Today -100: February 2, 1914: Of railroads and forcible feeding

Germany completes its East African Central Railroad. I’m sure that investment will really make Germany’s colonial presence in Tanganyika pay off for decades to come.

The Women’s Social and Political Union badgers the bishop of London into visiting Holloway Prison to determine whether suffragettes are being tortured (other prisoners can hear Rachel Peace screaming). He “investigates” and claims that she’s just being forcibly fed and is perfectly fine. The screams, he says, are protests rather than expressions of pain. The WSPU responds, as was the custom, by heckling him during services.

While Rachel Peace may have seemed perfectly “calm” to the archbishop (possibly because she was being drugged), she was driven insane by this forcible feeding and spent the rest of her life in and out of asylums.

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