Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action
Some suffragettes marched with banners, or printed and distributed propaganda pamphlets. Others took more direct action. Diane Atkinson tells the story of one activist who employed arson to spark awareness of the burning issue of women’s suffrage
Recalling her career as a suffragette arsonist and Houdini-like escapologist in interviews later in her life, Lilian Lenton lit up as if a fire had been started in her heart.
“To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful,” she later admitted. “But it really was lovely to find that you’d been successful – that the thing really had burned down and that you hadn’t got caught. There it was blazing, and there we were in the glare of the lights…”
Lilian Ida Lenton was one of the youngest, yet most militant, of suffragettes in the three years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Her career was daring, dangerous and dramatic, reported in newspapers around the country. The new half-penny dailies, with their half-tone photographs and full spreads, often featured her pyrotechnic activities.
Lilian was 5ft 2ins tall in her stockinged feet, with brown hair and eyes – a “tiny, china-like figure, but wiry and… wily”. She soon gained a romantic nickname, ‘The Elusive Pimpernel’, for her effective disguises and her ability to elude the policemen and detectives who guarded the places where she was kept under house arrest while released from prison on licence. With her tiny stature, she easily passed as a child, a delivery boy or a little old lady.
Becoming a suffragette
Born in Leicester in 1891, Lilian was the eldest of the five children of Isaac, a carpenter and joiner, and Mahalah, who had worked in a hosiery factory before her marriage. Lilian trained as a dancer, but was then inspired by hearing Emmeline Pankhurst speak about women’s suffrage. As soon as she was “21 and my own boss”, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Lilian was first arrested on 4 March 1912, one of about 200 detained during a campaign of window-smashing. Frustrated at the government’s refusal to give women the vote, and outraged at the force-feeding of suffragettes in prison, activists shattered hundreds of windows in Whitehall and the West End of London. Emmeline Pankhurst called these raids the “argument of the broken pane”.
Under the alias Ida Inkley, Lilian was sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison for smashing the windows of the Oxford Street Post Office. The sentencing magistrate commented that “only very ill-regulated minds could conceive of such ideas”.
Lilian was rarely out of the news in 1913. Telling WSPU headquarters that she wanted to progress from breaking windows, she declared that her mission was to burn down two empty buildings each week.
At three o’clock on the morning of 20 February, she and a comrade, artist Olive Wharry, set fire to the tea pavilion at Kew Gardens – which was reduced to a heap of ashes. They left postcards at the scene from “Two voteless women”, offering “Peace on earth and goodwill when women get the vote”, then ran off – but dropped two suitcases containing a hammer and their combustible materials.
Behind bars and forcible feeding
Lilian and Olive were rapidly apprehended by two policemen, denied bail and taken to Holloway Prison. Lilian refused to be medically examined or to “give any particulars”. She was moved to a special cell after she “smashed up everything in the cell she was first placed in”, and was kept apart from all other suffragette prisoners. She was well aware of the fate that would likely befall her.
“When I went to prison for fires, I knew the sentences would go into years,” Lilian later recalled during an interview with the BBC. “So I went on hunger strike for release, on the grounds they had no right to imprison women for breaking man-made laws. The forcible feeding process was extremely unpleasant. But some people managed to put up with it literally for months – which meant hundreds of times.”
All the time they were trying to push this tube down, I kept coughing and coughing incessantly. They kept on trying, and after a bit I suppose they thought they’d succeeded, because they poured the food in… In almost no time I felt intense pain all round my chest and I could not breathe
On 23 February 1913, it happened to Lilian. “They pushed a tube up the nostril, which went wriggling down into the stomach,” she later recalled. “Then they poured the food in through the funnel at the end of the tube. But I was determined to stop them if I could.
“All the time they were trying to push this tube down, I kept coughing and coughing incessantly. They kept on trying, and after a bit I suppose they thought they’d succeeded, because they poured the food in… In almost no time I felt intense pain all round my chest and I could not breathe.”
Food had been forced into Lilian’s lungs, and she soon developed double pneumonia and pleurisy as a result. She was released from Holloway’s hospital wing and taken to the home of suffragette friends in north London, where she was kept under house arrest.
One day, a laundry van arrived at the house. The driver was a female friend in disguise, and the laundry basket carried out was suspiciously heavy – because the extra weight was Lilian. She was whisked away, “leaving a squad of lynx-eyed detectives industriously watching an empty nest”.
The Cat and Mouse Act
Stories of women being force-fed created adverse publicity for the Liberal government, and in April 1913 the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act was passed.
Under its terms, hunger-striking suffragettes would not be fed by force; instead, they were released when their weight dropped dangerously low, and were served with a licence specifying that they should remain at a pre-agreed address. If they then regained weight, they would be returned to prison.
The suffragettes likened it to a game of cat and mouse, and the act failed spectacularly. Very few ‘mice’ were ever recaptured; instead, most went on the run and committed more militant acts. Force-feeding was reintroduced in the autumn of 1913.
Master of disguise
After evading authorities earlier that year, Lenton laid low until June, when ‘May Dennis’ (another alias) was found by a local reporter in a burning building in Doncaster. She managed to escape, but gave herself up when she read that a servant had been charged with arson.
Lilian was sentenced to six months in Armley Gaol (now HM Prison Leeds); again she went on hunger strike, but this time was not force-fed. She was released on licence after seven days to the home of local suffragette sympathisers, effectively under house arrest. Though under close observation, Lilian escaped from under the noses of the police keeping watch on the house, this time disguised as a delivery boy carrying a hamper.
- Read more | From china cups to letter bombs: how suffragettes got out the message of votes for women
She spent the rest of the summer dressed as a boy, on the run between Harrogate and Dundee, evading the Special Branch and other police officers who were hunting for her. She then disguised herself as an old lady, hobbling through Cardiff to escape by train to London. From there she travelled to Dover, where she boarded a yacht owned by a suffragette sympathiser and fled to France.
Returning to England, during the autumn of 1913 and spring of 1914 Lilian was hugely active. She continued to burn empty buildings and, when arrested, went on three hunger-and-thirst-strikes; each time she was released and then evaded police.
A life dedicated to fighting for women's rights
When the First World War began in August 1914, the government granted an amnesty to all suffragette prisoners on the understanding that their militancy would end. Lilian diverted her energies to other important work, first as an orderly for Dr Elsie Inglis’s Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit in Serbia; she received a medal from the French Red Cross for her efforts.
- Read more | Sisters in arms: women at war during WW1
After the war she took a role at the British embassy in Stockholm, and went to Russia with the Save the Children Fund, which had been founded in 1919. She also worked as the financial secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers and, in her final years, was the honorary treasurer of the Suffragette Fellowship, founded in 1926 to keep alive the memory of the militant campaign.
The earliest surviving photographs of Lilian show her lying in bed in prison, recovering from force-feeding; there are also surveillance images taken by Special Branch officers. The last known picture of her was taken in 1970 at the unveiling of the Suffragette Memorial in London’s Christchurch Gardens near Caxton Hall, which had been the venue of the ‘Women’s Parliament’ held in 1907. She had led the fundraising for the memorial.
Lilian Lenton died in 1972, after 60 years of activism dedicated to improving the lives of women.
Diane Atkinson is a historian and author of Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (Bloomsbury, 2018)
This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine