Evaline Hilda Burkitt
In April 1914, thirty-seven-year-old Evaline Hilda Burkitt (known by her middle name) and twenty-two-year-old Florence Tunks undertook an arson campaign. First, the pair set fire to two wheat stacks at a farm in Suffolk, causing £340 worth of damage. Next, they burned down the Pavilion at the Britannia Pier in Great Yarmouth. Finally, on 28th April, they attacked the Bath Hotel in Felixstowe. This last fire caused around £35,000 of damage. Nobody was hurt in any of the blazes and indeed the women had never intended for there to be any casualties. Instead, their arson campaign was part of a wider political struggle which by 1914 had developed a level of militancy which was utterly shocking by the standards of the day. Hilda and Florence were Suffragettes and their aims were simple - they would achieve Votes for Women, using Deeds not Words.
Westminster Gazette, 30th May 1914
The two women were tried at the Suffolk Assizes in Bury St Edmunds and they reportedly spent the duration of the trial with their backs turned to the magistrates, chatting among themselves. According to newspaper reports, 'Burkitt advised the judge to put on a black cap and pass sentence of death and not waste his breath [...] She asked for liberty or death'. Florence Tunks, meanwhile, 'vowed that she would be out of prison before long, and that the victory would be hers'.
Florence Tunks was sentenced to nine months imprisonment, but Burkitt received a sentence of two years, probably on account of her already impressive rap sheet. For this was far from Burkitt's first time in court - throughout her career as an activist, she had thrown stones at a train carrying the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, smashed shop windows, and burnt down a grand stand in Leeds. According to a newspaper produced by the well-known Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, both women had been forcibly fed while on remand and this force-feeding continued after their sentencing. Force-feeding was a barbaric practice used in response to the hunger strikes which imprisoned Suffragettes so frequently engaged in.
A Suffragette is force-fed, c. 1911
From The Suffragette by Sylvia Pankhurst
The experience of force-feeding was horrific. The woman was held down, often by multiple wardresses, and sometimes a steel gag was forced into her mouth, which would cause her gums to bleed. Sometimes a tube was forced into a woman's nose, but more usually it was inserted directly into her throat. Oral history testimony from Suffragettes, recorded during the 1970s by a historian named Brian Harrison, can be found here. The women's accounts of force-feeding are harrowing and many have likened it to rape. Maud Kate Smith told Harrison that
"The doctor tortured me, you see. The tube is forced up your nostrils, if it will go. It wouldn't go after he'd injured that nostril. So that it always is tender and it still bleeds, now and again, after sixty years"
Not only did women experience intense physical pain and emotional distress, but force-feeding could be extremely dangerous. Food finding its way into the lungs could cause pneumonia and pleurisy. Politicians had long been afraid that the process might eventually lead to the death of a Suffragette and thus create a martyr for the cause. Their solution to this problem was the 1913 Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Heath) Act, more commonly referred to as the Cat and Mouse Act. In essence, it meant that officials could temporarily release hunger-striking women from prison when their condition was very serious, allow them to recover, and then re-imprison them.
Not only was the Cat and Mouse Act seen by many as an assault on the civil rights of the prisoners, it was also not very effective. Many hunger-strikers disappeared, hidden by a network of sympathisers. It certainly did not break the militant spirits of the Suffragettes, though it no doubt caused lasting trauma. In the 1960s, one former Suffragette, Mary Richardson, recalled that
"I shall never forget, as long as I live, of the awful sound of the choking of women, which went on practically nearly all day by the time they got round the lot of us"
One way in which the released Suffragettes were able to evade re-capture by the authorities was with the help of an all-female group of bodyguards, set up by the WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union), Emmeline Pankhurst's militant campaigning organisation. Trained in ju-jitsu, this thirty-strong group of women sometimes even faced off the police in hand-to-hand combat, such as in the Battle of Glasgow in 1914.
The Sketch, 6th July 1910
The images above are taken from The Sketch, demonstrating that as early as 1910 Suffragettes were learning self-defence. The accompanying text explains to the reader that the woman in the photograph, Mrs Garrud, only four feet ten inches tall, had thrown the thirteen stone policeman to the ground in under ten seconds. The Suffragettes were not, the newspaper is careful to point out, learning ju-jitsu 'with any idea of scrimmaging with the police, but they feel that it is good that they should know how to protect themselves and, if necessary, throw "unpleasant young men" out of their meetings.'
Eventually, Hilda Burkitt was moved to Holloway Prison. She was reportedly being force-fed up to four times a day when the First World War broke out and the WSPU, the Suffragette organisation of which she was part, declared a truce for the duration of the war. Burkitt petitioned the government for her release, promising to end her militant action, and she left prison on 6th August 1914. In consequence of her passionate fight for women's suffrage, Hilda Burkitt had been force-fed almost three hundred times since 1909. She wanted, quite understandably, to live out the rest of her days in peace.
Burkitt would be the final woman to be force-fed at Holloway Prison. Opened in 1852, the Prison remained in use until just five years ago. A great many Suffragettes passed through its doors, but it also housed a number of other interesting and unusual characters over the years. Next week, we take a look at the dark history of HM Prison Holloway.
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