The prominence of Davison’s ‘intimate companion’ Miss Morrison at her funeral has always sparked intense speculation. Who was she exactly? And what exactly was the nature of their relationship? Anything that possibly adds to history’s understanding of Emily Davison, and the actions she took on Derby Day 1913, merits perusal and it would be remiss not to examine the facts as they are known.
Davison’s lack of male companionship has been attributed by those colleagues who subsequently went into print to her all-consuming commitment to teaching, good works and the pursuit of suffrage. There’s no mention of possible loathing, distrust or disgust for the male of the species – the charge often levelled at the suffragettes by their most misogynistic critics. As a role model for the male sex, her father had set the bar rather low, not only by obliging her to forfeit her college place and her mother to sell the family home but also by siring an illegitimate child. Davison often made plain her disgust at the manner in which women were degraded, professionally and personally.
If Davison did enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, the experience was likely to have been with a woman. The 1911 census lists her as ‘boarder’ with Charlotte Bateman, a fifty-year-old widow, at 31 Coram Street in Bloomsbury which she’d given as her London address for at least six months. At the time of her death she’d moved in with Alice Green and daughter at 133 Clapham Road. There’s no evidence to suggest either relationship was anything other than domestic. And although her circle of women friends is frequently listed, it’s seldom scrutinised for any relationship hinting at the sexual. Her closest friends were Eleanor Penn Gaskell, Rose Lamartine Yates (with whom she’d attended Royal Holloway) and Mary Leigh (with whom she’d shared gaol time in Holloway). All had married.
Leigh, however, had long since separated from her husband: she was born ‘Mary Brown’, the name Davison gave when arrested in Aberdeen. Also a teacher – and known as ‘The Bandleader’ owing to her role as drum major in the WSPU band – she was a dozen years younger than Davison, a working class girl from Manchester who’d married a local builder. She was mousy and soft-featured to look at, but chiselled from the same granite as Davison. Hers was the first hand to hurl a stone (‘It’ll be a bomb next time!’); hers the first body to be force-fed. ‘She was notable among us for her great courage,’ said Pethick-Lawrence. ‘Her calm and quiet demeanour seemed to add to her moral strength. She was adamant in her resistance to injustice.’ Like her friend, Leigh saw things in black and white, putting principles above WSPU internal politics and never afraid to act on them without informing the leadership. Her moral strength was matched by a physical courage belying her slightness (she was never averse to chasing hecklers) and earned her more prison time than Davison; she’d spent over six months of the previous year behind bars on three separate counts. Her standing in the movement was franked by her becoming one of the select few to adorn official WSPU postcards. In short, she was the kind of woman that Emily Davison wished herself to be.
Davison’s intense feelings for Leigh are broadcast in the present she sent her in December 1912 (it has been suggested that this gift was never sent because it later appeared in the papers and possession of Rose Lamartine Yates). The gift was a small green book, a collection of poems by the American Walt Whitman in the series Pearls from the Poets. On the title page she underlined in black ink the words ‘the institution of the dear love of comrades’ and added, in her distinctive large and bold handwriting, ‘from Comrade Davison to Comrade Leigh’. Throughout the volume evocative phrases and couplets are likewise marked: ‘None have understood you, but I understood you/I only find no imperfection in you/There is no virtue, no beauty, in man/Or woman, but as good as you/Dear friend, take this kiss/I give it especially to you – do not forget me.’ This speaks of an affection greater than the platonic. Yet it wasn’t Mary Leigh who sat in the chief mourners’ carriage in the funeral cortege through Morpeth, alongside Emily Davison’s mother Margaret and sister Letitia, and was publicly acknowledged in the Morpeth Herald as her ‘intimate companion’; this was a ‘Miss Morrison’. And resting beside Davison’s coffin was an open book carved from marble, destined for the graveside, on which was written: ‘A veritable princess of spirituality. From a loving Aberdeen friend.’
The likeliest candidate for the book’s donor is Katherine Riddell, a prominent Aberdonian suffragette whose letters to Davison reek of affection – which would explain how the tribute was commissioned and delivered so promptly: she simply brought it with her to the funeral. Yet the same might be said if ‘Miss Morrison’ and the ‘loving Aberdeen friend’ were one and the same.
‘Miss Morrison’ had been on close terms with Davison for at least three years, because an unposted letter of 27 June 1910 written by Davison’s cousin Isabella Bell includes: ‘Do you ever attend the suffragette meetings? Have you noticed Emily Davison’s name flourishing amongst them? We are expecting she will be through here for her holidays soon with Miss Morrison.’ The Morrison family is certainly known to all the Davisons because Letitia refers to them in a letter to her sister of early 1913.
The identity of ‘Miss Morrison’ has never been established satisfactorily. The lady might be Edith Morrison, a clergyman’s daughter from Ulster, recently a student at Aberdeen University and Vice President of the Women’s Suffrage Association in Aberdeen. Described as slight, shortish and in her late twenties, Morrison was said not to suffer silliness or romanticism. It’s no stretch of the imagination to envisage the junior intellectual in thrall to the senior. Morrison died an 81-year-old spinster in 1964.
A genuine soul-mate for Davison would have been ‘Margaret Morrison’. This was one of the aliases used by the Scottish suffragette, Ethel Moorhead, the first suffragette to be forcibly fed in Scotland. Suffragettes frequently gave false names to protect their families. There is no question Moorhead and Davison were acquainted. Moorhead had recently spent time in Aberdeen’s Craiginches prison with Davison following the ‘Lloyd George’ incident; Moorhead had thrown a stone at the Chancellor’s car. And it was Moorhead who lent Davison the train fare from Edinburgh to Aberdeen.
Three years younger than Davison, Ethel Moorhead was an acclaimed artist who’d flung herself into the suffragette movement with the same headstrong indomitability as her English alter ego: window-breaking, egg-throwing, tax-dodging and assaulting male foes. Two months after her imprisonment with Davison she was arrested as ‘Margaret Morrison’ for throwing cayenne pepper into the eyes of a constable; while on remand she flooded the lavatories by running the taps and threw a bucket of water over the warder who came to restrain her. The prison governor called her ‘insolent and defiant’; the medical officer described her as ‘a weak minded person of defective self-control’.
Moorhead enjoyed a long relationship with the suffragette Frances Parker and, in her own words, ‘we suffragettes snatched friendships as they rushed past on mad quests’. Like Davison’s, her kudos was entirely self-generated; she was a self-made heroine of the rank and file. Like Davison in England, she held no official position within the WSPU in Scotland. But nothing concrete confirms this match made in heaven.
If one does accept that the ‘Miss Morrison’ of the Morpeth funeral cortege was the ‘loving Aberdeen friend’ it may seem puzzling that Mary Leigh, and not she, subsequently made the annual pilgrimage to Davison’s grave. The ‘Miss Morrison’ who was Ethel Moorhead had a perfectly valid reason for not so doing: in the 1920s she moved to France and, eventually, on to Dublin, where she died in 1955. She never married.
Whether ‘Miss Morrison’ was the first or last ‘intimate companion’ enjoyed by Davison is academic. Yet the mere suggestion of lesbianism introduced by her presence does broaden the genesis of Davison’s espousal of everything blighting the condition of the female sex – and the consequent lengths to which that fervour might propel her.