Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement

by Harry Johnston

You know the sort of argument? Reduced to its essentials it is simply this:—That a few rich people are fond of gambling and fond of the excitement that is concentrated in the few minutes of the horse race. Some others, not so rich, believe that by combining horse-racing with a certain amount of cunning and bold cheating they can make a great deal of money. A few speculators have invested funds in spaces of open turf, and turn these spaces into race courses. Having no alternative, no safer method of gambling offered them, and being as fond of gambling as other peoples of the world, the men of the labouring classes and a few of their women, the publicans and their frequenters, army officers, farmers, and women of uncertain virtue stake their money on horses they have never seen, who may not even exist, and thus keep the industry going. And the chevaliers of this "industry," the go-betweens, the parasites of this sport, are the twelve thousand professional book-makers and racing touts.

Somehow the Turf has during the last hundred years, together with its allies the Distillers and Brewers, the Licensed Victuallers and the Press that is supported by these agencies, acquired such a hold over the Government Departments, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and Liberal politicians who are descended from county families, that it has more interest with those who govern us than the Church, the Nonconformist Conscience, the County Palatine of Lancaster or any other body of corporate opinion. So that when in September, 1913, representatives of the Turf (and no doubt of the Trade Unions) went to the Home Secretary in reference to the burning and bombing of racing stables, trainers' houses, Grand Stands and the residences of racing potentates, and said "Look here! This has GOT TO STOP," the Home Secretary and the Cabinet knew they were up against no ordinary crisis. At the same time Sir Edward Carson, the Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. F.E. Smith and nearly a third of the Colonels in the British Army of Ulster descent were actively organizing armed resistance to any measure of Home Rule; while Keltiberian Ireland was setting up the Irish Volunteers to start a Home Rule insurrection. You can therefore imagine for yourselves the mental irritability of members of the Liberal Cabinet in the autumn of the sinister year 1913. I have been told that there were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour.... Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest.

In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them: the Great War must have come almost as a relief. Not one of them was what you would call a bad man. Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who says to the recently spanked child, "You know, dear, it hurts me almost as much as it hurts you." If one met them out at dinner parties, or in an express train which they could not stop by pulling the communication cord, and sympathized with their dilemma, they would ask plaintively what they could do. They could not yield to violence and anarchy; yet they could not let women die in prison.

Of course the answer was this, but it was one they waved aside: "Dissolve Parliament and go to the Country on the one question of Votes for Women. If the Country returns a great majority favourable to that concession, you must bring in a Bill for eliminating the sex distinction in the suffrage. If on the other hand, the Country votes against the reform, then you must leave it to the women to make a male electorate change its mind. And meantime if men and women, to enforce some principle, rioted and were sent to prison for it, and then started to abstain from food and drink, why they must please themselves and die if they wanted to."

But this was just what the Liberal Ministry of those days would not do; at all costs they must stick to office, emoluments, patronage, the bestowal of honours, and the control of foreign policy. They clung to power, in fact, at all costs; even inconsistency with the bedrock principle of Liberalism: no Taxation without Representation.

It was decided in the innermost arcana of the Home Office that an example should be made of Vivie. They had evidently in her got hold of something far more dangerous than a Pankhurst or a Pethick Lawrence, a Constance Lytton or an Emily Davison. The very probable story—though the Benchers were loth to take it up—that she had actually in man's garb passed for the Bar and pleaded successfully before juries, appalled some of the lawyer-ministers by its revolutionary audacity. They might not be able to punish her on that count or on several others of the misdemeanours imputed to her; but they had got her, for sure, on Arson; and on the arson not of suburban churches, which occurred sometimes at Peckham or in the suburbs of Birmingham and made people laugh a little in the trains coming up to town and say there were far too many churches, seemed to them; but the burning down of racing establishments. That was Bolshevism, indeed, they would have said, had they been able to project their minds five years ahead. Being only in 1913 they called Vivie by the enfeebled term of Anarchist, the word applied by Punch to Mr. John Burns in 1888 for wishing to address the Public in Trafalgar Square.

So it was arranged that Vivie's trial should take place in October at the Old Bailey and that a judge should try her who was quite certain he had never stayed at a Warren Hotel; who would be careful to keep great names out of court; and restrain counsel from dragging anything in to the simple and provable charge of arson which might give Miss Warren a chance to say something those beastly newspapers would get hold of.

I am not going to give you the full story of Vivie's trial. I have got so much else to say about her, before I can leave her in a quiet backwater of middle age, that this must be a story which has gaps to be filled up by the reader's imagination. You can, besides, read for yourself elsewhere—for this is a thinly veiled chronicle of real events—how she was charged, and how the magistrate refused bail though it was offered in large amounts by Rossiter and Praed, the latter with Mrs. Warren's purse behind him. How she was first lodged in Brixton Prison and at length appeared in the dock at the Old Bailey before a Court that might have been set for a Cinematograph. There was a judge with a full-bottomed wig, a scarlet and ermine vesture, there was a jury of prosperous shopkeepers, retired half pay officers, a hotelkeeper or two, a journalist, an architect, and a builder. A very celebrated King's Counsel prosecuted—the Cabinet thus said to the Racing World "We've done all we can"—and Vivie defended herself with the aid of a clever solicitor whom Bertie Adams had found for her.

From the very moment of her arrest, Bertie Adams had refused—even though they took away his salary—to think of anything but Vivie's trial and how she might issue from it triumphant. He must have lost a stone in weight. He was ready to give evidence himself, though he was really quite unconcerned with the offences for which Vivie was on trial; prepared to swear to anything; to swear he arranged the conflagrations; that Miss Warren had really been in London when witness had seen her purchasing explosives at Newmarket (both stories were equally untrue). Bertie Adams only asked to be allowed to perjure himself to the tune of Five Years' penal servitude if that would set Vivie free. Yet at a word or a look from her he became manageable.

The Attorney General of course began something like this. "I am very anxious to impress on you," he said, addressing the jury, "that from the moment we begin to deal with the facts of this case, all questions of whether a woman is entitled to the Parliamentary franchise, whether she should have the same right of franchise as a man are matters which in no sense are involved in the trial of this issue. All you have to decide is whether the prisoner in the dock committed or procured and assisted others to commit the very serious acts of arson of which she is accused..."