The poisoner who taught Sylvia Pankhurst to dance.

 

The house pictured above, was once the home of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Mrs Pankhurst lived in the house with her husband, three daughters, and her son Harry, before Mr Pankhurst died in 1898. It's near Victoria Park in Manchester, Buckingham Crescent, 114, Daisy Bank Road.

Mrs Pankhurst was supposed to have been in straitened circumstances when she moved into a five-bedroom villa at 62 Nelson Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock in 1898. It's now the Pankhurst Centre and it faces Manchester Royal Infirmary. The family also had two servants and rented the property.

Mrs Pankhurst took a job as the salaried registrar for births, deaths, and marriages, for Chorlton-on-Medlock. The family knew the area well because her daughter's Christabel and Sylvia had taken dancing lessons at number 60 Nelson Street. The dancing school was run by Mrs W Webster and her brother. In October 1895, Mrs Webster poisoned herself and her two sons. The youngest son survived the poisoning. The inquest returned a verdict of murder and suicide due to temporary insanity.

Sylvia Pankhurst, who was a socialist, lived with an Italian anarchist called Silvio Corio and they had a son called Richard, born in 1927. The Italian was her lover and companion for thirty years, but Sylvia refused to marry Silvio, because she objected in principle to entering into marriage and taking a husband's name. Mrs Pankhurst severed ties with her daughter and never spoke to her again. Sylvia died in Ethiopia in 1960 aged 78.

Christabel Pankhurst worked as an evangelist for the Second Adventist movement and died in Santa Monica California in 1958 aged 77. She never married but had an adopted daughter called Betty.

The youngest daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, Adela Pankhurst, died in Sydney Australia, in 1961 aged 75. She had been a Communist and then an anti-Communist founding the far-right Australia First Movement. Later in her life she became a Roman Catholic. Mrs Pankhurst had given Adela a one-way ticket to Australia. She had five children and married a man called Tom Walsh.

Harry Pankhurst, the son of Emmeline Pankhurst, died in 1910 aged 21 of spinal inflammation. An older son Frank, had died of diphtheria in 1888, aged four. Emmeline Pankhurst died in a nursing home in Hampstead, London, in 1928 aged 69.