If you’re dying and there is knowledge that can save you… it is a crime not to use that knowledge to save somebody’s life, if you can do it.
Joseph Stiglitz
2001 Nobel laureate (Economics)

There is no developed country which would have tolerated the loss of millions of their citizens while life-saving drugs were available.
Peter Mugyenyi, MD
Founder-Director of JCRC, Africa’s largest
HIV/AIDS treatment and research centre

Drug companies are not there to protect the Third World. They’re there to make money. Pure and simple. That’s it.
Peter Rost, MD
Former Vice-President, Pfizer Inc.

FITB clip “Zackie boycott” PAL 1m42 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

Like many documentary films, Fire in the Blood began with a short article I happened to read in the newspaper nine years ago, one of those from which it is plain to see that what is going on between the lines is far more intriguing than what is in them. The piece dealt with the ‘power struggle’ over low-cost AIDS medication for the global south, and took a decidedly belligerent tone toward the coalition of activists, generic drugmakers, public figures and civil society organisations it accused of conspiring to bypass international patent laws in order to halt the carnage of HIV/AIDS in many countries where people were dying in shocking numbers. By sheer happenstance, a colleague I was sitting with as I was reading this (later my partner) mentioned being related to one of the key figures in the article, Yusuf Hamied, then the head of the socially-conscious Indian generic drug company Cipla, whom the writer of the article seemed intent on damning as a “pirate”, even though as far as I could tell he was doing exceptionally important and laudable work. Taking advantage of this connection, I had the opportunity to meet and get to know Dr. Hamied in Bombay several months later, and through him a number of the people who would later become key contributors to the narrative of Fire in the Blood.

Through getting to know and talking with these people, I began to learn the story of the deliberate, systematic blockading of safe, effective and available low-cost medicine to fight HIV/AIDS in the hardest-hit countries in Africa and other parts of the global south at the height of the AIDS pandemic: an action which resulted in ten million or more painful, totally unnecessary deaths and which I would come to view as one of the great crimes in human history.

Fire In The Blood clip 1 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

Aside from basic current affairs reporting, there was, as far as I could tell, no book or film which set out to examine this as an atrocity (as opposed to an “unfortunate-but-inevitable” phenomenon), to investigate how such a thing could have come to pass and go virtually unremarked-upon – with no one at all called to account – and then begin fading into the mists of time. An otherwise brilliant, four-hour PBS documentary on the history of AIDS released in 2006 to mark the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosed cases, for example, didn’t even mention it.
Three things had quickly become clear: (1) this was an immensely important historical subject about which there was essentially no adequate record, (2) the story was quickly being lost (even many people I met who were deeply involved were beginning to forget the details of what happened, often remarking that no one had ever asked them these questions) and (3) the groundwork was being laid for similar assaults on access to medicine – conceivably with even more horrific consequences, unimaginable as that might seem – to occur in the not-too-distant future. After unsuccessfully trying to convince a few documentarian friends to take the project on (they immediately saw what a massive amount of time and work it would demand from anyone foolish enough to do so), I woke up one morning in early June, 2007, clear in the realization that the only way anything was going to happen was if I were to do it myself, regardless of my obvious lack of background in non-fiction filmmaking.

Even though what I originally thought would be a one-and-a-half or perhaps two-year project has turned into almost six, I still feel incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to tell the story of Fire in the Blood – and that of several of the incredibly brave and inspirational people who came together to break the blockade of AIDS drugs to Africa, thereby saving millions upon millions of lives in the face of intense pressure and resistance from the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. What quickly emerges, however, is that, while the specific history of HIV/AIDS in Africa: the incredible devastation it was wreaking across large swaths of that continent, and the disdainful indifference patent-holding pharmaceutical companies, and so many others in the West had for the idea of extending treatment to the tens of millions of Africans in desperate need of it, was uniquely powerful and striking in its gross inhumanity; this was never destined to be a story about AIDS.

It in fact clearly needed to be a story about global commerce, the degree to which the business interests of giant corporations completely supersede those of the human race – no matter how cataclysmic the consequences might ultimately be – and more generally it serves as an exceptionally illustrative tale about how we as human beings treat each other.

Fire In The Blood clip 2 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

The more one explores the prevailing system of developing and commercializing medicine, the more one is struck by its essential contradictions. The system of “intellectual property” rights, which originally evolved on the principle of serving the public interest, seems in this case (as in many others) to do almost precisely the opposite. Those who claim to be “innovators” have no apparent interest in innovating outmoded business models which are disastrously flawed and utterly ill-suited to alleviating public health problems. Companies which claim they need to charge astronomical prices in order to recoup their huge expenditures on innovative research actually do precious little such research, and spend vastly more on marketing, lavish executive salaries and paying lawyers to extend their lucrative monopolies. Meanwhile, governments which actually fund the overwhelming proportion of global basic drug discovery research all but give the fruits of this research away to giant, profit-crazed corporations, which then proceed to sell the resulting products back to government and the public at wildly inflated prices, meaning that many of the luckless taxpayers whose money funded the breakthrough research in the first place will suffer and die without receiving any benefit from it (and may well go bankrupt in the process).

Regulating “Big Pharma” is the only area of politics I can think of where you find people on the right side of the political spectrum howling in favour of government-granted monopolies, while those on the left loudly bang their drums for “free market competition” and denounce patent restrictions for “distorting the marketplace” and “not allowing capitalism to function.”

FITB clip “State of the Union” PAL 1m42 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

Having spent so many years working on this project, consciously attempting not to take an ideological approach to the subject, I nonetheless often find myself astonished that we find ourselves where we do with medicine, given that the stakes are so incredibly high and we are clearly doing such an abysmal job at it. 84% of worldwide research for basic drug discovery comes from government and public sources (Light, BMJ, 2012), and the proportion of public money only rises where life-saving drugs are concerned. Yet the world, both rich and poor, is getting a terrible deal, despite investing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars per year on finding new and better drugs. The levels of profiteering on patented medicines are shocking, and out of all proportion to the expenditures involved. Yet of course this can only happen with the complicity of officialdom. I often say that the real villains of this story are not pharmaceutical companies or their fearsome lobby, but national governments which instead of fulfilling their mandate to protect the public interest, and in particular to safeguard the basic well-being of the most vulnerable in society, invariably do the exact opposite when it comes to pharmaceuticals. One can speculate as to precisely why this is, but where such vast sums of money are concerned, the conclusions are unlikely to be surprising. The companies, meanwhile, behave more or less as any capitalist entity might be expected to under the existing framework, using their “fiduciary duty” to maximize profits for shareholders as a fig leaf whenever anyone asks.

FITB clip “research and development” PAL 1m11 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

Far from improving, things are actually getting progressively worse. Using international trade mechanisms, Western governments led by the United States continue to work relentlessly to cut off supplies of affordable generic drugs to low- and middle-income countries, and if anything have only redoubled their efforts in recent years. Many of these schemes are now entering their end games, in particular the proposed EU-India “free trade” agreement and the multi-country trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), both of which contain harsh provisions intended to expand markets for Western brand-name drug producers at the expense of access to affordable medicine for huge swaths of the world’s population. Which is why it is sadly no exaggeration to say that a catastrophe like the one which occurred during the years lower-cost generic AIDS drugs were withheld from Africa may just be a taste of things yet to come. As Dr. Peter Mugyenyi, director of Africa’s largest Aids research and treatment centre told me a short time ago, “We are on standby awaiting another bloodbath.”

This would all be incredibly frustrating in and of itself, but it is only more so since things so clearly need not be this way. Once monopoly is removed from the equation, things quickly look very different indeed. Earlier this year, India’s Supreme Court reached an extremely important decision in a case brought by the Swiss-based pharma giant Novartis, which was appealing the denial of an Indian patent on its leukemia drug Gleevec (also called Glivec). The case was mainly significant for two reasons. It confirmed that India (unlike other major countries) would not grant patents on minor modifications of existing drugs without substantial benefit. In fact, such patents are the bread and butter of the pharma industry: an estimated 90% of drug patents have no meaningful clinical advantages for patients, but are used to extend monopolies, thus impeding access to lower-cost generic versions. India’s stand – which is fully in line with international agreements to which the country is signatory, most notable the TRIPS (Trade-Related Intellectual Property) Agreement promulgated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) – will undoubtedly serve as an important example which other countries will feel emboldened to follow, particularly those in the global south which are struggling to provide their populations with affordable medicine in the face of enormous pressure from Western trading partners.

More importantly for the poorest of the poor – a huge proportion of whom live in India itself, as well as in dozens of ‘least-developed countries’ with no capacity to produce medicines – the judgment reiterates India’s longstanding commitment to balance incentives for research and development of medicine with access to the resulting products, not just for elites but for the general population; and since India is the largest exporter of generic drugs on the planet – often referred to as “the pharmacy of the developing world” – this commitment provides hope and a measure of security to people and countries throughout the world who are reliant on Indian generic medicines, which in a great many cases represent the only affordable option available to them.

Monopolies enable profit-hungry drug companies to focus on where they can charge the highest prices and maximize profits: generally this means products for the richest sliver of the world’s people, and focusing on the ailments those segments tend to suffer from and are willing to pay handsomely for. In the case of HIV/AIDS, notwithstanding the fact that it was (and is) overwhelmingly a developing-world problem – with 95% of HIV-positive people living in the global south – the market for HIV drugs in the West was still a very lucrative one for brand-name drug companies, which went to great lengths to protect it. Global health needs which affect mainly poor people in developing countries tend to be of no interest to these companies, for obvious reasons, and therefore little money is spent on research into such things as malaria, river blindness, and so on. While this is a problem which urgently needs to be addressed, it will likely never be alleviated under the current system which entrusts development of medicines to for-profit corporations.

FITB clip “fluconazole” PAL 1m09 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

For other diseases, namely those which impact communities both rich and poor, there can be little doubt that the prevailing arrangement is fundamentally unsustainable and incredibly destructive (as well as wasteful and immoral). Even the wealthiest countries increasingly suffer from its gross imbalances: nearly half of all Americans now say they have problems affording their prescription medicines and numerous countries with advanced public health systems find themselves unable to pay for high-priced new drugs (especially those for the treatment of cancer). In resource-poor countries, with little in the way of public support and the vast majority of drug purchases coming directly from patients’ own pockets, the situation is infinitely grimmer. Even if the industry’s claims about its vast investments in R&D were truthful, which they very clearly are not (GlaxoSmithKline’s CEO Andrew Witty recently referred to the pharma lobby’s oft-repeated figure of over a billion dollars invested by drug companies for each product which successfully makes it to market as “one of the great myths of the industry”), none of us can be satisfied with a set-up which systematically excludes all but a tiny segment of the world’s population from the benefits of (overwhelmingly taxpayer-funded) scientific research because of corporate-controlled monopolies on medicine.

How then to incentivise needed investments by private sector players without creating monopoly scenarios? There are many feasible solutions, including a number with significant historical precedents, such as prize funds (whereby organizations or consortia of scientists would work on a given public health problem and receive a significant cash prize from a government or group of governments if they succeeded in solving the problem, or a lesser prize for solving some aspect of it). Perhaps the simplest approach, however – one which could be instituted virtually overnight, at little cost and with minimal bureaucracy – is that which was used in Canada for almost 70 years during the 20th century, whereby monopolies on medicine were explicitly prohibited, but patent-holders received a statutory royalty on any sales of generic equivalents based on their patented products. This arrangement maintained substantial profit incentives for innovation, while ensuring the public was not held hostage to monopoly pricing (it did not, however, allow for the kind of astronomical profits to which the industry had become accustomed, and, after decades of trying, US trade negotiators acting on behalf of the powerful American pharma lobby had it killed under the terms of the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement).

Though many in Canada now regard the decision to cave in to US government and pharma industry pressure and dismantle this highly successful system as one of the single worst decisions their government has ever made, the fact that it worked so well for so long (and that in an advanced economy with a significant R&D ecosystem) nonetheless serves as a time-tested example of how incentives for research and access considerations can be equitably balanced, without creating monopolies which obstruct access to new medicines for decades on end, resulting in needless suffering and death for tens of millions of people every year.

As former Vice-President of Pfizer Dr. Peter Rost says at the end of Fire in the Blood, however,

Why would anybody who is benefiting from this system want to change or tweak it? None of the people who make money off of it, none of the people who derive power out of it, want to change it.

Anyone who knows their history will tell you that it is almost always foolhardy to expect the powers-that-be to do the right thing, even when proven, easy-to-implement solutions are staring them in the face. Nonetheless, as we have seen time and again – in the story of Fire in the Blood and numerous other cases – a few key individuals, armed with clear, strong arguments and ready to go to the barricades for their beliefs can quickly expose the emperor as having no clothes, prove the impossible is possible, and ‘suddenly’ the world changes for the better.

FITB clip “Durban 2000″ PAL 1m35 from Fire in the Blood on Vimeo.

Dylan Gray

Fire in the Blood by Dylan Gray was selected for the Sundance Film Festival 2013

A Petition in support of Votes for Women. Mabel Capper holding Petition. (1910)

The North West Labour History Society is celebrating 40 years of activity promoting labour history with a conference on women’s history on 23 November 2013 in Manchester from 10am – 5pm.

Venue: Three Minute Theatre, Afflecks Arcade, Oldham Street, Manchester

There will be sessions on topics such as music, trade unionism, socialism, votes for women, socialism and feminism. The speakers will include Lindsey German, Claire Mooney, Alice Nutter, Louise Raw, Rae Street and Sonja Tiernan. The fee for the day will be £10 waged/£5 unwaged.

For further information and full programme details, please visit the North West Labour History Society event page here.

A series of workshops, discussions and skill-shares on the theme of ‘The Personal is Political’. All sessions will last approximately two hours and will take place at the Feminist Library, which is fully wheelchair accessible.

Thursday 13th June 7pm Women Taking Direct Action Angie Zelter

As a founding member of Action Atomic Weapon Eradication, Angie will talk about the need for more women’s action to eradicate atomic weapons in the world, followed by a discussion on direct action more generally.

Thursday 27th June 7pm Stuff Your Sexist Boss! South London Solidarity Federation

London SolFed is producing a pamphlet about practical methods of resisting sexual harassment in the workplace. So come along, share experiences, and exchange ideas on tactics for working collectively against workplace harassment and discrimination.

Sunday 7th July 3pm – 6pm London Irish Women’s Network hosts an afternoon on the Making and Breaking of Images of Irish Women

Who do we carry around in our heads? We will be going on a journey around what we’ve absorbed, what we’ve made or left unmade, and whether we should be doing anything about it. A participative event.

Thursday 11th July 7pm Feminist Film Showing and Discussion (Film TBC)

Thursday 18th July 7pm Review, Planning and Party

Review of activities so far, and all your ideas for our autumn series, followed by food, drink and music.

Please register in advance
For more info please contact:

Email: wsww@feministlibrary.co.uk

Phone: 020 7261 0879

Twitter: @feministlibrary #WSWW

Website http://feministlibrary.co.uk/womens-studies-without-walls-2/

Suggested donation on entry: £3-8 per session

An evening of presentations and discussion about how posters have been used in different radical, political, feminist, collective and community settings. By looking at specific historical moments it is hoped to open up a conversation about radical ideas and collective practices in the contemporary art context.

Suzy Mackie and Pru Stevenson, founding members of the See Red Women’s Workshop Collective, which produced silkscreened feminist and community posters from c1974 up to the early 1990s, will show poster images and talk about why and how the collective was set up and the first 8 years.

Jess Baines (LSE/LCC) will be presenting her research on the history of late 20th century radical and community printing collectives and co-ops in the UK – including: poster collectives, service printers, typesetters and print resource centres. Jess is also a former Member of the See Red Womens Workshop.

Dean Kenning (Kingston University and CSM) will be talking about the recent show at Portman Gallery: ‘Poster Production’ where he worked with art students from Morpeth School, Central St Martins and Reading University, and with several contemporary artists to produce posters based on different themes and according to various methods of working.

Rachael House and Jo David from artist run Space Station Sixty-Five on posters and archives in the art space, including poster-related shows such as ‘Shape and Situate’ ‘Rachael will also talk about her recent exhibitions ‘Feminist Disco’ and ‘A Space of Potential’ which draw on feminist cultures’?

Chair: Anne Robinson (senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University and former member of See Red Womens Workshop)

Refreshments available from 6pm

Lecture Theatre CR100, London Met University,
41-47 Commercial
Road, London, E1 1LA
Nearest tube: Aldgate East, buses: 15, 254,205, 25.

Admission free and all welcome, but please register for a ticket here.

Email: anne.robinson@londonmet.ac.uk for further information.

Wednesday 12 June, 6.00 – 8.00pm, at the Geffrye Museum

Explore the meanings and practicalities of home-making for lesbians and gay men past and present at this fascinating roundtable discussion.  With Matt Cook (Birkbeck College), Alison Oram (Leeds Metropolitan University), Amy Murphy (University of East London), and Brent Pilkey (University College London)

* Brent Pilkey’s research takes a queer approach to architectural history by looking at the domestic spaces of ordinary Londoners.

* Alison Oram explores how knowledge of same-sex love in the past is disseminated at historic houses, often seen as the most conservative type of heritage site.

* Amy Murphy’s research concerns lesbian identity in post-war Britain, with particular focus on the way it relates to interior, domestic worlds.

* Matt Cook has investigated how gay men’s lives relate to domestic space across the twentieth century.

Tickets £5 (includes a glass of wine). Must be booked in advance.

Contact Information and Bookings Officer on 020 7739 9893 or by email bookings@geffrye-museum.org.uk

Please visit the Geffrye Museum website for more information.

Organised in partnership with the Raphael Samuel History Centre and with the support of Birkbeck College.

1989. Via Wikimedia, Author: R. Barraez D´Lucca from Carracas, Venezuela

7.30pm Tuesday 4th June
Bishopsgate Institute,
230 Bishopsgate,
London EC2M 4QH

Free admission, advance booking at www.bishopsgate.org.uk or call 020 7392 9200

When the Apartheid regime in South Africa decimated the African National Congress, its exiled leadership recruited young, white volunteers to help keep the message of resistance alive by smuggling in ANC literature. Their work remained secret for forty years until the publication in 2012 of London Recruits: The Secret War Against Apartheid, edited by Ken Keable.
Speakers include Ronnie Kasrils, founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and former Minister of Intelligence Services; Ken Keable – London Recruit, and editor of London Recruits; Mary Chamberlain – London Recruit; Tom Bell – London Recruit, Katherine Levine – London Recruit.

An article The ANC’s London Recruits: a Personal Story by Mary Chamberlain, Emeritus Professor of Caribbean History at Oxford Brookes University, can be found in the most recent volume of the History Workshop Journal here.

Whose Remembrance? an investigation into how communities are addressing the colonial experience of the two world wars.

Friday 28 June, 6.00 – 8.00pm The Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square

Free, but booking is essential. See  www.bbk.ac.uk/sshpweek

In 2012 the Imperial War Museum’s  Research Department did a scoping study funded by the AHRC of how far communities are aware of the role of colonial troops during the two world wars. A 20-minute film Whose Remembrance? (dir. Alastair Uhlig) describes the findings.

The screening will be followed by a roundtable discussion with   Dr Matt Cook (Raphael Samuel History Centre’s Birkbeck Director), Ansar Ullah Ahmed (Swadhinata Trust),  Suzanne Bardgett (IWM), Pofessor Ian Christie (Birkbeck), and Toby Haggith (IWM Research Dept).

A wine reception will follow.

The event is part of a week of events ‘To Seek, To Find, To Live‘ showcasing the work and collaborations of Birkbeck’s School of Social Science, History and Philosophy.

To book your place go to: www.bbk.ac.uk/sshpweek

For many years the historiography of the British women’s suffrage movement was based, in the main, on collections of primary material left by members of suffrage societies, both militant and constitutional, augmented by published memoirs and autobiographies. In my Introduction to The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (Routledge, 1999) I dwelled briefly on the way in which the availability and nature of archival material shapes the writing of suffrage history (indeed, of course, any history). In order to break new ground with The Reference Guide I was keen to employ tools (for instance, genealogical information – such as wills and census returns – artefacts, postcards, films, novels, plays etc) other than those readily accessible. My intention was to dig deeper below the surface of minutes and annual reports in order to breathe a measure of life back into the individual women (and men) who had devoted so much time and energy to their Cause but who had not left a convenient record of their engagement. But what of those minor suffrage societies about which very little information had survived in the archives? Without a cache of documents to use as a basis for its construction, it is very much more difficult to piece together a coherent history of a society than it is that of an individual.

In the dim and distant pre-internet days of 1995 I had begun my research by writing to every archive and library in Britain in order to establish their holdings of suffrage-related material. The world has now changed; search engines can uncover material, from all manner of sources, that twenty years ago we would have had no hope of recovering.However, no amount of remote searching can conjure up information residing within the pages of a voluminous diary piled in boxes in a dank north London cellar. That falls to chance and in June 2009 that chance came my way.

Until 1916 Kate wrote her diary entries in large ledger-type volumes ordered from Whiteleys

The diary in question, contained in over 60 volumes and replete with an archive of associated ephemera, was the lifetime work of Kate Parry Frye (later Collins, 1878-1959). From it I have been able to draw a fuller picture than exists anywhere else of one of those previously shadowy suffrage societies – the New Constitutional Society for Women’s Suffrage. My Reference Guide entry on the NCS – based in the main on the only archival material that survived of the Society – three annual reports held in the Women’s Library – runs only to about 500 words; Campaigning for the Vote: Kate Parry Frye’s Suffrage Diary, my edited version of her diary, covering in detail the years 1911-1915, a time when she was working as a paid organizer for the NCS, to about 120,000.

The Work Room set up in 1914 by the NCS as part of its war effort. This is the only image extant of the NCS banner.

This published edition of Kate Frye’s diary allows those interested in political and suffrage history to accompany her as she works as an NCS organizer, not only at the London headquarters, but also in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Sussex as she knocks on doors, arranges meetings, trembles on platforms, speaks from carts in market squares and deals with the egos and foibles of her fellow suffragists.

Of this meeting Kate wrote, ‘Mrs Fawcett speaks well, but she did not seem to go down well at the Meeting.’

Although from her teenage years in the 1890s, when her father was an MP, Kate Frye had taken some interest in politics, she showed no real curiosity about the suffrage movement until 1906. From then the diary traces her growing involvement. In February 1907 she took part in the first National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) procession through London, her diary providing the longest account by a participant that I have yet read.

Kate’s flyer advertising what became known for obvious reasons as ‘The Mud March’

‘We flew up as far as Piccadilly Circus…The crowd began to gather and we were nearly swept away by the first part – a swarm of roughs with the band – but the procession itself came – passed along dignified and really impressive. It was a sight I wouldn’t have missed for anything – and I was glad to have the opportunity of seeing it as well as taking part in it. We stood right in front so as not to miss our contingent – and I asked if they knew where it was. Miss Gore Booth said it was coming and we were fearfully excited and I was so anxious not to miss our lot. The crowds to see us – the man in the street – the men in the Clubs, the people standing outside the Carlton – interested – surprised for the most part – not much joking at our expense and no roughness. The policemen were splendid and all the traffic was stopped our way. We were an imposing spectacle all with badges – each section under its own banners. Ours got broken, poor thing, […] I felt like a martyr of old and walked proudly along. I would not jest with the crowd – though we had some jokes with ourselves. It did seem an extraordinary walk and it took some time as we went very slowly occasionally when we got congested – but we went in one long unbroken procession. There were 3,000 about I believe. The mud was awful. Agnes [her sister] and I wore galoshes so our feet were alright but we got dreadfully splashed. It was quite a business turning into the Exeter Hall. A band was playing merrily all the time.’ [Extract, 9 February 1907]

Kate played her part at numerous fund-raising suffrage bazaars and dances (palm-reading was her speciality), attended meetings of the Actresses’ Franchise League, marched in all the main spectacular processions, stewarded at meetings, and bore witness to the ‘Black Friday’ police brutality in Parliament Square on 18 November 1910:

Kate was proud to walk with the Actresses’ Franchise League in the 1911 suffragette-organized ‘Coronation Procession’

Programme for the ‘Coronation Procession ‘

WSPU flyer, 18 November 1910

‘Then from there [Caxton Hall] we were turned into the street and I waited there, chatting with different women, till about 12.40 when the 1st deputation left the Caxton Hall for Parliament Square. They were soon swallowed up in a seething mob and I simply flew with many other women by short cuts to Parliament Square where I landed more or less by chance in the thick of it. One could hardly see the plan of it all and, oh, the hurly burly, excitement, shouts, laughter, applause & rushes of the enormous crowd which grew every minute. I was almost struck dumb and I felt sick for hours. It was a most horrible experience. I have rarely been in anything more unpleasant – it was ghastly and the loud laughter & hideous remarks of the men – so called gentlemen – even of the correctly attired top-hatted kind – was truly awful.’ [Extract, 18 November 1910]

Kate’s WSPU membership card

What she had witnessed caused her resign from the London Society and join the WSPU. But shortly afterwards, in early 1911, as her family’s finances collapsed, she took up an offer of employment as an organizer for the NCS and it is this period on which I have chosen to concentrate in the published edition of Kate’s diary. If interested, you will find posts relating to Kate’s earlier suffrage activity, when she had the luxury of giving her services freely to the cause, on my website – Woman and Her Sphere – together with an article, ‘Kate Frye and the Problem of the Diarist’s Multiple Roles’, discussing an associated issue – the ethics of ‘mining’ a diary to present only one episode drawn from a long life.

Since writing the entry on the NCS in the Reference Guide, no other information on the Society has surfaced and I think we can be reasonably certain that all the records created by the NCS were destroyed when the Society disbanded in 1918, its work, as its leaders saw it, accomplished by the passing of the Representation of the People Act. I would contend that, at the moment, Kate Frye’s diary represents the major primary source on the NCS.

Kate’s NCS Organizer’s Book

The Society had been founded in early 1910 by, among others, Alexandra and Gladys Wright, Kate’s friends and Kensington neighbours, to take a position between that of the ‘militant’ Women’s Social and Political Union and that of the ‘constitutional’ National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. The founding members of the NCS, many of whom had previously been Liberals and NUWSS supporters, thought that the NUWSS had become ineffectual and, although they were not prepared themselves to break the law, did not condemn WSPU tactics and actively supported its policy of campaigning at elections against government (Liberal) candidates.

The opening of the NCS office in Knightsbridge, April 1910

Over and above the information it provides about the internal workings of the NCS, Kate’s diary provides us with an inimitable record of her efforts to convert the men and women of England to the cause of ‘votes for women’. There is no other primary source that provides such a coherent picture of the life of an organizer. Although other ‘suffrage diaries’ survive in the public domain, most were written primarily because that involvement represented a singular experience – often imprisonment – a highpoint in the diarist’s life. Kate’s diary is valuable because, writing without the benefit of hindsight, she records the inconsequential daily details of, say, finding a chairman for a suffrage meeting in Maldon or dealing with an imperious speaker in Dover, or spreading the suffrage message in the East End of London

Kate distributed a NCS leaflet translated into Yiddish in Whitechapel in 1913

as well as the rather more momentous suffrage occasions, such as waiting on the platform at King’s Cross station as the train carrying Emily Wilding Davison’s coffin is about to leave for Morpeth.

  ‘Near King’s Cross the procession lost all semblance of a procession. We lost our banner – we all got separated and our idea was to get away from the huge crowd of unwashed unhealthy creatures pressing us on all sides. We went down the Tube way… through to the other side finding ourselves in King’s Cross station. Saying we wanted tea we went on the platform and there was the train – the special carriage for the coffin – and, finding a seat, sank down and we did not move until the train left. Lots of the processionists were in the train, which was taking the body to Northumberland for interment – and another huge procession tomorrow. To think she had had to give her life because men will not listen to the claims of reason and of justice. I was so tired I felt completely done. We found our way to the refreshment room and there were several of the pall bearers having tea.‘ [Extract, 14 June 1913]

In Women of the Right Spirit – paid organisers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), MUP 2007, Krista Cowman draws material from a wide range of interesting sources in order to analyze the working life of Kate Frye’s WSPU equivalents. Kate’s diary adds another dimension, allowing us not only to observe her work but to share her experience.

We can see first-hand how a society campaigning in a constitutional manner to raise awareness of the necessity for ‘votes for women’, backing in particular the Conciliation Bills that were before parliament for much of the time that Kate was organizing in the country, was affected by the activities of the militants, of how it became increasingly difficult to hold meetings, find lodgings, or make and keep members who were appalled by the methods of the WSPU. For instance on 2 December 1912, while working in Dover, Kate remarked, ‘I went out to see Miss Robinson, whose uncle was going to give a Suffrage party and now won’t owing to the letter box demonstrations.’

Kate’s words bring to life the world of the itinerant organizer – a world of train journeys, of complicated luggage conveyance, of hotels (and hotel flirtations), of boarding houses, of landladies, and of the ‘quaintness’ of fellow boarders. Although not a world into which she was born, it was one with which she was not totally unfamiliar. For Kate, a gently brought up daughter of the ‘grocerage’, was a devotee of the theatre and from 1904-6 had been a member of a repertory theatre company, touring the provinces.

Kate toured in J.M. Barrie’s Quality Street and was photographed, in costume, in a Dublin studio in October 1903

Although she had wanted to earn sufficient to support herself – to be a ‘working woman’ – when she discovered that acting did not pay, it was entirely natural that she should return to life as a daughter-at-home. However by 1911 Kate’s father, Frederick Frye, once North Kensington’s Liberal MP and a businessman of some standing, had suffered financial catastrophe and it was against the background of the impending loss of the family home that Kate began her work for the NCS. Her diary sheds a clear light on the precarious reality of the long Edwardian summer; one year she could take for granted a life of boating and regattas, dressmakers, cooks and maids, the next she was living in dingy digs, attempting to raise money by hawking the family jewellery and old clothes.

It is ever surprising that new primary material such as Kate Frye’s collection continues to surface. There is an argument to say that nothing happens by chance and although, when I bought the diaries, I had not the faintest thought that they would provide material for a book, I did not actually stumble into that cellar uninvited. The diaries had been offered, c. 2007, to the Women’s Library, one of whose archivists had subsequently viewed the collection and had written a report recommending acceptance, while commenting on the very poor condition of many of the volumes and associated ephemera. With reluctance the Library decided that it was unable to accept the offer, the expensive of conserving the collection to archival standards being too great.

It was two years after the initial offer that, in my capacity as a bookseller specializing in women’s history, I was alerted to the diary’s existence by the Women’s Library archivist. Thus it was as a bookseller that I viewed the soaking-wet, mildewed volumes. They did not look appealing, but I was loath to reject out-of-hand this record of one woman’s entire life. Moreover, glancing inside some volumes I could see that the diarist had laid in quantities of ephemera. Just as history has its ‘turns’ – be they imperial, linguistic, cultural, postmodern, or digital – so bookselling, thanks to digitization, internet selling and printing-on-demand, is experiencing an ‘ephemeral’ turn and, at one with the zeitgeist, I find ephemera – suffrage or otherwise – increasingly appealing. Curiosity got the better of commonsense and the soaking volumes were purchased.

Once the volumes had dried, the reading began. Kate Frye reshaped herself, drawing me into her world. Recognizing that what she had to tell us of her suffrage days was both invaluable and engaging, the idea of publishing her experiences as Campaigning for the Vote took hold. Publication of this new primary material will, I hope, be useful not only to ‘suffrage scholars’ but also those more generally interested in early-20th-century social history.

Kate’s diary entry for 21 May 1914, describing the WSPU demonstration outside Buckingham Palace