In Part 1 of these three articles about how the rail network influenced the suffrage campaign, I looked at how trains were instrumental in facilitating suffrage campaigns, including militant activism, as well as enabling suffrage organisations to set up and run their national networks. I also explored the way that trains became arenas for sometimes violent encounters between suffragettes and politicians. You can read Part 1: "Cheap and easy railway traffic": Suffragettes and the Railways here.   In Part 2, I tell a tale of suffragette derring-do with the story of the struggles to free Mrs Pankhurst on the train between Glasgow and London in 1914.           By 1914, Mrs Pankhurst was protected by a suffragette bodyguard armed with clubs who tried to prevent the police arresting her whenever she appeared in public. On 9 March 1914 she was due to speak at St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow. Heavily cloaked, she got into the hall with the audience, ap...

When Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were sent to prison in 1905 after interrupting a Liberal politicians’ meeting in Manchester, one of the victories they claimed was that for the first time in years the press had taken notice of the women’s suffrage movement. The point of the protest – and of much of the militancy over the next few years – was to get noticed, and according to Christabel Pankhurst, it worked. She and Annie “had certainly broken the Press silence on votes for women.” [1]   She also referred to stories that pressmen actually got together and agreed amongst themselves that they would ignore women’s suffrage, adding that these “rumours were false or else the agreements broke down”. [2] But after 1905 she said, referring to a meeting she and her mother had had with the representative of an unidentified newspaper, “Never again was the cause ignored by that or any other newspaper”. Mrs Pankhurst reiterated in 1909 that the WSPU had “broken down the pre...