marching behind and before it, was a poignant reminder that while the disciple
might be honoured in death, the leader was subjected to an infamous act of
parliament. Vast, largely silent crowds lined the streets. When the coffin was
carried into St. George’s Church, Bloomsbury, for a short memorial service,
militants dressed in white lined the way on either side, giving a military salute.
After the service, the coffin was conveyed to King’s Cross station where it was
placed on the 5.30 train to Morpeth, Northumberland, Emily’s birthplace.^38
Emily’s funeral, covered in all the major newspapers, was the last of the great
suffragette displays of sisterhood and feminism. Churlishly, the disapproving
national leadership of the NUWSS refused to take part or even send a wreath
but in view of the feminist friendships that cross-cut formal organisations, many
rank-and-file NUWSS members must have attended.^39 It is ironic that Ray
Strachey, a NUWSS supporter, claimed fifteen years later in her influential
book ‘The cause’: a short history of the women’s movement in Great Britain, that
Emily Wilding Davison’s death ‘startled and indeed roused the country. ... All
over the world people read of it’; it was a turning point in public opinion so that
people felt that it ‘was time the struggle ended’. This view was strongly evident
at the time. Laurence Housman was not alone in recollecting how Emily’s death
changed the views of many thousands who had been ‘careless or indifferent’ to
women’s suffrage to see it as ‘a serious thing’.^40
Back in Holloway, an angry Emmeline went on hunger strike and was
admitted to hospital. The Governor reported that she refused to undress and
was, ‘[v]ery irritable and more illogical than usual in conversation. Refuses
medical examination, all food and medicine. Says that, if she had strength, she
would assault me and all officers of the Prison and commit damage.’^41 Two days
later, Emmeline was released on a seven-day licence to 51 Westminster
Mansions. Many voices condemned the barbarity of her treatment. In a leading
article on 18 June, theNorth Mailasked whether Mrs. Pankhurst should be
pardoned since if the ‘in-and-out process’ continued, she would die. ‘Mrs.
Pankhurst is not a criminal, though she has been indicted for a criminal
offence. It may not be the business of the law to analyse her motives, but there
is no man living who does not agree that her motives are mainly political.’ The
influential playwright and suffragist, George Bernard Shaw, in a letter toThe
Ti m e s opined that the moment chosen for the latest arrest of Emmeline
Pankhurst was ‘a revolting one’, a feeling he believed that was shared by a
large body of the paper’s readers. ‘[T]here is nothing to be said for pursuing her,
now she is out, with a game of cat-and-mouse that will produce on public
feeling all the effect of vindictive assassination if she, like Miss Davison,
should seal her testimony with her blood.’ Rebecca West, in the Clarion,
expressed similar sentiments, fearing that the government was ‘going to murder
Mrs. Pankhurst’.^42 However, for an embittered Dora Marsden, who had
resigned from the WSPU in 1911 and was now editor ofThe New Freewoman,
with its trenchant attacks on the style of leadership of the Pankhursts, it was
all too much:
PRISONER OF THE CAT AND MOUSE ACT