Edith Garrud: The Tiny Suffragette Who Taught Women to Throw Policemen
On the evening of 9 March 1914, about 4,000 people packed into St Andrew's Hall in Glasgow to hear a woman the police were determined to arrest. Emmeline Pankhurst was out of prison on licence and wanted for re-arrest. Detectives had come up from Scotland Yard and police had the hall surrounded.
She came in heavily cloaked, walked in with the ordinary ticket holders and then made her way up to the platform to a roar from the crowd. Her opening line was a dig straight at the men sent to stop her: "in spite of His Majesty's Government I am here tonight".
Behind the podium stood a group of women who'd travelled up from London the night before. When the police charged the stage, they found barbed wire hidden in the flower display along the front. Then the women went to work. Buckets of water. Plant pots. Chairs and tables. Indian clubs swung at truncheons. Glasgow suffragette Janie Allan is thought to have fired blanks from a revolver to scare the officers off.
None of these women were born fighters. Most of what they knew about holding off a grown man had come, one way or another, from a woman in London who stood about four foot ten and had spent the past few years throwing policemen over her head for the newspapers. Her name was Edith Garrud.
Quick Answers
• Who was Edith Garrud? A British martial arts instructor (1872 to 1971) and one of the first professional women martial arts teachers in the Western world. She taught jiu-jitsu to the suffragettes.
• Where was she from? She was born Edith Margaret Williams in Bath in 1872 and grew up in Wales before moving to London after her marriage.
• What's she famous for? Training suffragettes in self-defence and helping prepare the Bodyguard, a unit of around 30 women who protected Emmeline Pankhurst from re-arrest in 1913 and 1914.
• How tall was she? Sources put her at 4ft 10in or 4ft 11in.
• When did she die? In 1971, aged 99. An Islington People's Plaque marks her old home at 60 Thornhill Square.
A Girl From Bath Who Married a Gym Instructor
Rewind 40-odd years. Edith Margaret Williams was born in Bath in 1872 and grew up in Wales. Nothing about her early life marks her out as a future street fighter. Then, in 1893, she married William Garrud, a physical culture instructor who taught gymnastics, boxing and wrestling, and followed him to London.
She didn't just keep house. Edith worked alongside William as a physical training instructor, which was a pretty unusual job for a woman in the 1890s. So when the couple stumbled on something new in 1899, she was already used to being the odd one out in the gym.
That something was jiu-jitsu, and it arrived via Edward Barton-Wright, an engineer who'd spent years in Japan and come home determined to sell Londoners a mixed self-defence system he called Bartitsu. If the name rings a bell, it's because Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed a garbled version of it, "baritsu", as the art Sherlock Holmes used to survive Reichenbach Falls.
The Garruds went on to train under Sadakazu Uyenishi at his school in Golden Square, Soho, where Yukio Tani was also teaching. Edith was hooked. Jiu-jitsu, "the soft art", works by using an opponent's weight against them rather than meeting strength with strength. For a woman of her size that wasn't a limitation. It was an advantage nobody saw coming, the same trick that made wiry little instructors like Francois d'Eliscu so unnerving to much bigger men decades later.
When Uyenishi went back to Japan in 1908, he left the dojo to his senior students, the Garruds among them. Edith took charge of the women's and children's classes. The girl from Bath was now running a martial arts school in the middle of the West End.
Getting Famous for Being a Joke
Edith never seemed to mind being laughed at by the papers. Being laughed at still meant being noticed, and she made the most of it.
In 1907 she starred in a short Pathé film usually listed as Jiu-Jitsu Downs the Footpads, in which a purse thief gets chased across London before Edith hands out her own brand of street justice. It's often described as one of Britain's first martial arts films, although the records are patchy. One memorial database credits her as "Madame Gerrud" in a 1907 short called Ju-Jitsu and says the film is now lost.
Her way into politics came down to a sick husband. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) booked the Garruds for a demonstration, William fell ill and Edith went on her own. Emmeline Pankhurst encouraged her to speak as well as throw people around. It went down well enough that she was soon running twice-weekly classes for WSPU members only. She also organised the Women's Athletic Society, a branch of the Women's Freedom League that doubled as a heckler squad for meetings, and said she wanted jiu-jitsu to be "an additional weapon" in the fight for the vote.
Then she started on the police. At a WSPU bazaar at the Prince's Skating Rink, which one academic paper dates to 1909, she threw a police officer to the ground in front of a crowd. In June 1910 the Evening Telegraph reported another demonstration against a constable who stood around six foot and weighed 13 stone. Edith let herself go down on her back, planted her feet in his diaphragm and flipped him over her head. He's said to have admitted afterwards that on a real pavement the force would be "one man short". The Illustrated London News ran a six-step photo sequence of her taking a policeman apart.
The press couldn't get enough. In July 1910 Punch published an Arthur Wallis Mills cartoon titled The Suffragette That Knew Jiu-Jitsu. The Arrest., showing a small woman fending off a group of cowering policemen. Papers coined "suffrajitsu" and "jujitsuffragettes" and meant them as put-downs. Every one of those jokes was free advertising.
Edith kept pushing. In 1911 she choreographed the fight scenes for a stage play called What Every Woman Ought to Know and wrote a short play of her own for Health and Strength magazine, Ju Jutsu as a Husband-Tamer, which showed women how to defend themselves against domestic violence. That was a bold thing to put in print in 1911.
She was careful about the image, though. She argued that learning to fight didn't mean losing ladylike qualities and pushed back against the caricature of mannish Amazons picking on innocent coppers. She had good reason. Edwardian Britain had firm views on what was too unladylike for women, as the pit brow lasses of Lancashire had already found out.
Black Friday Stops the Laughing
On 18 November 1910, around 300 women marched on Parliament and ran into police and hostile crowds. The violence that followed, much of it sexual, became known as Black Friday, and more than a hundred women were arrested. After that, the WSPU leadership decided women needed to be ready to defend themselves at every future demonstration.
Almost overnight, Edith's party piece became a survival skill. Women at marches started hiding rubber clubs under their skirts and wearing cardboard armour. Women had been improvising weapons for years, of course. A decade earlier the Chicago Tribune had published a list of the household objects they most often reached for, hatpins included. What was different now was that someone was teaching them how to use their bodies properly.
Edith's dojo turned into something closer to a safe house. During the suffragettes' window-smashing campaign, women would turn up for a "class", Edith would vouch for them and their hammers went under the exercise mats while police searched the streets outside. Her great-nephew, Martin Williams, has said the dojo hid clubs and bats after protests on Oxford Street. She was also running a training centre at Argyll Place near Oxford Circus, teaching women and children, and at one point the couple had a school on Seven Sisters Road in north London.
Building the Bodyguard
By 1913 suffragettes in prison were refusing food, and the government had a new answer: the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, better known as the Cat and Mouse Act. Starving prisoners could be released and then re-arrested once they'd recovered enough to be locked up again. Emmeline Pankhurst became the mouse every policeman in Britain wanted to catch.
The WSPU decided to fight back literally. It formed the Bodyguard, around 30 women trained in jiu-jitsu and Indian clubs, whose job was to stop the police getting their hands on Pankhurst whenever she surfaced in public. Edith helped train them at secret locations across London. They learned to hide clubs in their dresses, to pad themselves with homemade cotton and cardboard armour and to turn anything to hand, flowerpots included, into a weapon.
The squad was led by Gertrude Harding, a Canadian who'd grown up on a farm in New Brunswick. Harding first came to London in 1912, threw herself into the movement, helped wreck the Orchid House at Kew Gardens and secretly edited The Suffragette while the rest of the leadership was jailed, in hiding or on hunger strike. If Edith was the coach, Harding was the captain.
It's worth being honest about one thing. The paper trail on Edith's own part in all this is thinner than her fame suggests. One literary scholar points out the surviving material amounts to a handful of newspaper articles, cartoons and magazine reports, and there's no solid evidence she was in Glasgow herself. What we can say is that the women on that stage were fighting the way she'd been teaching suffragettes to fight for years.
Back to Glasgow
So how did that night at St Andrew's Hall end? Not well, in the short term. The police got through and Pankhurst was arrested, dragged outside and thrown into a cab. When the dust settled, officers gathered up what the Bodyguard had left behind: six Indian clubs, five truncheons, wirecutters, a weighted bludgeon, a length of barbed wire and a pistol. That haul is now on display at the People's Palace museum in Glasgow.
Pankhurst went straight onto a hunger and thirst strike. Two days later the police carried her out on a stretcher, drove her eight miles to Coatbridge to dodge the supporters massing at Glasgow Central and put her on a London train. Even then they didn't risk Euston. The train made an unscheduled stop at Loudon Road, now South Hampstead, and she was driven from there to Holloway.
The Bodyguard learned from it. When Pankhurst later spoke from a balcony in Camden Square, the police pounced on a veiled woman being hurried away by the squad, sure they'd finally caught their mouse. She was a decoy. The real Pankhurst had been smuggled out in the scuffle.
In May 1914 the WSPU marched on Buckingham Palace to petition the King. Around 1,000 police were waiting. Pankhurst was arrested near Wellington Arch and plenty of women ended up in hospital. It was one of the last big fights. A few months later, everything changed.
After the Fight
When war broke out in August 1914, Pankhurst called off militant action and the Bodyguard was stood down. In 1918 women over 30 finally got the vote, with full equality following a decade later. You can see how Britain compares with the rest of the world in our rundown of the year women became eligible to vote in each country.
Edith went back to doing what she'd done before politics found her: teaching. She and William kept the classes going until they sold the dojo and retired in 1925. A family photograph shows her with her children, Sybil and Owen, though very little has been published about them.
She settled in Thornhill Square in Islington and stayed there for the rest of her long life. There's a lovely story, worth taking with a pinch of salt, that during the Blitz she refused to be frightened of the bombs and shook her fist at Hitler's planes as they went over.
She never lost the knack, either. In 1965 the journalist Godfrey Winn came to interview her and she put him in a wrist hold. The interview is usually described as taking place on her 94th birthday, although if she really was born in 1872 she'd have been 92 or 93. Either way, it's a good party trick for a woman in her nineties. She died in 1971, aged 99.
The Joke That Outlived the Jokers
Here's the bit Edith would probably have enjoyed most. On 30 June 2012, after a public vote that drew more than 3,000 ballots, Islington Council unveiled a People's Plaque at her old home at 60 Thornhill Square. Its wording is lifted almost straight from that mocking 1910 Punch cartoon: "The suffragette that knew jiu-jitsu lived here." It was unveiled by her great-granddaughter, a boxer.
There's a steel figure of her at Station Place in N4 too, part of a Sustrans Portrait Bench alongside Soul II Soul's Jazzie B and Florence Keen, who founded the North Islington Welfare Centre and School for Mothers. The statues went missing in 2018 and were back by 2019, but the bench with the name plaques never came back, so Edith now stands there unlabelled.
Popular culture has been better at remembering her. In the 2015 film Suffragette, Helena Bonham Carter's character was renamed Edith in her honour. In the Enola Holmes films, Susan Wokoma's jiu-jitsu-teaching Edith Grayson is a clear nod to her, which brings things neatly back round to Sherlock Holmes and that made-up martial art. She turns up in the 2023 musical Sylvia, in Tony Wolf and João Vieira's Suffrajitsu graphic novel trilogy and in the French graphic novel published in English as The Bodyguard Unit.
The cartoonists of 1910 thought a tiny woman throwing a policeman was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. More than a century later, most of them are forgotten and she's the one with her name on the wall.
Further Reading
If you want to go deeper into Edith Garrud and the fighting suffragettes, these are worth a look (affiliate links):
• The Bodyguard Unit: Edith Garrud, Women's Suffrage, and Jujitsu by Clément Xavier and Lisa Lugrin. A punchy graphic novel that builds to the Battle of Glasgow.
• Suffrajitsu: Mrs Pankhurst's Amazons by Tony Wolf and João Vieira. The first in the graphic novel trilogy, written by a Bartitsu historian.
• With All Her Might: The Life and Times of Gertrude Harding. The Bodyguard's leader in her own words, edited by her great-niece.
• Old Baggage by Lissa Evans. A very funny novel about an ageing ex-suffragette, with plenty of Garrud in its DNA.
