[From above The Face of Suffrage installation, a large photo mosaic on the concourse floor, made up of thousands of smaller photographs to form the black and white image of an Edwardian woman wearing a large hat.]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.’
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.
Laugh a Defiance 