The Suffragette Movement

An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals - With an Introduction by Dr Richard Pankhurst

E. Sylvia Pankhurst

• Publisher: Wharton Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781447498599
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

"The Suffragette Movement - An Intimate Account Of Persons And Ideals" is a 1931 work by E. Sylvia Pankhurst. In this volume, Pankhurst aims to describe the events and experiences of the movement, as well as the characters and intentions of those involved. In this fascinating volume, Pankhurst shows the strife, suffering, a hope behind the pageantry, the rhetoric, and the turbulence of the time. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the British suffragette movement and worthy of a place on any every bookshelf. Contents include: "Richard Marsden Pankhurst", "The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement", "Emmeline Goulden", "The Manchester by-election of 1883", "Green Hayes", "Third Reform Act. Pankhurst V. Hamilton", etc. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was a British political activist who organised the British suffragette movement and helped women attain voting rights. "Time" magazine named Pankhurst one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century in 1999.

PART I

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

RICHARD MARSDEN PANKHURST

AS I leave the darkened bungalow where the tranquil child has dropped asleep, and gaze through the oak trees upon the setting sun and the flowers his father has planted mellowing in the soft glory of the departing light; when I muse alone under the old trees of Epping Forest, or watch my young hopeful playing in the short grass, finding the new-old treasures that we as children loved; as I pass through the sad, seer streets, the dreary wastes of crowded little houses, same in their ugliness, and among the pale and shabby throngs of the East End, and watch the drawn-faced mothers bargaining at the stalls; as I view the great shops and the flashing equipages of Piccadilly, or tread the stately, ordered precincts of Parliament Square, memories, vivid and turgid, crowd upon me, mingling with the events of the passing moment, imparting their influences to the experiences of to-day.

Earliest of my long memories is the faint vision of the house where I was born, 1 Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, called in our nursery parlance simply “Old Trafford.” I see of it only a soft, grey dimness; figures of people unrecognizable and flickering; the dazzling light of windows, filtering through the prevailing haze, and the deeper shade of some half-open door. This, overhung with a sense of vain and restless search to remember further, is all that I can discern.

That first home, in recollection long almost obliterated, yet cherished throughout our childhood as the mysterious shrine of our beginnings, was a centre of earnest and passionate striving. Our father, vilified and boycotted, yet beloved by a multitude of people in many walks of life, was a standard-bearer of every forlorn hope, every unpopular yet worthy cause then conceived for the uplifting of oppressed and suffering humanity.

Our mother, twenty years his junior, charged with the abounding ardour of impressionable youth, was the most zealous of his disciples, following his view of all public questions and having no dearer wish than to emulate him in the extremity of his ideas.

Without, he breasted the storm and stress of political turmoil; at home he poured forth for us a wealth of enthusiastic affection, in the precious hours torn for us from the fabric of his vast activity, revealing to us in a fascinating and never-ending variety the brilliant facets of his thought and knowledge. His struggle was the background of our lives, and his influence, enduring long after his death, was their strongest determining factor. Past forty years before any of us were born, he had led already more than twenty years of strenuous public service. Our advent had entailed a certain lessening of his public activities, which he felt had laid upon us, his children, the obligation to be workers for social betterment—to be, as he often told us, “worth the upbringing.” “If you do not work for other people, you will not have been worth the upbringing.” Almost daily he exhorted us!

His sense of family was strong and tender. “My children are the four pillars of my house!” he would say with joyous pride. Of his father, whom we children had never known, he spoke constantly, with a fervent affection and the thrill of a poignant loss ever new. Often as we clustered about the piano to hear her, he would ask our mother to sing his father’s favourite song:

“Jog on, jog on the footpath way,

And merrily hent the stile-a.

A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile-a.”

Then he would call for his own favourite: “The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington,” seeing in its gallant heroine a semblance of the young wife who had eagerly seized up many a gage of battle on his account. When she was away from home for a few hours, and the time had arrived for her return, he would rise from his work and pace to and fro, whistling always a single valse tune which had tender associations with his courtship, and from which, as his impatience grew, the melody would fade away.

On his father’s side he was of old Kentish stock, tracing back to remote forebears of Lye and Penshurst before the coming of the Normans. His grandfather, for some reason outside my knowledge, altered the spelling of the name from Penkhurst to Pankhurst. Entering it thus in the family Bible where several generations of Penkhursts were recorded, he put a stroke under the a to emphasize the change. He it was who sold his land and moved to London, where he lost the proceeds of his inheritance by taking a share in one of the unlimited liability companies of the time. The directors of the company absconded, leaving him and others to meet the loss to the uttermost farthing of their possessions. Thus impoverished, he obtained the headmastership of the Delves’s School at Walgherton in Cheshire, where he remained for more than forty years, and so managed to earn a living for his family of thirteen children. He died in 1857 aged seventy-one—so long ago! I have the old memorial card in my hand, embossed in fine relief as though it were wrought but the other day.

His son Henry Francis, my grandfather, broke with the Conservative and Church upholding opinions of his family, and became a Liberal and a Baptist Dissenter. Settling in Manchester as an auctioneer, he married Margaret, daughter of Richard Marsden of Wigan, who bore him four children, John, Harriette, Richard and Elizabeth. Tall, blond, strikingly handsome and vivacious, the sight of him on his great black horse was an awe and a wonder to my father, Richard Marsden, his younger son, by whom he was ever greatly adored.

Ardent and eager in his affections, Henry Pankhurst was yet, on occasion, the stern, unbending parent of his day and generation. His elder son, John, as a mere lad, left the parental roof on account of some youthful peccadilloes and a marriage which aroused a father’s displeasure, and sailed with his young bride for America never to return. There he encountered most terrible hardships. When I saw him, a tall, gaunt old man in Chicago, more than half a century later, John Pankhurst still spoke resentfully of those bitter days and of his little baby lying dead of privation on a bed of straw.

When Elizabeth, called Bess, went to her wedding, she walked out alone from her home, in face of her father’s anger. Her bridegroom, young and impecunious, and noted for the beautiful white neck he displayed when appearing in women’s parts at the Manchester Athenæum Dramatic Society, was regarded as an impossible match. Under the tender influence of her brother Richard, who had been a child, too young to interfere-when his brother John left home, the breach was healed; and by Richard’s aid and that of their father’s sister, Mary, the impulsive Bess was saved from the pecuniary ills of an improvident marriage. Her husband was “stage struck,” it is true. When Mary Pankhurst set him up in a hatter’s shop he failed ignominiously; but eventually he became the manager of a theatre in Aberdeen. Thus reaching an assured position in a work he liked, he proved himself a patient and worthy paterfamilias, deferring in most things to his determined spouse.

The tragic fate of Harriette saddened the closing years of her father’s life and cast upon her brother a deep sorrow, of which we, as little children, were aware, though she died in my first year, and only the silver mug she gave me remained to stir some vague elusive consciousness of a presence which had been. She had married a ne’er-do-well musician. Nominally he was editor of a musical magazine; actually it was she who edited the paper, and maintained their home, though afflicted by a slow cancer, caused, it was believed, by one of his blows.

It was on his younger son, Richard, that Henry Pankhurst’s hopes mainly centred. Between that beloved son and his parents was never a jar. He lived with them until their death, when he had passed his fortieth year; and I have often heard him say that he never left their house for an hour without telling them where he was going and at what time he would return. Though his political views shot far ahead of his father’s earlier type of Radicalism, the latter would only shake his head and warn him kindly: “You are making the steep road harder.”

As a child Richard Pankhurst would creep under the table and read for long, delightful hours, hidden from all distractions by the drooping cloth. He early became a pupil of the Manchester Grammar School, the old school of Thomas de Quincey and Harrison Ainsworth, founded in 1519 by the enlightened Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter: “to teach freely every child and scholar coming to the school,” with the proviso, strange from a cleric, that no member of the religious orders should ever serve as headmaster. Reared in an atmosphere of sturdy public spirit, the lad grew up proud of the democratic traditions of his city. Manchester had then no university of its own; but, by the bequest of John Owens, a Manchester merchant, Owens College had been founded in 1851, to give an education equal to that of the universities, without religious tests, either for teachers or students. It was well for our young scholar that there existed such an institution to receive him; for, as a Dissenter, he was debarred from the older universities. Studying at Owens, he took his degrees at London University, instituted for just such Nonconformist youths as he, under the beneficent influence of Lord Brougham, the historian Grote, the elder Mill and other enlightened people. He graduated B.A. in the year 1858, LL.B. with honours in Principles of Legislation in 1859, and LL.D., with the gold medal of the University, in 1863. He became an Associate of Owens in 1859, and was later appointed a Governor of the college. After practising as a solicitor, he was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1867, and joined the Northern Circuit and the Bar of the County Palatine of Lancaster Chancery Court.

Thus brilliantly equipped with academic distinction, he was to become, for forty years, the most outstanding public personality in his native city. His abilities never passed unperceived. Office was always refused him; honour never. At the great civic functions pertaining to art, education, science, his oratory and influence were always requisitioned. In the Press and generally he was commonly referred to as “the Doctor,” and often, affectionately, as “our learned Doctor.” His contemporaries caricatured, lampooned and abused him; they decried and discounted his policies, yet withal they loved him. His townsfolk were often most proud of him when they differed from him with loudest voice; and thousands of men and women regarded him as, before all others, the pattern of civic virtue.

In appearance he charmed and challenged. Younger in looks than his youthful years, graceful and vivacious in bearing, wearing his red beard pointed like a Frenchman, instead of the then meticulously observed legal clean shave, and occasionally other small departures from the then conventional dress of his profession. His voice, in platform speaking, higher pitched than that of most men, though it came appreciably down the scale as his years advanced, was often the subject of comment. I have seen it described as “weird and wonderful.” I have heard admiring women tell him he would have made a glorious tenor singer, but, so far as I know, he never sang a note.

The community spirit was very strong in him; he took great joy in social and public life, regarding participation in civic functions and institutions as at once a duty and privilege of high worth. Lunch at the Club was, to him, no mere partaking of a meal in a crowded room, but a sacrament of fellowship and good will. A speech of his at some function of the old Manchester Brasenose Club is by chance preserved:

“Coming into this club we enter a new world, not dominated by the judgements of the vulgar world outside. . . . Here we ask one question: not what is a man worth, but what is the worth of the man? By slow degrees as the Club enters into our minds in association of feeling, one member after another, his tone of voice, his gesture, his phrase, his bearing, his character store up; and whether he be living, or whether he be dead, when we go about we see him and we hear him, as it were, just as we see dear Edwin Waugh1 and hear him now.”

When the set speeches were over, “the Doctor” was always a centre of animated argument, easily coping with a score of opponents, flinging about him bright sparkles of wit and eloquence; and Edwin Waugh, the poet of the Lancashire dialect, beloved of all the company for his power of humorous entertainment, would gaze with a warm affection on the younger man, and taking a pinch of snuff would chuckle in broad, soft Lancashire: “The doctor’s gradely a-gate this evening: he is, by gum!”

At the Arts Club Dr. Pankhurst might be heard addressing the company on Shakespeare and the Greek drama, or other congenial theme:

“In and through the individual, when he is in the hands of the poet, universal man speaks and thrills. . . . This is the real seat and fact of poetic truth—that in the individual there is translucent the universal. . . . The difference between Sophocles and Shakespeare is that the individual in each character in Shakespeare is richer, deeper, more abundant with the fullness of meaning, which the centuries had brought on from the calm Greek days. . . .

“Shakespeare had music in himself. His high heart, through all his works, beat ever in unison with that great music, the true sphere music, audible to the purgèd ear—the music which goes forth ceaselessly from the mighty harmonies of the universe, of nature, and of man.”

Recorded, for the most part, only in the columns of the daily press, through the dulling medium of reporters’ abbreviations, and the space-saving sub-editor’s blue pencil, with few brief notes in hand, he poured forth his ardent thoughts in impromptu periods, glowing with an enthusiasm which cast its enchanting spell upon all around him. At such moments he appeared almost a meteoric figure among the “flat, unraised” influences of “cottonopolis.” It was written of him that he had ceased to attend an old club when it deserted plain living and high thinking and grew op...