20 March. This time Emmeline asked Lady Haberton to lead the hundreds of
marchers amongst whom were about forty mill women, recruited by Annie
Kenney and Adela; all the mill women and Annie were dressed, as requested, in
clogs and shawls. When the women reached the Commons, they were repelled
by over 500 police; brute force was used as they rushed repeatedly at police
lines. By the end of the evening, seventy-four women had been arrested.^65 The
government, Emmeline complained bitterly, was sending to prison women
whose ‘militancy’ consisted merely of trying to carry a resolution to the Prime
Minister. ‘Our crime was called obstructing the police. It will be seen that it was
the police who did the obstructing.’^66 That same evening, while the women
were still struggling in the streets, Emmeline left London for a by-election
campaign at Hexham in Northumberland.
Emmeline had not led either of the processions from the two Women’s
Parliaments to the Commons since she was trying to confine herself exclusively
to constitutional action that would not result in arrest and imprisonment. She
knew that this approach was necessary if she wished to keep her post as
Registrar, her sole source of income for herself and her youngest child Harry,
still a schoolboy. Emmeline would go to the most extraordinary lengths to get
back home in time to undertake her official hours of duty, often travelling alone
by night trains; when this was impossible, her sister Mary, as noted earlier, acted
as her deputy.^67 For some time now the Pethick Lawrences had begged
Emmeline to resign her post so that she could devote herself full time to the
leadership of the WSPU; the funds were now sufficient to give her, its key
speaker, a guaranteed income of £200–300 per annum. Emmeline, who valued
fiercely her financial independence, was reluctant to give up her employment,
with the promise of a state pension, for the insecurities of a political campaign,
and yet the failure of the Dickinson Bill indicated that she had to do so. She
knew that the work of the WSPU was growing in importance; the Clement’s
Inn headquarters now comprised seven rooms, forty-seven branches had been
established, eight paid organisers were employed and the income for the fiscal
year from 1 March 1906 to 28 February 1907 was £2,959 4s.^68 As Emmeline
prevaricated on the issue, a decision to relinquish her post was ‘practically
forced upon her’ when the Registrar General told her that she had to choose
between her political activity and her official position, a situation which
Emmeline believed had been engineered by a clique of Manchester Liberals
who strongly resented her determined opposition to the Liberal government.^69
On 21 March 1907, she resigned her post knowing that her fees as a speaker
would not replace the amount of her government salary and pension.^70 She also
decided to give up her Manchester home and provide for Harry’s future by
apprenticing him to a builder in Glasgow; Mary agreed to become an organiser
for the Union. Emmeline barely had time to reflect on these matters when she
had to face criticisms about WSPU tactics from suffragists within and outside
her own organisation as earlier disagreements surfaced again at the ILP
Conference held in Derby at the beginning of April.
TO LONDON