by Simon Webb
Later that week, on Thursday, 14 December, Davison set fire to two more pillar boxes in the City of London, one at Leadenhall Street and the other near the Mansion House. Then she went to Whitehall and tried to set fire to the post office in Parliament Street by putting a lighted match to some kerosene-soaked rags, which she hoped to push into the postbox set into the front of the building. She was caught in the act by a policeman and taken to nearby Scotland Yard, where she freely confessed what she had done. Later that day, Emily Davison was taken to Cannon Row police station and charged with arson.
In January 1912, Davison was tried at the Old Bailey and sent to prison for six months for arson, a lenient sentence given the nature of the crime. It was while in prison for this offence that Emily Davison’s mind turned, according to her own account, to self-destruction. It is impossible to know what prompted these thoughts. The motive may have been purely political or maybe she was a disturbed woman with little to live for, someone who thought that although her life was pointless, her death could serve some purpose. The events of this time in prison have a good deal of bearing on what subsequently befell this unhappy woman.
There were a fair number of suffragettes in London’s Holloway Prison at the time that Emily Davison was serving her sentence there for arson. As before, she went on hunger strike, along with other prisoners. On 22 June, the suffragette prisoners decided to barricade themselves in their cells as a protest against the continued force-feeding to which they were being subjected. The prison authorities managed to get through the cell doors and resume the force-feeding, after which Davison smashed the remaining panes of glass in her cell. She decided that if she gave her life, ‘One big tragedy may save many others’ (her own words). The cell in which Davison was confined was on the top floor of the prison wing, with the door leading out on to a narrow walkway which overlooked a considerable drop.
When her cell door was opened later that afternoon, Emily Davison rushed out of the cell and threw herself over the railings. Her intention was to fall to her death in the central hall of the prison. In her excitement, she had apparently forgotten that wire netting was stretched over the hall at the level of the first floor for the very purpose of frustrating suicides of this sort. The warders brought her back up the stairs, whereupon she dived over the railings once more, trying to fall away from the edge of the wire netting, so that she could land on an iron staircase. Once more, she ended up on the wire netting, her frantic bid for suicide rapidly descending into farce. At last she succeeded in injuring herself though, as before the warders were able to retrieve her once more from the wire netting, she jumped head first onto the iron staircase, a drop of 10 feet or so. Davison landed on her head, knocking herself out.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that Emily Davison, a year before her death at the Derby, was genuinely trying to end her life. She wrote later of this episode in Holloway, ‘If I had been successful, I should undoubtedly have been killed’. It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of an intended suicide than this.
The final dive, head first onto the iron staircase, resulted in concussion and two cracked vertebrae in Davison’s spine. She was plagued by pains from these injuries for the rest of her life.
After her release, following her suicide attempt, Emily Davison resumed her activities on behalf of the suffragettes. Which brings us to the extraordinary attack on the Reverend Jackson at Aberdeen Railway Station. Lloyd George was giving a speech in Aberdeen in November 1912, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer would hardly travel to and from London alone. As for the idea that he would do so in fancy dress, pretending to be a vicar, it is safe to assume that no well-balanced person would entertain this notion for a moment. But was Emily Davison well-balanced at that time? The evidence tends to suggest otherwise.
There is a common misconception that Emily Davison was a young woman when she died, shortly after that fateful Derby. Accounts of her life often aim deliberately to give this impression, perhaps because a girl sacrificing her life is more likely to tug at the heart-strings than the death of an older woman. The official website of the BBC History magazine, for instance, has a piece on the suffragettes which states: ‘As the government struggled to prevent scores dying in prison, one young woman successfully provided the cause with its first martyr. In June 1913, Emily Davison was killed by the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby’. Davison was a few months short of her forty-first birthday when she died, hardly a ‘young woman’ by the standards of the time.
What sort of life did Davison lead in the weeks and months leading up to her death? Stripped of a century’s hagiography, Emily Davison’s life was not an enviable one. She had no family of her own, was unemployed and her health was poor. She had been in and out of prison for the last couple of years, which did not make getting a job any easier; indeed, it rendered her all but unemployable as a governess or teacher. Without the struggle for female emancipation, she would have been eking out a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, with no prospect of any improvement in her life as she grew older. She was wholly dependent upon the charity of friends, having no resources at all of her own.
A letter written to an old school friend gives some insight into her life in the early part of 1913. She wrote:
I am at present with my mother, who is glad to have me… The last four days’ hunger strike in Aberdeen have, of course, found out my weakness, and I have had some rheumatism in my neck and back, where I fell on that iron staircase. If it is wet or I am tired, both parts ache… At present I have no settled work here or in town… I wish I could hear of some work though.
Davison was constantly applying for jobs right up to her death, without success. Her family were evidently a little bitter about the fact that, although she had devoted her life to the suffragette cause, the WSPU would not give her a salaried position. Sending her a postal order, one family member said in the letter which accompanied this gift of money, ‘I do think the militants might remember your services and give you something’.
In the next chapter, we shall look in detail at the bombing of Lloyd George’s house at Walton-on-the-Hill. According to Sylvia Pankhurst, writing almost 20 years after the event, the bombing of Lloyd George’s house was carried out by Emily Davison and others. Sylvia Pankhurst was in the best possible position to know about it and had no conceivable reason to lie. This shows Davison to have been very careless not only of her own life, but also those of other people. The bomb exploded only 20 minutes or so before a group of workmen arrived at the house. Those who planted that bomb really did not care whether or not they harmed others in the process.
Sylvia Pankhurst was not the only associate of Emily Davison to know about her forays into terrorism. More evidence is to be found in the words of one of her close friends, Edith Mansell-Moullin, who, together with her husband, was closely involved with the campaign for women’s suffrage and who wrote an account of Emily Davison’s life. Before doing so, she asked, in a letter to a mutual friend, whether she should, ‘leave out the bombs?’ The fact that this close friend and Sylvia Pankhurst both thought that Davison had been handling bombs puts the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Both thought very highly of Davison and neither had any reason for inventing such a thing.
And so we come to that most famous incident in Emily Davison’s life, the only event in her life of which most people have even heard. On 4 June 1913, she bought a return ticket to Epsom. Earlier that day, she had visited the WSPU offices to pick up two suffragette flags in green, white and purple. When asked why she needed them, she was evasive. She told one woman that if she read the evening paper that day, then she might see something about the business.
Much has been made about the significance of Davison’s choosing to buy a return ticket to Epsom as though this sheds some light upon her state of mind. In fact, for excursions to Derby Day, it was no cheaper to buy a single ticket than it was to purchase a return. Besides, even if Emily Davison had been intending only a protest which would not entail her own death,
she would surely have realised that arrest was inevitable. Whatever she planned, it must have been pretty clear when she bought that return ticket that she would not in fact be using the return half. Either she would be in a police cell, hospital or mortuary.
In later years, stories emerged that Davison, perhaps in the company of friends, had practised grabbing horses and attaching things to their bridles. Shortly before the Derby, she had visited the village of Longhorsely, not far from her mother’s home in Northumberland. While there, she had supposedly been seen at Longhorsely racecourse, trying to grab the bridles of moving horses. It is worth noting that this story did not come to light until years after Davison’s death. The idea that it would be possible to attach a flag to the bridle of a horse travelling at 30 or 40 miles an hour is so preposterous that it may probably be discounted. If that was really the object of the exercise when Emily Davison went to the 1913 Derby, then it suggests that her mental state was even more fragile than anybody could have guessed.
Once she arrived at Epsom, Davison made her way to the racecourse and positioned herself at Tattenham Corner, which was where the Pathe´ newsreel cameras were filming the race. Whether this was deliberate or mere coincidence, it means that we have a filmed record of what happened when the horses thundered round the bend. Most of the riders had passed, leaving four or five trailing behind. One of these was the King’s horse, Anmar, ridden by Herbert Jones. The figure of a woman ducks under the barrier and runs out onto the racetrack. One horse swerves slightly and avoids her. Then the woman raises both arms above her head and appears to be standing in front of, or clutching at Anmar. When a horse weighing half a ton and travelling at 35 miles an hour hits a human body under such circumstances, the result will surprise nobody. The woman is knocked under the flying hooves and as the animal’s legs become tangled up, it trips and performs a somersault, throwing the rider and landing on top of him.
In recent years, there has been much debate as to Emily Davison’s intentions that day. Was she trying to get herself killed or was her aim only to disrupt the race? Could she have been trying to pin one of the suffragette flags to the horse’s reins, or possibly slip a scarf over its head, so that the King’s horse carried the green, white and purple colours past the finishing line? A scarf in the suffragette colours was found near her. Might she have hoped to loop this round the horse’s neck as it thundered past?
In 2013, the centenary of her death, a television documentary subjected the film of that fateful Derby to modern analysis. It was claimed that this showed clearly that Davison was trying to grab at or pin something on the horse’s reins and not throw herself deliberately beneath the horse at all.
The debates about Emily Davison’s precise motives on Derby Day 1913 miss the point. Her intentions are, in a sense, irrelevant; it is her actions which show what sort of person she was and these indicate that she did not care who she harmed that day. She chose to run in front of and interfere with a galloping horse carrying a rider, thereby not only risking her own life, but also that of whoever was riding the horse. Her own injuries were certainly caused by her actions, but there was another victim of her behaviour, one who is almost never mentioned in accounts of the incident.
It was little short of a miracle that Herbert Jones, the jockey of the horse in front of which Davison ran, was also not killed that day. His horse turned a complete somersault and landed on top of him. In the event he suffered only concussion and a dislocated shoulder. The legal position when somebody behaves in such a dangerous fashion though is quite clear. Emily Davison was legally and morally responsible for the injuries to the jockey. She had evidently not cared in the least if somebody else was hurt as a consequence of what she did. While she was lying unconscious in hospital, the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that ‘if Miss Davison recovers, it will be possible to charge her with doing an act calculated to cause grievous bodily harm’.
One more detail is usually left out of the reckoning when Emily Davison’s story is recounted today: that she was without doubt guilty of inflicting GBH upon Jones, a man with whom she could have no possible quarrel. Combining this with the unprovoked attack on the Reverend Jackson, the attempted arson at two post offices and the bombing of Lloyd George’s house we have a more rounded portrait of the suffragettes’ most famous heroine.
Herbert Jones said in later years that he was ‘haunted by that poor woman’s face’ and he was greatly affected psychologically by Davison’s death beneath the hooves of his horse. He himself committed suicide many years later and there is at least a suspicion that his inadvertent role in Emily Davison’s death was connected with his own suicide.
Reading the contemporary newspaper accounts of this race is a disconcerting experience today. In retrospect, the only possible point of interest that day can surely have been Emily Davison’s behaviour? Even The Times was more concerned with the fact that the favourite, Craganour, although the first horse past the post, was subsequently disqualified by a stewards’ enquiry and the race given to Aboyeur. It was the first time in many years that such a thing had happened at a Derby and for most newspaper readers this was of far more consequence than another suffragette protest.
The suffragettes had finally found the martyr they needed and Emily Davison’s funeral was turned into a grand exercise in propaganda. The inquest into her death, held in Guildford on 10 June, brought in a verdict of accidental death from a fractured skull, caused by ‘being accidentally knocked down by a horse through wilfully rushing onto the race course at Epsom Downs Surrey on the 4th June 1913, during the progress of a race’.
For the WSPU it was infinitely more advantageous to depict her as a suicide and martyr to the cause of women’s suffrage, than to have her death treated as merely an accident. Writing in the popular news-paper, the Daily Sketch, Christabel Pankhurst said that, ‘The government’s refusal to grant the vote drove her to make her protest. Argument has not convinced Mr Asquith of the seriousness of the position, but perhaps a woman’s death will’.
It was plain that the WSPU intended to milk this death for all that it was worth. Not unnaturally, Emily Davison’s mother in Northumberland wanted her daughter to be buried near to her, but it was still possible for the WSPU to make capital from the death by an ostentatious funeral procession in the capital. It would be interesting to know what Mrs Davison made of this attempt to wring every advantage from her daughter’s death. She seemed herself to regard the suffragette movement with a certain amount of disfavour, at least in their dealings with her daughter. She could not have expected her daughter to die, because she wrote a letter to her at the hospital in Epsom, saying, ‘I cannot believe that you could have done such a dreadful act, even for the cause which I know you have given up your heart and soul to. It has done so little in return for you’.
It would also be interesting to know why Mrs Davison thought that the cause had done, ‘so little’, for her daughter. There were hints after her death that the leadership of the WSPU regarded the over-zealous Emily Davison with a certain reserve and did not feel that she was really one of them. She was never given a paid role in the organisation, which meant that she was constantly struggling for money.
Her body was brought from Epsom to Victoria Station and transported across London to Kings Cross, where it travelled north to Davison’s mother’s home. A spectacular parade was laid on through central London, with mourners dressed in the suffragettes’ colours marching along behind the hearse. What the dead woman’s mother would have made of this exploitation of her daughter’s death can only be imagined. Between Emily Davison’s action at the Derby and her funeral in Northumberland on 15 June, there were a number of suffragette attacks, including one which caused over £7,000 worth of damage at another racecourse.
On the night of 8 June, a patrolling police constable noticed flames coming from some wooden buildings at Hurst Park. An off-duty fireman gave evidence that he had seen two women heading towards Hurst Park at about 10.45pm. They were each c
arrying a bag, but when seen later had nothing in their hands. Copies of The Suffragette were found near the burned-out stand at the race track.
When the police learned that the WSPU had it in mind to hold a spectacular demonstration to coincide with the transfer of Emily Davison’s body from Victoria Station, where it was due to arrive from Epsom, to King’s Cross (where it would be returned to her mother’s home town of Morpeth) there was some uneasiness. They suspected, quite correctly as it turned out, that the suffragettes were planning to exploit the passage of the body through central London for political ends. Writing on behalf of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, Chief Clerk, W.H. Kendall sent a letter to Mary Allen, who was organising the procession for the WSPU. In it, he wrote:
Madam, – Having regard to the traffic conditions in the streets through which the funeral procession has to pass, I am directed to warn you that as all reasonable facilities must be given to the ordinary traffic, the progress of the proposed funeral cortege may be greatly hindered, and if the crowd of sightseers is more than usually large, it may prove impractical for the hearse to reach the church in time for the service there. In order to convey the remains from one railway station to another in a seemly and reverent manner, the hearse should be accompanied by a limited number of mourners only and taken through streets where traffic conditions will not interfere with its progress. The police will be prepared to indicate a suitable route.
This is a curious letter. It sounds very much as though the police feared that the suffragettes would be turning Emily Davison’s funeral into a three ring circus; references to a ‘crowd of sightseers’ and the need for a ‘seemly and reverential manner’ certainly appear to hint at such an attitude.
