Book Review: Simon Webb - The Suffragette Bombers: Britain's Forgotten Terrorists

"During the early hours of 19th February 1913, a powerful bomb wrecked Chancellor Of The Exchequer David Lloyd George's new house. It was the opening shot in 20th Century Britain's first terrorist campaign, and it was carried out by women in ankle-length skirts - the suffragettes."  

If I were to sum up this book in one sentence it would be:

Everything you think you know about the suffragettes is wrong.

 Simon Webb takes a crowbar to several longstanding myths about the Suffragettes and in the process discovers some unpleasant facts that have been airbrushed from history.

Myth: Edwardian England was a Golden Age of peace and stability.
Fact: The United Kingdom was wracked by political and social unrest and on several occasions, came very close to Civil War.

Myth: The suffragettes were a widespread popular movement.
Fact: That would be the suffragists - a genuine, grassroots, movement that was peaceful and law-biding. You know, the ones you've never heard of.

Myth: The Suffragettes fought for women to be given the right to vote. 
Fact: Emmeline Pankhurst made it clear early on that she had no interest in Universal Suffrage for working class men and women - only extending the vote to women with property. Like herself.

Myth: The suffragettes were essentially non-violent activists who confined themselves to heckling and vandalism.
Fact: In the years leading up to the First World War, the suffragists waged an enthusiastic campaign of bombing, arson and vandalism that targeted stately homes, churches, sports-grounds and public buildings while paying no thought whatsoever to potential casualties. In the most chilling example, suffragettes attempted to blow up a dam. 

Myth: The suffragettes got women the vote. 
Fact: The general public - including most women - found the methods of the suffragettes so appalling that their antics actually set progress back by years.

"The Suffragette Bombers" is a fascinating book. Britain in the early years of the 20th Century was a more complicated place than Downton Abbey would have you believe and the struggle to get women the vote is particularly complex.  Simon Webb manages to explain it in a way that's accessible for the layman, kicks some long-cherished sacred cows in the ribs and asks why a small, radical group of fanatics are now revered by historians.
The whole thing is squeezed into a book that can be read in an afternoon, remaining informative and entertaining throughout.

 Highly recommended to anybody fascinated by social history