The months spent at the sleepy seaside resort of Southport, in a rented
furnished apartment, were ‘the most reposeful time’ of Emmeline’s life, claimed
Christabel, with the exception of a year spent long afterwards in Bermuda.^1
Emmeline had no more worries about the lack of customers in her shop nor
about how to organise political gatherings in her home on a limited income; she
became what she never wanted to be, a full-time wife and mother. Emmeline
and Richard, like many middle-class parents of their time, now decided that
their two eldest daughters were of the age when they should have formal
schooling. And as ‘progressive’ radicals, they decided to send the twelve-year-
old Christabel and ten-year-old Sylvia not to a select, finishing school where
they might be schooled in those accomplishments that would attract a suitor,
but to the local high school, one of the more academic institutions for middle-
class girls that were established during the late Victorian era.^2 When Adela
heard that her sisters were to attend Southport High School for Girls, she
begged to be allowed to be a pupil there too. Eventually Emmeline gave way,
despite her misgivings that her eight-year-old daughter was too young for such
formal instruction.^3 Now a housewife at home with her young son Harry and
the loyal servant Susannah, without her shop and political meetings, and
without the company of her sister, Mary, who had left to marry, Emmeline
became ‘utterly languid and depressed’.^4 Full-time motherhood had never fitted
easily on her shoulders and more so now that it was thrust upon her in a quiet
seaside town. Desiring a change of scene, the family moved for the summer of
1893 to rooms in a farmhouse in the pretty village of Disley, in Cheshire, some
sixteen miles from Manchester. Here Emmeline seemed to regain some of her
old vitality as she took the children on picnics, drove them around the country-
side in a trap pulled by a temperamental donkey, named Jack, and helped with
the haymaking. ‘She seemed as young as ourselves’, Sylvia recollected, urging
the youngsters to collect the big berries almost out of reach, ‘reckless of torn
stockings and scratched arms.’^5
The hunt for a new home in Manchester ended when Emmeline found 4
Buckingham Crescent, Daisy Bank Road, Victoria Park, a big, two-storey house
in a block of four, facing fields. While the house was being made ready, the
nancy kaufman
(Nancy Kaufman)
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