Laugh a Defiance

Pinafores, fancywork and kittens: what the Birmingham suffragettes brought to the Women’s Exhibition

May 6, 2019June 7, 2019 laughadefianceLeave a comment

In early to mid-1909 the WSPU was on the cusp of its first transition into the ‘militancy’ it is now remembered for; soon words would really be eschewed for deeds as heckling politicians evolved into stone-throwing outside political meetings. Yet, the WSPU was still a nascent political organisation in many regions. Militancy needed to be bolstered by mustering support amongst local communities and, more importantly, raising funds.

The WSPU had established a firm presence in Birmingham a year or so previously. Thanks to the fundraising efforts of local members, permanent headquarters had opened in October 1908 on Ethel Street, near to New Street station. In March 1909, the movement was really beginning to establish traction. Under the direction of Gladice Keevil, the organising employees were making inroads locally and finding support throughout middle- and working-class communities. That month, Christabel Pankhurst spoke at a meeting in the Town Hall and the WSPU gained 50 new members. (1)

ce8ede42f036b7d5b98bbe8e7e34da84 — Gladice Keevil in 1908

This influx of members would have proven particularly fruitful. Since the beginning of the year, local branches had been busily preparing for the Women’s Exhibition, to be held for two weeks in May at the Prince’s Skating Rink, Knightsbridge. Different regions would have stalls from which they could sell donated goods. The Midlands was to have two of the 6ft by 3ft tables, one for the Birmingham branch and the other a joint effort by other areas, including Malvern, Cradley and Stoke-on-Trent.

Joint Exhibition Secretaries Edith Kerwood and Lucy Calway presided over a successful drive for donations. These poured in from the member base. Wealthy women donated high quality second-hand clothes and homeware, including a silk blouse worth 15s, silk dresses (one from Japan) and a tablecloth from India. The second stall was stocked with a variety of Leadless Glaze pottery pieces and a purple, white and green china tea set.

There is something particularly striking about the Birmingham accounts of donated items published throughout March and April in the ‘Local Notes’ and ‘Campaign in the Country’ sections of Votes for Women. Many of the Midlands women made use of their skills to create items to sell. A large amount of embroidered fancywork was collected. Laura Coxon made a purple, white and green silk cushion, Florence Relph dressed 20 ‘“Suffragette” dolls’ in the same colours and Constance Prior made purses and workbags (no prizes for guessing her chosen colour scheme). A Miss Steen created some metal artwork samples and offered to take costume jewellery commissions from customers (‘in the colours’, naturally). After Bertha Ryland, a very wealthy (and generous) Birmingham woman procured a sovereigns worth of material, ‘sewing meetings’ were held in Ethel Street, during which ‘a group of energetic workers’ set to creating a batch of pinafores.

The-Womens-Exhibition-1909-by-Christina-Broom — The Women’s Exhibition – Prince’s Skating Rink, Knightsbridge, May 1909. Photo: Christina Broom.

The devotion to the WSPU evident in the women’s choice of colour scheme seems quaint, but it was also part of a concerted merchandising effort that was modelled from the top of the organisation. The Women’s Exhibition was more than a fundraising effort, it was also a spectacle and advertisement for the suffragettes. Sylvia Pankhurst used the colour scheme to decorate the Prince’s Ice Rink inside and out. The external walls were covered in garlands and purple white and green bannerets, whilst inside, the walls were decorated with painted designs; a repeated pattern of ivy, grapes, roses and butterflies surrounded doves and the prison arrow. Even the tickets matched; those who came for the opening ceremony (2 shillings sixpence) had purple, whilst day tickets afterwards (1 shilling) were green. Visitors could look upon a replica 2nd Division prison cell (with resident suffragette) and take part in a daily ‘election’ from a model polling booth. Refreshment stalls offered light meals, and there was also a fully operational ice cream soda café.

137933 — ‘2nd Division Cell Allotted to Suffragettes’

christabel-ballot-1909 — *that photo* of Christabel Pankhurst voting in the replica polling booth

The Midlands stalls did very well; the leadless glaze pottery was especially popular. Another draw to the stall had been promised some months previously; the Birmingham women were accompanied by a ‘charming white kitten’, who ‘caus[ed] great amusement’. The kitten at least seems to have been better behaved than the Shetland ponies that had been tasked by Ada Flatman, a member of the Birmingham WSPU, to wear ‘saddle cloths of purple, white and green’ with posters attached to advertise a meeting in Birmingham in April. She intended the ponies to be led by three women whilst three others distributed handbills, however it had proven ‘rather difficult’ to ‘get one white pony to wear the white trappings and walk in the middle’.

Looking at the effort expended by the Midlands women for the Exhibition in May 1909 shows another side to the suffragette campaign, one that is often passed over for the traditional idea of the imprisoned force-fed woman. Simultaneously, of course, the Midlands branches were hard at work holding street meetings and accosting Cabinet Ministers speaking at local political events. Whilst Ethel Street was abuzz with pinafore stitching and donation collecting, it was also a hive of activity preparing to campaign at co-occurring by-elections. However for those who were unable or unwilling to devote time to this kind of suffragette work, there was still an opportunity to support and contribute to the movement’s success. Poignantly, skills and hobbies that were usually reserved for the feminine sphere of the home became a tool for individual women to come together and work toward their ideal of empowerment – an Edwardian women’s craftivism. I wonder (and hope!) that somewhere, maybe, some of these unique items have survived.

Sources

(1) For all things Birmingham and suffrage (not just WSPU!) Nicola Gauld’s study is amazing. Words and Deeds – Birmingham Suffragists and Suffragettes 1832-1918 – follow the link to see a short documentary film about suffrage campaigning in the city.
Votes for Women – editions in March, April and May 1909
– for aberrant Shetland ponies – 30th April
– sewing meeting / Laura Coxon’s cushion – 19th March
– advertisement of upcoming Exhibition describing decoration – 7th May
– little white kitten – 21st May

14th December 2018

December 14, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

There’s something strange about centenaries, anniversaries, ‘#onthisday’s. It feels arbitrary and yet, there is something about the temporal closeness that makes them feel a little more significant than usual. Today, 100 years ago, the first wave of women were able to vote alongside men. Not all women, of course – it would be 10 years until that milestone was reached. But nevertheless, 100 years ago today, Hilda Burkitt would have woken up, gone about her morning business and then, at some point, did what she had given 7 years of her mind, body and soul to gain the right to do.

I can’t imagine how it must have felt as she walked into the polling booth, filled out her ballot and left, having exercised her newly gained democratic right. Only four and a half years previously, she had spent three and a half months in prison, a tube down her throat three or four times a day as she maintained a continuous, unfaltering hunger strike. She had broken into empty buildings and left them in flames, she had broken windows, in- and outside of prison, all while shouting, screaming or leaving in written form “Votes for Women!”

She had also spent days, months, years really, patrolling the streets of Midlands towns and cities, spreading the word for the cause she held so dear. Newspapers in one hand, she climbed up onto chairs or boxes and took a breath before regaling the sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, sometimes both, crowds of the need for the female vote.

An admittedly infrequent, but still common, response to the commemoration of any suffragette or the WSPU usually invites a number of prickly responses:

But what about the suffraGISTs?

We should remember the suffragists, and many historians have been doing very valuable work into the many alternate forms of suffrage activism and how they overlapped with each other. History does not need to be a competition for attention. Commemorate more women! Commemorate them all!

The suffragettes actually harmed the suffrage movement’s efforts!

I tend to shy away from assessment of (in-)efficacy – is it even really relevant now? The suffragettes did what they did, forming their own microcosm of deeds and words, and that is something that is very interesting.

They were what we would call terrorists now!

Indeed. They were what one might call terrorists then. Indeed, in a 1913 editorial by Christabel Pankhurst in The Suffragette, she even uses the verb.

“Very obvious are the replies to these two points. In the first place, the Suffragettes not only “think”, they know that Parliament can be terrorised into granting reform. They also know that Parliament never grants reform unless it is terrorised. The men terrorised Parliament into giving them the Vote. The Catholics terrorised Parliament into giving them emancipation. The Nationalists (by their votes in the House of Commons) are terrorising Parliament into proceeding with the Home Rule Bill.
Terrorism is, in fact, the only argument that Parliament understands!
– 27 June 1913

It is of course, very reductive to employ that ‘terrorism’ as we understand it now is the same as ‘terrorism’ as utilised in 1913. However, there is a case to be made for the fact that the WSPU was an early form of ‘reform terrorism’ in terms of rhetoric and action.(*) . The fact that the only life lost came from their number does not absolve them of some at times very dubious deeds. However, History is full of flawed, dubious ethics. That’s what makes it so interesting. Terrorists or no, the WSPU are a fascinating entity, and much of the history of this particular union and its membership remains to be explored.

I am of course, biased in my interest in Hilda Burkitt, and will always seek to justify it. Even if sometimes our relation to each other seems far too distant to be anything but nominal, I still feel a connection to her – especially when I catch a glimpse of my mother next to her photograph and see traces of similar facial features, when I see my grandfather in photographs of Hilda’s brother. Similar interests have made their way down the family tree; both the past and present lots have talented saxophonists, accomplished long-distance runners, love for textile arts amongst them. When I saw the photograph of Hilda sitting in the garden for the first time I was taken aback; she poses with a cat on her lap and a Jack Russell at her feet, the same two types of pet that have been part of my family since my early teens.

But regardless, Hilda is fascinating as a historical actor, and I will think about her and her cause a lot today. Her actions went beyond the pale, but then so did those of the government who force-fed her, the crowds who mauled her, the Press who defamed her. Her story is complex, her doings even more so – all the more reason to try and piece it back together, as should be the case for the many other figures across the suffrage movement, whether militant, semi-militant or not militant at all.

The vote was not the final victory – 1918 wasn’t even a full victory. As time has passed, old issues have persisted, new ones have arisen. The fight goes on. But today, and in the future, we can at least take the stories of the suffragettes and draw something from them. Hilda’s shows us that courage, persistence and commitment exist in many forms, usually not entirely morally faultless. If anything, she reminds us, as does the WSPU anthem The March of the Women, that ‘naught can ye win but by faith and daring!’

———————————————————————————————————————-

(*) See The Transfiguring Sword – Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp

Nuneham Park pt. 1

December 6, 2018December 9, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

On the 10th July 1912, two women hired a canoe from Salter’s Boatyard on Folly Bridge in Oxford. They paddled down the Thames to Stevens Boatyard in Abingdon, where they stayed the night. Upon being asked by the tourists for recommendations, Mrs Stevens suggested they go back on themselves up the river to visit nearby Nuneham Park. One of the women asked if they would be allowed inside the house, to see the paintings – her companion was an artist. Mrs Stevens said that no, the house was closed to the public.

Labelled black and white photograph of Nuneham House, date unknown. Country Palladian villa surrounded by walls and formal gardens. [Source]

The next day, the two women took the twice-weekly Salter’s river ferry through the Oxfordshire countryside to visit Nuneham. After the ferry moored at the Park boathouse, the two women disembarked and wandered up from the river through the Capability Brown landscaped estate. They then rang at the front door of the Palladian villa and asked if they might come inside to view the owner’s extensive art collection – one of them was an artist and would so like to see the paintings. Doris Gale, daughter of estate manager Henry, politely declined, explaining that the house was closed to the public. The two women returned on the ferry boat to Stevens Boatyard, where they made arrangements for their canoe to be returned to Oxford. They then hired another canoe from Stevens and left, saying they were setting off in the opposite direction to Wallingford.

Oxford and the surrounding countryside were popular tourist destinations, so the Stevenses likely thought little of the two well-to-do ladies and their excursion to Nuneham as they said goodbye at Abingdon. That is, until the day after next, when they would discover the women’s real motive for visiting.

In the early hours of the 13th July, local Police Constable Godden made an unexpected discovery as he patrolled Nuneham Park. Hiding in the creepers of the North Wing of the house were two ‘well-dressed’ women. Asked to explain what they were doing, one of the women answered that they had come up the river and were camping in the area. It was a warm night, too hot to sleep, so they had decided to come and look at the house. Dissatisfied by her explanation, Godden grabbed the woman by the wrist and eventually managed to subdue her. Her companion fled.

After the arrest, a basket and satchel were discovered at the scene. The basket contained three brushes, two cans and a bottle containing substances later found to be methylated spirits, turpentine and paraffin, twelve firelighters wrapped in cotton, four lighting tapers, a box of matches and lock-picking tools. In the bag was a two-foot rule, a torch, more matches, cigarettes, chocolate, a typewritten letter outlining the women’s motives, and a piece of string. Meanwhile, the arrested woman’s identity had been discovered; her name was Helen Craggs and, upon searching her in the police station, a small purple white and green flag carried on her person confirmed her political affiliation. A few hours later, the women’s hired canoe was found in the reeds on the riverbank at the bottom of the gardens. Inside it was food, clothes and several books, one containing a postcard with the lyrics and music for Ethel Smyth’s The March of the Women. In a notebook were written the telephone numbers for Nuneham House and Oxford Fire Station. It was thus confirmed; having stumbled upon the two women on his nightly rounds, PC Godden had prevented what would have been the first serious arson attack on private property by a Women’s Social and Political Union militant. Helen Craggs and her accomplice had also nearly dealt a severe personal blow to an ardent anti-suffragist member of Parliament; Nuneham Park was the country seat of Lewis Harcourt, a member of Herbert Asquith’s cabinet.

The residents and staff of Nuneham House may have been on guard against any suspicious activity by apparently harmless-seeming women. Since his appointment to Cabinet in 1910, Lewis Harcourt had been a consistent target of WSPU ire. Women from Australia and New Zealand were particularly furious that the new Secretary for the Colonies, responsible for their home countries, should be a vocal supporter of the opposing cause. In the days after the infamous Black Friday incident, the windows of Harcourt’s London home in Berkeley Square were broken in revenge by a number of suffragettes who had suffered from the police’s brutal behaviour. (Votes for Women, 25/11/1912)

This was repeated on March 4th 1912, three days after the March 1st mass window-breaking demonstration and five days after Harcourt spoke at a mass meeting at the Albert Hall held by the National Society for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Ethel Smyth, a well-known WSPU member (who had written the music to The March of the Women, found on the bookmark in the canoe) had distracted police guarding Harcourt’s home by asking for directions before breaking one of his windows (Votes for Women, 08/03/1912). The Monday before the arrests at Nuneham on Saturday morning, Harcourt had moved the Second Reading of the Franchise Bill, stating it would be absurd to set up a property qualification for women when they were about to abolish property qualification for men’ and that he “could not believe that the House was prepared to add ten and-a-half million women to the voting rolls”. (Common Cause – 11/07/1912)

Helen Craggs was a twenty-four year old veteran of the movement. She had originally become a teacher of physics, chemistry and physical education at her former school, Roedean, after her chartered accountant father refused to let her train to be a doctor. She had left her teaching position two years after joining the WSPU in 1908, and eventually held a number of full-time organising positions across London. (1) She was present not only in the deputation that would lead to the infamous “Black Friday” police violence against suffragettes but in another that occurred four days later (Votes for Women, 25/11/1912). Astoundingly, on the Sunday between the two marches and brawls with policemen on Friday and Tuesday, Craggs attended a performance at the Paragon Theatre. After ‘she reconnoitred carefully’, she returned at half past two in the morning with two companions. They entered the building, climbed onto the roof and then over to the roof next door, ‘where, sustained on a few pieces of chocolate, she and her comrades lay through the whole bitter freezing night and through the whole of Monday’. They did this so that Craggs could run down into the theatre during a later meeting ‘to show the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the women had ended the truce’. Craggs managed to shout and wave her tricolour flag before she was swiftly and brutally removed from the building. (Votes for Women, 25/11/1912)

Helen Craggs’s militancy had also escalated in the two years since her surprise appearance at the Paragon Theatre. She had smashed windows on March 1st and been imprisoned. (Votes for Women – 08/03/1912) Two weeks before she was found at Nuneham, she had been detained but released at Llandaff on the 26th June after making a protest at the King and Queen’s visit. As the Royal Procession entered the Cathedral, it was held up for a few minutes by Helen Craggs leaping over the wall by the lych-gate and stopping Home Secretary Reginald McKenna, shouting “Mr. McKenna, you are a traitor to all the women in the country” (Votes for Women, 05/07/1912).

On the afternoon after her arrest, Craggs pled guilty to ‘being found by night on July 13 armed with a dangerous instrument with intent to break and enter the dwelling-house of Lewis Harcourt and to commit a felony’ in front of a special session of the Bullingdon Magistrate Court. She was remanded in custody for a week, having been refused bail. During that week, the authorities made efforts to piece together the womens’ movements in the days preceding the planned arson, interviewing the boatyard staff at Salter’s and Stevens, and the staff of Nuneham House. They also tried to find Craggs’s accomplice, eventually settling on Dr Ethel Smyth. Circumstantial evidence tied Smyth to the scene – she was a friend of Craggs, her song was in the canoe, and she had already smashed Harcourt’s windows in London. What was more, when hiring the canoe in Abingdon, the women had corrected James Stevens as he filled out the boatyard log-book- the name was not ‘Smyth’ but ‘Smith’.

(*Daily Mirror*, 27/07/1912) ‘Suffragette Committed for Trial’. On the left, a photograph of Helen Craggs (marked with x) whilst on trial in Oxford. On the right, a photograph of Ethel Smyth standing by a doorway.

The following Friday, Helen Craggs stood before the magistrates again. Smyth had been discharged that morning at a private sitting, after witnesses failed to positively identify her as the other suffragette. Smyth remained in court and was one of Craggs’s two £500 sureties when she was released on bail until her trial at the October Assizes.

The attempted arson of Nuneham House was a pivotal moment in the Women’s Social and Political Union’s militant campaign for women’s suffrage. The movement towards large-scale damage to private property had already been initiated some months previously in March, when hundreds of suffragettes smashed central London shop-windows in unison. Many stated that they had been provoked into their actions by the words of MP Charles Hobhouse at an anti-suffrage meeting in Bristol in February 1912. Hobhouse had said that ‘in the case of suffrage demand, there had not been the kind of popular sentimental uprising which accounted for [the burning of] Nottingham Castle in 1832 or the Hyde Park railings in 1867.’ (Votes for Women – 23/02/1912) Standing trial in Oxford five months later, Helen Craggs would also name Hobhouse as her prime inspiration. She made clear in her first two trials that there was no malice in her actions, she was driven solely by her political motives. These were also outlined in the typewritten letter that had been found at the scene, which was subsequently used as evidence in the trial, and printed in full by many mainstream newspapers.

The Nuneham House case is too fascinating (and complex) for one blog entry. In the next post, I will outline Craggs’s trial and further discuss its place in the evolution of WSPU militancy. I will also situate the statements made by Craggs whilst appearing in court within the contemporary WSPU rhetoric and self-representation. Until next week!

Additional Sources

(1) Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (London: Routledge, 2008).

– Details of the women’s movements gleaned from witness statements are taken from a cross-section of contemporary newspapers, including The Times, The Manchester Guardian/Observer, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror, as well as Votes for Women – 12/07/1912 – 10/08/1912.

Lillian Burkitt

December 1, 2018December 6, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

“I’ve found her! I’ve found her! I’VE FOUND HER!”
“Who? What? What are you talking about?”
“Ida! Lillian! The sister! Hilda’s sister! The other aunt! I’VE FINALLY FOUND HER.”

I had just leapt out of my desk chair and actually jumped for joy. I had been working with the family anecdote told to Hilda Burkitt’s biographer Wayne Bennett that the two other Burkitt sisters had also spent time in prison. I had found evidence for Christobel, but Ida Lillian kept slipping through my fingers. I had had the lightbulb moment that, given that Lillian had worked as an actress since she left home at 18, she may have used a stage name. But how to find her?

I eventually thought of the (very scientific) method of taking the Home Office Amnesty document of all the suffragettes arrested, ctrl + f-ing all the Idas and Lillians, and cross-referencing the names on the British Newspaper Archive. After that, I would give up.

The universe was kind that evening. The first name I hit upon was ‘Ida Cunard’. The first hits on the BNA were articles from 1963. Local newspapers reported curiously of a bequest left to The Suffragette Fellowship by Lillian Burkitt, ‘former suffragette’, ‘in memory of my imprisonment in the name of Ida Cunard in 1908 in the cause of votes for women’. It felt like Lillian had finally revealed her true identity, half a century later, from the safety of the grave. And another fifty years later, there I was, finally finding her.

It then hit me that Ida Cunard had been one of the Birmingham women arrested in February 1908 in London. She had stood trial and gone to Holloway alongside her younger sibling Christobel Wood. True ‘sister suffragettes’.

After her release, Ida Cunard published a stirring, and stridently proto-feminist, ‘message of encouragement to women’ in the WSPU newspaper.

Screenshot_22 — ‘Dear Fellow-Workers, – With the finger-post of Peckham pointing to “The Only Way,” the best thing I can at the moment say to you is, *Go on and win*. Of one thing I am assured, the more one does for the cause, the more one’s heart and sympathy are involved, and the more one realises the need of, and the magnitude of, the whole scheme.
To have helped, even in ever so small a way, towards the common cause of womanhood is *not to have lived in vain*. Therefore, let us all, with the concentrated energy of our sex, rally round our beloved leaders, giving them first of all our undivided loyalty, and to the Union unbounded enthusiasm, and the help that lies each in her individual power.’ [*Votes for Women*, April 1908]

Ida Lillian Burkitt, known by her second name, was the second child of Reuben and Laura Burkitt, born in July 1872. The eldest daughter, she was four years older than Hilda. She attended the Summer Hill girls branch of the King Edwards Grammar School. When she was 15, she won the end of year class prizes for drawing, English Literature and botany. That Christmas, she appeared in a pantomime production of ‘Sindbad the Sailor’ at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Broad St Birmingham. The following year, ‘Ida Cunard’, a ‘Well-Educated Young Lady’ posted in the Seeking advertisements in acting magazines for ‘Engagement in Dramatic or Comedy Company. Experienced.’ Over the next two years, as she approached 18 years old, she was engaged in numerous productions and often given special mentions in local reviews. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Cunard appeared in a performance of It’s Never Too Late to Mend at the Grand Theatre in Birmingham, and was noted for her ‘pathetic rendering of Josephs’.

Lillian in suit — Lillian Burkitt, posing at her studio. Date unknown. She is leaning on one arm, looking at the camera, wearing a large padded suit. Her hair is tightly waved to look shorter.

Lillian toured the country with music-hall and pantomime troupes for the next 15 years. In 1905, in her early thirties, she might have grown tired of a nomadic lifestyle. She had recently started a side-business running a photography studio out of her parents’ house in Perry Barr, Birmingham. Most of the portraits of the family taken around this time that have survived were produced at ‘The Warwick Art Company’. It was Lillian who took the original photograph that makes up The Face of Suffrage portrait.

As already mentioned, 3 years later Lillian had taken part and been imprisoned for her involvement in suffragette demonstrations. Shortly after her release from Holloway in 1908, she embarked on a completely different career path. Until 1911, she trained in nursing at Wolverhampton General Hospital. She then, in the early summer, left for Rome to instruct at the newly opened Queen Elena training hospital. She remained there for a year, and returned in July 1912 to take up a post at the Warneford in Leamington. In 1914, when the war began, she applied and was accepted to become part of the Queen Alexandra Imperial Nursing Reserve. She served throughout WW1 at Gallipoli, then Egypt and Greece.

Lillian (1911OR1912OR1913).jpg — Lillian in Rome, 1911 or 1912. She wears a starched long white nurses dress, apron and cap. She is sitting on an armchair, posing for the camera with her hand on an open book.

Assumedly because of her vocation, Lillian was never re-arrested. She did, however, remain a member of the WSPU and also assisted Hilda in her work as an organiser. She assisted in giving street meetings at a week’s intense campaigning in Coventry, giving speeches to factory girls on their dinner hour in 1910.

Lillian is an enigmatic character. Although not as outwardly unconventional as her arsonist baby sister, she still astounds me. Taking to the stage at 15, to spend the next 15 years on it as a young woman in late Victorian England suggests nerves of steel. Both the 1891 and 1901 censuses list her away from home, occupation ‘actress’. Aged 35, Ida Cunard disappeared, months after having given her final ‘performance’ in the newspapers as an arrested suffragette. She was replaced by Nurse Lillian Burkitt, who subsequently moved, by herself, to Italy. She would later serve and take care of dying soldiers in appalling conditions at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli.

Lillian never married. After the war she was discharged for undisclosed medical reasons and lived with her father until his death in the late 1920s. In 1939, she shared a house in Erdington with three younger women, a lecturer, a nurse and a typist. She later moved to Morecambe in Lancashire (where Hilda joined her in the 1950s). The main surviving family anecdote of her is that she never missed a Remembrance Day Parade. Lillian died in 1963, and finally revealed her secret identity in her last will and testament.

Lillian, or as my grandfather wrote on the back of her photograph ‘Auntie Lil’, was not as involved in the WSPU as her younger sister. She nonetheless led a fascinating life and broke gender conventions in her own way. Whilst she abandoned the stage for the more traditionally feminine role of a nurse, she still did this independently. She braved hideous conditions during WW1 and returned declared physically unfit to continue nursing for the military.

group — Group photo, around 1901. Left to right: (standing) Hilda Burkitt, (sitting) Christobel Wood, holding small baby Jack on her lap (baby not really visible). (Seated) Frederick Wood, with Kathleen. (Standing) Lillian Burkitt. The sisters would join the WSPU in 6 years.

The photographs of Lillian evolve as her biography does. A young woman, she stares firmly at the camera for a head-shot or plays dress-up. Later, she is the wise older sister leaning and smiling comfortably whilst her siblings stand or sit slightly awkwardly. She then morphs into the severe Nurse Burkitt, posing in Rome.

I have so many things I want to ask her. Did you speak Italian fluently? What was it like taking to the stage in your mid-teens? How did you survive the First World War? Where did you learn to do photography? I also want to thank her, for the possibly throwaway, likely intentional, choice to record her former stage name in her will. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to find all this out about her.

Sources:

britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk
findmypast.co.uk

27/11/18: Suffragette Rhetoric

November 27, 2018November 27, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

As part of their Suffragette Stories project, the University of East Anglia has been digitising items from the Annie Kenney archive. I was struck by this letter to Annie by Constance Lytton, written as it emerged that WSPU prisoners, including Hilda Burkitt, were being forcibly fed.

Whilst Lytton describes it as ‘harrowing’, adding that the Mrs Pankhurst and Lawrence ‘are both ill with it’, she ends with a statement that neatly encapsulates contemporary suffragette rhetoric.

“But as soon as the public realise it and the ‘laughter’ it has caused in the House, it will, as usual, move on the tide immensely. These heroic women will be only too glad, one knows they are only proud to have been pioneers in this receiving of the Government’s new violence.”

As WSPU militancy escalated, the movement developed a rhetoric that allowed the members to justify their actions through asserting themselves as “just warriors”, part of a wider, unstoppable force that would secure the emancipation of women. (1) The ‘tide’ of women’s liberation was a frequent image in suffragette propaganda. Similarly, the women were ‘heroines’ in the tradition of historic militants such as Joan of Arc. In the letter above, Lytton draws on both iconographical elements. The idea of the women in Winson Green taking pride in the medical abuse they suffered is slightly jarring, but it is not surprising. Imprisonment, hunger-strike and forcible feeding would later become emblematic of the Suffragette’s tortured martyrdom for the Cause.

But what of the women inside Winson Green? Outside, Lytton could muse to Kenney, Votes for Women could run on their front page that ‘these women deserve well of womanhood and of the country of their birth; they are setting up a standard of heroism which will be remembered and honoured so long as the annals of human society are preserved’. [Votes for Women, 01/10/09] But how did the women inside Winson Green express themselves? What did they think about it?

In 1914, Hilda Burkitt’s closing speech at her and Florence Tunks’s trial for arson is deeply imbued with the suffragette rhetoric that had evolved from that mentioned above.

“Whatever sentence you impose I shall not serve, because I have made up my mind that I will not take any food or drink while I am in prison. I cannot stand the torture of the feeding for a great length of time, flesh and blood can’t stand it; and if Mr McKenna does not release me I shall die in prison, in which I case I shall then be the victor, because I shall not have served the sentence. You can give me liberty or death.”
[The Suffragette, 05/06/1914]

I had always naively assumed that Hilda’s political statements would have become more ‘extreme’ as the movement progressed. 1909 Burkitt as opposed to 1914’s fully-fledged arsonist and prison veteran seemed quieter, more subdued. I was wrong to assume this.

[excerpt of hand-written petition submitted to Home Office in 1909]

Hilda, in 1909, left no uncertainty around her intent as she declared hunger-strike in a hand-written petition.

‘so, will you reply to my Petition at once, as if I should [succumb crossed out] die through my fasting my death will lie at your door, but I am ready to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex.
Evelyn Hilda Burkitt.
Women’s Social and Political Union.
[HO 45/10418/183577]

What always strikes me about this document is the trace of Hilda’s thought-process as she wrote, crossing-out the more euphemistic, weaker ‘succumb’ for the far clearer ‘die’. Her self-portrayal as a willing martyr for the Cause makes her seem very much one of the ‘heroic’ ‘pioneers’ that Lytton related to Kenney from outside Winson Green. This self-representation would continue throughout her career. She would also draw on her ‘credibility’ as the first suffragette to be forcibly fed to draw people to drawing room and street meetings. She wore her ‘prison badge’, and likely the hunger-strike medal, presented to her by Christabel Pankhurst at Birmingham Town Hall in November 1909, with pride.

Reuben 1907.jpg — Photograph of Reuben Burkitt in 1907, taken by his daughter Lillian Burkitt.

These sources show Hilda Burkitt as she wished to present herself to hostile onlookers and the government. She states her political motives clearly, she is committed to the death. However, Hilda also used similar language in communication with her family. In 1914, she wrote to her father from prison to inform him of her arrest. As she was trying to keep her identity secret from the police, the letter is vague, and sent via her brother-in-law Fred. However Hilda also states that she was

‘not taking food or water, what will be the result I do not know. I am quite prepared to give my life if need be, but I suppose McKenna will desire that’.
[HO 144/1205/22030]

Of course, Hilda was obviously aware that the letter would be read, and could have been using this as a further outlet of political self-expression. That said, she obviously did not mind her father reading it after receiving it unexpectedly.

Reuben Burkitt was also present in 1909. As the facts of forcible feeding emerged, he wrote to Keir Hardie. Hardie secured him a Home Office permit to visit Hilda in Winson Green, ending his reply hoping Reuben ‘will find your daughter bearing up bravely’. As he left the prison, Reuben was interviewed by a local journalist and described how Hilda had related the entire process to him, including rough handling by doctors. She had asserted its illegality. Sounding slightly resigned, he is apparently quoted as saying ‘ “She is more reconciled now, although she evidently seems to have given more trouble to the officials than all the other Suffragists.” ‘ Burkitt was, according to the Birmingham Daily Gazette ‘in favour of the Parliamentary franchise being given to women […] but he regrets the militant movement in its present form.’ [Birmingham Daily Gazette, 11/10/09]

Reuben was also present, a week later, after Hilda’s release as she gave an interview to the Birmingham correspondent for the London Daily News. She spoke lying on a couch in her home in Sparkbrook. Her father related that she had just been examined by a doctor and her heart was weak. Hilda described how inside prison, the suffragettes were able to ‘cheer one another up by their “tattoo.” “We call our battle-cry our tattoo, you know – ” “Are we down-hearted? No surrender” Miss Burkitt explained’. She also stated that ‘she still justified violence as the only method of agitation open to the Suffragists’. [London Daily News, 18/10/09]

This web of source material is of course limited; it merely provides snapshots of particular moments and statements. However, throughout, we can see echoes of the same images and rhetorical devices that would shape WSPU self-representation. What is more, we see how the suffragettes used this imagery in their own communications to each other, either by letter as with Lytton and Kenney, or through prison cell walls. In the case of Hilda Burkitt, this was extended to their own family, as her father witnessed, either first-hand or by letter, his daughter’s hunger strikes.

Additional sources

1 – Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Womens Social and Political Union (University of Alabama Press, 1997).
See also: Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women (University of Chicago Press, 1988).

The Face of Suffrage

November 15, 2018November 15, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

Whenever the train pulls in or out of New Street station, I can’t help but think of Hilda. I imagine the adrenaline that pushed her through the hordes of people congregated to wave off their Prime Minister’s train. How did it feel, the moment her hand closed around the stone in her pocket before she sent it flying through the air? ‘Votes for Women!’, the sound of shattering glass, then the angry crowd descends. Three days later, she is being restrained in a hospital kitchen, having stared the government down as she wrote her petition from her prison cell. If they did not recognise the political motive behind her actions, she would hunger strike, and ‘if I should die through my fasting, my death will lie at your door, but I am ready to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex’.

Today, as I left New Street, I wasn’t the only person thinking of Hilda Burkitt. Her face is currently emblazoned across the concourse floor, 200 square metres huge. The portrait, that has always been my main mental image of her, has been reproduced out of thousands of crowd-sourced pictures of women and girls, past and present. Thousands of people will pass her for the next four weeks. As they stop to check for their train, they will see her half-smile between the departure screens.

[The departure screens in New St Station. In between them is a banner with a photograph of Hilda Burkitt.]

Trite as it is, I don’t have the words for the feeling as I travelled up the escalator to see the installation from above. Gradually the individual faces blurred, and Hilda appeared. Hilda, aged 25, the same age as me now. Hilda before it all began. She looks gently at her sister, who was behind the camera. Over a century later, I now read a look of coy knowing into her expression. ‘You don’t know the half of it’.

People asked what Hilda would have thought. I don’t know. Perhaps she would have blanched, hated the limelight cast on what turned into a traumatic chain of suffering. Perhaps she would have been delighted. All we have is her calm, fixed stare looking back at us. I would like to think that Hilda Burkitt the Suffragette, charging across New St Station with such firm literal and figurative aim, might see the funny side to the stage of her ‘outrage’ becoming a site for her commemoration.

My mother and I stood for a second in awe, and watched as people beneath moved slowly across, looking for themselves in the mass of faces. Later, we joined them. Pausing to point out Hilda’s father, brother and grandfather, her sisters, her nieces and nephews and the great times however many ones that came after. I submitted a photograph taken on my first day of university. I felt it was fitting, given all that the women’s movement has done and will do to break down the doors of institutions that previously remained firmly closed.

The crowds of New St no longer look at Hilda with hostility, but with curiosity and interest. She could never have known, when she posed for that portrait so long ago, that this would be where it would end up. That her face would gaze out from the faces of so many others. That she would, as artist Helen Marshall described it, be part of ‘the coming together of women past and present […] a bridge to express their story.’

Finding Hilda Burkitt

November 13, 2018November 14, 2018 laughadefianceLeave a comment

Hilda 1905 (contrast edited).jpg — Hilda Burkitt, sitting at her elder sister’s photography studio in 1905. [Overexposed black and white portrait of a 29 year old woman, she wears white, a pearl necklace and holds a rose. She looks away from the camera.]

My great-great-great aunt Hilda Burkitt was a militant member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. In the seven years she spent involved in the WSPU’s campaign, Hilda was caught up in a steadily increasing whirlwind of activity – selling newspapers, organising, speaking, and finally arson. She was the first of the first suffragettes to be forcibly fed at Winson Green in Birmingham. She was a co-perpetrator, five years later, of ‘one of the most spectacular fires to be attributed to the suffragettes’. (1) This arson attack was also one of the last. Indeed, Burkitt was one of the last women to be released from prison, and thus one of the last to be forcibly fed. Her militant career possesses an eery symmetry – she was there until the bitter end.

Hilda is mentioned once in Sylvia Pankhurst’s and once in Christabel’s respective memoirs of the WSPU movement. (2) She is not mentioned in Emmeline Pankhurst’s at all. Indeed, Mrs Pankhurst, either purposefully, with poetic license, or unintentionally, designated Mary Leigh as the first suffragette to be forcibly fed. (3) This myth has echoed through the historiography. Yet Mary Leigh was on remand and did not set foot in Winson Green Prison until the day after the prison doctors began to forcibly feed Hilda. After being released from Winson Green, Hilda gave a number of talks to different WSPU branches about her time in prison and was marketed as ‘the first suffragette to be forcibly fed’. She included it in her own mini autobiography in the Suffrage Who’s Who of 1913. (4) It was included in her obituary in 1955, likely written by a close family member for the local newspaper.

Why then, has Hilda Burkitt been mentioned so little?

It is not surprising. Much of the current historiography on the WSPU has been drawn from sources that were carefully curated by the Union themselves, after the campaign was finished. In these sources, Burkitt also only features occasionally. As Mayhall and Riddell have observed, a sanitised ‘Suffragette Spirit’ was created, one which carefully swept the ash of burnt buildings and postboxes under the rug. (5) In the words of Edith Mansell-Moullin in a letter to Edith Howe-Martin discussing a potential memoir of Emily Wilding Davison, should she ‘leave out the bombs?’ In her study of the forgotten suffragette Kitty Marion, Fern Riddell points out how Marion was one of many ‘extreme’ militants, ‘yet we know so little about them. They have been erased from the record, deleted by a process of PR and simplified storytelling’. (6)

Burkitt had been a prolific organiser and was frequently mentioned in the regional listings of the WSPU newspapers (Votes for Women and subsequently The Suffragette), either giving meetings or reporting from areas she held temporary responsibility for. She was paid by the WSPU for her services from 1909. In 1913, living in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, she arranged jumble sales, put on plays and coordinated newspaper sellers in unpleasant weather. She was one of many rank-and-file members who devoted their lives to the cause, and yet these women have also been forgotten. Those who were not included in the suffragette iconography, whose pictures were not sold on postcards to adoring followers, who did not publish autobiographies, have missed the attention of many modern historians. As Jill Liddington has termed it, with ‘celebrity suffrage’, there is a historiographical bias towards well-known figures in the WSPU hierarchy. (7) Whilst Hilda’s contribution has been acknowledged in the extensive research into lesser-known suffragettes conducted by Elizabeth Crawford, the details of her militant career are only now coming to light. (8) Nicola Gauld’s local study into the wider suffrage campaign in Birmingham and the West Midlands has also brought Hilda to the centre stage. (9)

With 100 years since the granting of the vote to the first swathes of women in 1918, interest in the WSPU has boomed. Sources that have previously remained slightly inaccessible have been digitised. (10) The 100 year rule that has classified documentation about individual suffragettes, such as the medical records of their forcible feeding, has lifted. Contemporary historians are in a unique position to expand to a more comprehensive pool of previously unavailable source material.

As Morley and Stanley comment in their work on Emily Wilding Davison, an important facet of reconstructing a subject’s biography is the process of researching the individual, drawing sources together from various archives and libraries. One must ‘assess “the evidence” by assembling it into different patterns, to try and make connections, to look out for and see (sometimes without really knowing what it was that we were looking for) new evidence, new leads’. (11)

Yet Emily Wilding Davison is by no means a forgotten suffragette – she has, inadvertently, become one of the modern-day suffragette memories, alongside women chaining themselves to railings. Much of ‘her archive’ is collected together, in specific places. Autobiographical writing and letters remain for the historian to consider. Hilda Burkitt, however, is scattered through contemporary documents. The only ‘archive’ of her, explicitly, is the dossier kept on her by the Home Office, which includes the daily reports of her three and a half month prison time and forcible feeding in 1914, and snippets of her previous actions (12). Finding her has proven a challenge. The jigsaw pieces of her career have not come in a box at all, they have had to be found first.

Hilda Burkitt in 1901. Image credit [Black and white portrait of 25 year old woman. She is wearing a white blouse, a large hat and a chain necklace. She smiles slightly at the camera]

Of course, ‘Hilda Burkitt the suffragette’ will be in many ways a creation, a particular assembly of facts gleaned from archival and historical records. However, her voice can be found in primary source material. Her most strident, and historically most poignant, words come from the hand-written petitions she submitted to the Home Office from her prison cells. In her first, she states that she is ‘willing to lay down my life, to bring about the Freedom of my Sex’. Her statements in trials project the image of a fierce and determined suffragette, one who demands ‘liberty or death’ from the government. Equally, the brief reports that she wrote from organising positions reveal a self-assured and confident manner.

Hilda Burkitt’s archive is also a family one. I have had the opportunity to connect with distant family members who have inherited, through Hilda’s sister, more personal material. She also appears in my own, paternal grandfather’s archive. Hilda’s face smiles out of a number of candid, relaxed photographs. She sits with a rose on a postcard she sent to my great-great-grandmother, with measurements for a dress. She smiles with her nephew and niece at the seaside. She poses regally in a large elaborate hat.

Finding Hilda has been a slow, at times laborious, at times incredibly exciting detective puzzle. Combing local newspapers, suffragette newspapers and contemporary records has yielded so much and there is still so much yet to trawl. Whilst she will always be my great-great-great aunt, she is also a significant figure in a fractious and violent political movement. Her biography provides a lens through which to view a variety of sides of the WSPU. She also remains a fascinating character – a single, independent woman who supported herself financially and was part of an explosive and brutal early feminism.

Sources
1 – Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (London: Routledge, 2008) 87.
2 – E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement – An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals.
– Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of how We Won the Vote.
3 – Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (London: Hesperus Press, 2015) 146
4 – Various, The Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London: Hanley Paul & co., 1913).
5 – Laura Nym Mayhall, “Creating the ‘suffragette spirit’: British feminism and the historical imagination”, Women’s History Review Vol. 4 Issue 3: 1995.
6 – Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2018) 298-299.
7 – Jill Liddington, Rebel Girls (London: Little, Brown, 2006).
8 – Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (London: Routledge, 2003) 87-88.
9 – Nicola Gauld, Deeds Not Words (Birmingham: History West Midlands, 2018).
10 – See The British Newspaper Archive and The Suffragette Collection on Find My Past
11 – Ann Morley with Liz Stanley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1988) 69.
12 – The National Archives, HO 144/1205/222030.