1. When did the Labour party appear?

2. What was its name in the beginning?

3. Why were the members of a powerful political movement called suffragettes?

The 1906 election restoring the Liberals to power had also raised the spirits of the Labour Representation Committee, twenty-nine out of their fifty candidates having been elected.

Keir Hardie, a Scottish newspaperboy and miner, who believed in socialism as the only creed to offer 'life for the dying people', became the first Independent Socialist M.P., for West Ham, in 1892, startling the House by arriving complete with cloth cap, tweed jacket and brass band. He was chairman of a conference in 1893 to form an Independent Labour Party, which in February 1900 met other workers' groups and set up a Labour Representation Committee with the task of creating a Labour group at Westminster.

The first secretary of the LRC was James Ramsay MacDonald, who from poor beginnings in a Scottish fishing village had worked his way through board school and evening classes to become secretary to an M.P. and then a political journalist. In 1911 he be­came leader of what was now firmly established as the Parliamentary Labour Party, which after the 1910 elections numbered forty-two.

Funds for election campaigns and for the maintenance of Labour members came largely from the trade unions. The payment of official salaries to members eased the strain considerably and made possible a wider representation of socialist views, not tied exclusively to union policy.

A motion for women's right to vote was introduced as early as 1867 by the philosopher and M.P., John Stuart Mill, but defeated by men confident that the country was safer in male hands. In the more emancipated society of Edwardian days, women began to speak out for themselves; and, when speech availed nothing, turned to aggressive action.

In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst established the Women's Social and Political Union to press for female suffrage. Their claims were met with amusement, and the word 'suffragette' became an easy term of derision. Mrs Pankhurst had a meeting with the prime minister at which he made it clear that no action was contemplated to meet the suffragettes' wishes. She and her colleagues, most of them well educated and from good families, thereupon began a campaign of nuisance tactics which intensified as repressive measures were taken. They chained themselves to railings, broke windows, set fire to pillar-boxes, and heckled the public speeches of Govern­ment spokesmen. When arrested, some went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed. Descriptions of this ugly process reached the newspapers and the public, and sympathy for the suffragettes began to perturb the Government.

An Act was passed, ostensibly with humanitarian intentions, but soon denounced as the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. Women hunger strikers were to be released from prison when their condition became serious, and then rearrested when they had recuperated or when it suited the authorities.

The distinguished physician Sir Almroth Wright, pioneer of anti-typhoid inoculation and other enlightened methods of combating infection, wrote magisterially to The Times to explain women's unsuitability for making rational decisions. 'There are no good women, but only women who have lived under the influence of good men.' Those who chained themselves to railings were sexually thwarted; the middle-aged ones of course going through that phase when all women go slightly mad. Their programme, he feared, was simply 'to convert the world into an epicene institution in which men and women shall everywhere work side by side at the self-same tasks and for the self-same pay'.

On 4th June 1913 Emily Davison, a young Northumbrian lady, threw herself under King George's horse at the Derby. She died in hospital. The suffragettes organised a huge funeral procession, at which Mrs Pankhurst was arrested as she was about to get into her carriage.

Militancy increased. Buildings were burned, and paintings in art galleries were slashed, including Velasquez's Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery.

But a greater war was threatening. (Burke)

Part 2. Before the First World War. The War and its Aftermath

THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR

Task 25. Read the text and answer the following questions: