WSPU members, including Christabel, Adela, Flora Drummond, Mary Leigh,
Nellie Crocker, Hertha Ayrton, Elsa Gye, Ada Flatman and Gertrude
Conolan.^10 Adela had been sent to Aberdeen earlier that winter, to organise a
six-month campaign, and Helen Fraser was horrified when she greeted her at
the railway station since she had difficulty with breathing. ‘Did your mother see
you when you left last night?’ she enquired. She thought Adela replied, ‘Yes’.^11
But Emmeline, who could be firm in the way she organised her family, had not
realised the extent of her youngest daughter’s illness; furthermore, the 24-year-
old Adela loved her mother dearly and did not like to upset her plans.
Nevertheless, the woman doctor who successfully treated Adela was scornful
about the way she had been allowed to travel when suffering from pneumonia.
It was while she was in another city of Scotland, Glasgow, that Emmeline
wrote to Scott again, thanking him for all he was doing for the Holloway pris-
oners and for the news that her sister was better. ‘She is not strong but can
“endure” better than anyone I have ever known’, she explained. Then she
pressed home the point that ‘friends’ of the WSPU ought to impress upon the
Liberal government that it should remove the grievances which have led
women who were naturally law abiding to commit the offences for which they
are put in prison. ‘Please don’t think I am ungrateful to you’, she ended, ‘I am
indeed but forgive me for urging you to treat our women’s question politically
for until it is so treated we must go on with the sacrifice we are making of
health possibly even of life.’^12 Scott’s intervention was not successful;
Gladstone decided that Mary Clarke could not be allowed newspapers since,
unlike Emmeline Pankhurst, she was in prison for only one month and was not
in a condition of ‘nervous excitability’.^13
No mention had been made of women’s suffrage in the King’s Speech and so
Emmeline held another Women’s Parliament in Caxton Hall, on 24 February,
from which another deputation of women went forth, led by Emmeline Pethick
Lawrence. The women, who included Lady Constance Lytton, Daisy Solomon
and Helen Watts, the deaf daughter of a Nottingham clergyman, were soon
arrested and taken to Cannon Row police station. Emmeline, Mabel Tuke,
Jessie Kenney and Isabel Seymour, amongst others, visited them much to the
delight of Helen who wrote to her parents that the visitors ‘have been beaming
at us all through the hole in the door, & making us all feel puffed up’.^14
Emmeline was in court the following day, with Christabel and Lady Betty
Balfour, sister of Constance Lytton, by her side, where she heard the women’s
refusal to be bound over and sentences passed of from one to two months’
imprisonment.^15 Then she was back in Scotland again, campaigning. This time
she took her recently released sister with her.^16 Emmeline was comfortable with
Mary; there seems to have been no sisterly rivalry between them, as had devel-
oped between two of her own daughters, Christabel and Sylvia. Mary had long
ago accepted that her elder sister could be an influential force in the women’s
campaign for the parliamentary vote, and had been supportive in helping
Emmeline to become a well-known political figure.
‘A NEW AND MORE HEROIC PLANE’