Distraught in her grief, Emmeline did not know how to break the news to
Richard. Fearing that a telegram would be too much of a shock, she contacted
instead her eldest brother, Walter, who hastened to London and then travelled
back to Manchester, to break the news to his brother-in-law.^10 Richard was
devastated; the sudden early death of his favourite child was a deep sorrow that
remained with him always, claimed Christabel, and seemed to give him new
tenderness for his surviving children.^11 Emmeline ordered two portraits of little
Frank, with his dark hair and long black eyelashes, but then found she could not
bear to gaze at them; she hid them away, in a bedroom cupboard, out of sight.^12
Neither could she bear to hear his name mentioned. When defective drainage
at the back of the house was found to be the cause for Frank’s diphtheria it
aroused in her ‘a bitter revolt’ against the deprivations of poverty. Had she not
chosen that ‘dismal neighbourhood’, she told herself, her boy would still be
alive; the doctors would have treated him very differently had she gone to
them, ‘not as a little shopkeeper, but as the wife of a distinguished lawyer’.^13
The issue of the effect of deprived living conditions upon the health and moral
welfare of the working classes in London had, of course, been much discussed
after the sordid revelations in Andrew Mearns’ much publicised pamphlet The
bitter cry of outcast London, first published in 1883 and then excerpted in the Pall
Mall Gazette.^14 It must have been particularly difficult for Emmeline and
Richard to know that their little son was the victim of those insanitary condi-
tions that also plagued the poor.
The surviving children were hurried away to the relative safety of Richmond,
Emerson’s was closed and the premises advertised to let. With a heavy heart,
Emmeline feverishly sought forgetfulness by channelling her energies into a
whirl of activity. Undaunted by the failure of her first shop, she was determined
to open another, and, more importantly, to make her home a meeting place for
people involved in the advanced causes of the day that she and Richard
supported. With this end in view, Emmeline rented a large house in a
respectable middle-class area, at 8 Russell Square. She took great delight in
furnishing it in the fashionable style of the time, especially with the brilliant
colours of the East. As Sylvia vividly tells us, her mother put up ‘Japanese blinds
of reeds and coloured beads, and covered the lamps with scarlet shades; their
ruddy glow shone a cheerful welcome to us when we came home on dark winter
afternoons’.^15 The first floor, comprising two large inter-connecting rooms that
would make an ideal place for meetings and conferences, was decorated in
yellow, Emmeline’s favourite colour, with a frieze of irises painted by Mary; since
Emmeline hated gas, the large space was lit by tall oil lamps, with yellow
shades.^16 Some of the stock of the new Emerson’s that she opened initially in
Berners Street, off fashionable Oxford Street, was put in the new home – old
Persian plates, Chinese tea pots, oriental brasses, rugs from Turkey and
cretonnes in the style of William Morris. Attempting to make a comfortable,
stylish home, at a moderate cost, the practical, energetic Emmeline did as much
of the work herself that she could – laying carpets, hanging pictures, making
POLITICAL HOSTESS