THE WINDOW SMASHERS.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LX, Issue 143788, 11 May 1912, Page 5

THE WINDOW SMASHERS.

The proceedings in the Loudon Police Courts in connection with the recent suffragette demonstrations, were not without pathetic touches. It was evident that many of the girls and women who were sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour, for having smashed windows, were shocked at the discovery that they were to be treated as ordinary offenders against the rights of property. One elderly woman appeared at Bow Street in widows’ weeds, and pleaded for the option of paving a fine, promising that she would never offend again. She was sent to prison for two months, the evidence showing that she had destroyed several panes of glass with a large hammer. "I am very vexed 1 did it. I will pay for the damage.” said another elderly woman. She had made an attack upon the War Office, and was sentenced promptly to “two months’ hard.” Sho was succeeded in the dock by two young girls, the daughters of an Essex gentleman. They had thrown large flints through some windows, and the pleading of their lawyer did not save them from going to g"aol. A woman whose name, appropriately enough, was “Lawless,” was charged with having broken a window in the Cannon Road Police Station. She had gone there to visit a friend, who was under arrest, and while the oficers were making inquiries courteously on her behalf, she produced a stone and flung it against a largo pane of glass. She examined to the magistrate that she had been assailed by a “sudden impulse,” and a sentence of one month’s imprisonment with hard labour was inflicted. Dr. Ethel Smythe was charged with having done damage to the residence of Mr. Lewis Hnrcourt, in Berkeley Square. She said that sho had thrown a stone, but had been “horrified to find that the shot had failed.” She was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and told the magistrate as she left tho dock that she had seen Mrs. Pankhurst recently and had been assured that ‘“even if the leaders disappeared beneath the earth the movement would go on.” Fifty women were sentenced during the same sitting, the punishment in the great majority of cases being imprisonment with hard labour. The magistrate inflicted a small fine only in the case of a woman aged seventy-nine years, who had broken a window of a club. He suggested that she was old enough to have known better.