In 1913, the Cat and Mouse Act was passed by the British government. The law established what was to be, in effect, a revolving door policy: suffragettes who went on hunger strike in prison could be released temporarily for a few days to recover their health, after which they would be re-arrested to finish their sentences in full. The suffragettes therefore inevitably found themselves in and out of prison over and over again. The health of many women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, suffered as they endured repeated hunger strikes and imprisonments. The response of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was to form the “Bodyguard” – a group of women who were to protect the leaders from arrest. Thereafter WSPU leaders did their utmost to stay at large once released, attracting considerable publicity as they addressed packed audiences of supporters whilst on the run.
Gertrude Harding, the Bodyguard’s organiser, made a careful selection of about 30 volunteers, ensuring they were “trustworthy, in good physical shape, and to be ready at a moment’s notice to do battle with the police in defence of Mrs Pankhurst”. [1] Edith Garrud, a martial arts instructor, was already offering suffragettes self-defence classes in jiu-jitsu and, with the escalation of police violence, they were becoming increasing popular. Garrud was the obvious choice to train the Bodyguard in secret. They were drilled as a military unit, required to report regularly for her classes, and supplied with Indian clubs as defensive weapons. After training sessions police officers followed each woman, hoping to establish their addresses.[2]
Gladya Schütze met the Bodyguard in 1914, when she provided refuge to Emmeline Pankhurst.[3] She recounted that the group was formed of two shop assistants, two teachers, a dressmaker, a mill worker, a children’s nurse, three servants, a society lady, and two clerks. The others were middle-class women of no occupation. They do not seem to have been the “Amazons” that they were dubbed by the press.
Gladys Griffiths’ mother was a member of the Bodyguard.[4] Ellen Dewar (1869-1939), was aged 44 in 1913. She lived at 16 Spring Street, Paddington, London, with her husband, Fred, and her children, Gladys and Madge. Dewar had duties as a decoy, helping leading suffragette, Norah Dacre Fox, to evade arrest. With her husband’s encouragement she also participated in theatre protests and, together with Gladys, church protests and processions.
Although she hated violence, Dewar was thrilled to be invited to join the Bodyguard, aware of all that might be required. Her identity and address must have become known to the police because Gladys recalled that officers were sometimes stationed outside their house, and they were raided on two occasions. Dewar often delighted in buying skewers of cat meat and ostentatiously presenting them to the so-called “cats” keeping watch, much to the amusement of passers-by.
Contemporary accounts provide a colourful description of the Bodyguard’s activities. For example, a meeting at St Andrews Hall in Glasgow in February 1914 resulted in mayhem. Shortly after Emmeline Pankhurst rose to speak, police officers rushed in from all sides, drawing their truncheons and were “met by a fusillade of flower-pots, tables, chairs and other missiles.”[5] Attempting to climb onto the platform, they discovered that it was protected by barbed wire cleverly concealed by garlands. “The bodyguard and members of the audience vigorously repelled the attack, wielding clubs, batons, poles, planks, or anything they could seize, while the police laid about right and left with their batons, their violence being far the greater.”[6] At one point a woman fired a revolver loaded with blanks to keep the police back. Despite the Bodyguard’s protection Emmeline Pankhurst was roughly seized by officers and dragged into a vehicle waiting outside to return her to prison.
Although they were not always successful in saving their leaders from arrest, the Bodyguard showed police that these women would refuse to go down without a fight. One cannot overestimate the courage and strength it must have taken for these Edwardian women to challenge the views of the day and to behave in a manner that was probably as foreign to them as it was to their critics in pursuit of their desire for the vote.
By Lesley Griffiths, a U3A Shared Learning project researcher for the Citizens project
Featured Image
‘The Suffragette that Knew Jiu-Jitsu,’ [Edith Garrud] by A. Wallis Mills (1878 – 1940), published 1910 in Punch magazine and in The Waganui Chronicle
Bibliography
Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of The Suffragettes (Bloomsbury, 2018)
Gladys Griffiths, Life With Mother: A Militant Suffragette (Unpublished manuscript, c. 1972, G.N.O. Griffiths family papers)
Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder (Penguin Books Ltd, 1975)
Susan McPherson and Angela McPherson, Mosley’s Old Suffragette: A Biography of Norah Dacre Fox (McPherson and McPherson, 2011)
Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (Vintage, 2015)
Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled (Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1959)
Antonia Raeburn, The Militant Suffragettes (Michael Joseph Ltd, 1973)
Jane Robinson, Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of The Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote (Doubleday, 2018)
Gretchen Wilson, With All Her Might: The Life of Gertrude Harding Militant Suffragette (Goose Lane Editions, 1996)
[1] Gretchen Wilson, With All Her Might, p. 131.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Henriette Leslie (Gladys Schütze), More Ha’pence than Kicks: Being Some Things Remembered, pp. 103-104, quoted in Diane Atkinson, Rise Up Women!, p. 461
[4] Gladys Griffiths (nėe Dewar), unpublished manuscript, Life With Mother.
[5] Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, p. 307.
[6] Ibid.
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