A "sympathiser" apologised for having helped to shout the women down saying that he would never have done so had he realised what was really taking place. On first reading the accounts, Mr. Keir Hardie, the only Member of Parliament to come forward in support of the prisoners, telegraphed, "The thing is a dastardly outrage, but do not worry, it will do immense good to the Cause. Can I do anything?" Sir Edward Grey's wife, Lady Grey, made no public statement but she told her friends that she considered the women justified in the means they had adopted of forcing their question forward. "What else could they do?" she asked. Whilst Mr. Winston Churchill, fearing probably that his approaching candidature in Manchester might be damaged by the imprisonment of the women, visited Strangeways Gaol and offered to pay their fines, but the Governor refused to accept the money from him. On Friday, October 20th, a crowded demonstration was held to welcome the Ex-prisoners in the Free Trade Hall from which they had been flung out with ignominy but a week before, and now, as they entered, the audience rose with raised hats and waving handkerchiefs and greeted them with cheers. Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney did not speak of their imprisonment. We knew that they had been treated as belonging to the third and lowest class of criminals, and that they had been dressed in the prison clothes, fed on "skilly" and brown bread, and kept in solitary confinement in a narrow cell both day and night; that they had attended services with the other prisoners in the Chapel and with them had gone out to exercise in the prison yard, that they had performed the daily routine of prison tasks and, losing their own names, had answered only to the number of their cell. These things we know, but _they_ refused to speak of them then, wishing that all attention should be concentrated upon the cause of the enfranchisement of women for which they had been willing to endure all.