Terrorism for Women
The Long-Buried Real History of British Feminism
|
 |
Presented as heroic, high-minded, principled campaigners, the feminist ‘Suffragettes’ were in fact pioneers of murderous terrorism. Their fight for votes for upper and middle class women was filled with the exact same hatred, hysteria, coded snobbery and ugly fanaticism which we see today among groups such as Antifa and trans militants. Their true nature needs to be understood, and this in-depth study is a very good place to start.
Students of Real History are well aware of the use by mainstream court historians of the Memory Hole trick. Inconvenient facts which run counter to the established narrative are given Orwell’s 1984 treatment; heroes become villains, and villains become heroes – or heroines. A classic case of the latter transformation by the omission of facts is the campaign for ‘Votes for Women’ in Britain in the early 20th century.
The struggle of the Suffragettes is portrayed in history books, schools and in the media as a matter of street protests, hunger strikes and a fanatic throwing herself under a horse. At worst, feminist activists are shown smashing windows and assaulting politicians. The truth, however, is that the Suffragettes also ran a full-on terrorist campaign.
In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation dedicated to “deeds, not words”. Initial stunts such as heckling politicians quickly escalated to vandalism and physical assaults on opponents and police officers. Many of the mainly middle-class women activists received repeated prison sentences, where they staged hunger strikes to secure better conditions, and were often force-fed.
 |
WSPU supporters raided Parliament, attacked politicians and smashed windows at government premises. Late in 1909, a suffragette assaulted future Prime Minister Winston Churchill with a dog whip on the platform of Bristol railway station.[i]
The following year, the violence became more organised and sustained. The daughter of WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst, took to advocating and organising a self-described “reign of terror”. Emmeline Pankhurst confirmed that the aim of the campaign was “to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe”.[ii]
In June and July 1912, five serious incidents signified the beginning of the campaign in earnest: the homes of three anti-suffrage cabinet ministers were attacked, a powerful bomb was planted in the Home Secretary’s office and the Theatre Royal, Dublin, was set fire to and bombed while an audience attended a performance. Direct action against supposedly ‘legitimate targets’ had now become naked, cowardly and indiscriminate terrorism.
One of the most dangerous attacks committed by the suffragettes, the attack on the Theatre Royal was carried out by Mary Leigh, Gladys Evans, Lizzie Baker and Mabel Capper. They tried to set fire to the building during a packed lunchtime matinee attended by the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. A canister of gunpowder was left close to the stage and petrol and burning matches were tossed into the projection booth, which the assailants knew contained highly combustible film reels.
Earlier in the day, Mary Leigh had hurled a hatchet towards Asquith, which narrowly missed him and instead slashed the ear of Irish MP John Redmond.
On 25th October 1912, a rare male collaborator, Hugh Franklin set fire to his train carriage as it pulled into Harrow station. He was arrested and charged with endangering the safety of passengers. Then, on 28th November, post boxes were booby trapped across Great Britain, starting a day-day long pillar box sabotage campaign, with dangerous chemicals being poured into some boxes.
In London, meanwhile, many letters ignited while in transit at post offices, and paraffin and lighted matches were also put in pillar boxes. On 17 December, railway signals at Potters Bar were tied together and disabled by suffragettes with the intention of endangering train journeys.
The potential for deadly disaster was now all too clear, but the feminist terrorists were only just getting going. In a speech in January 1913, leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared “guerrilla warfare”.
Her followers responded with ever-greater ingenuity and ruthlessness. The suffragettes have the dubious distinction of having invented the letter bomb, a device intended to kill or injure the recipient. (1) On 29th January, several letter bombs were sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and the Prime Minister Asquith, but they all exploded in post offices, post boxes or in mailbags while in transit on the railway system.
In the following weeks, further attacks on letters and mailboxes occurred in cities such as Coventry, London, Edinburgh, Northampton, and York. On 6th February five completely innocent postmen were burned, four severely, in Dundee when a phosphorus suffragette letter bomb addressed to Asquith exploded as they examined it.
On 19th February, Emily Davison planted two bombs at the home of Lloyd George’s house. Only one of them detonated, but the building was seriously damaged. While no-one was injured, the bomb went off just before the arrival of workmen at the house. The crude nature of the timer – a candle – meant that the likelihood of the bomb exploding while the men were present was high. (2) WSPU Leader Emmeline Pankhurst was herself arrested for planning the attack and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Between February and March, railway signal wires were purposely cut on lines across the country, further endangering train journeys. As well as such novel attacks, the suffragettes also took inspiration from the Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s, (3) using more sophisticated explosive devices to hit highly emotive targets, such as the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral.
Also hit were sporting events. There was a failed attempt to burn down the grounds of the All-England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon, while a plot to burn down the grandstand of Crystal Palace football ground on the eve of the 1913 FA Cup Final was also foiled.
The grandstand of the Manor Ground football stadium in Plumstead was burned down. This the home of then south London club Arsenal, which was forced to move to a new stadium in Highbury, north London. Suffragettes also attempted to burn down the grandstands at the stadiums of Preston North End and Blackburn Rovers football clubs. Golf clubs and courses were also targeted.
Anti-suffrage politicians could perhaps be considered “legitimate targets” and attacks on empty sporting venues made a powerful point without endangering innocent lives. But the increasingly hysterical campaign lurched rapidly towards unrestrained and indiscriminate terrorism.
On 4th April, the day after Emmeline Pankhurst was imprisoned for her role in the bombing of Lloyd George’s home, a suffragette bomb was discovered outside the Bank of England. It was defused before it could explode in one of the busiest public streets in the capital.
Trains and their unsuspecting passengers were often targeted. A bomb exploded next to a passing train in Manchester, nearly killing the driver when flying debris grazed him and narrowly missed his head. Bombs were planted on the Waterloo to Kingston line, with one being placed on the eastbound train and the other on the westbound train. One of the bombs was discovered before it exploded in a previously crowded third-class carriage. Picking a third-class carriage meant that successful bombing would not hit politicians or other members of the ‘patriarchy’, but poor working men and women.
As the Waterloo train pulled into Kingston, its third-class carriage exploded and caught fire. The rest of the carriages were full of passengers at the time, but they managed to escape without serious injury. Although they proved faulty, the bombs were designed to cause maximum civilian casualties, being packed with lumps of jagged metal, bullets and scraps of lead. (4)
The London Underground was also targeted. A nitro-glycerine bomb was planted at Piccadilly Circus tube station. Despite the serious risk of it exploding while being transported, highly unstable nitro-glycerine was used for a number of suffragette bombs.
A simpler arson device was used in April 1913 to burn down the home of MP Arthur Du Cros, but in May, a powerful potassium nitrate bomb was discovered at St Paul’s Cathedral at the start of a service. Not long after, the danger from indiscriminate attacks was further highlighted when three London postmen were injured by noxious chemicals poured into pillar boxes.
A month later, a potentially deadly letter bomb was sent to a magistrate, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett at Bow Street, but the bomb was intercepted by London postal workers. Two days later suffragettes again attempted to assassinate Curtis-Bennett by pushing him off a cliff in the seaside resort of Margate.
On 10th May, a bomb packed with iron shrapnel was discovered in the waiting room at Liverpool Street Station, London, before it could explode. Four days later, another three suffragette bombs were discovered in a crowded passenger train as it pulled into Kingston. Once again, the would-be killers had planted their bombs in a third-class carriage.
Some later feminists have suggested that the low rate of success of suffragette bombs was due to them being used primarily to get publicity rather than to kill and maim. The fact that the three Kingston bombs, like many others, were made of nitro-glycerine exposes this claim of some sort of moderation; the substance was so unstable – particularly when made in amateur laboratories – that it could have detonated at any time, killing and maiming untold numbers of innocents. (5)
Another completely indiscriminate railway attack involved a suffragette bomb thrown from an express train onto Reading station platform. It exploded immediately and it was only by good fortune that no-one was killed or injured.
In all, during the month of May 1913 alone, 52 feminist bombing and arson attacks were carried out across the country.
The most common targets for suffragette attacks during the campaign were houses or residential properties belonging to politicians or members of the public. These attacks were justified by the WSPU on the grounds that the owners of the properties were invariably male, and so had the vote. Since they already possessed the vote, the suffragettes argued, the owners were responsible for the actions of the government since they were their electors. The fanatics said nothing about the fact that working class men who did not own property were also denied the vote. Dozens of homes were bombed or firebombed, with some families being targeted simply because they were related to senior politicians.
The Mill House near Liphook, Hampshire was burned because the owner was Reginald McKenna’s brother Theodore, while a bomb was set off in a house in Moor Hall Green, Birmingham, as the property was owned by Arthur Chamberlain, brother of Conservative politician Joseph Chamberlain.
 |
A 1913 cartoon, showing “Dame London” welcoming a suffragist, while behind her a suffragette holding a bomb threatens London
In early June 1913, a series of fires started in rural areas in Bradford killed at least two men, as well as several horses. Responsibility for the murders was claimed in the movement’s official newspaper, The Suffragette.
A suffragette bomb was discovered at the South Eastern District Post Office, London. It contained enough nitro-glycerine to blow up the entire building and kill the 200 people who worked there. Working class people also had a narrow escape when a large suffragette bomb blew up but narrowly failed to breach the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal in Yardley Wood, Birmingham. Since there was no lock for 11 miles, a breach would have seen a vast amount of water flood into the densely populated valley below. (6)
On 19th July 1913, letter boxes across Birmingham were filled with poisonous chemicals, seriously burning a postman when he opened one box. On the same day, Edith Rigby planted a pipe bomb at the Liverpool Cotton Exchange Building, which exploded in the public hall. After she was arrested, Rigby stated that she planted the bomb as she wanted “to show how easy it was to get explosives and put them in public places”.
An even more extreme action was carried out on 8th August, when a school in Sutton-in-Ashfield was bombed and burned down in protest at a visit to the town by Lloyd George. On 18 December, suffragettes bombed a wall at Holloway Prison in protest at the imprisonment of one of their number in the London prison. Many nearby houses were damaged or had their windows blown in by the bombs, showering some children with glass while they slept in their beds.
Inevitably, such levels of violence produced fatalities. A fire started at Portsmouth dockyard killed two men on 20th December 1913 as it spread through the workshops. The fire was so large that a battlecruiser, HMS Queen Mary, had to be towed to safety to avoid the flames. Two days before Christmas, several postal workers in Nottingham were severely burned after more suffragette letter bombs blew up as they moved mailbags.
Arson and bombing attacks continued into 1914. One of the first attacks of the year took place on 7th January. In a mode of attack later copied by the IRA, a dynamite bomb was thrown over the wall of the Harewood Army Barracks in Leeds, which was being used for police training at the time. One man was serious injured. An arson attack on Aberuchill Castle in Scotland on 4th February also nearly caused fatalities. The building was set on fire with the servants inside, and they only escaped in the nick of time.
Many churches were also attacked, as the feminists believed that the Church of England was among the leading voices opposing women’s suffrage. In the two-year campaign leading up to World War One, thirty-two churches were hit by bombs or arson. Among the most iconic the fanatics attempted to destroy was Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, long associated with the Knights Templar.
On 8 May 1913, a potassium nitrate bomb was found at St Paul’s Cathedral at the start of a sermon. It would likely would have destroyed the historic bishop’s throne and other parts of the cathedral had it exploded.
On 5th April 1914, St Martins-in-the-Field Church, in Trafalgar Square, London, was bombed, blowing out the windows and showering passers-by with broken glass. A bomb was also discovered in the Metropolitan Tabernacle church in London, and in June, a bomb exploded at Westminster Abbey, damaging the Coronation Chair. The bomb had been packed with nuts and bolts to act as shrapnel and narrowly missed a party of sightseers.
Two days after the Westminster Abbey bombing, a second suffragette bomb was discovered before it could explode in St Paul’s Cathedral
Annie Kenney attempted a second bombing of the Church of St John the Evangelist in Smith Square, Westminster on 12 July, callously planting a bomb underneath a pew during a sermon before leaving. Fortunately, the bomb was spotted by a member of the congregation, and Kenney, who was being trailed by Special Branch detectives, was arrested as she left.
May 1914 saw particular public outrage after suffragettes targeted a hospital in Dundee, which was burned to the ground. Two prison medical officers assaulted by suffragettes in public with horse whips.
A suffragette letter bomb set fire to a moving train in Salwick, Lancashire. The train’s guard bravely threw the burning sacks off the train to avoid further damage, but was badly burned in the process.
Another attempt to flood a populated area took place on 7th May, when a bomb was placed next to Penistone Reservoir in Upper Windleden, south Yorkshire. If successful, the attack would have led to 138 million gallons of water gushing into the populated valley below, potentially drowning large numbers of residents. Fortunately, the bomb failed to make the anticipated breach. (7)
The feminist terror campaign was only halted by the outbreak of war in August 1914.The conflict finally brought the fanatics to their senses, and Pankhurst and other leaders ordered their followers to stop all attacks and to join the war effort. This mirrored the position adopted by a large majority of the campaigners for Irish independence and by the Ulster Protestants who had prepared to defy the Westminster elite in order to resist Home Rule. Neither side in the Irish conflict in the few years before the war, however, had used violence and terror on anything like the scale indulged in by the suffragettes.
Their bomb and arson attacks alone had, in total, cost approximately £700,000 in damages (equivalent to £71,470,000 in 2021). According to historian C. J. Bearman, the campaign overall cost the British economy between £1 and £2 million in 1913 to 1914 alone (approximately £130–£240 million today).
There were an average of 21 bombing and arson attacks every month in 1913, and 15 per month in 1914. Bearman found the records a total of 337 arson and bombing attacks between 1913 and 1914, but states that the true number could be well have been over 500.
 |
St. Catherine’s Church, London, in flames after another feminist fire bombing
The atrocities included the first terrorist bomb to explode in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. The bombing of Lisburn Cathedral in August 1914 was carried out not by the IRA, but by suffragettes.
Their campaign was not merely outrageous in its own right, but went on to provide the inspiration for later bombing and terrorist campaigns of the several incarnations of the IRA. (8) As already noted, the suffragettes invented the letter bomb. The IRA’s so-called S-Plan of 1939 to 1940 copied the feminists’ multiple incendiary attacks on pillar boxes.
Share Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale
The combination of high explosive bombs, anti-personnel shrapnel, incendiary devices and letter bombs used by the suffragettes also provided the pattern for the IRA campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. Even the targeting of shops with incendiaries as part of a grinding-down strategy of economic warfare had its origins not with the tacticians of Irish Republicanism, but with the gang of terrorists around the Pankhursts.
By the end of the campaign, more than 1,300 people had been arrested and imprisoned for suffragette violence across the United Kingdom. The deaths, serious injuries, lucky near-misses and massive damage to public and private property had turned the suffragettes into hate figures for millions of Britons.
Today’s rose-tinted accounts of the suffragettes invariably downplay or even totally cover up their 1912-1914 terror campaign. A potted history on the BBC website, for example, briefly mentions arson and bomb attacks, but the very short list of targets includes the phrase “Church of England buildings”. This attempt to imply attacks on, perhaps, administrative offices, rather than cathedrals and much-loved churches, is typical of the modern efforts to whitewash the campaign.
The same accounts often portray attacks on suffragette meetings by angry mobs as if they were inspired by irrational male fury at the audacity of women demanding the vote. In fact, such incidents were invariably a spur of the moment reaction to the latest suffragette bombing outrage. The notorious 1913 attack on an WSPU rally in Hyde Park, London, for example, was caused by public outrage over the bombing attack on the home of Lloyd George’s house in February 1913.
The meeting turned into a riot as members of the public lost their tempers. Clods of earth were thrown and some of the women manhandled, with many shouting “incendiaries” and “shopbreakers” at the feminists. Attacks on private houses often produced understandably angry responses; in Doncaster in May 1913, suffragette arson attacks on several homes led to mob of 1,000 locals attacking a WSPU rally. After the burning of Bristol University’s sports pavilion on 23rd October 1913, undergraduates took their revenge by raiding the WSPU office in the city.
After rowdy suffragettes were thrown out of a political meeting in Doncaster in 1913, the house of the man who had thrown them out was burned down. In response, an angry mob of 1,000 attacked a WSPU meeting. (9)
Time and time again, what is now presented in feminist propaganda as thuggish male chauvinist aggression was in fact retaliation for the suffragette terror attacks which have now so conveniently been ‘forgotten’. It was opposition not to middle class women getting the vote (while generally making no such demand on behalf of disenfranchised working=class men), but to the suffragettes promoting their campaign through deadly violence – more often than not completely indiscriminate.
The feminists of the time were quite shameless in their description of the campaign. The WSPU described its own bombing and arson attacks as terrorism, with suffragettes declaring themselves to be “terrorists” in 1913. (10) Christabel Pankhurst repeatedly used the word “terrorism” to describe the WSPU’s actions. Emmeline Pankhurst stated that the suffragettes committed violent acts because they wanted to “terrorise the British public”. The WSPU also reported each of its attacks in its newspaper The Suffragette under the headline “Reign of Terror”.
Why, then, has all this largely been forgotten? Because the feminist movement and its liberal allies decided that it should be. In the 1930s, as the Suffragette Fellowship compiled the history of the recently successful struggle for the vote, they ruthlessly censored the records. As they compiled the sources on the movement that were used by later historians, the feminists decided that they were not going to mention any of the bombings in any of their material. This was partly in order to protect former suffragettes from prosecution, but was also an attempt to step away from the violent rhetoric and to change the cultural memory of the suffragette movement. (11)
Many official records of suffragette violence were ordered to be sealed for decades and are only now beginning to be released from the archives. On top of this, there is the natural bias of the liberal-left, which not only favours its feminist allies but also dominates academia and the legacy media.
That the sustained terrorism of the suffragettes is now largely forgotten is testament to the power of the Memory Hole tactics of the feminists, court historians, media and education system. It is also a reminder of the importance of efforts to preserve and popularise Real History.
Thanks for reading Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale! I’m still happy to give you all this for free, but I am keen to build my reach, so please share my posts and, above all……
ENDNOTES:
1 “Letter bombs and IEDs: Were the suffragettes terrorists?”. Sky News. Retrieved 7 November, 2024.
2 Walker, Rebecca (2020). “Deeds, Not Words: The Suffragettes and Early Terrorism in the City of London”. p. 57.
3 Legg, George (2 January 2020). “’The Buildings are Screaming’: The Spatial Politics of Terrorism in London”. The London Journal. 45 (1): 12.
4 Riddell, Fern (2018). “Death in Ten Minutes: The forgotten life of radical suffragette Kitty Marion”, p. 124.
5 Webb, Simon (2014). “The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists”. Pen and Sword. p. 108.
6 Bearman, C. J. (2005). “An Examination of Suffragette Violence”. The English Historical Review. 120, p. 385.
7 Webb ibid., p. 1
8 Walker ibid., p. 61.
9 Bearman ibid., p. 376–377.
10 Grant, Kevin (2011). “British suffragettes and the Russian method of hunger strike”. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 53 (1): 113–143
11 Books interview with Fern Riddell: “Can we call the suffragettes terrorists? Absolutely”“. History Extra. Retrieved 9 Sept 2024.
Bibliography
Bearman, C. J. (2005). “An Examination of Suffragette Violence”. The English Historical Review. 120 (486): 365–397. doi:10.1093/ehr/cei119. ISSN 0013-8266. JSTOR 3490924.
Robert F. Cholmeley (1907). “Tactics”. The Case for Women’s Suffrage: 154–163. Wikidata Q107276376.
Jones, Ian (2016). London: Bombed Blitzed and Blown Up: The British Capital Under Attack Since 1867. Frontline Books. ISBN 978-1-4738-7901-0.0
Mayhall, Laura (2003). The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195159936.
Monaghan, Rachel (1997). “’Votes for women’: An analysis of the militant campaign”. Terrorism and Political Violence. 9 (2): 65–78. doi:10.1080/09546559708427403. ISSN 0954-6553.
Monaghan, Rachel (2000). “Single-Issue Terrorism: A Neglected Phenomenon?”. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. 23 (4): 255–265. doi:10.1080/10576100050174977. ISSN 1057-610X. S2CID 72122553.
Riddell, Fern (2018). Death in Ten Minutes: The forgotten life of radical suffragette Kitty Marion. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-1-4736-6621-4.
Rosen, Andrew (17 January 2013). Rise Up, Women: The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1914. Routledge. pp. 242–245. ISBN 978-1-136-24754-5.
Walker, Rebecca (2020). “Deeds, Not Words: The Suffragettes and Early Terrorism in the City of London”. The London Journal. 45 (1): 53–64. doi:10.1080/03058034.2019.
Webb, Simon (2014). The Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists. Pen and Sword. ISBN 978-1-78340-064-5.
Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
