Richard Marsden Pankhurst - A Eulogy by his Daughter

By Sylvia Pankhurst

A tribute to the campaigner and political reformer Richard Pankhurst, husband to Emmeline Pankhurst and father to suffragists Adela, Sylvia and Christine Pankhurst. He helped found the Manchester Liberal Association and established a National Society for Women's Suffrage as well as drafting the first women's suffrage bill in England. A committed liberal, he also campaigned for such diverse causes as independence for India, universal free education, nationalisation of land and the abolition of the House of Lords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Oct 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447490593

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PANKHURST

RICHARD MARSDEN PANKHURST

AS I leave the darkened bungalow where the tranquil child has dropped asleep, and gaze through the oak trees upon the setting sun and the flowers his father has planted mellowing in the soft glory of the departing light; when I muse alone under the old trees of Epping Forest, or watch my young hopeful playing in the short grass, finding the new-old treasures that we as children loved; as I pass through the sad, seer streets, the dreary wastes of crowded little houses, same in their ugliness, and among the pale and shabby throngs of the East End, and watch the drawn-faced mothers bargaining at the stalls; as I view the great shops and the flashing equipages of Piccadilly, or tread the stately, ordered precincts of Parliament Square, memories, vivid and turgid, crowd upon me, mingling with the events of the passing moment, imparting their influences to the experiences of to-day.

Earliest of my long memories is the faint vision of the house where I was born, I Drayton Terrace, Old Trafford, Manchester, called in our nursery parlance simply Old Trafford. I see of it only a soft, grey dimness; figures of people unrecognizable and flickering; the dazzling light of windows, filtering through the prevailing haze, and the deeper shade of some half-open door. This, overhung with a sense of vain and restless search to remember further, is all that I can discern.

That first home, in recollection long almost obliterated, yet cherished throughout our childhood as the mysterious shrine of our beginnings, was a centre of earnest and passionate striving. Our father, vilified and boycotted, yet beloved by a multitude of people in many walks of life, was a standard-bearer of every forlorn hope, every unpopular yet worthy cause then conceived for the uplifting of oppressed and suffering humanity. Our mother, twenty years his junior, charged with the abounding ardour of impressionable youth, was the most zealous of his disciples, following his view of all public questions and having no dearer wish than to emulate him in the extremity of his ideas.

Without, he breasted the storm and stress of political turmoil; at home he poured forth for us a wealth of enthusiastic affection, in the precious hours torn for us from the fabric of his vast activity, revealing to us in a fascinating arid never-ending variety the brilliant facets of his thought and knowledge. His struggle was the background of our lives, and his influence, enduring long after his death, was their strongest determining factor. Past forty years before any of us were born, he had led already more than twenty years of strenuous public service. Our advent had entailed a certain lessening of his public activities, which he felt had laid upon us, his children, the obligation to be workers for social betterment—to be, as he often told us, worth the upbringing. If you do not work for other people, you will not have been worth the upbringing. Almost daily he exhorted us!

His sense of family was strong and tender. My children are the four pillars of my house! he would say with joyous pride. Of his father, whom we children had never known, he spoke constantly, with a fervent affection and the thrill of a poignant loss ever new. Often as we clustered about the piano to hear her, he would ask our mother to sing his father’s favourite song:

"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,

And merrily hent the stile-a.

A merry heart goes all the day,