Docile Suffragettes? Resistance to Police Photography and the Possibility of Object–Subject Transformation

By the time these photographs were taken police departments in major metropolitan areas around the world were routinely collecting and archiving photographs of criminals (Finn 2009, 6–11). Early use of civilian photographers by the police has been traced back to the 1840s (Tagg 1988; Phillips 1997), though photographic records of prisoners were not at all common until the 1860s, and even then procedures varied considerably across police districts (Sekula 1986, 5). Police photography gained legal recognition with the passing of the Habitual Criminals Act 1869, as modified by the Prevention of Crimes Act 1871 and the Penal Servitude Act 1891 (Pavlich 2009). This meant that by the 1870s the police were required to attain photographs of all criminals sentenced to at least 1 month imprisonment together with finger prints and recording of other details about the criminal body such as hair and eye colour. Prison Governors were responsible for notifying particulars and personal descriptions to those responsible for crime prevention. From 1884 the Criminal Records Office published many of these details in The Police Gazette which was circulated daily to all Police Forces in Great Britain (The National Archives 2013).

A recent exhibition of police photographs suggests that Australian police photographers in the period 1912–1948 allowed subjects considerable discretion over the pose they adopted. These photographs show criminals and suspects wearing their own clothes including hats, standing on their own or clustered in groups. In some instances group photographs show partners in crime smiling confidently and conveying a sense of bravado and swagger (Doyle 2007). Across Europe there were also variations in the way that information about criminals and suspects was recorded. The French record system, developed by Bertillon, and much used across continental Europe, required extremely detailed records and prescribed camera angles which were never used in England.⁹ This involved measuring numerous body parts, taking descriptions of facial features and noting peculiar marks alongside more subjective considerations such as complexion, demeanour and voice (Logan 2012). It has been suggested that not all jurisdictions were as open to Bertillon’s morphological system of classification of criminals as France, preferring to devote resources to the systems of fingerprinting developed by the English (Logan 2012, 1573). It is also the case that while the British authorities were prepared to put the new systems of physical identification to work in the colonies, they were much more circumspect about the use of these techniques at home. This appears to stem from fears that such intrusive record keeping might jeopardize the co-operation of the public in police detection work (Knepper and Norris 2009).

Despite these variations, dominant conventions about the mugshot had clearly emerged by the time the photographs shown in Figs. 1 and 2 were taken. Drawing on the customs of the photographic portraiture of the mid-late nineteenth century, it was generally expected that mugshots should be frontal images, showing head and shoulders with no facial expression (Finn 2009; Edwards 2006).¹⁰ By the 1870s mugshots in England reflect a somewhat ironic preference for making the images of criminal’s uniform. Albums of images of untried prisoners dating from 1897 in the National Archives contain page after page of head and shoulders shots of men in the same prison uniform holding their jackets in exactly the same way. Records from Wadsworth prison dated 1873 show a similar head and shoulders pose with each prisoner holding a crime number in front of them.¹¹

Surviving Home Office records demonstrate that prior to April 1913 it had not been the practice of the governor of Holloway prison to photograph suffragettes because of the likelihood of them resisting and concerns about adverse publicity. After attacks on artworks began in 1913, this policy changed but Home Office officials were still keen to keep their practices of photographing and fingerprinting suffragettes after 1913 away from the attention of MPs for fear of the outrage it might provoke amongst those whose sympathised with the suffragist cause (National Archives 1913a). In the event, their decision to photograph suffragettes was not as successful as had been anticipated. There is little doubt that the prison authorities wanted to produce conventional mugshots of suffragettes but the images in Figs. 1 and 2 make clear that the photographs produced were far from conventional. Only one of the images, that of Kitty Marion (13), is the usual head and shoulders pose expected of the mugshot at this time. It is also immediately obvious that they are of very little use for the purposes of identification. In the photographs of Mary Richardson (11), Miss Johansen (15), Jane Short (6), Annie Bell (5) and Clara Giveen (16) the faces of the subjects are cast into shadow by the hats they are wearing or the angle of the pose, and very few of the women are actually looking at the camera.¹² A number of the women in the montages looked much more dishevelled than normal. This is evident when the photograph of Jennie Baines (11) is compared with the image of her in the carte de visite produced for sale in the Women’s Social and Political Union (NWSPU) shops in which her hair is dressed and she is wearing a spotless high necked white blouse. Why do these images fall so far outside the boundaries of the conventional mugshot?

Once admitted to prison, suffragettes would often shout out from their cells and smash cell windows. More specifically, Home Office records from July 1913 record that suffragettes “…invariably do their utmost to avoid being photographed while in prison”. They raised their arms, turned their heads and made faces in order to render the photographs less valuable for surveillance purposes. (National Archives 1913b). Contemporary accounts suggest that just one of the photographs, that of Lilian Forester (14), was taken by the police with the permission of the subject (National Archives 1913i). By way of contrast, the photograph of Evelyn Manesta (10), reproduced in larger format in Fig. 3, shows her screwing up her face and closing her eyes. Her facial expression makes her lack of compliance clear and provides a much more nuanced account of the power dynamic than is usually anticipated in accounts of the mugshot.

Another equally powerful incentive for improved identification procedures came about as a direct result of the suffragettes claiming the status of political prisoners. The refusal of the government to formally afford them this recognition led to a strategy of hunger strikes and the controversial decision to force feed the women. Growing public disquiet over this practice led to the passing of the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge) Act or the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act in April 1913. This allowed hunger strikers to be temporarily released when fasting put their health at risk, followed by their re-arrest once it had improved. The legislation placed the police in the role of hunter with responsibility for recapturing a category of convicts who proved themselves extremely adept at avoiding re-arrest. Consequently, the police began to seek out new methods of surveillance that would allow them to match the skills of their adversaries and the recently established special branch were given additional resources in order to achieve this.¹³ One of the suffragettes shown in Fig. 2, Lilian Lenton (12), who was also known as Ida Inkley and May Dennis, was particularly famous for avoiding the police (BBC 2002). The result was that mugshots, taken before interruptions in periods of incarceration, began to play an ever more important role in the playing out of the tense relationship between these political activists and the state.

Faced with the suffragette strategy of non-cooperation, the police and prison authorities turned to covert surveillance methods. From April 1913 the Home Office instructed all prisons that if suffragettes objected to having their photograph taken as expected then an ‘expert photographer’ from Scotland Yard could be sent to take one without the prisoner’s knowledge (National Archives 1913f, g). A memorandum of 1914 required, in a rather convoluted feat of reasoning around the notion of consent, that: “As …photographs cannot be taken by force, the officer who takes photographs at the prison should be instructed to endeavour to take a photograph without the knowledge of the prisoner” (National Archives 1914a).

Home Office documents provide us with an intriguing, and often detailed, account of the procedures subsequently adopted. New Scotland Yard employed a professional photographer, Mr Barrett of Salisbury Court Fleet Street, to provide advice to them about the best method of successfully photographing prisoners without their knowledge. He was also asked to take a series of clandestine photographs of suffragettes (National Archives 1913b). Initial experiments at Holloway prison, where most suffragettes were incarcerated, proved unsuccessful because of problems with focus caused by the long distances between photographer and suffragette. The police also became increasingly concerned about the cost of instructing a private photographer on a regular basis (Crawford 2005, 495). As a result the police sought further advice from Mr Newton, a scientific instrument maker of Covent Garden and purchased a telecentric lens and Wigmore Model 2 reflex camera on his advice (1913c, 1914c, d). Equipped with this superior equipment, a police constable and superintendent from Scotland Yard took photographs from inside a van parked in the exercise yard at Holloway. The photographs taken were shared with police forces, prisons and art galleries throughout the country (Crawford 2005), a development that marked an important step in the development of modern surveillance techniques by the police.

Accounts of attempts to take a covert photograph of Kitty Marion (13) suggest that guards were asked to coax prisoners towards a particular position in the yard in order to ensure the photographs were in focus (1913d). Photographic collections held at the National Portrait Gallery, National Archives, Women’s Library at the LSE and Museum of London make clear that not all the surviving images were taken from the same angle, or with the suffragettes in the same position, but there are clearly some favoured backdrops which suggest that the van at Holloway was often located in the same position. Significantly, there are suggestions that Kitty Marion (13) may have had some idea that attempts were being made at covert photography. Contemporary records show that she was unwilling to remove her hat and motoring veil when in the exercise yard, despite being coaxed to do so by a prison guard (National Archives 1914b). A photograph found in the Museum of London showing her in the yard at Holloway demonstrates how her reluctance would have undermined attempts to take a photograph for identification purposes. This may explain why the photograph of this popular vocal comedienne in Fig. 2 (13) is in the style of a carte de visite, as this would have been easy for the police to purchase.¹⁴ At least one other photograph located in the Museum of London, which shows an unknown suffragette pointing at the camera, suggests that they might have had some inkling of what was going on (see further Museum of London, undated).

Despite these suggestions that the suffragettes might have had an inkling of what was going on, it seems unlikely that they understood the full scale of this clandestine operation. An analysis of Votes for Women, the Suffragettes’ weekly newspaper, reveals no discussion of these police practices, although concern is expressed about the new practice of forcibly taking fingerprints of suffragettes (Votes for Women1914, 443). Accounts of covert photography are also absent from the diaries of prisoners (see for instance Kitty Marion, undated). The highly secretive nature of the police operation is evidenced by a note in the National Archives which describes the code names to be used to denote photographers, suffragettes, police stations and New Scotland Yard in telephone conversations between prisons, the Home Office and the Police (National Archives 1913e).

By altering their approach to producing photographs the police were successful in their attempts to put images of the suffragettes on record. The fact that agents of the State were exercising powers considered legitimate when they snatched these likenesses places the women in the guise of passive objects of the police gaze. At the same time, the failure to comply with mugshot conventions causes us to pause a little in what might otherwise have been an instant recognition of the subject as an incarcerated criminal. Separated out and placed in newspapers or scrapbooks many of the eighteen images might have been made by a photojournalist or feminist supporter. Once the criminal mask of the conventional mugshot pose, with all its associated cultural signs, is removed these images continue to destabilise the currency of the surveillance records produced by the state.

These photographs also disrupted prevailing concepts of who the appropriate objects of the police gaze are. In addition to its role in identifying individual criminals, the mug-shot was seen as providing another important function in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The growing popularity of criminal anthropology, psychiatry, phrenology, criminology and physiognomy all contributed to the emergence of theories that linked the propensity to habitually commit crime with physical traits, heredity and retarded evolution (Finn 2009; Rafter 2009). Photography played a critical role in establishing the credibility of such claims. It was generally considered possible during this period to read criminality from the face. Mugshots were commonly used in the construction and illustration of seminal works on the topic. In Italy, Lombroso drew heavily on photographs of prisoners to illustrate his theories about the criminal type (Rafter 2009) and in England, the statistician Galton (1879), used composite photographs of convicts to identify a biologically determined average offender. In this way the emerging discipline of criminology produced a new set of signs which allowed identification of the criminal by reference to physical characteristics (Logan 2012).

The photographs of the female suffragettes being considered here disrupted this new system of branding in ways that are particularly relevant to studies of gender and crime. Criminality had long been associated with the masculine rather than the feminine (Zedner 1991; Lacey 2008). Where women and crime had been discussed they tended to be associated with a limited number of particular crimes such as witchcraft, infanticide, shoplifting and prostitution (Smart 1995; Carlen and Worrall 1995; d’Cruze and Jackson 2009). The focus on prostitutes has been particularly pronounced as women convicted of offences relating to this category invariably made up a larger proportion of incarcerated women than any other category (Tarnowsky 2009). In the period in which each of the suffragettes depicted in Figs. 1 and 2 were facing prison it has been calculated that 85–90 % of the women in prison had been convicted for offences relating to prostitution (Crawford 1999). The crimes to which women have been linked can often be seen as mere extensions of the roles it has been considered legitimate for them to play in capitalist and patriarchal societies. For Weis (1976, 18) understandings of female crime often constitute an illegitimate expression of legitimate female role expectations. Homemakers become shoplifters, healers become witches and submissive sexual partners become prostitutes. The resonance of these conventional representations of gender and crime is made all the more obvious when women step out of the usual role expected of them by murdering their husbands, lovers, seducers and children and are characterised as ‘freaks, lunatics or rebels’ by the press, judiciary and even ‘sober historians’ as a result (Hartman 1973, 381; Carstens 2011). Viewed in this way it will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that militant suffragettes were labelled hysterical, fanatical, sexually depraved, menopausal, intellectually pretentious or delusionally ambitious (Purvis 1995, 104). Like other women in history who have failed to comply with dominant norms, these women were conceptualised as being out of place (Gullickson 2014).

These attempts to explain female criminality remained rare. Dominant theories of crime focused on the behaviour of lower class men and typically disregarded middle class and female crime on the basis that it was negligible and insignificant. Scholars are increasingly alert to the fact that many of the assumptions about the criminal behaviour of women are based on now contested theoretical progenitors, reliance on official crime statistics which did not necessarily reflect all criminal activity, logical errors of inference and questionable interpretation of the skewed data available (Weis 1976, 17). Regardless of the many claims of early criminologists to scientific method, contemporary commentators are apt to recognise the significance of the status and class of those constructing these new knowledge systems in determining what they sought to theorise (Phillips 1997). As Tagg (1988) has convincingly argued it was particular categories of people such as the working classes, sex-workers, colonised peoples, the poor, ill-housed, sick or insane who became the objects of knowledge in this discourse. For present purposes, the real importance of these photographic archives is probably not what they tell us about those photographed but how the mugshot became enmeshed in a class based binary of normal versus deviant (Sekula 1986; Finn 2009). For Sekula (1986, 10–14) photography provided a means to produce a biotype which was organically distinct from its bourgeois observers. As a result it might be argued that interpretations of mugshots can be seen as a mirror of what the elite feared might reside within them rather than objective pieces of data.

It is far from easy to fit the 1085 militant suffragettes imprisoned for their cause (Crawford 1999) into these contemporary ideas about the criminal body. It has been suggested that those suffragettes who served time in prisons were more likely to be middle class women who enjoyed the support of independent income and servants and as a result found it much easier to be absent from households. This has caused some commentators to characterise the suffragette policy of accepting imprisonment rather than the payment of a fine as posing an unacceptable risk for working class women and a blatant display of class privilege (Bolt 1995; Caine 1997). However, the assumption that suffragettes who went to prison were invariably middle class has been challenged by Liddington and Norris (2000) and Purvis (1995) and is relevant here. Several of the suffragettes depicted in Figs. 1 and 2 had to work for their living including Gertrude Ansell (7) who worked as a ‘typewriter’ (Crawford 2004), Lillian Lenton (12) who was the daughter of a carpenter and worked as a professional dancer, Kitty Marion (13) who worked on the stage and Jennie Baines (16) who worked as a sewing machinist and paid volunteer at the WSPU (Crawford 1999).

Whatever, the ethics of the suffragettes prison strategy, none of the women shown in Figs. 1 and 2 were typical subjects of the surveillance photograph. It is their political convictions rather than a life of crime that led to them being photographed. Tagg (1988, 2009) has argued that those who provided the focus of new theories of the criminal type were generally those who were cut off from command of meaning. By way of contrast, the leaders of the militant suffragettes had a number of influential supporters in political circles. Whilst not always able to steer political debates in the way they wanted, the suffragettes were nonetheless highly skilled in their attempts to interrupt them. The mugshots being discussed here provide an excellent new case study in the success of this strategy.

Unlike many of the female prisoners with whom they were incarcerated the suffragettes actively courted imprisonment when they had a viable alternative and defied the judicial process by interrupting the link between crime and punishment.¹⁵ Prison for them was an important site of protest (d’Cruze and Jackson 2009) as illustrated by these small acts of rebellion as well as the hunger strikes on which most other studies of their incarceration focus. This conviction is captured in the quotation from W.E. Gladstone on the sketch of a prison cell drawn by Olive Hockin (2): ‘You have made of your prison a temple of honour’ (Crawford 1999, 288). For these suffragettes, prison was not just a conscious choice but an integral part of their political struggle. Though the Fenians might be regarded as one of the first modern movements to furnish political prisoners in the 1860s, it has been argued that the suffragettes were their successors. Moreover, it was in the militant suffragette campaign that the prison first emerged as a terrain of political contestation in its own right and this was a model that was to be adopted around the world (Kenney 2012). Unlike those usually captured by the mugshot these suffragettes actively chose to be in prison.

The suffragettes’ transgressions also went beyond their physical acts of criminal damage and arson. Those considered ‘ladies’, who had previously represented, and been represented as, the ideal of womanhood offended their own class as much by their political activism as by their militancy (Zedner 1991). It was the idea that amongst the militants were middle class women who might damage the contents of the very West End shops and galleries which had been created for them to consume that also rendered their behaviour problematic (Crawford 2005, 493). This anomaly is particularly potent in the cases of Mary Richardson (11) who had studied art and travelled to Paris and Italy or Olive Hockin (2), an artist trained at The Slade who had exhibited at the Walker gallery in Liverpool and the Royal Academy (Crawford 1999). Zedner (1991, 128) concludes that the stigmatisation of this new class of deviant forced a reappraisal of the category of criminal women and created an entirely new set of offenders for criminologists to grapple with.

The final way in which the suffragette photographs being discussed question prevailing norms about documentary evidence is that they cast doubt on the credibility of claims that police photography displayed an objectivity not enjoyed by other forms of representation. The mugshot is commonly identified as a prime example of the ‘documentary’ form of photography (Warner-Marien 2002). In contrast to photography which claimed to be an art form the mugshot was, and largely continues to be, conceptualised as capable of presenting a direct and unmediated index of its subject. Viewed from this perspective, it is perceived to be relatively neutral, style-less and devoid of subjective intention on the part of the photographer. In short, the mugshot is a mechanically produced non-aesthetic object. Edwards (2006) terms it as an example of a category of photography “…cast in the role of lowly carrier of information”’ (16).

The credibility of the notion of the purely documentary photograph has been hotly contested. It has been argued, for instance, that although police photographs are not taken with an explicit aesthetic purpose they do nonetheless embody expressive properties and tend to offer an ambiguous rather than an absolute truth (Phillips et al. 1997, 7). Despite such assertions, the notion of the ideal type of documentary photographs remains central to scholarly debate about photography. This type of image continues to be characterised as relatively truthful because of the aspiration of the photographer to marginalise their own values and influence. Practitioners of this form are not expected to alter negatives for effect or edit the image in any way by cropping, retouching, posing, staging or adding of dramatic light effects. However, as Edwards (2006) has argued “What is left unsaid in this account is that some institutions or powerful individuals have the resources and authority to decide what counts as true or objective” (27). The story of the suffragette’s photographs demonstrates just how easily the state was able to manipulate the messages conveyed by the photographs they took.

An analysis of Home Office files demonstrates that, contrary to the conceptualisation of the police document as a reliable index, those responsible for producing the photographs that appear at Figs. 1 and 2 deliberately edited them. In some instances the photographs have been cropped in ways that create a very different impression of the subjects. For instance, the images labelled 1–3 in figure two of Margaret Scott (1), Olive Hockin (2) and Margaret McFarlane (3) come from the same photograph of four suffragettes walking together companionably in Holloway prison exercise yard. They have been severed, only to be reunited as a set of discrete images in the montage.¹⁶ The four companions of Maud Brindley’s (8) with whom she is talking have also been cropped out of the photograph of her, just as the companion affectionately linking Clara Giveen (16) arm has been removed (Museum of London 1913). What is lost when these images of groups are re-presented as separate frames is the sense of camaraderie shown in the original photographs. In the place of images that demonstrate solidarity each suffragette is represented instead as isolated.

These transgressions clearly impact on how we interpret the photographs, but the most blatant misrepresentation of the circumstances in which a photograph was taken is reserved for the photograph of Evelyn Manesta (10) in Figs. 2, 4 and 5. Home Office files make clear that Manesta resisted being photographed in line with suffragette policy and an initial attempt at producing a clandestine photograph in a Manchester prison resulted in a photograph deemed unsuitable for identification purposes. As a result, the Prison Commissioner requested the Deputy Governor of Holloway prison to arrange for another photograph, shown as Fig. 4, to be taken of her when she was in Holloway prison (National Archives 1913h). A comparison of Figs. 3 and 4 demonstrates that the version circulated to art galleries was radically altered. The original version in Fig. 4 reveals a warden standing behind a resisting Manesta holding her in place by means of an arm around her neck and a hand on her side. A contemporary memorandum from the Prison Governor provides a perfunctory account of the decision to edit the photograph resulting in Fig. 4:

The photographer informs me that he can easily print out the matron’s arm around Manesta’s neck, should it be considered desirable to do so. They were required in order to prevent her holding her head down. The likeness is very fair and I have not had another one taken as she would inevitably only close her eyes again so the result would be similar (National Archives 1913h).

In the image circulated to art galleries by the Metropolitan Police the warden’s arm has been replaced by a scarf and uncomfortable evidence of coercion has been covered up by the editing process. Historians have since referred to this ‘cumbersome manipulation’ as politically convenient and an attempt to avoid negative publicity (Liddington 2005, 205). For present purposes it provides an important case study of Edward’s (2006) suggestion that state institutions commonly have the discretion to decide what counts as true or even neutral representation.