On Sunday 21 June, 1908, Christina Broom, aged 46, attended a “monster” meeting organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union in Hyde Park, London. Around 500,00 people attended what came to be known as Women’s Sunday – the largest gathering of people in support of the Votes for Women movement.
“It seemed to me that all London had turned out to witness our demonstration. And a goodly part of London followed the processions,” wrote the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst, in her memoir, My Own Story, published in 1914. “When I mounted my platform in Hyde Park, and surveyed the mighty throngs that waited there and the endless crowds that were still pouring into the park from all directions, I was filled with amazement not unmixed with awe. Never had I imagined that so many people could be gathered together to share in a political demonstration.”
Aided by her daughter, Winnie, Christina Broom carried a heavy box camera and a tripod though the crowd, setting up in front of one of the 20 platforms where speakers roused the faithful. The resulting photograph, one of 106 glass plates of suffragette images taken by Broom and now belonging to the Museum of London Docklands, whose exhibition devoted to her work opens on 19 June. The image shows a congregation of elaborately dressed women – and a handful of men, three of whom are bemused-looking police constables – below three flags and a banner belonging to an Irish revolutionary sisterhood.
This image captures a historic moment, but it also teems with revealing detail. The women, young and old, wear wide-brimmed hats and ornate dresses of lace and cotton. One or two sport mortar boards, but several wear baroque headgear bedecked with flowers and ribbons, many of which would be in the suffragette colours purple, white and green, symbolising dignity, purity and hope. (The colours are, of course, lost in Broom’s monochrome photographs.) A youthful, bespectacled clergyman in the group, just below one of the moustachioed policemen, peers towards the camera while women around him look stern, defiant or happy. “I am sure a great many people never realised how young and dainty and elegant most of the leaders of the movement are,” wrote a reporter from the Daily Mail, “and how well they spoke.”
Christine Broom attended the gathering in Hyde Park not as a supporter of the cause of women’s emancipation, but as a working photographer and an independent businesswoman – one with a keen eye for the dramatic and the newsworthy. In 1903, when the family business failed, she taught herself photography using a borrowed box camera. That same year, she convinced the American jockey Danny Maher to pose with his mount, Rock Sand, in the parade ring before the Epsom Derby. The horse won the race and, in the weeks afterwards, Broom made a small fortune selling postcards of her photograph.
Soon, she had a thriving business selling postcards of whatever and whoever she encountered on her travels around London: street scenes, public sightings of the royals and popular sporting events such as boat races. Winnie taught herself to develop the plates in a coal cellar that served as a dark room, while Brooms’s husband, Albert, wrote all the postcard captions by hand.
As the suffragette movement caught fire in 1908, the protesting women attracted Broom’s attention and were a lucrative addition to her blossoming postcard trade. “There was a growing appetite among young women all over Britain for picture postcards of their heroines, both suffragists and suffragettes, and the large and colourful events they held in London,” writes Diane Atkinson in Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom, a catalogue to accompany the Museum of London Docklands exhibition.
Broom photographed suffragette activities in London from 1908 until 1914, capturing dramatically choreographed events such as the Prisoner’s Pageant in July 1910, in which former prisoners, including Sylvia Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davison, marched in white robes and prisoners medals. Davison, of whom few photographs exist, would famously die of head injuries at the age of 40 after dashing into the path of a horse at the Epsom Derby of 1913.
Broom created a series of arresting portraits of leading activists, including Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and Barbara Ayrton-Gould, who in one image is dressed as a fisher girl in a shawl and scarf. Broom’s photographs caught the excitement of that radical moment. At times, though, they look like elaborate fashion shoots: young suffragettes dressed as medieval maidens, women in hats festooned with feathers, ribbons, bows and flowing, diaphanous veils.
“Christina Broom is drawn to the costumes rather than the politics behind the gathering,” notes Atkinson. Perhaps this is why Broom’s images present a more collectively joyous view of the suffragette movement than the one handed down by history. They also highlight Broom’s keen eye for drama, telling detail and extravagant display. The images continute to surprise and delight. And despite her seeming disinterest in the cause, Broom was a pioneering woman in the predominately male world of early 20th-century photography. Her suffragette photographs are a testament to her talent and her tenacity.
• Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom is at Museum of London Docklands, 19 June-1 November. The accompanying catalogue is out now (Philip Wilson, £20)
