Emmeline arrived back in London in October 1917 ill and exhausted. Her low
spirits at the failure of her Russian mission were deepened by a severe attack of
pleurisy; in addition she heard that Adela had recently married Tom Walsh, an
Irish, working-class, ex-Catholic, radical socialist and trade unionist who was
fourteen years older than her daughter. Always prim and proper regarding the
formalities of life, Emmeline would hardly have regarded the rough-cut Tom
Walsh, a widower with three daughters aged fifteen, twelve and eleven years
old, an ideal son-in-law. Yet Adela was happy with her ready-made family,
despite the fact that a four-month prison sentence for her anti-war activities was
hanging over her head.^1 Two months after her wedding, she wrote to Sylvia,
‘[T]his is the life, isn’t it & I am happy – more than happy in it & hoping that I
shall one day have a son or daughter to carry on our father’s work.’^2 At this
euphoric time for socialists, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been swept to
power in Russia, it was her dead socialist father to whom Adela felt close rather
than her very much alive patriotic mother. Yet Emmeline too had married a
man many years her senior. And the Walshes, like Emmeline and Richard
Pankhurst, were political comrades, sharing a family life which was always
subordinate to their political activities.^3
Emmeline came back home to find that Christabel had adopted her
favourite of the ‘war babies’, Elizabeth. But more than this, Christabel had been
busy in her mother’s absence, using WSPU funds to purchase and convert
Tower Cressey, a large house in Aubrey Road, Kensington, into a day nursery
and adoption home for female orphans. Catherine Pine and a young woman
assistant were to take charge of the children while Jane Kenney, trained in the
progressive Montessori methods of education, was to be brought over from the
USA to administer a non-directive programme with which Miss Pine, ‘a stern
traditionalist’, had little sympathy.^4 When Emmeline visited the home, Ethel
Smyth thought her friend seemed ‘horrified’ by the ‘unnecessary luxury, elabo-
rate armchairs,chaises-longuesand so on’ with which it had been refurbished.
The blunt Ethel, glancing at the wire-netted windows, sarcastically remarked
that it was the best place to commit suicide from that she had ever seen.
Always ready to defend Christabel from any criticism, the WSPU leader replied
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
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