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Mar 4 2011 Perthshire Advertiser Friday

A FORGOTTEN episode in Perth’s history is being revisited in Edinburgh for International Women’s Day on Tuesday.

They were middle-class terrorists prepared to burn and bomb to get the vote. He was an ambitious prison doctor with no qualms about force-feeding women. What happened when their paths crossed at Perth Prison is explored in a new play to be given a rehearsed reading in Edinburgh on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.

Cat and Mouse, by former Perth writer-in-residence Ajay Close, tells the story of four suffragette hunger strikers held in Perth in the summer of 1914.

A rehearsed reading of the play last October at the Soutar Theatre in Perth proved so popular that many people were unable to secure tickets. They now have a second chance to see the play read at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre on Tuesday at 6pm.

There has been a revival of interest in the Scottish suffragettes recently, but the extraordinary story of what happened in Perth in June and July 1914 is relatively unknown.

The play by Ajay Close is a work of fiction, but draws on extensive historical research to explore the experiences of Frances Gordon, Maude Edwards, Fanny Parker and Arabella Scott who had been jailed for attacks on property. Each refused to eat or drink in the hope of forcing the authorities to release them but they were force fed by the prison doctor, Dr Hugh Ferguson Watson.

For the five weeks the women were imprisoned, Perth jail was effectively besieged. Thousands of women from all over Scotland descended on the town, marching through the streets, picketing the prison gates and singing hymns through the night to raise the spirits of their imprisoned comrades. The prison governor was even warned of a plot to bomb the doctor’s house.

Perth had been hostile to the suffragettes since they burned down the town’s cricket pavilion in 1913, but during that turbulent summer of 1914 the tide of feeling in the town turned. Local people became increasingly sympathetic, as they heard more about the women’s treatment in the jail.

Arabella Scott spent many hours in conversation with the man she called her ‘torturer’ – Dr Watson – and it is their complex, ambivalent relationship which lies at the heart of Ajay’s play.

“She was quite clear that her treatment was torture,” says Ajay, “but he was the only person she saw, apart from the warders. Reading between the lines of the archive material, it’s pretty clear they made some sort of connection. He even suggested that, if she gave up her hunger strike, the government would send her to Canada, with him to escort her.”

Cat and Mouse is directed by Muriel Romanes of Stellar Quines theatre company, and produced by Perth and Kinross Council arts development service. The 50-minute extract will be followed by an open discussion of the play.