Despite being marked ‘Private and Confidential’ a copy of the letter was
forwarded anonymously to Scotland Yard in an envelope bearing a Manchester
postmark.
On 13 January, when Emmeline addressed a WSPU meeting, plain-clothes
detectives were present. Emmeline protested, amongst other matters, against
the sentences of nine months’ imprisonment recently passed on Louisa Gay and
the crippled May Billinghurst, who had been forcibly fed that morning. Then,
tactfully, she told her audience there would be no more militancy until the
‘foredoomed’ amendments had been debated. ‘We are not going to give them an
excuse to put the blame on our shoulders, and we have got to accept the respon-
sibility.’^36 It was Evelyn Sharp, who had resigned from the Union over the
Pethick Lawrences split and was now an editor of Votes for Women, who had
persuaded Emmeline to suspend the onset of militancy. Emmeline, however,
held little hope that the amendments would be passed, nor did she expect the
deputation of working women, drawn from all parts of London and the
provinces, to result in success; although the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd
George, and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey, met
twenty of the demonstrators, who included teachers, laundresses, nurses, pit-
brow women, mill hands and fisherwomen, the replies made by the two
ministers were considered ‘shifty and vague’.^37
Emmeline’s fears of treachery on the part of the government were justified.
The Speaker of the House of Commons ruled that the women’s suffrage amend-
ments were out of order since they would so change the nature of the Manhood
Suffrage Bill that a new bill would need to be introduced. On 27 January
Asquith announced in the Commons that he regretted that the bill would be
dropped that session. ‘Either the Government are so ignorant of parliamentary
procedure that they are unfit to occupy any position of responsibility, or else
they are scoundrels of the worst kind’, thundered an angry Emmeline. Despite
Asquith’s denials of complicity and deception, the WSPU alleged that the
government had used this particular mode of ‘torpedoing’ the amendments as
an ‘expedient held in use in the event of a Woman Suffrage amendment being
carried’. The only way the Prime Minister could fulfil his pledge to women was
by ‘introducing a Government measure giving Votes to Women. He refuses to
do this. Let no one after this talk of him as a man of honour!’^38 Addressing large
and enthusiastic audiences later that day, Emmeline announced, ‘It is guerilla
[sic] warfare that we declare.’ Human life they regarded as sacred, but ‘if it was
necessary to win the vote they were going to do as much damage to property as
they could’. When she was asked, she continued, why the militants attacked the
property of people who were not responsible for the unenfranchised state of
women, she replied, ‘They are all responsible unless they put a stop to the way
in which women are being treated.’ The WSPU had a ‘plan of campaign’, the
details of which they could not make public.^39 The following evening, in heavy
rain, Flora Drummond and Sylvia Pankhurst lead a deputation, demanding
equal suffrage, to the Commons; windows of government offices in Whitehall
HONORARY TREASURER OF THE WSPU AND AGITATOR