Prisons & prisoners: some personal experiences

Contents

chap. page

Dedication

I. Intkodtjction .....

II. Mt Conversion ....

III. A Deputation to the Prime Minister

Dedication To Prisoners

When, for a short while, I shared your lot, I asked myself through all my waking hours if there were any friendly thought which could act beneficently for all prisoners, no matter how various the training of their previous Hves, no matter whether distress of circumstance, drunkenness, selfish action, cruelty, or madness had been the cause which brought them into prison.

And there seemed this one thing. It is a single idea, but needs many words to give it shape.

Lay hold of your inward self and keep tight hold. Reverence yourself. Be just, kind and forgiving to yourself. For the inner you of yourself is surely the only means of communication for you with any good influence you may once have enjoyed or hope some day to find, the only window through which you can look upon a happier and more lovable life, the only door through which some day you will be able to escape, unbarring it to your own release from all that is helpless, selfish, and unkind in your present self.

Chapter I Lntrodtjction

Some of the experiences which I have to record are of so unusual a character that I think it will help to a better understanding on the part of my readers if I briefly outline the drift of my existence before I became aware of the women's movement, and in touch with that section of it known as the '* IMihtant Suffragettes."

My father had been dead fifteen years and I was thirty -nine years old in 1906, when my narrative begins. I Hved with my mother in the country. Two sisters and two brothers had left the home when they were yomig — the sisters to marry, the brothers to train for and enter their professions. I assumed, as did all my friends and relations, that, being past the age when marriage was likely, I should always remain at home. In my early girlhood I had a yearning to take up music professionally ; again, after father's death, when unexpected financial misfortunes caused my mother great anxiety, I had longed to try my hand at journahsm ; and once more, a few years later, I had the same ambition. But these wishes, finding no favour, had m each case eventually to be repressed, and in 1906 I had neither equipment, trauiing nor inclination for an independent life.

I had been more or less of a chronic invahd through

p. B the greater part of my youth. An overmastering laziness and a fatalistic submission to events as they befeU were guiding factors in my existence. I was passionately fond of animals and of children, music was a great delight to me ; otherwise I was not given to intellectual pursuits. So far as I know, I was an average ordinary human being, except perhaps for an exaggerated disHke of society and of pubhcity in any form. I had many intimate friends, both men and women, and also children. Such mental training as I have known was chiefly due to intercourse with them. I owed to them, as well as to my mother and many members of my family, a happy life, in spite of considerable physical suffering.

In 1896 and successive years I had given secretarial help to my aunt, Mrs. C. W. Earle, in the writing of her wonderfully delightful books, beginning with " Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden." She insisted that, in return for my small and mostly mechanical services, we should share the profits of the sale. The book ran into many editions, and she held to her bargain, but I never felt as if I had a right to the money. Her widely sympathetic and stimulating companionship had a great influence on my mind. Thanks to her investigations in theories of diet, I became a strict vegetarian. My health gained in all directions and I gradually freed myself from the so-called " constitutional " rheumatism from which I had suffered since my infancy. I realised, too, that all these years I had caused untold suffering that I might be fed, and determined that in future the unnatural death of an animal should not be necessary to make up my bill of fare. My

INTRODUCTION 3

vitality increased, but the notion of a vocation apart from my family and home remained as foreign to my ideas as it was then to the average British spinster of my class.

In the year 1906 my godmother, Lady Bloomfield, died. She had shown me much kindness and I had never found an opportunity to serve her in any way, the generosity had been all on her side ; yet, at her death, she left me some money, without any conditions as to how I should spend it. It gave me a strange new feeling of power and exhilaration. I look back upon this event as being spiritually the starting point in my new life, of which this book will tell, although, from the practical point of view, it seems only by a series of coincidences that my after experiences were evolved from it.

I looked about me with a view to spending the money. I had a fancy to put it to some pubHc use. The commonly accepted channels of philanthropy did not appeal to me. I shifted my inquiries in other directions. I remember that at this time I was chiefly occupied with the idea that reformers were for the most part town dwellers, their philosophy and schemes attuned to those surroundings. There seemed to me need for a counteracting influence to attempt reform and regeneration on behalf of country dwellers. The noiseless revolution which had been worked in a few decades by the system of compulsory education seemed to me tainted throughout by the ideals of townsfolk. The influence of teachers and clergy, of public authorities in general, sets before the nation's children and their parents ideals which mould them into townsfolk.

B 2

Country craft and country lore grow less, and are less honoured in every decade. There is no room for them in the national curriculum. This tendency, nevertheless, seems unnatural, imposed by a species of force on a reluctant though inarticulate people. Some temperaments cannot acchmatise themselves to town dwelling. The Hfe of cities will always appear to them artificial, repeUent from the physical conditions it imposes and the mental outlook resulting from these. Rain, earth and air are better scavengers than any municipal corporation. The ceaseless cleansing, yet never making clean, of town existence has from my childhood fretted my imagination and produced a sense of incarceration. In towns, the earth is laid over with tombstones, metalled roads or floors of wood. Avenues of bricks and mortar shut out a great part of the sky, Kmiting into a mere ceihng the heavens which should be our surrounding. A town had always seemed to me a " deterrent " workhouse at best, and often a punitive prison besides.

The monster of industriahsm, which followed in the wake of the discovery of steam and the dethroning of handicraft by artificially-propelled machinery, may one day be bridled and controlled so as to be a servant of humanity, a fellow worker in the day-to-day glory of creation ; but for the present it is stiU a wild beast, a dragon at large, deahng pestilence and death with its fiery breath, combated in panic, its evils evaded rather than faced, its power a nightmare breeding fear and subjection. Instead of harnessing this new force to every branch of our existence, ordering it to serve us at our command.

INTRODUCTION 5

we have cringed before it, left our normal lives and drained our energies to congregate in its grimy temples and worship at its shrine. Poor, bhnd force that it is, we are determined to make it an idol, and for sake of the return in money which its mechanical rotations produce, we have been willing to sacrifice the interests both of the human beings which should control it and of the soil, the land, which alone can produce the raw material for its task.

How to transform this Moloch from a tyrannous master to a helpful, submissive friend, that was the problem which seemed to cry out for solution above all others. I looked around to see how the needs of country folk were able to express themselves, and everywhere there was presented to my inquiries a comphcated machinery of administration both national and local — voting rights for election of parhamentary, municipal, county, district and parish councils. But tliis machinery was apparently bom and bred of urban conditions, super-imposed upon the rural districts, in no way native to them, not of spontaneous growth. This succession of councils, instituted with the apparent purpose of watching one another, and, if necessary, bringing pressure to bear upon one another, were for the most part hfeless formahties, having no organic Hfe, no breath of reahty to set them in motion. The only fmiction which gives them any tangible vitaHty is their power of imposing taxation and levying rates. You find in the country districts that members of these different bodies are the same individuals. The parish councillor who is expected to bring

6 PEISONS AND PRISONERS

pressure to bear on the district councillor, who again must appeal, if need be, to the county councillor, is one and the same person who, as Hkely as not, is also the representative of the district on the board of guardians, and he is sure to be selected again to work the administrative machinery of every new device that comes along for the amelioration of social evils. In other words, the elective principle is a farce in rural districts. The electorate are dead both to their powers and their duties. They live, in fact, under a system which is anything but representative. They Hve rather, under the devitalised husk of the feudal system, the poorer members of the community dependent, in the worst sense, upon those who are their socia superiors, but no longer receiving from them any security of well-being, and neither class extending to the other, with rare exceptions, either the loyalty or devotion which seem to have been bound up with the feudal traditions of our forefathers. Was it possible to wake up this inert mass, so that they should co-operate with one another, and thus b< strong enough to grasp the present machinery o: national Government, and either utilise it or alter i< to one better suited to their needs ?

Each of my inquiries in turn led me back to th individuals concerned, to the human beings them selves. What were their homes, their ambitions thoughts, beliefs ? What guidance do they give t those who wish to serve them ? I groped my wa^ blindly and acquired knowledge only in a negativ sense by a series of failures. I gleaned two genera precepts from my investigations. They were these

INTRODUCTION 7

It is useless to try and help the lives of a community without consulting the individuals whom you hope to benefit, and that to benefit the fife conditions of men does not necessarily benefit the life conditions of women, although their interests may be apparently identical as to social grade, locahty, rehgious and other beHefs.

After a series of barren experiments, I stumbled by chance on a piece of social radium, a regenerative agency that bore good fruit and that contained an element of spontaneous joy most refreshing compared to the oppressive straight- jackets of national or private philanthropists. I heard of the revival of folk songs and dances. I went to see and hear them. The first performance opened the door for me into a new paradise. The Esperance Club of working girls had been the means of bringing to Hfe researches of antiquarian musical students. This club had evidently been for many years an unusually successful social enterprise, but the discovery of a lost treasure in the shape of traditional songs and dances gave it a new inspiration. Both words and tunes of the songs have come, generation after generation, from the heart of the English folk. Each generation, each individual who has sung them, has added or omitted some little touch, so that in these songs, which have been mostly collected from old men and women over eighty years of age, is expressed the very soul of English national sentiment. The same with the dances. They were traditional in families or localities, they had been handed do\vn from father to son, and were as truly folk dances as the songs were folk songs. Songs and dances alike are full of hfe on the land and love of the land, of flowers, animals and crops, of the daily Hves of men, women and children. Dramatic, tragic and comic incidents find spontaneous expression, and every one of them tells of a vigorous and mainly joyous existence. The girls of this club learnt the Morris dance first from two Oxfordshire countrymen. Both the dances and songs were acquired easily *' by a sort of spiritual sixth sense," as if the rhythm and meaning of them were latent in their being and were easily reawakened. The girls not only learnt quickly, but were inspired to teach others, young girls of seventeen and eighteen showing an amazing faciHty and power of organisation in this matter. One of these came, at my eager request, to teach in our village, and, after one week, men, women and children were ahve with these friendly, joy-giving, native arts. The following year a girl teacher came to us again with renewed success.

In the autumn, 1908, I was invited by the secretary of the club. Miss Mary Neal, herself a wonderful organiser, to share a seaside hohday with her girls. In those days I never left home save for family reasons, or for some very exceptional matter. I, therefore, refused the invitation. I happened to mention the proposal the next day to my mother. She said : " Why don't you go ? " I immediately went, httle reahsing that this visit would lead to a most unexpected series of experiences.

I

Chapter II

It was in August — September, 1908, at " The Green Lady Hostel," Littlehampton, the hoUday house of the Esperance Girls' Club, that I met IMrs. Pethick Lawrence and Miss Annie Kenney. I was two or three days in the house with them without discovering that they were Suffragettes or that there was anything unusual about their Uves. But I reahsed at once that I was face to face with women of strong personahty, and I felt, though at first vaguely, that they represented something more than themselves, a force greater than their own seemed behind them. Their remarkable individual powers seemed illumined and enhanced by a Hght that was apart from them as are the colours and patterns of a stained -glass window by the sun shining through it. I had never before come across this kind of spirituahty. I have since found it a characteristic of all the leaders in the mihtant section of the woman's movement, and of many of the rank and file. I was much attracted by Mrs. Lawrence, and became intimate with her at once on the strength of our mutual friendship for Ohve Schreiner. We had, besides, many other interests and sympathies in common. The first Sunday that we were together, the girls of the club were asked to come in early that evening, so that Jessie Kenney, Annie Kenney's sister, who had only recently been released from Holloway, might tell them of her prison experiences. I then realised that I was amongst Suffragettes. I immediately confessed to them that although I shared their wish for the enfranchisement of women, I did not at all sympathise with the measures they adopted for bringing about that reform. I had, however, always been interested in prisons and recognised from the first that, incidentally, the fact of many educated women being sent to gaol for a question of conscience must do a great deal for prison reform, and I was deHghted at this opportunity of hearing first-hand something about the inner life of a prison. I listened eagerly and was horrified at some of the facts recorded. Amongst these I remember specially that the tins in which the drinking water stood were cleaned with soap and brick dust and not washed out, the tins being filled only once or at most twice in twenty -four hours ; the want of air in the cells ; the conduct of prison officials towards the prisoners.

Having betrayed my disapproval of the Suffragette " tactics," which seemed to me unjustified, unreasonable, without a sense of pofitical responsibihty, and as setting a bad example in connection with a reform movement of such prominence, there was naturally something of coolness and reserve in my further intercourse with Mrs. Pe thick Lawrence and the Kenneys. But before their brief stay at the club came to an end, I achieved a talk with each of the leaders.

One evening, after incessant rain, Annie Kenney and I marched arm-in-arm round the garden.

under dripping trees. I explained that though I had always been for the extension of the suffrage to women, it did not seem to me a question of prime urgency, that many other matters of social reform seemed more important, and I thought class prejudice and barriers more injurious to national welfare than sex barriers. I was deeply impressed with her reply. She said, in a tone of utmost conviction : " Well, I can only tell you that I, who am a working-class woman, have never known class distinction and class prejudice stand in the way of my advancement, whereas the sex barrier meets me at every turn." Of course, she is a woman of great character, courage and abihty, which gives her exceptional faciKties for overcoming these drawbacks, but her contention that such powers availed her nothing in the face of sex prejudices and disabihties, and the examples she gave me to bear out her argument, began to Kft the scales of ignorance from my eyes. She was careful to point out that the members of her own family had been remarkably free from sex prejudice, and her illustrations had no taint of personal resentment. She explained how the lot of women being not understood of men, and they being the only legislators, the woman's part had always got laid on one side, made of less importance, sometimes forgotten altogether. She told how amongst these offices of women was the glorious act of motherhood and the tending of Httle children. Was there anything in a man's career that could be so honourable as this ? Yet how often is the woman who bears humanity neglected at such times, so that life goes from her, or she is given no money to support her child. I felt that through Annie Kenney's whole being throbbed the passion of her soul for other women, to hft from them the heavy burden, to give them life, strength, freedom, joy, and the dignity of human beings, that in all things they might be treated fairly with men. I was struck by her expression and argument, it was straightforward in its simplicity, yet there was inspiration about her. All that she said was obvious, but in it there was a call from far off, something inevitable as the voice of fate. She never sounded a note of sex-antipathy ; it was an unalloyed claim for justice and equity of development, for women as for men.

Then Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and I, during a day's motoring expedition, achieved a rare talk out. She met all my arguments, all my prejudices and false deductions with counter-arguments, and above all with facts of which I had till then no conception. I trusted her because of what I had learnt of her personality, her character, mind, wide education and experience, and was to a certain extent at once impressed ; still I only half beheved many of the things she reported, the real purport of her statements did not yet sink into my soul as they were soon to do, fact upon fact, result upon result, as I found out their truth for myself.

During my stay at Littlehampton I witnessed a scene which produced a great impression upon my conscience. One morning, while wandering through the little town, I came on a crowd. All kinds of people were forming a ring round a sheep which had escaped as it was being taken to the slaughterhouse. It looked old and misshapen. A vision suddenly rose in my mind of what it should have been on its native mountain-side with all its forces rightly developed, vigorous and independent. There was a hideous contrast between that vision and the thing in the crowd. With growing fear and distress the sheep ran about more clumsily and became a source of amusement to the onlookers, who laughed and jeered at it. At last it was caught by its two gaolers, and as they carried it away one of them, resenting its struggles, gave it a great cuff in the face. At that I felt exasperated. I went up to the men and said, " Don't you know your own business ? You have this creature absolutely in your power. If you were holding it properly it would be still. You are taking it to be killed, you are doing your job badly to hurt and insult it besides." The men seemed ashamed, they adjusted their hold more efficiently and the crowd slunk away. From my babyhood I have felt a burning indignation against unkindness to animals, and in their defence I have sometimes acted with a courage not natural to me. But on seeing this sheep it seemed to reveal to me for the first time the position of women throughout the world. I reaHsed how often women are held in contempt as beings outside the pale of human dignity, excluded or confined, laughed at and insulted because of conditions in themselves for which they are not responsible, but which are due to fundamental injustices with regard to them, and to the mistakes of a civifisation in the shaping of which they have had no free share. I was ashamed to remember that although my sympathy had been spontaneous with regard to the wrongs of animals, of children, of men and women who belonged to down-trodden races or classes of society, yet that hitherto I had been blind to the sufferings peculiar to women as such, which are endured by women of every class, every race, every nationality, and that although nearly all the great thinkers and teachers of humanity have preached sex-equahty, women have no champions among the various accepted political or moral laws which serve to mould public opinion of the present day.

Nothing could have exceeded the patience, the considerate sympathy even, with which both Annie Kenney and Mrs. Lawrence endured my arguments, arguments, as I now reahse them to have been, without any genuine element, stereotyped and shallow. Before we parted, Mrs. Lawrence said to me, and it was the only one of her remarks which savoured in the least of the contempt which my attitude at that time so richly deserved, " You are sufficiently interested in our policy to criticise it, will you be sufficiently interested to study its cause and read up our case ? "

For two months I *' read up " the subject as I had never read in my life before ; I took in the weekly paper Votes for Women , the only pubHcation which gave events as they happened, not as they were supposed to happen. I attended as many meetings as I could, and the breakfasts of released suffrage prisoners, whereat the spirit behind this movement, its driving force, seemed best exemphfied. Above all, I watched current politics from a different point of view. I still held back from being converted, I criticised and argued at every turn, over every fresh demonstration of the W.S.P.U., but I began to realise of what stuff the workers in the movement were made ; what price they paid for their services so gladly given ; how far removed they were from any taint of self-glorification, and how amazingly they played the game of incessantly advertising the Cause without ever developing the curse of selfadvertisement. I have never been amongst people of any sort who were so entirely free from selfconsciousness, self-seeking and self -vaunting.

At this juncture of my conversion I was much concerned with the arguments of Anti-Suffragists. I wrote a pamphlet to refute their points of view, as generally presented in newspapers and magazines. I was always, as it were, stopping on my road to combat their attitude. It was only after considerably longer experience that I reahsed the waste of energy entailed by this process, since the practical opposition which blocks the way to the legal removal of sex disability is not due to those men or women who have courage to pubHcly record their opposition, but to those who take shelter in verbally advocating the cause, while at the same time opposing any effective move for its achievement. Anti-suffrage arguments or agitations should, of course, be met whenever they present themselves, but it soon became clear to me that in private intercourse many people put them forward without any conviction, merely as a way of opening the conversation, and while at heart much more interested in the positive than the negative side of the question.

The same is true of public audiences. The assertive claim to the value of voting rights for men, wherever these are denied, is perennially educating the public to our contention ; one has but to catch them "at it " to illustrate the claim of women. The drawbacks resulting from laws and customs based on sex bias are also constantly put forward by Anti-Suffragist men themselves, when they are not considering the possible infringement of their own monopolies. Lord Cromer has headed the agitation against freedom for women in Great Britain. When he was responsible for the welfare of Egypt, he wrote, concerning the Prophet Mahomet : " Unfortunately the great Arabian reformer of the seventh century was driven by the necessities of his position to do more than found a religion. He endeavoured to found a social system. The reasons why Islam as a social system has been a complete failure are manifold. First and foremost Islam keeps women in a position of marked inferiority." He quotes Stanley Lane Poole in corroboration : " The degradation of women in the East is a canker that begins its destructive work early in childhood, and has eaten into the whole system of Islam." Lord Cromer then draws conclusions worthy of the most ardent Suffragette : " Look now to the consequences which result from the degradation of women in Mahomedan countries. It cannot be doubted that the seclusion of women exercises a baneful effect on Eastern society. The arguments on this subject are indeed so commonplace that it is unnecessary to dwell on them. It will be sufficient to say that seclusion, by confining the sphere of women's interest to a very Kmited horizon, cramps the intellect and withers the mental development of one-half of the population in Moslem countries. . . . Moreover, inasmuch as women, in their capacities of wives and mothers, exercise a great influence over the characters of their husbands and sons, it is obvious that the seclusion of women must produce a deteriorating effect on the male population, in whose presumed interests the custom was originally estabhshed, and is still maintained " ("Modem Egypt," Vol. II., chapter entitled "DweUers in Egypt," pp. 134, 155, 156, First Edition). The contention of woman Suffragists could not be more reasonably presented. Add to this the behef of Enghshmen in the power of the vote to hft from degradation and to widen the outlook of citizens ; their attitude towards rebeUions on behalf of constitutional rights by Russians , Turks, Persians, and Uitlanders of South Africa ; the principles of every constitution in which Britishers have had a hand, notably in Australasia and South Africa, and the case is complete. To meet the Anti-Woman Suffragist arguments, it is only necessary to quote their own utterances.

My own researches had shown me not only the grievous harm to women from the inequahties of law and custom with regard to them, but that in many matters concerning men, and in practically all questions relating to children, the help of women was needed with an urgency that would no longer justify delay. I learnt that before resorting to mihtancy the women's organisations had for many years past succeeded in obtaining a majority of supporters in

P. o the House of Commons, and the backing of leading men of both parties. It was startling to realise that the professed advocacy of such men as Lord Beacons - field, the late Lord Salisbury and Mr. Arthur Balfour had not moved the Conservative party in any way to assist their cause. When the Liberal Government was returned to power in 1906, under the leadership of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, he himself was a declared Suffragist, as were all but a few of the men of most influence in his Cabinet, including Mr. Birrell, Mr. Buxton, Mr. John Morley and Mr. John Burns. Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Haldane had themselves introduced a Woman Suffrage Bill in 1889. Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Runciman and Mr. Winston Churchill, who joined the Cabinet in 1908, were strong verbal advocates of votes for women. The women had tried repeatedly, and always in vain, every peaceable means open to them of influencing successive Governments. Processions and petitions were absolutely useless. I saw the extreme need of their position, the ineffectiveness of every method hitherto adopted to persuade these professed Suffragists to put their theories into practice. But I stiU held aloof from completely backing their militant action owing to mistrustfuhiess bred of ignorance as to its true nature.