Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. Emmeline, watching Nancy Astor
in action in the Lords, admired the way she dealt with opponents of the Act.
She must have hoped that she would soon would be in parliament, displaying
her oratory. But even allowing for the difficulty of being elected for an
unpromising seat, Emmeline’s prospects of becoming an MP looked increasingly
remote. ‘She looked very frail and old’, commented one reporter, ‘not even the
shadow of an Amazon.’^41
Despite the odds stacked against her, Emmeline’s optimism prevailed. She
decided that life would be easier if she lived in her constituency; the travelling
was making her tired and she had a deep dread of using the London under-
ground trains, refusing even to use the District Line when it ran above
ground.^42 But, as she later explained to Esther, it was really necessary to live in
the constituency ‘if Whitechapel is to be won at the next election.’^43 Kitty
Marshall found for her furnished rooms at 9 High Street, Wapping, and
Emmeline took delight in making the place more comfortable. She bought a
black carpet for the sitting room, mainly to quieten down the pseudo Chinese
wallpaper of bright royal blue and gold; her desk and a few other things were
moved from Gloucester Road.^44 But before Emmeline took up residence, the
family secret erupted, in a most cruel way. Commander Venn heard that at a
meeting of his to be held that evening, chaired by Emmeline, questions would
be asked about whether one of Mrs. Pankhurst’s daughters had had a baby, out
of wedlock. At a time when unmarried mothers were stigmatised as wanton,
sexually promiscuous women, Venn warned Emmeline what to expect. Shell-
shocked by the rumour, Emmeline had time to prepare herself. When a
working-class woman abrasively raised the question, she curtly replied that it
was not her custom to discuss private matters in public and, trembling inside,
went on with her speech. This was the last time Emmeline spoke on a public
platform. When the Marshalls took her down to Ongar on Maundy Thursday, 5
April 1928, for the Easter break, Emmeline looked desperately ill.^45
On Easter Sunday she went to church with the Marshalls, the very day that
the news of Sylvia’s baby became public. On the front page of the News of the
World, not considered a respectable newspaper, was an article titled ‘ “Eugenic”
Baby Sensation. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Amazing Confession.’ Drawing upon an
interview that Sylvia had given to the American Press the day before, the
article told how the forty-six-year-old ‘Miss Pankhurst’ advocated ‘marriage
without a legal union’, that her ‘husband’ was a foreigner, fifty-three years old,
and that she considered her son a ‘eugenic’ baby since both his parents were
intelligent and healthy people. The baby had been named Richard Keir Pethick
Pankhurst, the first name being after the child’s grandfather, Keir being after the
famous Labour leader, the late Keir Hardie, who was a great friend of the
Pankhurst family, while the name Pethick was given after Mrs. Pethick
Lawrence, the wife of Mr. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, the MP. Sylvia had
given the baby her own surname, not that of his father, and professed that she
could not understand why the Pankhurst family, particularly her mother,
CONSERVATIVE PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATE