echoed privately by many WSPU members, such as Mary Blathwayt who
resigned her WSPU membership. But, as Hannam observes, both Mary and her
mother retained friendships with WSPU members and seemed reluctant to crit-
icise former colleagues.^24
According to Annie Kenney, Emmeline Pankhurst never felt as comfortable
with the ‘burning days’ of the WSPU campaign as she did with the milder forms
of militancy.^25 But Emmeline also prided herself in being part of that older
tradition of popular protest for liberty and freedom that had included incendi-
arism when men had campaigned for franchise reform. And, as she regained her
strength, resting at Coign, she became increasingly irritated with the police
surveillance of her movements. ‘I never went to the window, I never took the
air in the garden without being conscious of watching eyes’, she recollected.
When Ethel pondered one very rainy day whether she should take out
umbrellas to two detectives who had made a sort of cave amongst the prickly
gorse bushes, Emmeline’s voice from the spare-room bed hastily settled the
matter. ‘Nothing of the sort’, she sharply retorted. ‘Don’t make things pleasant
for them!’^26 Eventually Emmeline planned to end the intolerable, siege-like
situation by announcing that she would attend the WSPU meeting at the
London Pavilion on 26 May. On that hot, sunny day, Emmeline, dressed in pale
grey, limped out of the cottage, supported by Ethel Smyth and Nurse Pine. She
attempted to enter the Union car that she had ordered and from which Dr.
Flora Murray had alighted. But detectives kept their hands on the doors of the
vehicle, asking where she was going. Protesting at such treatment and overcome
by weakness and the heat, Emmeline fell back, fainting onto Ethel’s knee. The
police called a taxi and she was rearrested, to continue her three years’ prison
sentence under the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. The vehicle that took her to
Holloway was followed by four cars of her supporters, vociferously cheering the
prisoner. When the prison was reached, the women alighted quickly,
attempting, unsuccessfully, to rush the open gates and invade the precinct.
Knowing that she would be arrested, Emmeline had already prepared a letter to
be read out to the afternoon meeting at the Pavilion. ‘No power no earth can
break the spirit of our militant women’, she wrote, ‘and I warn the Government
that all their methods of repression will fail ignominiously. ... We are soldiers
engaged in a holy war, and we mean to go on until victory is won.’^27 The
dramatic pictures of her arrest at Coignfeatured on the front page of many
newspapers.^28
Back in Holloway, Emmeline refused any medical examination and went on
hunger strike. Suffering from a severe attack of dyspepsia as well as sleeplessness,
her physical condition deteriorated so that she was released on 30 May, on a
seven-day licence. The Standardcommented wryly that at this rate, she could be
expected to complete her sentence in about eighteen years hence.^29 But
Emmeline, under the Cat and Mouse Act, was to serve just six weeks of her
three-year sentence. On this occasion, as so many, she was cared for by Nurse
Pine, but at a different address, at 51 Westminster Mansions, the flat of WSPU
PRISONER OF THE CAT AND MOUSE ACT