The following night, 9 March, at St. Andrew’s Hall, the bodyguard – who
included Flora Drummond, Olive Bartels, Mrs. Williams and Lillian Dove-
Willcox – were on the platform which had been fortified by barbed wire
covered with flags in the Union’s colours, tissue paper and flower pots. Police
had been swarming about the building all day, looking out for Emmeline, who
managed to slip into the hall, walk quietly past detectives, give up her ticket
like a member of the public, and walk round the gallery and down on to the
platform at 8.15. p.m. According to one eye witness, she looked ‘pale and fragile
as a snowdrop, with luminous eyes, whose light twelve months of slow torture
have not quenched though they have turned her hair to silvery whiteness’.^12
‘Today in the House of Commons has been witnessed the triumph of militancy
- men’s militancy’, Emmeline explained to the packed audience of about
5,000–6,000 persons, ‘and to-night I hope to make it clear to the people in this
meeting that if there is any distinction to be drawn at all between militancy in
Ulster and the militancy of women it is all to the advantage of the women.’ Her
text for the evening, she explained, was ‘Equal justice for men and women,
equal political justice, equal legal justice, equal industrial justice, and equal
social justice’.^13 All of a sudden, the police burst into the hall and onto the
platform where the bodyguard were waiting with their batons, Indian clubs, and
hammers. During the fierce fight that ensued, Janie Allan fired blank shots from
a revolver. However, the bodyguard were unable to prevent the arrest of
Emmeline who was hit over the head by a big constable and knocked to the
ground. Badly shaken, she was then dragged into a taxi where she was made to
crouch on the floor while a matron and detectives occupied the seats; punched
in the back, her ankles and legs bruised and swollen, a dishevelled Emmeline in
her torn velvet dress, without her hat or fur coat, was taken to the police
station. Here she suffered the further indignity of being placed in a dirty cell
with an open sanitary convenience nearby. Demonstrators outside, protesting
against her treatment, were dispersed by mounted police.
Emmeline was taken by train back to London the following day, accompa-
nied by two metropolitan police officers, four detectives and a matron. Despite
elaborate attempts to prevent any suffragettes following her, when the train
reached Carlisle, Mrs. Williams and Lillian Dove-Willcox came running along
the platform shouting, ‘Are you there Mrs. Pankhurst?’ ‘Yes, I am here’, replied
Emmeline from a carriage with its blind drawn. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘Yes.’ As the
two women boarded the train they cried out, ‘We are with you.’ Several other
suffragettes also climbed on board. At every stop, some of the women went to
Emmeline’s window and spoke to her, pushing papers and flowers through the
small opening at the top. The driver was instructed to stop at Loudoun Road, a
small station just north of Euston, placing the front portion of the long train, in
which the suffragettes were sitting, in a tunnel while the rear end, which
contained the prisoner, was close to the exit. Emmeline, who refused to co-
operate in any way, was carried from the train and taken to Holloway without
their followers being able to attempt a rescue. Before she arrived at the gaol, she
FUGITIVE