Arrest me at the gates of the Palace. Tell the King!’, shouted a defiant
Emmeline as she was carried to a car waiting behind police lines, ready to take
her to Holloway.^33 The photograph of the frail-looking Emmeline Pankhurst,
lifted off the ground, her face writhing in pain, has become the most reproduced
of all images of the suffragette movement. Outraged about the brutal way their
leader had been treated and the peaceful demonstration crushed, the militants
launched a war of reprisal that included damaging paintings at the National
Gallery and the Royal Academy, planting bombs in empty churches and in
water mains, protesting in theatres and churches, and smashing mummy cases
in the British Museum. The comparison between the treatment of her mother
and Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservatives, who strongly backed the mili-
tancy of the Ulster Unionists, was not lost on Christabel. ‘Why is Mrs.
Pankhurst sent to prison, while Mr Bonar Law is left at liberty?’, she asked in a
leading article in The Suffragette.^34
Meanwhile, after her eighth hunger and thirst strike, Emmeline was released
after five days, on 27 May, to 34 Grosvenor Place, London SW, due to return to
Holloway in a week’s time. Two days later she wrote to Ethel who was now en
route for Vienna, telling her all the news:
I was released on Wednesday and Pine wired you the moment she knew
herself. On Sunday it was reported that I was dead and I don’t think
McKenna would have been sorry if that had been the result of the
horrible bear’s hug that huge policeman gave me when he seized me.
Fortunately for me I have ‘young bones’ or my ribs would have been
fractured. After it I suffered from a form of nausea just like very bad sea-
sickness; however it’s all over now and I am getting back my strength
slowly but surely. There has been less waste of tissue than on previous
occasions and the blood poisoning was not quite so bad either ...
Lying here my heart swells within me at the thought of our women.
I shall never forget how, when we saw the Wellington Gates closing on
us as we marched towards the park, they dashed forward, flinging
themselves against them to prevent their being shut, returning again
and again to the charge, their tender bodies bruised and bleeding. ‘She
urged us not to turn back’, said one poor little thing when urged to go
away and rest. Bless them! ...
Many of the prisoners were novices, militant for the first time, and
almost all adopted hunger-and thirst-strike. Think what it means for a
first experience of prison to do the whole thing, and be ready to do it
again!O my splendid ones!^35Emmeline returned to the community to find a desperate state of affairs. On
the morning of the deputation to the King, the police had raided a flat in Maida
Vale where they had found a suffragette arsenal – bags of flint stones, hammers,
two handsaws, a quantity of suffragist memoranda, and a plan showing the situa-
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