Why my great-granny smashed a Whitehall window
My great-grandmother, Margaret, was a very small, delicate-looking, white-haired old lady. She was also a suffragette. Once, when she was demonstrating noisily in Whitehall, a policeman caught her in the melee and said: “Go home, Granny. This is too rough for you.” She was so incensed at this patronising talk that she picked up a stone, concealed it in her reticule and then, when the coast was clear, threw it, smashing the window of the Home Office. Among the several purple, green and white “Votes for Women” brooches in my family used to be one (now, sadly, lost) with a stone in its middle to celebrate such tactics.
A century ago tomorrow, women got the vote for the first time. It is endlessly disputed if violence in a political cause can ever be justified in a free society. This is a practical question too. Does it work? My feeble answer is, yes and no. Yes, because violence forces people to pay attention. No, because people dislike violence and vote for those who can restore order.
In the suffragette case, you could say that violence was a feminist act because it claimed for women the power of brute force which men had traditionally monopolised. But I suspect the stones thrown by people like my great-granny Margaret made little difference. A far greater violence altered the case.
The First World War was the first “total” war. It insisted that millions of men should fight and that millions of women should work (in munitions, for example) to support their fighting. This entitled these masses to a greater “ownership” of the country. In the general election of 1910, the last before the war, about 4.5 million people voted; in that of 1918, nearly twice that number. Unprecedented male violence had thus created the conditions which made people feel that all men and – though the full female franchise did not come until 1928 – all women should be allowed to vote. Strange, but true.
Readers may recall that this column has questioned the way the Church of England upheld accusations of child abuse against George Bell, the great Bishop of Chichester, who died in 1958. Its own report, by Lord Carlile, showed unequivocally that its procedures were so inadequate as to make the case against Bell unsafe.
But the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has defied the report, and persists, without explaining how the balance of probabilities could possibly lie against Bell. Last week, the Church put out a short statement saying that “new information” about Bell had been received, and that the police had been informed.
The Bell case is about to be debated at this week’s General Synod. The announcement was designed to suggest that there’s no smoke without fire, and so to squash the debate. As Lord Carlile himself recommends, any new material should be carefully looked at before it is bandied about in public. Mention of the police (who, anyway, are supposed to investigate accusations against the living, not the long dead) is a way of making everything sound worse.
After the grubby farce in which Wiltshire police falsely accused the late Sir Edward Heath of similar things, I hope Sussex police will explain why they are again being dragged into the Bell case.
One should not rejoice at a business in trouble, but I cannot resist a certain pride at the costs I have added to the now-distressed outsourcing company Capita.
Capita has sent endless letters threatening me with court action for not having a television licence in my London flat. I have had 56 such missives since 2015. The reason I have no licence there is that I have no television. I do not see why I should have to prove this, so I never answer Capita’s rude accusations or accept its false implication that it has a legal power to enter my premises.
If I have made it a few hundred pounds poorer, that is its own fault – and that of the BBC which pays it to perform this oppressive task.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds helps millions improve their ornithological knowledge. But, like too many charities these days, it suffers from what economists call “producer capture” – being run by people with special obsessions.
Perhaps for some class reason, the RSPB in effect opposes grouse shooting, despite its formal neutrality on the subject. It frequently accuses gamekeepers of killing hen harriers because these birds can reduce grouse numbers. Some interesting new figures have been collated by You Forgot the Birds, the group representing the interests of grouse moors, using published government sources. These show that hen harriers breed less well on land controlled by the RSPB than elsewhere. In Scotland and England, only 35 per cent of nests on RSPB land produced at least one chick in the past five years. This compares with 52 per cent on the other land.
Since 2012, the RSPB has ceased to publish annual data about endangered species across its 200 reserves. It would be interesting to know why. Fox predation? Many rare species need the human intervention of vermin control to prosper, but the RSPB won’t admit it.