My own story
my detention entirely overlooked the advertising value of the incident.
My lecture tour was made much more successful for it and I embarked for
England late in November with a very generous American contribution to
our war chest, a contribution, alas, that I was not permitted to deliver
in person.
The night before the White Star liner _Majestic_ reached Plymouth a
wireless message from headquarters informed me that the Government had
decided to arrest me on my arrival. The arrest was made, under very
dramatic conditions, the next day shortly before noon. The steamer came
to anchor in the outer harbour, and we saw at once that the bay, usually
so animated with passing vessels, had been cleared of all craft. Far in
the distance the tender, which on other occasions had always met the
steamer, rested at anchor between two huge grey warships. For a moment
or two the scene halted, the passengers crowding to the deckrails in
speechless curiosity to see what was to happen next. Suddenly a
fisherman's dory, power driven, dashed across the harbour, directly
under the noses of the grim war vessels. Two women, spray drenched,
stood up in the boat, and as it ploughed swiftly past our steamer the
women called out to me: "The Cats are here, Mrs. Pankhurst! They're
close on you--" Their voices trailed away into the mist and we heard no
more. Within a minute or two a frightened ship's boy appeared on deck
and delivered a message from the purser asking me to step down to his
office. I answered that I would certainly do nothing of the kind, and
next the police swarmed out on deck and I heard, for the fifth time that
I was arrested under the Cat and Mouse Act. They had sent five men from
Scotland Yard, two men from Plymouth and a wardress from Holloway, a
sufficient number, it will be allowed, to take one woman from a ship
anchored two miles out at sea.
Following my firm resolve not to assist in any way the enforcing of the
infamous law, I refused to go with the men, who thereupon picked me up
and carried me to the waiting police tender. We steamed some miles up
the Cornish coast, the police refusing absolutely to tell me whither
they were conveying me, and finally disembarked at Bull Point, a
Government landing-stage, closed to the general public. Here a motor car
was waiting, and accompanied by my bodyguard from Scotland Yard and
Holloway, I was driven across Dartmoor to Exeter, where I had a not
unendurable imprisonment and hunger strike of four days. Everyone from
the Governor of the prison to the wardresses were openly sympathetic and
kind, and I was told by one confidential official that they kept me only
because they had orders to do so until after the great meeting at
Empress Theatre, Earls Court, London, which had been arranged as a
welcome home for me. The meeting was held on the Sunday night following
my arrest, and the great sum of L15,000 was poured into the coffers of
militancy. This included the L4,500 which had been collected during my
American tour.
Several days after my release from Exeter I went openly to Paris to
confer with my daughter on matters relating to the campaign about to
open, returning to attend a W. S. P. U. meeting on the day before my
license expired. Nevertheless the boat train carriage in which I
travelled with my doctor and nurse was invaded at Dover town by two
detectives who told me to consider myself under arrest. We were making
tea when the men entered, but this we immediately threw out of the
window, because a hunger strike always began at the instant of arrest.
We never compromised at all, but resisted from the very first moment of
attack.
The reason for this uncalled for arrest at Dover was the fear on the
part of the police of the body guard of women, just then organised for
the expressed purpose of resisting attempts to arrest me. That the
police, as well as the Government were afraid to risk encountering women
who were not afraid to fight we had had abundant testimony. We certainly
had it on this occasion, for knowing that the body guard was waiting at
Victoria Station, the authorities had cut off all approaches to the
arrival platform and the place was guarded by battalions of police. Not
a passenger was permitted to leave a carriage until I had been carried
across the arrival platform between a double line of police and
detectives and thrown into a forty horse power motor car, guarded within
by two plain clothes men and a wardress, and without by three more
policemen. Around this motor car were twelve taxi-cabs filled with plain
clothes men, four to each vehicle, and three guarding the outside, not
to mention the driver, who was also in the employ of the police
department. Detectives on motor cycles were on guard at various points
ready to follow any rescuing taxicab.
Arrived at Holloway I was again lifted from the car and taken to the
reception room and placed on the floor in a state of great exhaustion.
When the doctor came in and told me curtly to stand up I was obliged to
tell him that I could not stand. I utterly refused to be examined,
saying that I was resolved to make the Government assume full
responsibility for my condition. "I refuse to be examined by you or any
prison doctor," I declared, "and I do this as a protest against my
sentence, and against my being here at all. I no longer recognise a
prison doctor as a medical man in the proper sense of the word. I have
withdrawn my consent to be governed by the rules of prison; I refuse to
recognise the authority of any prison official, and I therefore make it
impossible for the Government to carry out the sentence they have
imposed upon me."
Wardresses were summoned, I was placed in an invalid chair and so
carried up three flights of stairs and put into an unwarmed cell with a
concrete floor. Refusing to leave the chair I was lifted out and placed
on the bed, where I lay all night without removing my coat or loosening
my garments. It was on a Saturday that the arrest had been made, and I
was kept in prison until the following Wednesday morning. During all
that time no food or water passed my lips, and I added to this the sleep
strike, which means that as far as was humanly possible I refused all
sleep and rest. For two nights I sat or lay on the concrete floor,
resolutely refusing the oft repeated offers of medical examination. "You
are not a doctor," I told the man. "You are a Government torturer, and
all you want to do is to satisfy yourself that I am not quite ready to
die." The doctor, a new man since my last imprisonment, flushed and
looked extremely unhappy. "I suppose you do think that," he mumbled.
On Tuesday morning the Governor came to look at me, and no doubt I
presented by that time a fairly bad appearance. At least I gathered as
much from the alarmed expression of the wardress who accompanied him. To
the Governor I made the simple announcement that I was ready to leave
prison and that I intended to leave very soon, dead or alive. I told him
that from that moment I should not even rest on the concrete floor, but
should walk my cell until I was released or until I died from
exhaustion. All day I kept to this resolution, pacing up and down the
narrow cell, many times stumbling and falling, until the doctor came in
at evening to tell me that I was ordered released on the following
morning. Then I loosened my gown and lay down, absolutely spent, and
fell almost instantly into a death-like sleep. The next morning a motor
ambulance took me to the Kingsway headquarters where a hospital room had
been arranged for my reception. The two imprisonments in less than ten
days had made terrible drafts on my strength, and the coldness of the
Holloway cell had brought on a painful neuralgia. It was many days
before I recovered even a tithe of my usual health.
These two arrests resulted exactly as the Government should have known
that they would result, in a great outbreak of fresh militancy. As soon
as the news spread that I had been taken at Plymouth a huge fire broke
out in the timber yards at Richmond Walk, Devenport, and an acre and a
half of timber, beside a pleasure fair and a scenic railway adjacent, to
the value of thousands of pounds was destroyed. No one ever discovered
the cause of the fire, the greatest that ever occurred in the
neighbourhood, but tied to one of the railings was a copy of the
_Suffragette_ and to another railing two cards, on one of which was
written a message to the Government: "How dare you arrest Mrs. Pankhurst
and allow Sir Edward Carson and Mr. Bonar Law to go free?" The second
card bore the words: "Our reply to the torture of Mrs. Pankhurst, and
her cowardly arrest at Plymouth."
Besides this fire, which waged fiercely from midnight until dawn, a
large unoccupied house at Bristol was destroyed by fire; a fine
residence in Scotland, also unoccupied, was badly damaged by fire; St.
Anne's Church in a suburb of Liverpool was partly destroyed; and many
pillar boxes in London, Edinburgh, Derby and other cities were fired. In
churches all over the Kingdom our women created consternation by
interpolating into the services reverently spoken prayers for prisoners
who were suffering for conscience' sake. The reader no doubt has heard
of these interruptions, and if so he has read of brawling, shrieking
women, breaking into the sanctity of religious services, and creating
riot in the House of God. I think the reader should know exactly what
does happen when militants, who are usually religious women, interrupt
church services. On the Sunday when I was in Holloway, following my
arrest at Dover, certain women attending the afternoon service at
Westminster Abbey, chanted in concert the following prayer: "God save
Emmeline Pankhurst, help us with Thy love and strength to guard her,
spare those who suffer for conscience' sake. Hear us when we pray to
Thee." They had hardly finished this prayer when vergers fell upon them
and with great violence hustled them out of the Abbey. One kneeling man,
who happened to be near one of the women, forgot his Christian
intercessions long enough to beat her in the face with his fists before
the vergers came.
Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout
England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most
barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In
other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been
allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some
clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these
prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have
voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has
undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for
women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During
the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities,
the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some
of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury,
refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the
answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal
residence until surrender followed--as it invariably did.
As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited
by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself
should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the
proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see
them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of
his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of
the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the
Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of