[wordup] Spy pictures of suffragettes revealed

[Adam Shand]

From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3153024.stm
Via: erica at spack.org

Spy pictures of suffragettes revealed

By Dominic Casciani
BBC News Online

Photos uncovered by the National Archives show how the police spied on 
the suffragettes. These covert images - perhaps the UK's first spy 
pictures - have gone on display to mark the centenary of the 
votes-for-women movement.

Ninety years ago, a Scotland Yard detective submitted an unusual 
equipment request.

It was passed up the chain, scrutinised, reviewed and finally 
rubber-stamped in Whitehall itself. Scotland Yard duly became the proud 
owner of a Ross Telecentric camera lens. And at a cost to the taxpayer 
of £7, 6s and 11d, secret police photographic surveillance was born.

Within weeks, the police were using it against what the government then 
regarded as the biggest threat to the British Empire: the suffragettes.

Documents uncovered at the National Archives reveal that the 
votes-for-women movement probably became the first "terrorist" 
organisation subjected to secret surveillance photography in the UK, if 
not the world.

The covert photographs are at the heart of an exhibition marking the 
centenary of the founding of the Women's Social and Political Union, 
which invented modern direct action and ultimately changed the face of 
the UK.

The state's use of cameras in fighting crime began when prisons were 
instructed to photograph all inmates in 1871.

But police found the technology's real value as they tried to combat 
the increasingly militant suffragettes.

Within two years of the founding of the WSPU, Christabel Pankhurst had 
become the first woman to be jailed for direct action. That civil 
disobedience continued within prison walls as jailed women refused to 
be photographed.

So Scotland Yard brought in the UK's first long-lens paparazzi-style 
photographer, says Carole Tulloch, curator of the exhibition.

That first photographer, Mr A Barrett, sat quietly in a van, snapping 
away as the women walked around Holloway Prison's yards, according to 
the documents.

On the outside, detectives compiled photographic lists of key suspects, 
the aim being to stop arson attacks, window-smashings or the dramatic 
scenes of women chaining themselves to Parliament's railings.

"The police got quite good. They would even send people along to 
meetings to take pictures and notes of what was being said," says Ms 
Tulloch.

"They eventually put an officer in plain clothes and on a motorbike to 
try and keep up. He was able to make some notes but failed to keep up 
with the suffragettes because he had not been given a bike with an 
automatic starter motor."

At Manchester Prison, the authorities used the technique to snap 
infamous window-smashers Evelyn Manesta and Lillian Forrester.

When the results were disappointing, the records suggest another 
attempt was made to coerce the women into posing.

Evelyn Manesta resisted and eventually a guard was used to restrain her 
around the neck. But when the photograph was reproduced in the official 
rogue's gallery, it had been doctored - replacing the arm with a 
fashionable lady's scarf.

Back in London, the nation's greatest art collections were nervous 
after suffragettes slashed the National Gallery's Rokeby Venus in March 
1914.

We still have her suffragette plaque and brooch and I remember as a 
child how my mother and grandmother would bring them out and explain to 
me their significance

The private Wallace Collection gallery appealed to Scotland Yard for 
help, and detectives supplied their list of London's most wanted - 
almost all of the pictures secretly taken.

One of the women on the list, Kitty Marion, went on to become one of 
the most celebrated of the suffragettes as she endured more than 200 
force-feedings in prison while on hunger strike.

"On the one hand, the state considered them dangerous terrorists, but 
on the other it simply did not know what to do with them," says Ms 
Tulloch.

"The police and prison officials were so worried about what to do they 
made sure that every step they took was authorised by the Home Office. 
In the records you can find daily communications between the governor 
of Holloway Prison and Whitehall. In that era it was extremely rare for 
government to communicate so quickly."

But the police surveillance did nothing to stop the movement - nor did 
it dim the growing support they were finding in the country.

While the photographs presented the women as dangerous subversives, 
press photographs uncovered by the National Archives also exposed what 
some newspapers  - particularly the Daily Mirror - regarded as police 
and mob brutality.

"I think we take for granted what they fought for," says Ms Tulloch. 
"One of the images we found shows a lone woman on a cart, surrounded by 
1,000 men.

"Today, she would be on a podium, surrounded by supporters in an 
organised event. No doubt many of those men would be telling her what 
to do - go home and feed the kids. The courage these women showed was 
remarkable."