Spied on for taking a stand
Thousands of files kept on suffragettes by the police will be preserved online. Claire Cohen looks at the stories contained within
‘It seems to me we have grounds for believing that there is something amounting to a conspiracy to murder.” These words were written on Sept 27 1909, in a threepage memo from Special Branch. Addressed to one “Mr Gladstone” – a son of the former prime minister and the then home secretary – it warned of a “genuine conspiracy” to shoot PM Herbert Asquith. The culprits? Suffragettes.
This remarkable document is just one of 3,000 Metropolitan Police and Home Office records that have mostly gathered dust for a century. Now, in a year-long collaboration between family history site Findmypast and the National Archives, they are being made available for the public to search online for the first time – and for free until International Women’s Day on March 8. And already, the astonishing collection has shone new light on the story of those women who fought for the right to vote.
Clashes between suffragettes and police are familiar stuff, of course. But what has remained hidden, until now, is how closely the women were policed by the highest levels of government; and by plain clothes officers, skulking in carriages and at suffragette meetings.
What started life as an archive aimed at spying on the suffragettes has unintentionally created an invaluable record of those women who bravely put their lives on the line. Most eye-catching are leaflets published by Scotland Yard in spring 1914, which feature dozens of covert photographs of suffragettes – taken with a camera that was bought with taxpayer money (£400 today).
One shows Evelyn Manesta, a governess arrested for hammering paintings in Manchester Gallery in 1913. In another Ethel Cox (alias Gwendoline Cook, arrested for breaking windows at the home secretary’s house) is pictured being forcibly restrained. Descriptions that accompanied each for easy identification were sent by the police to museums and galleries “so they could keep an eye out for any women who came through their doors”, says Alex Cox at Findmypast.
Among the newly digitised files is a letter to the Wallace Collection in London from the Met Police Commissioner, in April 1914, suggesting they might wish to place
The women were policed by the highest levels of government
the photographs of London’s most wanted women “in such a position as to ensure they were under continual observation [by staff ]”.
There can be little doubt that the “national danger” posed by the suffragettes was, in the years before the First World War, enough to deem them one of the greatest threats to the Empire.
“Certain suffragettes have been practising shooting at 92 Tottenham Court Road,” continued the 1909 memo to Mr Gladstone. Inquiries confirmed that: “Three weeks ago, two women (one of whom was described as a little woman wearing a tam-o’-shanter), who were said to be suffragettes, had been practising with a Browning pistol.”
The sender was Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten, the Met’s Assistant Crime Commissioner – who, earlier in his career, had played a significant role in trying to catch Jack the Ripper.
What is surprising about this particular memo, however, is that the intelligence came from one “Mrs Moore” of East Dulwich, south-east London – herself a former member of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union. While in the vicinity of Parliament, she was apparently handed a letter informing her of the supposed plot (of which nothing ever came) and felt duty bound to pass it to the authorities – although she refused to name the author, as it would be a “breach of faith”.
Her actions offer a fascinating glimpse into a still-hidden phenomenon: the women who spied on their suffragette sisters. We learn, for instance, that Margaret Gertrude Schencke was arrested after confiding her plans to smash Home Office windows to two women at a 1913 demonstration. They turned out to be undercover informants for Scotland Yard. “We are still searching for these women,” explains Cox, who hopes more documents will emerge. “But we know they existed.”
What is clear, from looking through the records is the sheer volume that exist and the speed at which they were flying back and forth between Britain’s top brass. “They were desperately trying to make sense of the situation,” says Cox. “The government had never faced a political movement on this scale and they didn’t know what to do.
“The fact that many records include the women’s aliases shows that, by 1914, the government had a fairly good idea of who they were. It also indicates that the suffragettes knew they were being watched.”
But for all this watching, waiting and warning, Cox suggests that the surveillance wasn’t ultimately that effective, citing Emily Wilding Davison, who had been arrested on nine occasions by the time she made it on to the track at the Epsom Derby, where the King was in attendance.
If anything, Cox says, the surveillance increased support “as it was so closely tied to the appalling treatment of suffragette prisoners”.
“At least,” he adds, “the government got better at this sort of thing during the Great War. Then espionage was a serious threat.”