The great pilgrimage
It’s 100 years since women first got the vote and a very long – but little-known – walk was crucial to the campaign. WORDS : J E NNY WALT E R S
100 years since women got the vote, the walk that played a big part.
SOMEONE IN THE crowd hurled an egg. Others threw mud, ‘all manner of vegetable produce’, rotting rats and rocks. But the women kept their courage and their sense of humour: ‘stones greeted us, but owing to the fact that neither men nor boys can throw straight, at any rate at Suffragists, no one was hit,’ reported Margaret St John.
Margaret was one of thousands of women walking to London in the summer of 1913, part of a ‘Monster March of Suffragists… from the North, South, East and West of England and Wales’ campaigning for women’s right to vote. The idea was first announced in early May and by mid-June the Great Pilgrimage had begun: a feat of organisation in a time before social media and mobile phones. Eight main routes including Watling Street from Carlisle, the Great North Road from Newcastle, the West Country Route from Land’s End and the Pilgrim’s Way from Kent, would converge on Hyde Park for a huge final rally on July 26th.
Maps and schedules were drawn up and published in The Common Cause, the weekly paper of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). A marching tune was chosen – The Song of the Suffrage Pilgrims – and suitable clothing discussed. Trousers were still de trop so the women would hike in long skirts of neutral colours, with the option to raise the hem up to four inches to stop it dragging in the muck (a lesson learned at the ‘Mud March’ rally of 1907). Fashion brands ran adverts: ‘ The Burberry: The ideal coat for the Pilgrimage.’
Each group of pilgrims would carry banners saying ‘Law-Abiding’ and ‘NonMilitant’. These suffragists were keen to set themselves apart from the militant suffragettes of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union ( WSPU), whose controversial ‘Deeds not Words’ included smashing shop windows, bombing postboxes and setting fire to empty houses.
On June 18th the Watling Street and Great North Road walkers set off; those from Land’s End the next day; by July 21st every route was underway. Pilgrims didn’t have to walk the whole way; they could trek for a day or a week or however long they could spare. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, President of the NUWSS, joined the Great North route: ‘ We believe she will out-march many more youthful Pilgrims, for she is a famous walker.’ Many did hike start to finish, like 80year old Mrs Ramsay from Cornwall who arrived at the first stage to ‘encourage them’ and ‘the next morning… I walked again, and the next day and the
next, I did the same’ until five weeks later she reached Hyde Park.
All along the way the women held rallies to raise awareness and funds for their cause, sometimes speaking to crowds over 10,000 strong. Many people were curious. Many were kind, offering tea to thirsty walkers and even ‘strewing the road with daisies’. But others were angry, stirred up by anti-suffrage campaigners who’d got hold of the schedule and were walking the route a day ahead of the pilgrims. Then they encountered ‘intoxicated men bearing sandwich boards entitled Women do not want votes’, rock and rodent missiles, opponents rushing their makeshift stage, and even trampling them.
Nevertheless they persisted – walking long miles on muddy roads, camping overnight, spreading their message – and proving that women were not weak and feeble-minded, as anti-suffragists claimed. Dispatches published in The Common Cause show these women relished the trek. Early reports from the Watling Street route described how ‘ The road runs by the beautiful lake of Thirlmere... the whole route, passing along the sides of Helvellyn, being most picturesque and romantic’. Those on the Great North Road passed ‘through wooded dales and over fine moorlands to Harrogate, Swaledale, Wensleydale, Nidderdale, and Wharfedale... each in its own way, extremely beautiful’. And from North Wales: ‘I wish I could bring before you some of the vivid scenes that lie splashed across my memory—the long procession winding slowly down the hill to Colwyn Bay with bristling pennants and banners blazing in the sun… and every morning the beauty of sea and hills, and the insistent call of the long white road between them.’
The pilgrims also honoured the ‘famous women whose names are connected with the places we pass’, and the poverty they often witnessed fuelled their hunger for the vote, and the power to change things: ‘How shall we rear our own children in the pleasant places of our kingdom, without care for the luckless ones, when we have marched through the England of to-day, through the cities of whirring wheels, where babies rot and womanhood is destroyed.’
On the 26th July, 50,000 people gathered for the final rally in Hyde Park, ‘women from North, South, East, and West, who have been tramping the roads, some for days, some for weeks, some for nigh on two months, carrying the message of hope and freedom for women through town and city, hamlet and remotest village, to the capital’. They united to demand a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women. Prime Minister Asquith chose to do nothing (again), but the people of Britain had heard the suffragists: ‘in no other way could we have reached the thousands of men and women who are now listening to our message.’
The First World War soon suspended domestic politics, but women again proved their strength in the munitions factories, at the hospitals, and on the land, and in 1918 women (over 30 with property) got the vote. 10 years later, women finally had equal voting rights with men. Katherine Harley, the suffragist who first imagined the Great Pilgrimage, didn’t live to see those hardwon triumphs: she was killed helping refugees in Serbia in 1917. But what Katherine – and all her fellow walkers – achieved was immense. As one witness waiting to cheer the passing pilgrims explained: ‘when we saw them winding down the hill towards us, when we realised what they were doing, and what they meant, we got such a lump in our throats that we couldn’t speak.’