Emmeline was extremely busy in the early days of October, speaking at
important meetings in London, on 7 October, at Edinburgh on the 9th, and at
Liverpool two days later. Then unexpectedly, a few days before she was due to
sail, she was confronted with devastating news: Harry had been struck down
with inflammation of the spinal cord and was paralysed from the waist down.
The sick young man was taken from the farm to the Pembridge Gardens nursing
home in London where the sight of her boy unable to use his legs, and in great
pain, tore at Emmeline’s heart. Knowing that she needed money for Harry’s
care, especially if he were to become an invalid, and advised by Dr. Mills that
her son would have the very best attention, Emmeline felt she had no choice
but to undertake her lucrative lecturing trip although she confided to Miss
Birnstingl ‘I don’t like going at all.’^13 She left her son under the skilled care of
Dr. Mills, Nurses Pine and Townend, and under the overall charge of her sister,
Mary, and her daughters. However, since Mary was a WSPU Organiser in
Brighton, Adela was campaigning in Scotland and Christabel was the
Organising Secretary of the WSPU, it seems to have been Sylvia who bore the
brunt of the responsibility – and who failed to tell Adela, who was particularly
close to Harry, about their brother’s illness.^14 For Christabel, her mother’s deci-
sion to leave her sick son was based on ‘necessity’.^15 A resentful and embittered
Sylvia, on the other hand, writing of the incident over twenty years later in The
suffragette movement, portrays her mother as heartless, implying that she was
responsible for Harry’s eventual death. ‘So ruthless was the inner call to action,
that ... she persevered with her intention ... there was never a moment of
doubt as to where she should be substituted – on the platform or by the bedside
of her son. The movement was paramount.’^16 When Adela read Sylvia’s
account of these events in 1931, she was upset. Harry, she commented ‘would
surely be hurt to know that Sylvia used the opportunity which his dependence
on her in the last few months of his life gave her to make money by trying to
blast his mother’s reputation’.^17 Yet, in her later biography of her mother, Sylvia
changes her story. This time she claims that Emmeline ‘steeled herself to perse-
vere with her journey, declaring that he [Harry] would recover as before’.^18 Such
contradictory statements have been missed by historians who have taken the
account in the influential The suffragette movementas the standard reading of
events.
Christabel, Sylvia and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence were amongst those who
bade Emmeline goodbye when she caught the boat train from Waterloo on the
13th. The voyage, with its bracing sea air, gave Emmeline a chance to rest and
to look forward to her lecturing tour, the only kind of ‘holiday’, as Christabel
knew too well, her mother would take.^19 ‘Welcome to the first political leader
among women in the history of the world’, cabled Harriot Stanton Blatch in a
wireless message to Emmeline, shortly before she docked.^20 But news of the
impending arrival of an internationally known militant feminist had already
caused controversy in the USA and continued to do so. While many welcomed
the opportunity to hear ‘The World-famed Leader of the English Suffragettes’,
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE