Authors: Geert Mak
Did everyone, though, believe in that ‘shared citizenry’? A brief section of newsreel has been preserved of the Derby held in June 1913. We see the horses hurtling around the bend at high speed, neck and neck. In the background we catch a glimpse of the crowd, men in straw hats, here and there a woman. Then something happens, so quickly as to be almost imperceptible: a woman runs onto the track, there is a whirl of bodies, then the horses are past and spectators rush towards a pile of clothing. That is how she entered history. Waving two flags, the narrator says, Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king's horse for the cause of female suffrage. She died four days later.
I wanted to find out more about her. The British Library, though, contained only a short commemorative volume published shortly after her death, a bijou in a finely tooled case. The frontispiece shows a proud woman in a gown, diploma in hand. She is frowning gravely for the photographer, but obviously capable of breaking into a smile at any moment. That impression is confirmed only a few pages later: Emily loved life, she was generous, enthusiastic and exceptionally cheerful.
Her story reads like a classic account of radicalisation. And, at the same time, as a nineteenth-century story, a story about the place where two eras clashed.
Emily Davison came from a good family, but even in early childhood there was something wayward about her. ‘I don't want to be good!’ she often shouted at her nanny. When her parents died she had to leave school. Like many women in her situation she became a governess, but she spent her evening hours studying and so finally left school with exceptional grades. She was at one with the dreams and ambitions of the nineteenth century, but was also brutally confronted with the dark side of that same century: the social pressures, the curtailment of the individual, the double standards, the never-ending conflict between desire and possibility.
Shortly before Emily was born, John Stuart Mill – prompted by his blue-stocking spouse Harriet Taylor – published
The Subjection of Women
in 1869. The title speaks for itself. The country may have been ruled by a queen, but women in other walks of life had no say whatsoever. A man held absolute sway over his wife's person and her possessions. University degrees were off-limits to women, a situation that continued at Cambridge until 1948. Women frequently earned less than half a man's salary for the same work. Many professions actually barred women from their ranks. Many poor girls turned to whoring to survive.
But, after 1870, there came a change. Women began making themselves heard on subjects such as education, charity work, health care, mandatory vaccination and prostitution. Starting in 1880, the major political parties established women's organisations, and demonstrations for female suffrage began in 1900. In 1908 a window was shattered at 10 Downing Street; in 1913, one wing of Liberal leader David Lloyd George's mansion was blown up in order to ‘rouse his conscience’. With remarkable speed, women who had been brought up as delicate Victorian china dolls were becoming modern physicians, bookkeepers, civil servants and teachers, and sometimes even dyed-in-the-wool feminists.
Simple curiosity was what brought Emily Davison into contact with these suffragettes: she had read strange newspaper reports about gatherings of radical women, and she wanted to see them with her own eyes. Before long she had joined their ranks. When a mass demonstration was held on 21 June, 1908, Emily was one of the most enthusiastic organisers.
It is not clear what drove her; we can only guess. What
is
clear is that she was drawn into a current of political action, demonstrations of solidarity and intense friendships. Rage was not her sole motive. She was deeply convinced, as her female biographer wrote, that ‘she had been called by God not only to work, but also to fight for the cause she had embraced, like a Joan of Arc leading the French Army. Her prayers were always long, and the Bible always lay beside her bed.’ Emily united in herself the contradictions of her day; a hotchpotch of modern militancy and religious romanticism.
She went further and further for the sake of the cause. On 20 March, 1909, a delegation of women who had demanded to speak to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith were arrested heavy-handedly. Emily was among them. She spent a month in jail. On 30 July she was arrested again for disrupting one of Lloyd George's political rallies. The suffragettes detested the Liberal leader, probably because he resembled them more closely than the rest. Lloyd George, who had started off as a poor laywer in Wales, was a reckless man and a skilled manipulator, a passionate opponent of the Conservatives, a man bound and determined to break England wide open with major social reforms. This time, Emily Davison was sentenced to two months.
She became one of the first to wield the new weapon of the powerless: the hunger strike.‘When they locked me in the cell, I smashed seventeen windows right away,’ she wrote to a friend afterwards. ‘Then they threw me into another cell, where everything was bolted down … Then the real gnawing began. I fasted for 124 hours, and they set me free. I lost nineteen pounds and a great deal of muscle. I suppose you're in Switzerland now? Send me some picture postcards.’ On the wall of her cell she had scrawled the following text: ‘Rebellion against tyranny is obedience to God. Emily.’
After that she was arrested again and again, went on hunger strike once more, was force-fed through a tube and finally attempted to throw herself down the prison stairwell. ‘My idea was, one great tragedy can prevent many more. But the safety net prevented serious injury.’
Emily's story was not the only one of its kind. Although most of those in the women's movement did their best to remain calm and as rational
as possible, in order to break through the image of the ‘emotional’ female who was unfit ‘by nature’ for business and politics, another part of that movement radicalised in a way that had never been seen before. In the
Suffragette
of 26 December, 1913, I stumbled upon a list of the major polit-actions of that year, 130 in total. The following is a random selection, taken from only a single month:
2 April: arson at a church in Hampstead Garden; 4 April: a house in Chorley Wood destroyed by fire, a bomb attack at Oxted station, an empty train destroyed by an explosion in Devonport, famous paintings damaged in Manchester; 8 April: an explosion in the grounds of Dudley Castle; a bomb found on the crowded Kingston train; 11 April: a cricket pavilion destroyed in Tunbridge Wells; 12 April: arson at public schools in Gateshead; 19 April: an attempt to sabotage the famous lighthouse at Eddystone; 20 April: an attempt to blow up the offices of the
York Herald
; 26 April: a rail carriage in Teddington destroyed by fire.
They were gradually becoming highly organised female guerrillas. But after the outbreak of the First World War, it suddenly stopped. The women ceased their attacks, and the government released all female militants. Had things gone differently, how would it have all turned out?
I was reminded of a doll's house I had seen at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, showing the home of the Loebe family in Kilburn, the whole Edwardian female universe in a nutshell: the bedroom, the busy nursery, the bathroom, the parlour with its grand piano and conservatory, the full dining room with carpets, cupboards, mirrors and knickknacks, the kitchen with a fish on the table and two cats prowling below, everything reduced to a scale of 1:10.
In that Edwardian world, a family dwelling of this type was the ultimate symbol of the sheltered environment, regularity and eternal routine. Emily and her companions in arms rejected that, and their behaviour may better reflect what was actually happening in the country than all the doll's houses put together. Around 1900, Great Britain was much more modern than the British people themselves wished to admit. All the traditions – the bowler hats, the gentlemen's clubs and burnished walnut institutions – could not hide the fact that the City was filling with female personnel, that women were at work everywhere in the
field of education, that class distinctions were fading and that feudal gentility could not be combined with the equality of modern citizens. The empire's sober, macho values, in other words, collided head-on with the increasing priority given to care, consumption, democracy and women's rights.
Beneath the surface, from 1900–14, the England of the broad middle classes lacked the manifest cohesion of that doll's house, the inner calm of the cathedral. In the words of Jose Harris it was, in fact, ‘a chaotic and amorphous society, characterised by countless contradictory trends and opinions, and well capable of flying completely off the handle.’ It was, to put it differently, a society in which people at all stages of historical development lived side by side: modern commuters beside villagers who scraped together a living in exactly the same way that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done; Victorian patriarchs beside female academics; colonial conquistadors beside liberal ministers.
Within this field of contradictions, and driven by her own religious fervour, Emily Davison went further and further adrift. Slowly but surely, she began considering herself a martyr, a sacrificial lamb. On Tuesday 3 June, 1913 she was a free woman once more. She walked around at the ‘All in a Garden’ fair organised by the women's movement, and paused for a long time before the statue of Joan of Arc. She told her friends cheerfully that she would come back here every day,‘except for tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to the Derby.’ She refused to elaborate. ‘Read the papers, you'll see.’ The next morning she rushed into the main office. ‘I need to borrow two flags.’ In everything now, she
was
Joan of Arc.
But dying was not a part of her plan. When she committed her ultimate act, the train ticket home, third class, was still in her pocket.
DOORN CASTLE, IN THE HILLS EAST OF THE DUTCH CITY OF UTRECHT
, contains everything there is to say about Kaiser Wilhelm II. Five locomotives, pulling a total of ninety-five freight cars, had carried the last of the imperial attributes to the Netherlands in winter 1919, and there they remain to this day, huddled together in less than two dozen mediumsized rooms and a large attic.
Wilhelm's world contained, among other things, paintings of Frederick the Great, portraits of himself, walls full of battles and parades, tapestries that had belonged to Marie-Antoinette, 600 uniforms – most of which he had designed himself – the special fork which allowed the kaiser, lame in one arm, to cut his own food, a ‘
Garven Laufgewichtswaage 200 kg
’, two reinforced dining-room chairs guaranteed not to collapse under the weight of the emperor or his spouse, cabinets full of cigarette cases and snuffboxes, a heavy leather chair with built-in lectern for ease of discourse, a gold-embossed ‘Patent Water Flush Chamber’ toilet pot, twelve special hot-chocolate cups, an
Unser Kaiserpaar
album with a decorative silver binding, a drawing of the 1913 wedding banquet of the emperor's daughter, Victoria Louise, in which all of Europe's major sovereigns are seen sitting merrily together at the table and, lest we forget, a conjugal bed four metres square.
In addition to his palace at Potsdam and his immense yacht the
Hohenzollern
, the kaiser possessed at the height of his power some thirty castles and estates all over Germany. He visited a third of them each year, sometimes for no more than a weekend. There was nothing he loved more than to speed through the countryside at night in his own creamy-white train with gold trimmings. During the hunting season
he would sometimes kill more than a thousand animals in a single week. Whenever he graced a military manoeuvre with his imperial presence, every unit of his own army had to win – which did not always suit the purpose of the manoeuvre. The
Hohenzollern
– with 350 crew members and space for 80 guests – was kept in readiness for him to board at any moment. In Europe he was known as the ‘showman of the continent’, the ‘crown megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’.
After his fall, and Germany's defeat in 1918, all he had left was this park estate at Doorn with the stiff, white villa at its heart. He ruled over his own life with military precision: prayers at 9.00, newspapers at 9.15, chopping wood at 10.30, correspondence at 12.00, lunch at 1.00, nap from 2.00 to 4.00, working and reading from 4.00 to 8.00, then dinner. In the grass near the villa I happened upon the graves of his three dogs: Arno, Topsy and ‘the faithful Santos, 1907–27.
Begleitete Seine Majestät im Weltkriege
1914 — 18
’.
His grandson told me that, after the German defeat and his abdication, Wilhelm was a mental wreck. But he was also furious. He lectured endlessly to his visitors, and in 1919 was even heard to say: ‘God's wrath will be terrible. Such general treason on the part of a people against its ruler has no precedent in world history.’ The dream of seizing the throne once more continued to prowl the house, usually set in motion by Wilhelm's new wife, the young Princess Hermine, a stalwart lady who had moved in at Doorn soon after the death of the old empress. On Christmas Day 1931, Sigurd von Illsemann, an aides-de-camp, wrote in his diary: ‘All one has heard here at Doorn for months is the story of how the National Socialists will restore the kaiser to the throne; all hope, all thought, every utterance and all writing stems from this conviction.’
During his exile, Wilhelm stopped throwing parties. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands never once deigned to meet him. She had, people said, no desire to consort with rulers who abandoned land and army after hitting upon hard times. But Wilhelm's memoirs betray no shred of guilt. He still saw himself as the German emperor. He read everything he could about politics and psychology, and preached to his visitors, but he himself was incapable of extracting any learning from the knowledge
and experience of others. He would simply change the facts to make them fit the world of his imagination.
Yet he was not the ogre people for so long supposed him to be, the man who had purposely paved the way for a pan-European war. He had been more of a magician's apprentice, haplessly unable to get the genie back in the bottle. Or, in the words of Winston Churchill, a ‘careless tourist [who] had flung down his burning cigarette in the ante-room of the magazine Europe had become’, then went sailing on his yacht, and upon his return found ‘the building impenetrable with smoke … His undeniable cleverness and versatility, his personal grace and vivacity, only aggravated his dangers by concealing his inadequacy,’ Churchill wrote. ‘But underneath all this posing and its trappings, was a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole well-meaning man, hoping to pass himself off as a second Frederick the Great.’