Grandpa was a suffragette, too
As a statue of Alice Hawkins is unveiled in Leicester, her great-grandson tells Sally Peck how her fight was a family affair
On Sunday, at the first major event in this week’s suffrage centenary celebrations, an imposing 7ft-tall bronze statue of Alice Hawkins was unveiled in Leicester’s New Market Square – the first ever of a named woman in the city.
A shoe factory machinist who was buried in a pauper’s grave in 1946, Hawkins’s presence is a timely reminder that while suffrage is often portrayed as an upper-middle-class campaign – with the passion and elegance of the well-to-do Pankhursts continuing to captivate – there were maverick working women all over the country who risked their freedom, marriages and jobs for women’s right to vote.
It is also, as a story from Hawkins’s great-grandson, Peter Barratt, illustrates, a reminder that there were some men – “allies”, in modern parlance – who played a supporting role in the suffragettes’ fight. “I distinctly remember my grandfather telling me of a Sunday morning, circa 1910, when Alice was speaking on a platform in Leicester’s marketplace, just where the statue [is], urging the large crowd to support the women’s cause,” Barratt, a retired management accountant from Northamptonshire, recalls.
“Grandfather said Alice was heckled by a man shouting, ‘Get back to your family’, but as quick as a shot Alice replied: ‘But here is my family, they are here to support me.’ Her husband, Alfred, and my grandfather and his siblings were standing around the speaker’s platform, supporting mother and wife.”
Men such as Alfred didn’t just stand shoulder to shoulder with their wives at rallies. A Home Office index containing details of more than 1,300 suffragettes arrested in their campaign for equal voting rights shows the names of more than 100 men who joined the fight; Hugh Arthur Franklin, the son of a wealthy banker, was arrested five times for crimes including an attempted attack on then home secretary Winston Churchill, and setting fire to an empty railway carriage.
Alice, a mother of six who founded the Leicester arm of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in her 40s, was jailed a total of five times, for crimes ranging from window-smashing in 1912 to “obstructing police and damaging police whistles”. Her 50-something labourer husband’s first brush with the law came after heckling Churchill from the back of a crowded political meeting in Leicester in 1909.
When his wife and four other suffragettes were barred entry, Alfred marched into the Palace Theatre, shouting: “Why don’t they [the government] secure the support of women of the country? How dare you stand on a democratic platform?” The whole party was ejected by stewards, then arrested by the police upon trying to re-enter.
The next day at the magistrates’ court all of the women, as was the policy of the WSPU, elected to go to prison rather than pay a fine, where they went on hunger strike for a fortnight. Alfred, a working class man who needed to earn a living wage to support his family, reluctantly paid the penalty.
In 1910, Alfred again challenged Churchill during a speech to Young Liberals in Bradford; for which the stewards dragged him out of the room and threw him down a stone stairway, leaving him with a broken leg.
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#heforshe gestures go,
Alfred’s was costly: he spent six weeks recuperating at Bradford hospital. But he didn’t stop there: with his friend Victor Duval he founded the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement (MPU), which was so wellorganised that they had printed membership cards.
The MPU formed a fighting front and in a civil court
Alfred was awarded £100 for the injury inflicted by the stewards. Family legend has it that Alfred drank this princely sum, over what must surely have been an extended period, with his friends at the pub.
“That women would be treated as secondclass citizens was anathema to Alfred,” explains Barratt, who grew up with a rich collection of family stories and mementos, passed on from his grandfather, Alice and Alfred’s son, also called Alfred.
Barratt uses these details, and the news cuttings and suffragette postcards he has inherited from his family for inspiration in the lectures he’s given everywhere from schools to the Edinburgh Fringe over the past 14 years. But it was only when he visited the National Archives recently that he found Alice’s own voice, in a unique transcript of a Deputation of Working Women meeting she attended with Lloyd George, then chancellor, in January 1913.
“Women have been trying to get the vote to alter their status in life,” the minutes of the Treasury document report her as saying. “I have two sons who have been working for the country, one in the Army and one in the Navy. Those sons, under this new Bill – The Manhood Suffrage Bill – would have votes. I, the mother who brought them into the world, have nothing.”
A century on, “I’m appalled by the inequality we still see,” says Barratt. “The equal pay issue, which Alice campaigned on – that was her driving force. But pay remains unequal 100 years later – not just in the owner-managed business down the road, but in major corporations. When I visit schools, what I ask kids to do is to think about this human right that Alice and Alfred fought for – I ask them, at the earliest opportunity, to vote. If more people voted, we’d begin to create change.” Barratt also hopes men and boys might emulate his great-grandfather. “It shouldn’t just be women marching and campaigning; men should support women today in the same way Alfred supported Alice.
“It’s just the right thing to do; equal pay, equal voting rights – they were the right thing then, and they’re the right thing now.”
In a Britain currently wrestling with the question of whether a male presenter can be worth hundreds of thousands more than his female counterpart, the tale of a male suffragette who supported his wife through five arrests in the battle for equality, has a ring of modernity to it.
‘Men should support women today in the same way that Alfred supported Alice’