CHAPTER V

Between the time of the arrest in June and the handing down of the

absurd decision of the Lord Chief Justice that although we, as subjects,

possessed the right of petition, yet we had committed an offence in

exercising that right, nearly six months had passed. In that interval

certain grave developments had lifted the militant movement onto a new

and more heroic plane. It will be remembered that a week before our

deputation to test the Charles II Act, Miss Wallace Dunlop had been sent

to prison for one month for stamping an extract from the Bill of Rights

on the stone walls of St. Stephen's Hall. On arriving at Holloway on

Friday evening, July 2nd, she sent for the Governor and demanded of him

that she be treated as a political offender. The Governor replied that

he had no power to alter the sentence of the magistrate, whereupon Miss

Wallace Dunlop informed him that it was the unalterable resolution of

the Suffragettes never again to submit to the prison treatment given to

ordinary offenders against the law. Therefore she should, if placed in

the second division as a common criminal, refuse to touch food until the

Government yielded her point. It is hardly likely that the Government or

the prison authorities realised the seriousness of Miss Wallace Dunlop's

action, or the heroic mould of the Suffragettes' character. At all

events the Home Secretary paid no attention to the letter sent him by

the prisoner, in which she explained simply but clearly her motives for

her desperate act, and the prison authorities did nothing except seek

means of breaking down her resistance. The ordinary prison diet was

replaced by the most tempting food, and this instead of being brought to

her cell at intervals, was kept there night and day, but always

untouched. Several times daily the doctor came to feel her pulse and

observe her growing weakness. The doctor, as well as the Governor and

the wardresses argued, coaxed and threatened, but without effect. The

week passed without any sign of surrender on the part of the prisoner.

On Friday the doctor reported that she was rapidly reaching a point at

which death might at any time supervene. Hurried conferences were

carried on between the prison and the Home Office, and that evening,

June 8th, Miss Wallace Dunlop was sent home, having served one-fourth of

her sentence, and having ignored completely all the terms of her

imprisonment.

On the day of her release the fourteen women who had been convicted of

window breaking received their sentences, and learning of Miss Wallace

Dunlop's act, they, as they were being taken to Holloway in the prison

van, held a consultation and agreed to follow her example. Arrived at

Holloway they at once informed the officials that they would not give up

any of their belongings, neither would they put on prison clothing,

perform prison labour, eat prison food or keep the rule of silence.

The Governor agreed for the moment to allow them to retain their

property and to wear their own clothing, but he told them that they had

committed an act of mutiny and that he would have to so charge them at

the next visit of the magistrates. The women then addressed petitions to

the Home Secretary, demanding that they be given the prison treatment

universally allowed political offenders. They decided to postpone the

hunger strike until the Home Secretary had had time to reply. Meanwhile,

after a vain appeal for more fresh air, for the weather was stiflingly

hot, the women committed one more act of mutiny, they broke the windows

of their cells.

We learned this from the prisoners themselves. Several days after they

had gone to prison, my daughter Christabel and Mrs. Tuke, filled with

anxiety for their fate, gained admission to an upper story room of a

house overlooking the prison. Calling at the top of their voices and

waving a flag of the Union, they succeeded in attracting the prisoners'

attention. The women thrust their arms through the broken panes, waving

handkerchiefs, Votes for Women badges, anything they could get hold of,

and in a few shouted words told their tale. That same day the visiting

magistrates arrived, and the mutineers were sentenced to terms of seven

to ten days of solitary confinement in the punishment cells. In these

frightful cells, dark, unclean, dripping with moisture, the prisoners

resolutely hunger struck. At the end of five days one of the women was

reduced to such a condition that the Home Secretary ordered her

released. The next day several more were released, and before the end

of the week the last of the fourteen had gained their liberty.

The affair excited the greatest sympathy all over England, sympathy

which Mr. Gladstone tried to divert by charging two of the prisoners

with kicking and biting the wardresses. In spite of their vigorous

denials these two women were sentenced, on these charges, one to ten

days and the other to a month in prison. Although still very weak from

the previous hunger strike, they at once entered upon a second hunger

strike, and in three days had to be released.

After this each succeeding batch of Suffragette prisoners, unless

otherwise directed, followed the example of these heroic rebels. The

prison officials, seeing their authority vanish, were panic stricken.

Holloway and other women's prisons throughout the Kingdom became perfect

dens of violence and brutality. Hear the account given by Lucy Burns of

her experience:

"We remained quite still when ordered to undress, and when they told us

to proceed to our cells we linked arms and stood with our backs to the

wall. The Governor blew his whistle and a great crowd of wardresses

appeared, falling upon us, forcing us apart and dragging us towards the

cells. I think I had twelve wardresses for my share, and among them they

managed to trip me so that I fell helplessly to the floor. One of the

wardresses grasped me by my hair, wound the long braid around her wrist

and literally dragged me along the ground. In the cell they fairly

ripped the clothing from my back, forcing on me one coarse cotton

garment and throwing others on the bed for me to put on myself. Left

alone exhausted by the dreadful experience I lay for a time gasping and

shivering on the floor. By and by a wardress came to the door and threw

me a blanket. This I wrapped around me, for I was chilled to the bone by

this time. The single cotton garment and the rough blanket were all the

clothes I wore during my stay in prison. Most of the prisoners refused

everything but the blanket. According to agreement we all broke our

windows and were immediately dragged off to the punishment cells. There

we hunger struck, and after enduring great misery for nearly a week, we

were one by one released."

How simply they tell it. "After enduring great misery--" But no one who

has not gone through the awful experience of the hunger strike can have

any idea of how great that misery is. In an ordinary cell it is great

enough. In the unspeakable squalor of the punishment cells it is worse.

The actual hunger pangs last only about twenty-four hours with most

prisoners. I generally suffer most on the second day. After that there

is no very desperate craving for food. Weakness and mental depression

take its place. Great disturbances of digestion divert the desire for

food to a longing for relief from pain. Often there is intense headache,

with fits of dizziness, or slight delirium. Complete exhaustion and a

feeling of isolation from earth mark the final stages of the ordeal.

Recovery is often protracted, and entire recovery of normal health is

sometimes discouragingly slow.

The first hunger strike occurred in early July. In the two months that

followed scores of women adopted the same form of protest against a

Government who would not recognise the political character of their

offences. In some cases the hunger strikers were treated with unexampled

cruelty. Delicate women were sentenced, not only to solitary

confinement, but to wear handcuffs for twenty-four hours at a stretch.

One woman on refusing prison clothes was put into a straightwaistcoat.

The irony of all this appears the greater when it is considered that, at

this precise time, the leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of

Commons were in the midst of their first campaign against the veto power

of the Lords.

On September 17th a great meeting was held in Birmingham, on which

occasion Mr. Asquith was to throw down his challenge to the Lords, and

to announce that their veto was to be abolished, leaving the people's

will paramount in England. Of course the Suffragettes seized this

opportunity for a demonstration. This course was perfectly logical.

Denied the right of petition, shut out now from every Cabinet Minister's

meeting, the women were forced to take whatever means that remained to

urge their cause upon the Government. Mrs. Mary Leigh and a group of

Birmingham members addressed a warning to the public not to attend Mr.

Asquith's meeting as disturbances were likely to happen. From the time

that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet left the House of Commons until

the train drew in to the station at Birmingham they were completely

surrounded with detectives and policemen. The precautions taken to

guard Mr. Asquith have never been equalled except in the case of the

Tsar during outbreaks of revolution in Russia. From the station he was

taken by an underground passage a quarter of a mile in length to his

hotel, where he dined in solitary state, after having been carried

upstairs in a luggage lift. Escorted to the Bingley Hall by a strong

guard of mounted police, he was so fearful of encountering the

Suffragettes that he entered by a side door. The hall was guarded as for

a siege. Over the glass roof a thick tarpaulin had been stretched. Tall

ladders were placed on either side of the building, and firemen's hose

were laid in readiness--not to extinguish fires, but to play upon the

Suffragettes should they appear at an inaccessible spot on the roof. The

streets on every hand were barricaded, and police, in regiments, were

drawn up to defend the barricades against the onslaughts of the women.

Nobody was allowed to pass the barricades without showing his entrance

tickets to long files of police, and then the ticket holders were

squeezed through the narrow doors one by one.

Their precautions were in vain, for the determined Suffragettes found

more than one way in which to turn Mr. Asquith's triumph into a fiasco.

Although no women gained access to the hall, there were plenty of men

sympathisers present, and before the meeting had proceeded far thirteen

men had been violently thrown out for reminding the Prime Minister that

"the people" whose right to govern he was professing to uphold, included

women as well as men. Outside, mingling in the vast crowds, bands of

women attacked the barricades, the outer barricades being thrown down in

spite of the thousands of police. From the roof of a neighbouring house

Mrs. Leigh and Charlotte Marsh tore up dozens of slates and threw them

on the roof of Bingley Hall and in the streets below, taking care,

however, to strike no one. As Mr. Asquith drove away the women hurled

slates at the guarded motor car. The fire hose was brought forth and the

firemen were ordered to turn the water on the women. They refused, to

their credit be it said, but the police, infuriated by their failure to

keep the peace, did not scruple to play the cold water on the women as

they crouched and clung to the dangerous slope of the roof. Roughs in

the streets flung bricks at them, drawing blood. Eventually the women

were dragged down by the police and in their dripping garments marched

through the streets to the police station.

The Suffragettes who had rushed the barricades and flung stones at Mr.

Asquith's departing train received sentences from a fortnight to one

month, but Miss Marsh and Mrs. Leigh were sent to prison for three and

four months respectively. All of the prisoners adopted the hunger

strike, as we knew they would.

Several days later we were horrified to read in the newspapers that

these prisoners were being forcibly fed by means of a rubber tube thrust

into the stomach. Members of the Union applied at once both at the

prison and at the Home Office to learn the truth of the report, but all

information was refused. On the following Monday at our request, Mr.

Keir Hardie, at question time in the House, insisted on information from

the Government. Mr. Masterman, speaking for the Home Secretary,

reluctantly admitted that, in order to preserve the dignity of the

Government and at the same time save the lives of the prisoners,

"hospital treatment" was being administered. "Hospital treatment" was

the term used to draw attention from one of the most disgusting and

brutal expedients ever resorted to by prison authorities. No law allows

it except in the case of persons certified to be insane, and even then

when the operation is performed by skilled nursing attendants under the

direction of skilled medical men, it cannot be called safe. In fact, the

asylum cases usually die after a short time. _The Lancet_, perhaps the

best known medical journal in the language, published a long list of

opinions from distinguished physicians and surgeons who condemned the

practice as applied to the suffrage prisoners as unworthy of

civilisation. One physician told of a case which had come under his

observation in which death had occurred almost as soon as the tube had

been inserted. Another cited a case where the tongue, twisted behind the

feeding tube, had, in the struggle, been almost bitten off. Cases where

food had been injected into the lungs were not unknown. Mr. C.

Mansell-Moullin, M.D., F.R.C.S., wrote to _The Times_ that as a hospital

surgeon of more than thirty years' experience he desired indignantly to

protest against the Government's term "Hospital treatment" in connection

with the forcible feeding of women. It was a foul libel, he declared,

for violence and brutality have no place in hospitals. A memorial signed

by 116 well-known physicians was addressed to the Prime Minister

protesting against the practice of forcible feeding, and pointing out to

him in detail the grave dangers attaching to it.

So much for medical testimony against a form of brutality which

continued and still continues in our English prisons, as a punishment

for women who are there for consciences' sake. As for the testimony of

the victims, it makes a volume of most revolting sort. Mrs. Leigh, the

first victim, is a woman of sturdy constitution, else she could scarcely

have survived the experience. Thrown into Birmingham prison after the

Asquith demonstration, she had broken the windows of her cell, and as a

punishment was sent to a dark and cold punishment cell. Her hands were

handcuffed, behind her during the day, and at night in front of her body

_with the palms out_. She refused to touch the food that was brought to

her, and three days after her arrival she was taken to the doctor's

room. What she saw was enough to terrify the bravest. In the centre of

the room was a stout chair resting on a cotton sheet. Against the wall,

as if ready for action stood four wardresses. The junior doctor was also

on hand. The senior doctor spoke, saying: "Listen carefully to what I

have to say. I have orders from my superior officers that you are not to

be released even on medical grounds. If you still refrain from food I

must take other measures to compel you to take it." Mrs. Leigh replied

that she did still refuse, and she said further that she knew that she

could not legally be forcibly fed because an operation could not be

performed without the consent of the patient if sane. The doctor

repeated that he had his orders and would carry them out. A number of

wardresses then fell upon Mrs. Leigh, held her down and tilted her chair

backward. She was so taken by surprise that she could not resist

successfully that time. They managed to make her swallow a little food

from a feeding cup. Later two doctors and the wardresses appeared in her

cell, forced Mrs. Leigh down to the bed and held her there. To her

horror the doctors produced a rubber tube, two yards in length, and this

he began to stuff up her nostril. The pain was so dreadful that she

shrieked again and again. Three of the wardresses burst into tears and

the junior doctor begged the other to desist. Having had his orders from

the Government, the doctor persisted and the tube was pushed down into

the stomach. One of the doctors, standing on a chair and holding the

tube high poured liquid food through a funnel almost suffocating the

poor victim. "The drums of my ears," she said afterwards, "seemed to be

bursting. I could feel the pain to the end of the breast bone. When at

last the tube was withdrawn it felt as if the back of my nose and throat

were being torn out with it."

In an almost fainting condition Mrs. Leigh was taken back to the

punishment cell and laid on her plank bed. The ordeal was renewed day

after day. The other prisoners suffered similar experiences.