Band of sisters
Inside the secret terrorist wing of the suffragettes
On Tuesday, a statue to suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett will be unveiled in Parliament Square. It is a long overdue acknowledgement, following a campaign by activist Caroline Criado-perez and The Daily Telegraph, of the decades Fawcett spent peacefully campaigning for the partial suffrage of 1918, never giving up the belief that women deserved an equal voice with men.
And yet, just as feminism is fractured today, so it was then. We tend to think turning rage into activism is somehow new, that it never led women to join together, or fracture apart, with such force and strength before #Metoo. But that would be wrong.
Over a century ago, while Fawcett’s suffragists petitioned peacefully, the Young Hot Bloods (YHBS), a secretive group at the heart of the suffragettes (the name given to members of the Pankhurst family’s militant Women’s Social and Political Union), united with such intense anger at society that they chose to literally burn it to the ground. To blow it up with bombs on commuter trains, attacks on MPS’ houses, churches, museums, racecourses, sports grounds, post boxes and communications networks.
“If men use explosives and bombs for their own purpose, they call it war,” argued suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst, “and the throwing of a bomb that destroys other people is then described as a glorious and heroic deed. Why should a woman not make use of the same weapons as men? It is not only war we have declared. We are fighting for a revolution.” So widespread and prolific were their attacks that the police had to invent new methods of counterterrorism. Double agents, covert photo surveillance, public pleas for funding and a secret bomb disposal unit hidden on Duck Island in St James’s Park: these all formed central features of the response to suffragette bombs created with nitroglycerine, packed into tubs filled with shrapnel, set on timers and sent across the country in the hands of members of the YHBS, on Christabel’s direct instructions.
I first came across the YHBS in a newspaper report during a police investigation into the suffragettes in 1913. In academic circles, the whispers surrounding their actions had come from a single document found in the National Archives commemorating their foundation in 1907 by Adela Pankhurst and Jessie Kenny, the younger sisters of the suffragette leadership.
Membership of the YHBS was extended only to the unmarried and those under 30. Once initiated, they were assigned an older woman within the suffragettes to act as their partner during “danger duty”. This pair of women, one younger, one older, would then be entrusted with a bomb or arson attack at specific sites from London to Dublin, and Edinburgh to Portsmouth.
The YHBS were responsible for some of the most extreme political violence that this country has ever seen, and yet their stories have never been told. To find confirmation of the women themselves, their thoughts, their beliefs and the risks they took to secure our future, brand new research needed to be done.
Hidden in the archives of the Museum of London is a little-read and previously dismissed autobiography of one of these women. Kitty Marion, music hall star, birth control activist and militant suffragette, left her unpublished manuscript to the Suffrage Fellowship in the Thirties, and yet for the last 80 years it has languished there, ignored by historians who believed it to be little more than a list of her stage performances. It is so much more.
Reading Kitty’s words for the first time changed my entire understanding of the past. Kitty was the original #Timesup and #Metoo pin-up girl; a beautiful red-headed actress who suffered multiple sexual assaults and abuse at the hands of managers and agents throughout her career; who tried everything possible to get the government to listen to her and protect women in the workplace, and when they wouldn’t, became possessed by such a violent and unstoppable rage that she joined the suffragettes and became a committed, convicted bomber on their behalf. She was determined to “develop the courage of a ‘woman’ and somehow, sometime avenge the insult I had experienced”. Alongside other members of the YHBS, Kitty left a trail of devastation from Manchester to St Leonards; she was responsible for attacks on railway stations and carriages, public parks and the arson attack on the home of the MP for Hastings, Arthur Du Cros. Images of the smouldering ruins of his house, Levetleigh, in East Sussex, filled newspapers and newsreels the next morning, on April 14 1913.
At the outset of the First World War, Kitty fled to America, where she soon became the only woman brave enough to sell Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review on the streets of New York. Kitty continued to work in the birth control movement between the UK and the US, until her death in 1944. Yet somehow the story of this woman, a central figure in two of our most important feminist movements of the last 100 years, has been forgotten.
But Kitty didn’t only leave her manuscript behind. While her companions kept coded diaries and letters of their activities, Kitty, forever the actress, cut and pasted evidence of every single one of her attacks into a scrapbook as if they were reviews of her most recent performances. It is from evidence like this, that a new history of the suffragettes can be drawn. For the first time we can truly understand the world of the suffragettes and the lengths they were prepared to go to.
Calling for a pardon of the members of the WSPU – and, unknowingly, the Young Hot Bloods – during February’s centenary celebrations, Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “It would be a fitting tribute to pardon them now… In any meaningful sense of the word, they were not criminals.”
While Fawcett’s statue, to be unveiled on Tuesday, may celebrate peaceful women, we must never forget that it is the rage of the suffragettes that got us where we are today.
Death in Ten Minutes. Kitty Marion:
Activist. Arsonist. Suffragette by Fern Ridell is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To order your copy for £23 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
‘Kitty pasted clippings of her antics in a scrapbook as if they were reviews’