On November 2, 1920, Britain’s best-known revolutionary, Sylvia Pankhurst, was found guilty of sedition at London’s Mansion House courtrooms and jailed for six months. She remained unbowed.
“Although I have been a socialist all my life, I have tried to palliate the capitalist system,” she told the court. “But all my experience showed that it was useless trying to palliate an impossible system. This is a wrong system and has got to be smashed. I would give my life to smash it.”
Sylvia was no stranger to state repression. Over the previous decade, she had been jailed numerous times and tortured by force-feeding while imprisoned because of her role as a campaigner for women’s suffrage. Between June 1913 and June 1914 alone, she was arrested ten times, going on hunger and thirst strike each time in protest at the refusal of the British authorities to treat the suffragettes as political prisoners.
This time, she had been jailed not as a suffragette but as a communist revolutionary and staunch defender of Soviet Russia. The story of how she moved toward this position and the role she played in the early history of British communism is an important and neglected episode in the history of radical politics in Britain.
Born the second daughter of British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst in 1882, Sylvia was a trained artist who designed the logo of her mother’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as the suffragettes were formally known. However, her years of activism and experiences of the US trade union movement in 1911–12 led her…
Auteur: Tony Collins
