ABSTRACT
Emmeline arrived back in London in October 1917 ill and exhausted. Her low spirits at the failure of her Russian mission were deepened by a severe attack of pleurisy; in addition she heard that Adela had recently married Tom Walsh, an Irish, working-class, ex-Catholic, radical socialist and trade unionist who was fourteen years older than her daughter. Always prim and proper regarding the formalities of life, Emmeline would hardly have regarded the rough-cut Tom Walsh, a widower with three daughters aged fifteen, twelve and eleven years old, an ideal son-in-law. Yet Adela was happy with her ready-made family, despite the fact that a four-month prison sentence for her anti-war activities was hanging over her head.1 Two months after her wedding, she wrote to Sylvia, ‘[T]his is the life, isn’t it & I am happy – more than happy in it & hoping that I shall one day have a son or daughter to carry on our father’s work.’2 At this euphoric time for socialists, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been swept to power in Russia, it was her dead socialist father to whom Adela felt close rather than her very much alive patriotic mother. Yet Emmeline too had married a man many years her senior. And the Walshes, like Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, were political comrades, sharing a family life which was always subordinate to their political activities.3
