“Under a Government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man (or woman) is also a prison.”

I was sent to Liverpool and Manchester to join in working an Anti-Government campaign during a General Election in January, 1910. Just before I went, there came the news of the barbarous ill-treatment of Miss Selina Martin and Miss Leslie Hall, while on remand in Walton Gaol. They had been refused bail, and, while awaiting their trial, their friends were not allowed to communicate with them. This is contrary to law and precedent for prisoners on remand. As a protest they had started a hunger-strike. They were fed by force, in answer to which they broke the windows of their cells. They were put in irons for days and nights together, and one of them was frog-marched in the most brutal fashion to and from the room where the forcible feeding was performed. These facts they made known to their friends at the police court on the day of their trial.

I heard, too, of another prisoner in Liverpool, Miss Bertha Brewster, who had been re-arrested after her release from prison, and charged with breaking the windows of her prison cell, which she had done as a protest against being fed by force. She had been punished for this offence while in prison. She did not respond to the summons, and when arrested on a warrant, three and a half months later, she was sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour for this offence.

I felt a great wish to be in Liverpool, if possible, to get public opinion in that town to protest against such treatment of women political prisoners. If I failed in this, I determined myself to share the fate of these women.

When I was in Manchester, Mary Gawthorpe was ill with the internal complaint which has since obliged her to give up work. She saw me in her room one day. We had been distressed beyond words to hear of the sufferings of Selina Martin and Leslie Hall. Mary Gawthorpe said, with tears in her eyes, as she threw her arms round me: “Oh, and these are women quite unknown—nobody knows or cares about them except their own friends. They go to prison again and again to be treated like this, until it kills them!” That was enough. My mind was made up. The altogether shameless way I had been preferred against the others at Newcastle, except Mrs. Brailsford who shared with me the special treatment, made me determine to try whether they would recognise my need for exceptional favours without my name.

Our meetings were always crowded and enthusiastic, especially in Manchester. This was my first experience of meetings in a really poverty-stricken district. I never shall forget one in the Salford Division of Manchester. A small room was packed as close as it would hold of the poorest working women. How eagerly and intelligently they listened, and what a wonderful light came into their eyes as the hope dawned in their minds: “Can it be that Parliament would really begin to think of us and attend to our interests?” All their questions were to the point and practical. How different was the atmosphere from that of the typical drawing-room meeting, where many women came together with the remark: “I am all for propertied women having the vote,” but their fear is lest the electorate should be flooded with working women voters. I have never yet been asked by a working-class woman whether our Bill, to give votes to women for the same reason as men have it, would not give undue power to propertied women. That is a man’s question, though often taken over by women of the leisured or professional class who identify themselves with the objections of theoretic politicians. To the working-class women the matter presents itself easily and naturally, as it actually is—a woman’s question, not a class question. To have their right to labour unrestricted, their protection controlled by themselves, their economic position independent and on the straightforward footing of being judged by its value and by that alone; their property, earnings, and their persons to be defended by law, and their right over their children to be acknowledged by law. In fact, their freedom as human beings, their full recognition as equal members of the community with men—that is how the Votes-for-Women question appeals to them. They see it neither as a party question nor as a class question.

Suddenly I had my opportunity. The Press and the people in each different constituency were entirely engrossed with the elections. Up till now, protest meetings were being held by our Union every week outside Walton Gaol, Liverpool. These were not held during the elections, but I told the Liverpool organiser, Miss Flatman, and the general organiser, Mrs. Jennie Baines, that if they would have one more of these protest meetings on Friday, January 14, it was my intention to go in disguise, call upon the crowd to follow me to the Governor’s house, and insist upon the release of the Suffrage prisoners who had been tortured by forcible feeding. It was not our wont to do any militancy or to hold any protest meetings during election time, that being a time, as it were, when no Government is in, but it seemed to me that this was the opportunity to make the Governor of the prison responsible. It was a case of nothing less than cruelty and did not specially concern, unless they chose to back it up, the Government.

I joined the W.S.P.U. again, filling up the membership card as Miss Jane Warton. The choice of a name had been easy. When I came out of Holloway Prison, a distant relative, by name Mr. F. Warburton, wrote me an appreciative letter, thanking me for having been a prisoner in this cause. I determined that if it were necessary to go to prison under another name, I should take the name of Warburton. When I went to Newcastle, my family raised no objection. Now nobody was to know of my disguise, but Warburton was too distinguished a name; that would at once attract attention. I must leave out the “bur” and make it “Warton.” “Jane” was the name of Joan of Arc (for Jeanne is more often translated into “Jane” than “Joan”) and would bring me comfort in distress. A family sympathetic to our cause, who lived in the suburb near Walton Gaol, were informed that a keen member, Miss Warton, would call at their house in the afternoon before the protest meeting, to investigate the outside of the gaol and the Governor’s house by daylight, and that she was ready to be arrested if she could not obtain the release of the prisoners.

I spent the previous day and night in Manchester where no one knew of my intentions. In the afternoon, at a drawing-room meeting, I was introduced, after I had spoken, to a woman who was a factory inspector. She had very often to attend in the police courts. She said to me: “I think it is impossible to attend these cases, and hear the other cases while you wait, and not be a convert to votes for women if you were not one before. The other day a man and two women were had up before the magistrate. They had been found in the street, the man and one woman had been cohabiting together, the other woman mounted guard. The case was quite clear, and the facts were not denied, the man had bribed the women. The man was let free, the two women were sent to prison. If women had the vote such things could not be; in those countries where women have the vote they get altered in less than a year.”

In the evening we went to a meeting in a large hall. It was full of working men and working women; it looked as if there were not room to move, so crowded were the seats and gangways. They were tremendously enthusiastic, many of them shook me by the hand, and the thought of them remained for a long time in my heart.

The next morning I took leave of my two kind hostesses. Their last injunction to me was, the agitation of my impending task having affected my appetite, “You should eat more; mind you eat more.”

I accomplished my disguise in Manchester, going to a different shop for every part of it, for safety’s sake. I had noticed several times while I was in prison that prisoners of unprepossessing appearance obtained least favour, so I was determined to put ugliness to the test. I had my hair cut short and parted, in early Victorian fashion, in smooth bands down the side of my face. This, combined with the resentful bristles of my newly-cut back hair, produced a curious effect. I wished to bleach my hair as well, but the hairdresser refused point-blank to do this, and the stuff that I bought for the purpose at a chemist’s proved quite ineffective. A tweed hat, a long green cloth coat, which I purchased for 8s. 6d., a woollen scarf and woollen gloves, a white silk neck-kerchief, a pair of pince-nez spectacles, a purse, a net-bag to contain some of my papers, and my costume was complete. I had removed my own initials from my underclothing, and bought the ready-made initials “J. W.” to sew on in their stead, but to my regret I had not time to achieve this finishing touch.

All this sounds simple enough, but I suppose it was due to my preoccupation of mind that I have never known a day’s shopping fraught with such complications and difficulties. At the frowzy little hairdresser’s shop, the only one that seemed to me inconspicuous enough for so important a part of my disguise, the attendant was busy, and I had to return in an hour’s time. I told him that I was going a journey and wanted the hair short, since that would be less trouble. He cut it off. Then I wanted what remained to be worn in a parting, with the hair falling straight on either side. This part of the process was most absurd, for that way of wearing my hair was obviously disfiguring to me. “Ah! now that looks very becoming,” said the hairdresser, and with that I left the shop in haste.

The eye-glasses I had first bought made me feel giddy from the quality of the lens. I had to take them back and have the glasses changed to the weakest possible. At the first place, in spite of all my protests, the shopman insisted on elaborately testing my sight, afterwards requiring me to wait for half an hour or so while he fitted up the glasses. So I went to another shop, and in self-defence invented the story that the glasses were for stage purposes, for a friend of mine who had very good sight, and that if she was not to trip up in her part the glasses must be as nearly plain as possible. This time I was more successful with the lens, but the grip of the folders was still galling to the very large bridge of my nose.

When I had finished this errand I was startled to see walking along the street one of my kind hostesses, whom I had parted from early that morning, professedly to return to Liverpool without delay. I took refuge down a side-street until she had passed by. Then I had strayed into the more opulent quarters of Manchester, in my search for another spectacle shop. All the shops were of a high-class order, and Jane Warton could find nothing to her requirements. On inquiry for a “cheap” draper, three different people recommended me to a certain shop named “Lewis.” A sale was on there and Jane found that it was the very place for her. So many Miss Wartons were of the same mind that the street was blocked with customers for some distance down; but I was obliged to wait, for no other shop was of the same description. The hat was a special difficulty; every article of millinery was of the fashionable order, warranted to cover half the body as well as the head. This did not suit Jane. Finally she succeeded in getting the right one of stitched cloth, with a plait of cloth round the crown. Before leaving Manchester I realised that my ugly disguise was a success. I was an object of the greatest derision to street-boys, and shop-girls could hardly keep their countenances while serving me.

I had done my shopping at last, and hurried off to the station. I took out my box, put in it my own hat and jacket, put on the label “Miss Jane Warton, Cloak Room,” and left it there. In the refreshment room, where I went to take a last hurried meal, a delightful big, brown dog, a mongrel, came and talked to me. He was with a party of two men and a woman, who sat at a distant corner of the room. The dog came up to me at once; he put his head on my lap and was most dear.

After this I got into the train. I finished a letter to my mother, telling her of yesterday’s meetings and that I might not write to her for some little time because of being so busy with the elections.

Arrived at Liverpool, and not knowing my way to Walton, I took a cab and drove out for nearly an hour before reaching my destination. I was already racing hard with daylight and, thanks to a damp fog, it was already quite dark when I arrived there.

The house to which I had been directed was in a new quarter and nowhere to be found. We drove up and down the roads and inquired at shops and post offices. Presently I spotted the familiar sight of a woman stooping to chalk on the pavement some announcement—it was our protest meeting. I felt happy again, it was like seeing a friend. She turned out to be one of the daughters of the very house I was seeking. There were three daughters who lived with their mother. The daughters were zealots and welcomed Jane without a sign of criticism. I saw the mother gasp a little when I entered her drawing-room, but she was nevertheless most courteous and kind.

I was escorted to the gaol and took my bearings. To anyone who has been in prison, few things, I think, are more exasperating than the unrevealing face of the outer walls. On this occasion I felt an overmastering longing to inquire after the prisoners who had stirred me to my coming deed. What was the degree of their suffering and exhaustion? What should I be able to do for their release? If by some miracle I obtained it, would it be too late to help them? I thought more especially of Miss Selina Martin. I had seen her in Birmingham a fortnight after her release from the weeks that she had been fed in the prison there. She was in the nursing home, together with Mrs. Leigh, that splendid fighter for the women’s cause and most heroic woman. Their look of illness haunted me still. The idea that Selina Martin was again, perhaps at that very moment, undergoing the same cruel treatment exasperated me. I felt so feeble, had so little faith in the utility of what I was about to do, yet I was athirst to do it, and the strength of my wish that it should be effective made me feel, at moments, capable of anything. But to all this the prison walls had nothing to say. They revealed nothing. They looked angry with all the world, angry above all because of an uneasy conscience.

I returned to the house of my friends, selected from their garden small, flat stones in case of need, which I wrapped in paper, and snatched a hasty meal. My kind hostess had heard that I was a vegetarian, and had provided a most appetising dish of stewed white pears. My mouth was parched with the weary work of the day and the thought of what lay before me, but I had no time except to taste the pears; the memory of them during the hunger-strike filled my dreams.

Again we set out for the prison. All through the day I had been dogged by the nightmare thought that I should be too late for the meeting, or for some other reason should be prevented from achieving my purpose. As we neared the place, a crowd of between two and three hundred men and women were following the carriage in which were our speakers. It had been agreed that I should mix with the crowd, not join with the speakers, but at the end of the meeting should have my say from below. I passed the carriage to report myself to the organisers. Many of our members were standing around, but I think most of them did not recognise me, except from my voice later on.

Miss Flatman, Miss Patricia Woodlock and Mrs. Baines made stirring speeches, but the crowd had mostly gathered out of curiosity and were not many of them likely to listen to my coming appeal. I was afraid lest they should disperse before I had my chance, so I rudely interrupted Mrs. Baines and spoke from the outer rim of the crowd, on the side of the Governor’s house.

I reminded the audience of how the men of Dundee, when forcible feeding of Suffrage prisoners was threatened in that town, had assembled to the number of two thousand and protested against it. How thereupon the hunger-strikers had been released and no forcible feeding to our women had been inflicted in Scotland. Could not Englishmen have done the same? Let the men of Liverpool be the first to wipe out the stain that had been tolerated up till now. We were outside the gaol where these and other barbarities were actually going on. The Home Secretary had denied responsibility and asserted that it rested with the prison officials. Let us put this to the test and call upon the Governor of the prison to release these women. No violence was needed, but let us go to his house, insist upon his replying to our request and refuse to be dispersed until he had released these women. “If there are no men in Liverpool who will stand up for these prisoners, let the women do their part—I call on you all to follow me to the Governor’s house.” With this I turned towards the house, a separate building surrounded by a little garden. To my surprise, the crowd began to follow me. Again I shouted out to them—“No violence, remember, but call for the Governor and refuse to be dispersed till you have secured the release of the prisoners.”

A policeman began leisurely to follow me; there were only two or three of them about. I took to running and urged on the crowd. The police then took hold of me. As for once it was my object above all else to get arrested and imprisoned, I began discharging my stones, not throwing them, but limply dropping them over the hedge into the Governor’s garden. One of them just touched the shoulder of a man who had rushed up on seeing me arrested. I apologised to him. Two policemen then held me fast by the arms and marched me off to the police station. The crowd followed excitedly, and our members gathered round me, appealing for my release and saying that I had done nothing.

It had been agreed with the organisers that I should be the only one arrested. As I have said, militant tactics were in abeyance because of the elections, the less disturbance was made, therefore, the better; as it was, I feared lest my action, being out of the straight course, should be displeasing to the leaders. I said to the other members: “I am all right, don’t bother about me, but take the crowd back to the Governor’s house.” I did not wish to be recognised.

As they marched me off at a great pace, the police, who were very civil and considerate, questioned me: “What was you a-doin’? You weren’t in the carriage with the others, were you? What was that you was sayin’?” They knew they would have to make up a charge against me, and wisely thought the best plan was to ask me direct for information! I told them that I made towards the Governor’s house, appealed to the crowd to follow, and refused to desist when called upon by the police. I feared that this might not be enough to achieve a conviction. I was thinking, “Was there nothing else?” when the man appeared whose shoulder had been touched by my stone; he carried the missile in his hand, still wrapped in the purple hand-bill announcing this very meeting, no doubt a most evil-looking document in the eyes of the authorities. I knew then that I was safe.

Presently, two others who had been arrested were brought in. It was a most unlooked-for consolation to have their company through the night, though I hoped, of course, that they would be let off and not share the rest of the ordeal with me. Two of the members, on hearing my voice, determined that I should not be alone, so they returned, and one of them poked a flag through a window in the Governor’s house, breaking the glass; the other mounted guard while she did this. They were both arrested. One was Miss Elsie Howey, a valiant as well as most dear one of our members; the other was a local member, who gave the name of Mrs. Nugent. I had twice stayed with her and her husband when at Liverpool. She was not only most charming, but also of attractive appearance, which awoke a great deal of curiosity in the police as to her identity, and luckily drew off all possible suspicions from me.

We all played up to the situation; Elsie Howey and I treated her with deference, as a person of great importance; we nicknamed her “the Princess.”

The police were exceptionally friendly to us, although they were punctilious as to the regulations. For instance, Miss Howey and I were suffering from bad colds and had eucalyptus inhalers in our pockets. We were not allowed to keep these; they were removed with other things, such as a purse, stylo pen, brooches, watch, etc. We were all three allowed to be together and away from other prisoners, locked into a cell of the usual police-station description—that is, unfurnished but for the bare plank, serving as seat or bed, along the wall, and about one and a-half feet from the ground, terminating in a lavatory accommodation under a high-barred window, but now lighted by an electric light in the wall above the door. This cell was scrupulously clean and blankets were supplied to us. Our friends sent us some sandwiches and fruit, and the police themselves provided us with an evening newspaper.

We had been arrested at about 8 o’clock; the police station was some distance from Walton, so it was getting on for 9 o’clock when we were at last shut up after the charges were reported and entered, and we had been stripped by a wardress of our small belongings.

The quick walk from the scene of our arrest, hurried along between two policemen, had been a warming process, after which the cold in the cell seemed intense. The bench being wider than most in police-station cells, Mrs. Nugent lay down at one end, while Elsie Howey and I lay side by side under the same blanket and warmed each other. Mrs. Nugent and Elsie kept up an animated conversation. Elsie told anecdotes of her former imprisonments and those of the fellow-prisoners. I was short of breath and fearfully tired, so I rolled round and kept quite quiet.

At about 12 o’clock the husband of Mrs. Nugent had heard of her arrest, and came off to the police station to see her. He came to the door of our cell and was greatly distressed. It was ever so nice to see him. His visit had caused a great deal of concern amongst the police, who recognised him as one of the magistrates. He put himself out to do what he could, and we offered him the comforting news that we were almost sure that his wife would get off, as she had done nothing at all. With that, as his wife was kept standing at the little window so long as he was there, he felt obliged to leave us.

Towards about 3 a.m. we were taken out of the cell and ranged along a seat by the wall of a large room; at the other end was a desk with a policeman sitting at it. We went up in turn to give our names, ages, etc., that is, about seven or eight other prisoners, all females, and our three selves. It was the turn of Jane Warton. She walked across to the policeman, one shoulder hitched slightly above the other, her hair sticking out straight behind and worn in slick bandeaus on either side of her face, her hat trailing in a melancholy way on her head. The large, grey woollen gloves were drawn up over the too short sleeves of her coat; on the collar of it were worn portraits of Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Lawrence and Christabel, in small china brooches; her hat had a bit of tape with “Votes for Women” written on it, interlaced with the cloth plait that went round it, and eye-glasses were fixed on her nose. Her standing out in the room was the signal for a convulsed titter from the other prisoners. “It’s a shame to laugh at one of your fellow-prisoners,” said the policeman behind the desk, and the tittering was hushed. It was all I could do not to laugh, and I thought to myself “Is the Punch version of a Suffragette overdone?” As I got back to my companions they too were laughing, but I thought it wonderfully kind of the policeman to have spoken on my behalf.

When this process was finished, we three Suffragettes were taken to the policemen’s room, where there was a good fire, to wait for our Black Maria. The other prisoners had disappeared. The police sat round and spoke quite pleasantly; there were two or three of them at times. We discussed the chances of women getting the vote, they seemed quite in favour. Elsie Howey and Mrs. Nugent did most of the talking. I warmed myself and saw the police looking at me from time to time, wondering why I did not talk too.

At about 3.30 a.m. or 4 o’clock, Black Maria came and we were put in. This was different from the prison vans I had hitherto seen; it was not broken up into separate cell-like compartments, but was in the form of a double omnibus, one side for men and the other for women, divided by a thin wooden partition, each side having two seats facing each other and extending the length of the carriage. There were no windows; the light filtered in only through the grated ventilators. When we got into this Black Maria there was no one but us three, but we were told to sit near the door, so Mrs. Nugent sat first, then Elsie Howey, and then myself. The jolting of the van is excessive and suggests a complete absence of springs, the noise of its passage through the streets is terrific, to the point of excluding all other sounds—a noise of thundering wheels, of jolts and jars and bumps. I have not yet made out the reason why 3.30 a.m. was selected, none was given at the time to the prisoners.

Our destination was the Bridewell Police Station, but we called on our way at the other police stations in the town, picking up whatever unfortunates they had netted during the night. We called at four different stations, if I remember right. The drive in all took about an hour, and seemed a very long one.

We had not gone far before the rumbling and jolting ceased, the door was thrown open with a sound of keys and great rattling, a shaft of light fell along the ’bus, and lit up momentarily ourselves and those who were thrown in to add to our number. These were the only moments when the occupants had a chance of seeing each other. The door then hastily closed again, darkness, jolting and noise reasserted their grim influence. Drunken voices, the smell of the gin palace, an occasional query and reply shouted through the thin wall to the men on the other side, that was all. Knee to knee, and breath to breath we sat, companions of this world of darkness, fellow-sisters of the order of the outcasts. Before we had finished, we had taken up six women in all.

At the first stop, two Irish girls were let in; some men were put into the other side. The girls were only sufficiently drunk to make them intensely cheerful; they laughed and talked gaily at first and shouted lustily to their companions on the other side. But the effect of the pitch darkness was depressing, and after a time their communications ceased. They sat opposite to us near the door, and whenever there was a gleam of light I watched them, for they gave me immense pleasure. They were quite young, with beautiful arms, which one could see as their sleeves were rolled up; they had shawls on, and their faces were fresh and strong, and pretty, too, had it not been for the effect of the drink; they were as far removed as possible from the degraded town type, in every way they were healthy specimens, fresh from an Irish fishing village. They spoke to us several times, and there was a delightful feeling that disguise or no disguise did not matter with them, but it was difficult to hear what they said in the fearful noise of the Black Maria, and we felt that our answers were mostly lost on them. They put the question in a friendly way: “What did you get taken up for?” “We’re Suffragettes,” was the all-sufficient reply. This was very interesting, and they had to try to tell the men on the other side, with many a laugh, as a tremendous bit of news.

At another stop, a little woman got in with fair hair, a fluttering white boa, and in a white dress. She was dead drunk, but whereas the others smelt of cheap drink, her breath was of good brandy. She laughed, and now and then gave vent to a half sentence or two that rolled in and out of her sleep.

At the next stop, two were shot in who seemed really deformed with poverty, their complexions yellow, their hands gnarled and worn, their faces of utmost sadness. They said something to each other as they got in—something to give comfort, but their sentences were full of oaths of a senseless kind, and their speech, too, was broken with drink.

Finally, it was another type altogether who was let in. A woman who looked any age, her face of utmost melancholy had yet the appearance of having drunk heavily; she had all the hang of an “habitual,” her clothes were the dregs of clothes and tumbling off her. When the door was opened for her to be put in, she murmured a few broken words to the effect that her salvation didn’t lie in prison.

The Irish girls and the little woman with the white boa were young, the others looked old and worn out.

I think I shall never forget the self-reproach that stung through my whole being when I had thought my intervention necessary between one prisoner and another. On passing some unusual light in the street, which momentarily lit up our van, not enough to see our faces but only to distinguish the outlines of forms, I noticed that the prisoner opposite to Elsie Howey, my neighbour, was leaning forward and bent towards her. The momentary flash of light was too short-lived to judge whether this was a rapid movement perhaps, as I thought, of assault or drunken affection, or whether it was that the position of physical weariness could find no rest from leaning back on the walls of the jolting van. I was unable to see Elsie, but I imagined that she too might be scared by the attention of the prisoner opposite. As the darkness closed in upon us, I thrust my hand into hers; it was welcomed, but quite unnecessary. Before the end of our drive two things were clear—the prisoners might be evil-minded towards all the rest of the world, they might be blind drunk or raging with misery at their own plight, but the one thing impossible to them would have been to hurt a fellow-prisoner. Every one of those pathetic human wrecks, deformed by drink, so that one could not tell if they were guilty of crime besides, overtaken at a moment when their self-respect was lowest, and captured by a punitive system which would do its utmost to dissolve what remained of it, as they were thrust into the black cavity of the van, made a vigorous appeal to their own courage and met with instant response from their unknown companions. It might be only some drunken joke, it was almost invariably accompanied by a laugh, but for each one it had a call on their inmost strength, and it made its appeal to those in the van. Issuing from different spheres of existence, each one representing lives the most remote from one another, scarcely any two alike in a single respect as to detail, their one point of similarity being poverty and that they had given way to drink, the instinct of our first contact, doubtless to each one of us, was repulsion, mistrust, fear of one another. But it lasted for less than the flash of a moment, less than the inhaling of one breath. Our differences were there, but for the time unimportant, whereas the all-embracing fact was our similarity of fate. No need for social laws to bind that company, no rules of the club were necessary, the code of instinct, expediency and honour were all one and spontaneous to us. “We are all of one blood,” may be a great tie, but “We are all of one fate” is, while it lasts, a better; the bond of the outcast needs no seal.

We arrived for the fifth time in a courtyard, with a deal of jolting and din; it was the Bridewell Police Station, and we all got out. The little woman in the white dress and fur boa tumbled from the van into the arms of a policeman—she assured us that she loved him on finding herself thus closely against him; he remained stalwart as a piece of wood.

We Suffragettes were put into a cell by ourselves, it was perfectly clean. We had not been there very long before the door was opened with a clang and another woman was thrust in. She was reassuring to look at, smartly dressed with fashionably-shaped brown furs draped round her neck. She had come from Ireland that night and was terribly cold. We gave her the blankets that had been given to us; nothing, however, did much good. She had come over with another woman, who on landing had been taken as “wanted by the police.” This woman had been arrested, too, as “her friend,” but she said she was quite sure of getting off, as she had only known the other woman quite a short time, and had no idea that she was in any way “suspected.” The concern of this woman to get free was natural enough, but she seemed to care not at all for the other one, for whom my heart welled over with sympathy. I thought of her with a more or less deceitful face, but I loved her because she was “wanted by the police,” and this woman who was with us I wanted to get off, of course, but that was all; I could not feel any sympathy towards her.

We waited in this cell until it was dawning light. It was not a place for sleep, and the cold was terrible. As it was getting towards morning, we were taken out of the cell and led off to wash our hands and faces in another part of the prison. It was fearfully dark in one part, with only a light occasionally here and there, so that one could not see where one was going. On a bench, some ten or twelve little boys were sitting.

It was the first time I thought of children as prisoners. At Newcastle, it was true, I had seen one little boy in the police court, but he was enjoying himself over a cup of soup in the central room with the police, and he was much too small to be convicted, whatever his offences; possibly, if his parents were hopeless, he would have been sent to a reformatory school. That, of course, was bad enough; one knew that for half of the money that would have to be expended there was many a woman in the country who would have cared for him with motherly tenderness. But with these boys, who looked about nine years to fifteen or sixteen years old, it was another matter. The place where they sat, though public, for it was a gangway, was terrible, it was just where the passages seemed to go underground; they were extremely dark, on one side they abutted into a regular network of cells, with small communicating alleys in between. There the boys sat and gazed at the grown-up criminals who appeared from time to time; they looked at us with the greatest curiosity. It was horrible to see them in a place so profoundly ill-suited to children.

The Liverpool organiser, Miss Flatman, and Miss Maude Joachim came to us with the daylight of Saturday, January 15. It was a most unexpected joy to see them—not alone, for that was not allowed, but in one of the many passages near a window with a policeman standing by. I was able to write a little scrap of a letter to Mrs. Pethick Lawrence in the name of “Jane Warton.” This made me very happy. I believe we were offered breakfast, or should have been able to get it had we asked for it, but, in any case, those surroundings were so wretched that we almost as soon went without, and I was eager to begin the hunger-strike.

As the time of the assembling of the court, 10 o’clock, drew near we waited in different parts of a large and rambling building. At last we were conveyed, through what seemed an underground court, to the foot of a staircase that led right up into the prisoner’s dock.

I was the first of the Suffragettes to be taken up. Mr. Shepherd Little was the magistrate; he seemed to be thoroughly out of temper. They took only two or three minutes convicting me. When the policeman had done his work of charging me with urging the crowd to follow me to the Governor’s house, with refusing to desist when called upon by the police, and with throwing a “missile” (small stone wrapped in paper), I put in, “I had three stones upon me which I let fall in the Governor’s garden. A man in the crowd ran past me just as I was letting go the third—it fell on his shoulder; I apologised to him.”

On the strength of its being my first imprisonment, I was sentenced to a fortnight, 3rd Division, with option of a fine. Just when I had left the court I was called back. The magistrate thought I ought to have a longer sentence, thanks to my having thrown stones, but the clerk thought not, and in the little altercation he got the best of it.

The women of last night were waiting on the stairs. “How long have you got?” they all said to me. “Ah! well, buck up,” they added on hearing of fourteen days. Miss Elsie Howey, with the admission of her former imprisonments, got six weeks, and Mrs. Nugent was, to our great joy, released. The policeman downstairs told me that hard labour always accompanied the 3rd Division sentences, unless stated to the contrary.