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Don’t call them Lympne-pets: the suffragettes at Lympne Castle

Posted on 2nd March, 2025 in Herbert Henry Asquith, Suffragettes, Vera Wentworth, WSPU

On Sunday 5 September 1909, suffragettes Vera Wentworth, Elsie Howey and Jessie Kenney assaulted prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith when he was staying at Lympne Castle in Kent. Lympne (pronounced “Lim”, hence the pun referred to in the title, coined by the Daily Graphic) Castle belonged to Asquith’s brother-in-law, Francis John Tennant. Asquith’s wife and family were staying there, and he had joined them for the weekend. The Castle was regarded as a romantic spot with its views over Romney Marsh, the haunt of artists such as J M W Turner and writers like H G Wells, who set part of Kipps there.

A romantic spot.

I’ve often mentioned the Lympne incident in talks, as it marked an escalation of militant violence to include physical attacks on MPs. I’ve always been unable to picture it, though; that is, the geography of it, involving as it did a canal, a church with a door into the Castle, and banks and walls the women had to climb. On my recent trip to Kent, I visited Lympne, and was able to get a much clearer idea of what happened. Jessie Kenney gave a detailed account in Votes for Women, 10 September 1909. The outline below is based on her article, and so the press can’t be blamed if any of the story puts the suffragettes in a bad light.

The three women had planned the attack before going to Lympne (contrary to a later claim in Votes for Women, 17 September 1909 that they had only gone to Lympne “to spend a quiet holiday” and had not known in advance that the prime minster would be there). Asquith was due to arrive at Lympne on the Saturday evening, and so they arrived before him so that they could reconnoitre. They studied the layout of the Castle and the surrounding countryside, arranged their disguises – Vera Wentworth dressed as a nurse – and, having realised that they could use the Military Canal to get in and out of Lympne, they obtained a boat. On Sunday morning they rowed to Lympne.

The Military Canal at Hythe

While visiting Hythe, I discovered that the Military Canal was built during the wars against revolutionary France, when the fear of invasion was its height. Romney Marsh was a possible landing place for Napoleon’s troops, and the twenty-eight mile long canal was intended as part of a series of defensive measures. These included Martello towers, the Royal Navy in the Channel, and defence volunteers. The canal was constructed with a series of kinks in its course, designed to be easily defended by artillery. The excavated earth was used to build defensive parapets, and there was a military road alongside the canal.

The canal runs at the bottom of the  hill on which Lympne Castle stands. Having moored their boat near the Castle, the three women clambered up from the canal. Describing the ascent up the bank, Jessie Kenney wrote, “We had a lot of slips, and scrambles, falls and tumbles, till at last we reached the Castle wall”. The bank is steep, and looking down from it, it is easy to imagine the difficulty of the climb.

They stationed themselves in the churchyard. The church is right next to the Castle, with a door in the dividing wall between them. When Asquith left after the service they followed him and caught up with him in the doorway, where he struggled to get away. Someone came to his aid, he got through the door, and the women were shut out.

Lympne Church. Lympne Castle can be seen on the right on the other side of the wall.

Perhaps on this occasion Asquith did not suffer more than the loss of his dignity, but worse was to come. That afternoon the three women walked to Littlestone-on-Sea (eight miles away), where Asquith was playing golf with the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone. The suffragettes waited near the club house, and surrounded Asquith as he was leaving the building. There was another “scrimmage”. Gladstone came to the prime minister’s aid and what Jessie Kenney called “a real fight” with “blows received from both parties and plenty of jostling” then took place. Eventually Asquith, helped by Gladstone and other men, got away. The Home Office later released a statement saying that Asquith had been “struck repeatedly” outside the church, and that later at the golf club, Gladstone, who Jessie Kenney said had “fought like a prize-fighter”, had not stuck any blows (The Times, 8 September 1909).

Even after this, the women had not finished with Asquith. They went back to Lympne and carried out what Jessie Kenney called a “night attack” on the Castle. Having first checked their boat was safe, they climbed up the bank from the canal and onto the Castle wall, from where they could see through the windows into the dining room. Noticing that one of the windows was open, they got underneath it. Vera Wentworth and Jessie Kenney hoisted Elsie Howey up so she could shout a warning at the Prime Minister: “Mr Asquith, we shall go on pestering you until you give the women the vote”. They then threw stones at the windows, breaking one of them.

The women scrambled down from the Castle wall and “climbed over the fences and through the ditches” to get back down to their boat. They pushed it off, “rowing as fast as we could”. Looking back up at the Castle, they saw lights flashing in the grounds and heard shouting. In their scramble to get away, they left behind a basket containing their disguises. Once or twice they thought they were being followed along the canal, but got away and back to their lodgings (I do not know where these were). The next morning they checked Asquith’s whereabouts, and having learned he had gone back to London, they left Lympne.

Vera Wentworth later confirmed that the attacks on Asquith had been violent ones when she declared in a letter to WSPU supporter Mrs Blathwayt that “if Mr Asquith will not receive deputations they will pummel him again” (Vera Wentworth to Mrs Blathwayt, 16 September 1909). In a letter to Mrs Blathwayt’s husband, Colonel Linley Blathwayt, Vera Wentworth also referred to “punching Asquith’s head”. Like many others members, Mrs Blathwayt left the WSPU as a result of the assault: “An attack on one undefended man by three women was an act I did not expect from the Society” (Mrs Blathwayt to Vera Wentworth, (14) September 1909).

Jessie Kenney’s account of the incident is jaunty and light-hearted, with a great deal of derring-do thrown in – the scrambling, climbing, night-time raids, and escapes. The atmosphere of the humorous and exciting adventure is echoed in an interview she gave to the Daily Mirror on 7 September 1909: “ ‘It was quite a chase – absolutely” – and Miss Kenny’s [sic] eyes glistened at the recollection…‘It was a real old jostle,’ laughed Miss Kenny” [sic].

Seeing the location has made me realise how, in her account, Jessie has used the physical setting to help create and support this atmosphere of adventure: the canal which has to be negotiated by row boat, a bank to scramble, ditches to cross, the walls of the Castle to scale (they actually aren’t that high). This in turns supports a desirable image of the suffragettes: they are plucky, bold, daring, energetic. It all certainly helps to downplay the violence, but as I stood in that churchyard on a cold and wet day, I could not shake off the other side of the story, and the image of a startled man fleeing three angry women intent on doing him harm, with no way of knowing how far they would go when they caught up with him.

The gateway to Lympne Castle.