Resources

An expanding collection of references to publications and creative works that provide context to the injustice of the trial and its implications for today.

Explore:

• The case, the trial and why it matters

• The First World War

• Suffrage and women’s emancipation

• Conscientious objection

• Domestic surveillance in Britain and forensic review

Friends of Alice Wheeldon

Historian Sheila Rowbotham’s Friends of Alice Wheeldon comprises the script of a play re-enacting the 1917 trial and imprisonment of Alice and her family, as well as a companion essay on the ‘rebel networks’ that emerged before and during the First World War, including the shop stewards’ movement, and socialist education.

Initially published in 1987, this was the first book by a social historian to reassess the trial in the social and political context of the times, after the court papers and related documents were made public. A revised edition was published in 2015, with a foreword covering subsequent discoveries and the campaign to clear Alice’s name.

In an article in The Independent on the eve of publication of the 2015 edition, Sheila explains how she found out about the case and why she was inspired to write about it. Sheila Rowbotham, 'Alice Wheeldon, a false accusation, and why the case still matters', The Independent, Friday 17 April, 2015.

Sheila Rowbotham,  Friends of Alice Wheeldon, 2nd edition, London, Pluto Press, 2015 [Available from Pluto Press]

The plot to kill Lloyd George

Although written in 2009, before some key materials had been released, Derby writer Nicola Rippon gives a meticulous account of the trial and the events leading up to it.

Nicola Rippon, The Plot to Kill Lloyd George. The Story of Alice Wheeldon and the Peartree Conspiracy, Wharncliffe Books, Barnsley, 2009 [Available from Amazon]

Losing the Plot: The Trial of Alice Wheeldon

This vividly illustrated 2007 article from the journal History Today is a modern re-telling of the story drawing on the scholarly research and publications since the mid 1980s. “John Jackson exhumes the extraordinary case of a middle-aged woman from Derby convicted of plotting to murder the Prime Minister. Alice Wheeldon’s anti-war activities caused her and her family to be targeted first by the secret service and then made an example of by an Attorney-General who put the policies of the government before his duty to truth and justice. The shocking sequence of events and the tragic ending illustrate how the innocent can suffer if the Rule of Law has no champion and the state tramples on the rights of individuals in its anxiety to maintain national security.”

John Jackson, ‘Losing the Plot: The Trial of Alice Wheeldon’, History Today Volume: 57 Issue 5 2007

In another article in Open Democracy, Jackson uses the case to explore the role of attorneys-general and the rule of law, raising questions relevant today in both the UK and Australia. He reflects, for example, on the use of law enforcement as an instrument of government policy,

John Jackson, ‘Alice Wheeldon and the attorney-general’, Open Democracy 17 April 2007

Music and Poetry

Framed: The Alice Wheeldon Story is a folk music and song show written and performed by local Derby trio Moirai (Jo Freya, Sarah Matthews, and Mel Biggs).

“... a fascinating, moving and extremely well-researched insight into a little-known chapter in the history of the peace movement in the UK, the continuing relevance of which in today’s political climate cannot be denied. A very impressive achievement.” — David Kidman, Folk Radio UK, 30 December 2019

Available on CD through the Moirai website.

A short collection by Derbyshire poet Jane Weir including poems about Alice Wheeldon. It has been on the national school curriculum.

“This sequence of poems, both lyrical and elegiac, charts a journey that begins in a Derby coffee shop and ends who knows where...”

Jane Weir, Alice, Templar Poetry, Matlock, 2006. Available from Templar Poetry.

Robb Johnson’s song ‘Alice Annie Wheeldon’ was written as a tribute to Alice.

“Alice Annie Wheeldon – no gravestone holds her name
This is how the world gets changed…”

Read the lyrics.

Photo shows Robb Johnson with Alice’s great granddaughter, Chloe Mason, in the Derby Guildhall, 2013.

Film

The documentary War on Lies: The Alice Wheeldon Story (2023) was created by young filmmaker Elizabeth McGlynn. It traces the Wheeldon campaign – and why it still matters – through the lens of the people and experts who each in their own way contributed to changing the public’s opinion of Alice and her family, and to getting her story more widely known. Piece by piece, over many decades, each element of the puzzle is uncovered and finds its place, until today Alice is remembered for who she truly was, a strong, feisty woman who fought for what she believed in. Watch it here.

To End All Wars

Adam Hochschild’s award-winning book To End All Wars is a great starting point for exploring the Wheeldon story in the context of the protest and patriotism that divided Britain during the First World War. An engaging read through letters and biographical vignettes.

Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain, Pan Publishing [Available through Amazon]

Women and War

Alice Wheeldon appears as a key life in Women and War, a beautifully illustrated open-access e-book that is part of a series funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the centenary of the First World War. A timeline traces the discovery, reporting and re-telling of Alice’s story over a century by so many, including activist Sylvia Pankhurst, philosopher Bertrand Russell, prosecuting Attorney-General F.E. Smith, barristers, journalists, professional historians, artists – and most recently citizen historians.

The whole series is worth exploring. Drawing on the knowledge and experiences of the two of the First World War Engagement Centres – Voices of War and Peace and Everyday Lives – the editors worked with community activists, academics, and independent scholars to produce a series of four open access downloadable legacy-themed e-books. As well as Women and War, the series includes Remaking Histories of the Nation, Children and Conflict, and War and Aftermath.

Ian Grosvenor and Sarah Lloyd (eds), Beyond Commemoration: Community, Collaboration and Legacies of the First World War

Posters & poems: The World Is My Country

Artist Emily Johns invited artists and poets to respond to Adam Hochschild’s book To End All Wars for a travelling exhibition, ‘The World Is My Country’ – a visual celebration of the people and events that opposed the First World War.

 One of the posters, by Emily Johns herself, features Alice Wheeldon and aspects of her life. The lion-tamer imagery calls up Alice’s friend John S. Clarke, who was, among many other things, a lion-tamer. Later a well-known socialist editor, he gave the eulogy at her graveside in 1919, where he condemned this ‘judicial murder’. ‘The world is my country’ was an important saying for Alice, who used it in signing off her last letter from prison before the trial. The reference is actually a common misquotation of Thomas Paine Rights of Man: Part the Second (George Kline, Carlisle, 1792), p.62, ‘…my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’

Poster #3: Alice Wheeldon was a prophet

Poet Anna Robinson responded with ‘Sketches for Alice Wheeldon and her daughters and gaolers’

Find out more about The World Is My Country project.

The set of posters and poems, with text and references, are also compiled in a book by Emily Johns and Gabriel Carlyle, published by Peace News Press, ISBN 978-1-904527-18-3. [Available from the Peace News website]

Reflections and new histories

In Britain, the centenary of the war generated much reflection and review of classic works like Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August. New histories were written by masterful storytellers, including Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 and Margaret Macmillan’s The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.

A substantial review of Clark’s book by Thomas Laqueur provides a good overview:
‘Some Damn Foolish Thing’, London Review of Books, Vol. 35 No. 23 · 5 December 2013

Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilolgy

Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration Trilogy, a series of three novels, was inspired by experiences during the War in 1918 when officers and wounded men were dealing with psychiatric treatment. The second novel, The Eye in the Door, acknowledges real events, including the campaign against homosexuals being waged that year by right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing, and the conviction of activist Alice Wheeldon for attempted assassination of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, here subsumed with the character named Beatrice Roper. The words spoken at trial come through here. Because the story remains within the realm of fiction, Barker has the freedom to explore her characters and their actions.

Pat Barker, The Eye in the Door, London, Viking 1993 [Available though Amazon]

Before the First World War the movement for women’s suffrage broadly comprised the suffragists (constitutionalists), who used education and persuasion, and the suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), who had decided that direct action was needed (arson, window smashing, invasion of golf courses, for example), following Emmeline Pankhurst’s call for ‘deeds not words’.  

The Wheeldon family had been active supporters of the WSPU. Although they did not take part in any of the more serious militancy of that body, they sold The Suffragette and other literature.

With the advent of the First World War, Emmeline Pankhurst declared a moratorium on the suffrage campaign, instead promoting patriotic support for the war and decrying conscientious objection. In this spirit, she made a statement at the Wheeldon trial condemning Alice ‘for the honour of women’. Her daughter Sylvia Pankhurst, however, had differing views on both suffrage and the war, and publicly supported Alice, writing on behalf of the Workers Suffrage Federation to protest the conduct of the trial.

Selected references

Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Women and the First World War: a taste of freedom’, The Guardian, 11 November 2018

Jo Vellacott (1977) ‘Anti-war suffragists’, History, volume 62, no. 206, pp. 411-425.

Jo Vellacott (2007) Pacifists, Patriots and the Vote: the erosion of democratic suffragism in Britain during the First World War, Palgrave. Reviewed by Dr Marc Calvini-Lefebvre at Reviews in History.

Vivien Newman (2018) Suffragism and the Great War, Pen & Sword Books Ltd. [Available from Pen & Sword Books]

The 1916 Military Services Act in England for the first time included conscientious objection as one of the permitted exemptions from military service, at least formally, and subject of course to a decision by the local military tribunal. Recognition of this principle was an achievement of the many groups concerned about the war and conscription.

As the pre-eminent historian of conscientious objection in Britain for the First World War, Cyril Pearce has contributed much scholarship and assistance to other researchers. A good starting point to the topic is Cyril’s 2015 essay on war resisters dealing with conscientious objection, its origins and how it was administered and categorised: ‘Writing about Britain’s 1914-18 War Resisters - Literature Review’, in Reviews in History. He also mentions the dramatic Wheeldon story.

Originally published in 2001, Pearce’s earlier study of conscientious objection in his home city of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, explored the supportive network of community organisations that enabled a small but noticeable proportion of men (seven per thousand) to declare their objection: Comrades in Conscience: The Story of an English Community's Opposition to the Great War [available from the publisher, Francis Boutle].

A meticulous historian, Pearce created and compiled a database of nearly 20,000 British First World War COs in consultation with other historians and community groups. William Marshall Wheeldon, Alice’s son, is registered in this database. Pearce’s work, especially during the centenary, fostered questions about the actual extent of war resistance (the received view was that the war had generally been popular), how it varied from place to place and the experience at the local level – resulting in his 2020 book Communities of Resistance: Conscience and Dissent in Britain during the First World War [available from the publisher, Francis Boutle].

Jo Vellacott has written biographies of Catherine Marshall and Bertrand Russell, both of whom were active in the No-Conscription Fellowship. Marshall had been a major campaigner for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies before the war and became secretary to the N-CF. Russell greatly assisted the N-CF, and wrote about the Wheeldon prosecution at the time.   

Jo Vellacott, Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War, Macmillan, 2016.

Jo Vellacott, From Liberal to Labour with Women's Suffrage: The Story of Catherine Marshall, ‎ McGill-Queen’s University Press; Reprint edition 2016.

Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790-1988, Routledge 2017.

This book, first published in the late 1980s, delves beneath the myths and deceptions surrounding the secret service to reveal the true nature and significance of covert political policing in Britain, from the ‘spies and bloodites’ of the eighteenth century to today’s domestic security service MI5. The Wheeldon trial is mentioned pp.145-146

Nicholas Hiley articles:

• ‘The Failure of British Counter-Espionage against Germany, 1907-1914’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 835-862, Published by Cambridge University Press.

• ‘Counter-espionage and security in Great Britain during the First World War, English Historical Review 101:400, July 1986.

• Internal security in wartime: the rise and fall of PMS2 1915-1917’, Intelligence and National Security 1:3, 1986.

• With Julian Putkowski, ‘A postscript on PMS 2’, Intelligence and National Security 3:2, 1988.

Ann Ferguson, ‘Some Curare Murders?’ Medico-Legal Journal, June 2011, Vol. 179 No.2, 49-57. This article was written by a medical historian and former anaesthetist with clinical experience with curare. Her work challenges the evidence of the poison plot presented at the Wheeldon trial and raises doubt about the professional judgment of forensic pathologist Dr Bernard Spilsbury.