BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb

Subject: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: The Sandman
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 12:03 PM

HE UNVEILING OF THE STONE BOMB
Interview with Councillor George Miles

This is an excerpt from an interview with the late Cllr George Miles, who was present at the original unveiling of Sylvia Pankhurst's anti-airwarfare monument in Woodford in 1935. The interview was recorded in 1990, and is reproduced here courtesy of the Essex Record Office Sound Archive.

George Miles was born in Woolwich in 1909, and died in Essex in the 1990s. Having started out as a young Conservative in his youth in the 1920s when Churchill was elected to the Woodford constituency, George Miles had converted to Communism before the Second World War. After a busy career as a party activist, Miles left the Communists in 1956 and joined the Labour Party, eventually becoming a County Councillor for Essex.

Click the play button to hear it through your speakers:
example of play button

…or read the transcript below.

'[At the time I was in Woodford], Sylvia Pankhurst lived there, in this big house on the corner of a road off Snakes Lane. She lived with her common-law husband, an Italian anti-fascist. He was on the run from Mussolini. In the same way that Mussolini had put Gramsci in prison and killed Matteotti, he would have done this bloke in, undoubtedly!

She was interested in the League of Nations. When I started canvassing for that, I got to know her and she was interested and prepared to do something.

In addition to that house, she had a cottage at Woodford Wells, right opposite the Horse and Well. In the garden there, facing the bus stop on a very prominent site, she had somebody make a concrete plinth with a bomb on the top of it. She dedicated this to Lord Londonderry, because at that time he was, I think, the Minister for Air. He had made a speech in the House of Commons, where he said he had had great difficulty in preserving the bombing plane for posterity – almost apologising for it.

Of course she took this up, and had this carved on it. There was going to be a great opening. She had some clerics down; I think she had a bloke from Thaxted but I can't remember exactly. [This may well have been the person known as the 'Red Vicar' of Thaxted: the Christian Socialist, Conrad Noel. – Ed]

Among the people who came to jeer was one of the daughters of Lord Londonderry. She had with her a girl named Lettie who I managed to talk to for about five or ten minutes. She was quite easy to talk to.

That was the girl who I eventually married in 1945, when I came out of the Army. By that time Lettie had changed her politics! Her brother, Major Hicks-Beech, was the Conservative MP for Cheltenham. Her name was Lettie Hicks-Beech; they were a Gloucestershire family who married in and out of the aristocracy.

She was working, if you please, as a shop steward in an electrical factory, on behalf of the Communist Party, and she was decorated with the Communist Party's badge for 'party build-up' because she'd recruited more than 50 people. So I met her again after the War. It's very strange how these things happen; they talk about the wheel of circumstance and coincidence, but I've noticed this ever so times in my life, and am not able to explain it: nevertheless it's a fact; how you can seem to be running along, as trains along the same lines.

To get back to Sylvia: she had this event there, and made this demonstration, and I got to know her a bit more. I used to go round to her house. She had this little boy who was her son by the Italian anti-fascist; and he is the chap who is now a professor in Addis Ababa University: his name is Dr Richard Pankhurst.

Of course she was a smasher, she was. She was a real one-hundred-per-cent woman who knew everything, and knew what she wanted to do – and who could be relied upon, one hundred per cent!'
→ More in this 'The Stone Bomb' sub-section:
The Stone Bomb: Introduction; The Unveiling of the Stone Bomb, by Cllr George Miles; The Stone Bomb and sculptor Eric Benfield, by Patrick Wright; The Stone Bomb: the story since, by Sylvia Ayling
Also in the 'Her Campaigns' section:
Her Campaigns: Introduction, Sylvia & Suffrage, Sylvia in London's East End, Sylvia & Ethiopia and The Stone Bomb.
That was my father talking about SylviaPankhurst

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: MAG
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 01:43 PM

I'm glad this staunch early feminist is better known in her home ciuntry than she is here.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: Little Robyn
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 04:17 PM

There's a picture of it
here.

Robyn

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 06:58 PM

Good God. I thought Sylvia Pankhurst was a world wide icon.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: Rapparee
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 08:47 PM

I've heard of her and what she did. There was even something on PBS about her some years (a lot of years!) back.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 07 Jan 11 - 09:50 PM

Rapparee, I think the PBS production to which you refer is Shoulder to Shoulder, a mini-series that told the story of the Women's Suffrage Movement in England. I had heard of the force-feeding of the women prisoners but had no visual image of how that was done until I saw the series. The memory of that dramatization was so brutal that it still upsets me.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: LadyJean
Date: 08 Jan 11 - 12:32 AM

I didn't know that about Sylvia. She was a spectacular lady.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: Charley Noble
Date: 08 Jan 11 - 10:37 AM

Dick-

I didn't know that your family has such an intriguing connection. I have admired the work of Richard Pankhurst in Ethiopia as well, having run across him while I was there in the Peace Corps in the 1960's, and when I ladst visited Addis Ababa last year the Ethiopian Studies Center was still going strong.

It's also interesting that Cicely Fox Smith went to the same school as Sylvia and her sisters, The Manchester High School for Girls, and had many a battle with them over the Boar War. Smith was a militant conservative at the time, very patriotic, and one of her brothers was a soldier in South Africa. At one time years later Smith recalled with some relish gathering and flushing some of the Pankhurst anti-war flyers down the toilet at the school.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: The Sandman
Date: 08 Jan 11 - 12:47 PM

Yes,Charley, my mother was disinherited because of her communist views,
my father also did 30 days hard labour[ 1937] for supposedly insulting King George V1 in a public speech.
Of course its a great buzz for me, hearing my father again[he died in 1999 aged 90] after all these years, but what is more important is to hear history as related by those who were actually present.
So thanks to the Essex record offices for this, it really made my day.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: Cats
Date: 09 Jan 11 - 07:02 AM

Wonderful piece. My Grandmother was a suffragette and one day I will get round to writing up the things she told that she did. She was involved in the Oxted Railway Station Incident where the women were ushered away 'for their own safety' when the device was found without the men having realised it was the women who had made it!

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 09 Jan 11 - 08:37 AM

Hey Dick

Great stuff. Really glad you are making use of the Essex Record Office Archives.
So thanks to the Essex record offices for this, it really made my day

Where exactly did you access the transcription of the interview? Was it on SEAX?

An email or letter to Joanna Killian (the CEO of Essex County Council) stating the same may just help the Essex Record Office stay open at normal hours and keep getting funds for its digitisation projects of both paper / parchment and sound / video archives.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: MAG
Date: 09 Jan 11 - 11:42 AM

Our country (U.S.) barely recognises its own militabts, let alone others.

Only us left of centers know who Joe Hill was, or Sacco and Vanzetti -

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 09 Jan 11 - 09:32 PM

And MAG, that's probably because there are songs about Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti! It's amazing what gets left out of history textbooks.

Subject: RE: BS: sylvia pankhurst and the stone bomb
From: MAG
Date: 10 Jan 11 - 01:54 PM

Who will remember

this good shoemaker?

Who will remember this poor fish monger? (Holly Near)


Any songs about the Pankhursts?


and here's to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

who never would give in


I dreamed about Joe Hill Last night, alive as you or me ...

Voices of struggle show the power of song (Mr. Fielding)