PANKHURST STATUE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 968, 10 May 1930, Page 10

PANKHURST STATUE

MEMORIAL TO “MOTHER” OF THE MILITANTS STIRRING CEREMONY Old battles fought at the gates of Parliament were recalled in happier mood under the very shadow of the Palace of Westminster, when Mr. Stanley Baldwin, Leader of the British Conservative Party, unveiled in Victoria Tower Gardens, a statue of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the militant suffragettes till the Great War ended their activities. For the first time in history the band of the Metropolitan Police—representing a force with which Mrs. Fankhurst so often found herseif in conflict—played under the baton of a weman—Dame Ethel Smyth, the veteran suffragette, an imposing figure in her academic robes, personally conducted the two compositions, which she wrote during the women’s fight for the vote. Badges Of Honour Among those present were many elderly and middle-aged women, on whose breasts glittered badges indi eating that they had suffered imprisonment. Others wore medals denoting that they had been on hunger strike. Mr. Baldwin said it had fallen to his lot to take part in the ceremony as one who for many years was opposed to the work that Mrs. Pankhurst was doing, but to whose lot it fell in time to put the coping-stone upon her labours. Whatever view posterity might take, Mrs. Pankhurst had won for herself a niche in the temple of fame which would last for all time. She saw what could result from the prejudice of a certain type of callous man, and those things filled her soul with divine rage. It drove her ultimately into a sex war. and thus the women’s Social and Political Union was born. War Work When the war came the revolutionary died, and the patriot was born. The suffragette laid aside her banners, put on overalls, and went into the factory and field. They were nursing, they made munitions, and they endured sac iifices with the men. Effective opposition to the movement melted in the sufferings of the war, and the walls of Jericho fell before the trumpet was sounded. Mrs. Pankhurst lived to see her work done with ultimate success. She l’.ad done more in those later davs perhaps, than any individual to secure for women an established right of wav. and it now rested with women to tread worthily in that way opened to them.