and disaffected WSPU exiles and supporters whom Emmeline had known –
Henry and Agnes Harben, Henry Nevinson, Evelyn Sharp, Hertha Ayrton,
Jane Brailsford, Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, Beatrice Harraden, the Hon.
Evelina Haverfield, Laurence Housman, George Lansbury, Mrs. Israel Zangwill
and the Pethick Lawrences.^2 Emmeline had been given shelter at Hertha
Ayrton’s house when a ‘mouse’ on the run; Hertha, Louisa Garrett Anderson
and Evelina Haverfield had also marched with her on Black Friday while the
Pethick Lawrences had once been key figures in the WSPU. Emmeline must
have felt betrayed.
Still subject to her three-year prison sentence, she evaded detectives and
travelled back to England, more determined than ever to continue her present
course of action. Deaf to the criticisms being made, prepared to meet all hard-
ships, the struggle for the vote was becoming her own personal struggle. Many
years later, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence remarked that although Emmeline
Pankhurst’s fight for women’s enfranchisement began in a spirit of generous
enthusiasm, in the end ‘it obsessed her like a passion & she completely identi-
fied her own career with it’ while Holton, a present-day historian, goes so far as
to suggest that Emmeline’s campaign for the vote became of secondary impor-
tance to the struggle itself.^3 But these claims miss the point that, through this
struggle, Emmeline never lost sight of the victory of the franchise, nor of the
feminist struggle against an oppressive male state. And, most importantly, she
was leading by example, staying in the limelight – while also protecting
Christabel who lived faraway.
Hunted by the Liberal government, like a fugitive, Emmeline had to stay at
random in the homes of those brave enough to take her in. On 10 February
1914, a notice appeared in the press saying that that evening Emmeline would
address a public open-air meeting from the residence where she was staying, 2
Campden Hill Square, the home of the Brackenburys. Speaking from a second-
floor balcony to a large crowd of about 1,200, Emmeline challenged the
government to rearrest her, accusing them of cowardice in forcibly feeding
women whom she had incited to militancy while not daring to forcibly feed
herself. She threatened that if sent again to prison, ‘I shall come out of it alive,
or I shall come out of it dead, but never, never, will they make me serve three
years’ penal servitude.’ Then addressing her own followers in the crowd, she
entreated the women to continue fighting ‘against the vicious conditions into
which the majority of our sex are born’.^4 During the fierce struggle that broke
out between the police and Emmeline’s bodyguard, a heavily veiled woman
dressed in black, presumed to be the Union leader, was struck on the head by a
plain-clothes policeman, roughly handled and arrested. At the police station,
however, it was soon discovered that the woman who had been arrested was
Florence Evelyn Smith, a decoy. The triumphant escapee had to keep her
whereabouts secret, even from Ethel Smyth to whom she wrote of her hide-and-
seek adventures which included ‘twelve hours in a tiny pill-box of a landaulette
(three of us!). I had raging toothache all the time, pouring rain, punctured tyres.
FUGITIVE