Miss Billington chose imprisonment, but her resolution was balked by "an anonymous reader of the Daily Mirror," who handed the amount of her fine to the Governor of Holloway Gaol.[10]
The charges of disorderly conduct against the other three women were adjourned until July 14th.
Every charge against the prisoners, except that of being in Cavendish Square with the object of seeing Mr. Asquith broke down, but Mr. Paul Taylor, the magistrate, who seemed quite incapable even of trying to understand their motives, decided that they had created an obstruction and ordered them to enter into their own recognisances in the sum of £50 and to find one surety for the same amount, to be of good behaviour and to keep the peace for twelve months. In the event of their not finding such sureties and consenting to be so bound over he ordered that they should be sent to prison for six weeks.
To agree to be bound over to keep the peace would have been both an admission of wrongdoing and a promise to refrain from similar methods of agitation. Rather than this Annie Kenney preferred to suffer a second imprisonment and the other women, though they had but recently joined the Union and though many friends urged that they had already done good work and might now fairly return to their homes, decided that they too would go to gaol.
In the meantime there were stirring doings in Manchester. On June 23rd there had been a great Liberal Demonstration at the Zoological Gardens, Belle View, on the outskirts of the town, where Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. John Burns and Mr. Churchill had been the principal speakers. Representatives of the Women's Social and Political Union had been present to question the Cabinet Minister and had been thrown out as soon as they had raised their voices. In the scuffle Mr. Morrissey, a Liverpool city councillor, intervened to protect his wife from the violence of the stewards and was very roughly used. As the Suffragettes were flung by the stewards into the public road outside they were ordered to move on by the police and because Mr. Morrissey, whose leg had been seriously injured by his assailants, was unable to walk away, he was arrested. Seeing this my youngest sister, Adela, then scarcely out of her teens, and only about five feet in height, expostulated with one of the constables and in doing so laid her hand upon his arm, saying, "Surely you can see that Mr. Morrissey cannot walk!" But at that she was accused of attempting to effect a rescue, and was also taken into custody. The councillor's wife and a friend, who both offered similar protests, were treated in the same way. The case of these four people came up in Manchester simultaneously with that of Annie Kenney and her comrades in London, with the result that Adela was committed to prison for a week on refusing to pay a fine[11] of five shillings and costs whilst Mrs. Morrissey and Mrs. Mitchell on refusing to be bound over to keep the peace were imprisoned for three days. Of course this punishment was for daring to urge an unwelcome question upon Members of the Government, but as this was not a punishable act the charges of disorderly conduct outside in the road had been trumped up.
The question of these trials was raised in the House of Commons by Mr. Keir Hardie, who declared that it was stretching the law too far to forbid a deputation to approach a private house. He also pointed out that Mr. James Kendall, one of the magistrates who had tried the case of the Manchester Suffragettes, and had been Chief Steward at the Liberal meeting from which they had been ejected, Mr. Cremer and Mr. Maddison both delivered vindictive speeches against the Suffragettes, the former describing the sentence passed upon them as "extremely lenient" and the latter referring to them as "female hooligans." The more sensational and less reputable of the newspapers adopted a similar line speaking of the women as "Kenney," "Knight" and "Sparborough," calling them "mock martyrs" and "martyrettes" and publishing hideous and libellous drawings of them. Even the staider and more serious periodicals gave one-sided and biassed accounts of what had taken place, rebuking the Suffragettes for what they termed their "disgraceful behaviour," telling them that they were "ruining" their cause, and urging them to save it by returning to "Constitutional" and "orderly" methods of propaganda.
The following interesting and valuable letter to the press from Mr. T. D. Benson, the Treasurer of the Independent Labour Party cleverly exposed the hypocrisy of these strictures:—
Dear Sir:
Having had, through illness, plenty of time on my hands this last week, I have made a calculation of the number of years which the lady Suffragettes have put back their movement. I find that it amounts to somewhat about 235 years. The realisation therefore, of their aims is, according to this mode of chronology, as far off in the future as the Plague and the Fire of London are in the past. Nevertheless, I shall not be surprised if they succeed within the next twelve months, or two or three years at the most.