Vanishing for the vote: Suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the census

By Jill Liddington

Vanishing for the vote recounts what happened on one night, Sunday 2 April, 1911, when the Liberal government demanded every household comply with its census requirements. Suffragette organisations urged women, all still voteless, to boycott this census.

Many did. Some wrote ‘Votes for Women’ boldly across their schedules. Others hid in darkened houses or, in the case of Emily Wilding Davison, in a cupboard within the Houses of Parliament.

Yet many did not. Even some suffragettes who might be expected to boycott decided to comply – and completed a perfectly accurate schedule. Why?

Vanishing for the vote explores the ‘battle for the census’ arguments that raged across Edwardian England in spring 1911. It investigates why some committed campaigners decided against civil disobedience tactics, instead opting to provide the government with accurate data for its health and welfare reforms.

This book plunges the reader into the turbulent world of Edwardian politics, so vividly recorded on census night 1911. Based on a wealth of brand-new documentary evidence, it offers compelling reading for history scholars and general readers alike.

Sumptuously produced, with 50 illustrations and an invaluable Gazetteer of suffrage campaigners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781847798886

Jill Liddington

Jill Liddington is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds

Book preview

Vanishing for the vote

Vanishing for the vote

Suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the census

JILL LIDDINGTON

with

Gazetteer of campaigners

compiled by

Elizabeth Crawford and Jill Liddington

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively

by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Copyright © Jill Liddington, 2014

The right of Jill Liddington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 8748 6

First published 2014

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Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of maps

List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction

PART I      Prelude: people and their politics

1.  Charlotte Despard and John Burns, the Colossus of Battersea

2.  Muriel Matters goes vanning it with Asquith: campaigning cross country

3.  Propaganda culture: Clemence and Laurence Housman

4.  Parallel politics: Lloyd George plus Midlands suffragettes

PART II      Narrative: October 1909 to April 1911

5.  Plotting across central London: census and tax resistance

6.  The battle for John Burns’s Battersea revisited

7.  The Census Bill and the boycott plan

8.  Lloyd George goes a-wooing versus Burns’s ‘vixens in velvet’

9.  The King’s Speech: Jessie Stephenson parachutes into Manchester

10.  Battleground for democracy: census versus women’s citizenship

PART III   Census night: places and spaces

11.  Emily Wilding Davison’s Westminster – and beyond

12.  The Nevinsons’ Hampstead – and central London entertainments

13.  Laurence Housman’s Kensington, with Clemence in Dorset

14.  Annie Kenney’s Bristol and Mary Blathwayt’s Bath

15.  Jessie Stephenson’s Manchester and Hannah Mitchell’s Oldham Road

16.  English journey: sweeping back down from Teesside to Thames

PART IV   The census and beyond

17.  After census night: Clemence’s resistance, Asquith’s betrayal

18.  Telling the story: suffrage and census historiographies

19.  Sources and their analysis: vanishing for the vote?

Gazetteer of campaigners

Contents

Introduction

Abbreviations

Key mass evasions

London boroughs and Middlesex

Southern England

Midlands

Northern England

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

Maps

1.   England

2.   South east England: Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Hampshire

3.   West London boroughs: Hampstead via Kensington to Battersea

4.   Manchester and its suburbs

5.   The Midlands and south-west: Nottingham down to Bristol

List of figures

 1   Census schedule, Henry Brockhouse, West Bromwich, Black Country. The National Archives. [TNA].

 2   Charlotte Despard, WSPU, 1906–7. The Women’s Library. [TWL].

 3   John Burns MP, addressing an open-air meeting, 1897, A.J. Finberg. By permission of Wandsworth Museum.

 4   ‘The Colossus of Battersea’, the Rt Hon John Burns astride the streets of his ‘native borough’, Punch, 15 Dec 1909. Wandsworth Heritage Service.

 5   Emma Sproson of Wolverhampton, carrying WFL sandwich board. Museum of London. [MoL].

 6   Muriel Matters, WFL, Australian actress. TWL.

 7   Muriel Matters in WFL van, probably near Guildford, May 1908. TWL.

 8   Ray Costelloe, Ellie Rendel with two helpers in the NUWSS van, 1908. TWL.

 9   ‘The Simple Life – Caravanning: a halt by the wayside’, comic postcard, Ernest Ibbetson. Author collection.

10   Kensington WSPU shop, 1910. Mary Evans Picture Library.

11   Suffrage homes, Kensington: (a) Clemence and Laurence Housman, 1 Pembroke Cottages. (b) Brackenbury family, 2 Campden Hill Square. Author images.

12   Laurence and Clemence Housman, in front of Hampden tax resistance banner, 29 Sep 1911. TWL.

13   Laurence Housman’s banner, ‘From Prison to Citizenship’, procession Jun 1911. MoL.

14   (a) Helen Watts, portrait, 1911. Bath in Time – Bath Central Library. BiT-BCL. b) Reverend Watts’s church at Lenton, Nottingham. Author image.

15   ‘Burns or Benn for Battersea?’ cartoon, Daily Graphic, 8 Jan 1910. Wandsworth Heritage Service.

16   ‘Re-united’: Asquith ‘shelving woman’s suffrage bill’, cartoon, Punch, 20 Jul 1910.

17   John Burns, ‘Taxation and Representation’, Suffrage Atelier poster. MoL. 93

18   ‘No Vote, No Census’, A Patriot, Votes for Women, 24 Mar 1911. Elizabeth Crawford Collection.

19   ‘Census Meeting April 1st Trafalgar Square 3pm’, cartoon, The Vote, 25 Mar 1911 and WFL postcard. TWL.

20   ‘Beyond the Reach of the Census’, G.F. […], ‘Reliable’ comic postcard; no date, but undoubtedly Mar–Apr 1911. Author image.

21   Census schedule, Emily Wilding Davison, Houses of Parliament. TNA.

22   Census schedule, Ethel Smyth, Woking, Surrey. TNA.

23   Census schedule, Nevinson household, Hampstead. TNA.

24   Census-night refreshment stall, probably in London, possibly near Covent Garden, Illustrations Bureau. TWL.

25   Aldwych Skating Rink, with Decima Moore, 3.30 am on 3 Apr 1911. MoL.

26   Census schedule, Strachey family, Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead. TNA.

27   Enumerator’s summary page, Linden Road, Swanage (Clem Housman). TNA.

28   Census schedule, Laurence Housman, Kensington. TNA.

29   Suffrage homes, Bath area: (a) Blathwayt family, Eagle House, Batheaston. (b) 12 Lansdown Crescent. Author images.

30   Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney in Blathwayt arboretum c. 1910. BiT-BCL.

31   (a) Mary Blathwayt, 1911. b) Lillian Dove-Willcox, 1911. BiT-BCL.

32   Census schedule, Blathwayt family, Eagle House, Batheaston. TNA.

33   Census schedule, Mildred Mansel, 12 Lansdown Crescent, Bath. TNA.

34   Census Lodge, Denison House, Manchester, (a) detail, (b) full image. John Brock collection.

35   Manchester’s Census Lodge, sleeping evaders. John Brock collection. Also Daily Sketch, 4 Apr 1911, and postcard sent by Muriel Capper to her friend Nellie Hall.

36   Census schedule, Hannah Mitchell, Newton Heath, Manchester. TNA.

37   Census schedule, Jennie Baines, Stockport, Cheshire. TNA.

38   Census schedule, Mahony family, Middlesbrough, North Riding. TNA.

39   Census schedule, Adela Pankhurst and Helen Archdale, Sheffield. TNA.

40   Charlotte Marsh, 1911. BiT-BCL.

41   Census schedule, Muriel Matters, Lambeth. TNA.

42   Daily Sketch, 4 Apr 1911, Wimbledon Common. Mary Howey mss, MoL.

43   Constance Andrews, on release from prison, with Charlotte Despard, 27 May 1911. Original image not traceable.

44   Census schedule, Mary Hare and her school, Hove, Sussex. TNA.

Acknowledgements

To a greater degree than in my previous writing, this is a collaborative book – and so the span of names of all those I would like to acknowledge is fuller than usual. Foremost, I thank Elizabeth Crawford for her considerable contribution to the research: we embarked on the census project together five years ago, and then collaborated again last year in compiling the Gazetteer. Elizabeth not only contributed her unrivalled familiarity with suffrage biographies, but also married this with her considerable electronic search skills.

As this book is broad in its ambition, drawing together so many individual campaigners, my debts to suffrage historians are particularly extensive. I am extremely grateful to Angela John for generously sharing with me her knowledge of Henry Nevinson and his manuscript diary; to Tara Morton for her Suffrage Atelier expertise, and for devising our Kensington and Chelsea history walks together; to Elizabeth Oakley of the Housman Society for so open-handedly sharing her detailed knowledge on Laurence and Clemence Housman; to Anne Summers for our sunny suffrage walk-and-talk down from Hampstead Heath to Belsize Park; Frances Bedford of the Muriel Matters Society for so enthusiastically guiding me round Muriel’s Adelaide; plus Gemma Edwards at Manchester University for assistance with the Helen Watts manuscript, and her father Barry Edwards in Bristol for regaling me with the manuscript’s dramatic transmission story.

As my research journeys have criss-crossed so many communities up and down England, I have enjoyed the hospitality and expertise of local suffrage historians, and I warmly thank: Joy Bounds for introducing me to Constance Andrews and her fellow evaders in Ipswich; Kathleen Bradley for exploring Bath and Batheaston with me; Irene Cockroft for guiding me around Wimbledon and Richmond; Sarah Ryan for taking me down to Clemence’s street in Swanage; Annie Moseley for our visit out to Lowestoft’s windswept house of mass evasion; Colin Cartwright for discussion on Buckinghamshire; and Alison Ronan and Mike Herbert for sharing their knowledge of Manchester history.

Public libraries and record offices have had a rough time of it recently, so I am particularly grateful to librarians and archivists, notably in Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham, Gloucester, Portsmouth, Kensington, Battersea and Street in Somerset. The staffof the Women’s Library, despite reorganizing for the move to LSE, have been unfailingly helpful, as has Beverley Cook at the Museum of London. Along with Colin Harris at the Bodleian Library, they have made my many research visits a real pleasure.

For all their help with the book’s illustrations, I thank in particular: Hugh Alexander at TNA; Inderbir Bhullar at the Women’s Library; Daniel Brown of Bath in Time; Beverley Cook at the Museum of London; John Brock, descendant of Mabel Capper; and staffat Wandsworth Heritage Service.

For kind permission to quote, I am most grateful to the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford for the Nevinson diary; the National Trust and Gloucestershire Archives for the Blathwayt diaries; the Museum of London Suffragette Collections, for the Jessie Stephenson memoir; the British Library for John Burns’s diaries; and the Trustees of Street Library for the Housman letters.

For their expert reading and commenting on chapters in draft, I am particularly indebted to: Pat Thane for her generous help on the Edwardian roots of the welfare state; Eddy Higgs, the census historian, for his scholarly suggestions; June Hannam, historian of Bristol and the Blathwayt diaries; June Purvis, biographer of Emmeline Pankhurst; Elizabeth Crawford; Elizabeth Oakley of the Housman Society; and most especially Angela V. John for so generously reading and commenting on the entire draft.

The publication of this book has been assisted by a grant to Manchester University Press from The Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute for Historical Research (2011); additionally, my research costs were facilitated by a grant, also from The Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute for Historical Research (2012). These two awards have helped with the book’s design and illustrations; and I am also extremely grateful to Paul Grove for his professional map design.

Finally I would like to thank Emma Brennan, my editor at Manchester University Press, who has carefully guided this book right through from original idea to publication; and all the MUP staff who saw it through production. I also appreciate the friends who kept me going when hypothyroidism slowed the writing down to snail’s pace. And as ever, my greatest debt of gratitude is to Julian Harber, not only for helping with some of the more elusive census searches, but also for enthusiastically believing in the project over the last four years – from early start to final finish.

Abbreviations used in the text

Adult suffrage wanted the vote for all men and women by abolishing the property qualification. The People’s Suffrage Federation was formed in 1909.

Chronology

1918, 1928

Women over thirty win the right to vote, followed by women over twenty-one.

1946

National Health Service Act passed; the NHS was finally created in 1948.

Introduction

This book tells the story of what happened on one single night, Sunday 2 April 1911. It tracks the increasingly hostile relationship between the Liberal government and the suffragettes, neither side willing to concede an inch. Both flanks in this battle clashed at one moment of heightened political drama: census night. Yet this narrative is little known. The documentary evidence of the ‘battle for the census’ lay forgotten for generations. Released only recently, it can now at last be read, a century later – long after the political dust has settled, with no participants still alive.

By April 1911, ‘Votes for Women’ campaigning was nearing its height. For eighteen months, hunger-striking suffragettes had been subjected to forcible feeding in prison. Meanwhile, suffragists, preferring campaigns using constitutional tactics, had developed a dense network of local branches and regional federations.¹ Alongside, professional suffrage groups mushroomed – artists and actresses, writers and men’s leagues. All shared the same aim: votes for women on the same terms as they were given to men. And this impressively rich tapestry of large organizations and smaller ginger groups grew ever more adept at lobbying Asquith’s government.

By then, the Liberals had been confirmed in power by two 1910 general elections. Theirs might be a fragile majority in the Commons; but at least the elections had given Chancellor David Lloyd George an electoral mandate to pursue daringly ambitious reforms, notably his keystone National Insurance scheme. Less flamboyantly and heading the Local Government Board, John Burns continued his crusade against slum housing and appalling infant mortality levels. And, overarching all, the electoral mandate lent Herbert Asquith at Number 10 renewed vigour in his battle for parliamentary supremacy over the reactionary House of Lords, so helping clear the way for the government’s extensive health and welfare reforms.

The antagonism between the government and suffrage campaigners had by 1911 grown so bitter that observers outside Britain were amazed. The international suffrage movement looked across the English Channel aghast: Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, could boast well-educated wageearning professional women, indeed even tax-paying woman; yet it had become ‘the storm-centre of the women’s rebellion’. One German suffragist wrote dramatically of those years:

The storm-centre of the warfare which waged … from Lapland to Italy, from Canada to South Africa, was England … Delicate women … allowed themselves to be thrown into prison, went on hunger-strike to the verge of death. They suffered for their principles as no other women in any other country have done.²

Now, in spring 1911, suffragette organizations urged women, all still unenfranchised, to defy the law and boycott the census. This census rebellion would not be a violent confrontation, like forcible feeding in prison or street battles with the police. Rather, it would be peaceful civil disobedience to challenge the very meaning of citizenship. What did it mean, in an otherwise supposedly mature democracy like Edwardian Britain, to be a grown woman, yet to be treated politically like a child, a criminal or a lunatic?

The state required everyone to comply with the census law: suffragettes announced they would refuse. As Sunday 2 April neared, this grew into a contest of minds, of intellects, a battle for the constitutional high-ground, as each side – suffragettes versus Liberal ministers and their civil servants – tried to out-argue, out-wit and out-organize the other. Thus raged the battle for the census. The government evoked the imperative of reliable census data upon which to base future welfare reforms. Suffragettes drew upon distinctive traditions of resistance to an undemocratic state by the disenfranchised. Quiet rebellion, particularly of tax resistance, looked back to ancient roots in English constitutional history. Some had been overtly political – as John Hampden’s refusal to pay ship money in the in 1630s. Others drew upon nonconformist heritage – notably Quaker; or inspired by the civil disobedience campaigns of Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa.³

The full historical significance of census night, virtually forgotten for almost a century, can only now be recounted – with the opening up of 1911 census schedules. This brand new documentary evidence was publicly released by the National Archives from its vaults only in January 2009.

Most suffrage histories adopt a broad time-frame, from Emmeline Pankhurst’s founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, to the outbreak of war in 1914; or from the 1860s’ movement beginnings up to 1928 when all women over twenty-one finally won the right to vote.⁴ More rarely have such histories selected a narrower framework. This book, unusually, has a particularly tight focus: one night, well into the campaign, and the months leading up to it.

Similarly, suffrage histories predominantly focus on the campaigners themselves – their petitions and deputations, arrests and trials, their giant processions and delicately embroidered banners. Thus their political opponents – Cabinet members and vote-denying diehards – are relegated to bit-part caricatures who failed to recognize that women had the march of history firmly on their side. Likewise, histories of the Edwardian political turmoil largely focus on key Liberal ministers themselves – notably Prime Minister Asquith and his Chancellor Lloyd George; and on broader sites of conflict – Irish Home Rule, the armaments race with Germany, trade union and industrial militancy. In histories of this hubbub, Votes for Women is routinely relegated to irresponsibly irksome noises off. In such accounts, women (usually just suffragettes) might merit a few pages, at best a single chapter.⁵

Alongside this, census literature has offered scant acknowledgement of the persistent refusal by the Liberal government to enfranchise women: reference to the suffrage boycott remains notably absent. Demographic historians have been keen to celebrate the impeccable professionalism of elite civil servants and 1911’s technological achievements (counting machines powered by electricity). It was as if such men had no wives and daughters back home, raising pesky queries about citizenship over the breakfast table. The upshot is: suffrage historians and political (especially census) historians created two distinct historiographies.⁶

This book brings together these two separate narratives, at one sharp point of intersection: census night 1911. It is an account of that conflict – between suffragettes and their supporters on one hand, and on the other the government and Liberal intelligentsia. It was a night when every single resident in every single home the length and breadth of Britain was to be documented in vivid and unprecedented detail.

The public release of the evidence of suffragettes’ defiant census boycott had been expected in 2012. But a surprise was in store. On Tuesday 13 January 2009, under a Freedom of Information ruling, the National Archives made individual 1911 census schedules for selected counties accessible – three years early. Gradually during 2009, all English counties became fully searchable by the public, along with the census enumerators’ summary pages which offer vivid pen-portraits of individual neighbourhoods.

Excitement was palpable, particularly among family historians keen to trace their ancestors, and among those whose interest had been whetted by Who Do You Think You Are? For this census was indeed special. Unlike its predecessors, a 1911 schedule can be read exactly as it was written, usually in the head of family’s own hand (rather than transcribed into a book by the enumerator, sometimes standardizing information in the copying process). Here therefore we can glimpse into each Edwardian family’s distinctive life. We can read the defiant statements certain suffragettes wrote right across their schedules; we can see any smudging, scribbling and even doodling. Thus the 1911 census offers for the very first time a unique opportunity to eavesdrop right into the heart of Votes for Women homes.

1 The census schedule of Henry Brockhouse, West Bromwich, the Black Country. His wife, a WSPU member, is mysteriously absent – unlike his children.

When fellow suffrage historian Elizabeth Crawford and I heard of the census’s imminent release, we quickly re-jigged our research agendas and set to work. Among all the thousands of suffrage campaigners, we looked particularly for boycotters: both census evaders, determined to hide from the enumerator, whom we expected to be very tricky to find; and resisters who stayed put, returning defiant schedules, though often with very incomplete data. As we needed to be armed with as much biographical information as possible, our initial search was of names listed in Elizabeth’s The Women’s Suffrage Movement: a reference guide.⁷ However, this produced such a daunting number of census searches that we soon decided we would have to focus just on England, reluctantly omitting Wales and Scotland. So we looked for those resident in England in spring 1911, gradually adding less prominent campaigners involved in local suffrage activity or just little known; eventually our database totalled 572 campaigners right across England and we began to analyse this data.⁸

All our suffrage reading had led us initially to believe that boycotting had been very widespread; but our findings now suggested considerably lower levels of activity, and we began to assess possible reasons behind this. We retained however our strong sense of the significance of this census rebellion. Faced by such stiffodds, it demanded considerable personal courage to boycott. So, when our research was published in 2011 as ‘Women do not count: neither shall they be counted’, it was subtitled ‘suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the 1911 Census’.⁹ During 2010, Elizabeth moved across to work on another research project.¹⁰ However, I remained mesmerized by the 1911 census’s potential for historians. I was conscious that our article had had to be hedged around with ‘Provisional Findings’ and ‘Preliminary Conclusion’.¹¹ Further searches remained compelling. I could not let go. Hence this book.

Elizabeth and I had conducted detailed investigations across two counties: her home city London, and for me Yorkshire, site of my Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote.¹² These two regions had rapidly thrown up stark contrasts. Was the rest of England more like London, the suffrage mecca, or more like the industrial and rural vastness of Yorkshire, with boycotters few and far betweeen? Were there indeed ‘two Englands’?

To find out, I set out on journeys. During 2010–11 my research trips, usually by train, sometimes by road, criss-crossed England, visiting key boycotting communities, then re-visiting them, until I almost met myself coming back. Luckily, I was already familiar with ‘suffrage city’ Manchester, site of One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978);¹³ and with residential Kensington, west London home of suffrage writers and artists, notably the ‘census siblings’ Laurence and Clemence Housman. Other newer adventures beckoned: the Black Country towns of the West Midlands; East Anglian coastal communities like Ipswich; the seaside resorts of Southsea and Torquay. Other cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham – I now found myself approaching from an unfamiliar angle, pacing their streets with a newly focused research agenda: a suffrage census-night detective chase.¹⁴

For each city, town or suburb, I drilled deeper down into the rich archival and printed sources, often widely dispersed after a century. I worked forwards and backwards, from individual schedules, across to local histories, Edwardian street directories and the local press – then sideways, to the enumerator’s summary page of a neighbourhood. With community networks thus reconstructed, local suffrage clusters suddenly became visible. Alongside, I read more deeply into the competing 1909–11 political narratives, notably John Burns’s diaries to see how he viewed suffragettes; Lloyd George’s awe-inspiring championing of National Insurance provision – and the waves the two men created among many women, all disenfranchised.

Here, then, is the first full-length account of the 1911 suffragette census rebellion, featuring portraits of the boycotters themselves. Academic historians have often preferred aggregated census data rather than reading the handwritten original documents in their own right.¹⁵ However, rather than the wisdom of hindsight, household schedules here are read just as they were written – completed on census night itself, 2 April 1911. This book returns the suffrage boycotters to their firesides, to their own communities, right across England. With forensic precision, it aims to pin down campaigners at one key moment, the night each woman had to decide whether to comply, to evade, or to resist. They are each seen on the site, and at the moment, of their census decision.

This history swerves away from the well-known protagonists. Rather than urbanely patrician Asquith or ‘Welsh wizard’ Lloyd George, the key minister tracked here is necessarily John Burns, ‘The colossus of Battersea’. Burns’s Cinderella Whitehall ministry, the Local Government Board (LGB), was responsible for the census operation. Similarly, the key suffragette group highlighted initially is not so much the well-known Pankhursts’ WSPU, but rather the less celebrated Women’s Freedom League (WFL), led by mildly eccentric Charlotte Despard, also from Battersea. So the book draws these hitherto somewhat over-shadowed figures into the limelight.

The WFL had broken away from the WSPU in 1907, largely over the Pankhursts’ perceived lack of internal democracy. Indeed, the rebel WFL remained painstakingly democratic – though, like the WSPU, it too had its kamikaze moments of spiky militancy. Nevertheless, it built a distinctive style of civil disobedience, especially after Charlotte Despard met Gandhi in 1909. Central to this lay the right, and indeed the obligation, to resist a tyrannical state which withheld political citizenship from women. From this conviction sprang the WFL initiative of organized tax resistance; from this it was but a small and logical step to resist the state’s far more universal demand: to comply with the census requirements.¹⁶

The census aimed for a comprehensive recording of every inhabitant, of the 34 million people across England. So this book takes as its premise: Votes for Women everywhere. Good stories of ‘celebrity suffrage’ are not omitted: suffragette martyr Emily Wilding Davison, two years before her death, is discovered hiding overnight from the enumerator in a small Westminster cupboard; and, not far away and equally unintentionally, Emmeline Pankhurst is found listed on the census of a Holborn hotel. Alongside, and recorded on identically printed schedules, are however women hitherto ‘hidden from history’. As might be expected, some are branch secretaries in towns with a strong suffragette presence. Others pop up unexpectedly: flat-dwellers in city centres, women living at the end of suburban tube lines, or in remote market towns. Thus in West Bromwich, Mr Brockhouse’s mysteriously missing wife surfaces here, though little known to suffrage historians.¹⁷ All were equally disenfranchised, yet all were counted – or at least, so census officials intended. ‘The lowliest she in England’ trying to make ends meet in over-crowded housing was of as keen interest to census statisticians as a woman surgeon or suffrage dowager with half-a-dozen servants.

In the grander Edwardian houses, the unbending egalitarianism of the census schedule, with its impertinently probing questions and nasty little columns, irked not a few heads of family. Husbands such as Henry Brockhouse were asked about the length of the marriage, how many children had been born and how many had died. However, the advantage of this state surveillance is that – apart from a few of the most determined evaders – almost everyone was counted somehow, even if the enumerator had to rely on information from a neighbour or police.¹⁸ Everyone – however humble – counted. This comprehensive documentation now permits suffrage historians to reposition ‘Votes for Women’, to take them from a disembodied existence in the histories, back where women actually lived, in their homes, in their streets, right across England, on census night.

Finally, this book aims to address key questions. It analyses how widespread was the 1911 suffragette boycott – and where. What patterns can historians detect to map spatial patterns across the great English regions and their myriad communities? What numbers were involved in the boycott; and, behind these numbers, what were individual motives for responding on census night as each did – evading, resisting, complying? This returns attention to the Edwardians’ broader political agenda: the tensions between suffrage militancy and constitutional tactics to achieve a shared aim; and the conflict between prioritizing two different political goals: welfare reform and women’s citizenship.

*

From these aims flows the structure of this book. It opens with four prelude sections, introducing key people and their Edwardian politics. Then the chronological narrative covering eighteen months (October 1909 – April 1911) moves towards the census night climax. Most of the story unfolds in public places: at Westminster, in meeting rooms where committees plotted, in public halls with platform speakers urging their audiences on. This narrative peels the layers back to a more optimistic era when dignified civil disobedience seemed successful at chipping away at the Government, back to before the arson campaign began.

There then follows a shift in tone and focus, in Part III, ‘Places and Spaces’. The pace now slows right down, from chronological briskness to a generous pause of time: just one weekend, one night, merely a few hours. It would of course be impossible to tell the census night story across the whole of England. Selection criteria would have to be identified.¹⁹ From my research journeys, I selected four main areas where the census boycott was particularly widespread: London’s bohemian suburbs (Hampstead, plus Kensington and Chelsea); and two major urban areas, the Bristol – Bath and Manchester regions. Not only did these four areas reveal many boycotters, but crucially I could also supplement campaigners’ bare schedules with individual vivid personal testimonies.

Daily diaries are of course a magnificent source, allowing eye to be pressed to keyhole. The journals selected here record conscious personal defiance of the enumerator (or, much more rarely, a willingness to comply). Of these, the diary of Hampstead journalist Henry Nevinson illuminates both the boycotts near his home and the entertainments in central London that weekend. Second, Annie Kenney, WSPU organizer for the Bristol region, stayed with the Blathwayts near Bath; and the diaries of the Blathwayt family, a regular trove for suffrage historians, record census happenings in the Bath area.²⁰ The boycott in Kensington is illuminated by a rich cache of letters exchanged between two loving Housman siblings – Laurence at home and Clemence hiding away in Dorset; their correspondence offers as intimate an hour-by-hour testimony as any diary. For Manchester, the WSPU organizer was Jessie Stephenson; and her unpublished memoirs, a little-known typescript, offer a wonderfully vivid blow-by-blow account of census night across the city.

Then, in the final ‘Places and Spaces’ chapter, I spread my gaze more widely to reflect a broader England, with its population of 34 million. This north-to-south ‘English Journey’ glances briefly at selected local communities, both those where the boycott was widespread and those where – often surprisingly – it was not.

This geographical mapping of census night in key communities is followed by a brisker Afterwards chapter taking the story into the final peacetime years. The historiography chapter then reviews those earlier texts, both suffrage and census titles, that particularly helped shape this history. The final Analysis chapter dissects this new evidence to assess the boycott’s significance, and to look at correlations with particularly women’s occupations. The book ends with the Gazetteer of Campaigners compiled jointly; arranged geographically, it records five hundred household schedules.²¹

The logic of this book’s structure and sequencing does I think work best, to help make sense of the complex maelstrom of Edwardian political history. Here, then, is the battleground for democracy laid bare, a conflict for competing meanings of citizenship, between two rival concepts of democracy and the state, battling it out up and down England. Government ‘by the people’ versus government ‘for the people’; with Emmeline Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard championing one model, and John Burns and Lloyd George the other. For one, democracy worked, offering vital reform outcomes for welfare recipients; for the other, a tyrannical state denied women full citizenship, excluded them from participating in the political process, and did not work.²² Alongside also ran a sharp collision over the effectiveness of tactics to woo politicians and the public: for suffragettes in the WSPU and WFL, boycotting the census (and so breaking the law) would be effective propaganda; for suffragists in the extensive National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), constitutional tactics were less likely to alienate key politicians and the public, and so would be more effective. Many a committed campaigner found herself caught in between – and had to make an unenviable decision on census night. It was a close call.

This book is about these complex conflicts, the results of which were so well documented across the country on census night that, a century later, virtually no household escapes the historian’s gaze. So let battle commence!

Map 1 England.

PART I

Prelude: people and their politics

1

Charlotte Despard and John Burns, the Colossus of Battersea

It was a confrontation waiting to happen. Both shared a crimson socialist past and an impoverished south-London neighbourhood. Yet amid volatile Edwardian politics, what distinguished the two drove them apart into increasingly warring camps. Charlotte Despard, well-to-do eccentric widow, had chosen to leave her spacious home in the Surrey heathlands. She re-located to Battersea, selecting not just to any part of the borough, but the cramped noisy streets of Nine Elms. Here, down by the Thames wharves, shunting-yards jostled for space with gas works and pumping stations. By contrast, Battersea chose John Burns. One of eighteen children, he grew up competing for limited space in a cellar-dwelling near Charlotte Despard’s newly adopted home.

Both also shared a similar passionate late-Victorian Marxist socialism, well before the founding of the Labour Party; both immersed themselves idealistically in local practical politics of bringing urgently needed housing reform to Battersea. And both shared a deep belief in the right to vote, in the power of the ballot box, Burns even becoming MP for Battersea. All adults should be enfranchised – to help curb such cruel social inequalities.

But there the similarities ended. Their political priorities diverged dramatically, especially from 1906. Charlotte Despard, one-time socialist, shifted whole-heartedly to women’s suffrage – and never looked back. Meanwhile, John Burns became the first working-class man to enter the Cabinet. Thereafter, their political antagonism sharpened bitterly – democracy by equal citizenship, or democracy for welfare reforms; achieving desired aims using civil disobedience tactics, or by working lawfully through the parliamentary processes.

Burns was not only the sole Cabinet minister with impeccably proletarian credentials; he alone also had the misfortune to represent a central London constituency, almost visible from suffrage headquarters. And Charlotte Despard, rising through the suffragette ranks to become Women’s Freedom League (WFL) president, soon had her sights trained on the Member for Battersea. Burns, preoccupied with pushing reforms through his ministry, swatted off such irritating hecklers as so many small buzzing flies. Yet neither WFL nor WSPU suffragettes let opportunity slip to harass Burns. As the Liberal government’s battle with the House of Lords grew fiercer, and with it the likelihood of elections, the more personal became the mortal combat between Despard’s suffragettes and Burns’s Battersea loyalists.

*

Their two back-stories could not contrast more dramatically. Charlotte French was born in 1844 into a well-connected naval family. This however offered scant protection either from a mid-Victorian ramblingly inadequate education, or from family misfortune: her father died when she was ten, and her mother was committed to a lunatic asylum shortly after. Still rather unworldly, Charlotte in 1870 married Maximilian Despard. A successful businessman and a rationalist, Max allowed his bride new freedoms. But it was, her biographer suggests, a chilly liberty; and for Charlotte it proved a disappointing marriage, not least because it remained childless.¹

The prosperous Despards moved into an imposing mansion standing in fifteen acres of tranquil Surrey heathland at Oxshott. Since the opening of the Waterloo–Guildford rail line in the 1880s, their village had become a desirable retreat for well-to-do Londoners. Here, Charlotte wrote, ‘I soothed my disappointment and expended my superfluous energies in taking up all sorts of causes’ – of which particularly significant was the Nine Elms Flower Mission whereby ladies with country gardens distributed flowers in London slums. For her, this spelled Thames-side Battersea.

Max died in 1890. Charlotte became something of a recluse, shutting herself up at home. It was an aristocratic Oxshott neighbour who came to her rescue. Hearing of the widow’s grieving seclusion, she suggested taking up her Battersea philanthropy again. Charlotte seized on this with uncompromising vigour – and her own life now began. ‘It was only after my husband’s death’, she said, ‘that I was able to give full expression to my ideals.’²

She was soon unstoppable. Within months, she had bought a house on Wandsworth Road near Nine Elms. This morphed into the Despard Club, a nurse was hired, toys provided for