tion of a country house and the approaches to it. Five women, including Marion
Hall and her two daughters, Emmeline and Nellie, were arrested. The Hall
family were old friends of the Pankhursts, Leonard Hall having been imprisoned
during the Boggart Hole Clough free speech struggle; Nellie was now a WSPU
Organiser while her sister had been named after the much admired Emmeline
Pankhurst. Two days after the Maida Vale arrests, in a further attempt to crush
the women’s movement and the printing and sale of The Suffragette, Grace Roe,
the WSPU’s General Secretary, was also arrested in a raid on WSPU headquar-
ters. Although Emmeline knew that Grace’s important work would continue
under the direction of Olive Bartels, her understudy, the issue of the drugging of
prisoners in order to lower resistance against forcible feeding and to destroy
morale suddenly now surfaced. ‘Grace Roe is being druggedand forcibly fed’, a
shocked and outraged Emmeline told Ethel. ‘How can one stay on in a country
so horrible?’ When the clerk of Alfred Marshall, the WSPU’s solicitor, was
caught trying to smuggle a powerful emetic to Grace during a professional visit,
so that she could be sick and secure an early release, the authorities claimed
that the prisoners were drugging themselves, a charge that the WSPU refuted.
Libel actions were later issued on behalf of the Holloway medical officers
against Dr. Flora Murray and Dr. Frank Moxon who claimed that sedative or
hypnotic drugs had been given to the prisoners, and against Emmeline and
other WSPU officials.^36
Emmeline now stayed at the home of Ida and Barbara Wylie, 6 Blenheim
Road, which was known as ‘Mouse Hole’ since suffragettes who recuperated
there could, once they were well enough, escape the watching eyes of detectives
by scrambling over six garden walls into the home of a secret sympathiser.^37
While recovering at ‘Mouse Hole’, Emmeline could not escape her responsibili-
ties as Honorary Treasurer of the WSPU and wrote to a number of wealthy
supporters encouraging further subscriptions to the self-denial fund, as on 8 June
when she penned a letter to Mrs. Badley, wife of the founder of Bedales, a
progressive, co-educational boarding school. ‘[T]he Government ... are
attempting as they have previously done, to terrorise our subscribers by threats
of legal action. ... I do hope dear Mrs. Badley that you will do all in your power
to help me to raise a large sum of money with which to carry on our work to the
end of the year.’ She asked for the reply to be sent to her under cover as ‘Miss
Howard c/o Miss Wylie’ and for her address to be kept private.^38 The following
day the police raided the temporary WSPU offices in Tothill Street,
Westminster, and banned its operations.^39
Emmeline was outraged at McKenna’s comments made in the Commons just
two days later, 11 June, when the gravity of the situation created by the WSPU
militants was debated. In a long speech, McKenna discussed the four alternatives
of dealing with the militant women which had been laid before him – allowing
them to die in prison, deportation, commitment to a lunatic asylum, and
granting the franchise. The last he would not discuss while the others were
rejected as offering no solution to the problem. Instead, he defended the working
FUGITIVE