From the biography: How Annie Besant campaigned for trade unions and universal suffrage in England

Annie Besant, along with reformers Josephine Butler and Milicent Fawcett, was one of three remarkable “apostolic” women of the age. That was the judgment of William T Stead, editor of the liberal newspaper Pall Mall Gazette and the man who was to become her friend and collaborator. Her genius, shared also by Stead, was in generating publicity and public support with speechmaking and the power of the pen. In 1888, Annie employed those skills when she challenged a major employer and put the spotlight on their iniquitous treatment of working women. She was an activist because she had to be. “Some one ought to do it, but why should I?” she explained was a commonly held attitude. “Some one ought to do it, so why not I?” was the proper alternative. “Between those two sentences,” she concluded, “lie whole centuries of moral evolution.” Now, and throughout her life, she was the catalyst that made things happen.

Stead was a famous campaigner who had earned his radical reputation with stories about deprivation and injustice. He had fought against the Contagious Diseases Act and in 1885 purchased 13-year-old Eliza Butler to show how easy it was to sell a child into the sex trade. He lived and breathed scandal to make change happen. In the wake of Bloody Sunday, with their similar objectives and methods, the pair created an organisation they called the Law and Order League and a halfpenny weekly, The Link, as its mouthpiece. Its masthead read “A Journal for the Servants of Man”. This desire to support the oppressed and alleviate poverty ran like the words in a stick of rock through Annie’s different allegiances. The league had many targets. It aspired to tackle sweated labour, overlong hours, bad landlords and workhouse scandals. It also advocated for the very progressive idea of free school lunches for children. “If we insist on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall be fed?” asked Annie.

The league had the ambition of creating circles of membership across the nation, with general meetings, shared mission statements and pledges. It hoped to establish volunteers in every neighbourhood, in a scheme that had overtones of David Cameron’s Big Society, but with more rigid rules and dark undertones of vigilantism. Unsurprisingly, Bradlaugh was hostile to these groups, convinced as he was that they would lead to violence. They fizzled out.The Link newspaper remained and was edited by Annie, who now identified as a secularist,atheist and Fabian, working alongside Stead who was a Christian. It was a moment when, if radicals had worn badges on their lapels, they could well have had half a dozen each. The left of the day was riven with embryonic tribes. Socialism for Annie was a very practical form of social reform.

On May 5, 1888, groups of men loitered suspiciously and self-consciously in Trafalgar Square. Two were heroes of Bloody Sunday, Robert Cunninghame Graham and John Burns. They ambled and chatted but if they stood still for too long, a policeman politely moved them on. Public meetings were still banned in the square and memories of the previous winter of discontent were fresh, but the two men insisted they were not here to protest. Their presence was the brainchild of Annie and Stead, who described the walking and talking as conversaziones. This was a way of evading the ban on public rallies in Trafalgar Square, and they advertised Open Air Town Hall meetings every Saturday afternoon. On this first occasion, at a qaurter to five, a man stood at the balustrade near the National Gallery and started to address those below. He got as far as “Friends and fellow workmen” before a bevvy of policemen rushed towards him and he wisely disappeared.

Meanwhile, 41-year-old Annie found another target for her ceaseless energy. An order issued by the Metropolitan Board of Works made collecting money at meetings illegal. She regarded this as unacceptable, and in June she made a speech on Clapham Common for the Social Democratic Foundation that was designed to test and challenge the byelaw. She took up her collection bowl and received £1 9s 6d. She announced both her intention of doing the same at the next meeting and her resolution to go to jail for flouting the legal injunction if necessary. A policeman dutifully wrote down her name in his notebook, but no further action was taken and Annie continued to collect contributions at public meetings until the byelaw was quietly rescinded: job done. She had a very determined nature. It was said of Annie that if she said a thing three times, she believed it would happen. It was an admirable quality for getting work done.

Soon Annie and Stead became firm friends. They aspired to create a new church based on social duty and righteousness. They called it a brotherhood and the service of man would replace service to God. In her autobiography, Annie looked back at this moment in early 1888 and saw herself grappling for the truth, justice and immortal hope which she later found in Theosophy. “How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was soon to throw myself.” She was enthusiastic about socialism, but restless. It demanded faith in mankind in the here and now, and mankind did not always deliver. She was still searching for something more.

The pair worked very closely together as co-conspirators, and some say, more. Nine years after she had lost the custody of her daughter, there was little else her husband could do to punish her. It was two years since her dalliance with Shaw and ten years since she first worked with Aveling.Still married, Annie had an intense work ethos and a daunting public profile. Stead had the core characteristics of the all-in campaigner that Annie was herself. Sharing so much in common and spending so much time together, Annie soon found herself falling for him. He was after all, an energetic, bearded 38-year-old, who was a masterly defender of civil liberties and a brilliant influencer of public opinion. Only her side of their correspondence remains, but it is clear from her letters that she adored him. In one very touching letter, she told him that at night she dreamt of slipping her hand in his.

Whatever he felt for Annie, Stead was a committed family man, and when she addressed him as her Sir Galahad and told him after Bloody Sunday that he was the best man she knew, she was well aware that any feelings could not be acted upon. The subjects of her letters moved swiftly back and forth between discussions of The Link’s editorials, the sharing of news cuttings and emotional outpourings. Reading them today, it is clear Annie was in love with the work and the man. “To me now,” she wrote, “you are the single anchor that keeps me safe.” The correspondence feels lustful but at the same time theoretical. She was used to working with men, she told Stead, who fell in love with her, and, with the exception of one relationship (maybe Aveling), she had remained unscathed, steering through and maintaining friendships. This time had been a surprise to her. “I have been so accustomed,” she noted, “these 14 years to work with men and not suffer from it, that I was not quite on my guard.” There were no prospects here. Nevertheless, she wrote touchingly to the man she worshipped that she felt the pain of her unrequited love was worth it simply for the benefit of knowing him. The passion that could not be was quelled when Stead set off on a trip to Russia in June and by the time she wrote to him again on his return in July, the only letter in the archive from this time suggests the temperature had lessened, with amorous feelings replaced with business as usual and straightforward affection. Understanding people’s love lives is always a guessing game, but Annie’s seems to have been most active in her mind.

Stead was clearly a biased source with his own reputation to protect; he wrote a mini-biography of Annie in his Pall Mall Gazette. Never, he wrote, “in all the prolonged litigations in which Mrs Besant has been engaged, has there ever been any imputation cast upon her personal character”. Moreover, since her separation, he added:

although she has been tracked by detectives, enveloped in a cloud of scandal, and made the mark for every reckless calumniator, no human being has ever ventured to stand up in public and attempt to substanti ate a single accusation against the character of Mrs Besant.

In print, at least, he was clear about her moral standing.

Annie’s professional focus remained on social reform. A year after the events of Bloody Sunday, poverty was as acute as ever in Britain. Some blamed indolence and the demon drink, but people were increasingly obliged to accept that there were external factors. Cities were crowded with people who had flocked there from rural areas, housing was inadequate and insanitary, and there was a scramble for low-paid jobs which led to subsistence living. Annie saw family size as the root cause of poverty, and she also saw land reform as essential to relieve the suffering of rural farm tenants. She had broader plans too, arguing for a republic to follow the death of the queen, and for universal suffrage. It was a multi-faceted agenda, and a radical strategy for social and political reform, but in 1888 an issue emerged in London’s East End on which she was to have an immediate and significant impact.

On June 15, at a meeting of the Fabian Society, Henry Hyde Champion shocked his colleagues with the news of the well-known brand of matchmakers, Brynt & May. The firm, Champion told them, had increased its shareholder dividends while their workers were on star vation wages. Annie and another colleague, Herbert Burrows, resolved to investigate the truth of the allegation and to write an article for The Link. Without delay, Annie organised a secret meeting with some of the factory workers, and her tumultuous and controversial engagement with the match women began.

Factory workers and other Victorian poor feared falling ill and not being able to feed their families. Some of them paid into friendly socie ties or trade associations but there was always risk, which Annie knew from personal experience. The Trade Union Act, one of the first laws on collective labour, was passed in 1871 and soon after, Joseph Arch became the founder and president of the National Agricultural Labourers Union. When she had lived in Sibsey with Frank, Annie went out into the parish to meet the labourers who lived in hovels in acute poverty. Workers were cheap and plentiful and as Annie discovered, the landowning farm ers were bitterly opposed to the union and would never give work to a “union man.” She encountered a young, married father of two small children, “who was sinful enough to go to a Union meeting, and sinful enough to talk of it on his return home”. Since then, no farmer would employ him and he traipsed the countryside in vain looking for work. He took to drink and Annie was shocked to find his fever-stricken wife lying in bed with her dead child. Witnessing the burden that had crushed this family and others like them had developed Annie’s political education.

Excerpted with permission from The Nine Lives of Annie Besant: The Astonishing Story of a Victorian Rebel, Clare Paterson, Penguin India.