Annie Kenney – Women’s Fight for the Vote (continued)
Annie Kenney in prison dress
That was the first of 13 times Annie Kenney was sent to prison. On 21 June 1906, for instance, she was arrested during a demonstration outside the house of Herbert Asquith, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in Cavendish Square in London, and sentenced to six weeks in prison for refusing to be bound over to keep the peace.
Telegram to Labour Representation Committee about the arrest of Annie Kenney and others 21 June 1906. In Prison Faces1 Annie Kenney wrote: ‘The magistrate who sent me for six weeks to Holloway said: “I am going to deal with this case severely. These women must understand that the law is stronger than they are”. He does not know himself, perhaps, how much he has done for me. He could not have sent me to a better school. If he had wished to brand the wrong done to women on my memory, if he had wished to forge my will in the furnace of hot indignation, and send me forth determined as never before to fight on to the finish, he could not have chosen a better way to do it. The law may be stronger than I am, but if I may not change the wicked law that holds in bondage the smitten womanhood of this country, I will at least die in the attempt to change it’.
Annie Kenney and other suffragettes heckled Churchill again in the lead-up to the 1906 General Election. He was Liberal candidate for North West Manchester and, at hustings in a school in Cheetham Hill in Manchester, is said to have exclaimed amidst the hubbub: ‘Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the Franchise, and I am not going to be henpecked into a question of such grave importance’.
Cartoon from Votes for Women, 15 March 1912. Jessie Kenney remembered another, later incident, during Asquith's time as Prime Minister (1908-1916): ‘Poor old Asquith, we really got on his nerves which was what we wanted to do. One Whitsuntide, three of us turned up at Clovelly where he was spending his holiday, and on the Sunday we went to church. We were all dressed up – one in purple, one in white and one in green. And we sat there very quietly as demurely as we could. The Asquith came in and took his seat with his wife who hated us like poison. She nudged him and passed him a note. He looked up and saw us. He passed a note to someone else as much as to say, “Protect me as best you can”. Afterwards he left the church by a side door’2.
Article from Votes for Women 1 December 1911
Lloyd George received similar treatment, such as when he addressed a meeting in Bath. This incident was reported in Votes for Women on 1 December 1911.
After the 1906 election Annie Kenney moved to London to continue campaigning - she was the only working-class woman to become part of the senior hierarchy of the WSPU. Memories of a Militant3 describes her work getting factory women to come to London to participate in the first so-called Women’s Parliament in 1907: ‘The wildest parts of the Yorkshire and Lancashire moorlands were the parts from which we received most recruits. This was owing to the women being versed in Labour politics. Many, many are the happy evenings I have spent in some lonely cottage on the edge of the moors, not many miles from the famous “Wuthering Heights”. The wife would have returned from her mill-work, having tramped miles during the day, the husband would also be at home. Tea would be served, hot muffins, tea-cake, sometimes cold ham, and a real good pot of tea. The fire would have been lit by a good-hearted neighbour, and the hearth cleaned. The lamp would be burning, and we would talk about politics, Labour questions, Emerson, Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, right into the night’. (The recruits she was seeking were women who were willing to go to prison). On 13 February 1907 the `Women's Parliament' met and a resolution condemning the omission of women's suffrage from the King's Speech was passed, as was a motion that the resolution be taken to the Prime Minister. A procession of about 400 women marched towards the Houses of Parliament, but they were told by police when they reached the green beside Westminster Abbey that they could continue no further. However the women carried on, and a number of skirmishes broke out; 51 women were arrested, 15 of whom had managed to reach the lobby of Parliament.
