One Sunday evening in June, Mrs. Pankhurst had been invited to speak on Women's Suffrage to a meeting held under the auspices of the Oldham Independent Labour Party. During the proceedings glees were sung by a choir of men and women cotton operatives, and one of the members of the choir was Annie Kenney, who was afterwards to take so prominent a part in the Votes for Women Movement. Annie Kenney was deeply impressed by all that Mrs. Pankhurst had to say, and shortly afterwards, when my sister Christabel also lectured in Oldham, she asked to be introduced to her. Christabel then asked her to pay a visit to our home in Manchester, and the friendship which was to have such far-reaching results began. Annie Kenney was born at Lees, near Oldham. She was the child of working-class parents, and, to supplement her father's earnings, her mother, in addition to all her household cares, had been obliged to go out to work in a cotton mill most of her married life. Annie Kenney herself had early become a wage-earner, for at ten years of age she secured an engagement as a half-timer in one of the Oldham cotton factories. Then, wearing her heavy steel-tipped clogs, her fair hair hanging down her back in a long plait covered by a shawl, she had gone into the hot, crowded spinning mill, and working amid the noisy jarring of the machinery as a "little tenter" at the disposal of three older women, she had learnt to fit into place the big bobbins covered with fleecy strands of soft, raw cotton; and to piece these same fleecy strands when they broke, as they did so often, whilst they were being spun out thinner and stronger. Once, as she seized the broken thread in her tiny fingers, one of them was caught somehow and torn off by the whirling bobbins. Whilst she was still a half-timer she worked alternately, one week from six o'clock in the morning till midday in the mill, and during the afternoon at the elementary school; and the next week she spent the morning at school and four hours of the afternoon in the mill. At thirteen, her school days had ceased, and she had become a "full-timer," working in the mill from six o'clock in the morning till six at night.