Category: Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

One hundred and ten years ago, on the 4^thof June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison suffered a fractured skull following a collision with George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She died four days later in a room hung with bunting in the green, white, and purple colours of the suffragette movement.

Emily had studied at Royal Holloway College, London, and St. Hugh’s Oxford where she had gained first class honours, but being female was not allowed to take a degree. In 1906 she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). This militant wing of the female suffrage movement had emerged in 1903 after decades of peaceful lobbying by the law-abiding suffragists had failed to obtain voting rights for women. The WSPU embraced direct action, and Emily was at the forefront of this, disrupting political meetings from which women were barred, breaking windows and daubing slogans on the walls of buildings where these meetings were held.

In 1911 suffragettes boycotted the census, reasoning that, “If women don’t count, neither shall they be counted.” Some returned incomplete or “spoilt” forms covered in suffrage slogans. Others avoided being at home on the night of the census and held outdoor gatherings including a midnight picnic on Wimbledon Common. Emily hid overnight in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster. Ironically when she was discovered she was recorded on the census as a “resident” of the House of Commons. In 1990 the Labour MP Tony Benn mounted a plaque in the cupboard commemorating her commitment to feminism and socialism.

But the consequences for the militant suffragettes were severe. They were arrested and faced solitary confinement in prison. When they went on hunger strike protesting the government’s refusal to classify them as political prisoners they were force fed. Rubber tubes inserted into their mouths or nostrils passed through their throats and oesophaguses to transmit liquid food to their stomachs. This painful process resulted in broken teeth, bleeding, vomiting, and the risk of regurgitated food passing into their lungs.

Emily was arrested nine times. She was imprisoned eight times and went on hunger strike seven times. She was force fed forty-nine times. On one occasion when she barricaded herself in her cell to avoid this abuse the cell window was broken, and a fire hose turned on her for fifteen minutes. By the time the door was wrenched open her cell was six inches deep in water.

In a further attempt to end the torture of force feeding she threw herself from one of the inside balconies of the prison. She wrote, “The idea on my mind was that one big tragedy may save many others.” She was severely injured but saved from death when she landed on the wire netting instead of the stone staircase. Force feeding continued.

Public disquiet eventually brought the practice to an end. Under the provisions of the The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, commonly known as The Cat and Mouse Act, however the suffragettes were released from prison when hunger began to affect their health, only to be rearrested without trial to serve out their sentences once they had recovered.

On the day of the Epsom Derby, Emily had ducked under the railings and run into the path of the King’s horse. Film footage of the event shows her apparently reaching for the horse’s reins. She had not discussed her plans with anyone and left no note, so we cannot be certain of her intentions. She may have sought to attach the two suffragette banners which she was carrying to the horse’s bridle so that he crossed the line waving the suffragette flag. She may have decided to throw herself in front of the horse in a suicidal attempt to provide the WSPU with a martyr and to expose the abuses happening in prisons.

There had been the previous suicide attempt in prison, and in The Price of Liberty Manuscript she had written: “To lay down life for friends, that is glorious, selfless, inspiring! But to re-enact the tragedy of the Calvary for generations yet unborn, that is the last and consummate sacrifice of the militant! She will not hesitate even unto this last.” The coroner however rejected the possibility of suicide on the grounds that she carried in her purse a return train ticket to Victoria, was attending a suffrage event that evening, and had a diary full of appointments for the following week.

The press and the establishment ridiculed her actions, but for the WSPU and their supporters she was indeed a martyr. 6,000 women accompanied her coffin to the funeral service at St. George’s, Bloomsbury and 50,000 people lined the route. Afterwards her coffin travelled north to Morpeth in Northumberland where she was buried in the family plot in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin. Her headstone bears the suffragette watchword “Deeds Not Words.”

Other memorials surround the larger monument

A new marker placed by the family a hundred years after her death

Emily’s friend, Mary Leigh (1885-1978 ), visited the grave every year taking with her one of the suffrage flags which Emily had carried on the fatal day. Later she carried the same flag on the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march to Aldermaston in 1958.

Whatever her intentions Emily must have known the risk of stepping into the path of a racehorse moving at full gallop, and there is little doubt that she would willingly have given her life to ensure female suffrage “for generations (then) unborn.”

Female suffrage was not obtained on equal terms with men in Britain until 1928.

When Parliament seems a sordid place and many politicians at best meretricious and out of touch with the electorate, at worst criminal and cruel, remember Emily Wilding Davison died for our right to vote. And if with heavy hearts we fear that we can only cast our ballots for the lesser evil, we owe it to her at least to do that.

Remembering Raja Ram Mohan Roy

By Gravedigger

On October 9, 2022

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

At Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol a magnificent chattri towers incongrously above the angels, crosses, and obelisks which line the Ceremonial Way. Made from Bath stone but based on a traditional Bengali funeral monument, and much the grandest of the Victorian memorial sculptures, it marks the grave of Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy, often referred to as The Father of Modern India, was a linguist and philosopher, committed to female rights, education, and religious reform. He was born into the Kulin Brahmin, those Bengali Brahmins designated Kulina or superior. They advocated the prevailing systems of polygamy, dowry, sati, caste rigidity and child marriage. In his childhood he witnessed the burning to death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law in a sati ceremony. Mohan Roy championed a social reform Hinduism which opposed all these practices, leading to conflict with the authorities of the day and with his own family. Committed to monotheism, he co-founded the Kolkata Unitarian Society in 1822 and the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, the latter specifically seeking to reform Kulin Brahminism tempering it with Unitarian beliefs.

For Mohan Roy, education was the key to social reform, and he established schools where teachers incorporated western learning into Indian education, believing that modern subjects were vital to prepare young people for success in the world. This integration of eastern and western culture brought further criticism, as did his emphasis on the particular importance of education for girls.

He travelled widely, learning many languages, and defying the Hindu prohibition on crossing the Kala Pani, the Black Water, or the seas which separate India from foreign lands. Such journeys resulted not only in loss of social respectability but also, it was believed, precluded reincarnation when individuals were cut off from the regenerating waters of the Ganges.

Roy had been instrumental in obtaining a ban on the practice of sati which the British East Indian Company had long condoned to facilitate their own trading and colonial expansion. In 1830 he came to Britain, acting as Ambassador for the Mughal emperor, and successfully pressured the British government into upholding the ban.

While in Britain the Raja visited his Unitarian friends in Bristol including Lant Carpenter and his daughter Mary. Influenced by her contact with him, Mary was to become a political and social activist campaigning against slavery, for prison reform, female education, and latterly for female suffrage.

Sadly, the Raja was never to leave Bristol, for in 1833 he died of meningitis while staying at Beech House, the home of Unitarian friends in the suburb of Stapleton. According to Hindu beliefs he should have been cremated but in the England of 1833 this was still illegal. Non-Christian burials in Christian graveyards were also prohibited. And so, at a silent service, his friends buried him in the grounds of Beech House.

Ten years later new owners had purchased Beech House. Consequently, William Carr and William Prinsep, businesspeople who had worked in Kolkata, bought a plot in the new cemetery which the Bristol General Cemetery Company had established at Arnos Vale . They moved Mohan Roy’s coffin to a brick lined vault in an unconsecrated section of the cemetery. The chattri was designed by Prinsep and funded by Dwarkanath Tagore.

There is a celebration of the life of Raja Ram Mohan Roy every year at Arnos Vale on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of his death on 27th September 1833. This year marked the 250^th anniversary of his birth in 1772. Anyone is welcome at the ceremony and so I joined members of Brahmo Samaj, Unitarians, a representative of the Indian High Commission, The Lord Mayor of Bristol, staff and volunteers at Arnos Vale, and other members of the public to honour the life and achievements of this remarkable man.

Mrs. Mariju Chowdhury, a member of Brahmo-Samaj speaking at the ceremony

Ovessa Iqbal laying flowers on behalf of the Indian High Commission

Carla Contactor speaking at the ceremony

There are other tributes to Mohan Roy in Bristol:

In Bristol Art Gallery, a magnificent portrait of the Raja provides a burst of colourful magnificence dominating a room of Victorian art.

Portrait of Raja Ram Mohan Roy in Bristol Art Gallery

In 1998 the Indian government presented a bronze statue of Raja Ram Mohan Roy to the City of Bristol in celebration of fifty years of Indian Independence. It stands outside the cathedral on College Green.

Bronze statue of Raja Ram Mohan Roy outside Bristol Cathedral

There is a plaque on the wall of Beech House in Stapleton.

Beech House, Stapleton where Mohan Roy stayed on his visit to Bristol

Contrary to the dedication on the plaque, the Raja was born in May 1772

Next year the ceremony at Arnos Vale will be on 24^th September.

https://arnosvale.org.uk/remembering-the-raja

Arnos Vale Cemetery closed and fell into neglect in the 1980s. With no room for new burials, the income of the private for-profit company which owned it disappeared. With fewer descendants left to care for graves the cemetery become overgrown and vandalised. In 1987 the company proposed to clear away the graves and use the land for commercial development. The Friends of Arnos Vale Cemetery led a successful campaign to save it, and in 2003 Bristol City Council made a compulsory purchase order. Today volunteers have cleared away brambles and overgrown paths, restored monuments, and cleaned graves. They host tours, talks, film, theatrical and musical productions. And they have a great café where in fine weather you can sit outside with the forty-five green acres of the new Eden stretching before you. If you find yourself in Bristol pay them a visit.

https://arnosvale.org.uk

Daniel Defoe

By Gravedigger

On July 17, 2022

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

A year on from the first Covid lockdown I turned to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year to compare notes. His plague year was very much like ours: the first signs in Holland and rumours regarding the possible origins in Italy or the Levant, mirrored our own experiences watching Italy and Wuhan. The gradual spread from St. Giles and the West End to Cripplegate, Clerkenwell, and the City reflected our monitoring of Covid hotspots. The flight of the court and the well-heeled to their second homes was familiar; likewise, the first deaths and the sudden desolation in the streets with shops closed, Inns of Court shut up, theatres, alehouses, and diners all dark. Attempts to control wandering beggars resembled our own government’s sudden concern to house the homeless. The sick were either sequestered and died apart from their families or whole households were shut up in their homes, as happened in our hospitals and care homes. When Defoe bemoaned the lack of enough “pest houses” he might have been speaking of our own shortage of Covid wards leading to the construction of the Nightingale hospitals. Quack medicines appeared, just as hydroxychloroquine and the possibility of injecting bleach into our veins to wash out our lungs found favour in certain quarters in the twenty first century. Defoe recorded people moving to live on boats in the Thames or to camp in Epping Forest, and similarly at the height of Covid caravans and camper vans occupied green sites, sometimes received sympathetically by locals, at other times not. During the plague year the government forbade movement to second homes once people were sick, but some went against the rules; no need to labour the parallels. Daily and weekly recording of illness and death rates confirmed that then as now, the poor, living in overcrowded conditions with inadequate ventilation and unable to avoid the breath of others, sickened more than the wealthy. It became apparent that asymptomatic people could carry the plague. There were disruptions to trade and the closure of ports. As the plague intensified people rushed to stockpile provisions and there were shortages; they soaked their money in vinegar there being no contactless cards to replace cash. The poorest in the community found themselves out of work, unable to purchase food or pay for their lodgings. Charity, like our foodbanks, stepped in to supplement the parish relief which like our universal credit proved inadequate. Servants were redeployed as nurses, sextons, gravediggers. In Defoe’s London burials took place before sunrise and after sunset and neighbours and friends could not attend church funerals; when people died in the streets their bodies were removed in deadcarts to mass graves. Similarly in our own times government regulations limited numbers of mourners requiring them to be socially distanced, and as morgues and mortuaries became overwhelmed in 2020 contract workers wearing hazmat suits dug mass graves on Hart Island off the Bronx in New York. When, at last, the death rate began to decline JPs issued certificates of health to permit travel anticipating our own vaccine passports. Then as people became careless the rate rose again. Plus ça change…

There were differences, not least the greater presence of religion in Defoe’s Britain: sects, fortune tellers, and astrologers flourished; Solomon Eagle stalked the streets, naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head, calling on the populace to repent; though some clergy fled, others kept their churches open; and when the plague ended Defoe gave credit for the recovery to god. Conversely there was less respect for the medical profession and far from clapping for carers Defoe wrote of nurses finishing their patients off and stealing their goods. And while, notwithstanding some fear of interspecies transmission, pet ownership increased during lockdown, Defoe’s London witnessed the wholesale killing of cats and dogs.

Defoe was only five years old in 1665 and the vivid “eyewitness account” which he recorded originated with his uncle Henry Foe, supplemented by Defoe’s own meticulous research. A man of many talents – merchant, spy, novelist, poet, political pamphleteer, and activist – Defoe’s life was a rollercoaster of excitement, achievements, and disasters. In 1685 he participated in the Monmouth rebellion against James II but escaped retribution in the Bloody Assizes, and when William III came to power became a secret agent in the pay of the latter. His poem The True Born Englishman defended William against racial prejudice, reminding xenophobic readers that they were all descended from immigrants. William’s death and the succession of Queen Anne led to the persecution of nonconformists and Defoe’s arrest in 1703 for pamphleteering, political activity and producing satires directed against high church Tories. Prior to his removal to Newgate, he was placed in the pillory for three days but his poem Hymn to the Pillory putatively resulted in the pillory being garlanded, flowers rather than rubbish thrown at him, and his poem sold in the streets. With the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories he was able to resume work for the Whigs. Over five hundred works have been attributed to Defoe: away from the world of politics, these include Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and of course A Journal of the Plague Year. No stranger to the debtor’s prison during his life he died, as he had often lived, in debt.

Defoe was buried in the Non-Conformist Cemetery at Bunhill but the original stone which marked his grave was struck by lightning and the headstone broken in 1857. James Clarke, the editor of Christian World, a children’s newspaper, encouraged his readers to donate 6d. each for a new memorial, setting up two rival subscription lists, one for girls and one for boys. An obelisk, raised in 1870 bore the inscription:

THIS MONUMENT IS THE RESULT OF AN APPEAL
IN THE CHRISTIAN WORLD NEWSPAPER
TO THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF ENGLAND FOR FUNDS
TO PLACE A SUITABLE MEMORIAL UPON THE GRAVE
OF
DANIEL DE-FOE
IT REPRESENTS THE UNITED CONTRIBUTIONS
OF SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PERSONS.

Samuel Horner, a stonemason from Bournemouth, erected the obelisk and took the original stone home with him, selling it as part of a general load from his yard. It became part of the paving of the kitchen floor at Bishopstoke Manor Farm until the farm manager, Frederick Stiles King, moving to a new house at 56 Portswood Road in 1883, took the stone with him, where it remained in his front garden for over 60 years. Charles Davey acquired it in 1945 and thirteen years later gave it to Stoke Newington library. There it lived in a glass case in the entrance lobby, an appropriate final resting place as Defoe had lived in Stoke Newington from the age of fourteen while he attended the Dissenting Academy under Charles Morton at Newington Green. But when I arrived at the library in search of the stone there was no sign of it. Happily, the librarian knew of its whereabouts: having been vandalised several times it had been moved to more secure premises in the delightful local history museum in Hackney where, beside a bust of Defoe and backed by a wall display of the famous pillory, it keeps company with other Hackney radicals, revolutionaries, and immigrants, not to mention a Saxon longboat and a complete reconstruction of a pie and mash shop.

Defoe’s original gravestone in Hackney museum

Ivan Franko and The Stonebreakers

By Gravedigger

On April 10, 2022

In Inspired and Inspiring, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Victims of war

For over six weeks Ukrainians, led by the brave and seemingly tireless Zelenskiy, have been fighting to protect their homeland from an evil and brutal invasion. And even as they have fought in defence of their country, they have negotiated too, working and hoping for a political compromise which allows them autonomy and freedom to choose their own way of life.

There are no words for the horror, ugliness, and violence of war. Every night we have watched the news on television, every morning read the newspapers. War is death, injury and mutilation, homelessness, hunger and degradation, fear of an ever-present threat. Part of a privileged generation in a privileged country who have not known war in our lifetimes I cannot claim to empathise, to know anything of the feelings of those who have fled or the fears of those who remain. I can feel only shame for our own government’s failure to welcome refugees.

In happier times I travelled around Ukraine on the Ukrainian railways. Then the distinctive blue trains with their yellow stripe provided a comfortable intercity sleeper service for tourists like me, and the carriage guards greeted us with tea in the mornings. In recent weeks, those trains have been involved in a massive evacuation programme, carrying as many as 200,000 people a day, two million in the first two weeks of the war alone, to the west of the country, returning packed with humanitarian aid.

When my train took me to Lviv I visited the Lychakivske cemetery where I found Ivan Franko (1856-1916), nationalist poet, journalist, activist, and reformer, he was a co-founder of the Ruthenian-Ukrainian Radical Party in 1889. On his grave a massive sculpture of a stonecutter “crushing the granite wall” references his poem Kamenyari, The Stonebreakers, an allegory of the Ukrainian struggle for liberation from her oppressive past under the Polish, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. For foreign oppression is not new to Ukraine. In the 1340s the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and The Kingdom of Poland split the country between them. As the power of Lithuania declined, Poland tightened her hold until a challenge by Russia in the seventeenth century subjugated Kyiv and Northern Ukraine, while the Poles remained in the West. In the eighteenth century the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires carved up Poland between them and the Austrian Hapsburgs annexed Lviv and the West. Against this background of colonisation and foreign dominance, Ivan Franko took a leading part in the rise of Ukrainian nationalism in the nineteenth century. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the turmoil of the Russian Revolution allowed Ukraine a very brief period of independence after the First World War, but the Polish-Ukrainian war (1918-1919) effected a return to Polish ascendancy in the West, while the Polish- Soviet war (1918-1921) precipitated the incorporation of most of Ukraine into the Soviet Union. Occupied at separate times in the Second World War by the Nazis and the Soviets, Ukraine emerged under Soviet domination. At last, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine obtained a fragile independence in 1991, until on 24 February this year a new Russian invasion brought war.

In the same cemetery as Franko l discovered Maria Konopnika, (1842-1910), Polish poet, novelist, translator, advocate of women’s rights and Polish independence from Prussia and Russia, and the flowers were piled as high on her grave as they were on Franko’s. Even more surprisingly I stumbled upon the burial ground of the Polish Eaglets, young Polish volunteers who “defended” Lviv in the Polish-Ukrainian War. Polish workers began the restoration of this cemetery within a cemetery, which had been used as a truck depot after World War Two, in the late eighties, and following Polish support for Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, it officially reopened in a joint Polish-Ukrainian ceremony in 2005. And today it is the old enemy, Poland, which has opened its borders and whose people have welcomed more than two million refugees.

In the last week, the war in Ukraine has taken on ever darker and more evil tones, Russian forces sinking to new depths attacking civilian targets including schools and hospitals, and from Bucha footage has emerged of civilians who have been shot with their hands tied behind their backs. A Russian missile strike on a crowded railway station in Kramatorsk, where four thousand people were waiting to board the trains which would evacuate them to safety, killed over fifty people and injured more than a hundred. In the face of these war crimes the possibility of any reconciliation between Ukrainians and Russians seems a naïve and absurd hope. I know how easily in those circumstances I could soon burn with indiscriminate hatred for Russians, and who can fail to understand any Ukrainian who feels that way.

And yet many brave Russians although fully aware of the consequences for themselves have dared to oppose their government’s war: Marina Ovsyannikova who held up signs during a state TV news broadcast reading “Don’t believe the propaganda,” and “Russians Against the War”, was arrested and detained by riot police . Others have had their homes vandalised and lost their jobs for signing petitions against the war. Anti-war protests have been criminalised, and even referring to the attack on Ukraine as war or invasion, carries the threat of fifteen years in prison. Protestors have responded by holding up blank sheets of paper, placards reading “two words” or bearing eloquent asterisks. Blue and yellow flowers materialize at war memorials and anti-war graffiti appear. Tens of thousands, described by Putin as traitors and enemies of the state, have left Russia and now gather at protests around the world, and independent Russian journalists are working in Ukraine to break the Kremlin’s stranglehold on information; one of them, Oksana Baulina, was killed by a Russian missile in Kyiv while filming damage in the city from an earlier attack.

Franko’s poem spoke not just of smashing through rock with sledgehammers but also of building a strong dwelling and a new life. The determined courage of the Ukrainians, the generosity of the Poles, the bravery of Russians who stand up to their government, and the well-tended graves in the Lychakivske Cemetery foster hope even in the darkest of times that there will come a day when the war is over and Ukraine is free again, and the blue trains with their yellow stripe carry only carefree holiday makers, when old hatreds while not forgotten are forged into new friendships, and a new memorial may find a place alongside Franko, Konopnika, and the Polish Eaglets, remembering those Russians who stood with Ukraine.