Photograph, surveillance image

From 1913 the Home Office commissioned an undercover photographer to take surveillance images of Suffragette prisoners as they took exercise in the yard of Holloway prison. The images were widely distributed for the purpose of identifying suffragettes most likely to undertake militant action, including damage to artworks in museums and galleries.
It is likely this image while Clara she was on remand in Holloway prison having been arrested for smashing a display case in the Asiatic Saloon at the British Museum breaking three Chinese porcelain cups and a saucer. The event took place on 9th April 1914. As indicated on the image Clara used the alias 'Mary Stewart' when arrested. Witness accounts noted she entered the Museum dressed in a ‘long tweed costume over which she wore a long coat’ Clara appeared to be studying the antiquities, when ‘she produced a brand new hatchet from beneath her coat and before the attendants could seize her, belaboured the cabinet of porcelain’.
At Bow Street Court the next morning Clara ‘in a very excited manner began to shout and declaim’ to the magistrate. She told him she had not come to listen to him, refused to recognise the authority of the court, and told him she would not sit down while Mrs Pankhurst and others were being tortured by the ‘devilish’ work of the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna. Clara was taken from the court and the case was adjourned until the afternoon, but when she returned she was ‘disorderly and continued speaking loudly’ while two officers held her firmly in the dock.
Clara was committed for trial and went on hunger strike, was force fed, released on a Cat and Mouse licence and absconded from her address. On 24 April Scotland Yard circulated a memorandum to all police stations in the country featuring a Special Branch surveillance photograph of her, giving her details: she was five feet one inch tall, had a sallow complexion, brown hair and grey eyes. Clara was 40 years old, had two convictions for breaking windows, and had recently been found in the House of Commons ‘in male attire with a riding whip in her coat pocket… for an unlawful purpose.’

Clara Lambert came from a working-class background, and was a collar-dresser in the family laundry business in Catford before throwing herself wholeheartedly into the WSPU in 1906. A member of the Lewisham branch of the Women's Social and Political Union, she served at least four terms of imprisonment for suffragette activity. Her militancy included entering the House of Commons dressed as a boy, smashing windows of the Strand Post Office having concealed a hammer in her muff and throwing a tomato at the Public Prosecutor, Archibald Bodkin. On one occasion, armed with a dog whip, she attempted to intercept Prime Minister Asquith at Waterloo Station as he boarded a train on his way to a wedding. Missing his arrival she boarded the train along with the wedding guests and then took a taxi to the wedding venue. Frustrated by missing Asquith again she set fire to a nearby haystack. During World War I Clara joined the Women's Police Service and was sent to Pembury, South Wales, where she was engaged on welfare work among girl munitions workers. After the war she worked with the Rev. Dick Sheppard's Society 'rescuing' female sex workers in London's west end. In 1926 Clara and her close companion Violet Croxford established a refuge for female sex workers in Hythe Kent. On their retirement the two women moved to Farncombe in Surrey where Clara died aged 94 in 1969