In March 1914 someone tried to burn down the parish church at Clevedon. Those responsible were never caught and we’ll probably never learn their identities, but it was almost certainly the work of suffragettes.
No-one was hurt, but nonetheless we’d call it terrorism nowadays.
SUPPOSED SUFFRAGETTE OUTRAGE AT CLEVEDON, said the Western Daily Press on Monday March 23 1914.
The Vicar, Dr Charles Visger and the church keeper, Mrs Dinham, discovered the damage caused by the fire which had been set the previous night when they arrived on Sunday morning.
“Investigation showed that a determined attack had been made on the vestry, where a scene of destruction was presented.
“A large amount of cassocks & surplices had been completely consumed by the flames, which had burned through wainscoting in several places. The floor was also burnt and the ceiling charred, showing that there had been a good blaze of some time.”
A window had been smashed and the fire had been started using brown paper, resin and sulphur and a box of matches was found outside the window. It was assumed that the woodblock floor of the vestry and a lack of wind that night meant that the fire burned itself out without spreading.
On the tombstones in the churchyard “suffragette literature” was found bearing such messages as “Votes for Women” and “Apply to Asquith (the Prime Minister) and Co for Damages”.
The attack came in the middle of a spate of arson attacks around the country. The more militant wing of the women’s suffrage lobby, the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU), founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, had embarked on a campaign of destruction.
As far as they were concerned, the arrest and force-feeding of women on hunger-strike amounted to state-sponsored torture of women. Some were prepared to fight fire with fire – literally.
The Bristol University sports pavilion at Combe Dingle was burned down in the autumn of 1913 and suffragette literature left near the scene of the crime. Begbrook Mansion in Frenchay was burned down in November, and again leaflets demanding votes for women were left at the site. A house in Stoke Bishop was burned, as was another near Lansdown in Bath. Imperial Tobacco’s timber yard at Ashton Gate was torched in March and not long after the Clevedon attack the clubhouse at Failand Golf Club would be attacked.
The Clevedon fire was, by comparison with other attacks around the local area, a small matter. The church was fully insured, though there were some inconveniences: “Owing to their cassocks and surplices being destroyed, the men and boys of the choir had to take their places as they were dressed at the morning service, at the conclusion of which the 51st Psalm was sung by the congregation on their knees, followed by the hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’, in thankfulness for the preservation of the church.”
However much outrage the attack caused in the small, genteel seaside town in a far more God-fearing age, it would soon be forgotten, overshadowed by events on the Continent later in 1914. But some of the people involved in the Clevedon LitFest rediscovered it and they engaged Bristol’s Show of Strength Theatre Company (SoS) to put on an open-air show about it. It took place last weekend.
One of the real-life characters to be portrayed in the “promenade performance” is Mabel Hunt, a suffrage campaigner in early 20th century Clevedon, though she had nothing to do with the arson attack as she was no longer even in the country by 1914.
Despite Mabel’s absence, Sheila Hannon of SoS told BT why she was going to be featured anyway:
“I wanted as many real characters as possible and found three – one of whom is Mabel Hunt. Mabel lived in Clevedon and was one of over 300 women, including the Pankhurts and Pethick-Lawrences – lesser known but shouldn’t be, Emmeline Pethick was born in Clifton and also lived in Weston-Super-Mare – who marched to the Houses of Parliament in November 1910 to protest at the failure of the government to grant the promised ‘Votes For Women’.
“Over 100 women were arrested and many assaulted by the police. All were released the following day. So I had my Clevedon campaigner and started researching. I tracked down Mabel’s grandchildren and learned that Mabel left Clevedon in 1913 and was living in New Zealand by 1914, so definitely wasn’t responsible.”
She also discovered that Mabel Hunt later quit the Pankhursts’ militant WSPU and instead joined the less overtly-confrontational National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. So she probably would have been strongly opposed to arson attacks on anything.
A further twist in all this is that by 1914 Mabel was living in New Zealand, and her name appears on an electoral roll there because women in that country were given the vote in 1893! Mabel, who had long wanted the right to vote, now had it, though she had had to go to the far side of the world to get it.
In yet another twist, you might say it’s a shame that she had nothing to do with any arson attacks because her father had been … a match manufacturer!
(His name was Octavius Hunt, and Octavius Hunt Ltd. is still in business in Bristol, though it was bought out by Bryant & May shortly before the arson outrage in Clevedon. It also claims to have been the first UK firm to manufacture Bonfire Night sparklers. The firm nowadays specialises in smoke generators for crop protection and pest control.)
Mabel, who qualified as a midwife around 1908, married an Irishman, Patrick Reardon, also known as Jack Critchley, and over the coming years the couple lived in New Zealand, Ireland, New York and Australia, dying in Queensland in 1961 aged 79. She seems to have campaigned on women’s issues for the rest of her life.
Sheila Hannon is full of praise for the Clevedon LitFest team and her “lovely cast of Bristol and Somerset actors”, among whose number is Corrinne Curtis, whose martial arts experience landed her a part in the 2015 film Suffragette alongside Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep.
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