Helen McCarthy teaches at Cambridge.
The Endell Street wards were named after female saints and had colourful bed quilts and easy chairs, striking a very different note from the ‘chilly whitewashed walls and gloomy brown blankets’ of standard army hospitals. The WSPU motto, ‘Deeds Not Words’, was embroidered on the curtains in the recreation room, where entertainments were put on throughout the war.
The General Strike isn’t remembered as one of the labour movement’s great failures, but as a crisis that failed to happen, or even as the moment when Britain faced the prospect of revolution and turned...
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