Theatre

A few years ago I worked as an usherette at the National Film Theatre and on one of my tea breaks was looking through the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge. A huge and battered copy of ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ by Midge Mackenzie caught my eye and I started reading it. It’s a fascinating history of the militant suffragettes and I decided that I wanted to write a play about them. My admiration for the movement grew the more I read. I became hooked on their pluck and prowess. Bookshops and archives are as exciting as speakeasies at the height of one’s quest. Recently, I watched a rare 1950s documentary about the suffragettes. It was hugely exciting to see faces that had become familiar through photographs now animated, and all of them 50 years older than the pictures I’d seen. Feature continues

The ’50s interviewer asks Sir Frederick Pethick-Lawrence: ‘Do you have any regrets about your involvement with the movement?’ Pethick-Lawrence, who helped run the Women’s Social and Political Union with his wife, replies: ‘No. When I joined the cause at that time, I thought it was vital that women should have the vote because I believed women were the same as men. Now, at the end of my life, I think it was vital because women are so very different to men.’

Christabel Pankhurst, still lioness beautiful, speaks movingly of her mother Emmeline Pankhurst with whom she had led the WSPU as a youth from Manchester, then London and finally Paris in exile. All of the women interviewed have a certain dignity and practical strength that seems rare now. One woman becomes quieter as she is asked about the force-feeding. Sitting there in her simple black dress and pearls, she recounts how she had been force-fed more than a hundred times. Describing it as ‘beastly’, she averts her eyes slightly and is obviously still deeply affected by the memory of it, of being locked up in Holloway, pinned down and forcibly fed.

An elite troupe of militant braves, the suffragettes were not defined by class or age, only a willingness to follow the creed ‘deeds not words’. The Liberal government’s refusal to discuss female suffrage and their vetoing of the women’s right to petition Parliament led the suffragettes to break rank with the law-abiding suffragists. They would use shock tactics to gain ground.

The campaign was adamantly non-violent but the ensuing attacks were a military operation. Churches were burned, as were a pier, golf courses, houses of MPs. One night the whole of the West End was a frenzy of smashed glass. Hundreds of suffragettes put their hammers through windows from the Strand to Oxford Street. Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery ‘as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history’. The Cat and Mouse Act had been introduced in 1913 to release fasting suffragettes who had become so weak that they might die. When they were a touch recuperated, they were imprisoned again. Mrs Pankhurst was re-arrested at the funeral of Emily Wilding Davison, who had thrown herself in front of the King’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby.

Their agitation angered women as well as men, who felt the suffragettes were de-feminising their race. Lord Curzon wanted them deported. Keir Hardie and George Lansbury championed them, but few other MPs cared or dared to. Their weekly paper, The Suffragette, carried news of the latest meetings, trials and imprisonments. It was fantastic to read and handle the originals in the Museum of London. Most moving, though, was a box of suffragette photographs, many with no names, just dates and places. One woman walks out of prison alone, she is thin and handsome, she has obviously been through hell and she looks at us, defiant and timeless. Perhaps she had been force fed. The women termed it ‘oral rape’: the government ‘hospital treatment’. The process was an horrific one. She stares at us as if to say ‘What next? I shall endure it’ and she’s almost smiling. The women like her, named, unnamed, undaunted, they were the suffragettes.

‘Her Naked Skin’ previews at the National Theatre, Olivier from July 24.