Although the mob fled when the police arrived, it was two hours before it was
considered safe to leave.^33
On her return to London, Emmeline found Harry staying at Sylvia’s lodgings,
the builder to whom he had been apprenticed in Glasgow having gone
bankrupt. She was both disappointed and concerned that her son was not
settled in an occupation. Realising that an outdoor life in the harsh Clydeside
winters had been unsuited to Harry’s delicate health, Christabel came up with
the idea that he would fare better in an office job as a secretary. Emmeline
enthusiastically embraced the suggestion, offering to pay for classes in shorthand
and typing and to give her son a weekly allowance of £1 per week. She also
insisted that Harry should get a reader’s ticket for the British Museum, to
further his general education. With the matter settled, Emmeline went off to
the provinces again, to Leeds, despite the fact that her bruised ankle had not
healed. With their mother out of the way, Christabel and Sylvia arranged an
eye test for Harry and the purchasing of the spectacles that Emmeline had
discouraged. But Harry had less interest in studying than in the suffrage and
socialist movements, which drew him ‘like a magnet’. Soon he was heckling
politicians, chalking pavements, speaking at street corners and doing a range of
useful political work.^34
Once in Leeds, the intense pain in Emmeline’s ankle forced her to lie down
between meetings and then hobble in and out of motor cars as she rushed from
one gathering to the next, expectant that the vote could be won that year. A
Liberal MP friendly to the women’s cause, Mr. Stanger, had drawn a place in the
private members’ ballot and 28 February was the day fixed for the second
reading of a women’s franchise bill. Emmeline’s fervour communicated itself to
her audiences, especially in the final torchlight procession to Hunslet Moor
where an enthusiastic crowd of 100,000 people waited to greet her, Mary
Gawthorpe, Rosamund Massy and Rachel Barrett.^35 The police had refused
protection for the speakers but the vast crowd kept order and parted to let the
speakers through as local women in their broad Yorkshire accents kept up a
chorus ‘Shall us win? Shall us have the vote? We shall?’^36 Emmeline was
succeeding in her aim of rousing women to claim their citizenship rights. As
Frances Rowe confided to Harriet McIlquham, ‘Mrs. Pankhurst works such
appeals and how quickly women respond! A Miss Naylor who a few weeks ago
began to take part in the protests at meetings & said she could never speak,
could not put two words together, is down ... for meetings all over the
country.’^37
Still lame from the injury to her ankle, an elated Emmeline returned to
London for the last day of another Women’s Parliament, 13 February. ‘I have
come back to London feeling as I have never felt before, that we are near the
end of the struggle’, she told her audience at the Caxton Hall. ‘I feel that the
time has come when I must act.’^38 She proposed to form a deputation to parlia-
ment to challenge the Tumultuous Petitions Act, dating from the reign of
Charles II, which stated that no person should repair to the King or parliament
AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?