stroke some years ago, she had recovered enough to lead an active life and to
continue following, with the greatest pride, the exploits of her eldest daughter
and granddaughters in the suffrage movement.^68 Now that another link with
her past life had been severed, Emmeline was only too glad to see Annie whom
she loved ‘as her own child’.^69 Annie was very friendly with the Blathwayt
family who lived at Batheaston, and on 15 April she accompanied the WSPU
leader to Eagle House, the Blathwayt home, where they had supper and stayed
overnight. The following day, Emmeline was asked to follow the customary
practice for WSPU visitors to Eagle House, namely to plant a tree in that part
of the garden known as the ‘suffragette field’. Once the deed was completed, a
photograph was taken of the Union leader, spade in her hand, standing by her
cedrus deodara, with Mary Blathwayt and Annie Kenney to her right. Although
Mary Blathwayt’s mother, Emily, had resigned her membership of the WSPU in
September 1909, since she disapproved of the stone throwing violence, she still
admired Emmeline and welcomed her; and her home continued to be a well-
known centre of hospitality for suffragettes for some years to come. ‘Mrs.
Pankhurst is still very thin’, Emily recorded in her diary, ‘but she gained about a
stone weight in a week by (as she says) eating less, but she took rusks instead of
bread and only very thin toast.’^70
Martin Pugh claims that Mary Blathwayt’s diaries reveal that Eagle House
became a centre for suffragette lesbians indulging in ‘short-lived sexual
couplings’, ‘one-night stands’. ‘In the diary’, he asserts, ‘Kenney appears
frequently and with different women. Almost day by day Mary says she is
sleeping with someone else.’^71 This theme is especially elaborated upon in his
book where the problematic term ‘lesbianism’ is never defined.^72 Although, as
Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull point out, the idea of ‘lesbianism’ in the
1980s and 1990s encompassed a range of identities, from the ‘feminist woman-
identified-woman (emphasising community and politics) to a specifically sexual
definition (emphasising powerful eroticism and transgression)’, Pugh associates
lesbianism with the latter aspect.^73 ‘[T]he physical nature of Annie Kenney’s
relationships seems clear from the evidence of the private diaries’, he asserts;
‘she slept so frequently with her female friends and colleagues that it would be
surprising if her feelings were not those of a lesbian.’^74 Yet his evidence to
support such a claim is slim, based upon five entries in Mary’s diaries! More
importantly, Pugh gives a twenty-first century interpretation to the phrase
‘sleeping with’, seeing it as involving sexual intercourse. It was common for
suffragettes campaigning in the early twentieth century to share beds when they
were put up in other people’s houses and this does not necessarily mean that
they were lesbians – although some undoubtedly were, whether they shared
beds or not. Pugh’s eagerness to speculate about the sexuality of suffragettes is
not confined to Annie Kenney. The determination of another WSPU member,
Grace Roe, he continues, ‘to protect the reputation of Christabel and Emmeline
in the context of the suffrage campaign led her to obscure what she knew about
their private lives’.^75 Such innuendo, without any firm evidence to support such
PERSONAL SORROW AND FORTITUDE