their patience. We hear of strikes and riots amongst men ... what if
women lost patience and began to riot – not for money, not in order to
have easier conditions, but because they were not allowed to work at
the time of their country’s need! We hope it won’t come to that.^70Emmeline temporarily lost her voice when campaigning with Flora
Drummond and Norah Dacre Fox in South Wales that late September and
October. The work in a strongly ‘Red’ area was arduous, and she felt obliged to
write privately to Lloyd George to warn him that strikes and rumours of strikes
filled the air. ‘Mrs. Pankhurst ... says there are districts where the people simply
don’t care whether the Germans are beaten or not’, recorded Frances
Stevenson, secretary and mistress to Lloyd George, and a supporter of the
parliamentary vote for women. ‘She says they are sulky and difficult to handle,
and will not sing the national anthem.’^71 Such anti-patriotic feeling was alien
to Emmeline. She had worked hard to transform the WSPU into an organisa-
tion that supported the war effort and brought women into war work, a process
that took a further step when The Suffragettewas renamed Britannia, the first
issue appearing on 15 October 1915. As Gilbert notes, the ‘female intuition’
expressed in that renaming, that women were now ‘coextensive’ with the state,
a female state, a Britannia not a Union Jack, was accurate; women would be
enfranchised after the war was over, in 1918.^72 Emmeline felt it necessary to
explain to the WSPU membership the necessity for the change of name, as in
her letter to Mrs. Badley. ‘This more comprehensive title ... is adopted in the
name of British Women’s equality of political right and duty, also as a pledge of
devotion to the nation of which we are privileged to be members and through
which we as British citizens can do our best work for humanity and human
progress.’^73 Edited by Christabel, who lived in Paris, Britannia, with the slogan
‘For King, for Country, For Freedom’, became not only more patriotic but
profoundly anti-German, in a way that is offensive to modern ears. Blunt criti-
cisms continued to be made against Prime Minister Asquith’s leadership of the
government and against the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, whose resigna-
tion was demanded, as well as ‘the disappearance’ of Sir Eyre Crowe, the
‘principal permanent servant’ at the Foreign Office, ‘who is connected with
Germany both by birth and marriage’. In order to save the country, it was
demanded that decisions concerning naval no less than military and diplomatic
policy should be made and announced by the Allies jointly, instead of being
made and announced by Britain alone.^74
Emmeline had always held a deep compassion for the poor and the oppressed
and her sympathy now moved from the cause of illegitimate children in Britain
to the plight of women and children in Serbia, a small Balkan country which
the Austrians had been determined to destroy at the outbreak of war and which,
she believed, the Asquith government had failed to help. At a meeting at the
London Pavilion on 28 October, she loudly condemned Grey’s decision not to
send British troops to the stricken country, a policy she believed to be dictated
WAR WORK AND A SECOND FAMILY