her. Her heart was no longer in public affairs and politics and she had no
interest any more in music or in singing.^35 Mary, who had left her unhappy
marriage and now lived at 62 Nelson Street, tried to console Emmeline as did
Herbert Goulden, Emmeline’s brother, who also now lived with the bereaved
family, sharing household expenses. Sylvia too was not in good health since she
suffered with nervous depression and neuralgia in the head and arms as a result
of the traumatic circumstances surrounding her father’s death; consequently, she
was frequently absent from the first year of her college course. Feeling guilty
about holding a free studentship under such circumstances, she persuaded her
financially stricken mother to pay her part-time fees for the second year of study
although she was awarded another scholarship for the final year.^36 But the
sorrow in the household seemed particularly to affect the two youngest children.
Harry, a sensitive child, developed acute and permanent astigmatism after
catching chicken-pox and then measles. His Uncle Herbert, suspecting that the
unhappy boy was playing truant from school, followed him one day and discov-
ered that his nephew was slinking off to railway stations to watch the trains.
Deeply worried about what to do for her son, Emmeline consulted a doctor who
advised that nothing was wrong apart from the boy’s nervousness and lack of
self-control.^37 She decided that it was best to remove Harry to another school
and then, later, to the Higher Grade Board School.
Adela was also a worry for the heart-broken Emmeline. When she left the
High School for the dirty and noisy Ducie Avenue Board School, she became
cut off from her friends. ‘My health and nerves could not stand it’, Adela later
wrote, ‘and I soon began to be unhappy at home, where gloom descended upon
us.’ To make matters worse, her head became infected with lice. Emmeline was
firmly told by her sister, Ada, by whom she hated to be criticised, that the
school was ‘unsuitable’ for her niece. Eventually Adela went back to the
academic High School where the new headmistress, Sara Burstall, encouraged
her interest in history.^38
By now Christabel had returned from Geneva and regained her place as
Emmeline’s closest confidante, a situation that must have been difficult for the
displaced Sylvia to cope with. Emmeline enjoyed the comfort of having her
eldest daughter by her side each day in the shop; while Christabel had been
away, she had employed shop assistants to cover the hours she could not be at
Emerson’s, due to her work as a Registrar.^39 The working-class women who
came to register births and deaths were glad, wrote Emmeline in her autobiog-
raphy, to have a woman registrar to talk to. But the dreadful stories she was told,
with patient and uncomplaining pathos, were tales she would never forget:
Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I was shocked to
be reminded over and over again of the little respect there was in the
world for women and children. I have had little girls of thirteen come to
my office to register the births of their babies, illegitimate, of course. In
many of these cases I found that the child’s own father or some nearWIDOWHOOD AND EMPLOYMENT