The great British campaigner for women's rights Lilian Lenton is so little known or recognized today that her photo showed up in my Pinterest feed as a generic suffragette...
"In 1912, Scotland Yard detectives bought their first camera, to covertly photograph suffragettes. The pictures were compiled into ID sheets for officers on the ground."
But Lilian Lenton was just about as generic as King Kong!
"In Holloway Prison she held a hunger strike for two days before being forcibly fed, which caused her to become seriously ill with pleurisy caused by food entering her lungs. It took two doctors and seven wardens to restrain her. She was quickly and quietly released. Her case created an outrage among the public, made worse by the fact that the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, denied that she had been force fed and that her illness was actually caused by her hunger strike. However, Home Office papers show that she was force fed on February 23, 1913. A letter to The Times in 1913, from Victor Horsley, a leading surgeon, claimed “...the Home Secretary’s attempted denial that Miss Lenton was nearly killed by the forcible feeding is worthless...she was tied into a chair and her head dragged backward across the back of the chair by her hair. The tube was forced through the nose twice . . . after the second introduction when the food was poured in, it caused violent choking.”
"It took two doctors and seven wardens to restrain her." Ms. Lenton was 5'2" tall, and slender!
And back she went to prison again and again and again.
"She was arrested in October 1913 while collecting a bicycle from the left luggage office at Paddington Station, and while on remand went on a hunger strike and a thirst strike, for which she was again forcibly fed. Her physical health again being seriously affected by this treatment, she was released on licence for 5 days into the care of a Mrs Diplock of London, but again absconded."
And every time she got out of prison...
"Whenever I was out of prison my object was to burn two buildings a week. The object was to create an absolutely impossible condition of affairs in the country, to prove it was impossible to govern without the consent of the governed."
