[rollei_list] Bicycles, the Pankhurst Sisters, and Sasquach, grossly OT
- From: Marc James Small <msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:58:37 -0400
At 04:03 PM 6/8/06 +0100, David Restall - System Administrator wrote:
>I was out a couple of weeks ago on Emily (so called because like all
>Suffragettes she spends a lot of time chained to railings)
Wow! What a great name! The reference might be a bit obscure, though, for
some USians.
Emily (full name, Emmeline) Pankhurst was a "suffragette" -- a female
campaigner for extending the franchise to women -- in the Edwardian and
Georgian era (floruit, 1903 or so to 1914). One favorite tactic was to
hold public protests (which drew out all of the Press of the day, precisely
as do similar events in our own time) and to chain themselves to those iron
railings then common in the financial, legal, and professional areas of
cities. The police would have to forcibly remove them, which caused a bit
of a stink as the Press would then file reports of "police brutality"
complete with pictures of screaming and kicking women being carried away by
stolid-faced Bobbies. In those days, men only touched women on those
occasios when the women rolled over and "thought of Britain" in the dark of
the night. The Fourth Estate has ALWAYS pandered to the public prejudice.
Such women would occasionally be arrested and would then go on
hunger-strikes. The screws would then, after an appropriate span of time,
force-feed the women, which would lead to another spate of huge
splutterings in the Press -- the force-feeding process then in use involved
the insertion of rubber tubes down the esophagus, and HOW the British
gentry and yeomanry were revolted at the thought of those male hands
mauling female flesh, and with force at that! This led to such delights as
the "Cat and Mouse Act" which allowed the government to release women
approaching death and then to re-arrest them once they had recovered their
health. (Eventually, an act was passed which precluded the use of
force-feeding in UK jails; Bobby Sands, the IRA thug who starved himself
to death in the late 1970's while in British custody was a putative victim
of that last.)
The violent wing of the Suffragette Movement was headed up by two sisters,
Christobel and Emmeline Pankhurst who were the leaders of the Women's
Politial and Social Union. In 1910, they turned to real violence, and
began a campaign which the modern IRA could only hold in respect: they
smashed windows, set fire to mansions, and even set of a bomb or three --
including one at Westminster Abbey -- to make their point. But the
movement lost a lot of steam when Emily Dawson ran in front of the entry
owned by King George V, Anmer, at Epsom in 1913. The British began to view
the Suffragettes at that point as dangerous nut-cases and sympathy for the
movement died. (The British Press, of course, reported this as
"SUFFRAGETTE TRAMPLED BY KING'S HORSE!, leading many to believe that she
had been killed by a horse ridden by the king. George V did not especially
like to ride and was not noted for spending a lot of time aboard the equine
species.)
The best brief treatment of this in the 12th edition of THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA
BRITANNICA, though my own copy is inaccessible at the nonce as it is on the
shelf behind a bunch of packed boxes of cameras in preparation for my move.
Another great source is the dated but most eloquent THE STRANGE DEATH OF
LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield, work more than four decades old and
of a pronounced leftist bent but still a grand read. (Dangerfield noted of
Lord Willoughby de Broke, a leader of the "Backwoodsmen" opposition to the
House of Lords Reform of 1910 that he "thought clearly, wrote well, and
was not more than 200 years behind his times". I would like those words
for my epitaph, though I shall have to live for another sixty years or so
to avoid copyright problems, I fear! I might use Dr Johnson's "[N]othing
concentrates a man's mind so much as the knowledge that he is to be hanged
a week hence" in its stead: I suspect that this is now in the public domain.
I have never had such a neat name with such a finely tuned and subtle
reference as your calling your bike "Emily". I did once name a Great Dane
I once owned "Sasquatch" due to the inordinate size of its paws, but that
was hardly subtle. ("Sasquatch" is the Native American Agrarian Reformer
name for a Yeti-wannabe in the Pacific Northwest better known as "Big Foot".)
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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