This article attempts to catalogue, analyse and assess the impact of suffragette violence – that is, the bombings and arson perpetrated by members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their sympathizers between February 1913 and August 1914 – and thereby to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the campaign. Before 1911, the WSPU had made only sporadic use of violence, and it was directed almost exclusively at the government and its servants. After 1911, it was directed increasingly at commercial concerns and then at the general public. Early in 1912, there was a symbolic arson attempt. 1 In June and July of that year, there were five more serious incidents: the homes of three anti-suffrage cabinet ministers were attacked, a powerful bomb was planted in the Home Secretary’s office and the Theatre Royal, Dublin, was set fire to while the audience was leaving after a performance. 2 Some other arson attempts followed before the end of the year.

Since the late 1960s there has been a tremendous outpouring of books and articles about the militant suffragettes, which, if anything, has grown even more profuse in recent years. Despite the revisionist scholarship of Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh, which has emphasized the role of the non-militants and drawn attention to the failure of militancy in winning the vote, it is militancy – and, in particular, the violent militancy of 1912-14 – which has continued to attract public attention. But, with few exceptions, this historiography has concentrated on what may be called the ‘personal’ issues of the campaign: biographical work on the leaders and membership of the suffrage societies, their motivations, the violence used against them and their sufferings in prison. The aspect which has attracted little or no attention is the issue of violence on the suffragette side, in particular the number of bomb and arson attacks, how they were organized, who carried them out and whether or not there was a threat to human life. 5

There are very many difficulties in assessing the scale, range and intention of suffragette violence, of which the first and greatest is establishing the number of incidents. Bombings and fires attributed to suffragettes in national and local newspapers could easily exceed 500, but a definitive set of figures could only be arrived at through a major research project. My concern has therefore been to establish a minimum reliable figure, and the basis for this survey is the number of incidents ‘claimed’ by the WSPU, checked, as far as possible, against newspaper reports. From 31 January 1913 The Suffragette almost invariably carried a page – more usually a double-page centre spread – which reported the outrages committed. During the periods when its printers were not actually faced with prosecution, it openly claimed responsibility by threatening headlines and subheadings. 11 The weekly issues of the newspaper give a total of 325 incidents. But there were several weeks in which no crime catalogue was published, and at the end of 1913 The Suffragette published an additional selective catalogue entitled ‘A Year’s Record’, which claimed another twelve incidents, giving a grand total of 337. 12

So far as it is possible to establish, The Suffragette followed the attributions in the press, although it was selective and sometimes appeared to show a degree of inside knowledge. One of the chief areas of WSPU militancy was Birmingham. On 23 August 1913 the Birmingham Daily Mail reported three fires in the greater Birmingham area, one of which was a garage fire at Handsworth in which the building was gutted and some cars destroyed. 13 The newspaper did not attribute the incident to suffragettes, and the fire brigade did not suspect arson, but nevertheless this fire was claimed by The Suffragette . 14 If the WSPU was making wild claims, it has to be asked why it selected this one incident: why not claim all three fires? In this instance, the most probable explanation is inside information from the perpetrators. It has been alleged that the WSPU claimed every suspicious property fire. 15 There is some substance for this allegation in that, at the very beginning of the campaign, the organization claimed several hoaxes and one known insurance fraud. 16 However, from about June 1913 such bogus incidents disappeared from the columns of The Suffragette – although hoaxes continued. From that comparatively early date, all the claimed incidents appear to have been seriously intended, and wild claims are conspicuous by their absence. For example, one of the most destructive blazes of the period was the fire at a coal wharf at South Shields in 1914, causing damage estimated at between £30,000 and £60,000. 17 The fire started on a January night at about 9 p.m., the cause was not established, and Tyneside had been one of the chief areas of suffragette militancy. It would have been easy for the WSPU to claim it, but the organization did not do so. It did not even acknowledge all the offences against property known to have been committed by its membership. Edith Rigby (the joint secretary of one of its branches) planted a pipe bomb at the Liverpool Exchange building in July 1913. 18 She was a genuinely idealistic woman, and her action was a relatively harmless protest which could not have compromised the WSPU in any way, but The Suffragette did not claim Edith Rigby’s bomb. It also failed to claim many incidents in which people had been injured or human life threatened. 19 There is in fact a vast shadowy area of incidents that were widely believed to be the WSPU’s responsibility, but cannot be directly linked with the organization. This ‘grey area’ is too large and the issues are too complex to be examined here, and I will return to the subject elsewhere.