa met Mrs Pankhurst she found she lived up to her reputation: ‘she was gracious, lovely and dominant … and a force, vital and resourceful. She had a beauty and graciousness, moving and speaking with a dignity, but with no uncertainty of mind or movement.’ Teresa spent many hours at 62 Nelson Street in those early heady months, organising and booking speakers.⁴³

When her school day ended, Teresa juggled her suffrage work with her role as the secretary of the Manchester branch of the Equal Pay League. Christabel remembered Miss Billington as ‘a power in debate who could make short work of any platform opponent’. At the beginning of 1905 Emmeline Pankhurst and Keir Hardie asked her to become the first full-time woman organiser for the ILP.⁴⁴

Mrs Edith Rigby was making her mark in Preston with her unconventional ideas and dress. She was tall, had ‘wheat-gold hair’ and ‘speedwell blue eyes’. In 1893, a month before her twenty-first birthday, Edith Rayner married Charles Rigby, a doctor who was twenty years older than her.⁴⁵ Charlie allowed Edith the physical comfort and emotional space to create her own life at their home at 28 Winckley Square, a well-to-do address. She soon blossomed into a campaigner, developing her own sartorial style, wearing ‘extraordinary dresses that looked as if they were made of blue sacking, and heavy amber coloured beads on chains.’ Edith ‘never raised her voice and was utterly different from everyone else’. Dr Rigby was ‘tolerant, gentle in voice and manner and was like her in many ways, sharing her compassions if not all her passions.’⁴⁶ Charles Rigby indulged Edith’s wish to have her own place; she rented a bungalow in Broughton and grew fruit and vegetables, travelling the eight-mile round trip by bicycle.

Preston, which by 1900 had a population of 100,000, had been the inspiration for Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times. Conditions in the heavily industrialised town had barely changed since Charles Dickens’s visit:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever … It had a black canal and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye …⁴⁷

Edith Rigby learned about the lives of mill girls and garment workers and in 1899 she opened St Peter’s Club, a night school for working women in a room on the first floor of St Peter’s School. Twice a week there were ‘get-togethers’, with singing, there were two sewing tables, lessons on hygiene and sports, and Edith’s aerobics class with her sister Alice playing the piano.

Mrs Rigby’s behaviour was an affront to many residents of Winckley Square. She treated her servants as equals, allowing them to eat their meals in the dining room, and did not insist they wore a uniform. She tried to persuade her neighbours that menial tasks should be shared by all members of the household, upsetting ladies and servants alike when she scrubbed her own front-door step. Edith’s fondness for sandals and Turkish cigarettes offended many. Two ladies called on her and told her that her appearance and the way she treated her servants as equals was a disgrace, and that if she could not alter her ways perhaps she had better leave the area. Edith’s response was to whitewash the front doors of her impertinent callers.⁴⁸ A niece remembered: ‘When Edith became involved in suffrage her neighbours cut her in the street, tarred the stone work of her house and as far as it was possible for ladies to spit, they spat at her as she went by.’⁴⁹

In 1904 Edith Rigby joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and went to meetings at Mrs Pankhurst’s house where she became friendly with Christabel and Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney. Edith’s family believed that Christabel was ‘responsible for her metamorphosis … into a decidedly fiery angel’.⁵⁰

The Rigbys’ childlessness after more than a decade of marriage would have caused gossip over the tea cups in Winckley Square. When Edith was ready to have a child she had one: in December 1905, immersed in socialist and suffrage activities, she persuaded Charles that they should adopt a two-year-old boy whom they named Arthur, a freckle-faced redhead whom Edith dressed in kilts and tunics and velvet caps. Arthur, known as Sandy, was brought up to share her values and was seen helping Edith scrub the front step. Edith inspired a band of women in Preston to join the branch of the WSPU she founded in 1907.⁵¹

Mrs Flora Drummond joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in the summer of 1905. Flora Gibson was born in Manchester in 1879 to Scottish parents. By 1881 her father Francis, a tailor, had moved the family to Scotland and her childhood years were spent on the Isle of Arran. Flora left school when she was fourteen and became a telegraphist, then studied to be a postmistress in Glasgow. Her obvious source of employment was the post office, but a bizarre new rule denied her this: she was an inch shorter than the regulation height of five feet two inches.⁵²

On 26 September 1898 Flora Gibson married Joseph Drummond in Glasgow. Joe was an upholsterer born in Manchester and a local hero on Arran, having fallen overboard on the steamer taking him there on a holiday trip.⁵³ Flora and Joe’s son Percival was born in July 1899 in Manchester but died aged twenty-two months, of gastroenteritis.⁵⁴ After the death of their child the couple became members of the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society and the Clarion Cycling Club. Joe Drummond was in and out of work and Flora had to supplement his wages. Hearing from comrades of the conditions that working women endured she went to find out for herself by taking a job in a garment factory. One of the factors that took her to 62 Nelson Street was the low wages that were one of the causes of prostitution. She became the main breadwinner and found better paid work as the manager of the Oliver Typewriter Company in Manchester.

In the summer of 1905 Flora Drummond travelled round the Lancashire cotton towns encouraging women to join the WSPU. She was remembered by Sylvia Pankhurst as ‘brimful of self-assurance and audacity, she was always able to draw a laugh from her audience by jocular stories … good at organizing and directing in a rough-and-ready way’.⁵⁵ Flora quickly earned a new name: ‘the General’.

Hannah Mitchell, née Webster, made her way to women’s suffrage via the Independent Labour Party of which she and her husband Gibbon were early members. Hannah recalled her parents Benjamin, a farmer, and Ann, a reluctant farmer’s wife, as being opposite in character: Ann resented her last three children, Hannah, Sarah and Benjamin, often lashing out at them in wild rages. Benjamin, a hill farmer whose sheep nibbled a living from the harsh terrain, was a gentle man who taught all his children to read and write.⁵⁶

Ann Webster decided her daughters should train to be dressmakers, so she sent Hannah to Glossop to learn dressmaking with Miss Brown, an ‘elderly crippled lady’ who ran a small business. Hannah was happy at Miss Brown’s. ‘Even a very strict mistress would have seemed kind after my mother’s harshness, but Miss Brown was so kind and gentle she soon roused my interest, and for the first time I realized that work could also be a pleasure.’⁵⁷

The antagonism between mother and daughter grew worse: ‘she was determined to mould me to her pattern … by nagging, ravings and beatings. But I was stronger now, and had no mind to allow myself to be thrashed.’⁵⁸ In 1888, Hannah walked the ten miles to Glossop to lodge with her eldest brother William, and his wife and baby son. ‘Somewhere on the moorland road I left my childhood behind for ever.’⁵⁹ By 1891 she was nineteen years old and working in Bolton as a dressmaker, earning ten shillings a week.⁶⁰ Hannah learned the harsh conditions of the garment industry: low pay, long hours, seasonal unemployment, strict rules which included silence at all times, and a system of fines ‘enforced by a thin-lipped shrew of a woman’.⁶¹

Hannah was caught up in the agitation for shorter working hours for shop assistants. At a meeting to ask for a weekly half-day holiday for shop workers, she was captivated