THE KING’S HORSE AND

EMILY DAVISON

1913

ON 14 JUNE 1913 LONDONERS FLOCKED BY the thousand to Epsom Downs in Surrey for an afternoon of beer and betting. It was Derby Day, and in the stands with his binoculars was the King himself, George V, the bearded son of the bearded Edward VII, whom he had succeeded in 1910. The King owned one of the less fancied entries, a colt named Anmer,^* and as the horses reached the halfway stage, the sharp bend at Tattenham Corner, Anmer had already fallen back in the chasing pack.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the crowd. ‘I noticed a figure bob under the rails,’ recounted one eyewitness in The Times next day. ‘The horses were thundering down the course at a great pace bunched up against the rail.’

The figure was a forty-year-old university graduate and teacher, Emily Davison, a ‘suffragette’ – so called because of her campaigning for female suffrage, votes for women.

‘The king’s horse Anmer came up,’ recounted another spectator, ‘and Miss Davison went towards it. She put up her hand, but whether it was to catch hold of the reins or to protect herself I do not know. It was all over in a few seconds. The horse knocked the woman over with very great force, and then stumbled and fell, pitching the jockey violently onto the ground. Both he and Miss Davison were bleeding profusely.’

Anmer rolled over, got to his feet, and galloped off down the course to complete the race without his rider. The jockey, Herbert Jones, lay ‘doggo’ on the ground till the last horse had passed, then sat up gingerly – he had a bruised face and fractured rib, with mild concussion. But Emily Davison did not move. She lay crumpled and unconscious, thrown to the ground with such force that her spine had been fractured at the base of her skull. She never regained consciousness, and died four days later.

Emily Davison was a passionate member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel. The Pankhursts had campaigned for many years through the Independent Labour Party, the predecessor of the modern Labour Party, until the ILP, fearing that middle- and upper-class women would vote for their opponents, had grown lukewarm on female suffrage. Working men (who routinely banned women from their clubs) were as prejudiced as the males of other classes, realised the Pankhursts. So in 1903 they had founded the WSPU to fight on the single issue of votes for women, demonstrating peacefully to start with, but resorting to law-breaking as they got arrested for ‘obstruction’. ‘Deeds not Words’ was their motto, and their deeds became more extreme as feelings escalated.

Emily Davison’s personal motto was ‘Freedom against tyrants is obedience to God’. In 1909 she had written the words on slips of paper and tied them to rocks that she hurled at a carriage containing David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer – she had been sentenced to one month in prison.

This was one of seven prison terms that Emily served between 1909 and 1912 for offences that included obstruction and breaking windows in the House of Commons. Her longest sentence was six months for setting fire to public postboxes. ‘Argument is no use,’ she once said, defending the fierceness of suffragette demonstrations, ‘writing, speaking, pleading – all no use.’

Going on hunger strike while in prison, Emily suffered the dreadful ordeal of forcible feeding: she was held down while a rubber tube was pushed down her throat or up her nostril, then, inevitably, vomited up the fatty brown soup that was poured down the tube. When she barricaded herself inside her cell to escape the feeding, the authorities flooded it with freezing-cold water. In furious protest, she threw herself down an iron staircase, knocking herself out and seriously damaging her spine. She was never free from pain again.

‘I give my life,’ she declared, ‘as a pledge of my desire that women shall be free.’

So dramatic were some of Emily’s protests that history has tended to assume she travelled to Epsom in June 1913 with her mind made up to die. But newsreel film of the incident suggests that she was only trying to slow Anmer down by grabbing his reins – and that was the impression of Jones, the royal jockey. In her pocket were found a return rail ticket, and two flags in the suffragette colours.

‘She had concerted a Derby protest without tragedy,’ explained Sylvia Pankhurst, Emmeline’s second daughter ‘ – a mere waving of the purple-white-and-green at Tattenham Corner which, by its suddenness, it was hoped, would stop the race.’

Whatever the intentions of Emily Davison, her death did not impress people at the time, only confirming popular prejudice against the wildness of the suffragettes. ‘She nearly killed a jockey as well as herself,’ complained The Times, ‘and she brought down a valuable horse . . . Reckless fanaticism is not regarded by [the public] as a qualification for the franchise.’

It took the terrible war of 1914-18 to transform attitudes, as women moved into offices, shops and factories to take over the jobs of men. Mrs Pankhurst suspended suffragette protests – it would be pointless, she argued, to fight for the vote without a country to vote in – and her conciliatory attitude prompted the politicians to climb down.

‘Where is the man who would now deny to woman the civil rights she has earned by her hard work?’ asked Edwin Montagu, the Minister of Munitions, in 1916. In June 1918, five months before the war ended, the vote was given to women over the age of 30 who were ratepayers (council-tax payers) or married to ratepayers. Ten years later suffrage was extended to all women, on the same terms as men.

In the short term, Emily Davison’s gesture on Derby Day may have been counterproductive, but over the years it has come to be romantically symbolic of the fight for women’s rights – and that was how her fellow campaigners saw it at the time:

Waiting there in the sun, in that gay scene, among the heedless crowd [wrote the journal Votes for Women in June 1913], she had in her soul the thought, the vision of wronged women. That thought she held to her; that vision she kept before her. Thus inspired, she threw herself into the fierce current of the race. So greatly did she care for freedom that she died for it.