Chapter Twenty-Two

The Fourth Pillar

I opened my eyes and saw that my youth had fled. Then I said that I should have a child of my own in whom I should live again

Sylvia Pankhurst, In the Days of my Youth

REACTIONARY Woodford Green was, in many ways, a most surprising place for socialist revolutionary, internationalist Sylvia to make her home. In those days there was not a black face for miles, and the first synagogue was almost 40 years away. On the edge of the glorious forest of Epping, with its ancient, twisted hornbeam trees, magnificent beeches and shady glades, Woodford was an easy weekend escape for oppressed and overcrowded East Enders. Sylvia herself had enjoyed picnics there, and her friend Bessie Lansbury’s brother had made it his home. Sylvia had found refuge with his family when hiding from the police and her spirit responded to the rural surroundings.

Pretty, white weather-boarded houses still fringed Woodford’s huge village green where cricket had been played since 1735. In the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, more affluent business and professional men built themselves substantial villas with large gardens. Local social historian and author Josephine Boyle says, ‘Gradually, in the early Twentieth Century, as the middle-classes expanded, more and more young Londoners made their homes in this oasis’. Clement Atlee and his wife were amongst them. They bought a house on the much sought-after new Monkham’s Estate, and the future leader of the Labour Party and eventual Prime Minister could later be seen on a Saturday morning lifting his new baby Martin in his pram over the stile onto the Green.

The arrival of the railway to Woodford in 1856 had already created a social barrier that, as the developers moved in, was becoming well and truly entrenched. The working classes now lived mostly ‘on the other side of the line’, down streets with names like Prospect Road. They shopped at the Co-op and went to the nearby secondary modern school. The commuting middle-classes lived in tree-lined Prince’s Avenue and Snakes Lane, shopped at Sainsbury’s and sent their sons to Bancroft’s Grammar School. The Woodford County High School for Girls opened in 1919.

By the time Sylvia moved there, Woodford had become decidedly ‘desirable’ and, stranger still, Winston Churchill, her old adversary, was its Constitutional and anti-Socialist MP. However, Sylvia’s first toehold in this village-turned-suburb was entirely in character. She and Norah found a ramshackle, rat-infested, semi-detached weather-boarded cottage, known euphemistically as Vyne Cottage. She changed its name immediately to Red Cottage. Overlooking the Green, it was set back from the main road at Woodford Wells between London and Epping. Her old friend Henry Harben helped out with the purchase price. Sylvia’s initial intention was to devote herself to writing the books for which she had had no time in her politically active years.

Some accounts say that she moved to Woodford with Norah and that their plan was to run left-wing study groups. But the place was tiny; there was hardly room for three and it seems more likely that, if Norah shared it with Sylvia initially, she moved out when Silvio moved in. Sylvia may even have lived there alone for a few months.

It is easy to feel sad for Norah, displaced by a man after so many years of unstinting devotion to Sylvia and the cause. She commented ruefully on the friendship with Silvio that Sylvia needed a sharper brain than hers: ‘mine was not intellectual enough, partly because she had the effect of stultifying what little I had, partly because I was always overworked and never had time or energy to think’.

One half of the cottage, with two bedrooms, was the home of the Powter family. Leslie Powter was born in 1921 and lived there with his two brothers, sister and parents. His father had grown up in the cottage. Whether they were Sylvia’s tenants is unclear. ‘It was an absolute slum,’ Mr Powter recalls. ‘We had a cold water tap and bathed in a tin bath; there was no electricity and a toilet up the garden. Eventually we were given a council house.’ Mrs Powter grew flowers, especially dahlias, to sell to passers-by, and when Sylvia moved in, she decided to follow Mrs Powter’s example by serving tea and cakes in the garden. When life was too much or Silvio had lost his temper, she would ‘trot round’ for a cup of tea – Mrs Powter’s shoulder was a comfort to cry on.

‘Red Cottage’ teas were advertised in the Workers’ Dreadnought. Customers also came from the nearby Horse and Well public house, as well as lorry drivers and passengers and crews from the various buses, which had their terminus opposite. As she had always done, Sylvia drew on a circle of willing helpers from Bow. She was still well loved, her charisma had not dimmed with age, so friends flocked around, happy to be with her.

Annie Barnes was one of those old faithfuls who came down from the East End at weekends. Sylvia couldn’t cook, so someone had to make the cakes. Annie, who had first thought Silvio the gardener, recorded an interview with writer Brian Harrison in 1974, in which she described how Sylvia was once caught boiling a rasher of bacon. Norah O’Connell (later Mrs Walshe) recalled in a letter to David Mitchell in 1964, ‘I thought Sylvia was a wonderful person … so brave but she did demand service from everyone and some of her friends became tired of it. It was a curious household, so untidy and casual …’.

In January 1924, Lenin, dying in Moscow, had proclaimed his likely successor Josef Stalin as ‘unbearable’. In Rome, the Italian socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti ended an outspoken speech criticising Mussolini, with the words ‘and now get ready for my death’. Shortly afterwards, he was assassinated. These events flashed a warning light for the far-seeing Sylvia. Democracy appeared to her to be increasingly under threat from the emerging dictators. She began making notes for a new book, The Red Twilight, which was to chronicle the demise of Communism and what she viewed as the ominous Fascist lust for power.

During this unusually chaotic but creative period in her life, Sylvia embarked on yet another mammoth project. Her 638-page book India and the Earthly Paradise was published in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) in 1926, but has never appeared in Britain. Sylvia’s fascination with India had been long established. Walter Crane, her mentor in the art school days, had visited the subcontinent and produced and illustrated a travel book in 1907. The same year, Keir Hardie had undertaken a sensationally successful tour of India, during which he told her that he was being ‘worshipped’.

Sylvia herself had never been there and has been criticised for superficiality and failing to grasp the complexities of Indian life. But the book is meticulously researched. Certainly Sylvia spent hours, day after day, in the British Museum reading room, and was helped by William Wedgwood-Benn, appointed Secretary of State for India in 1929, and her old friend Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who was eventually to assume that post.

Social historian and active member of the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee, Mary Davis also believes the book deserves attention as one of the very few British anti-racist and anti-imperialist attempts to analyse Indian culture, traditions and history. Never did she adopt the ‘haughty superiority of the conquering race,’ she says.

This was followed in 1927 by Delphos or the Future of the International Language, an introduction to Interlingua, written during 1926. Silvio Corio spoke Interlingua, an international language rather like the better-known Esperanto, and Sylvia was convinced that it paved a way to better understanding.

The General Strike took place in 1926. Sylvia cared for a stream of miners’ children in the cramped accommodation at Red Cottage, but her active involvement was comparatively low-key compared with the earlier years. Her health was not good and she found campaigning a strain. In the autumn, her mother was invited to stand as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in Whitechapel, although an election was not due until 1929. This could have been seen as the last and most dramatic snub to Sylvia, for Emmeline, now almost 70 years old, began speaking and proselytising Conservatism in the East End heartland Sylvia had come to regard as her own emotional home. In the spring of 1927, Emmeline even moved into furnished lodgings over a barber’s shop in Wapping in order to be closer to the campaign. It was a strangely unwise decision; she had no chance of success.

In 1926, Sylvia had confided to her old friend Charlotte Drake that she was expecting a baby; but it was only wishful thinking. However, in April 1927 she telephoned Mrs Drake again. This time there was no mistake, she claimed she ‘could feel the baby kicking’. Mrs Drake bought her a ring to protect her respectability when they went to see the midwife together, where she confirmed what Sylvia so badly wanted to hear: at the age of 45, she was pregnant.

Euphoric, she was desperate to share her happiness and repair the breach between herself and her mother. The gulf between the two had become ever wider over the years, as Emmeline’s life took some bizarre and unpredictable turns. During the war, her views and those of Sylvia could not have been further apart. Emmeline was an imperialist, monarchist and anti-Bolshevist.

To the amazement and dismay of her friends, she had adopted four orphan babies, one of whom she eventually handed over to Christabel, while the others were largely left to the care of the long-suffering Nurse Pine. The girls and Nurse Pine had led a strange life, travelling with Emmeline for six years wherever she went, lecturing in Canada, Bermuda and America until, eventually, they all went to the South of France, where Emmeline opened a teashop in Antibes. When this failed, she returned, impoverished as ever, to live in London. One by one, the children were found alternative homes and vanished from the story.

Emmeline was staying with friends at Chipping Ongar in Essex when she heard the terrible news of Sylvia’s expected baby, whereupon she is said to have taken to her bed and wept for days. However, Sylvia still longed to heal the hurt that both she and her mother had suffered and during the pregnancy, called to see Emmeline while she was back in London. It was hopeless. Emmeline’s sense of propriety had been devastated beyond repair by her daughter’s behaviour, and Sylvia’s aunt told friends that when she arrived, Emmeline retreated to her room, refusing to see ‘that scarlet woman’.

When Annie Barnes asked Sylvia why she would not marry Silvio, she justified her actions on the grounds that, were they to be married, they would be deported and shot as anti-Fascists. It was a theatrical response but not entirely unjustified, since, in those days, women lost their British nationality on marriage to a foreigner.

Kindly Mrs Drake offered to see Sylvia through the birth at her own home, but Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Lady Sybil Smith wisely thought it would be safer for her to stay in a nursing home. Sylvia was booked into Fitzjohn’s Avenue in Hampstead for her confinement. After a miserable pregnancy and a difficult labour during snowstorms and blizzards, she gave birth to Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst on 4 December 1927.

Sylvia, lonely and not allowed visitors in the nursing home, felt compelled to try, yet again, to appeal to her mother. But her letter was intercepted and never reached its destination. She also wrote to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, ‘Yes, dear friend, he is a fine, healthy, beautiful child, perfect in every way and yet I am told that if I had not come here when I did I should not have brought him out alive’. In the New Year, mother and son went to recover at the Pethick-Lawrence home.

Talking to Reynold’s Illustrated News after the birth, Sylvia spoke movingly about her new status and the controversy surrounding it. ‘My son is the child of a happy union of affection and long friendship of two people who care for each other. His father is not a wealthy man but he is a man of fine character. I do not believe it is eugenic or fair to children that they should be brought into the world except as a natural result of affection between their parents. I do not seek publicity but want to share the joys of motherhood with my darling.’

Her own mother was failing in health, although she was still commanding rapturous audiences. When, on 29 March 1928, she was present in the House of Commons to witness the final debate on equal franchise for women, she was too weak to climb the stairs to the public gallery. On 14 June, she died. The Franchise Bill, to which she had devoted her life, had been passed a month earlier and became known as ‘the flapper vote’. Women were at last entitled to vote on equal terms with men.

There were those who blamed grief over Sylvia’s outrageous behaviour for Emmeline’s, death, but it is much more likely that years of imprisonment and hunger striking had simply taken their toll. Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral, at St John’s Church, Smith Square, was an appropriately theatrical affair, reminiscent of the great Suffragette parades she had masterminded. Everyone was there, including Sylvia with Richard in his pram. The jockey of the King’s horse under which Emily Davison had died was present with a wreath ‘to do honour to the memory of Mrs Pankhurst and Miss Emily Davison’. There were flags and flowers, and the newspapers were filled with pages of biographical outpourings. Christabel was red-eyed and Sylvia, overcome and fainting, had to be supported. But it was too late for tears. There was no chance now of finding the mother she had lost. She was herself a mother and determinedly looking forward to a very different kind of relationship with her son. She was defiantly proud of Richard, and it was not long before the scandal of his birth as the son of the man Sylvia described as her ‘soulmate’ whom she had known and loved for ten years was international news.

While Sylvia was away, Silvio had booked a local handyman, Mr Ashman, to help him build a shack in the garden of Red Cottage. It came in sections and was erected very slowly, Silvio on the floors and the younger Mr Ashman on the roof. The plan was for Sylvia to have a bolthole when writing, although eventually the hut became an anti-war museum.

Piecing together clues buried in the Pankhurst collection, it seems that Sylvia borrowed money for the building from Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, with whom she was still closely in touch. It also appears that Silvio, who was no better at managing money than Sylvia, had overspent, and there are some distraught notes to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Sylvia is clearly beside herself with distress at a misunderstanding between them partly for fear that Emmeline might withdraw her badly-needed financial support. Sylvia’s only possible means of financing her family was by writing, and this was a daunting prospect with a tiny baby. The finished letter is lost but the drafts are revealing:

Dearest Emmeline, When I got your letter I felt all my world had crashed down and that worst of all I had lost your love and that my poor little Richard would suffer terribly for only I know the attention to him would have to be set aside for hour at a time if I were without help.

But more than that the awful thing that you think I have deceived you. Well dear the old Sylvia cried and said she must not even take …

You are right to say you were astounded. You are right and yet I was almost as much in the dark. I was in another world somehow in the nursing home and at Farnham …

Clearly the problems were ironed out, for Sylvia and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence sustained regular and warm contact until Emmeline’s death in 1954.

Sylvia then embarked on several articles about her mother, leading up to the unveiling of the statue in her memory in Victoria Tower Gardens, near the Houses of Parliament. Before writing, she seems to have sought Mrs Pethick-Lawrence’s advice about certain aspects of Mrs Pankhurst’s life, to which Emmeline replied:

Dearest Sylvia … with regard to the matter on which you ask my opinion. I consider that you have done the better thing in leaving the subject untouched … from what I know I think your mother’s financial affairs would not be easy to explain. I regard your mother dispassionately (as you do) as a most interesting human problem. She was undoubtedly a great force and like Napoleon who, in some respects she resembled, has been used to effect … I believe that she conceived her objective in the spirit of enthusiasm. In the end it obsessed her like a passion … she threw scruples, affections, honour, loyalty and her own principles to the wind. The movement developed her powers – ALL her powers – for good and for evil. Cruelty, ruthlessness – as you say – I should add betrayal … she was capable of beautiful tenderness, magnificent sense, justice and self sacrifice. These things in the course of the struggle became changed … she sacrificed her very soul. That is how I look at it. I hope to see you and Richard in the New Year. Much love.

In another letter she said, ‘she was great in her littleness, human in her greatness, superb at moments of crisis …’.

Sylvia was the only Pankhurst daughter present at the unveiling, by Stanley Baldwin, of the statue on 6 March 1930. Even she had not been officially invited and was not on the platform. She sat with Richard, in the audience. Christabel was in America and Adela in Australia. But some 500 Suffragettes kept her company. Journalist Henry Brailsford wrote a eulogy. But it was Sylvia’s own words that once again tugged the heartstrings. Writing in the Star on ‘My Mother’, she insisted that she would be remembered as ‘the Suffragette’, not for any of the right-wing roles she later played. ‘We do not make beams from the hollow, decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigour of its sap.’

Adela had written to her mother when Emmeline was dying and the letter pleased her greatly. Adela said she and Tom had come to believe that class warfare, labour against capital, was a dangerous idea and that they intended to found a movement for industrial peace. This they did in 1929. The aim of the Australian Women’s Guild of Empire was to combat Communism, to establish industrial co-operation and peace, to uphold Christian ideals, safeguard the family and to deepen the appreciation of the value of British citizenship and Australian membership of the British Empire.

Sylvia was now to devote herself to the childhood of young Richard. He was to be her next and happiest cause; her fourth ‘pillar’. Despite Silvio’s constant attention and willingness to cook and shop and take over the domestic routine at which Sylvia was totally inept, life was not easy.

The statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, Victoria Tower Gardens. Sylvia was present at the original unveiling, although she had not been invited.

Sylvia, almost alone among the Pankhursts, seems to have enjoyed long-lasting friendships. Henry Harben, for instance, wrote to her at about this time. He was living in the Boulevard Malherbes in Paris, and it appears that Sylvia had written to ask if he could find work for a young friend in need. He replied ‘in sincere friendship and admiration’, thanking her for the ‘delightful letter’:

… it is not only your activities that interest me but the true proposition in which you set your motherhood, the optimism born of goodness and natural joy … Ah! How few of our women nowadays are like that! Here in Paris nearly every woman one knows (not only the smart people either) are outwardly dressed far too expensively for their husband’s means and inwardly damaged by repeated abortions; no ideals; no foyer; no God but pleasure and no religion but self … Your letter came like a breeze of sunny air – I was so glad and happy to receive it … and I wish you in the future the realisation of all that your letter sketches … if I can in any way contribute to helping you through your darker moments you may rely on me so far as my poor capacities go …

By 1928, Sylvia had a contract from Longman to write the book that became her best known work, The Suffragette Movement.

Between 1928 and 1930, a period of phenomenal literary output and motherly concern, Mrs Walshe, her friend from the East End, was in regular touch. The letters Sylvia wrote to her are now in the David Mitchell Collection in the Museum of London:

18 October 1928
From Red Cottage

Dear Mrs Walshe. Many thanks for the little garments for Richard; they are most useful and comfortable … I am glad your boy is doing well, you deserve it. Richard is making big efforts to talk …

By the next time she wrote, the family had moved. According to Mr Powter, the council had condemned Red Cottage for residential purposes and he and his family were re-housed. Sylvia, though she still owned the property, moved out to a three-storeyed rambling house with a large garden known as ‘West Dene’ in Charteris Road, on the right side of the railway line. It was just out of sight of the new, eminently respectable Monkham’s Estate, but, looking west towards London, there were still fields, smallholdings and farms. It was a paradise for a small boy to grow up in. Sylvia wrote again in early 1929:

From West Dene, Charteris Road

Dear Mrs Walshe,

I told you, I think, I had a contract to write a book. I am in despair about my writing. Richard wakes early and keeps me on the go till eleven or so. If I can get him to sleep from then till 1p.m. it is the best I can hope for frequently – today he woke whenever I put him down and unless I put him to sleep in my arms he won’t sleep at all … afternoon he won’t sleep except if he had not slept the morning. If I do make him sleep I have more trouble at bed time. If I get him to sleep at 6p.m. I am lucky; it is more likely to be 7.30 and I have to sing to him and rock him to accomplish it … Some days I have managed to work between 11.30–12.30, when I have my meal and again from 8–11p.m. and once or twice from 12p.m.–1a.m. but I can’t keep that up … The solution is to get someone to take care of Richard part of the time regularly, so that I can count on it … Richard’s father has been ill with sciatica so I can’t count on him to help me with the boy; indeed when he is at home I get less done than when he is out! I don’t want to hand my little boy over to anyone – I know how important it is he should be rightly handled … I think it is too much to hope that you could do it for me, even for four or five afternoons a week? … Actually I find myself so irritable and jaded that when I sit down to write I am often unable to find a sentence … yet in the old days words used to pour out without difficulty …

During 1930, two-year-old Richard was unwell, and anxiety caused the over-protective Sylvia to collapse. She and the little boy were invited to stay with her former Suffragette friend Joan Hodgson at Eggington in Bedfordshire. While they were there, Richard became worse and the doctors insisted on a tonsil operation. Author Simon Houfe, whose grandfather, the classical architect Sir Alfred Richardson, was a friend of the family, has described the encounter with Sylvia at the time. Mrs Hodgson, at the end of her tether, didn’t know how to cope with the hysterical mother who had been parted from her child. She was also fielding a barrage of questions from her own inquisitive children on the whereabouts of Richard’s mystery father!

Eventually, the operation over, Mrs Hodgson telephoned Sir Alfred and invited herself, with Sylvia and the recuperating Richard, for the day:

My grandfather responded immediately, insisted they should come at once and determined to give them a wonderful visit …

Sylvia came over in a three-wheeler … she looked at the pictures and clocks, sat in the sedan chair, examined the lock of Nelson’s hair, heard my grandfather read and saw him sketch … while the little boy played and piped under the table following with his fingers the patterns of the rich Persian carpet … with enormous compassion and skill he steered this shattered woman with the horsy face and projecting teeth through a whole afternoon of hope … when the party finally met in the cobbled courtyard before the return to Eggington there was something approaching a smile on that wan, grey face.

In July 1930, when Sylvia wrote again to Mrs Walshe inviting her to visit Woodford, she was making efforts to start a small Montessori School at West Dene. ‘Most days I make a point of being free from 4pm to 6pm when Richard goes to bed … I seem to be terribly rushed and in arrears and I find it difficult to keep even that time free but I try to make a point of it. We are trying to start a Montessori nursery school … Vera Brittain is to be the Hon. Treasurer …’ By October, the little school was open and attended by four pupils, including Fenner Brockway’s daughter. Sylvia wrote again, ‘Richard knows practically all his letters (capitals) and begins to have some ideas of the others and has also the idea of word building. He is very quick and has good command of his limbs.’

These early traumas seem to have settled down and the letters between Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Sylvia became less fraught. Emmeline wrote at Christmas in 1930, ‘I was charmed with the Christmas cards from Richard. I think it is very remarkable that so young a child should be able to choose cards from so definite an idea and preference … All that you tell me about his development is most interesting. I like especially the story both of his feelings and his loving ways …’ She goes on to say that she plans to buy several copies of Sylvia’s The Suffragette Movement, and to urge Sylvia to write her mother’s biography – ‘if Christabel ever writes her life it will be unutterably dull – “me and mother” stuff.’ On Boxing Day 1930, Sylvia wrote again:

Dearest Emmeline,
The spirit moves me to write to you to say that in spite of plenty of anxieties I feel a flood of happiness today. Daddie [sic] and Richard are in the garden. It is warm and sunny.

Richard has not had so much as a cold this winter! He is bright and well. Instead of having the doctor like last year he was able to make Christmas presents for his friends and dress the tree … He stitched over a pencil drawing on paper tacked to the ribbon to make the little calendar banners. Then we tore the paper away and the red ribbon was left. He was greatly pleased.

He looks straight and tall. His bones are straight and his thoughts are kind. He puts bread and cheese for the mouse and crumbs for the birds and milk for the cat. He brought his money box to me to buy a present for Daddy. He has his own ways and his own character … I gaze at him amazed and say to myself, ‘where have you come from little man?’ He is physically joyous as I never was … he loves to ‘dance’ and jump and climb …

It is a daily marvel this new person – like no one else – himself. One realises the miracle more when one realises one bore him. I look at his father – the boy is not him – not me – new entirely. How have you – so entirely individual sprung from us? This year when I heard the carol singers I thought so often of waiting for him at Hampstead. How wonderful it all was. How you came to make his happy arrival safe and all that one could desire. So I feel a great flood of gratitude and joy …