When a student researching in the archives of a London museum read the unpublished memoirs of a suffragette bomber, she began to wonder if the history of the movement had been sanitised. The suffragettes may have won the vote for women, but some of them, she argues, were terrorists.
Fern Riddell recognised the bomb straight away.
On the morning of 15 September 2017 an explosion on a rush-hour train at Parsons Green underground station in west London had resulted in dozens of injuries.
It was the fifth act of terror in the capital in less than a year, and Riddell was anxious for more information. Combing through social media looking for real-time updates, she came across the image of a burning white plastic bucket.
The crude bomb that had detonated in the packed train carriage had been wrapped in a plastic grocery bag and concealed inside that bucket.
To Riddell, the image had a powerful resonance.
"That," she thought, "is a suffragette bomb. Home-made and with materials you could buy in chemist's and hardware stores. That is the kind of bomb the women used to terrorise the country into paying attention."
Riddell's interest in the suffragettes had begun five years earlier while she was studying for a PhD in history, though her first instinct had been to have nothing to do with them.
"It felt like a trap. That to be a young female historian, I had to write about women, about suffrage," she says.
She was far more interested in Victorian Music Halls. They featured skits and novelty acts, and, frequented by all classes, were a democratic and affordable form of entertainment.
"They were the internet of their day," says Riddell. "Just like memes appear on social media today, a song would be written and performed in Music Halls on the day of a significant cultural event. It was a raw, electric and relevant world that told of a society that differed from the restrained images often painted by historians of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Especially when it came to women. It captivated me and I was excited to learn more."
But a chance discovery in the archives of the Museum of London, made with the help of archivist Beverley Cook, led to a dramatic change of direction.
"Bev said to me, 'I've got this unpublished autobiography of a young Music Hall artist, very few people have ever really looked at it. She was also a suffragette. I don't know if you're interested?'
"And I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, 'Oh God not a suffragette,'" Riddell says.
"At that time I had a certain impression of suffragettes that many people did. I knew about the window-smashing, being chained to rails, the force-feeding, the posters and marching. I thought I knew everything there was to know about these women."
Riddell told herself that she'd read the parts about the Music Halls and skip the campaigning parts. She was presented with two folders' worth of handwritten papers.
About five pages in, Riddell says, an incredible voice leapt off the page. She was reading the words of a suffragette who talked openly about staging arson attacks. Other papers indicate she was also a bomber. In other words, says Riddell, she was "a terrorist".
"Through the pages Kitty was a such a powerful speaker. And she was telling me a violent story that I had never heard. Later I checked with my friends, my family, and even other academics I knew. They had never heard this either. This was a part of our history that most historians seemed to have shied away from exploring, and here I was with access to a primary source, a woman who was unlike anyone I had encountered in the history books."
She calls it a Da Vinci Code moment.
Riddell stayed in the archive until it closed, reading the story of Kitty Marion in one sitting.
Katherina Maria Schafer had arrived in London at the age of 15 after fleeing from her abusive home in Germany. Her mother had died when she was an infant, leaving her alone with a violent and unloving father. He killed her puppy when it began to show her affection.
She lived with her aunt, uncle and cousins in east London, and quickly learned English. By chance, she stumbled into the energetic and vibrant world of Music Halls and for the first time, the teenager felt a sense of belonging. She renamed herself Kitty Marion and began a career as an actress and dancer.
"Kitty was mesmerised by this world," says Riddell. "Music Halls were an exciting and cosmopolitan pocket of Victorian London. Working, financially solvent women and interracial marriages were common here. Kitty had a diverse group of friends - the son of a Chinese diplomat gave her her first cigarette. She forged fast friendships with women - strong, sexually liberated women unlike those I had read about in the history books. Women in Victorian England were generally depicted as long-suffering pious victims, not the free agents I was meeting in Kitty's autobiography."
Marion didn't immediately champion the cause of gender equality or votes for women, but then, as Riddell puts it, "she had a Me Too moment".
An assault by a Music Hall agent, whom she refers to only as "Mr Dreck" or Mr Trash, made Marion seriously question a career in an industry dominated by powerful men. In her autobiography she describes how her "whole being revolted" at the incident.
"Few women forget the first time they have been assaulted. The first time someone has decided that they have the right to touch, to kiss, to take without asking," says Riddell.
As a travelling actress, Marion saw that she was far from alone in having to endure such an experience.
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