Clara Gilbert Cole: brief notes

Clara Gilbert Cole was a suffragette who agitated against the First World War. Arrested and tried in 1916 with Rosa Hobhouse, the prosecution asked ‘Are you going to allow persons to go about the country encouraging, inciting and canvassing persons to acquire a conscience? […] there are men to whom nature has denied many of the qualities of courage, endurance and imagination which a soldier needs. […] Are not these persons to protected from literature of this kind?’ Rosa was unable to pay and ‘unwilling to ask for it to be paid for her because she felt this would be an admission of having done wrong […] Clara Cole took a similar course.’[1]

In 1922 Cole wrote ‘Parliament is used to keep the rich rich, and the poor poor, and the Labour Party is impotent to alter this. It can alleviate or apply palliatives during industrial crises when Capital over-reaches itself; in other words, it staves off the explosion of the gasometer.’[2]

Later Cole joined the anarchist movement and wrote for Freedom ‘If you fondly hope that one day there will be no hungry children in so-called democratic countries, let me assure you it is an impossibility – because the present system functions through hungry children.’[3]

Longer biographies of Clara are available at: https://menwhosaidno.org/context/women/cole_clara.html and https://libcom.org/article/cole-clara-gilbert-1868-1956 

Notes

1, ‘Trial of Rosa Hobhouse and Clara Cole’ in The Friend, June 23, 1916.

2, Parliament, The People’s Enemy, published by the Dreadnought Press https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/76hgd6 

3, ‘Logic of the Strike’ https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/gb5ppw