packing & disposing of books, papers etc the accumulation of many years’, she
wrote in mid April to Caroline Phillips, a journalist and Honorary Secretary of
the Union branch in Aberdeen. ‘You will understand that it is not a light
task.’^75 Emmeline made sure that all Richard’s correspondence and documents,
the family birth certificates and other personal papers were not thrown away. In
particular, the personal letters from Richard to herself were cherished carefully
all through the subsequent years of imprisonment and release, travel, war and
residence abroad so that they passed to Christabel on her death; all the other
papers Emmeline eventually gave to Sylvia, possibly in 1912, with a request that
she would write a biography of her father.^76
Towards the end of that April 1907, Emmeline met up again with Keir
Hardie. Hardie was not well, having noticed just after the ILP Conference a
strange numbness all down his left side, probably caused by a small stroke.
Sylvia feared he was dying and wrote to her mother who immediately rushed to
London. Ramsay MacDonald, a future Labour Prime Minister, saw a frail Hardie
walking with Emmeline on one arm and Annie Cobden-Sanderson on the
other, a situation which concerned Hardie so much that he wrote to
MacDonald the following day explaining that ‘Mrs Pankhurst and he had not
made a tryst.’ When MacDonald saw the two together again, on board a train at
St. Pancras station, Hardie was even more troubled and asked Frank Smith to
write to explain that the meeting was purely a coincidence, ‘he had not the
remotest ideas she was anywhere near. It seems she has a Scotch Tour arranged.
... For various reasons he would like you to know this.’^77 But what were the
reasons? For some years there had been gossip in Labour Party circles that
Hardie, a married man whose wife lived in faraway Scotland, was having an
affair with the beautiful Emmeline, a captivating widow who had become, as
Glasier was later to phrase it, ‘the Delila [sic] that has cut our Samson’s locks’.^78
It is possible, of course, that there was some substance to the gossip and that
Hardie wished to avoid any hint of sexual scandal. But it was Emmeline’s
daughter, Sylvia, with whom Hardie – known as ‘a great one for the girls’^79 –
was emotionally involved, not Emmeline. When or where Hardie and Sylvia
first became lovers is impossible to say although her biographer claims that their
love affair began soon after Sylvia moved to London, and continued into
1912.^80 In one undated letter to Hardie, written while she was in prison, Sylvia
writes of longing to ‘feel your dear length pressing on me until my breath comes
short’; although Romero suggests the letter was written about 1906, it could
easily date to Sylvia’s imprisonment in Holloway in February 1907 or a later
time.^81 The most likely reason for Hardie’s concern about being seen with
Emmeline was his fear that it might be interpreted as a sign that he had deserted
the Labour Party, won over by the charm of a powerful feminist leader who put
women’s suffrage before the party’s interests.^82 After all both Hardie and
Emmeline had written chapters for a recently published volume in which
Emmeline had argued that the women’s suffrage campaign must be above party
politics and based in sex solidarity. ‘[T]o the women of all parties one appeals
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