Richard
Pankhurst,
the son of an auctioneer, was born in Stoke
in May 1834. Richard's father had originally been a member of the
Church of England and the Conservative
Party, but eventually become a Baptist
and supporter of the Liberal Party. As
a youth Richard taught at Baptist Sunday School in Manchester
but later he became an agnostic.
Pankhurst was educated at Manchester
Grammar School and the University
of London. He graduated in 1858 and after a period at Lincoln's
Inn qualified as a barrister. Pankhurst joined the Liberal
Party and was active in the campaign for social reform. A supporter
of free secular education for all, he started evening classes for
working class people at Owens College in
Manchester.
As a barrister, Pankhurst took a strong interest in legal reform.
He was especially interested in changing those laws that discriminated
against women. Pankhurst was legal adviser to Lydia
Becker and the Manchester
National Society for Women's Suffrage. In 1869 he drafted
the amendment which included women in the Municipal
Corporation Bill. The following year he was responsible for drafting
the first bill for the enfranchisement of women ever presented to
Parliament. Pankhurst also wrote the Married
Women's Property Act of 1870, although it was much altered after
it went through Parliament.
In 1879 Pankhurst married Emmeline
Goulden. The couple had five children, including Christabel
Pankhurst and Sylvia Pankhurst,
who were later to play a prominent role in the WSPU.
Pankhurst remained involved in the struggle for women's rights and
in 1882 drafted the Married Women's Property
Act.
Pankhurst continued to be active in the Liberal
Party until 1883 when he resigned over
policy issues. Later that year he was an Independent candidate for
a by-election in Manchester.
Pankhurst's campaigned on a radical programme that included universal
adult suffrage, payment of salaries for MPs, Disestablishment of the
Church of England,
free compulsory elementary education, Irish
Home Rule, land nationalization and the abolition of the House
of Lords. He was defeated in the election by 18,188 to 6,216.
In 1885 the Pankhurst family
moved to London. He became friends with
leading radicals in the capital including William
Morris, Tom Mann and Annie
Besant. Pankhurst joined the Fabian
Society and played a leading role in the protest against police
behaviour during the events of Bloody Sunday
in 1887.
In 1893 Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst
returned to Manchester where they formed
a branch of the new Independent
Labour Party (ILP). In the 1895
General Election, Pankhurst stood as
the ILP candidate for Gorton, an industrial suburb of
the
city ,
but was defeated.
For
several years Richard
Pankhurst suffered
from gastric ulcers. Towards the end of 1897 they became more severe
and he died on 5th July, 1898.
(1)
In her book Emmeline Pankhurst My
Own Life published in 1914, she described how
she met Richard Pankhurst.
I
came to know Dr. Richard Pankhurst, a lawyer… who was a supporter
of woman's suffrage… Dr. Pankhurst acted as counsel for the Manchester
women who tried in 1868 to be placed on the register as voters. He
also drafted the bill giving married women absolute control over their
property and earnings, a bill, which became law in 1882.
I think we cannot be too grateful to the group
of men and women, who, like Dr. Pankhurst, lent the weight of their
honoured names to the suffrage movement in the trials of its struggling
youth. These men did not wait until the movement became popular, nor
did they hesitate until it was plain that women were roused to the
point of revolt. They worked all their lives with those who were organising,
educating and preparing for the revolt which was one day to come.
Unquestionably those pioneer men suffered in popularity for their
feminist views.
(2)
In her book Unshackled, Christabel
Pankhurst described her relationship with her father when she
was a child.
The picture now in my mind of those Manchester days is of the library,
with flowered gold-and-brown paper and book-lined walls. Mother reading,
writing or sewing on one side of the big, glowing fire. Father at
the other side, deep in a book. He stretches out his fine sensitive
hand, now and again, to show that he is thinking of us all and enjoying
our companionship. We schoolchildren had leave to do our homework
at the big table and suddenly one or another would ask: 'Father, what
is such and such?' or 'Who was so and so?' He was roused at once.
Books were taken from the shelves, references and authorities were
shown. The subjected was illuminated in all its ramifications.
(3)
As a young girl Sylvia Pankhurst went
with her father Richard Pankhurst, when he was campaigning for the
Independent Labour Party in Manchester.
Often I went on Sunday mornings with my father to the dingy streets
of Ancoats, Gorton, Hulme, and other working-class districts. Standing
on a chair or soap-box, pleading the cause of the people with passionate
earnestness, he stirred me, as perhaps he stirred no other auditor,
though I saw tears in the faces of the people about him. Those endless
rows of smoke-begrimed little houses, with never a tree or a flower
in sight, how bitterly their ugliness smote me! Many a time in spring,
as I gazed upon them, those two red may trees in our garden at home
would rise up in my mind, almost menacing in their beauty; and I would
ask myself whether it could be just that I should live in Victoria
Park, and go well fed and warmly clad, whilst the children of these
grey slums were lacking the very necessities of life. The misery of
the poor, as I heard my father plead for it, and saw it revealed in
the pinched faces of his audiences, awoke in me a maddening sense
of impotence; and there were moments when I had an impulse to dash
my head against the dreary walls of those squalid streets.
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