# Transcript

MICHAEL PORTILLO
This is Tottenham Court Road in the West End of London, famous now for its electronics and furniture shops. But in 1909, on the site of the building behind me, number 92, a police investigation was underway into a possible conspiracy to murder the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. The potential assassin wasn’t a German spy or a Fenian terrorist – but a small woman in a hat. She was described as a ‘suffragette’. On the 27th of September, Inspector Riley of the Met reported:
READER
I made enquiries late on Saturday evening at 92 Tottenham Court Road, and the proprietor of the miniature shooting range there informed me that about three weeks ago two women (one of whom was described as a little woman wearing a tam-o’-shanter) who were said to be ‘suffragettes’ had been practising with a Browning pistol.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
His superiors at the Home Office took the threat seriously. That shooting range had recently been used by the assassin of Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the aide to the Secretary of State for India. The Home Office’s conclusion:
READER
There is now definite ground for fearing the possibility of the PM’s being fired at by one of the pickets at the entrance to the House of Commons. It seems to me that we have in fact prima facie grounds for believing that there is something nearly amounting to a conspiracy to murder.

[Music.]

MICHAEL PORTILLO
It’s a shocking thought, a suffragette, hatted in her tam-o’-shanter, lurking outside Parliament for the Prime Minister to arrive, then springing forward to shoot him.

[Music.]

MICHAEL PORTILLO
This tableau sits uneasily alongside our image of the suffragettes as noble crusaders for constitutional recognition. When we think of suffragettes, we call to mind the tactics of civil disobedience – women chaining themselves to railings, disrupting meetings, maybe going as far as breaking windows. Is there something we’ve forgotten to remember? That the women’s suffrage movement was prepared to go much further and to embrace lethal violence? I took the Home Office documents to an expert in early twentieth-century guns at an armourer on the outskirts of London to see what ballistics could tell us about the seriousness of the threat.
TONY
What we have to do for the first shot, we have to pull the slide back and let go, which will chamber it.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
These pocket or overcoat pistols, if I was standing close to Carriage Gates at the House of Commons as the Prime Minister swept by in his carriage or car, what chance of hitting him or indeed hitting his car?
TONY
Within 10, 15 feet you would probably hit them. You have to remember that Franz Joseph was killed with a Browning 1910, which is in this calibre 32. The pistol involved is known as the pistol that killed 8.5 million people.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
I wonder if we might have a pop with these. What do you think?
TONY
Yes, we can let you fire this.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Okay. I’m going to put these squidgy ear defenders in my ear. And if this lady came and practised a few times, how much better would she get at aiming?
TONY
A bit of training would improve it. But it would only show her that she has to get up close.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Okay. I’m inserting my second earplug.
TONY
Okay. That gun is now loaded.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
It’s a smallish gun, fits very neatly into my hand. Ready? [Fires]. Yeah, a bit of a kick. The barrel definitely moves, doesn’t it? You have to hold it quite steady. Even if it was only half an inch that would be quite a wide miss ...
TONY
Absolutely.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
... if I hadn’t controlled it.
TONY
As you can appreciate, to a lady who fired that for the first time it would have been a shock. So if she’d gone to a range, after maybe firing 10 or15 shots you get a little bit more used to it. Someone who’s never fired a gun, it can come as a surprise.
KRISTA COWMAN
Ministers would walk to the House of Commons. They would not, they would not be chauffeur-driven in a ministerial car.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Krista Cowman is Professor of History at Lincoln University. She explains that cabinet ministers at the time were vulnerable to attack.
KRISTA COWMAN
You could get at cabinet ministers. They were completely accessible. You could wander down Downing Street, and the suffragettes did on, on several occasions. So I think that within this context it is quite understandable. This is a period of escalating political violence across the scale, not just of women’s violence but from a whole variety of other organisations who are determined to use this form of protest as a means of advancing their aims.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Professor June Purvis is the biographer of Emmeline Pankhurst. She senses that Prime Minister Asquith was very much the focus of the suffragettes’ anger.
JUNE PURVIS
He was a very staunch anti-suffragist so he wasn’t in favour of votes for women. And I think when the suffragettes began to be assertive, to demand their rights, this was what upset a lot of men in the House of Commons.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
But she dismisses the plot described in the Home Office papers as merely the product of over-zealous policing.
JUNE PURVIS
I’m not quite sure whether it’s just part of the paranoia at the time. I have never come across any evidence of women wielding guns and practising at firing ranges to shoot people. So I’m a bit sceptical of that.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
It’s almost impossible to tell whether the conspiracy was foiled by the vigilance of the police – or whether there was a plot at all. But there is evidence of violence emanating from within the suffragette movement, something that has been forgotten. Dr Christopher Bearman is an independent researcher. His speech has been affected by illness. He’s spent the last few years investigating the occurrence of potentially lethal violence during the suffragette campaign from 1909 to the outbreak of war in 1914. He claims to have evidence that some women were willing to take their campaign to a level little short of terrorism.
DR CHRISTOPHER BEARMAN
Well bombing, some bombs placed in public places. There was one set near the Bank of England in April 1913. In June 1914 a suffragette was taken into custody in Nottingham and in her suitcase was a pound of high explosive with fuses and detonators.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Professor Krista Cowman’s research has also unearthed evidence of bombings, actual and intended.
KRISTA COWMAN
Edith Rigby placed a bomb in the stock exchange at Liverpool, which did go off. It went off while the stock exchange was not working. But it’s very difficult to time these things, and to argue where the line is between the sort of more symbolic aspects of militant action like that and the way in which you can actually affect protection of people who are involved in the vicinity at the time.
DR CHRISTOPHER BEARMAN
In July 1912 a device of some sort was planted in the Home Secretary’s office, but no details got into the press until 10 months later when the Manchester Guardian claimed it was a bomb which had sufficient power to wreck the office and kill anyone inside.
KRISTA COWMAN
There are other examples where women talk about going out with bombs which didn’t actually detonate. One woman who was an organiser had a bomb in her bag on a bus that started buzzing and she had to get off the bus very quickly because obviously she didn’t want it to detonate with her, with her still holding it.
DR CHRISTOPHER BEARMAN
They had a chemist named Edwy Clayton who in fact lived at Kew. And his wife was the secretary of the suffragette branch there. In April 1913 the police made a number of raids on the suffragette headquarters and on the homes of people who worked there. And they found letters from Clayton. He thought of targets like the National Health Insurance Commission and he was made payments by the suffragettes.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Arson, bomb-making and intimidation are not what we learned in history lessons about the suffrage movement.