In the summer of 1913 many Welsh women took to the roads.
They were usually quite well-off, professional women themselves or married to professional men, and could afford to travel by train or sometimes even by car or carriage.
They were walking to make a political point. They wanted the vote and they were using a peaceful way to campaign for it.
The times were tense - Ireland was deeply divided over the issue of Home Rule and by 1914 would be on the verge of civil war. Huge strikes had erupted across the country.
In Wales we remember the coal strike in the Rhondda (especially Tonypandy), the rail strike at Llanelli where troops fired on and killed people, and the Cardiff dock and seamen’s strike which was conducted against a background of a burning warehouse and a riot against Chinese laundries.
Women in militant mood
Militant suffragettes had escalated their violence from smashing windows and blowing up pillar boxes to actions which could have cost human lives. Fortunately, they never did. Militant women were always in the headlines and seen by the press as conducting a sex war.
In Wales they heckled and disrupted Lloyd George at the Eisteddfod of 1912 in Wrexham and in his home village of Llanystumdwy when he was opening the village institute. In the summer of 1913 there were fears they would burn down the Eisteddfod pavilion in Abergavenny . Extra insurance was taken out and guards posted.
But for every member of the militant suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, there were probably 25 members of the constitutional, pacific National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. They were known as suffragists rather than suffragettes.
The problem for the peaceful advocates of votes for women was to grab newspaper headlines.
Their meetings were reportedly briefly in the press but they never captured the news agenda with daring and spectacular stunts. Such societies had existed for around 40 years in Britain and had achieved little. How were they now to seek centre stage when it was already occupied by the militants, by strikers and by Ireland?
The answer they came up with was a peaceful march to London, to be conducted over a few weeks and ending with a huge demonstration in Hyde Park on July 26.
Women would come from the furthest reaches of Britain, march to the larger towns and cities, and there would join with others until all the streams converged on London. It would be a visible demonstration of how big and broad-based their support was.
Along the way they would hold meetings to spread the word to areas of the country which had not had the opportunity to hear it. They called themselves pilgrims. There was an ancient tradition of taking to the roads for a religious cause and that gave them respectability.
Not all of them, by any means, would march all the way. The older travelled much of the way by car or carriage; the younger often used their bicycles. We forget how much women’s liberation could be achieved by those with the means to buy a bike and get on it.
Some marched for a few days, returned home to attend to domestic duties, and then rejoined the march. It was not exactly a route march and there was some mockery of this.
That missed the point. The women were stressing that they were ordinary people and not Amazonian suffragettes. (Many vile and spiteful postcards of militant suffragettes were published in the period.)
They were respectable in their light-coloured dresses and sashes resplendent in the colours of the constitutional movement. These were red, white and green in contrast to the white, green and purple of the militants. They were showing that they could attend to the domestic duties expected of them at the time and exercise the vote.
Cardiff's rousing send-off
In South Wales women gathered from several locations. The meeting to give them a rousing send-off was in Cardiff.
It was Cardiff’s new civic centre, near the splendid City Hall and the Law Courts. That symbolised women claiming their places in public life. Many wore their gowns to show that they were graduates or students. Others wore their nursing uniforms.
Women who had achieved so much in their own lives – it was being silently suggested – deserved to have a place in public life.
Prominent in the photographs of the scene in Cathays Park was Mrs Henry Lewis of Greenmeadow, the leading figure in the Cardiff Suffrage Society. She was from a landowning family with industrial interests and lived in a huge gothic mansion which dominated Tongwynlais.
She was a Conservative when it came to party politics. The NUWSS was not aligned with any party and took its supporters from all parties. All the political parties were split on the issue of votes for women, so there was no simple divide between left and right.
Conforming to the conventions of the day, she used her husband’s name in public, while in private she was Mabel. She had made the red dragon banner which the Cardiff Society carried in demonstrations.
According to the ideas of the time, women were not supposed to take part in public life and instead concentrate on being homemakers. But many turned those ideas around and argued that to run a home and educate children you needed an education yourself.
Who better than a woman to formulate policy on housing, education and child welfare?
Moreover, the skills developed in running a household were transferable to the wider society. Who better to supervise the administration of a workhouse or hospital than a woman with her special experience? Who better than a woman to formulate policy on housing, education and child welfare?
Even before 1913 the suffragists of Cardiff had held public meetings in the city and taken part in rallies in London. But now they were faced with a new challenge. Would they dare to march through the main street of their own city to assert their right to vote? There was some trepidation over this. They were afraid of abuse and catcalling. In the end they grasped the nettle.
From Cathays Park they strode along Kingsway and past the castle.
This meant they had to run the whole gauntlet of Queen Street. They could, of course, have used what was effectively the back entrance and marched down Park Place, leaving only about half of Queen Street to negotiate. But they took their courage in their hands and were rewarded with interest and respect, even if not with great enthusiasm.
From there they marched, drove or cycled to Newport, holding meetings along the way in small villages.
Eventually they would join with women coming from Bristol and those from Devon and Cornwall.
North Wales joins the march
In North Wales the pilgrims had needed to start about 10 days earlier as London was much further away. Women gathered from the recesses of the Llyn Peninsula before rallying in Bangor for the big send-off.
The meeting was held at the Reformers’ Tree, a symbol of the long 19th-century campaign for political rights for men.
They marched on to Llanfairfechan, where there was a monument to the Liberal reformer and former prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, who had frequently holidayed there.
They were claiming that it was now their turn to have rights and to continue the long struggle for votes for working men. We can confidently assume that Gladstone, a staunch opponent of votes for women, was wildly rotating in his grave in Westminster Abbey!
We know quite a lot about the North Wales women’s march because one of them wrote a vivid and detailed account of it. This was published in slightly different versions in several newspapers.
We don’t know who wrote this, but it was most likely Charlotte Price White, one of the leading figures in the movement in Bangor and one of only two North Wales women who went all the way to London.
Magic and hostility
Born Charlotte Bell in 1873 near Dumfries, she was of Scottish origin but had been a student at the training college in Bangor . In 1902 she had married Foulkes Price White, the city’s electrical engineer, and they had two young children.
She tells a tale of meetings along the North Wales coast which generally drew favourable responses and attracted local supporters in their marches into the towns. She refers to the “magic” of the experience.
Let her speak for herself: “Pilgrims find themselves doing things they have never done before and would never have dreamed of doing... Someone is urgently needed to speak – there is the waiting crowd and one simply forgets to be self-conscious and only remembers that there is a great message to deliver, a great gospel to preach, and somehow one is speaking and they are listening, and there you are! ...”
They were learning skills, self-confidence and something more – comradeship, “sharing high purposes and rejoicing in wider horizons and a freer air”.
The north Wales women joined those from Carlisle and Liverpool in Stafford and they marched on together. Despite the fact that they stressed their peacefulness and moderation, they frequently had their meetings broken up or disrupted. This was the same with the marchers from South Wales as well.
They accused the anti-suffrage movement of organising this hostility, of falsely claiming that the women were militants. Students at an agricultural college in Cirencester were especially difficult.
Mass march to show unity
Finally they reached London. The big demonstration in Hyde Park was not made up simply of women who had marched – there were not enough of those to have made an impressive display.
But they were joined by others who had come to London on special trains and by supporters of the movement in the capital.
It was estimated that 50,000 were present and, as the photographs taken on the day show, many of them were men.
The marchers entered London along four routes so that as many people as possible could see their display. In the park they gathered around a dozen platforms.
This was in the days before amplification and even the most powerful speaker’s voice could not be heard by the whole of the vast attendance. So there were always 12 speakers at any one time and a succession of speakers on each platform gave many individual women and men their chance to have their say.
At five o’clock a bugle sounded and the resolution in favour of votes for women was put at every platform simultaneously – and then passed in unity.
Women had come from all over England and Wales (Scotland had a separate movement for suffrage). They represented their various regions but at the climax they expressed their unity in the cause.
Did they succeed in their aims? They certainly attracted a lot of favourable comment in the press as they marched along their many routes and roads. They collected money for the cause and ensured that their message was heard in remote places which had never seen a suffragist before.
But they didn’t grab all the headlines. Militant activity continued and was always seen as more newsworthy.
Back in Wales, Margaret Haig Thomas, Lady Mackworth, had been convicted of blowing up a post box in Newport and sent to Monmouth jail. The daughter of a millionaire coal-owner, she went on hunger strike to secure her release and so was guaranteed more space in the press than the large numbers of women dutifully and respectably walking to publicise their cause.
It was during the march that Emily Wilding Davison protested in front of the King’s horse in the Derby – and of course died as the result of her injuries.
The militant suffragettes staged her funeral impressively with a march through the streets of London to Euston Station, from where her body was taken to her home town Morpeth in Northumberland for burial. Anyone who has watched the impressive recent film Suffragettes will have seen the remarkable newsreel footage of the procession in London at the end of the film.
Women did not win the vote simply because a good number of them marched along the roads through the summer hedgerows of 1913 on their way to a mass rally and demonstration. They did so because they had made a case for votes for women which was unanswerable by 1914.
They had won over much of public opinion and, crucially, the majority of MPs.
Winning the vote
Peaceful agitation like the pilgrimage and militant activity both played their parts in this. But votes for women was not a political priority for the government before the war.
That log-jam was broken by the First World War.
As a result of women’s contribution to the war effort, it was impossible to deny them the vote at the war’s end.
To console the diehard opponents of women’s votes, this was restricted to women over 30 and to those who were householders or married to householders. This ensured that men remained the majority of the electorate.
Everyone knew that this situation could not last.
In 1928, 10 years after the restricted right to vote had been conceded in 1918, women won the right to vote on equal terms with men. Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Garrett Fawcett both lived long enough to see the act go through Parliament.
Millicent was given a civic reception in Cardiff in 1924. As she drily remarked at the time, on a previous visit she had needed police protection!
In 1929 a North Wales newspaper said that votes for women had inaugurated “nothing short of a revolution”. That owed a lot to the courage and sacrifice of militant suffragettes.
But it also owed much to the quieter, patient work of the non-militants as symbolised by the pilgrimage of 1913. The two sides of the movement were complementary.
Some women belonged to both and they co-operated in events. Some were impressed by the actions of the militants and their propaganda value, but did not feel able to do such deeds themselves. They therefore joined the constitutional movement.
Which side of the movement was more important?
Perhaps that’s impossible to decide. But we don’t need to decide.
There is an old question: “Which blade of the scissors cuts the cloth?”
All women who campaigned for the vote were united in a cause. They were only divided in methods. Constitutionalists have been unjustly neglected. Yet they alone would hardly have won the vote.
WHO IS NEIL EVANS?
He has been secretary and chairperson of Llafur: The Welsh People’s History Society and was editor of the journal Llafur for 15 years.
He started to research women’s history because it was the only way to gather material for teaching!
He first wrote on women’s history in collaboration with his student Kay Cook, later Browning. He returned to the topic when he was honoured to be asked to give a memorial lecture for the pioneering historian of Welsh women, Ursula Masson.
He would like to dedicate this article to those two friends who died far too young.
* This article was first published during the Western Mail's Welsh History Month 2017.