Aside from the odd visit to her sisters, Aunt T and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Constance now lived entirely at home and largely in bed. In such constrained circumstances, her days were now once again dominated by family concerns, especially as the younger generation grew up. By now, Constance had twelve nieces and five nephews. In July 1912, Betty had a final daughter at the age of forty-five (her eldest daughter, Eleanor, was twenty-one) and named her Kathleen Constance.10 Victor’s children lived a short walk away and often came to visit; the others used to come for weekends and extended holidays in the summer. They all loved Constance but each responded to her, of course, according to their age and personality. Few were old enough to remember her as anything but a complete invalid. The natural tendency of the very young to see all adults as ‘very old’ was exacerbated by her obvious illness. She was constantly breathless and easily tired. She stayed in bed until lunchtime and then would have another nap in the afternoon. But compared with her former state, she could describe this to Alice Ker as being ‘wonderfully well’.11
Except on her very worst days, she was still sparky and still funny, keen to involve the children in innocent conspiracies. Something of a rebel herself and already aspiring to be a composer, Elisabeth Lutyens found Constance to be a kindred spirit and an ally against her rather intimidating Grannie. ‘She chuckled at things, she was anything but sanctimonious,’ Elisabeth remembered. ‘Aunt Con was slightly disrespectful. Nothing was sacrosanct. I felt she was on our side.’ Neville’s daughter Anne was a less frequent visitor, but Constance had a deep and unforgettable impact on her. ‘When we were very young she used to read fairy stories to us, and though never as a child did I really believe in fairies, she made me believe … by making it quite impossible not to, she made them sound so very real,’ Anne said, remembering that Constance was visibly amused by the dark morality of these fairy stories. Aunt Con was a special favourite of Anne’s, and she believed to the end of her life that Con was the most impressive person she ever knew. Hermione, Victor’s older daughter, remembered that her natural empathy with people was even more obvious when it came to children. She invited confidences, and the older children would turn up at her door with bunches of wild flowers and their homework, ready to share their secrets. At fifteen, Hermione left an essay with Constance to read, and it was returned full of scratches. Every time Hermione had written ‘men’, Constance crossed it out and wrote ‘men and women’. It was also Constance, perhaps remembering Emily’s disastrous honeymoon, who gave them a book to teach them the facts of life. Judith was cross about this. Anne found the book was so euphemistically written that after reading it she was still none the wiser.
The younger ones, though, could find Constance strange and a little frightening. Hermione’s sister Davinia found Constance’s obvious differences uncomfortable rather than interesting. Elisabeth’s younger sister, Mary, found the atmosphere oppressive and dreaded the hour that she would be expected to sit with Aunt Con. ‘She asked me questions, I had to sit beside her bed and I didn’t know how long I’d have to stay there, I didn’t like this invalidish atmosphere and I felt trapped, completely trapped,’ she remembered. It always very hot in Constance’s room, and there was a lingering smell of flannel sheets, mixed with the smell of her Pekingese dog. Constance would peel grapes for the dog to eat while she talked. She had shelves full of ornaments and knick-knacks which the children were allowed to inspect, play with and occasionally take home.
The children liked it better when she was well enough to come downstairs, when they could escape outside if her company got too much. Sometimes they were allowed to push her around in her chair. She was quite particular about the way the rugs should be arranged on her legs, but otherwise was content to sit back and let the children play at being horses while she sat in the carriage. At home, she sat in the sunny dining room, by far the nicest room in the house, and arranged flowers with one hand. These were ‘in the Japanese style’, in flat pans rather than tall vases, with individual flowers and twigs held down with stones. Occasionally she played a few notes on the piano with her left hand. She could not, of course, indulge herself in cleaning any more, but she still liked everything spick and span, detested mess and loved the smell of Brasso. Her dark hair had by now turned grey, but her deep blue eyes were still striking, and when she laughed – as often as she could manage it – her whole face lit up. She wore a long purple dress with a white lace collar, to which she pinned her suffragette medals. Her own clothes were loose and flowing, to make it easier for the nurse to get them on and off, but she had strong opinions about the children’s clothes and what the ‘right’ shoes were.
Constance made a stark contrast with Edith, now very much a grande dame, who sat for hours straight up on a hard chair and demanded attention rather than affection. ‘She already seemed to belong to history,’ Mary recalled. ‘She pronounced cucumber, cowcumber; laundry, larndry; soot, sut; and blouse and vase, bloose and vaize. She sent her hair-combings to Paris to be made up into curls which the maid pinned to the front of her head.’12 But Elisabeth remembered that Edith was lonely too. She would sometimes sit very quietly in the dining room so that she could hear the servants’ conversation. Edith was very much respected and admired in the village, and had a genuine interest in the welfare of local people, but her elevated social position also had the effect of cutting her off from company. Neville brought out the best in Edith: on visits he rubbed her back and played the flute for her. The children all saw that Edith and Constance adored each other. ‘I only remember Grannie being so devoted to her and thoughtful for her comfort and making her really the care of her life,’ Mary recalled. Anne said that Constance was a calming influence on Edith: if Edith threatened to get upset, Constance had a knack of saying exactly the right soothing thing.
Yet the children also sensed the unspoken complexities of this relationship, even if they didn’t fully understand them. Having lived at the epicentre of a whirlwind, Constance found it hard to go back to living a life of restrictions and constraints. She remained devoted to the suffragettes and would not hear a word against them. Edith could find this difficult. Lady Selborne wrote to Betty accurately (if tactlessly): ‘She is such a noble, selfless nature, that it makes one feel better to be with her, but I always do feel that life would hardly be bearable if one held one’s opinions with that intensity.’13
It was hard to reconcile the stories of Aunt Con’s wild adventures with her present illness. ‘The idea of prison was the nightmare that bad nannies threatened you with,’ Davinia remembered. ‘The fact that one’s aunt had gone to prison and that … everybody said she was nearly a saint: I couldn’t work it out.’ Few of the children were old enough to remember her as anything other than a complete invalid. Anne thought that she would have been happier living in modern times, with greater freedom.14
Outside the family, Constance’s closest friend during these years was Miss Avery, the village schoolteacher. Miss Avery was a friend from the suffragette campaign: she had been the secretary of the Knebworth branch of the WSPU.15 She now became a weekly visitor, and Constance interested herself in the running of the school. She also took an interest in several children who had been orphaned in the war and boarded out in the village; these were known as ‘Lady Constance children’.16
After the Pethick-Lawrences had been released, they went to Canada to recover. The government seized their home as payment for the costs of their trial. When they returned from their holiday, they urged caution on the Pankhursts. They could see that popular opinion was turning vehemently against the increased militancy, and believed that a campaign to educate the public about why the shift in tactics was necessary before they continued to smash windows and start fires. But Mrs Pankhurst and Christabel were not used to being criticised within the WSPU, still less being told what to do. Their response was to eject the Pethick-Lawrences from the movement. This was heartbreaking and inexplicable to many of the suffragettes. The public version of events was that t
he Pethick-Lawrence finances were becoming a liability to the WSPU. The Pethick-Lawrences, to their credit, did not contradict this and kept their counsel, to ensure the break was swift and clean. They took Votes for Women with them and the WSPU started a new newspaper, The Suffragette. Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst never spoke to the Pethick-Lawrences again. Many of the suffragettes were understandably left bewildered by this episode. Constance decided to stick with the Pankhursts until the end. But she wrote to a friend describing Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence ‘as the Leader whom I am proud to follow, in whom I place whole hearted faith and love.’17 She had brought Constance into the movement and they had served time together in Holloway; Constance would never forget her. Holloway was on her mind that spring. It was five years since she had first been imprisoned and she wrote an open letter to the friends joining together for a reunion:
The sufferings of our fellows in prison are so much greater now and the fight has become much fiercer to some, yet it was truly a beginning, a baptism of fire, and that whatever the camp in which we may now find ourselves, we have grown in this woman’s movement startlingly beyond our vision in 1909.18
Christabel was still abroad and Mrs Pankhurst now cut a lonely figure at the top of the organisation. Annie Kenney did her best to keep the show on the road and ran the day-to-day business while Mrs Pankhurst was in prison. She made weekly visits to Paris to take orders from Christabel and then returned to carry them out. This was an incredibly difficult time for the suffragettes. The WSPU appeared to be collapsing and the government seemed to be winning.
Though Constance had no physical strength to serve the suffragettes, she still had one asset: her name. She was determined that it should be put to some use. In January 1913, she got out the manuscript of her book, shelved for many months. She had reached the moment in Holloway when she had been to communion with Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.19 Now she determined to finish the story, as a way of bringing renewed publicity to the struggle and shame on the government. This was no simple task, and the first obstacle was purely practical. Her right hand remained paralysed, wasted and useless. So, over many months of patient struggle, Constance taught herself to write with her left hand. Her old handwriting had been fluid and easy; now, the carefully formed letters stood up painfully straight, each one formed and printed individually. She had to struggle on this way until 1917, when her friends bought her a typewriter. There is a poignant picture of her, looking positively elderly, sat up in bed with the typewriter on her lap. However, there are more handwritten letters than typewritten among her papers: it cannot have been easy to press down the keys with her withered hand.
With the more cautious Pethick-Lawrences out of the picture, and with Christabel still in Paris, unable to see the impact of her policies at first hand, suffragette violence now reached new heights. Though they were still careful not to risk lives – apart from their own – they went on the rampage. Telegraph wires were cut and golf courses were torched. The public were incensed, but the suffragettes were unrepentant. One wrote to the Daily Telegraph:
Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual.
1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom. 2. Give women the vote.20
But option two now seemed further away than ever. In January 1913, the Speaker ruled that the government’s proposed Bill to grant universal suffrage for men could not be amended to include votes for women. Their last hope for this parliamentary session was gone. Militancy escalated once more. One suffragette, Lilian Lenton, recalled in her memoir that the strategy was now to make the country ungovernable, demonstrating that governments cannot rule without consent.21 They were certainly succeeding in causing chaos. In February, a house that was being built for Lloyd George was blown up. Emmeline Pankhurst took responsibility, was arrested and sentenced to three years’ hard labour.
Emmeline Pankhurst on hunger strike presented an acute problem for the government. Much older than most of the other strikers, she was also worn out from her years on the road, and as a result was very frail and vulnerable. There was a very real risk she might die. Indeed, the authorities had only just managed to avoid killing another suffragette. Early in 1913, Lilian Lenton was forcefed while tied to a chair. She was later discovered unconscious and hurriedly released for treatment. The feeding tube had accidentally been put into her lung, not her stomach. She developed septic pneumonia and almost died.22 Her case became almost as notorious as that of Jane Warton.
Partly as a result of such horrific accidents, and partly to avoid having to force-feed Emmeline Pankhurst, the government changed tack. It hurriedly passed what became known as the infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. This gave them the ability to release a hunger-striking prisoner who appeared too weak and ill to continue in prison, then re-arrest them later on. Of course, once released, many ‘mice’ went on the run. They rested and recuperated in supporters’ homes – one house in Kensington became known as ‘Mouse Castle’ – but then relished giving the authorities the slip and going out on the rampage again. The ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ did mean that the numbers of suffragettes being forcefed now dwindled to a handful: those who were thought too dangerous to let out because their offences were particularly serious.23 Constance felt hopelessly disconnected and wrote wistfully to Adela, ‘Now that I have more life, I do sometimes wish tremendously to be near and see my darling suffragettes, and to hear news of them.’24 That Christmas, she was delighted to see both Adela and Olive Schreiner. Each was profoundly moved and joyful at the reunion. It was sixteen years since the three of them had last been together. It never happened again; but for all three it was among the most significant friendships of their lives.25 Adela’s daughter was named Olive Constance.
This last period of the suffragette campaign was marked by increasing desperation, personified by Emmeline Pankhurst.26 She declared herself ‘a prisoner of war’.27 She had begun thirst striking as well as hunger striking while in prison in order to get out faster, and the impact on her health was predictably devastating. Thirst striking, Emmeline recalled later, made the ordeal of hunger striking seem ‘a mild experience’.28 Under the terms of the Cat and Mouse Act, she was repeatedly released and re-arrested, and in the first year of her sentence she served only thirty days. The suffragettes were incensed by this treatment of their beloved leader.
In June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison, who had been at Constance’s side in Newcastle and for many speeches, died under the King’s horse on Derby Day. Mrs Pankhurst, on release under the Cat and Mouse Act, was re-arrested trying to attend Emily’s funeral. Constance sent a book of Whitman’s poems to be placed in her comrade’s coffin. Mary Leigh carried out this request and the book was put in Emily’s lifeless hand before burial, open at her favourite poem.29
With Mrs Pankhurst in and out of prison and Christabel far away in Paris, the suffragette movement continued to spiral out of control. They began, for example, attacking works of art, and the government responded by closing historic buildings, galleries and museums. This did not stop Mary Richardson, who famously walked calmly into the National Gallery the following year, armed with an axe, and attacked the Rokeby Venus ‘as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history’.30
Meanwhile, after running the WSPU for almost a year, Annie Kenney was finally arrested in April 1913 and became one of the highest-profile ‘mice’ in the movement. Like Mrs Pankhurst, she went on both hunger and thirst strike, and embarked on a cycle of release, recovery, evasion and arrest. She was carried about on a stretcher to meetings so the suffragettes could be in no doubt as to what the government was doing to her. She had a special place in Constance’s heart and was never far from her thoughts. ‘I am wondering what we can do for the prisoner who every time that the police see her they re-arrest her,’ Constance wrote to Alice, a year
into Annie’s harrowing life of disguise. ‘I will try all I can to bring her south, but I am almost helpless.’31 Sylvia Pankhurst was also undergoing a harrowing experience. She was the only member of the Pankhurst family to be forcefed, and found it excruciating. It went on twice a day for more than a month, until she went on a ‘rest-strike’ and walked round her cell for twenty-eight hours until she was finally released; then, like Annie Kenney, she was in and out of prison and carried around on a stretcher. But suffrage remained just one of her causes; she remained a fervent socialist and supporter of the Labour Party. After speaking out in support of striking Irish workers, she was summoned to see Christabel in Paris in January 1914. Not only was she seen as insubordinate, her prominent visibility was a direct challenge to Christabel’s authority. Emmeline and Christabel demanded she leave the WSPU. Adela Pankhurst – it is almost impossible not to think of her as ‘poor Adela’, so overshadowed was she by her dominant sisters – was also shipped off to Australia soon afterwards, forbidden to campaign for the cause. Sylvia continued her campaign for the vote independently, even going on hunger and thirst strike outside the House of Commons until Asquith agreed to meet a deputation of working women. After listening to their arguments, he said, ‘If change has to come, we must face it boldly.’32
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