The following day, 18 June, an impressive funeral took place as Emmeline
went to her last resting place ‘like a dead general in the midst of a mourning
army’.^65 Long before the service began at 11 a.m. the church was packed to
capacity with a congregation chiefly of women, old and young, rich and poor,
many of them wearing their WSPU insignia – sashes, ribbons and rosettes in
purple, white and green, medals and broad-arrow prison badges. Before the
clergy arrived, Nellie Hall-Humpherson and a woman Conservative worker
Elfreda Acklom, carrying respectively the flag of the WSPU and a Union Jack
draped with black, marched up the nave, ‘dipped’ their colours, and then stood
as a guard of honour at the foot of the catafalque. After the singing of the chief
hymn, Emmeline’s favourite, ‘Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear’, the Rev. W. F.
Geikie Cobb, an old friend of the women’s movement, gave an address in which
he said that Emmeline Pankhurst had fought her fight consistently and coura-
geously. ‘We salute her to-day as an heroic leader and staunch friend.’ As the
organist played Chopin’s Funeral March, former members of the WSPU –
Barbara Wylie, Marion Wallace Dunlop, Harriet Kerr, Ada Wright, Georgina
and Marie Brackenbury, Rosamund Massy, Kitty Marshall, Marie Naylor and
Mildred Mansel – acted as pall bearers to attend the coffin to the door.
It had been intended that the thirteen-year-old Mary, who had been in the
church, should not go to the service at Brompton Cemetery but when one of
the women in the funeral cortège saw her crying in the vast reverent crowds
that lined the streets, she leapt out of her car and gave up her seat to the
distressed child. More than a thousand women wearing the Union colours
followed the cortège to the graveyard where, under Flora Drummond’s order
‘Rally! For the last time’, they marched eight abreast through the cemetery. The
chief mourners included Ada and her four children, Robert Goulden
(Emmeline’s brother), Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond and especially
Emmeline’s two warring daughters. By the open grave stood a red-eyed and
tearful Christabel, supported by one of her friends. Sylvia stood a little distance
apart. Defiant to the last, she had brought her young son to the funeral. He was
not in Sylvia’s arms at that moment but was being looked after by women
friends who stood nearby.^66 Adela, in faraway Australia, grieved for her dead
mother who had become a public figure.
When Christabel went through her mother’s papers at Ada’s house, she
found the letters her father had written to Emmeline, when he was courting her.
Although, as noted earlier, many years ago Emmeline had given to Sylvia most
of her father’s papers, so that she could write his biography, these letters she had
kept back; they were too precious to part with. She had little else to leave. Her
estate amounted to just £86 5s. 6d. Probate was granted to Christabel.
CONSERVATIVE PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATE