Talk:Ada Wright

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big change
I removed the bit about "twisted arm". Is there a cite for this? My understanding is that it was tough, the pic looks like she is being mistreated, but actually the policeman is holding his gloves, not her arm. Victuallers (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Victuallers: page 759 of the source The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928: : "She was knocked to the ground several times, had her arm severely twisted by a policeman and suffered, she recorded, a great sense of humiliation. The front-page picture of the Daily Mirror of 19 November shows Ada Wright lying on the ground, a tiny cowering figure. The thief commissioner of police expressed the opinion that he thought from the smiling expression of a boy seen in the background, and from the fact that there was not a dense crowd around the police, that the woman had simply sunk to the ground exhausted with struggling with the police. The picture in the 25 November issue of Vows for Women shows that the police are holding back a large crowd, a man who had come to Ada Wright's aid has been seized by the police, and another policeman is bending over her, apparently about to grasp her by her upheld arm. Ada Wright's predicament produced the iconic image of "Black Friday". She reported that the government suppressed copies of the Daily Mirror and ordered negatives of the photographs to be destroyed. The WSPIJ made full use of its moral advantage".Elisa.rolle (talk) 19:15, 18 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks Elisa, I wasn't aware of that quote. Sorry. The article seemed to imply that the photograph showed her with her arm being twisted. I'm happy to repair. I've also made more positive improvements to Rosamund Massy. Thanks for your work. Victuallers (talk) 19:29, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

The picture which appeared in Votes For Women on 25 November is an obvious forgery, being a montage of at least two different pictures.

https://womanandhersphere.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/dsc01109.jpg

https://womanandhersphere.com/2013/05/20/campaigning-for-the-vote-kate-frye-and-black-friday-november-1910/

There is a better-quality copy somewhere, which I saw earlier today but can't find at the moment. The central group of figures are clearly the same as in the famous Daily Mirror front-page photo, pictured a moment later from the same angle. The stooping police officer is now trying to haul Ada Wright up by her hand. The smirking boy in the flat cap has barely moved. The gentleman in the top hat and light-coloured overcoat, apparently Captain Charles Melville Gonne, late Royal Artillery, head of the Men's Committee for Justice to Women and a cousin of Yeats's muse Maud Gonne, has straightened up and is now grappling with the other police officer. (Captain Gonne was arrested shortly afterwards, presumably as a result. He was photographed, probably by the same photographer, being led away by two officers, with his top hat missing -- an expensive thing to lose, because the whole point of top hats was how much they cost. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/arrest-of-capt-c-m-gonne-daily-mirror/UAGND8BUNno8nA?hl=en) Since the Votes For Women picture was clearly taken from the same spot as the famous picture sold to the Daily Mirror, and only a moment later, then we should see the stonework of St Stephen's Entrance to the Houses of Parliament in the background, just as in the Mirror photo. Instead we see a large crowd, taken from a completely different picture and superimposed. The Votes For Women picture has also been crudely retouched, with light-coloured brushstrokes to make the stooping police officer stand out from the dark crowd that has been added in behind him (where the light stonework was before) and dark brushstrokes to make Captain Gonne's top hat stand out more for some reason. The authentic Mirror photo was taken a few yards from St Stephen's Entrance, behind the police cordon (which Wright had broken through in her attempt to storm Parliament), and there obviously couldn't be a huge crowd hanging about there. There were quite a few people, but not a huge massed crowd like that.

In a purported interview published in Antonia Raeburn's The Militant Suffragettes, 1973, (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Militant-Suffragettes-Antonia-Raeburn/dp/071811020X), pp.154-5, Wright, who died in 1939, is claimed to have said:-

"The police rode at us with shire horses, so I caught hold of the reins of one of the horses and would not let go. A policeman grabbed my arm and twisted it round and round until I felt the bone almost breaking and I sank to the pavement, helpless. A contingent of the United States Navy was in London at the time, and they lined up outside Westminster Abbey and watched the proceedings. I was continually tripped up by the police and thrown to the ground in the sight of the American sailors. Each time I got up, and once more made a show of advancing to the House of Commons only to be thrown to the ground once again ...

"As I leaned against the railings after one of these episodes, a sense of the humiliation I was undergoing came over me. I wondered what my relations would think of me if they were to see me. When night came, I was mercifully arrested. After a long proceeding in the police station, we were bailed out and I returned to where I was staying at one o'clock in the morning. As I lay down, tired and exhausted, I said to myself with a shudder: 'What a sordid day!'

"The next morning I found I had been photographed lying on the ground where I had been flung, and the photograph occupied the front page of the Daily Mirror. As soon as this became known to the Government, an order to have the picture suppressed was sent to the office of the newspaper, but they could not suppress the copies which had been sold. There were headlines: BLACK FRIDAY."

Although mounted police were present, and appear in the William Monk watercolour painting of the event held by the Museum of London, https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/black-friday, the horses obviously wouldn't have been behind the main police cordon right outside St Stephen's Entrance where the photographs were taken, so Wright was either mistaken in her recollection or was attempting to conceal the real reason why the police officer had to use a degree of force against her. (It was suffragette policy to assault police officers by hitting them and spitting in their faces to procure an arrest. In a different interview Wright said that the officer in the photos told her he 'wouldn't give her the satisfaction' of arresting her.) Note that Wright at no point claimed she was struck. She said she was 'tripped up' and had her arm twisted.

It does not seem to be true that there was any 'order to have the picture suppressed', since the government had no such power over the press, and it would have been ludicrous to ask the editor of the Mirror, Alex Kenealy, to stop an entire edition. That claim has a very made-up air about it and there are no good sources for it. (The Commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, could have telephoned Kenealy man-to-man and asked him not to use the picture, but he would have had no legal authority, and the D-Notice Committee system, which was voluntary, didn't exist until 1912 and only had competence in military and secret-intelligence matters even then.) It is also not true that Fleet Street papers ever used the term 'Black Friday', which was a propaganda invention by the WSPU. Fair enough, propaganda was what the WSPU did and it was what the WSPU was for. It was, all the same, propaganda. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:46, 8 February 2020 (UTC)