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Section 18: Arrest and Imprisonment

(18.1) In 1906 Hannah Mitchell was fined half-a-crown for assaulting a policeman at a women’s suffrage demonstration. Hannah refused to pay the fine and was sent to Strangeways Prison.

At Strangeways we were not badly treated… The wardress kindly allowed us to change in her own room, giving us a sheet to use as a screen. The prison dress was horrible, coarse and unshapely. It consisted of a wider skirt, thickly gathered at the waist, a sort of short jacket or bed gown, such as was worn a hundred years ago, in a horrible drab stuff stamped with a black arrow, one flannel singlet, a coarse calico chemise, no knickers or corsets, short thick stockings without garters and heavy shoes which would have fitted a navvy; mine were different sizes… It was very uncomfortable. It was all too big, and the absence of garters and knickers made one feel almost naked… the shoes kept slipping off, and the stockings fell down over my ankles.

We went outside Lloyd George’s meeting at Limehouse. I was busy haranguing the crowd when the police came up and arrested me. We were charged next day at Thames Police Court. I and Mrs. Leigh got the longest sentences, i.e., two months, the rest mostly got two weeks. The governor told us that if we went quietly to our cells we could keep our clothes. Then they took us off one by one after a struggle. When I was shut in the cell I at once smashed seventeen panes of glass. Then they rushed me into another cell. They forcibly undressed me and left me sitting in a prison chemise. Then I was dressed in prison clothes and taken into one of the worst cells, very dark, with double doors.

"I have come to see if there is anything I can do for you." I saw close to the barred window, and in deep shadow, Mrs. Pankhurst’s fine face, looking very tired. She thanked me. Mrs. Pankhurst pointed to the bare plank bed, like a long low table, there was something raised at the head like a mattress pillow. I could not see the foot of it, there may have been a blanket for covering at that end, but I could not see it. She added. "I hardly dare lie down on it, for it is almost certainly verminous, and I am very cold, we have no wraps of any kind.

Mary Gawthorpe was ill with an internal complaint. Mary said, with tears in her eyes, as she threw her arms round me: "Oh, and these are women quite unknown – nobody knows or cares about them except their own friends. They go to prison again and again to be treated like this, until it kills them!"

I am just back from a night with the militants… The police in solid lines turned the women into Victoria Street. Here we saw several arrests, the women all showing extraordinary courage in the rough rushes of the crowd round them… Two women, exactly in front of us threw stones at the windows. Poor shots; I don’t think the glass was cracked. A policeman flew round at them and had his arms round their necks before we could wink. The courage that dares this handling I do admire. There is a fine spirit, but whether it is not rather thrown away on these tactics remains a doubt in my mind.

I saw hundreds of women doing no violence thrown about by the police till they were black and blue, their arms twisted, wrenched out of joint, women of over 60 or 70 thrown on to the ground and trampled on, systematically kicked and pinched in the most sensitive parts of their bodies… The police hold the woman’s arms behind her, thus thrusting forward the sensitive glands of the breasts, so that it is here she receives all the pressure when pushed into a thick crowd.

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