... O dear what a time. However it all ended happily at 4 a.m. and I slept until
midday after it was all over.’^5
On the morning of 21 February it was announced that Emmeline would
make an address that evening, this time from the balcony of a private house in
Glebe Place, Chelsea, the home of a young married couple, Dr. and Gladys
Schütze. Writing to Ethel before the meeting, Emmeline enthused about the
hospitality of her hosts, ‘How wonderful, the way new people are always turning
up just when you want them! Doctor Schulze [sic] examined my heart this
morning so that we might be prepared with a report if needed, for I am chal-
lenging McKenna [Secretary of State] to forcibly feed me.’^6 As noted earlier,
Emmeline would never willingly allow the prison doctors to examine her in
order to assess her fitness for forcible feeding and, as a way of saving face, they
always pronounced that her heart was too delicate to stand the operation,
which she knew to be a lie. She wanted a medical certificate stating that her
heart was sound, so that she could wave it, if need be, in the face of the prison
officials as yet another means of humiliating the government.
From the balcony of the Schütze’s home, Emmeline addressed another large
crowd of about 1,000 people and then went inside the house, waiting for a
convenient moment to evade arrest from the detectives sitting on the doorstep.
At 1.45 a.m, she and about twelve others crept quietly down the stairs and
stood waiting silently, for about two hours, for a signal outside saying all was
safe. The signal never came. ‘Oh, how exhausted I felt when at 4 a.m. I crept
into bed stone cold’, Emmeline lamented to Ethel. ‘I got one hot water bottle,
but before a second one arrived I was fast asleep. Is it not a mercy to be able to
sleep like that after strain or excitement?’ The following night, she managed to
escape, but only after a fight had broken out with the police. ‘I have strong
hope that I shall get through all my engagements up to Easter unarrested’,
Emmeline continued cheerfully to Ethel, as she tried to comfort her worried
friend:
Put your mind at rest about me and my health for I am compelled to
take rest between these skirmishes and so keep well. I need not tell you
how I am looked after and cared for, indeed absolutely spoiled by the
kind good women I am with now, and who put me in cotton wool.^7Ever since Emmeline’s return from her American lecture tour the Irish ques-
tion had become increasingly serious. Sir Edward Carson and his followers in
the Ulster Unionist Party had declared that if Home Rule were granted to
Ireland, with a parliament in Dublin, they would establish a rival, independent
government in Ulster. Arms and ammunition had already been shipped to
Ulster, men were being drilled, and it seemed as if civil war would break out.
The WSPU approached Carson and asked him if the proposed rebel govern-
ment would give equal voting rights to women; Carson declared that would be
so. Asquith, however, concerned about the potential scale of Ulster militancy
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