In the heart of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia, is Trinity Cathedral. Cross the road and you’ll find rows of graves which honour patriots of the Italian war, but look carefully and you will see something unexpected, you will find the grave of a woman, a British woman and her name may be familiar.
For here is buried one of the most extraordinary political figures of the 20C. She died in 1960 and on the orders of Emperor Haile Selassie she was named an "honorary Ethiopian” and given a great state funeral. She is the only non-Ethiopian honoured here.
The woman’s name is Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst and this is her story…
Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester on 5th May 1882, second daughter of brilliant scholar, barrister and activist, Dr Richard Pankhurst and the indomitable Emmeline, who would become the leader of the militant suffragettes.
Her elder sister Christabel, her mother’s favourite, had been born two years earlier and Sylvia was soon followed by brother Frank and sister Adela. Born into a family of radicals, the children’s formative years were to be shaped by the growth of the Socialist movement.
Sylvia was deeply influenced by her father who would daily drum into the children “if you do not work for other people, you will not have been worth the upbringing.”
Money was tight, but the family loved music and would sing around the piano and the artistic Sylvia was happy in her own private world of painting and drawing. She later wrote that whilst she revered her ‘wonderful father, the lode star of our lives,’ her relationship with her mother was more complicated.
Discipline was strict though Emmeline once admitted that she abandoned the idea of beatings because Sylvia always made her afraid “she would kill her daughter before she gave way.”
The family moved to London and in 1888 Sylvia became haunted by pictures of the victims of Jack the Ripper murdered in the poverty stricken East End, an area where she would one day settle and work to improve the conditions of the poor.
The family soon moved to Russell Square, where their home became a hub of radical discussion and debate and attracted free-thinkers and radicals from supporters of the emerging Indian Nationalist movement to abolitionists and feminists, who became role models for Sylvia.
This was a happy time for her. The children would enjoy “romps in the square” and aware of their parents’ important work, they would help entertain the guests, laying out pamphlets before meetings and running a family newspaper called “Home News,” in which they would report on the all the comings and goings. Yet beneath the excitement and the fun tensions simmered which would emerge properly in the years to come.
Another brother, Harry was born. He would become an active supporter of women’s suffrage himself, though sadly he died at the age of 19.
The family returned to Manchester, where for the first time the girls attended school. Here unemployment had spiralled out of control. Sylvia would help her mother distribute food to the poor and she became aware first hand of their suffering. Kier Hardie, the Scottish trade unionist who would become the leader of the Labour Party was a family friend he was to become an important influence in Sylvia’s life.
Sylvia became aware that her father was ill. On 2 July 1898 he collapsed and three days later he died from a perforated ulcer. Emmeline and Christabel were away in Geneva at the time and were unable to get back. Sylvia had to cope with the trauma of her father’s death alone and she was distraught with grief. At the funeral mourners were reminded that the progress women had made towards freedom was largely due to the influence of Dr Richard Pankhurst.
Two years earlier the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) had been formed with Millicent Fawcett as chairman, which was a compilation of many small suffrage societies which had been working steadily for change around the country. Fawcett believed in gentle persuasion to achieve her aims and was strongly opposed to the use of violence.
The 1890s was to be a decade of change and the world was opening out. Chain stores such as Boots and Liptons emerged with exciting window displays, cycling became all the rage and middle class girls were beginning to rebel against their parents and demand equal treatment with their brothers. Admission to university was increasing and women’s clubs were becoming popular.
But crucially there was still no vote for women. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 seemed to herald new beginnings and it was time for the Pankhurst women to step upon the public stage.
The Pankhursts saw votes for women as a vital step towards achieving a better world, but as a new century dawned Sylvia had her sights set on becoming an artist. Very talented , she won a scholarship to the Manchester School of Art and she was offered a travelling studentship to Italy. She travelled to Venice and were she would paint scenes of ordinary people and street sellers and domestic scenes. She would be surrounded by crowds of curious children and it would seems that she was truly happy here.
But in Spring she was told her mother needed her back home to help in their family shop. Duty prevailed, though when Sylvia arrived home she found her presence was not required.
Christabel by now was involved in the suffrage movement and was proving a charismatic speaker. Sylvia at the age of 21 found herself affected by her sister’s group of influential friends and in 1903 she was asked by the Independent Labour Party to decorate the lecture hall in Salford to be named Pankhurst Hall in honour of her father.
Sylvia’s depictions of the natural world were much admired and she was asked to make her first public speech at the opening. The hall would eventually become a bingo hall and was demolished in 1978.
Sylvia was horrified to discover that women were not allowed to join the Salford branch of the Independent Labour Party and that there were even those who opposed votes for women which highlighted the fact that most people in Britain were still lukewarm on the subject and in Parliament the whole idea was seen as a huge joke. Only Keir Hardie himself seemed passionately committed to the cause of women’s suffrage.
So on 10 October 1903 in the front parlour of the Pankhurst house, Women’s Social and Political Union or WSPU was founded. This new organisation believed that gender inequality could only be tackled if women had the vote. The motto “Deeds Not Words” was coined.
Emmeline and Christabel were becoming a formidable team. Highly visible and brilliant at propaganda, today they would no doubt be influencers on social media with millions of likes and follows.
Meanwhile Sylvia had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where she was determined to improve the lot of the female students who were in a minority of 13:1. She found herself conflicted; should she live the life of an artist or do as her her social conscience demanded and give it up to help others. She wrote to Keir Hardie “Is it just that we should devote our entire lives to the creation of beauty, while others are meshed in monotonous drudgery?”
The two shared a strong socialist drive and formed a close friendship. With his wife and family in Scotland and it would appear that though discreet, they had a relationship which lasted for several years, and appear to have filled a deep emotional need in each other.
In 1906 Sylvia made the decision to devote herself to the cause and became a full time worker for the WSPU. She channelled her artistic talent into becoming the designer of the movement and much of its visual identity including the banners, badges, the angel motif and the Holloway brooch given to hunger strikers were Sylvia’s work.
Using journalism to fund her activism, Sylvia wrote a series of articles on women’s labour for the WSPU newspaper, Votes for Women and went to America on a lecture tour. In 1911 she published The Suffragette which was about the movement’s history.
The WSPU moved to London, but their ethos had now changed. They abandoned their working class roots and became a more autocratic institution, with privileged upper class women at it core. They were becoming increasingly militant and this forced the issue into public debate.
In 1910 a bill was introduced which would give wealthier women the vote, but it was shelved. On November 18th the Suffragettes marched furiously on Parliament, but were met met with a brutal response.
On the day that would become known as Black Friday the women were beaten, thrown into a hostile crowd and taken down side streets and sexually assaulted. The suffragette base at Caxton Hall, became a makeshift hospital for treating black eyes, bleeding noses and other injuries. Sylvia, in the thick of it, documented the event.
The Suffragettes now moved underground, waging guerrilla warfare against the government and their campaign of arson, window smashing and sabotage began, but Sylvia was uncomfortable with the violence and the new direction the movement was going in which she regarded as undemocratic.
In 1912 she arrived in Bow, East London to work with George Lansbury, a supporter of votes for women. Moved by the poverty and suffering she witnessed, she strongly believed that universal suffrage was the answer to the injustice in society and decided that her work was here with the working class women of the East End.
Despite Emmeline and Christabel's strong objection, on 27 May 1913 the East London Federation of the Suffragettes was formed, which was closely affiliated with the Independent Labour Party and Sylvia began to produce a weekly newspaper called The Women's Dreadnought.
Later that year Sylvia spoke at the Albert Hall in support of the Dublin workers who had recently gone on strike “in order to promote a more humane society.” Her relationship with her family was further strained by Sylvia’s involvement with the Labour Party, which her mother and sister felt went against the suffragette ideals of independence. Sylvia was summoned to Paris, where Christabel had taken refuge to escape arrest and she was expelled from the WSPU.
Now independent the East London Federation thrived as a grass roots organisation of socialist feminists. It was democratic and men were welcomed. In fact local men were even invited to come and heckle that so the women would get used to it and had practise.
The Suffragette tactic of hunger striking had begun in 1909. Between February 1913 and July 1914 Sylvia was arrested 8 times. Each time she was repeatedly force fed and she was the most arrested, tortured, force fed suffragette of them all.
She wrote ‘I was struggling wildly, trying to tighten the muscles and to keep my throat closed up. They got the tube down, I suppose, though I was unconscious of anything but a mad revolt of struggling, for at last I heard them say, “That’s all”; and I vomited as the tube came up.’ * She described her ‘sense of degradation’ and that the fight shattered ‘one’s nerves and self-control”.
The psychological damage was often even worse than the physical effects. The feeding tube which was forced into the nose or throat, often damaged the soft tissue and when inserted incorrectly food could enter the lungs causing infection including pneumonia . It almost certainly contributed to the early death of a number of women.
It is shocking to hear that the women could be subjected in other inappropriate forms of force feeding in other orifices causing the maximum pain and degradation and as part of the torture food was brought to the cells in order to taunt and test the women.
Often completely isolated, the mental torture led one suffragette Emily Davison to attempt suicide and Sylvia herself suffered a breakdown. But she was fearless and resilient. By 1913 she started to also refuse water and sleep and would walk endlessly up and down her cell in an attempt to stay awake. By this time the government, tired of the public’s condemnation of their force-feeding policy, had introduced the act known as the Cat and Mouse Act, whereby they released a hunger striking suffragette, only to imprison them again once they had got their health back.
In June 1914 Sylvia was released from Holloway. She went straight to parliament, still on hunger strike to support Keir Hardie with a request for a deputation of women from the East London Federation to meet Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, who had refused to meet with them til now. She lay down outside strangers entrance next to Cromwell’s statue and when the police inspector came to tell her she would have to move, she replied that she would wait there until the Prime Minister consented to receive the deputation however long it took.
Asquith relented. For the first time ever he met with working women who told him of the struggles in their own lives. He was impressed and told them they had made a very moderate and reasonable case.
When she was too ill to leave her bed, she wrote letters trying to garner support for the East London Federation. She had been quickly adopted by the East End community, and stayed with various families throughout her time in and out of prison. At times local people would stand guard outside her room to prevent police officers from arresting her and forcing her to return to prison.
With war approaching Emmeline and Christabel instantly stopped campaigning. Their newspaper The Suffragette was renamed ‘Britannia’ and they threw the full weight of their support behind the war effort.
Sylvia meanwhile was pacifist and strongly opposed. The federation campaigned against the war, with some of its members hiding conscientious objectors from the police and their policy was altogether different.
“We set up a League of Rights for Soldiers' and Sailors' Wives and Relatives to strive for better pensions and allowances.” Sylvia wrote. “We also campaigned for pay equal to that of men. Votes for Women were never permitted to fall into the background. We worked continuously for peace, in face of the bitterest opposition from old enemies, and sometimes unhappily from old friends”.
In her view it would be the working classes, particularly the women who took the brunt of the war. She threw herself into organising cost price restaurants in the East End and endeavoured to support the poor who had suffered job losses and spiralling food costs and whose struggles were often hidden. She established a toy factory to give work to women who were unemployed due to the war and opened mother and baby clinics in response to the high infant mortality rate.
Sylvia emerged from the war as a revolutionary socialist. She supported the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin respected her and understood her importance to the formation of a Communist party in Britain. However she was denounced by Lenin as being too left wing. As she had no passport she smuggled herself to Moscow on a clandestine mission to confront him at the Kremlin, where they ended up arguing over the issue of censorship.
Back in Britain she changed the federation’s name to the Workers' Suffrage Federation. Their newspaper was renamed The Worker’s Dreadnought and she employed Britain’s first ever black journalist in Britain, Claude McKay, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
In 1921 she found herself once more in Holloway Prison, this time for sedition, in publishing anti-war articles. On her release, she published her poetry anthology Writ on Cold Slate which she had drafted on slate and written up in prison on toilet paper.
She had become a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, but was expelled the following year when she refused to close the Workers’ Dreadnought in favour of a single Communist newspaper.
Universal male suffrage had been established in 1918, along with women over 30 who were property owners and in 1928 the voting age for women was lowered to 21 in line with men. By which time Sylvia had shifted her energies to opposing racism and the rise of fascism in Europe.
After the war Sylvia met Silvio Corio, an Italian radical. They moved to Woodford Green and at the age of 45, she gave birth to a son, Richard. She refused to marry however, resisting pressure from her mother and sister and she wrote several books at this time including The Suffragette Movement.
She remained politically active throughout her life, passionately working for numerous causes. She supported the Republicans in Spain, helped Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, she was anti-racism, pro Indian independence and relentlessly supported Ethiopia during the Fascist Italian invasion of 1936–1941.
She denounced the use of poison gas during the war and demanded effective sanctions against Mussolini’s government. As the press interest in Ethiopia waned, she took matters into her own hands and founded a newspaper of her own, the New Times and a weekly journal, The Ethiopia News which publicized the efforts made by Emperor Haile Selassie to persuade the League of Nations to prevent colonization.
It is telling that the British secret service who had long held a file on Sylvia was still considering various strategies for "muzzling the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst.” as late as 1948.
In 1953 Sylvia suffered a heart attack which prompted a partial reconciliation with her sister Christabel. The following year, her partner Silvio died and Sylvia made the decision to accept an invitation from Emperor Haille Sellasie to live in Ethiopia with her son Richard.
In Addis Ababa she helped found the Social Service Society and edited the monthly periodical, The Ethiopia Observer. Campaigning passionately until the end, Sylvia died on 20 September 1960 and she was so well loved was a state funeral was ordered in recognition of her service to the country, attended by Haille Sailasse and his family. A memorial service was held in London in the Caxton Hall a few months later.
Rachel Holmes, Sylvia’s biographer asserts that Sylvia’s rebellion was in her DNA. She was a visionary who, in the face of all opposition, even from her own family, was prepared to stand up and fight against injustice.
She believed that the liberation of women was inextricably tied up with the liberation of the working classes and with the later causes she took up from communism to antifascism, Ireland, Indian home rule and Ethiopia, she was often ahead of the times.
She took on authority and tackled injustice wherever she found it and as the writer George Bernard Shaw once said “There were only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous. The other that she was unbearable.”
How often the words of the father she adored must have rung in her head “if you do not work for other people, you will not have been worth the upbringing,” and how wholeheartedly did she live by them.