Sylvia Pankhurst isn't the most well known member of her family. Her mother Emmeline and her sister Christabel both led the Suffragette movement in their time, so their place in history is assured. But Sylvia was no less a campaigner, and far more of a militant, and her story is less well known. She began her campaign work in Bow, drawn here by the poverty of the East End and a desire to help put that right. And she began her work a stone's throw from my front door, which is highly appropriate given the events of 100 years ago today.
Sylvia Pankhurst first came to Bow in October 1912 to campaign for the local MP, George Lansbury. He'd taken the unusual step of resigning to fight a by-election on the issue of votes for women, so Sylvia arrived as a representative of the Women's Social and Political Union. She rented an empty baker's shop at 198 Bow Road, and painted "VOTES FOR WOMEN" in letters of gold across the front. The only picture I can find of that shop is here, with Sylvia addressing the crowd outside atop a precarious-looking wooden tower. Her oratory did no good - Lansbury lost the election to his Conservative challenger - but it brought Sylvia to see the hardship of the locals first hand, and so she stayed.
That baker's shop is long gone, as are all the shops along Bow Road along the southern side of St Mary's Church. The London County Council demolished the lot in 1933, removing what had been the heart of the medieval village, replacing slums and alleyways with the brick apartment blocks of the Bow Bridge Estate. These have survived, but Sylvia wouldn't be pleased to hear that the tenants remain amongst the poorest in London, the very people she came to save. To find the site of 198 Bow Road walk to the tip of the churchyard, closest to the flyover, and turn to face Canterbury House. The shop would have been where the railings make way for a soundproofing wall - the latter covered with greenery and used to screen a communal garden from the roar of traffic. Nobody's ever thought to commemorate the site, even though there's a thick brick post on which a plaque could easily be erected. I've passed the site hundreds of times, but I still can't picture Sylvia's shop nor the bustling parade it sat in, so comprehensively has the former heart of Bow been erased.
Likewise Bromley High Street, the entrance to which is a hundred yards up the road, and which has been transformed beyond recognition over the years. Post-war redevelopment created Stroudley Walk, a retail piazza that never lived up to expectations, with space for a hundred market stalls where today there's usually only one. The post office is a gloomy tomb, there's usually an alcoholic or three outside the betting shop, and I'm never convinced that the fish in the chippie is genuinely cod. The only building Sylvia would recognise is the Rose and Crown pub, although that closed a few years ago and it's now a halal-friendly shop (four roosters cost £9.99, and a whole sheep sells for less than three quid a kilo). 100 years ago today she made her campaigning speech atop a cart outside the LCC school, which was located behind the dry cleaners where a tower block now stands. In 1913 this was a genuine high street, an important local centre, but it's absolutely not today.
Sylvia's hurled flint struck Selby & Sons, the undertakers on the corner of Bow Road. That's long gone too, replaced by a modern block of flats called St Mary's Court, but the business has moved into a building up the road, which ironically used to be the local police station. Nextdoor is Bromley Public Hall, now the Tower Hamlets Register Office, where I often see under-dressed wedding parties spilling out onto the street. Here Sylvia's emancipation campaign held many of its meetings, and its window was smashed by George Lansbury's son Willie on that freezing Monday afternoon a century ago. All this wanton destruction ended up with a group of five protesters locked away in the cells at Bow Road's brand new police station, a building I blogged about last month. Sylvia was sentenced to two months hard labour in Holloway and here she began a lengthy hunger strike to draw further attention to the cause.
By now Sylvia's Bow base had shifted to number 321 Roman Road, a campaign office decorated with green and white flags above the door. From here Sylvia published her own polemic newspaper called the Women's Dreadnought, initially with a print run of ten thousand, later rather less. Now ejected from the national Suffragette movement, she set up the independent East London Federation of Suffragettes and continued the battle. On her 32nd birthday she opened The Women's Hall at 400 Old Ford Road, now demolished, but nextdoor to the Lord Morpeth pub. Wholesome fibre-rich meals were served at the locally affordable price of tuppence, although not everyone appreciated the dried beans and (heavens) potatoes with their skins on. Meanwhile at 45 Norman Grove she opened a small toy factory to provide Bow's women with sustainable employment, and made sure there was a creche and nursery to keep them in work. Practical and forward-looking, Sylvia had created a welfare bubble where it was most required.
The world changed in 1914, and the national Suffragette movement quickly evolved into a patriotic organisation supporting the troops. Sylvia was having none of it, continuing to fight against poverty and towards universal suffrage. Her organisation edged more towards communism, straining relations with her mother, who disowned her entirely when she gave birth but refused to marry the child's father. Sylvia moved with her non-husband from Bow to Woodford, where she lived for the rest of his life. They lived first at Vine Cottage, which Sylvia renamed Red Cottage, in Woodford Wells opposite the Horse and Well pub. In 1935, deeply concerned by the legalisation of aerial warfare, she commissioned a stone carving of a bomb which she erected on a concrete plinth in her front garden and unveiled with some ceremony. Red Cottage was demolished in 1939 but this peculiar monumentlives on, semi-hidden at the back of a muddy verge overshadowed by chestnut trees.
Sylvia's penultimate move was to West Dene, a larger Edwardian house on Charteris Road close to Woodford station. Again this no longer stands, having been replaced by flats, but Redbridge council have named a nearby wedge of open space Pankhurst Green in Sylvia's honour, complete with commemorative sign and mosaic. And finally in 1956 she emigrated to Ethiopia, subject of her latest political grand project, where Emperor Haile Selassie gave her a state funeral. From a chucked stone in Bow to a grave in pride of place outside Addis Ababa's cathedral, Sylvia Pankhurst's life was anything but forgettable.
In 1913 the Suffragette movement spread across Britain, fighting tirelessly for "Votes For Women". The battle was particularly intense in the East End, where Sylvia Pankhurst had set up a campaign shop at 198 Bow Road. In Sylvia's own words, this is what happened here in Bow 100 years ago.
On February 14th 1913, a week after the shop was opened, we held a meeting in the Bromley Public Hall, Bow Road, and from it led a procession round the district. Some stones were solemnly thrown at the window of a bank. My stone missed, but someone else managed to send one through the glass. To make sure of imprisonment, I broke a window in the police station, and was convicted for this and the bank window. Daisy Lansbury was accused of catching a policeman by the belt, but the charge was dismissed. Zelie Emerson and I went to prison for six weeks on Friday, and began the hunger and thirst strike, but Mrs. Pankhurst had our fines paid anonymously, and we were released at noon on Saturday. We rushed back to the shop and found it crowded with members, scrubbing the tables and arranging to march to Holloway prison to cheer us next day.
On the following Monday, February 17th, we held a meeting at the Obelisk, a mean-looking monument in a dreary, almost unlighted open space near Bow Church.
Our platform, a high, uncovered cart, was pitched against the dark wall of a dismal council school in the teeth of a bitter wind. Already a little knot of people had gathered; women holding their dark garments closely about them, shivering and talking of the cold, four or five police constables and a couple of Inspectors. We climbed into the cart and watched the crowd growing, the men and women turning from the footpaths to join the mass. One of the Inspectors stretched up to ask me in a whisper whether I intended to form a procession. I answered "No." Zelie Emerson spoke first, witty and engaging. I sat beside her, half numbed by the cold, thinking of many things in a dull way, and wondering how the damp cold would affect my throat, which had been troubling me of late, and whether I should be able to make myself well heard when my turn came.
As she stopped I was suddenly all alert. My voice rang out loud and very clear. I felt the tense expectancy about me; the thrill of sympathy responding to my words. In concluding I said I knew it to be a hard thing for men and women to risk imprisonment in such a neighbourhood, where most of them were labouring under the steepest economic pressure, yet I pleaded for some of the women of Bow to join us in showing themselves prepared to make a sacrifice to secure enfranchisement. Then amid a stunned surprise that I had said no more, for the people expected a call to action, I got down from the cart, slow and stumbling, for my feet were stiff with cold.
Half the crowd was disappointed that nothing had come of the meeting; half was wondering if something would happen yet. The police too were waiting, and would have prevented what I intended had I spoken of it. I walked slowly away toward the Bow Road, the crowd irresolute, half turning to follow, half waiting to see if someone else would speak. A few of the women pressed round me. At the corner was a brightly-lit undertaker's shop with cheap, showy monuments in its window.
I took a heavy flint from my pocket and hurled it as hard as I could. It broke the glass with a loud report, passing through it as easily as though it had been butter, I thought, recalling my bad shot in St. Stephen's Hall. Three stones went flying from close beside me; they sounded like the firing of guns. I was seized by two policemen; three other women were seized. We were dragged, resisting, along the Bow Road, the crowd cheering and running with us. Suddenly a young man darted forward with a shout: "Votes for Women!" and flung a stone through a window in the Bromley Public Hall. The people applauded: "Bravo! Votes for Women!" The police leapt upon him, wrenching his arms, hauling him along by the collar, a short, thick-set figure, struggling and breathless. It was Willie, George Lansbury's eldest son, who had promised his wife to go to prison instead of her because she had tubercular tendencies and could not leave their little daughter only two years old.
The crowd, always growing in numbers, surging around and ahead of us, roaring its cheers and its epithets, massing around the doors of the big new police station. The police fought their way through and thrust us inside. The Inspector shouted: "File out, you men, and keep them back – and shut the doors!"
There were four others inside with me: Annie Lansbury and her brother Will, pale, delicate Mrs. Watkins, a widow struggling to maintain herself by sweated sewing-machine work, and young Mrs. Moore. A moment later little Zelie Emerson was bundled in, flushed and triumphant – she had broken the window of the Liberal Club.
I looked at the others who were new to this. They all seemed satisfied and glad. Mrs. Moore sat with her fair young face a little raised and lighted by an ecstatic smile.
That baker's shop is long gone, as are all the shops along Bow Road along the southern side of St Mary's Church. The London County Council demolished the lot in 1933, removing what had been the heart of the medieval village, replacing slums and alleyways with the brick apartment blocks of the Bow Bridge Estate. These have survived, but Sylvia wouldn't be pleased to hear that the tenants remain amongst the poorest in London, the very people she came to save. To find the site of 198 Bow Road walk to the tip of the churchyard, closest to the flyover, and turn to face Canterbury House. The shop would have been where the railings make way for a soundproofing wall - the latter covered with greenery and used to screen a communal garden from the roar of traffic. Nobody's ever thought to commemorate the site, even though there's a thick brick post on which a plaque could easily be erected. I've passed the site hundreds of times, but I still can't picture Sylvia's shop nor the bustling parade it sat in, so comprehensively has the former heart of Bow been erased.
The world changed in 1914, and the national Suffragette movement quickly evolved into a patriotic organisation supporting the troops. Sylvia was having none of it, continuing to fight against poverty and towards universal suffrage. Her organisation edged more towards communism, straining relations with her mother, who disowned her entirely when she gave birth but refused to marry the child's father. Sylvia moved with her non-husband from Bow to Woodford, where she lived for the rest of his life. They lived first at Vine Cottage, which Sylvia renamed Red Cottage, in Woodford Wells opposite the Horse and Well pub. In 1935, deeply concerned by the legalisation of aerial warfare, she commissioned a stone carving of a bomb which she erected on a concrete plinth in her front garden and unveiled with some ceremony. Red Cottage was demolished in 1939 but this peculiar monument lives on, semi-hidden at the back of a muddy verge overshadowed by chestnut trees.
On the following Monday, February 17th, we held a meeting at the Obelisk, a mean-looking monument in a dreary, almost unlighted open space near Bow Church.
Half the crowd was disappointed that nothing had come of the meeting; half was wondering if something would happen yet. The police too were waiting, and would have prevented what I intended had I spoken of it. I walked slowly away toward the Bow Road, the crowd irresolute, half turning to follow, half waiting to see if someone else would speak. A few of the women pressed round me. At the corner was a brightly-lit undertaker's shop with cheap, showy monuments in its window.
