A Woman's Place

by Maggie Ford

  With only so many to be chosen from each branch for the cortege, neither Connie nor Eveline were included. Eveline was especially put out and Connie knew why. As an ex-prisoner she’d expected to be picked. That she wasn’t made Connie feel not smug but relieved, not having to go through the humiliating experience yet again of being excluded from the prisoners’ group.

  They were told that only those with no family commitments would be there, keeping the numbers down and the cortege sober and unostentatious, for this would be no procession of protest with bands and banners but a solemn farewell to a brave and honourable comrade.

  ‘We can still go and watch it pass,’ Connie consoled, feeling sensitive.

  She saw Eveline hesitate for a moment then shrug, and was relieved to see her finally nod her agreement.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  It was a funeral procession as never before seen except perhaps for royalty, the crowds that had come to watch the cortege pass also as large as any there would have been for royalty.

  Sometime after two o’clock that Saturday, Eveline and Connie stood among a subdued crowd as the procession came into sight, led by the white figure of Charlotte Marsh carrying a huge gold cross. Silent masses parted as she made her way, men even doffing headwear as the cortege passed along its route to St George’s Church in Bloomsbury.

  A contingent of ex-hunger strikers walked beside Mrs Pankhurst’s empty carriage – with insensitive ill-timing she had been rearrested as she left in deep mourning to join the cortege. With Christabel Pankhurst exiled in France, only Sylvia Pankhurst was left to do honour,

  As the hunger strikers passed, Connie saw Eveline’s face become tight at not having been included, but it was obvious that only a handful could be selected from all those who’d suffered, not once like her, but many times. The look soon faded as tears filled her eyes at the sight of the coffin, draped with purple velvet embroidered with silver arrows, looking so lonely on its open carriage drawn by four black horses with their black-clad grooms. Beside it women in their white dresses and black sashes, carrying madonna lilies, stood out starkly. Some way behind came several carriages and taxicabs holding wreaths and flower tributes from all over the world.

  Connie heard a tremulous sigh come from Eveline at the sight of close friends and family walking mournfully behind, faces inscrutable in grief, the dead woman’s half-brother Captain Davison with bowed head.

  ‘Oh, the poor things,’ she heard Eveline whisper and knew that she thought no more of the honour it would have been to be included there today.

  It was a bigger procession than expected with hundreds of women, not all of them in white, carrying madonna lilies or laurel leaves. There was a purple banner with the words of Joan of Arc:

  FIGHT ON AND GOD WILL GIVE THEE VICTORY!

  Some were in black or purple, some held bright red peonies; later the Daily News spoke of crimson being for sacrifice, purple for loyalty and white for purity, which seemed fair comment. But the bands were a surprise. Despite playing solemn and muffled tunes, they were a splash of colour in all this sombreness, a military band in scarlet and yellow and another in scarlet, as well as the red and blue robes of women graduates, their hoods silver and gold or blue and purple.

  Following were columns of the Woman’s Freedom League, Church Leagues, the Men’s Leagues, even representatives of the Gas Workers’ and Dockers’ Union, the General Labourers’ Union, and several other unions.

  ‘I didn’t realise how well we were supported or that we were so well thought of,’ Eveline said with awe as the cortege moved on out of sight and the crowds began quietly to disperse.

  It hadn’t all been quiet. A woman not far from where Connie and Eveline stood had rushed out from the crowd shouting, ‘Down with votes for women!’

  Trying to grab at a banner she’d been apprehended for breach of the peace – ironic when many of those she’d tried to attack had themselves been arrested for the same thing. Another incident they heard later of one man calling out, ‘Keep your hats on!’ but it seemed few had taken notice of him.

  Eveline was quiet with her own thoughts as they left. In an odd way she was almost glad not having been asked to walk with the hunger strikers. In comparison to what she had endured, these women who had faced it time and time again and never flinched were beginning to put her paltry few days of defiance to shame. In fact she rather wanted to forget it. It was a long time ago. And being singled out to walk with them whenever there was a procession was beginning to come between her and Connie.

  The next time they asked her to join a prisoners’ pageant she would decline. Continuing friendship with Connie was far more important.

  There didn’t look like being a next time, however. As summer passed and the year progressed it seemed the steam had gone out of the suffrage campaign. No processions had been planned, though in July there had been what was called the Women’s Pilgrimage organised by the NUWSS, with large numbers of women following eight routes spread across England, but while many looked to complete an entire route, others joined only for a certain distance before leaving. Some of the old excitement and pageantry had been lacking. Newspapers giving sketchy accounts of it published pictures of women with sun-browned faces, wearing stout walking shoes, sensible clothing and haversacks. Very dull, Eveline thought.

  ‘We couldn’t have found the time anyway,’ she remarked to Connie in September. It was the tenth, Rebecca’s birthday. She was three and Connie had given a little party for her.

  Having spread a two-month old copy of the Women’s Weekly on the table to catch the cake crumbs she was brushing on to it, she’d become engrossed in a Swan & Edgar advert depicting that summer’s slimmer style of women’s wear: narrow, button-through skirts and jackets with vertical stripes, small bowler-type hats and low-crowned toques, straight blouses with no bust to speak of. A few years ago the full bosom was a feature of womanly pride. Figures were beginning to have no shape at all.

  Carefully she folded the magazine over its debris of cake and bread crumbs – very little, with most children around here ready to eat the tablecloth itself, brought up as they were in near poverty with every crumb of food precious. Eveline knew from a life spent around here that to them even the small spread Connie had provided for Rebecca’s third birthday was a feast. But apart from scoffing everything in sight, though it consisted of just a few tinned salmon sandwiches, jelly and the small iced cake Connie had made, they’d behaved very well.

  Returning to the living room, Connie glanced at her as Eveline began collecting the empty plates. The half-dozen children of neighbours in Connie’s block had gone home and Rebecca herself, tired from the party, had been put to bed a little earlier than usual, leaving Helena sitting on the floor playing with Rebecca’s birthday present of a tiny cardboard doll’s house.

  ‘Lots of them used bicycles,’ she said, taking up Eveline’s remark about the pilgrimage.

  ‘I expect they needed them,’ Eveline said. The plates stacked, she gingerly sipped the tea Connie had poured for them. Connie’s tea always came scalding.

  ‘Going for miles and miles – going nowhere really. I can’t see the point of it. Not at all like our old processions with their colour and music. Who was going to take that much notice of women traipsing around from one end of the country to the other? There didn’t seem any purpose to it.’

  It had seemed pointless. Admittedly, thousands of women had taken part in what was supposed to be a walking pilgrimage, but quite a lot had resorted to transport of one kind or another – bicycle, horseback, pony and trap, even the occasional motor car or small van lent to carry their luggage.

  ‘More like an outing than a serious intention to attract the notice of the public or the government,’ she scoffed and dismissed it. It was rather like some marvellous firework that had fizzled out. All that hard work they’d done had, it seemed, come to nothing.

  Even so, there had been quite a few rallies in Hyde Park as thousands of the pilgrim women conver
ged on London at the end of July. Some of the old verve took hold beneath the summery skies, the crowds that gathered surprisingly cheerful with no hostility whatsoever. Once again bands had played and banners had fluttered as the redoubtable, round-faced Mrs Fawcett addressed the Hyde Park crowds; an aeroplane had even dropped suffragette leaflets on the heads of the spectators, causing a sensation. But it hadn’t lasted. With summer fading there were no more rallies and even WSPU activity appeared to be dying down.

  Turning her mind from it, Eveline gathered up the tablecloth, stepping over Helena on her way to empty the cloth over the balcony’s iron railings. The few crumbs floating on the air would cause no inconvenience to those living below. She came back, folding it absently, although Connie would want to wash it before putting it away, whereas she might have used it a couple of times more before it needed washing.

  It had been a good little birthday. She thought of the passing years. In three months another year would be gone. How things had changed since first meeting Connie, a pampered, wealthy young woman and a girl from an entirely different walk of life. Eveline was amazed how Connie had adjusted to her world even to persuading the young man for whom she’d forsaken all to venture this side of London to be with her. The bond between her and Connie was of course their mutual interest in the suffragette movement. But one day they’d win and maybe Connie would sail off into the blue with her George to take up her old life of ease and plenty and forget all about her.

  A passing thought but it suddenly made Eveline feel sad.

  Connie and George had Christmas with her and Albert, in Eveline’s new little flat where even the winter sun came in. She’d invited Albert’s mum and his brother Jim, and Gran too, who needed only to walk the few yards from her block to Eveline’s and remained sprightly enough for the three flights of stairs.

  She’d climb her own two flights several times a week when she went shopping, with no trouble at all though she was in her seventies and fiercely independent. Eveline was so proud of her, still willing to have charge of the children at odd times despite them being energetic three-year-olds.

  ‘They be’ave like little angels with me,’ she’d say. ‘Little ’uns always do when someone else looks after ’em. It’s when they’re with their mothers they start to play up. Lord knows why because it’s from them that they get the smacks. Don’t know for the life of me why. With me they’re little angels.’

  Even so, Eveline made sure not to put on her too often, she and Connie for the most part continuing to look after each other’s daughters when attending the Saturday suffragette meetings, unless something special was going on, and that hadn’t been all that often this autumn.

  It annoyed her that Gran was willing to take on both children for those couple of hours while her mother couldn’t offer to have her own grandchild for that short while. It had come to her ears that she had looked after both Tilly’s and Fred’s children on odd occasions, and it hurt even more that Mum could do that for her brother and sister and not her.

  Boxing Day was spent at Mum’s, Connie and George happy to cosily spend it on their own. Mum and Dad’s house bulged with the whole family. Lenny, now twenty and courting a girl named Flossie, had invited her. May at nineteen also had a boyfriend, though he was with his own family, but she was talking of getting engaged in the New Year. With Eveline’s three younger brothers, her married brother and sister, Fred and Tilly, and their families, it was quite a crowd, yet she could never feel at ease here any more.

  Mum thought a lot of Albert but there was this invisible wall between Mum and herself that made her feel she’d never really been forgiven. Nothing said, but it was there. Maybe it was all in her mind but the rift seemed to have grown between her and her married brother and sister, Fred and Tilly, who’d so far not come nigh or by to see her new flat.

  It was Gran, bless her, to whom she turned, Gran who was in most ways closer than her mother. Also, the fact that Gran had taken Connie under her wing helped a little to compensate Eveline for the frigidity of her mother and she readily accepted Connie’s invitation to see in the New Year at her flat, in the hope that her presence would help take Connie’s mind off her own family.

  Nineteen fourteen came in on an ominous note, though Eveline along with everyone else took very little notice of Lloyd George referring on the first day of the New Year to a build-up of arms in Europe as insanity.

  But of far more importance to British suffragettes was the rearrest of Sylvia Pankhurst three days into January under the Cat and Mouse Act. It caused rumblings or, as some put it, squeakings, referring to the Act rather than the suffragettes, the relative calm of last autumn ready to explode into riots of retaliation against it. In fact four days into February came reports of Scottish suffragettes burning down two mansions and later the same month Whitekirk Parish Church in East Lothian.

  When Sylvia Pankhurst was again arrested in early March on her way to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, the suffragettes there rose with renewed vigour. She and Connie were at the Trafalgar Square demonstration and when the news broke of Sylvia Pankhurst’s rearrest, they were caught up in the pandemonium that broke out.

  ‘If they think they’re going to dishearten us by continually sending her to prison, they’re much mistaken,’ Connie yelled defiantly as they were pushed about by the packed throng. ‘We’re going to fight on until we win!’

  Eveline had never heard such emphatic words from her. She certainly sounded a different Connie to the one who a few months ago had been championing the moderate NUWSS, but she had to agree with her that the fight had to go on, especially when, a few days later, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst was once more arrested in Glasgow.

  ‘They’re trying to make us leaderless,’ Connie said grimly. ‘But we’ll always have other leaders to take up the sword in their place. They’ll never break us, no matter how they try.’ Again Eveline had to agree with her.

  But when the news came of a Mary Richardson, a thirty-one-year-old journalist, who had entered the National Gallery with a meat cleaver under the noses of the attendants and hacked a masterpiece, the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez, causing irreparable damage, calmly stating as she was marched off by the police that she had tried to destroy the most beautiful woman in mythological history in protest at the government’s destruction of Miss Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history, Eveline had a feeling that this was taking militancy too far.

  ‘It’s one thing destroying property,’ she confided in Connie, without sympathy this time for the woman arrested, ‘but wonderful art you can’t replace … She must be insane doing a thing like that.’

  But it was soon setting off a chain of quite vicious militant deeds: British Museum cabinets smashed; a militant suffragette named Gertrude Mansell attacking Herkomer’s portrait of Wellington in the Royal Academy; a bomb thrown at a London church, another destroying Yarmouth pier, and another attack on the Royal Academy damaging John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James.

  Then in May came a concerted onslaught by a small army of women led by a frail-looking Emmeline Pankhurst in an attempt to break through a thousand-strong police cordon around Buckingham Palace in an effort to deliver a Votes For Women petition to the King following the defeat of an enfranchisement bill. Though more than fifty women were arrested, two thousand petitions with over a million names had so far been presented to Parliament but it seemed nothing was going to sway the members to even consider the women’s pleas.

  ‘At this rate I can’t see us ever winning,’ Connie said, her spirits at last taking a knock. But it seemed women’s spirits refused to take any sort of knock as in June suffragettes set fire to yet another church, Wargrave Church in Henley, as well as disrupting services in many London churches.

  On the Tuesday after Connie and Eveline attended their George Street meeting, Gran once again taking on the two children for a couple of hours, the police raided the offices of the WSPU and the next day arrested Sylvia Pankhurst for the eighth time whi
lst on a march.

  ‘But for the children we could so easily have been in that,’ Connie said. ‘What if we’d been among those arrested, knowing the state we’d have put our daughters in? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  There had been a good many volunteers on Saturday for the march and they’d almost been swayed by the persuasive words from the speaker that day. It was only Eveline saying that they couldn’t keep asking Gran to look after the children. With both their husbands at work and no one else to have them, neither wanted to go alone while the other looked after the two.

  In the end they decided to wait for a Saturday march, feeling down and thoroughly out of it, annoyed that as mothers they were tied whilst others could do what they liked. Now, of course, it had been a blessing in disguise.

  There was some kind of rally being planned for Sunday, intended to be peaceful. Eveline spoke to Albert about it on the Friday. ‘I never seem to join in anything these days,’ she said. ‘I really should be there, just for once.’

  ‘What about Helena?’ he asked, oddly obstructive.

  ‘It’ll be in the evening,’ she told him, trying not to show annoyance. ‘Helena will be in bed. It’s nearly midsummer. The evenings are light. Connie is asking her George if it’s all right with him.’ Albert’s face grew obdurate, his tone sharp, which wasn’t like him. ‘I don’t think you should go.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said angrily.

  ‘Things are getting a bit too nasty lately. Protest is one thing but all this bombing and setting fire ter things. You ’ave to think of Helena. If you went off and got yerself arrested, how’s she going to cope?’

  He was right, of course, but it didn’t please her being told in this way. She hated arguing with him just to get her own way, he was such a good man, and even after all these years she still felt she owed him a debt of gratitude for what he’d done for her in her darkest moments.