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16 HISTORY & POLITICS Pilgrimage of greats Why the march of the suffragists should be commemorated About twenty-five years ago a retired academic I know moved house, which meant registering with a new doctor. She went along to the surgery and provided her details to the receptionist, who entered them straight into the shiny new Practice computer. When my friend gave her title – Professor – the computer froze. A message flashed up on the screen: “status incompatible with gender”. My friend sighed in exasperation. There were not many professional areas women could not access when her GP’s computer said “no” in the 1990s and there are even fewer now. But, in her mother’s day, the story was different. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth, women were defined by low expectation and limited opportunity. Traditionally they acquiesced while the powerful debated; they looked down while the educated scanned the horizon. Without a vote, they had neither the influence nor authority to challenge the domestic stereotype. They were voiceless; locked out of the system that defined them. I had “status incompatible with gender” firmly in my head when I embarked on research for a book, Hearts and Minds, celebrating the centenary of the Representation of the People Act which allowed (some) women to vote for the first time. Mention “votes for women” to most people, and a succession of stock images invariably leaps to mind. In a haze of green, white and violet, a group of determined-looking Edwardian ladies strides towards us wearing sashes and top-heavy hats, or the aprons and clogs of the factory floor. They carry placards – “Who Would Be Free Must Strike the Blow” – or bricks; a few of them are manhandled by policemen while the others raise their fists in protest. Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women” plays sternly in the background. Alternatively, we see a young prisoner with wild eyes and loose hair, strapped down in her cell being forcibly fed through a tube, or Emily Wilding Davison on the Epsom turf with her broken head wrapped in newspaper. Votes for Women? It’s all about the suffragettes. And what is there left to say about them? I went to our local museum, thinking they might have images of suffrage campaigners to inspire me. I could write about the “ordinary” women of the UK, perhaps, who lacked the charisma and high profile of Pankhursts or Kenneys but were no less passionate in their fight for enfranchisement. The volunteer on duty that day said no, they didn’t have any photographs, but she did remember her grandmother talking about the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage of 1913, and how proud she had been to play a part. This “Pilgrimage” – unknown to me – was a six-week march through Britain culminating in a London rally involving thousands of women and men, and it entranced me. It had nothing to do with the suffragettes. It was all about the suffragists. I quickly learned the difference. In general terms the “gettes” were militant campaigners belonging to Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and almost exclusively JANE ROBINSON female. They wore the amethyst and emerald colours with which we are familiar. The “gists” were the non-violent majority, advocates of constitutional change who believed in deeds and words. They belonged to Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), wore green, white and red, and included men. The Great Pilgrimage was the highlight of a fifty-year campaign by the suffragists, an inspiration for Jarrow, for Greenham Common, for every women’s march that’s taken place since Trump arrived. Crowds of pilgrims set off on six major routes across the country: from Newcastle and Carlisle in the north (including marchers from Scotland), Cromer and Yarmouth in the east, Aberystwyth in Wales and Land’s End, Portsmouth, Brighton and Margate in the south. Further routes fed into these main ones like tributaries, all flowing to the capital city. People joined in or dropped out along the way, each sparing as much time as possible from the round of daily life. Some stayed the whole course, travelling as far as 300 miles between the middle of June and the end of July 1913. They marched because they believed in the power of peaceful persuasion, at a time when the militant suffragette campaign was at its height. They were expected to cover up to 20 miles each day, day after day, in rain as well as the full sun, holding meetings morning and evening to explain their mission. Most were on foot (perhaps unused to walking any distance at all) while others rode in caravans, on horseback or on bicycles. Pilgrim Lady Rochdale commented that she was privileged to meet all sorts of women on the road, from duchesses to fishwives. By the time she reached London she considered herself indistinguishable from a fishwife herself: “hot and smelly” and proud to be so. A young mother from Kent took her children with her, while a suffragist daughter accompanied her eighty-year-old father and an elderly married couple lifted everyone’s spirits as they strode along together. “Are we fools or heroes?” asked one of them of a friend. “A little bit of both”, he replied. An undergraduate from Oxford was thrilled by the good humour of everyone he met on the march. “I have lunched with pilgrims”, ‘Ceiling’ by Ella Baron he claimed proudly, “I have tea-d with pilgrims, I have dined with pilgrims, and the whole time, I have heard more stories that I wouldn’t tell to my sisters than ever before!” There were problems, however. Not just practical ones associated with walking through successive pairs of boots and swarms of blisters, but more dangerous difficulties occasioned by the fact that all suffrage campaigners were perceived by the majority of the public to be violent militants. The pilgrims were frequently assaulted; at meetings they were pelted with an unlovely artillery of rocks, cowpats, rotten vegetables and dead rats plump with maggots while the filthiest obscenities flew through the air like bullets. More than once death threats were made and very nearly carried out. This was no picnic. But it did make a difference. It was not the arson, the bombing, the canvas-slashing or window-smashing of the militants that finally persuaded Prime Minister Asquith to give women the vote. It was this suffragist campaign for the hearts and minds of Britain, forced to counter the negative publicity attracted by the suffragettes while struggling to demonstrate to Parliament and the public that women were responsible enough to be trusted with democracy. When asked after the pilgrimage whether he would now admit that women had finally won the right to be called “persons” in a political sense, and therefore to vote, Asquith is said to have replied – albeit rather doubtfully – that yes, he supposed women were persons after all. The war delayed legislation, but this march changed lives. So why had I not heard of it before? Simply because everyone’s attention has been arrested by the suffragettes, whose fame flares so brightly it consumes the lower-profile (but no less adventurous) achievements of their suffragist sisters. For almost a year I travelled as a pilgrim myself to unearth in archives and private collections around the UK the forgotten diaries and letters of those who took part in the march. I trawled through regional newspapers (mortifyingly coming upon an editorial by my great-grandfather, a Lincolnshire journalist, deploring women’s aspirations to venture out of their natural sphere); I read contemporary suffrage journals and pored over parliamentary records. Most importantly, I looked beyond the beguiling testament of the suffragettes. My reward was huge: in learning about the Pilgrimage I found a glorious sort of Edwardian road movie with characters of different political and religious creeds, social classes and generations, discovering for themselves the heady and joyous power of women coming together in the name of freedom, peace and social justice. Before I left my local museum that day right at the beginning of my research, I asked what exactly the volunteer’s grandmother had done. It turned out she wasn’t a pilgrim herself; she had neither the money nor the time to join the march. Instead she saved up scraps of her family’s food for a week and then, when the pilgrims passed by her village, offered them a tiny packed lunch to help them on their way. That was how she won the vote. I salute her. TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8
page 17
17 Poetry is always upstairs Arriving in Hay-on-Wye on a cold winter’s morning, by the stone bridge over a fine, broad sweep of the river Wye, from the direction of Clyro where Francis Kilvert was rector, the visitor is immediately struck by the prospect. Dominated by the half-ruined castle, whose architectural jumble of Norman, Jacobean and Victorian patiently awaits restoration, Hay is at once an old-fashioned market town of the Welsh Marches, a vaunted “town of books”, and the site of an international annual literature festival now spreading across the globe. The most recent Hay Festival took place in Cartagena, Colombia, between January 23 and 28. The festival’s director, Peter Florence, was knighted in the New Year’s Honours list. Traditional country outfitters and ironmongers jostle with secondhand bookshops and chic boutiques. Until recently, there was a regular auction of Welsh hill ponies – “straight off the mountain”, I heard the auctioneer boast as they raced around his sawdust ring – but the boutiques now have the upper hand. Hay was launched as a town of books in 1977 by Richard Booth, a local bookseller with a genius for publicity. That year, he declared Hay an independent kingdom and himself Richard Coeur de Livre, his horse being appointed Prime Minister. There was a great deal more in the same vein. The stunts seemed to work and the town of books flourished. In 1988, Norman Florence and his son Peter founded the Hay Festival of Literature, which did much to consolidate the town’s bibliomania. As I walked down the High Street on a blustery day last month, however, I started a count of the bookshops that had recently closed. Having lived for the past thirty years just a short drive away from Hay – something good to have on one’s doorstep on a wet Sunday in Mid Wales – I have come to know the place well. There are twenty-three bookshops listed in the trade’s official guide but at its peak that figure would have been closer to thirty. (There are also numerous local traders in books who don’t have retail premises.) Each bookshop, including the vanished ones, evokes memories. The first on my list of closures is a gardening books specialist that has reverted to a private house. Another bookshop now sells household goods. Noting in passing the boarded-up, old-fashioned baker, I reached an expensive handmade kitchen shop which occupies premises that once had a marvellous wall of green Virago Press classics. Long gone is the proprietor of what I still call “Smokey Joe’s”, who sat at his desk, rubicund, stout and tweedy, puffing without end on a large pipe. A corner shop whose dusty basement used to stock some markedly subfusc paperbacks is now a delightful stationery shop, so not everything is to be lamented. But the boom in boutiques is impossible to ignore, a reminder that Hay, as much as it is a land of bibliophiles, is a tourist town. By the time I reached the crime and mystery specialist, Murder and Mayhem, one of three shops run by Anne Brichto and Derek Addyman, two of the town’s more energetic and independent-minded booksellers, I was armed to present my findings. But Anne was more than ready for me. After some preliminary ver- N I CHOLAS MURRAY bal fencing about numbers, I was treated to an upbeat account of the realities of second-hand bookselling in the town. Tensions soon emerged between Booth and the Florences. As well as Booth’s coolness towards the Festival because of rivalrous feelings that he was the person who had built up the reputation of Hay, the progressive Hay constituency didn’t always like Florence’s choices of sponsor (when Al Gore flew over on an underpopulated jet, for example, to talk about climate change). It was claimed that by flooding the new edge-of-town festival site with literati, they were neglecting the shops in the town centre. There were rumoured to be problems between Booth and his biggest rival Leon Morelli, who ran the vast Cinema Bookshop. In 2005, Booth sold his shop (which nonetheless retains his name in its title) and retreated to a tiny outlet in the High Street called The King of Hay. As I passed, I saw in the window a petition that called for “A Democratic Discussion of the Difference Between a New and a Second-hand Book”. There was a rambling prolegomena which hailed second-hand bookselling as a triumph of recycling, thus making it “the world’s largest green economy”. The King stood as a Socialist Labour Party candidate in the 1999 Welsh Assembly elections, but his politics are all his own. Happily, everyone seems to have made peace; Booth has even appeared at the Festival himself. When the notoriously astringent guide to Britain’s second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, Drif’s Guide, appeared in 1991 (my dog-eared copy of this vanished classic has itself now become collectable), its author, the idiosyncratic bookdealer Drif Field, called Booth’s shop “a hospice for books that no-one can bear to see die in public”. In my recollection, some of the books, especially in the upstairs squalid and chaotic poetry section overseen by Booth’s manager, had already passed beyond the care of those hospitallers. Under its new ownership the former Booth’s is spruced up, slightly pricier, with an attractive coffee smell emerging from the café. It also sells a selection of new titles, now that Hay’s only new bookshop has gone. The marvellous wide wooden staircase still creaks musically and the poetry is still upstairs. Poetry is always upstairs. In Murder and Mayhem, Anne challenged my decline thesis with the news that she and Derek have had an excellent year, with a 30 per cent increase in turnover. They see the future as bright. She agreed that the high rents in Hay make it difficult for new entrants and conceded that there are fewer bookshops and more boutiques but, she says, “I am saddened by the number of articles still being written about the death of books and the near extinction of bookshops”. In Anne’s view, book businesses seem to be thriving after a tough period. She points to the splendid premises of the revamped Poetry Bookshop, which has moved further into the centre of town. There are crops of new bookshops emerging in the other cities, she says. “And there are also now more ways of selling books.” Hay-on-Wye, 2017 We had reached the unavoidable point where the internet entered the conversation. To the traditional bookshop browser, the internet is a mixed blessing. In need of a copy of Richard Jefferies’s Round about a Great Estate recently, I found one in less than two minutes on AbeBooks (which has now been swallowed by Amazon). In the same week, my wife asked after a particular author in an East Sussex bookshop and was told firmly: “It’s up to you to look for it”, a sentiment that would have produced a knowing harrumph from the author of Drif’s Guide. His indictment of the book trade’s erratic opening hours and general unco-operativeness, that became the hallmark of his truculent guide, is still valid. The true book-lover, the rummager in book barrows, scavenger of boxes hidden by further boxes at the top of narrow, dusty staircases, is not interested in the algorithm and the instantordering promise of the websites. We are not looking for that long-elusive title. We are looking for the book we didn’t know we wanted. Serendipity, the accidental discovery, are the deliverers of our pleasure. The internet is a killjoy. It has also made even the charity shops aware, at the click of a mouse, of the price of everything. True bargains can still be found but only by accident and usually in a shop that specializes in something other than books, keeping a box of dismissed oddities in a corner. What the book trade calls a “sleeper” – the valuable gem that lies in a surrounding bed of dross – is harder than ever to stumble on, as those morose booksellers tap, tap, tap their way into submission to the net’s imperious conformity. Anne and Derek told me that they now get 35 per cent of sales from the internet, but they are adamant that the shops will stay. Derek and Anne report a growing interest among younger readers in the physical book, the e-reader having failed to sweep all before it, as many predicted it would. “Books are very cool now”, Anne says. Her theory is that young people, far from being glued to mobile phone screens, remember that the only time when they man- aged to get their parents’ attention away from their mobile self-absorption was when they were read a children’s story which was always from a real book, and that is why they love them. After leaving Murder and Mayhem, I stopped for a coffee in one of the many cafés in the town of books. I pondered Anne’s argument: ingenious, perhaps, and attractive; but valid? I idly opened the book I had bought in her shop and began to read, but before I had got far my phone rang. TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

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16

HISTORY & POLITICS

Pilgrimage of greats Why the march of the suffragists should be commemorated

About twenty-five years ago a retired academic I know moved house, which meant registering with a new doctor. She went along to the surgery and provided her details to the receptionist, who entered them straight into the shiny new Practice computer. When my friend gave her title – Professor – the computer froze. A message flashed up on the screen: “status incompatible with gender”.

My friend sighed in exasperation. There were not many professional areas women could not access when her GP’s computer said “no” in the 1990s and there are even fewer now. But, in her mother’s day, the story was different. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth, women were defined by low expectation and limited opportunity. Traditionally they acquiesced while the powerful debated; they looked down while the educated scanned the horizon. Without a vote, they had neither the influence nor authority to challenge the domestic stereotype. They were voiceless; locked out of the system that defined them.

I had “status incompatible with gender” firmly in my head when I embarked on research for a book, Hearts and Minds, celebrating the centenary of the Representation of the People Act which allowed (some) women to vote for the first time.

Mention “votes for women” to most people, and a succession of stock images invariably leaps to mind. In a haze of green, white and violet, a group of determined-looking Edwardian ladies strides towards us wearing sashes and top-heavy hats, or the aprons and clogs of the factory floor. They carry placards – “Who Would Be Free Must Strike the Blow” – or bricks; a few of them are manhandled by policemen while the others raise their fists in protest. Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women” plays sternly in the background. Alternatively, we see a young prisoner with wild eyes and loose hair, strapped down in her cell being forcibly fed through a tube, or Emily Wilding Davison on the Epsom turf with her broken head wrapped in newspaper. Votes for Women? It’s all about the suffragettes. And what is there left to say about them?

I went to our local museum, thinking they might have images of suffrage campaigners to inspire me. I could write about the “ordinary” women of the UK, perhaps, who lacked the charisma and high profile of Pankhursts or Kenneys but were no less passionate in their fight for enfranchisement. The volunteer on duty that day said no, they didn’t have any photographs, but she did remember her grandmother talking about the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage of 1913, and how proud she had been to play a part.

This “Pilgrimage” – unknown to me – was a six-week march through Britain culminating in a London rally involving thousands of women and men, and it entranced me. It had nothing to do with the suffragettes. It was all about the suffragists. I quickly learned the difference. In general terms the “gettes” were militant campaigners belonging to Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and almost exclusively

JANE ROBINSON

female. They wore the amethyst and emerald colours with which we are familiar. The “gists” were the non-violent majority, advocates of constitutional change who believed in deeds and words. They belonged to Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), wore green, white and red, and included men.

The Great Pilgrimage was the highlight of a fifty-year campaign by the suffragists, an inspiration for Jarrow, for Greenham Common, for every women’s march that’s taken place since Trump arrived. Crowds of pilgrims set off on six major routes across the country: from Newcastle and Carlisle in the north (including marchers from Scotland), Cromer and Yarmouth in the east, Aberystwyth in Wales and Land’s End, Portsmouth, Brighton and Margate in the south. Further routes fed into these main ones like tributaries, all flowing to the capital city. People joined in or dropped out along the way, each sparing as much time as possible from the round of daily life. Some stayed the whole course, travelling as far as 300 miles between the middle of June and the end of July 1913. They marched because they believed in the power of peaceful persuasion, at a time when the militant suffragette campaign was at its height. They were expected to cover up to 20 miles each day, day after day, in rain as well as the full sun, holding meetings morning and evening to explain their mission. Most were on foot (perhaps unused to walking any distance at all) while others rode in caravans, on horseback or on bicycles.

Pilgrim Lady Rochdale commented that she was privileged to meet all sorts of women on the road, from duchesses to fishwives. By the time she reached London she considered herself indistinguishable from a fishwife herself: “hot and smelly” and proud to be so. A young mother from Kent took her children with her, while a suffragist daughter accompanied her eighty-year-old father and an elderly married couple lifted everyone’s spirits as they strode along together. “Are we fools or heroes?” asked one of them of a friend. “A little bit of both”, he replied. An undergraduate from Oxford was thrilled by the good humour of everyone he met on the march. “I have lunched with pilgrims”,

‘Ceiling’ by Ella Baron he claimed proudly, “I have tea-d with pilgrims, I have dined with pilgrims, and the whole time, I have heard more stories that I wouldn’t tell to my sisters than ever before!”

There were problems, however. Not just practical ones associated with walking through successive pairs of boots and swarms of blisters, but more dangerous difficulties occasioned by the fact that all suffrage campaigners were perceived by the majority of the public to be violent militants. The pilgrims were frequently assaulted; at meetings they were pelted with an unlovely artillery of rocks, cowpats, rotten vegetables and dead rats plump with maggots while the filthiest obscenities flew through the air like bullets. More than once death threats were made and very nearly carried out. This was no picnic. But it did make a difference.

It was not the arson, the bombing, the canvas-slashing or window-smashing of the militants that finally persuaded Prime Minister Asquith to give women the vote. It was this suffragist campaign for the hearts and minds of Britain, forced to counter the negative publicity attracted by the suffragettes while struggling to demonstrate to Parliament and the public that women were responsible enough to be trusted with democracy. When asked after the pilgrimage whether he would now admit that women had finally won the right to be called “persons” in a political sense, and therefore to vote, Asquith is said to have replied – albeit rather doubtfully – that yes, he supposed women were persons after all. The war delayed legislation, but this march changed lives.

So why had I not heard of it before? Simply because everyone’s attention has been arrested by the suffragettes, whose fame flares so brightly it consumes the lower-profile (but no less adventurous) achievements of their suffragist sisters. For almost a year I travelled as a pilgrim myself to unearth in archives and private collections around the UK the forgotten diaries and letters of those who took part in the march. I trawled through regional newspapers (mortifyingly coming upon an editorial by my great-grandfather, a Lincolnshire journalist, deploring women’s aspirations to venture out of their natural sphere); I read contemporary suffrage journals and pored over parliamentary records. Most importantly, I looked beyond the beguiling testament of the suffragettes. My reward was huge: in learning about the Pilgrimage I found a glorious sort of Edwardian road movie with characters of different political and religious creeds, social classes and generations, discovering for themselves the heady and joyous power of women coming together in the name of freedom, peace and social justice.

Before I left my local museum that day right at the beginning of my research, I asked what exactly the volunteer’s grandmother had done. It turned out she wasn’t a pilgrim herself; she had neither the money nor the time to join the march. Instead she saved up scraps of her family’s food for a week and then, when the pilgrims passed by her village, offered them a tiny packed lunch to help them on their way. That was how she won the vote. I salute her.

TLS F EBRUARY 9 2 0 1 8

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