ON the afternoon of 23 October 1906 a group of roughly sixty women began making their way towards the Houses of Parliament, where, thanks to a timely wire from a ‘plain clothes man’ watching their movements, a contingent of uniformed officers from the nearby Cannon Row police station had been posted to ‘strengthen the approaches’. Initially the women – all supporters of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union – expressed only the wish to petition MPs with the ‘usual request to grant women the vote that session’, but once the Liberal whip confirmed what everyone in attendance already knew, namely that the newly installed Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had no intention of considering female enfranchisement ‘during this Parliament or at any future time’,5 things took a decidedly more animated turn.

Seizing on the propaganda value of the occasion, Mary Gawthorpe, one of the twenty women allowed inside the Central Lobby, climbed on top of the armchair next to the stern-faced statue of the earl of Iddesleigh and began addressing the crowd ‘viz. Votes for Women, Votes for Freedom, We are slaves etc.,’ as Chief Inspector Charles Scantlebury, head of police in the House of Commons, dismissively put it in his report.

Gawthorpe was immediately pulled off her makeshift platform and, along with her comrades, discourteously removed to Old Palace Yard, where ‘the poorer women who had come up from the East End’ had been standing around for hours, waiting for news. The sudden commotion revitalized the combative spirit of the ‘suffragettes’ – an epithet coined by the Daily Mail which the WSPU had been quick to reclaim8 – and many began forming human chains around the ‘ringleaders’ in order to protect them from police.

Intense scuffles with reinforced numbers of increasingly brutish constables ensued and by the early hours of the evening ten of the women – Annie Cobden-Sanderson (daughter of Richard Cobden), Annie Kenney, Adela Pankhurst and Dora Montefiore among them – were taken into custody and charged with ‘using threatening and abusive words and behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace’.