welcome to do that, but I shall insist on my right to speak to my daughter.’
Another wardress who had left the yard, now returned with a large number of
officers. Emmeline was hastily rushed to her cell while the other suffrage pris-
oners cheered her. For their ‘mutiny’, they were given three days’ solitary
confinement while Emmeline, unrepentent, told the Governor that she would
never submit to the silence rule again: ‘To forbid a mother to speak to her
daughter was infamous.’ For such a remark she was labelled a ‘dangerous crim-
inal’ and sent into solitary confinement, without exercise or chapel, a wardress
being stationed outside her cell to see that she communicated with no one.^21
Emmeline now heard, mistakenly, that Christabel was ill. In desperation, she
made an application to the Board of Visiting Magistrates to be allowed to see
her daughter, which was refused, with the crushing comment that she could
reapply in a month when the answer would depend on her conduct. ‘A month!
My girl might be dead by that time’, was her anguished comment. The anxiety
caused another migraine attack. As she lay on her bed in the early evening of
Saturday, 7 November, she could hear faintly the singing of the Women’s
Marseillaise and also cheering which helped to lighten the burden of her ‘pain
and loneliness’.^22 A demonstration of encouragement for imprisoned comrades
and of protest against the petty and inhuman regulations of Holloway had been
arranged. Brass bands played and Sylvia, Flora Drummond and other released
prisoners sat in wagonettes, some in home-made prison dresses identical with
the Holloway uniform, while the rank-and-file and general public fell in
behind. By the time the procession reached Holloway, where they circled the
prison twice, cheering Emmeline enthusiastically as they passed the hospital
wing, it was about half a mile in length and thousands strong.^23 Contrary to the
assumption of most historians, in these early years of the militant campaign,
Emmeline was a popular leader, as she challenged the terms of women’s political
subordination.
Before Emmeline’s solitary confinement, Adela – who had succeeded Helen
Archdale as WSPU Organiser in Yorkshire – had visited her mother in prison
and now a number of people, including Sylvia, Keir Hardie and Annie Cobden
Sanderson, applied for visiting permission – and were refused.^24 Another large
WSPU demonstration was held but since the roads to the prison were blocked
by 1,000 police, the women demonstrators, led by Mrs. May, shouted into a
megaphone, with all the strength of their lungs, ‘Mrs. Pankhurst!’ The crowd
then took up the name which echoed back and forth. The exercise was repeated
with the shout of ‘Christabel!’ ‘They musthave heard’, the protesters told each
other.^25 Continual pressure on the government, including the asking of ques-
tions in the Commons, eventually led Gladstone to concede that Emmeline and
Christabel could be allowed to spend one hour of each day together. When
Emmeline was also granted the right, after one month’s imprisonment, to write
one letter, her identity as a leader took precedence over that as a mother. She
wrote not a personal letter to any of her children but a public letter for her
followers, to be published in Votes for Women:
EMMELINE AND CHRISTABEL