We’ve reached a time of rising violence in English history. This episode concentrates firstly, and briefly, on the violence around the growing militancy of the trade union movement, worrying and ugly though not even remotely comparable to what was happening in the US at the time – these things are all relative…

Next we return to the women’s suffrage movement, to the growing divergence between the Suffragists of Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Suffragettes of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, as the former stuck to the commitment to campaigning by legal means only and the latter moved increasingly towards violent actions.

But the changes were also producing internal splits within the WSPU itself. We talk in this episode about what happened as the Pankhursts fell out with each other, leading to Adela Pankhurst’s departure to Australia and Sylvia’s expulsion from the WSPU, with her organisation emerging as the East London Federation of Suffragettes, wedded as firmly as ever to the cause of the working class and the Labour Party, and close to one of that party’s most fervent supporters of votes for women, George Lansbury.

Finally, we mention the one martyr’s death for the Suffragette cause, that of Emily Davison, an iconic event in the campaign, though perhaps not quite what many people believe it to have been.

Illustration: The funeral procession for Emily Davison. Postcar print by Ferdinand Louis Kehrhahn & Co, June 1913. National Portrait Gallery x45196

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.