and in large West End shops were broken and both women were amongst the
forty-nine arrested. The crowds who had once cheered the suffragettes, were
now menacing. ‘It is a significant sign of the changed temper of the public in
their attitude towards Suffragette militancy that ... many of the women had to
be protected by the police from hostile crowds’, commented the Pall Mall
Gazette.^40 Nevinson lamented that the old-style deputations, so spectacular in
the past, were no more, ‘indeed the organising & inspiring spirit has gone, the
implicit confidence & faith, ever since the split’.^41
For Emmeline, however, the new militant policy of attacks on property was
now the only way to make the general public angry, so that it would pressurise
the government to grant the women’s demand. At a WSPU meeting held on 30
January, therefore, she praised her militant followers and reiterated that she
took full responsibility for all acts of militancy.^42 Yet she was also very conscious
of the hostility that the women’s war was arousing and conscious of the need to
court the goodwill of sympathisers who would help released prisoners recover
from their ordeal. ‘Will you let me know how many you can put up so that my
secretary can hand the information on to the prison Committee’, she wrote to
Agnes Harben when thanking her for her kindness in offering to look after
some of the women.^43 When Emmeline met Nevinson at Charing Cross on 31
January, she was impatient with him when he advised restraint. ‘She also said
rather fiercely that it was impossible for Christabel to return: she had the finest
political insight & the time for great speeches was gone. Also that no reconcili-
ation or alliance with the Lawrences would ever be possible.’^44
What Nevinson did not know was that earlier that day, the WSPU had
engaged in a new form of militancy in the Birmingham areas when ‘Votes for
women’ had been cut into golf courses and acid poured into the ground. Over
the next three weeks, other forms of damage to public and private property,
especially arson, took place as an orchid house at Kew Gardens was burned, the
refreshment house at Regent’s Park was destroyed, pillar boxes set on fire, and a
railway carriage set ablaze; in addition, telegraph and telephone wires were cut,
a jewel case at the Tower of London smashed, and windows at London clubs
broken. Few of the militants committing such secret and sporadic attacks were
caught by the police.^45
At the end of the first week of February, Emmeline quietly returned from a
short trip to Paris; rested, and knowing that she was being watched by the
police, she felt physically stronger for her next speech on 10 February when she
admitted that she was ‘the head and front’ of those who were offending the
public by destroying orchid houses, breaking windows, cutting telegraph wires
and injuring golf greens, and that in many instances, she had ‘incited people to
do these acts’.^46 Now staying in a small furnished flat at 159 Knightsbridge
rather than the Inns of Court Hotel, Emmeline wrote a warm letter the
following day to Elizabeth Robins, in New York, explaining how she had to
write now, on her return from Ipswich and before going to bed, since she was
‘uncertain’ as to what would happen tomorrow. ‘I am daily expecting to be
HONORARY TREASURER OF THE WSPU AND AGITATOR