ABSTRACT
Emmeline, in her lonely Holloway prison cell early in April 1913, went on hunger strike for nine terrible days, subsisting only on water. A vigil was kept at the prison gates by relays of her loyal followers. A migraine attack added to her anguish of body and mind as she sadly reflected on how distant, though certain, their goal of women’s suffrage seemed to be. The eiderdown, quilt and pillow that had been sent in from outside were now taken away, on orders from the Governor who offered instead to send her a Nonconformist minister. Desperate to appear at the 10 April meeting at the Albert Hall (it was to be the last WSPU meeting to be held there), she threatened to take off her clothes or walk about all night in order to ensure release. Mrs. Pankhurst ‘appears to be very nervous about herself ’ noted a Home Office report.1 Vulnerable, depressed and in a state of collapse, Emmeline believed she would not survive and wrote some messages on two small cards to Ethel Smyth which she asked Miss Harper, a kind wardress of whom she was fond, to post secretly. ‘You will smile to hear that during sleepless nights I sang the “March” and “Laggard Dawn” [another of Ethel’s suffrage songs] in such a queer cracked voice’, she told Ethel. Acknowledging that she had been through a difficult time, Emmeline nevertheless optimistically noted, ‘But that is over, and now that the end is perhaps near I want you to know how happy I am, lifted above these dismal surroundings and feeling certain that if I am to die good will come of my going.’2
