beyond recognition? I’d rather see her cut out. She is a good fighter &
came to our side when we had so few friends. In spite of her little ways
which sometimes make me squirm, I am very fond of her & I don’t like
to think of her being wounded.^8However, Emmeline did not write to or visit another WSPU worker whom she
had known in Manchester, working-class Hannah Mitchell who was suffering a
nervous breakdown at this time. The deeply hurt, class-conscious Hannah felt
she had been snubbed and, resolving not to work with the Pankhursts again,
joined the WFL. ‘I did not realize’, she later reflected, ‘that in a great battle the
individual does not count and stopping to pick up the wounded delays the
fight.’^9
Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy was one of many WSPU members delighted
with the way Emmeline had dealt with the tensions. ‘Mrs. Pankhurst’s so-called
autocratic action’, she confided to Harriet McIlquham, was a necessary
‘desperate remedy’ to meet a desperate situation. ‘The whole intrigue is to
make Mrs. Despard the despot of the movement, to put Mrs. Pankhurst & the
rest of us under her rule – It is London intrigue of the worst kind all over.’ She
could remember how she had ‘so oftenseen & heardMrs Pankhurst cleverly &
pleasantly tide over difficult situations, keeping her own temper & soothing
other people’s ruffled tempers’, that she could not possibly accept the represen-
tations of her conduct and Christabel’s give by Mrs. Rowe.^10 For the
embittered Teresa Billington-Greig, on the other hand, Emmeline had
proclaimed herself a ‘dictator’ who had ‘elected herself and a few personal
friends as an autocratic permanent committee answerable to no one in the
world, and to sit at her pleasure’.^11 Rather than meet open criticism and
discussion, Emmeline and her conspirators had deflected the key issues by
cloaking themselves ‘in the mantles of saviours who had boldly nipped an
insidious conspiracy in the bud and had saved the Union at the price of their
most cherished principles’, while the dissenters came to be regarded ‘as rene-
gades who had plotted to sell the movement to the Labour Party’. This story
was seized upon, insisted Teresa, not because of its truth but because ‘Mrs.
Pankhurst with that quick instinct for effect and that political unscrupulous-
ness which mark her out’, knew that it was the kind of excuse ‘that would
confuse the issue and leave the burden of justification ... upon the new rebel
group that had refused to submit to her authority’.^12 Emmeline, for her part,
offered no apology for the autocratic organisational structure of the Union
since she believed it to be the most effective structure for her charismatic style
of leadership and the kind of campaigning in which the Union engaged. As
she later emphasised:
The W.S.P.U. is not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no
constitution and by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or
quarrelled over at an annual meeting. In fact, we have no annualAUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?