have a particular affection for my cousin Sir Winston Churchill who was born here on November 30, 1874. He proposed to his wife Clementine in the Temple of Diana and was buried near Blenheim Palace in the church at Bladon near his mother and father.
We have an excellent exhibition about Sir Winston near the room where he was born. The letters to his father are fascinating.
Winston was a great friend of my grandfather, and my father and mother. He was my godfather and I knew him quite well. He loved Blenheim. One of his biggest works was the four-volume biography of the 1st Duke.
It was very moving that he made the decision to come back here to be buried. On January 30 1965, I was fortunate enough to travel on the train which brought his body from Waterloo down to the station at Long Hanborough near Bladon. It was the most amazing day, nobody has ever seen a day like it.
Sex war
by Melanie Phillips
Daily Mail, March 29, 2003
The violence swept the country. Windows and street lamps were smashed, the cushions of train carriages slashed, phone wires severed, golf greens burned with acid and buildings razed to the ground. Thirteen paintings were hacked to bits in a Manchester art gallery and bombs were placed near the Bank of England.
Senior politicians were ambushed and assaulted. A package containing sulphuric acid was sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and burst into flames when opened. An attempt was made to burn down his country home.
Even the Prime Minister was a target. On a golf links in Scotland, attackers tried to tear off his clothes and were prevented from doing so only by the intervention of his daughter, who protected him with her fists.
On another occasion, an axe was thrown at the Premier. It missed him, but grazed the ear of an MP sitting alongside.
Britain had never seen anything quite like it. And the most shocking thing of all was that every one of these outrages was perpetrated by women.
They were the suffragettes – a term first coined by the Daily Mail to describe the militant activists who crusaded for female suffrage, or the right to vote, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Today, these women are widely regarded with uncritical veneration; their cause so manifestly just, and their one-time opponents so manifestly wrong, that their status as modern heroines goes unchallenged.
Last year, Emmeline Pankhurst, their radical leader, was put by BBC viewers near the top of a list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. Her statue stands outside the Houses of Parliament.
But the story of the suffragettes – or at least, the most militant among them – is much stranger than most people realise. Far from being a simple battle for equality at the ballot box, their campaign was driven by a deep-rooted distaste for male sexuality.
Quite simply, the more extreme suffragettes were man-haters, waging what amounted to a sex war. They regarded men as a lower form of life, whose untrammelled sexual appetites were the root of all evil – from physical disease to every kind of moral degeneracy.
For these women, winning the vote was merely a means to an end: the reining in of male lust, which they thought would raise the whole of society to a higher spiritual plane.
What is more, they were prepared to adopt virtually any tactics to achieve it – even those we would now call terrorism.
The explanation for this sexual fervour lies in the squalid world of Victorian vice, with its huge and highly visible trade in prostitution. In 1841 the Chief Commissioner of Police estimated there were 3,325 brothels in Central London alone.
Thirty years later, a French visitor to the East End reported that “all the houses, except one or two, are evidently inhabited by harlots”. According to Scotland Yard’s director of CID, it was impossible for a respectable woman to walk through the West End in mid-afternoon because of the number of prostitutes openly soliciting.
Droves of girls were seen huddling along Regent Street, Piccadilly and Haymarket, urinating and defecating in public. For men of such tastes, children were easily procured: the age of consent was just 12.
Domestic servants joined the trade at night, desperate to supplement their meagre wages. Shop assistants did the same, with the encouragement of West End dress-shop managers who hired out clothes to them by way of advertising.
The phenomenon gave rise to endless scandalised discussion. At first, conventional opinion held that the prostitutes were corrupting the nation’s morals, whereas the men who patronised them were merely satisfying their natural inclinations while leaving respectable women unsullied. Gradually, however, the climate changed. Under the influence of evangelical reformers, the public began to see prostitutes as victims exploited by profligate males.
Rescuing “fallen women” became a national pastime. Reformers would seek out girls in the streets, give them improving tracts and plead with them to change their ways. The Liberal leader William Gladstone frequently took prostitutes home, where his wife gave them food and shelter.
But compassion was mixed with a morbid fear of venereal disease, which was especially rife among the Armed Forces. One in three cases of sickness in the Army was due to VD.
MPs responded by passing the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed police to arrest suspected prostitutes within a ten-mile radius of garrison towns, hold them for several days and order them to undergo an internal examination with a speculum.
The results were deeply unpleasant. Women, not always prostitutes, could have their most intimate privacy invaded, often brutally, on the say-so of a single policeman.
For many women, it crystallised the feeling that they and their kind were being victimised when the real fault lay with amoral men looking for sex. When doctors tried to extend the legislation nationwide in 1869, there was uproar.
Under the leadership of a charismatic clergyman’s wife, Josephine Butler, women across the country banded together to campaign for the law’s repeal. It was 16 years before they succeeded, but the crusade had far-reaching effects.
Butler and her colleagues saw their job as the reform of promiscuous men as much as the rescue of fallen women. In their eyes, it was men who funded prostitutes, and men who passed the laws degrading them.
The only solution was for women to enter public life and sort things out. “Male vice” would only end if women had the vote and the chance to purify politics.
It proved a popular rallying cry. Women’s emancipation became a crusade to save humanity from men’s corrupting influence. The battle for the vote became inextricably tangled up with a campaign for sexual purity.
The year 1886 saw the final repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. It was a watershed in the women’s movement. Feminists redoubled their demands for the vote and became ever more outspoken in their attacks on men. To some extent, this was a natural reaction to the horrors they had uncovered. In part, however, it arose from a sense of moral superiority that was rapidly tipping over into puritanical self-righteousness.
The most militant now argued that marriage was as exploitative as prostitution – just another way of purchasing women. Some saw all sexual relations with men as abhorrent. Women like the veteran feminist Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy believed that male sexuality was an expression of the bestial side of human nature, and that to indulge it threatened the very existence of society.
Indeed,
