Extract of a statement from Mary Richardson on forcible feeding, 6 February 1914 (Catalogue ref: HO 144/1305/248506)
Mary Richardson had been imprisoned in Holloway Prison and was regarded as a dedicated militant. She also slashed Velazquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’, a painting in the National Gallery, and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
Transcript
The process of driving the tube through the nose is very terrible, as the tube is usually too large for the nasal cavity, and when there appears to be any obstruction, more and more violent pushing is resorted to. On one occasion Dr Pearson almost tore my nose in his repeated efforts to force the tube through the opening, merely because he did not take pains to locate the nasal-throat cavity carefully. When I remonstrated, he replied:- “There is congestion, and I must force it through”.
After thirty times of nasal feeding, my face, eyes and nose were so swollen and bruised that Dr Pearson brought in a Home Office specialist and after consultation he announced that he would feed me by the throat tube thereafter. I refused to be so fed and set my teeth together, whereupon he ran his second finger through my lips, cutting them, and then, finding the extremity of my jaw, he deliberately cut my cheek with his finger nail. I cried out at his cruelty, but he continued until, in agony, my teeth were parted, and a metal spring gag inserted, followed by the feeding-tube.
By this time the blood from my cheek and gums was running from the corner of my mouth, down my neck into my clothing, and I began to choke violently, so violently that both doctors present looked alarmed, and one said:- “Don’t do that!” in a mocking fashion, and the other:- “Imagine its macaroni you are taking!”
The pain of the operation was beyond my endurance. I was driven almost mad by it, and springing up off the bed (when they had left off holding I ran out of my cell, in front of the wardress. It was at that point that Pearson said I was in “a dangerous state of mind” and must be treated [accordingly], with the result that they refused to open my cell door when I needed anything, and contented themselves with shouting at me from [without] as they would a lunatic.
The following day, at the feeding hour, Dr Pearson told me he had decided to the nasal feeding, and I was fed accordingly, until discharged four days later owing to an attack of appendicitis. This was bought on by the “hospital treatment” I had been receiving, but more especially by the brutality of one particular wardress, who had taken pleasure, it seemed, in paining me in the body by digging her knuckles into me, even after the struggle, during the feeding process.
My shoulders were worn sore after three days forcible feeding, and continued in a bleeding condition until my release.
Sleeplessness is an accompaniment of the hunger strike, but more especially of forcible feeding, when one suffers from horrible nightmares and this in spite of the fact that medicines containing drugs to quiet the nerves are administered. When first noticing the fact that I was being given curious mixtures before being fed, I asked what I was being given, and complained that it burned my stomach and smelt of ammonia. The doctor’s reply to me was:- “That is my business”, and thereafter the medicine was poured from an opaque glass, that I might not see it. I mention this because I believe the use of drugs will play a more important part in Holloway in the immediate future, for Mr. McKenna knows that to even temporarily check the Suffragette defiance of physical torture he must introduce something to deaden the minds of his defiant prisoners. He fully realises that it is in the mind that Suffragette lives and moves and has her being—he fully realises the use of drugs in this connection.
It is therefore more than a wish or desire, it is an entreaty from me that you will stop this prison torture before this last stage of satanic statecraft is reached; this last fiendish element added to the torture of suffragist prisoners.
(Signed) Mary Richardson
Feb.6th, 1914.