SUFFRAGETTE DINNER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23054, 3 December 1936, Page 12

SUFFRAGETTE DINNER

MEMORIES OF A RAID Veterans at the Suffragette Fellowship- dinner in London recently retold their experiences of 30 years ago to admiring juniors, to whom the suffragette movement had to be explained in detail (says the Manchester Guardian). There were stories of arson—£so,ooo worth of damage here, two lots of £40,000 there—stories of pillarbox incendiarism, of a bomb or two, of the slashing of the Rokeby .Venus by Miss Mary Richardson,' whose medal with clasps showed how often she had- been to prison and forcibly fed on account of hunger strikes. “My knees were shaking, ’ most of them said. “ but I felt I had to do it.”

The dinner actually celebrated tha first raid on the House of Commons, and the guests of honour were Mr and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, whose portrait together by Dame Laura Knight is to be presented to them, Dama Laura Knight, Lord and Lady Balfour of Burleigh, and ex-inspector ' Jarvis, to whom fell the task of arresting most of the more prominent suffragettes. It was represented, said one of the speakers, that the dinner was of the “ forgive and forget ” nature,, but it was rather a dinner of remembrance of a time inspiring to everybody. The suffragette movement began in 1905, said Mrs Billington Greig, when Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenny were arrested in Manchester for their insistence on asking a Liberal statesman—Sir Edward Grey—to give women the vote. AMUSED COUNTRY

Mr Pethick-Lawrence said he liked to think of the mirth which was always present in the movement, and this point was taken in her speech by Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, who reminded her audience of the laughter of the country when her husband offered £lO to the movement, for every day that she was kept in prison. They wanted to remember those times, she said. The only people who forgot were the politicians now writing their autobiographies, who made no mention of the little affair of votes for women. But the monument of Mrs Pankhurst stood under the shadow of Parliament, and for all time would represent the high principle of democracy. Ex-Inspector Jarvis corrected some of the recollections of the raid on the House of Commons. He said he saw a pantechnicon out of which rushed a lot of women, and then there was pandemonium. All the police next day in court gave evidence that the prisoners had shouted out “ Votes for women! ” and he wondered whether their official war cry came from this. What struck him was that, instead of trying to get away from the police, the women tried their hardest to get arrested, and even fought for the privilege.

MAORI MOTORIST ARRESTED (Pia United Press Association! WHAKATANE, Dec. 2. As a sequel to the death of a cyclist, Augustus Frederick Moore, on the Poroporo road on the evening of October 19, the police arrested Peter Paul, a Maori, on three charges of being the driver of a motor vehicle on the WhakataneAwakeri road, of failing to stop when the accident arising from use of such vehicle occurred, of negligently driving a motor vehicle, thereby causing the death of Moore, and of being in charge of a motor vehicle on the main road while he was in a state of intoxication. On the application of the police the accused! was remanded until Wednesday next.