THE wave of industrial protest which arguably peaked in intensity with the short-lived national coal strike in January continued rippling through the rest of 1912, occasionally with violent consequences. At Rotherhithe, for example, tensions occasioned by a dockers’ strike led to Metropolitan Police constables charging into a hostile crowd on the night of 11 June, striking ‘right and left with their [rolled-up] capes in a brutal way and without discrimination’.

Such sporadic flare-ups notwithstanding, the latter part of the year saw suffragette militancy quickly rise to the status of foremost domestic security threat. March saw a redoubled campaign of window-smashing and occasional arson, a police raid on Clement's Inn, the arrest and imprisonment of Emmeline Pankhurst and the Pethick-Lawrences on charges of conspiracy, the flight of Christabel to Paris in order to avoid the same fate, as well as an ever increasing torrent of public opprobrium. Following this series of dramatic events, the WSPU entered a new phase in its evolution; one marked by pure hostility to anything supportive of the status quo.

The first major sign of this shift came in mid-July with two alarming incidents involving senior government figures. The first occurred on the evening of 13 July when two ‘respectably dressed’ suffragettes were apprehended in the vicinity of the Oxfordshire residence of Lewis Harcourt, Colonial Secretary and inveterate opponent of female enfranchisement. While one of the women managed to escape police capture, her accomplice, Helen Craggs (the daughter of a well-to-do chartered accountant), was promptly taken into custody along with a suspicious basket containing ‘[two boxes] of matches, four tapers, twelve fire-lighters… nine pick-locks… an electric torch [and] a glass cutter’. Pleading guilty to attempted arson, Craggs professed to have ‘taken part in every peaceful method of propaganda and petition [to] no avail,’ before deciding to do ‘something drastic’.

That same impulse manifested itself only five days later in Dublin during an official visit by Asquith, when the battle-hardened Mary Leigh, who had ‘pioneered’ window-breaking over four years before, threw an axe at the ministerial carriage as it passed through Princes Street, failing to do any real damage other than leaving John Redmond with ‘a nasty cut on the eye’.