Christabel was lecturing in America while Adela was too poor to afford the fare
from Australia. For an hour before the unveiling, the metropolitan police band
played music in honour of the woman the metropolitan police had arrested and
rearrested under the Cat and Mouse Act, and then Ethel Smyth, in her
academic robes, conducted the band in a rendering of ‘The March of the
Women’. At 12 noon, Flora Drummond opened the proceedings by paying
tribute to Emmeline’s human qualities as well as to her leadership. She then
read a telegram from the absent Christabel. No reference was made to Sylvia;
Kitty Marshall had purposely excluded her from the planning and notification
of the day’s events, much to Sylvia’s anger. To a fanfare of trumpets, no less a
person than the ex-Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, unveiled the statue
proclaiming, ‘I say with no fear of contradiction, that whatever view posterity
may take, Mrs. Pankhurst has won for herself a niche in the Temple of Fame
which will last for all time.’ After prayers had been said by the Reverend Canon
Woodward and a hymn sung, speeches were made by Viscountess Rhondda and
Fred Pethick Lawrence. Fred, now a Labour MP, stressed that the statue was
fashioned in the likeness of the woman ‘who typifies for all time the revolt of
womanhood’ against the old false conception that women should remain
outside the mainstream of life, and be ‘ministers to the happiness, the comforts,
or the vices of man’.^15 Once the speeches had ended, friends of Emmeline and
especially veterans of her old army of militants decked with prison brooches and
other WSPU insignia, placed wreaths at the base of the statue. The ceremony
was broadcast so that millions could listen at home.
The shunned Sylvia was determined to have her say, in print. The day before
the unveiling ceremony, she had published in The Staran article titled ‘My
Mother. Rebel to Reactionary’ which, as expected, ‘mixed vinegar with
honey’.^16 The essay began, ‘My Mother, in an indefinable way, had the dynamic
quality which gets things done, though she herself did not possess any great
organising or executive ability.’ The suffrage cause ‘gave full scope to her
dramatic power, without demanding from her the difficult task of discovering
precise solutions’. After reminding her readers that it was her father who had
been prominent in the advanced causes of his day, including women’s suffrage,
and that her mother had ‘adopted him as her guide’, Sylvia praised the contri-
bution of the Pethick Lawrences to the movement since they ‘supplied the very
qualities’ her mother lacked. In particular, ‘Mrs. Lawrence had ... the gift of
making the most of her co-workers; she took the lead in weaving an atmosphere
of ardour and romance about the personality of Mrs. Pankhurst and other hero-
ines of the Suffragette movement’. Her mother’s breach with the Lawrences was
‘always a matter for deep regret’. Turning back for a final assessment of her
mother, Sylvia wrote:
She could do the outrageous thing without appearing outrageous, or
losing her charm. A detective confided in after years to an ex-militant:
‘Mrs. Pankhurst was my idea of a queen’. ... Her interest in dress andNICHE IN HISTORY