authorities.’^5 Despite the fact that she and Richard were often together only at
weekends, they participated in a number of protests, such as the free speech
gathering held in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 13 November 1887 at which
well-known socialists, such as John Burns, William Morris and Annie Besant,
spoke. William Morris, an upper middle-class artist, poet and craftsman, and
Annie Besant, who had achieved notoriety in 1877 when she had republished
with Charles Bradlaugh an old birth control pamphlet, were soon to become
frequent visitors to the Pankhurst household. On ‘Bloody Sunday’, as it
became known, the mounted police prevented the meeting taking place by
attacking the crowd with truncheons, some 150 being injured and about 300
arrested. One man, Alfred Linnell, died as a result of injuries sustained when a
police horse trampled him to death. Emmeline and Richard, riding in a coach
with Linnell’s family, were amongst the 100,000 mourners at the funeral.^6 The
following year Emmeline enthusiastically supported the strike of women in
Bryant and May factories who were protesting about the sacking of some of
their colleagues for giving information about pay and working conditions to
Annie Besant. The women not only made matches by hand, dipping them
into the dangerous chemical phosphorous, but also ate their food in the work-
rooms, thus developing ‘phossy jaw’, a disease that rotted teeth and jaw bones;
their scandalously low wages, in conditions that Annie condemned as ‘White
Slavery in London’, were even subject to fines for lateness and various
mistakes.^7 Shocked by these revelations, Emmeline worked with the strikers
and with Annie who, together with Herbert Burrows, another prominent
socialist, and the Women’s Trade Union League, helped the women to form a
Match-Makers Union that demanded better working conditions from their
employers. Public support for the strike was so successful that a large amount
was raised for strike pay, enabling the women to press successfully for some
changes.^8
In addition to participating in such protests, Emmeline sometimes accompa-
nied Richard on his trips to Manchester, Mary managing the household in her
absence. It was on one such occasion, on a September day in 1888, that four-
year-old Frank fell ill. In the morning, Susannah had taken the children out for
a walk, pushing the three-year-old Adela, with her weak legs in splints, in a
pram. Frank, in his new reins, ran happily beside, pretending to be a horse.
When the children returned home, he suddenly developed a cold, flushed
cheeks and a persistent coarse cough. An anxious Emmeline rushed back from
Manchester to find her son in a critical condition. Frank had not been visited
by their own doctor, who was away, but by two unknown doctors who had
mistakenly treated him for croup only to discover too late that he was suffering
from diphtheria. He died in the middle of the night on 11 September.
Emmeline’s unearthly cries and weeping for her dead boy woke up the two
eldest girls to whom Susannah explained, in hushed whispers, what had
happened.^9 Mary, who was present at the death, had the sad task of informing
the registrar.
POLITICAL HOSTESS