Decima Moore

No Vote No Census! Night

Evening Standard & St James Gazette :3rd April 1911

Aldwych Skating Rink London

I have had the unusual experience of being counted out in the company of hundreds of militant suffragists of the WSPU who have stayed in the Aldwych Skating Rink all night – They started to skate at five o’clock, and the interminable circling has made me think and blink in circles. I am glad it is all over. It has been a long and cold vigil – nine and a half hours. The meeting went with a swing from the start. Dr Ethel Smyth led the audience in the chorus, ‘The March of the Women’, and members of the Actresses’ Franchise League, headed by Miss Decima Moore, in a gorgeous evening gown of gold and black, thrust home the Suffragist arguments by the recitals of Suffragist poems and other pieces – and a Spanish lady trilled a melodious Spanish song.

Kitty Marion

Unpublished Memoir

Joining the Militants

I joined the ranks and to the stirring music of the ‘Marseillaise’, mostly, marched along Oakley Street, Kings Road, Sloane Street, and Knightsbridge into Hyde Park. I had thought it quite funny, like a pantomime Grand March, but when I listened to the speakers, I became serious. I heard my own ideas and ideals expressed much better than I could ever express them – the scales were falling from my eyes and I recognized the other ‘mad women’, the women who had actually been demanding changes in conditions of which I had practically only been ‘talking in my dreams’ –

As a member of the Actor’s Association and the Variety Artists’ Federation, I voted for the executive, then why should not women vote for members of Parliament? So I joined the militants –

One of first things I learned was to sell the paper Votes for Women on the street. That was the ‘acid’ test. All new recruits who were anxious to ‘do something’ were told the best thing they could do was take a bundle of papers and show the ‘faith that was in them’ by standing on the streets with it, even if they didn’t sell any, as long as they held up Votes for Women to the public and advertised the cause.

What a lesson in self-denial, self-abnegation, self-discipline! The first time I took my place on the ‘Island’ in Piccadilly Circus, near the flower sellers, I felt as if every eye that looked at me was a dagger piercing through and I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. However, that feeling wore off and I developed into quite a champion paper-seller. I also carried sandwich boards in poster parades, advertising meetings and important events.

My friends all reacted differently to my interest in Votes for Women. Some always thought I was crazy, now they were sure. Some had always credited me with more sense, while others were converted, since it must be right if I, with all my common sense, believed in it – Mr Henri Gros, who had booked me several times, told me I need not ask him for any more work. He died soon after. A girl with whom I had played the leading part in a dramatic sketch told me how in the course of conversation with her agent, he asked who had played the other part and when she mentioned my name, he said, ‘Oh, that bloody Suffragette, she’d better not come here for anything.’

Unpublished Memoirs: 1914

And one fine morning, Tuesday April 16^th, the governor, Dr Paton, instead of the stern official, made his entrance into my cell like a jolly human being, happy as a sand-boy with the joyous, sparkling greeting, ‘Well, Ginger!’ He had brought my release in a ‘Cat and Mouse’ licence for 6 days. It would have taken longer than that to repair the damage His Majesty’s Christian Government had done to me. Fourteen weeks and two days, forcibly fed 232 times, for the last 5 weeks and 5 days three times a day. I lost 36 pounds in weight –

Friends who came to see me at Nurse Pine’s Nursing Home to which I was taken, were shocked at my changed appearance. An old woman of seventy, they said I looked. My age was forty-three.

Kitty Marion

Inez Bensusan

TRUE WOMANHOOD

A New Cinematograph Play

A very ……wring play, written by Miss Bensusan, and with Miss Decima Moore,  Miss Auriol Lee and Mr Ben Webster as the principal actors, will be see at the Cinematograph Theatre in a new play. It sets forth the trials of a sweated woman worker (Miss Bensusan) for whom, thanks to her drunken husband (Mr Ashton) there is nothing left but the workhouse.     ….however she is saved by the suffragette heroine (Miss Decima Moore) who comes as a fairy godmother to the aid of the unhappy woman, and brings about a reconciliation between the man and wife, and helps them to make a fresh start in life. The interest never flags for one moment. Two scenes that will especially appeal to every Suffragette represent a poster parade advertising the great Procession of June 17^th (the leader being Miss Auriol Lee) and a mass meeting at election time addressed by a leading politician (Mr Ben Webster) who is interrupted by Suffragettes (Miss Decima Moore) and others, subsequently ejected amidst a tremendous uproar – a most realistic scene. Mr Barker (of Barker’s Motion Photography) has most kindly undertaken to produce the film and has devoted unfailing attention to the play. Every member of the Women’s Freedom League can help to make the play a success in the following ways.

Visit the Cinematograph Theatre in your district and ask if this play is to be seen there. If it is, get together a group of friends and sympathisers, and go in a body to see it. If not, ask the manager if he has heard anything about it, and give him the title of the play, ‘True Womanhood’ and the address where he can buy the film: Barker’s Motion Photography Limited, 1 Soho Square, WC. Also promise him that you will undertake to bring a large number of people.

from The Vote 10^th June 1911.

Sime Seruya

To Secure a Conviction: the Case of Miss Seruya

 …Two ordinary policemen and a serjeant swore, first that the defendant had been arrested on the pavement outside the pit door of the Lyceum Theatre; secondly that she had been warned by each in turn that she was causing an obstruction by selling VOTES FOR WOMEN and giving away pamphlets; and thirdly that she had slapped one constable on the face with VOTES FOR WOMEN, struggled violently when arrested and kicked all three on their shins. Miss Seruya who is one the finest women in the movement , who has given generously of her money and her services and who was one of the first to suffer imprisonment for the Cause, gave evidence on oath that she had been tols once  by one policeman to stop selling on the footpath; secondly, that she had immediately complied by stepping into the roadway; secondly that she had not again attempted  to dispose of her wares from the pavement; thirdly that she was selling “Alice in Ganderland” the book of the play, tht she was not giving away pamphlets or anything lese, that she had not a single copy of VOTES FOR WOMEN in her possession…; fourthly , that she was arrested on the steps of the theatre while walking up with  friends to attend the perfomance…

…Miss Seruya was not sentenced to a term of imprisonment but merely ‘bound over’…. If Miss Seruya had been unable to employ counsel, and had not made it clear that she was determined, if necessary to make a cause celebre of the case, the verdict might have been otherwise.

As I left the Court I saw two men of the working class being rudely hustled into the dock. I feared whatever the cost, a conviction in their case would be secured.

Extract from report by M.Slieve McGowan in The Vote 11^th November, 1911

Lillah McCarthy

There were baskets of paper and there was the blotting paper, the solid austere ornaments of the Prime Minister’s desk. Fervour for the cause took hold of me. I felt like a Joan of Arc of the ballot-box. Martyrdom or not, the occasion must be seized. I opened my box of grease-paints, took out the reddest stick I could find and wrote across the blotting-paper ‘Votes for Women’. I went out of the room exultant. When the rehearsal for which I had gone to Downing Street was over, Mr Asquith came to me. We had tea together. He asked, ‘Why do you think women should have the vote?’ By Heavens, I told him. I poured out arguments in no unstinted measure. He greetd me with a quizzical smile which, whilst it did not discourage me, forced me to wonder if the weight of my arguments was a great as their volume.’

from Myself and My Friends by Lillah McCarthy 

Eva Moore

At a time when forcible feeding was being resorted to very much, two girls, who were suffragists, were presented at court. They were both of very good social position and very charming. One of them on being presented to the King said, ‘Your Majesty, won’t you stop forcible feeding?’ She was promptly hustled out of the presence and the press the following day were full of ‘the insult offered to the King’. It may have been, probably was, the wrong way  to attempt to do it; but I did feel, and still feel, that the girl must have called up every ounce of courage she possessed to say what she did. At a meeting the next day I ventured to say what I have just written here, ending with ‘Whatever one may feel about the wisdom or propriety of her action, you must take off your hat to the girl for her courage.’ Then the storm burst. That evening I found headline in the papers; ‘Eva Moore takes off her hat to the woman who insulted the King’, and so on, it was astonishing. The result was rather dreadful; men I had never seen wrote to me, wrote the most abusive, indecent  letters I have ever read or dreamed could be written… had I not already been a suffragist those letters would have made me  one!  However, it came to an end, and I survived, though I admit at the time it distressed me very much indeed.

from Exits and Entrances by Eva Moore

Irene Vanbrugh

Drury Lane was packed to suffocation. The meeting opened more or less quietly when, to my consternation, two speakers with militant leanings stirred up a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and shouting from an audience which I gathered must have been almost entirely composed of those in favour of any form of attack. When my turn came to speak, I knew I was bound to encounter opposition, but I had made up my mind to make my position clear… It came quickly, for no sooner had they realised the attitude I was taking in the matter than there were shouts of ‘Sit down’, ‘Why did she come?’ etc., etc. However by this time all cowardice had left me. I finished my say and was followed by Lena Ashwell, a very prominent member of the movement, who said that while she appreciated my wishing to clarify my own attitude, it was not possible for the AFL to disassociate themselves from either side of the campaign. In these circumstances guests left the stage.

from To Tell My Story by Irene Vanbrugh

Ellen Terry

(Adeline Bourne, playing the Woman, introduced all the other characters),

Ellen Terry as Nance Oldfield:

By your leave,

Nance Oldfield does her talking for herself!

If you, Sir Prejudice had had your way,

There never  would be actress on the boards.

Some lanky squeaky boy would play my parts:

And though I say it, there’d have been a loss!

The stage would be as dull as now tis’ merry

No Oldfield, Woffington or Ellen Terry!

from A Pageant of Great Women by Cicely Hamilton

by Pamela Colman Smith

Janette Steer

The actress in joining this woman’s movement is absolutely impersonal. She has no grievance, her remuneration is the same as her brother artiste for the same work; on the stage there is no inferior sex: the woman is as necessary as the man; and therefore all honour to my artiste-comrades who are throwing themselves heart and should into this glorious ‘dawn of womanhood’ for she does it with no thought of self or idea that it will bring any benefit to her personally. No; she is doing it for the toilers, the less fortunate sister, who has –   heaven knows – only too many grievances, grievances and burdens – which are bearing her to the ground, crushing the life and spirit and pluck out of her, so that she seems to  have lost all desire even to save herself.

I cannot be thankful enough when I think of what this Suffrage Movement is doing for us women; the wonderful education it is affording us; the political, spiritual and moral education that is being carried on by the Suffrage meetings; the literature, the comradeship that has sprung up amongst us, the kindred souls drawing together, silently sounding each other, as it were, to see if the keynote rang true, weighing one another in the balance and not finding any wanting. And the “reverberations of our spiritual emergencies” always give   back the same answer. Heart-whole for the Cause. And is the cause limited to the right to a political vote? We know how much more fundamental it is than that, for it has sprung out of our very foundations, our spiritual longings and necessity of being.

I look upon this movement as the salvation of the race; in saving and raising herself woman must eventually save the man for we are one; and the woman cannot leave him behind, she must take him with her.

from THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND THE SALVATION OF THE RACE

by Janette Steer, The Vote, Sat 1 June, 1912

Rose Mathews

It is constantly stated by the opponents of organisation and reform that actors are helpless before the supply and demand that the present struggles of irregular employment and inadequate salaries are due to such natural causes as over-competition and bad theatrical business, causes over which actors themselves have no control.

…The Actors’ Association and the Actors’ Union cry out alike for the qualified actor, but where and how this qualification is to be gained, or purchased, and what steps must be taken to reach the degree of qualification required, are left to schools, agents, managers, and middle-men generally to answer.

And yet it is precisely from the ranks of this amateur, novice or beginner that the perpetual flood of underselling actors is derived. Establishing a £2 minimum in the Actors’ Association agency or advocating its establishment in the Actors’ Union, will not discourage a single would-be actor from entering the profession by any means that may happen to offer themselves.

Our recruits of today become at once our competitors of today and tomorrow. The novice of the present is the actor of the future, and any improvement in the present state of affairs requires our co-operation and sympathy.

from ‘The Amateur Question’ by Rose Mathews, press article 30^th July 1908

Pamela Colman Smith

I owed a great deal to Yoshio Markino, for taking me to the house of Miss Pamela Colman Smith in the Boltons. She was an artist who had been discovered in Jamaica (or perhaps on a visit to America) by Ellen Terry who had brought her to England. She had a weekly ‘evening’ in her studio and I was soon one of the fortunate ones with a permanent invitation. There were always actors and actresses at these evenings, and sometimes Ellen Terry herself would illumine the whole room just by being there. Here I met for the first time W. B. Yeats whose poems Pixie (as our hostess was called by everybody) used to read aloud so well that even now, fifty years later, I cannot read them to myself without hearing her read them to me. A strange mixture of people came to those evenings. Ellen Terry brought the Craigs and my cousin Christabel Marshall who, as Christopher St John, translated Sudermann’s play The Good Hope. That was staged by Ellen Terry, when the whole party at her invitation went to Hammersmith to see it. Yeats used to bring Irish players from the Abbey Theatre, and he had given the name of ‘opal hush’ to the innocuous blend of claret and fizzy lemonade that we used to drink. Poets came there and read their poetry, but none as well as Pixie herself read ‘The Happy Townland” or “I went out to the hazel wood’. I took Gordon Bottomley there and, though Pixie was afterwards wicked enough to mimic the grave solemnity of his slow speech, she knew him for a poet and invited him to come again. Miss Nona Stewart, sitting at an eighteenth-century instrument that may have been a spinet or a harpsichord, used to sing the song of ‘Spanish Ladies’ to music that had been written down in that very room, when Masefield brought a shy old sailor, who had been dumb in the light of all those candles and with so many strangers waiting to hear him, sat invisible and whistled the delicate old tune, slightly different from the version more generally known.

 Sooner or later would come the turn of the Anansi stories. These were the Negro tales that Pixie had heard as a child in Jamaica. She told them in the dialect in which she had heard them. Each story began in the same way” ‘In a long before time before Queen Victoria came to reign over we …’ Then would come the story, ‘Der lib in de bush one black fat shiny spider call Anansi …’ or ‘Der lib in de bush one king an’ dis king him hab one BEARD!’ Pixie used to squat down on the floor to tell these stories, playing while she told them with small wooden figures she had made and painted to represent the characters.

from The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, London:Jonathan Cape, 1976

by Pamela Colman Smith