Prisoners (Temporary Discharge For Ill Health) Act 1913 - Unintended Consequences

Unintended Consequences

The ineffectiveness of the Act was very soon evident as the authorities experienced much more difficulty than anticipated in re-arresting the released hunger-strikers, many of whom eluded the police with the help of a network of suffragette sympathisers. The inability of the government to lay its hands on high-profile suffragettes transformed what had been intended as a discreet device to control suffragette hunger-strikers into a public scandal.

This act was aimed at suppressing the power of the organisation by demoralising the activists, but turned out to be counter-productive as it undermined the moral authority of the government. The Act was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of Cat and Mouse Act, referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the suffragettes from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy.

The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war. A related effect of this law was to increase support for the Labour Party, many of whose early founders supported votes for women. For example, philosopher Bertrand Russell left the Liberal Party, and wrote pamphlets denouncing the Act and the Liberals for making in his view an illiberal and anti-constitutional law. So the controversy helped to accelerate the decline in the Liberals' electoral position, as segments of the middle class began to defect to Labour.

The Act also handed the WSPU an issue on which to campaign and rail against other parts of the British establishment in particular the Anglican Church. During 1913 the WSPU directly targeted The Bishop of Winchester, Edward Talbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, and the Bishops of Croydon, Lewes, Islington and Stepney. Each one was picketed by deputations at their official residences until granted an audience, during which the Church leaders were asked to protest against forcible feeding. Norah Dacre Fox (later known as Norah Elam) led many of the deputations on behalf of the WSPU which were widely reported in The Suffragette. At one point the Bishop of London was persuaded to visit Holloway personally in connection with allegations of women prisoners being poisoned during force feeding. The Bishop made several visits to the prison, but this came to nothing and his public statements that he could find no evidence of ill treatment during force feeding – indeed he believed that it (force feeding) was carried out 'in the kindest possible spirit' – was seen by the WSPU as collusion with the government and prison authorities. This was summed up on the front page of the Suffragette of 13 February 1913 which carried an artistic impression of a woman being force fed above a statement (repeated and expanded in an inside article) " A whitewash brush, my Lord Bishop, has been placed in your hand by the authorities in order that the public shall still remain in ignorance of the diabolical methods used by the Government in their desire to terrorise the militant women." Dacre Fox perhaps further summed up the frustrations of the WSPU with the Church leaders in her statement recorded in the Suffragette after an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury in January 1914 that, "The only feeling (she) experienced …… while she was interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury... was “utter contempt”... Mrs Dacre Fox said that the Archbishop's Chaplain was “a pitiable object, trembling and with chattering teeth”, and later was also reported to have said that, "I can only say that as I sat looking at that old man, the feeling which was uppermost in my mind was that of contempt….I wondered if Calvary had almost been in vain." If the WSPU had been hoping to win support from the Church for their wider cause of suffrage by pressing on the issue of forcible feeding, they were disappointed. The Church chose not to be drawn into a battle between the WSPU and the authorities, and clung to a party line that militancy was a precursor to forcible feeding and militancy was against the will of God, therefore the Church could not act against forcible feeding.

The nickname of the Act came about because of a cat’s habit of playing with its prey (a mouse) before finishing it off. Research indicates that the Act did little to deter the activities of the Suffragettes. Their violent actions only ceased with the outbreak of war and their support of the war effort. However, the start of the war in August 1914, and the ending of all Suffragette activities for the duration of the war, meant that the full potential impact of the 'Cat and Mouse Act' will never be known.