Emily Davison, forty-one, a governess before becoming a full-time militant suffragette, died on 8 June 1913, four days after her protest at the Derby.
The police now closed in on the printers of The Suffragette. Nervous about their clients’ editorial, Messrs Speaight had recently ended their contract with the WSPU. The Victoria House Printing Company at Blackfriars, with financial backing from Henry Harben, took over, and were waiting for Christabel Pankhurst’s editorial before going to press. The police seized all the copy at the press but the pages were rewritten and printed, with some blank sections. When Edwy Clayton and the five women arrested at Lincoln’s Inn were charged at Bow Street Court the day after the raids, the magistrate Archibald Bodkin sent out a fierce warning to any printer who worked for the WSPU, saying that The Suffragette ‘must be put a stop to, as a continued danger to society … If there is any printer who can be found after this warning to print and publish the literature of these women associated with the WSPU, he will find himself in a very awkward position as the aider and abetter of these persons.’1 Bodkin also warned that anyone who spoke in favour of the Union or contributed to its funds would also be ‘in a very awkward situation’. The managing director of the Victoria House Printing Company, Sidney Granville Drew, was arrested and charged with conspiracy (along with Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond and five office staff at Lincoln’s Inn House). He was released on sureties of £2,000 and agreed not to print The Suffragette or any other WSPU literature again. The following week’s edition was printed by the National Labour Press of Manchester, whose manager, Edgar Whitely, was similarly charged, found guilty and sentenced to six days in prison before being immediately released.2
The government was taking all measures to drive the suffragettes out of existence, and yet they failed. More members of the WSPU emerged or re-emerged to help with the day-to-day running of Lincoln’s Inn House. Dorothy Evans, recovered from her time in Aylesbury the previous year, was secretly put in charge of headquarters and was also wanted by the police for her part in the distribution of the edition of The Suffragette on 2 May which told the story of the police raid. ‘The type was broken up by the police just as we were going to Press and the copy was confiscated.’3 Grace Roe went to Maud Joachim’s flat and they put the abbreviated issue of the paper together which was distributed direct to retailers all over the country and on the streets on 2 May.
Grace Roe had been understudying Annie Kenney as chief organiser in the event of Annie’s arrest. When she was interviewed by the BBC in 1968, she recalled that she had visited Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney in Paris, both of whom seemed uncertain as to what the government would do next. When Grace arrived at Lincoln’s Inn House on 30 April, ‘there was terrific excitement … the girls said, “We’re raided.” They had arrested all the departments and didn’t realise I was anyone at all. I lost myself with all the office girls – they were so wonderful those girls – no one will ever know.’ Grace witnessed rough treatment by the police: ‘I heard one of the young office girls clipped right at the top of her ears and flung across the room.’ One of the youngest, a girl aged thirteen or fourteen, went up to Grace, ‘her eyes sparkling, “Miss Roe, I’ve got the leading article.”’ She had been in the editorial room when Rachel Barrett and Geraldine Lennox were arrested and was quick-witted enough to see an article in Christabel Pankhurst’s handwriting, ‘and the little girl knew it would be our leader seized it and stuffed it into her blouse’. A new printer for the paper was needed and Grace went to her own bank ‘to get some money… and told the bank manager, “I want £500 and I want it now … If I haven’t got it I’ve got bonds to meet it.”’ The next day, disguised as an old woman, Grace visited Mrs Pankhurst, who was recovering from the effects of her hunger strike at Hertha Ayrton’s home, and then travelled to Paris for instructions from Christabel.4
Not long afterwards Dorothy Evans also went to Paris in disguise to receive instructions and articles from Christabel. An innocent woman also named Dorothy Evans was arrested by mistake and our Dorothy slipped back into the country and went on the run for six months, ‘moving from place to place leaving evidence as I went for the public to read of our determination to be governed with our consent or not at all’.5 (This was Dorothy Evans’ way of saying she set fire to empty buildings.) During the summer she briefly worked as an organiser in Bristol before being sent to a new WSPU branch in Belfast in September ‘to harry Sir Edward Carson, and his “provisional government”’.
In 1913, Sir Edward Carson was the leader of the twenty Irish Unionist Members of Parliament at Westminster, and the MP for Trinity College, Dublin. Since the general elections of January and December 1910, Herbert Asquith had relied on the support of the Irish Nationalist MPs in the House of Commons. The Irish Unionists detested the notion of Home Rule for Ireland and were alarmed that the prospects seemed promising for the Home Rule Bill. Carson led the Unionist opposition. The Liberal government were trying to remove the House of Lords’ veto on House of Commons legislation, and once this was achieved the last constitutional barrier to the Irish Home Rule Bill would be dismantled. The price of Irish nationalist support for the Liberals’ attack on the House of Lords was a new Home Rule Bill, which Asquith had introduced in April 1912. Edward Carson prepared to confront his biggest challenge, to preserve the union, ‘the guiding star of his political life’, and defeat Home Rule.6
Under the terms of the proposed Home Rule Bill women would not be enfranchised. In September 1913 Carson said that if the Home Rule Bill was passed he would set up a ‘provisional government’ in Ulster. Also, in a letter to the Ulster Unionist Council, Carson implied that his provisional government would enfranchise women on the Local Government Register. Sir Edward Carson was not known for his women’s suffrage sympathies, and, while it was a welcome development, the leadership of the WSPU wanted to hear his position confirmed in public. Under orders from Christabel Pankhurst, Dorothy Evans and her Irish comrades were instructed ‘to manoeuvre, and coerce by militancy if necessary’ Sir Edward Carson ‘by any means they could, to commit himself in public to saying that women in Ulster would be granted the vote’.7
While Grace Roe was in Paris a warrant was issued for her arrest on conspiracy charges, and when her train arrived at Southampton the police were looking for her. Grace had suffered from seasickness and was travelling in a first-class carriage with an elderly couple. When a policeman looked into her compartment, they told him to go away as the ‘young lady was very ill’.8 When Grace reached London she went to the home of Arthur Marshall and his wife Kitty, where there were policemen in the street. ‘As I got to the house I realised they had retired, the lights were on upstairs and it was dark downstairs. I gave the danger knock, a special knock and Mr Marshall, who was in his dressing-gown, came downstairs very quickly.’ He ushered Grace indoors and paid her taxi. Before leaving, Grace raided Kitty’s wardrobe. Kitty Marshall was known to wear ‘racy outfits’, and Grace Roe emerged swathed in a heavy veil and toque hat. Suffragettes on the run were helped by members of the Actresses’ Franchise League who loaned them wigs and disguises. Her friend Charlie Marsh would be disguised with a black wig and long silk coat and had to wear ‘a type of costume that worn in the day had the wrong sort of man looking at you’.9
It is time to introduce Mary Richardson, one of the more unconventional suffragettes. A member of the chorus, Mary always wanted to be a star. Her autobiography, Laugh a Defiance, describes someone who was determined to be at the centre of things. While on active service she adopted ‘Polly Dick’ as her militant moniker. Mary’s presence at some of the most dramatic events she describes have proved difficult to corroborate – especially accounts in the (unpublished) second volume of her autobiography. Mary’s desire to become a novelist (she made several unsuccessful attempts to be published) may have encouraged her pen to run away with itself.
Mary Richardson was born in Canada in 1883, an only child who was brought up by her mother and her maternal grandparents. In 1900, aged seventeen, she travelled to Europe with friends and when she joined the WSPU she was living above a shop in Bloomsbury. Mary had an allowance, and an inheritance to look forward to, and was desperate for awfully big adventures. She joined the WSPU in 1909 after encountering a persuasive young man on Kingsway – who turned out to be Mrs Pankhurst’s son, Harry. He was selling WSPU literature, surrounded by a hostile crowd who were trying to overturn his barrow: ‘When I got near I saw what a pale, delicate-looking fellow he was. But he had a very determined expression and he kept waving a pamphlet with “Votes for Women” printed across it.’10 Mary tells us she helped him by standing between him and ‘the threatening crowd’, and when he turned the barrow into Clement’s Inn, she followed him. The first person she met was Christabel Pankhurst, ‘a plump, pretty young woman’, who directed her into another room where Flora Drummond, ‘a stout little woman with cheery countenance rose at once from a chair and trestle-table, thrust out her hand and clasped mine with warm friendliness. Flora said: “So, you’ve decided to join us, eh, lassie?”’ Mary writes as if she joined the movement in a daze, not quite sure what she was letting herself in for; she had felt sorry for Harry, and her instinctive dislike of ‘injustice and cruelty’ drew her further into the campaign.11 She abandoned her plan of becoming a novelist and threw herself into a new life which would only be halted by the outbreak of the First World War.
Mary worked for the Kilburn branch of the WSPU for six months, reporting to Mrs Eleanor Penn Gaskell, ‘a large, full-bosomed lady’,12 and was sent in 1910 to help Helen Craggs at the newly-opened Woman’s Press shop in Charing Cross Road. While most of the shop’s customers were campaigning for the vote, Mary Richardson would sometimes find herself arguing with ‘an irate customer who would buy one of our leaflets and then tear it to pieces in front of us’.13 Mary also learned from more experienced members how to chair meetings. In 1961 when she was interviewed she recalled being ‘showered with vegetables and rotting fruit but what upset me more than anything was the disgusting remarks we were subjected to. Men would come up and whisper in your ear the most obscene remarks and were very nasty.’14
Mary Richardson had been sent as an official observer, rather than a participant, to Parliament Square on Black Friday. However, her thirst for excitement led her into one of the many scrimmages. ‘Sick at heart, I wandered across the square when it was all over. It was littered with the sticks and stones the ruffians had used on us, with pieces of clothing, hats and the fragments of our literature.’15 During the final eighteen months of militancy, Mary was arrested nine times, a ‘mouse’ being pounced on by the government’s big black ‘cats’. Early in the morning of 11 March 1913, Mary broke a window of the Home Office in protest at the arrest the day before of five suffragettes who tried to throw petitions into the King’s carriage en route to Parliament. Although this was Mary’s first arrest, she was sent to Holloway for a month in the second division.16 The rest of her summer was spent released on Cat and Mouse licences, being arrested four times on new charges, returning to prison, going on hunger strike and being released on licence. On 12 July, Mary was released, only to be rearrested six days later, on 18 July, for breaking a Home Office window. When charged at Canon Row police station, she threw an inkpot through the window and was returned to Holloway. By 30 July she was out again and rearrested for obstruction.17
Emily Davison went to the 1913 socialist May Day celebration. She marched to Hyde Park, ecstatic to be part of the crowds, singing ‘The Marseillaise’, ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’: ‘I felt a revolutionary of the revolutionaries and ready and proud to take part in any great demonstration for the liberties of the people … We felt ourselves to be the heirs of all the ages and sires of the great, great future.’18 Emily’s exhilaration bubbled in an unpublished article, ‘A Militant Mayday’, full of fervour. Listening to trade union heroes like Ben Tillett and Will Thorne, Emily got carried away and her conversion took another step in that ‘feast of socialism’. Perhaps her genteel but hard-up childhood, ten years of being a governess, a newly independent and frugal life, her radicalisation in prison, and the feeling that she was being ignored by the WSPU leadership were evidenced in a more class-conscious analysis.
On 7 May Emily learned of the failure of Mr W. H. Dickinson’s second attempt to introduce women’s suffrage as a private members’ bill (the first had been in 1907). His ‘Representation of the People Bill’ had been defeated by forty-seven votes. Sylvia Pankhurst suggested that hopes for success had not been high: there were rumours that despite Asquith promising a ‘free vote’, the bill, which would have enfranchised women householders and the wives of householders, would not pass its second reading.
Wounded by the rejection of her May Day article by the Daily Citizen, and short of money, Emily returned to Longhorsley. She would have enjoyed The Suffragette’s call to arms on the front page titled ‘A Famous Militant’ and showing a bronze statue of Joan of Arc in full armour on horseback. Christabel Pankhurst’s caption read: ‘Joan of Arc lives on as the glory and inspiration of France. To British women also she has left a great inheritance … of simplicity, purity, courage, and militancy … She belongs to the womanhood of the whole world, and the women of our country are one with the men and women of France in adoring her memory.’19
The Daily Sketch published Emily’s last article on 28 May. The language of ‘The Price of Liberty’ is apocalyptic. ‘The perfect Amazon is she who will sacrifice all … to win the Pearl of Freedom [the vote] for her sex. Some of the bounteous pearls that women sell to obtain freedom … are the pearls of friendship, love and even life itself.’ Emily refers to the ‘terrible suffering’ she has endured, the loss of ‘old friends, recently-made friends, and they all go one by one into the Limbo of the burning fiery furnace, a grim holocaust to liberty’. She argues in favour of making ‘the ultimate sacrifice’, happy to pay the ‘highest price for liberty’. ‘The surrender of life itself is the supreme sacrifice … to lay down life for friends that is glorious, self-less, inspiring!’
On 1 June Robert Field of the Daily Citizen started his irascible note to Emily: ‘If you had as many preoccupations as I have, you would better understand why I have been such a dilatory letter-writer.’ He was cross that she had pestered him about an unsolicited article, and was brutal about a poem she had sent: ‘I have worried over it a great deal trying to decide what the author intended. The idea is quite good but the workmanship leaves something to be desired.’20 For an impecunious would-be poet, desperate to be a journalist, Field’s note and an offer of a cup of tea ‘one afternoon next week … not Monday’ must have seemed churlish. Two days later Emily received her last letter of rejection. She had applied for a job with the Women’s Tax Resistance League, but she was advised they required a junior shorthand typist, not a secretary. Now forty years old, with a first-class honours degree in English, ten years’ teaching experience and an impressive suffragette curriculum vitae, Emily could not get a junior post even with a women’s campaigning organisation.21
Emily had agreed to be a helper at the Suffragette Fair and Festival at the Empress Rooms, Kensington, on Derby Day, but she decided to visit the fair the night before, and discussed with Kitty Marion and others ‘the possibility of making a protest on the race course, without apparently coming to any decision’. As the women strolled into the festival, they were faced by a statue of Joan of Arc, bare-headed and holding her sword pointing to heaven. On the plinth were emblazoned Joan’s reputed last words: ‘Fight On and God Will Give the Victory.’ The event was a fundraiser for the war chest and the mood was sombre. The suffragettes were on a war footing. Emily placed a laurel wreath at the feet of ‘the virgin fighter and martyr who uplifts and inspires us all’. Before leaving the fair she gave Kitty Marion ‘a tiny green chamois purse containing a sovereign for munitions I might need’.22 Emily then returned to the Lambeth home of Mrs Alice Green, the friend with whom she was lodging.
The weather on Wednesday 4 June 1913 was forecast to be sultry with thunderstorms. The King’s jockey, Bertie Jones, was to ride Anmer in the Derby Stakes at three o’clock. Jones arrived from Newmarket with Richard Marsh, the King’s trainer, and half a dozen stable lads. Racegoers caught the last trains from London at midnight and milled about the town in the small hours. Epsom buzzed, cosy Surrey meeting the Wild West. At noon, Bertie Jones and Richard Marsh went to the jockeys’ dressing room where Jones dressed in the royal silks, transformed from an eight-stone man-child of thirty-three into an exotic bird with a purple body with gold frogging, black cap and scarlet plumage.
That morning Emily left Alice Green’s home at 133 Clapham Road, Lambeth, and walked to Oval to catch a tram to Victoria station, where she bought a return ticket for Epsom Downs. Before she left she told Alice what she was going to do. She pinned a purple, white and green flag inside her jacket and took her latch key, a small leather purse containing three shillings and eight pence and three farthings, eight halfpenny stamps and a notebook. Another suffragette flag was tucked up her sleeve. Emily walked to the racecourse and bought a Dorling’s List of Epsom Races.
Emily Davison marked the first three horses past the post on her race card and then came the Derby. It was easy for Emily to identify the object of her journey: the King’s horse Anmer was number one, and she had already seen ‘Jockey Jones’ gallop past in the royal colours. At odds of fifty to one, Anmer was not much fancied that day.
Emily made her way to Tattenham Corner, a tricky place for horse and rider in the gruelling mile and a half race. This was the biggest day out in Edwardian England. Here at three o’clock, the apex of the social pyramid met its base. The King and Queen and their entourage added glamour to an occasion that welcomed both the establishment and the working class at play.
Emily squeezed close to the rails. As the race started the sixteen horses and riders ran straight for three furlongs before the course climbed to a gradient of one in fifteen. Anmer made a good start. At seven furlongs the field took the left turn downhill for five furlongs and this is where Anmer fell away to the group at the back. The leading horses pounded towards the spot where Emily was waiting. Tons of horse flesh and men flashed past, spittle, sweat, huge eyes rolling with the effort, the noise of the crowd was bewildering. Everyone was screaming the names of their horses for that brief moment, and jumping up and urging them on. The trailing bunch, including Anmer, approached. Emily fiddled with the sleeve of her jacket, bobbed under the white railings, and made history.
Clutching her unfurled tricolour of purple, white and green, Davison dashed out to make her protest at the lack of progress on women’s suffrage in general, and the treatment of Mrs Pankhurst in particular. By targeting Anmer she was reminding King George V of his government’s callous injustice to women. Emily stood with her arms above her head, and then stepped in front of Bertie Jones and tried to grab the horse’s bridle.23 She was knocked over screaming. ‘The horse struck the woman with its chest, knocking her down among the flying hoofs … and she was desperately injured … Blood rushed from her mouth and nose. Anmer turned a complete somersault and fell upon his jockey who was seriously injured.’24 Anmer recovered himself, and Bertie Jones, whose foot was stuck in the stirrup, was dragged for a few yards. Oblivious to what was happening the spectators who stood to the left of Emily turned to follow the race, but those to the right of her were puzzled by what was happening in front of their eyes. There was chaos: the jockeys behind Jones cursed and struggled to pull away from the woman who had invaded the track. Anmer cantered off with a few cuts to his face and body, apparently none the worse for his fall.25
Steve Donoghue, one of the top jockeys of the day, was lucky not to be knocked off and wrote later that it was a miracle six more horses had not been brought down. He thought it was an act of ‘criminal folly brought on by the freak of a mad woman’s brain’.26 The crowd invaded the course and surrounded the jockey and the suffragette. Emily was unconscious. The police had to hold the crowd back, who were angry with her for spoiling the day and embarrassing the King. Emily was taken in a motor car to Epsom Cottage Hospital, and was there looked after by the House Surgeon, Dr Peacock. Police Sergeant Frank Bunn filed his report later that evening while the events were still fresh in his memory. 27
At first Bertie Jones lay unconscious where he fell, the left side of his body badly abraded and bruised. He was attended by a racegoer, Dr Percy Spencer of Tooting, and was taken to the racecourse doctor. Bertie recovered consciousness but was concussed, and his left arm was put in a sling. He tried to shrug off his injuries and refused to go to hospital.
There were film cameras at Epsom that day to satisfy the Empire-wide demand for stories about the royal family and Derby Day. Emily’s deathly dash was recorded on film and history was made on twenty feet of silver nitrate. She became the most famous suffragette, a heroine for all women who struggled for equality. Her jerky movements on grey, grainy film have played for a hundred years. Shots of the film were made into stills and distributed to the press ready for the first edition of the next day’s newspapers.
At Newmarket they called Emily ‘that malignant suffragette’. King George V wrote in his diary:
A most disastrous Derby … I ran Anmer, just as the horses were coming round Tattenham Corner, a suffragette (Miss Davison) dashed out and tried to catch Anmer’s bridle, of course she was knocked down and seriously injured and poor Herbert Jones and Anmer were sent flying. Jones unconscious, badly cut, broken rib, and slight concussion, a most regrettable and scandalous proceeding … A most disappointing day.28
Queen Mary sent Bertie a note wishing him well after his ‘sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman’.29 The Home Office and Metropolitan Police revealed that the Director of Public Prosecutions advised: ‘If Miss Davison recovers it will be possible to charge her with doing an act to cause grievous bodily harm to the rider of the horse.’30
Suffragettes formed a guard of honour around Emily’s bed and hung purple, white and green bunting above her. The flag she flourished had traces of her blood and mud and grass stains. The widely held belief is that Emily never regained consciousness, but a letter from Eleanor Penn Gaskell to Emily’s friend, Miss Dixon, revealed that she did come round but could not speak. Mrs Penn Gaskell told her:
Our heroine is now partly conscious, that is to say she shows recognition when addressed by name and can take food but makes no attempt to speak. It is thought she may remain much in this state for about a fortnight but in any case will not be able to be moved for a fortnight. The injury is to the head, the extent will not be ascertained for a fortnight – no bones broken. Her head struck the horse – she suffers no pain. She makes slight favourable progress and I think that is all there is to be said. We must wait patiently … they are most kind at the little hospital and she lacks for nothing.31
Mrs Penn Gaskell was proud of Emily’s actions: ‘What splendid courage. What a wonderful message she has sent through the length and breadth of the land. I am sure the sacrifice will not be in vain. I wish I could give you more definite and better news but it is early days yet and the injury of course was very serious’, and signed off the letter, ‘Yours in the Cause’.32
On 6 June Mr Charles Mansell-Moullin operated to relieve the pressure on Emily’s brain but she died, on 8 June. The Coroner recorded a verdict of death by misadventure: the cause ‘a fracture to the base of the skull caused by being accidentally knocked down by a horse through wilfully rushing on to the race-course … during the progress of the race’.33
A letter from Emily’s bewildered mother lay on her bedside table: ‘I cannot believe that you could do such a dreadful act. Even for the Cause which I know you have given up your whole heart and soul to, and it has done so little in return for you. Now I can only hope and pray that God will mercifully restore you to life and health and that there may be a better and brighter future for you.’ There were cards from well-wishers, a fan letter from a lunatic in Banstead Asylum and two poison-pen letters, one from an ‘Englishman’ who hoped she suffered ‘torture’ until she died: ‘I consider you are a person unworthy of existence … and I should like the opportunity of starving and beating you to a pulp.’34
On 8 June the WSPU’s creation of spectacle began. Emily was given a ceremonial funeral for her ‘noble sacrifice’ and the dues of ‘a fallen warrior’, ‘a brave comrade’ and ‘crusader’. In Votes for Women there were tributes from her closest friends. Mrs Penn Gaskell: ‘Emily Davison was one of the most wonderful personalities I have ever known’; Constance Lytton: ‘I have known her as the most cheerful companion, the truest upholder of our Great Cause’, and Rose Lamartine Yates: ‘She had felt the call, she knew that suffering and outraged womanhood looked to her.’35 In private the WSPU leadership was not pleased with Emily’s protest. Before Emily died Christabel Pankhurst distanced the Union, insisting that they knew nothing about it: ‘We were as startled as everyone. Not a word had she said of her purpose. Taking counsel with no one, she went to the race-course, waited her moment and rushed forward.’36 But Emily’s death changed everything: the WSPU had to honour her as their first martyr. A secular saint was about to be sanctified. A year later Mrs Pankhurst wrote: ‘The death of Miss Davison was a great shock to me and a very great grief as well and although I was scarcely able to leave my bed, I determined to risk everything to attend her funeral.’37 However, as Mrs Pankhurst left for Emily’s funeral service she was arrested by two detectives waiting outside Hertha Ayrton’s house where she was recovering from being on hunger strike. Not all women’s suffrage campaigners were uncritical of Emily’s protest: Philippa Strachey, Secretary of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, wrote:
this society is taking no part in … Miss Davison’s funeral. While respecting the fact that Miss Davison’s action was done in good faith it is impossible not to realise that she risked the lives of many innocent people, and we deplore her actions. We have to realise that such an occurrence does great harm to our cause by alienating many people who would consider it right to give the vote to women but who do most strongly believe it is wrong to endanger the lives of other people.38
On Saturday 14 June 1913, a special guard of honour of Emily’s closest friends brought her body from Epsom to Victoria railway station. Six thousand women marched from Buckingham Palace Road to Emily Davison’s funeral service at St George’s Church, Bloomsbury. Ten brass bands marched behind each section playing funereal marches. The coffin was escorted by Elsie Howey on a white horse dressed as Joan of Arc, and two contingents of hunger strikers walked behind the hearse which was laden with wreaths. Charlie Marsh made her final appearance for the suffragette cause as the standard-bearer at the head of the procession.
Grace Roe, still on the run from the police, organised the funeral. She asked several clergymen to hold the service before the Reverend Charles Baumgarten agreed to hold it in his church. Perhaps he knew Minnie Baldock and the WSPU from its early days in West Ham, when he was the vicar of St Gabriel’s church. Grace went in disguise to the funeral. Caprina Fahey, Leonora Tyson, Elsa Myers, Eleanor Glidewell and Dorothea Rock were five of the twenty-two ‘group captains’ leading sections of the procession.
Banners in purple silk included Joan of Arc’s last words: ‘Fight On and God Will Give the Victory’. Central London stopped. Some people jeered as the suffragettes walked past. Following the coffin, in the first carriage, were Emily’s mother, her sister Lettie, her cousin Jessie, and Miss Morrison, ‘Miss Davison’s intimate companion’. There were cries of ‘Three cheers for Herbert Jones’, and a brick hit the coffin. The crowds broke through the police cordon when the suffragette cortège reached the church. Newsreel of the procession showed Mary Leigh saluting Emily’s coffin as it left the church. Guarded by suffragettes in white and wearing black armbands, and protected by the police, Emily’s body lay in state at King’s Cross station, accompanied by a thousand wreaths, before a journey to Morpeth. She was interred in the family grave, alongside her father and his first wife. Emily’s posthumous life was about to start with Mary Leigh’s plans for the Emily Wilding Davison Club, the Emily Wilding Davison Lodge, and the Emily Wilding Davison Pilgrimage to Morpeth on the anniversary of her death. The possessions found with Emily at Epsom Cottage Hospital were cherished for many years by Rose Lamartine Yates.39 Gertrude Baillie-Weaver, whose pen name was ‘Gertrude Colmore’, published The Life of Emily Davison before the end of the year.
On the day of the funeral, Canon Aitken and his wife heard that their daughter Violet had reversed her recent decision to leave her job at The Suffragette and pursue a literary career. They were unhappy about her determination ‘to go on with their wretched paper, she feels it would look like she was deserting the cause to leave them now’.40
In private the suffragettes and Emily’s family and friends tried to understand her intentions, and a discussion as to whether her protest was an act of suicide persists to the present day. At the time there were plenty who thought that she had deliberately given her life for the Cause. There are several indicators that Emily Davison took her own life. For the last six months of her life, her journalism, mostly unpublished, reads like a suicide note. While the consensus was that she had ‘given her life’ no one would use the word ‘suicide’, which was an illegal act until 1961. Perhaps Emily was troubled by the death on 21 February of the clergyman she attacked in Aberdeen six months earlier. The purse she was carrying contained a dog-eared newspaper cutting announcing the Reverend Forbes Jackson’s death, leaving a widow and six children. The Times was in no doubt that she – although unnamed – was the cause. Emily would not have known he died of pernicious anaemia, caused by a chronic deficiency of the vitamin B12. As she learned more about the man she had whipped – he trained Baptist missionaries for the Congo and had exposed the genocide and amputations practised on the Congolese on the orders of King Leopold of the Belgians – this may have added to her depressed mood suggested in her writings. A good man had died and she was being blamed.41
People insist that because a return ticket was found in her purse this shows she had not meant to take her own life, but on the day it was cheaper to buy a return than a one-way ticket. Emily knew the risks when she stepped in front of Anmer. She was familiar with horses: in 1900 there were a quarter of a million of them in London, and when she worked as a governess for the Moorhouses in Northamptonshire, the Pytchley Hunt met there. It might be said Emily knew more about horses than most. Bertie Jones suffered from depression after Emily jumped out in front of him; he was ‘haunted by that woman’s face’ as he and Anmer ran her down. His career faltered and ended after the First World War; he suffered from poor health for the rest of his life. Years later, on 17 July 1951, Bertie Jones’s son, John, found his father dead in a gas-filled kitchen: the Coroner’s verdict ‘suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed’.42
The day before Emily Davison’s funeral procession through the streets of London The Suffragette depicted Emily on the front page as an angel with large wings; her halo includes the words, ‘Love that Overcometh’, and the image is captioned: ‘In Honour and Loving, Reverent Memory of Emily Wilding Davison. She Died For Women.’ Other headlines in the newspaper were: ‘Boathouse Burned Down’; ‘Mansion Destroyed Near Trowbridge’; ‘Station Fired At Glasgow’; ‘Attempt To Fire The Royal Academy’; ‘Mr Churchill’s Stormy Meeting’ and ‘Grand Stand in Flames’.43 The battle continued.
Emily Davison was a loose cannon who always pursued her own militant path, inventing a new form of protest – setting fire to pillar boxes, a tactic frequently copied by her comrades. Her cell protests brought militancy into the prisons where she served her sentences, and these methods were also adopted by other suffragette prisoners. While Emily was not disciplined by the WSPU for her wayward behaviour, it was perhaps the reason why her contribution was not rewarded by warmer and closer relations with the leaders and their acolytes, and a senior, paid position. In fact, she was more popular in the WSPU in death than she was in life. Apart from her maverick ways, on a personal level her sometimes overbearing manner grated – perhaps informed by a life of being a poor relation – and meant the obvious promotions did not come her way. When Emily was dead the leaders took notice of her and used her death in their propaganda war. The impact of her sacrifice was immediate: she filled the pages of the national press for days; there was a spike in arson attacks carried out by women who wanted to salute her martyrdom. Politically her actions at the Derby made no difference, but the suffragettes had shown that at least one of their women would give her life for the Cause and raised the possibility there were more waiting in the wings.