Black Friday

November 18^th 1910. Emmeline Pankhurst led a deputation of three hundred women of WSPU to the House of Commons to protest after yet another bill proposing to give women the vote had failed to be given due attention in parliament. Having called a truce earlier that same year to allow the Liberal government led by noted anti-suffragist Herbert Asquith (Simkin, 2014) to debate this same bill the Suffragettes were not best pleased. Action by WSPU could surely only have been expected. What could not have been was the brutality of the response.

Violence on 'Black Friday' (Hastingspress.co.uk, 2014)

There are few concrete reports of events over the four days that the protest took place, though this is hardly surprising given the extent of the censorship that a seemingly shameful yet shameless government exhibited. Some reports suggest that as many as 6000 police were pitched against the 300 women protesting (Demattio, 2013). A file in the National Archives (MEPO 3/203) contains documents which show that women were abused verbally, physically and even sexually both by the police and members of watching crowds, many of whom are thought to have been policemen in plain clothes. One memo to the Home Office suggests that police believed that in addition to preventing the women reaching the House of Commons this was all part of their duty (Turner, 2003).
Other documents seem to paint a different picture, such as this report  by PC George Bingham who stated of events on November 22nd 1910 that "In all cases the women went voluntarily & quietly, and I did not see one case of any PC having to handle his prisoner.  They were all treated kindly & courteously" (Nationalarchives.gov.uk, 2014). The above picture would seem to tell quite a different story.