a detective roughly seized her arm. ‘Women, they are arresting me!’ she cried as
pandemonium broke out. The militants struggled unsuccessfully with the police
for the possession of Emmeline, even using hatpins to disarm the enemy.
Emmeline was taken again to Holloway. When the cab reached the prison gates
she refused to get out and was forcibly carried inside, to the hospital wing.^57
Refusing to undress and get into bed, since that would indicate she was
staying, Emmeline lay on the bed, covered with blankets. She was worried
about Sylvia, another ‘mouse’ out on a licence, who was due to speak at
Bromley Town Hall that evening, and followed her example by going on both a
hunger and thirst strike, in order to get a quick release. When the Governor
visited her, he commented, ‘You are very cheap to keep’ and ordered three days’
close confinement. Emmeline refused all medical examinations. ‘I said to the
prison doctor’, she related, ‘that his desire to examine me was not prompted by
intention to help me as a patient, but to ascertain how long it was safe to keep
me in prison, and I was not prepared to assist him and the governor in any way,
or to relieve them of responsibility.’^58 The medical officer, however, suggested a
more vulnerable side to his ‘patient’, when he reported, on 23 July that she was
‘evidently in an emotional state and seemed distressed at her own position and
also because she thought her daughter [Sylvia] might be in the same plight as
herself ’.^59 Emmeline decided to force her release by doing what Sylvia had
done, walking up and down her cell until she collapsed. The prison authorities
found her gasping and half unconscious and released her on a seven-day licence
on 24 July, once again to 51 Westminster Mansions. Emmeline was in a severely
weakened state. She was now fifty-five years old and had less recuperative
powers than the thirty-one-year-old Sylvia; saline solutions had to be given by
transfusion to save her life. She had also contracted jaundice from which she
never fully recovered.^60
Keir Hardie, outraged at her treatment, asked questions that evening in the
Commons. If the government was not prepared to adopt the only method of
putting an end to this agitation by bringing in a bill for the enfranchisement of
women, he thundered, then ‘this method of barbarism’ of the Cat and Mouse
Act should not be continued in its present form.^61 Further requests for a pardon
for Emmeline were made, including two drawn up for presentation to the King
by the London Graduates’ Union for Women’s Suffrage; the first had been
signed by six prominent London men, including Sir Edward Busk, Sir Victor
Horsley, Professor Karl Pearson and Sidney Webb, and the second by 474
teachers and graduates. The Home Office also received petitioning letters that
contrasted the treatment of Emmeline with that of a man who had been
sentenced for assaulting young girls and then released on grounds of ill health;
the Bishop of Lincoln, the Bishop of Kensington, and Albert Dawson, the
editor of the Christian Commonwealth, were amongst the signatories.^62
Emmeline’s licence did not expire until 31 July. Although she was very ill,
she decided, against her doctor’s orders, to make the most of the opportunity by
attending the London Pavilion meeting on 28 July. She was wheeled in seated
PRISONER OF THE CAT AND MOUSE ACT