someone shouted ‘Dr. Pankhurst’, and Emmeline explained how her husband,
who had been in the vanguard of the democratic movement for twenty-five
years, knew what it was to be boycotted. After she had finished her address,
Keir Hardie then spoke, amid much cheering too.^59 Emmeline was present
again at the evening welcome meeting, held on 11 July, to celebrate the release
of Leonard Hall, earlier that day. She sat next to Hall in a wagonette as a brass
band led the way to Manchester’s Stevenson Square. When Fred Brocklehurst,
president of the Manchester ILP, was released one week later, all her family were
among the guests invited to the ceremonial breakfast.^60 As we shall later see,
brass bands and welcome breakfasts would become important aspects of the
ceremonial pageantry of the WSPU.
As the protests over the right of free speech showed no sign of abating,
Manchester City Council attempted to gain control of the situation by passing
in August a new law prohibiting all meetings in the parks except by the special
authorisation of its Parks Committee – which meant that permission would be
denied to the ILP. The new ruling was yet again ignored and the situation only
resolved when the Home Secretary put pressure on the City Council to adopt
another new by-law and to give an undertaking that no reasonable application
for the use of parks for public meetings be denied. Emmeline and other ILPers
rejoiced in the news while the Manchester Law Students’ Society in their
annual mock trial at the Assize Courts parodied the events by presenting a ‘Mrs.
Chorlton Board’ and a ‘Dr. Blank Hurst’ who supported a ‘Swear Hardie’ in his
claims for £100,000 damages for an assault in ‘Winterhill Clough’.^61 But despite
such good-natured humour, nothing could detract from Emmeline’s role as the
heroine of the socialist struggle for the right of free speech in Boggart Hole
Clough. She never forgot the political lessons she learnt in the struggle, of
drawing upon popular support and standing firm, as ways to secure a victory
when one was sure that the cause was just.
But fame in the Clough and devotion to a cause could also have a downside,
especially for a wife and mother with four children. While the confident
Christabel remembered these Manchester years as the best of all in their private
family life,^62 Harry and Adela often felt neglected and unloved by their
frequently absent parents. ‘I have often see my brother Harry, with little white
face ... as though turned to stone’, Sylvia wrote. A solitary child, he was slow at
learning, something that must have worried his parents.^63 The plump Adela,
feeling that she was ignored by her parents, decided to run away from school.
Brought back home by the kindly headmistress, she refused to speak. According
to her biographer, the unhappy Adela was in the throes of a nervous breakdown
and spent a year away from school, followed by a holiday with her aunt Bess in
Aberdeen. Emmeline and Richard were as kind and understanding as they could
be, the elderly father reading poetry to his distressed child, the anxious mother
playing the piano. Soothed by these and other attentions, Adela slowly recov-
ered and returned to school a much more contented child. But her breakdown,
insists Coleman, was an index of her ‘emotional fragility’.^64
SOCIALIST AND PUBLIC REPRESENTATIVE