the following Sunday, this time in Stevenson Square, Emmeline and Keir
Hardie were warmly received, once again.^31 But Hardie’s support for women’s
suffrage was leading many in the Labour Party to become dissatisfied. Snowden
was not alone in complaining that, as a leader, Hardie was ‘a hopeless failure. ...
He seems completely absorbed with the suffragettes.’^32
Before Emmeline had returned to Manchester, Sylvia had resigned her
Honorary Secretaryship of the London central office, contrary to her mother’s
wishes. Sylvia’s two-year scholarship was drawing towards an end and she
wanted to spend more time building up a portfolio so that she could earn a
living when her college course ended. She found this impossible to do when
WSPU work took up much of her spare time and WSPU members monopo-
lised her workroom during weekday evenings and at the weekends.^33 Emmeline
wanted Sylvia to retain the post until Christabel was free to come to London
to take up the office of Chief Organiser and preside over the choice of Sylvia’s
successor; she did not want Sylvia to become a paid organiser, thinking it not
fit for too many members of her family to be on the WSPU payroll and neither
did Sylvia herself want such a position. When Charlotte Despard and Edith
How Martyn, two ILP members, were appointed joint Honorary Secretaries,
Emmeline feared there would be ‘divided counsels’, a prophecy that came to
pass.^34 Emmeline’s anger at Sylvia’s stand had not subsided when she returned
home to Manchester. When Sylvia wrote to tell her mother that her college
teachers had encouraged her to apply for a free studentship to complete her
five-year course, Emmeline did not reply; she was busily preoccupied with
other matters including moving house to cheaper accommodation at 60 Upper
Brook Street. The brass Registrar’s plate was removed from 62 Nelson Street
and put up at the new address, the dwindling Emerson’s closed down. Amidst
these changes, Emmeline rejoiced in the news that the clever Christabel had
passed her law degree with First Class Honours, an achievement that would
have particularly delighted Richard. On 30 June, a hot summer’s day, the
proud mother attended the degree ceremony at the university and, as
Christabel’s degree was being conferred, heard a member of the congregation
shout out ‘Why have you not brought your banner?’ Overwhelming cheering
soon drowned out the interruption, a response that must have made Emmeline
glow with satisfaction.^35 Sylvia, in the meanwhile, was bitterly hurt that her
mother had not answered her letter. ‘We were no longer a family’, she wrote
some twenty-five years after the incident, still remembering the pain, ‘the
movement was overshadowing all personal affections. I had written to her
regularly every second day in all the years of my absences. Now, my last letter
unanswered, I ceased to write at all, except on matters of importance.’^36
Christabel’s immediate removal to London, where she took up the important
post of Chief Organiser for the WSPU, on a salary of £2 10s. per week, must
have intensified Sylvia’s resentment of her sister, a resentment that was to
grow as the political differences between the sisters widened. Christabel took
up residence not with Sylvia, who was moving her lodgings to 120 Cheyne
TO LONDON