Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst Memorial

The Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst Memorial is a memorial in London to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, two of the foremost British suffragettes. It stands at the entrance to Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster. Its main feature is a bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst by Arthur George Walker, unveiled in 1930. In 1958 the statue was relocated to its current site and the bronze reliefs commemorating Christabel Pankhurst were added.

Shortly after Emmeline Pankhurst's death in 1928 a Pankhurst Memorial Fund was established, with her fellow suffragettes Rosamund Massey and Katherine "Kitty" Marshall (Pankhurst's former bodyguard in the Women's Social and Political Union) as joint secretaries. The fund's objectives were to arrange a headstone for her grave, to acquire Georgina Brakenbury's portrait of Pankhurst and to erect a public statue. Some spectators, such as Nancy Astor, believed the idea of a statue impractical, noting that Pankhurst herself did not believe she was "statuesque" and the fact that the British public were facing austere times, which would impose financial constraints on the project. In reality raising the money, which was largely organised by The Suffragette's editor Rachel Barrett, was not the issue; finding a location for the statue was the real problem. Although the Chief Commissioner of Public Works, Sir Lionel Earle, was sympathetic to their cause, he believed that it would be impractical to place the statue in Westminster. After several locations were rejected Marshall secured permission to erect the statue in a corner of Victoria Tower Gardens near the Houses of Parliament. Though this required a special Parliamentary bill, the Conservative MP William Bull ensured its smooth passage.

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