Sylvia Pankhurst by Rachel Holmes

Author:Rachel Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

22

Mothers’ Arms

In March 1915 Sylvia and her friend Lady Sybil Smith took the train to Maidenhead where they were greeted by a flamboyant Nancy Astor and piled into her luxurious limousine with other guests invited for the weekend to the Astors’ renowned political salon. Lady Astor drove them herself to Cliveden House at the breakneck speed for which she was renowned. Along the way she entertained them with her singing, with interludes of vigorous political opinion and, at one point in the journey, with abuse of a horse rider in civvies. As they sped past she yelled out to him, ‘Why aren’t you in khaki?’ and then launched into a diatribe against slackers who didn’t join up and fight.

As they raced through the Kent countryside to its most magnificent estate, Lady Astor shared the ideas set out in the book she was currently reading which argued that indulging in luxury increased the poor man’s burden – ‘“I am going to be austere!” she shouted, eyeing us all with a glance of challenge.’1021 Soon, they arrived at magnificent Cliveden, a wedding gift from Lady Astor’s father-in-law, William Waldorf Astor, the richest man in America.

Feeling from the outset ‘like a fish out of water’, Sylvia was uncomfortable around Nancy Astor, who, she thought unkindly, ‘looked like a bit of Dresden china with her flaxen hair and pink and white skin’. She wished herself ‘a thousand miles away from her hospitality’.1022 The only moment of genuine empathy Sylvia achieved the entire weekend was when a telegram arrived one evening during pre-dinner cocktails bearing the news to one of Lady Astor’s sisters that her beloved fiancé had been killed.

Sylvia’s discomfort stemmed from the fact that she and Sybil had arrived as supplicants at the Astors’ house party. They needed investment from wealthy supporters, many of whom Sylvia knew from her WSPU days. To provide alternatives to the below-rate sweated labour justified in the name of ‘war relief’ work, the ELFS had set up two model factories in the East End. First, they opened a boot and shoe factory. Next followed a toy factory, which employed fifty-nine people and ran on a not-for-profit co-operative basis. Everyone received pay of fivepence an hour or eleven shillings a week.

Sylvia had set up the co-operative factories as an alternative to the Queen Mary Workshops. In August 1914 Sylvia had written to Queen Mary outlining her criticisms of the conditions in the workshops set up in Her Majesty’s name to give work to unemployed women at appalling wages. Sylvia dubbed them ‘Queen Mary’s Sweatshops’. She tried to persuade local and national government to raise the rates of pay in factories. Having failed, she changed tack and set up her own. They couldn’t make the boot and shoe factory break even, and now the toy concern was struggling too. Sybil suggested and arranged the drawing-room fundraising meeting at Cliveden.

Lady Sybil Smith, daughter of Lord Antrim, had joined the ELFS to help Sylvia run their first nursery. Driven mad by the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.