New history books reviewed
DIANE ATKINSON salutes an impressive new biography charting the action-packed life of Sylvia Pankhurst, from suffragette hunger strikes to secret missions to revolutionary Russia
On 28 September 1960, Sylvia Pankhurst’s funeral was held at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Addis Ababa, on the orders of her good friend Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia. One of Britain’s most notorious suffragettes was buried in state in the Kiddist Selassie Menbere Tsebaot Church Cemetery, reserved for Ethiopian patriots, the only non-Ethiopian to be honoured in this way (until her son was given the same treatment in 2017). It was a bizarre end for a lifelong republican atheist: chanting Orthodox bishops conducted the service; her coffin draped in gold cloth was buried by the Imperial Guard in full regalia, overseen by priests holding embroidered parasols. Haile Selassie, aged 68, stood to attention throughout the two-hour service.
Sylvia’s long life was spent in feminist, socialist, communist, anti-colonialist and anti-racist political campaigning. She was friends with Haile Selassie from the 1930s and loudly condemned Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, having been alerted to the rising Italian Fascism in the 1920s by her lover Erasmus Silvio Corio, an anarchist, political refugee and wanted man. When Sylvia met Selassie off the train at Waterloo station in 1936 to welcome him to Britain, she saw him as a victim of white colonialism and Fascism, a man who had fought alongside his troops in the trenches before seeking exile in Britain. She became a critical friend, making clear she supported him not because he was an emperor, but because she believed in his cause – the independence of Ethiopia. Some elements of Haile Selassie’s legacy are contentious, and Sylvia’s 25-year friendship with a man who was in many ways the antithesis of her life’s work raises questions that Rachel Holmes explores in this new biography.
That dazzling day in the Ethiopian sun in 1960 was a very long way from where
Pankhurst’s life had begun. She was born in sooty Manchester on 5 May 1882, to radical socialist and feminist parents. Her father, Richard, was a barrister, known as the ‘Red Doctor’ for both his gingery whiskers and his socialist politics. Her mother, Emmeline, and maternal grandmother were campaigners for women’s suffrage; her maternal great-grandfather had witnessed the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Sylvia and her siblings had politics and protest in their blood.
Almost every one of Sylvia’s 78 years were filled with art, politics, writing, talking, heckling, campaigning, espousing the most radical causes of the day – all driven by her father’s words: “If you do not work for other people you will not have been worth the upbringing.” Of the three Pankhurst daughters (two sons died young), it was Sylvia who followed his words to the letter. In 1898, when Sylvia was 16, her beloved father died of a perforated ulcer in her presence, while her mother and elder sister Christabel were away. His death informed the rest of her life: she devoted it to fight for what he believed. She maintained an intimate relationship with her parents’ close friend James Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour party and the suffragettes’ most loyal supporter in parliament, until he died in 1915.
Natural Born Rebel is an astonishing, comprehensive, personal and political cradleto-grave biography that surely stands alone as the definitive volume on an extraordinary woman: a suffragette, activist and artist for whom sacrifice and suffering were second nature. It is hard to imagine anyone who would be able to match the depth and breadth of all-consuming sincerity and passionate personal conviction that Pankhurst threw at every cause she seized by the scruff of the neck. She pursued a relentlessly political life, collecting and campaigning for causes as other people collected stamps.
The book brims with many extraordinary scenes from key moments in 20th-century history, in which Pankhurst insisted on being a key player. A talented artist who studied at the Royal College of Art, she gave the suffragettes a coherent visual identity quite unlike any other political campaign. In her work for the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, she designed exhibitions, banners and logos including the Holloway brooch, a medal awarded to all suffragettes who served time in prison for the cause. Pankhurst was herself arrested 15 times and served a dozen prison sentences for her protests. It was during these sentences that she refused sleep, water and food and was repeatedly force-fed, often twice a day, until she thought she was losing her body and mind.
Based in London’s East End during the suffragette campaign, ‘Our Sylvia’ was a pacifist during the First World War, scorned by everyone besides her socialist and pacifist colleagues for her efforts to stop the war. She was followed by Special Branch and her passport was confiscated. But, helped by local working women and some well-heeled friends, Pankhurst opened cost-price restaurants serving cheap nutritious food, creches, baby clinics, and not one but two toy-making factories offering work to local women who had lost their jobs because of the war.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who could match the passionate personal conviction Pankhurst threw at every cause she seized by the scruff of the neck
In 1916, she slipped out of England to witness the Easter Rising in Dublin. The following year she gave her wholehearted support to the Russian Revolution and called for the same in Britain. Pankhurst’s hairraising journey to the Moscow Congress of the Communist International in July 1920 to meet Lenin, and the aftermath of their tetchy encounter, was a significant moment. Heavily disguised, she stowed away on a freighter from Harwich to Sweden, where she boarded a tiny fishing boat for Murmansk. Suffering badly from seasickness and almost falling overboard in a squall, she went by train to the Kremlin for what would be a showdown with Lenin in the tsar’s bedroom suite. The row was caused by their diametrically opposed views on how to bring about a communist revolution in Britain. Comrade Pankhurst wanted to abolish parliamentary democracy to achieve revolution; Lenin urged the British left to work within it to bring about its downfall. Refusing to toe the line, Sylvia was expelled from the British Communist Party in 1921.
Rachel Holmes mines previously unseen archive material, describing breathtaking scenes and the inner thoughts of key players. This epic study is a generous, vivid and telling slice of 20th-century world history, lived in and acted upon by one heroic woman.