'The Suffragettes were in the organ'

I’ve been so busy preparing The Bristol Suffragettes for publication (expected in May) that I haven’t had a chance to write a blog for ages. With publication date drawing near, though, I’ve been thinking about dates quite a bit, and in particular how hard they, and other details, are to pin down. Surprisingly, that’s true even for recent and well-recorded events such as the suffrage campaign. You’d think that with newspapers, books, recordings and films available for us to consult, not to mention diaries and autobiographies, it would be comparatively easy to sort out the facts.  

Well, it isn’t!  

Take the case of the suffragettes who hid overnight in the organ in the Colston Hall, Bristol in 1909 to interrupt local MP Augustine Birrell’s speech the next day. According to A Nest of Suffragettes in Somerset by B M Willmott Dobbie (1979), the suffragettes were Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth and the event took place on 2 May. Dobbie includes a rousing description of the event taken from Annie Kenney’s memoirs, Memories of a Militant (1924). Annie was the organiser in Bristol and arranged the protests, so she ought to know what happened. In her account, the two suffragettes went to a concert in the hall on the previous night and afterwards hid in the organ until the next evening, munching on chocolate and apples. Annie goes on to describe the hilarious scenes during Birrell’s talk as stewards “scampered here, there, and everywhere” in an attempt to find the source of the cries “Votes for Women!”. “The night and day spent in the organ had,” concluded Annie, “served its purpose.” 

A great stunt, no doubt about it. But did it really happen like that? I first began to wonder when I noticed that 2 May was a Sunday. It seemed odd to me that a political meeting was held on a Sunday. No doubt people did hold meetings on Sundays, but I thought I’d just double check. I looked in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (Elizabeth Crawford, 1999), which confirmed in the entry on Elsie Howey that it was on 2 May that Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth hid in the organ. However, the entry for Vera Wentworth didn’t mention the event. 

I found this a bit puzzling so decided to take another book off my shelf. I looked in Antonia Raeburn’s The Militant Suffragettes (1973) and found that Elsie Howey had been accompanied by Vera Holme, not Vera Wentworth. I went back to The Women’s Suffrage Movement and in the entry for Vera Holme found confirmation of this. Vera Holme had written a verse account of the incident in the suffragette newspaper, Votes for Women, on 7 May which both Crawford and Raeburn mentioned. So it seemed fairly clear that the women were Elsie Howey and Vera Holme, not Vera Wentworth.  

However, while The Women’s Suffrage Movement entry on Holme repeated that the date was 2 May, Antonia Raeburn gave it as Saturday 1 May. She also said that the women had hidden in the organ during the Saturday afternoon, not on the previous night. This was corroborated by Vera Holme’s verse account, quoted in The Militant Suffragettes under the title “An Organ Recital” which read: “Seated one day in the organ/We were weary and ill at ease;/ We sat there three hours only,/Hid midst the dusty keys”. I also found a passage in Katherine Roberts’s Pages from the Diary of a Militant Suffragette (1910) which noted on 7 May 1909, “I want to make a note of an amusing parody I read in to-day’s Votes for Women…the other day two of our members contrived, during the afternoon, to slip in unobserved and hid in the organ.” Roberts went on quote Vera Holme’s poem, which she called “An Organ Record”. This was also the title given in the Crawford entry on Vera Holme. So now I had two titles for the poem.  

Finally, I checked the newspapers and found an article in The Guardian on 3 May 1909 which clearly stated that Mr Birrell had been interrupted during a speech in the Colston Hall on Saturday 1 May. However, The Guardian made reference to only one woman hiding in the organ: “She was found behind a group of pipes, and she was speedily rushed from the hall…” So now I had only one woman.  

Now, I’m not trying to point out other people’s errors because in fact I’d made the exact same error myself in my Spotlight On entry on Vera Wentworth – I’d put her in the organ with Elsie Howey on 2 May (now corrected – due out soon!). The point I want to make is that even though we have access to so many records nowadays, it’s still not as straightforward as you think to get the facts right – and I wouldn’t say I was 100% confident now! Confusions can very easily creep in, and for the very best of reasons.  

Annie Kenney’s account was written many years after the events, from memory, and did not always get the author’s full attention – she wrote sections of the book while taking her baby out for a walk. In addition, there were a number of incidents when suffragettes hid overnight in what Mrs Pankhurst called “dangerous positions, under platforms, in the organs, wherever they could” to get a chance of asking a Government Minister about votes for women. Emily Wilding Davison hid in a cupboard in the House of Commons on Census Night, 2 April 1911. On 8 May 1909, a suffragette hid for 24 hours under a platform in a hall in Liverpool to interrupt Birrell. There was even another “suffragette in the Colston Hall organ” incident in 1912, when two women hidden in the organ interrupted a speech by Mr Hobhouse, Liberal MP Bristol East. In Annie Kenney’s memoirs, it was during this episode that the women got into the hall during the afternoon. It seems likely that Annie muddled up the two Bristol events. In addition, Elsie Howey and Vera Wentworth often worked together in the south west, so it’s easy to see why their names become connected.  

I have one more check to make on the 1909 episode, which is to consult Votes for Women for 7 May 1909. Then I’ll see what I can find out about 1912…goodness only knows how much more confused that will leave me! For now, I’m going with Elsie Howey and Vera Holme in the Colston Hall organ on the afternoon and evening of Saturday 1 May  1909...

Profiled on Literature Works!

I am pleased to be one of the first south west UK writers featured on Literature Works's lovely new website http://www.literatureworks.org.uk/SW-Writer-Profile/Lucienne-Boyce

Literature Works is a literature development charity for South West England which offers support to writers and readers in the region. The new website features writers' profiles, resources for readers, and an events calendar.

The Stepmother, Githa Sowerby, Orange Tree

I went to see Githa Sowerby’s 1924 play, The Stepmother, at The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond on 16 February 2013. Before this production the play had never been performed in public (there was a private performance in 1924). In fact Sowerby, the author of a critically acclaimed play about a bullying industrialist, Rutherford & Son (1912), had been largely forgotten.

Over the years there have been rumblings of a revival of interest in Githa Sowerby (1876 – 1970). In 1980 the Theatre Upstairs put on an abridged version of Rutherford & Son. The Times Literary Supplement in 1994 talked of the “uncovered greatness of Githa Sowerby” in a review of a production of the play at the Cottesloe Theatre. Then she sank back into obscurity until 2009 with the publication of a biography by Pat Riley (Looking for Githa); the unveiling of a plaque at her Gateshead home; a revival of Rutherford & Son by Northern Stage; and other events in Tyneside to commemorate the Gateshead-born author – a veritable Githa Sowerby Festival.  

The Stepmother tells the story of Lois Relph’s marriage to Eustace Gaydon. Eustace gained influence over Lois when she was a young woman alone in the world, married her for her money, and immediately got control of her fortune. Running through his female relatives’ money is something of a habit of his: he’s already spent his Aunt Charlotte’s and for all we know (it isn’t mentioned) his first wife’s as well. Lois has no idea what he has done with the money, where it’s invested, even how much she has. If she needs money she has to ask Eustace for it, and then he only doles out small amounts. The situation continues even when she sets up her own business as a dress-designer (Eustace calls it her hobby), and might have continued indefinitely had not her eldest stepdaughter Monica needed money to make a marriage settlement, which Lois promises to provide. But when she tries to raise the funds, Lois discovers how much power her husband exercises over her and her affairs…

Despite the title and the fact that Lois cares deeply for her stepdaughters (a pleasant antidote to the Cinderella-Stepmother myth), the play isn’t really about being a step-mother. It’s about female autonomy and power within patriarchy. It offers a powerful exploration of the methods the system utilises to contain and control the feminine. Most obviously, these are through the control of property and the exclusion of women from male institutions (eg law, banking, investment industries). But – and it’s the confrontation with this issue that made the play of especial interest to me – it’s also through the use of language.

If the gasps of horror that greeted a number of Eustace’s utterances are anything to go by, others in the audience were impressed by this too. Eustace’s speeches are a master class in manipulation: in their use of jokes and flippancy; the undermining of Lois’s feelings and perceptions; the patronising assurances that all is well combined with just enough hints that all is not well to create a debilitating state of anxiety; the reversal of blame; the play for sympathy; the refusal to answer direct questions; the deflections from the main issue; the generalisations and vague criticisms. The bully’s language has many tactics, all designed to throw the victim off balance, to enforce their belief in their own ignorance and powerlessness (which at its most effective will have some basis in truth – Lois doesn’t know what’s happened to her money nor can she get it back); to put them in the wrong and instil a sense of the weakness of their cause.

If perhaps there were moments when we teetered on the brink of hissing Eustace and turning him into a pantomime villain, they were brief and the emotional and ideological impact of the play barely faltered. The performances were fantastic, in particular a plausible, gently-spoken Christopher Ravenscroft as Eustace and Katie McGuinness as Lois carrying us through all the horrors of a woman realising the reality of her position.  It’s a marvellous production and if you get the chance to see it don’t let it slip through your fingers!

My only carping criticism is of the seating arrangements. Unnumbered seating is all very well, but when the management tries to pack the audience in like sardines, and the audience refuses to be packed it doesn’t make for a very comfortable experience! And no, a seat that only has room for three people doesn’t seat four…

The Stepmother by Githa Sowerby runs at the Orange Tree Theatre until 9 March 2013 - http://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/whats-on

Patricia Riley’s biography, Looking for Githa, is available at Amazon – it’s gone onto my wish list!

The Times Literary Supplement, The uncovered greatness of Githa Sowerby, 14 June 1994

Rutherford And Son, Michael Billington, The Guardian, 18 June 1980

The Guardian, 14 August 2009: Githa Sowerby, the forgotten playwright, returns to the stage http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/aug/14/githa-sowerby-playwright-rutherford-son

The Githa Sowerby Festival 2009 - http://www.thresholdtheatre.co.uk/projects/githa-sowerby

 

 

 

 

Suffragettes and the Old Brown Dog

When Mrs Pankhurst spoke at a suffrage meeting in Battersea Town Hall with local suffragette Charlotte Despard, she was puzzled by hecklers' calls for “the old brown dog”. Who was the old brown dog, and what connection did it have with the campaign for female suffrage?

The old brown dog was the victim of vivisection at the hands of Professor William Bayliss (1860–1924) at University College London in 1903. Two female students witnessed  the procedure: Louise Lind-af-Hageby (1878–1963) and Liesa Schartau. Louise Lind-af-Hageby was born in Sweden but settled in England in 1902. She attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College before going on to study medicine with her friend Liesa Schartau. 

The women noticed that the dog had already been subjected to one procedure. The law at that time forbade the use of an animal for more than one experiment; it had to be destroyed. They reported the incident to Stephen Coleridge (1854–1936) of the Anti-vivisection Society, who publicly accused Professor Bayliss of breaking the law. Professor Bayliss sued Coleridge for libel, claiming that the dog had been under anaesthetic during the operation and when it was destroyed afterwards. The Professor won substantial damages. 

Anti-vivisectionists had lost the case but they were determined not to forget the old brown dog. In 1906 they erected a statue in Battersea in memory of “the Brown Terrier Dog Done to Death in the Laboratories of University College in February, 1903…[and] 232 dogs Vivisected at the same place during the year 1902”. During what became known as the Brown Dog Riots of 1907, medical students from London’s University College and Middlesex Hospital attempted to destroy the statue on 20 November and again on 25 November. On 10 December the London students held a pro-vivisection demonstration in Trafalgar Square where fights broke out between them and working men. They also interrupted anti-vivisection meetings: one hundred students broke furniture, fought and threw smoke bombs at one gathering in Acton on December 1907, and students rioted at another meeting in Battersea on 15 January 1908.  

But why attack suffrage meetings? The reason was that many people at the time saw suffragists and anti-vivisectionists as members of the same movement. Indeed, the connections were there for those who wished to make them. Charlotte Despard, who was present at the unveiling of the statue, was Honorary Secretary of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The founder of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, Frances Power Cobbe  (1822–1904), was also a campaigner for women’s rights. Batheaston WSPU supporter Mrs Blathwayt remarked in her diary that many suffragettes were vegetarian. Louise Lind-af-Hageby, who campaigned against vivi-section for the remainder of her life, herself linked the two causes as elements of a new humanitarianism which was opposed to cruelty and oppression.  

In fact, not all suffragists were anti-vivisectionists, but the belief that the two campaigns were connected was unshakeable. The students showed the same hostility to suffragettes as they did to anti-vivisectionists. In London they interrupted suffrage meetings with cries of “Down with the old dog”. Their antagonism to the cause of women's suffrage was followed by students elsewhere, including in Bristol where on 3 April 1908 Bristol medical students heckled Mrs Pankhurst at the Victoria Rooms. On 24 November 1909 students rushed the platform in Colston Hall where Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst were speaking. An attempt to wreck the Anti-Vivisection Shop in Queen’s Road was foiled, but in 1913 Bristol students were more successful when they launched a similar attack on the WSPU shop, also in Queen’s Road, looting and burning the premises.     

In 1910 the statue of the Old Brown Dog was removed and destroyed to prevent further student rioting. In December 1985 actress Geraldine James unveiled a new brown dog memorial in Battersea Park which had been commissioned by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) and the National Anti-vivisection Society. It is this statue (pictured above) you can see today. 

 

For the full story read Coral Lansbury’s fascinating book The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Winsconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)

Read about the Old Brown Dog Statue at the Friends of Battersea Park website, http://www.batterseapark.org/art/sculpture/brown-dog-statue/

 

Find out more about the anti-visisection movement at the BUAV website - http://www.buav.org/

 

Late an Officer in the British Navy

One of the voyage accounts I read while writing my novel To the Fair Land was The Adventures of Mark Moore: late an officer in the British Navy (1795).* Moore combined a naval career in British, American, Tuscan, Portuguese and Swedish services with a career in the theatre as an actor manager, touring Britain, France and Flanders. His was a rackety, wandering life which zigzagged between the sea and the stage, and from prosperity to bankruptcy.

Moore was born in Boston, America in 1739. His father had emigrated from Ireland and was a wine merchant. He died when Moore was three. When the boy was thirteen he was sent to near-by Cambridge to study. “I did not waste much of the midnight oil,” he confessed. He was much more interested in spending time with Hallam’s theatrical company which was touring in Rhodes Island. Stage-struck, Moore ran away to join the company when they went to Barbados.

Hallam’s company, founded by Lewis Hallam (1714-1756) and his wife (?-1773), was the first notable acting company to tour in North America. Lewis Hallam came from a family of actors. His mother was an actress and his elder brother ran a theatre in Goodman’s Fields. The Hallams formed the London Company of Comedians in 1752, and set sail for the British colonies in the same year. Lewis Hallam died in 1754 on a trip to Jamaica and his wife married David Douglass, who took over the company and took it back to New York in 1758, as the American Company Troupe.  

A family friend’s attempt to persuade Moore to go home met with refusal, but the young man did agree to enter the Navy as a midshipman. He was injured in an engagement with a French privateer. His skull was fractured and trepanned – the ship’s surgeon drilled a hole in the bone so that the wound could be cleaned. Though he was forbidden alcohol after the operation, he credited his recovery to the punch he persuaded a marine to smuggle in to him.   

Moore’s sea-going career went on to include a spell in a privateer as a surgeon’s mate, when he discovered that the surgeon had no more medical experience than he did himself. The surgeon had been a wood-cutter, and two men bled to death when  he attempted to carry out amputations. Moore later did a stint on a Bristol slaver as ship’s surgeon – his only qualification being this time as surgeon’s mate to the wood-cutter. Moore threw his own slave, who he called Ranger, overboard after the boy was shot in the stomach to spare him, he said, a tormenting death. Moore records that Ranger was “kissing his feet at his last moments”. For a time Moore operated as an American privateer harrying British ships, for which he was taken prisoner. In the 1790s he worked for the British Navy again, transporting pressed men.

His equally chequered theatrical career was resumed after his marriage to his first wife who he met at a ball in Worcester. They eloped the next day. The couple embarked on a wandering theatrical career throughout the UK. For a time they toured the west country performing Italian songs, calling themselves Signora and Signor Morini. They had one son who joined the French army and died at about the same time as Mrs Moore.

Moore saw the inside of a prison on more than one occasion. In the Midlands he was mistaken for a highwayman and arrested. In 1793, shortly after his second marriage to the landlady of his Liverpool lodgings, he ended up in debtors’ prison where he survived by making and selling model ships. He was in prison for seven months and eventually discharged. Back in Liverpool, with old age and poverty staring him in the face, Moore wrote his autobiography in the belief that “a British audience, and British readers, never fail to pardon, even where they cannot praise”. 

Moore’s narrative is interspersed with songs, Latin verses, a translation from a French novel and topographical information. There’s theatrical gossip, with some name dropping thrown in  – Garrick, Linley, Sheridan. A “Russian anecdote” tells the story of how Peter the Great disguised himself and joined a gang of rebels to foil their plot to assassinate him. How many of Moore’s stories are true, how many are tall, and how many are seaman’s yarns, it is impossible to say!

*I wrote about another American mariner, Aaron Thomas, in “A Crude and Cruel Age” on 4 June 2012.

 The Memoirs and Adventures of Mark Moore, Late an Officer in the British Navy, Written by Himself  (London, 1795)

Festive October in Bristol, Bath and Cheltenham

So the Bristol Literature Festival 2012 is over – and I almost wish it could have gone on for ever! (Though I’m sure the hard-working volunteer organisers must be glad they can have a well-deserved rest now.) It was a fantastic week of events with some great authors giving talks and readings – Helen Dunmore, Emylia Hall, Iain M Banks and many others. The programme was a mix of poetry, short stories, readings, sessions for writers, events for readers, activities for children and more. This was the second Festival and I’m already looking forward to the third.

 My particular interest is in historical fiction so I thoroughly enjoyed the two events I attended. The first was Michèle Roberts, Georgina Harding and Patricia Ferguson who read from their books and discussed their work afterwards. Many themes were touched on, especially war and its impact on non-combatants. A couple of nights later I saw Andrew Miller and Clare Clark, who answered questions about their work and its relationship to history.    

On the last day of the Festival, 20 October, I was delighted to be one of a panel of historical novelists discussing some issues around writing historical fiction. With me were internationally-published author Helen Hollick (whose work includes an Arthurian trilogy,  a series on pirates, and books on King Harold) and Jenny Barden (whose debut novel, Mistress of the Sea, has just been published). Helen Hart, author and publisher of SilverWood Books, chaired the meeting and kept us in order. The topics we covered were the place of historical research in historical fiction, how historical novelists can tap into support and community networks, and the historical novel and self-publishing.

 

·         For those who were unable to attend the historical fiction panel on 20 October, hand-outs from the talk will shortly be available on SilverWood Books’ Learning Zone.

 

In fact, October has been a wonderful season for literature. I managed to see Richard Ford  in Bath as part of Topping and Co’s literature festival. The author came with lunch as well – so not only a brilliant reading but excellent food too!

And I was thrilled when my historical novel, To The Fair Land, was chosen to feature in the Locally Sourced series at Cheltenham Literary Festival. I did a reading in the Festival bookshop on 8 October, and also fitted in a fascinating talk by Llewellyn Morgan on his book about the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

For more information about the historical fiction panellists see:-

Helen Hollick’s website http://www.helenhollick.net/

Jenny Barden’s website http://www.jennybarden.com/

Lucienne Boyce’s website http://www.lucienneboyce.com/

Helen Hart at SilverWood Books http://www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk/

Bristol Festival of Literature  - http://unputdownable.org/ 

Topping & Co Booksellers of Bath - http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/ 

Llewellyn Morgan can be found on Twitter -  https://twitter.com/llewelyn_morgan

 

Strange Carryings On

I’ve just read The Weekes Family Letters, the correspondence between Hampton Weekes (1780-1855) during his time as a student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1801-2, to his family at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. Hampton Weekes came from a medical family: his father and younger brother Dick were both doctors (surgeon-apothecaries). His Father Richard had studied at St Thomas’s before him, and Dick was due to study there when Hampton had finished. His mother was dead and his step-mother Elizabeth died in 1802. She brought with her a daughter, Fanny. Hampton also had two sisters, Mary Ann and Grace, who with their step-sister helped run the family’s medical practice.

Besides being illuminating about the practice of medicine and the attitudes and beliefs of eighteenth-century practitioners and patients, the letters give a vivid insight into the life of a close and affectionate family. (The exception is the step-mother, who the Weekes children were not particularly fond of.)  They share advice on what to wear, who to make friends with, medical case histories, and local gossip. They discuss the weather (the Thames is “frozen over in part” in January 1802), horses, tenants, the family business. Hampton’s father scolds him about overspending and going too often to the theatre. It’s the ordinariness of the letters that opens the family’s life up to you, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the detail of what they sent back and forth to one another by carrier.

 

While Hampton was in London he was given all sorts of commissions from his family, and “Knowles’s waggon” was kept busy transporting goods ranging from the homely to the bizarre. A new carpet for the best parlour “that will not show the Dirt”, a chamber-pot stand,  a sofa. Fish – not the sort people eat but counters for games – made of ivory, bone or mother of pearl, they came in various shapes, but fish-shaped ones were most popular.  

For his brother Dick, who was interested in mineralogy and botany, came fossils, shells, plant cuttings, the “snout of a sawfish” killed off the west coast of Africa, an elephant’s jaw, and “philosophical ink” – invisible ink. For his sisters fashion advice – ladies are wearing “hair tippets forming a triangle upon, or between ye. shoulders”.  Also for the girls lace, sheet music, and a shawl which they divided between them.

 

Food and drink featured a great deal. From London came a 60 pound-tub of “cambridge butter, excellent for toast”, a barrel of oysters which “I would advise you to eat the evening they arrive”, coconut, figs.  To London from the country came hares and pheasants, pears (“eat them as soon as ever they are ripe”), hogs pudding, sausages, apples, and empty barrels to be filled with porter and sent back.

 

Being a medical family, it’s only natural that Hampton was given orders for medicines and equipment. He sent James Powders, a thermometer, blister salve, forceps, scalpels. He also sent human body parts. Most of them were dissected and prepared by Hampton himself. A femur. A leg and foot – Hampton was going to throw them away but thought he might as well dissect them. An entire “Skelleton”. The testis of a London Bridge watchman – as this specimen was “offensive we could not keep it in the surgery”, Hampton’s father told him. A box of bones with instructions on macerating and bleaching them. The bones of a sailor aged about 30 who died from “inflamm. Of ye. Mucose membrane lining ye. Trachea”.   A stomach. To his friend William Borrer a female skeleton “by the Cobham stage” – what an image this conjures!  

 

Eighteenth-century carriers must have been a tolerant breed. Or perhaps they didn’t bother to enquire too closely about what was packed in the baskets and boxes they transported. Imagine the consequences of one of these packages being lost, stolen or falling off the back of the wagon, especially in an age when people detested dissection of corpses and riots against it were not unknown. I can’t imagine Royal Mail showing the same tolerance today!

 

A Medical Student at St Thomas’s Hospital, 1801-1902: The Weekes Family Letters, John M T Ford, (Medical History, Supplement No 7), (London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1987).