On 4 October 1911 Mrs Pankhurst set off on an American tour and Davison was one of a party who gathered at Waterloo station to bid her farewell. Every mile Mrs Pankhurst travelled proved symbolic, putting more than mere physical distance between them. Never again would Davison be so close to her leader in spirit. When the government reneged on its promises to further some form of women’s suffrage an uneasy WSPU ceasefire was immediately lifted, and Davison launched a fresh initiative that brought her into conflict with Mrs Pankhurst. From being someone with the leader’s ear, she was marooned on the periphery. Her actions came to be regarded as those of a self-aggrandising maverick feeding on the oxygen of publicity. She grew to be a thorn in the leadership’s side. In short, a liability. The salaried workforce of the WSPU now exceeded a hundred women but Davison was soon no longer one of them.

Davison’s latest bout of impetuosity landed her in the dock of the Central Criminal Court on 10 January 1912 charged with attempting to destroy the contents of letter-boxes. ‘The obvious next step after window-breaking was incendiarism,’ she declared. She’d manufactured miniature fire bombs by wrapping boxes of wax matches in linen soaked with kerosene, which over a period of six days she lit and dropped into letter-boxes in the streets adjoining the Houses of Parliament. When Davison promptly surrendered to the nearest policeman she was ignored – until one eventually caught her red-handed. ‘She has given the police a great deal of trouble,’ the arresting officer informed the court. She replied: ‘I contented myself with doing just sufficient to make my protest. I ignored pillar-boxes in Aldgate because the people there are of a poorer class.’ One further comment is telling: ‘I did this entirely on my own responsibility.’

If Davison’s claim to acting independently hadn’t inflicted enough damage by exposing her to accusations of being a maverick and a renegade, the tactic itself backfired spectacularly. Her trial resulted in the draconian sentence of six months’ imprisonment. Quite possibly she hadn’t curried favour by informing the Court:

If that tirade wasn’t enough to get under the judge’s skin, she ended by stating: ‘Justice cannot be perfect when the prisoner is very often judged by a judge who was not in the highest possession of his faculties.’

As a long-term prisoner in Holloway she enjoyed greater privileges than before, especially as outside pressures had ensured some relaxation in the prison’s regime. The daily exercise hour became positively joyous, with the women, who included Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence (jailed for being the leaders of the WSPU and therefore held responsible for the recent spate of incendiarism), even playing ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May on a cold and frosty morning’ and impromptu games of football – played ‘with especial vigour by Davison who became very hot and tired’ according to a fellow inmate. During the evenings there were now opportunities for singing, storytelling and reading aloud; a scene from The Merchant of Venice was performed, Davison adapting Shylock’s ‘If you prick me…’ speech by substituting ‘Woman’ for ‘Jew’. A mock election was organised and even a fancy dress ball. The scene painted by more than one suffragette chronicler is redolent of a dormitory of a girls boarding school resounding to jolly japes.

A book of songs and poems written by the incarcerated suffragettes appeared in due course. Entitled Holloway Jingles, Davison’s contribution, dated 28 April, was called ‘L’envoi?’:

This comparative idyll – by Holloway standards – was shattered by Mrs Pankhurst insisting on a hunger strike in protest at the denial of first-class status to the majority of the suffragettes. This was the first prison term in which Davison hadn’t initiated a hunger strike from the outset. Even so, she’d been forcibly-fed for a week when her health was deemed to be declining. The strike was called for 19 June. Three days later, just days before her due date of release, Davison was once more threatened with being forcibly-fed. In light of what was to happen at Epsom, her response was significant:

Davison sustained two injuries to the head, two of her vertebrae, the right shoulder blade and the sacrum. She was released on the 28th, ten days early, with an endorsement from Dr Craig ringing in her ears. ‘Don’t do any more for your cause,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘You have done more than enough.’

Craig’s official report makes some interesting observations worth highlighting:

Davison could be credited with forcing not only the release of her fellow hunger-strikers on 6 July, but also the broader public debate of the issue in general. Yet she received scant recognition from her movement other than an additional bar to her Medal of Valour. In the light of subsequent events at Epsom, her claim that her actions in Holloway’s stairwell graduated from a gesture into a serious suicide attempt has tended to be accepted with little scepticism, an interpretation fuelled by her adoption of highly charged phrases like ‘one big tragedy may save the others … quite deliberately … I should undoubtedly have been killed … as I meant’.

But this was not the case. Many among the suffragette leadership viewed her boast as spurious at best, showboating at worst. Hers was a ‘suicide attempt’ confessed with the benefit of survival; there were no farewell letters to loved ones or the kind of valediction for posthumous publication that a self-publicist like Emily Davison would’ve surely left. Others pointed out that a woman of her intellect would have known the netting was stretched along the galleries specifically to prevent suicides so that she was bound to be unsuccessful.

Significantly, Davison’s account of her latest ‘sacrifice’ in Holloway went unrecognised by her movement. It was printed in the Daily Herald on 4 July, but not in The Suffragette until after her death. Sylvia Pankhurst later confided:

This latest spell in Holloway had, without question, transformed Davison, both physically and mentally. She’d never endured a sentence longer than a month in the past and it’s probable that five months of undernutrition and malnutrition had weakened body and mind in equal measure. Holloway’s foundation stone carried the inscription: ‘May God make this place a terror to evil doers.’ In her case it had done its very best. She’d entered Holloway weighing 9st 12.5lb; she came out weighing 7 stone 8.5lb. She looked haggard; nearer sixty than forty.

Henceforth, her struggle would indeed be ‘terrible’. Three years on this treadmill of fasting and forcible-feeding was driving her to the brink of insanity. Now, more than ever, once her blood was up, one action inexorably fed another, each one more irresponsible, illogical and unreasoning than the last. What began rationally veered toward the irrational. She really was out of control, in grave danger of running amok. One line in Dr Craig’s report screamed out: ‘She is impulsively inclined and might do any rash act.’

Davison’s descent into the vortex was triggered by Mrs Pankhurst’s demand for heightened militancy at a Royal Albert Hall rally on 17 October 1912 which she concluded by ‘inciting this meeting to rebellion’. She went on: ‘Some women are able to go further than others in militant action and each woman is the judge of her own duty as far as that is concerned.’ Her leader had effectively given a ‘freelance militant’ like Davison carte blanche to do as she wished.

Davison’s loosening grasp on reality in the final months of her life may be gleaned from two unpublished essays. The first, dated 10 February 1912 and thus written in Holloway, was entitled ‘The Real Christianity’. In it she stated ‘the civilised world today is living a hideous lie! It professes to be Christian, but the teaching of the new Revelation is deformed and misrepresented.’ The second, more famous discourse was entitled The Price of Liberty. This revealing document, running to seven pages and undated but likely also written while serving this latest sentence, remained, like the account of her Holloway ‘suicide-bid’, unacknowledged by her movement until after her death, appearing in The Suffragette of 5 June 1914 (a week after it had been printed in the Daily Sketch). In this tract Davison resorts to language that, taken at its every word, implies a mind if not actually set on martyrdom, then at least in the early stages of disintegration and self-destruction. It reads like a strange hybrid of Bible-bashing fire-and-brimstone and chivalric fantasy, full of religious rhetoric and crusading ideals. However, to Davison and other like-minded suffragettes this brand of florid tub-thumping was the language of choice. One can be sure that Emily Davison believed every word of it.

She transforms Jesus’s parable of the ‘Pearl of Great Price’ into a suffragette war cry, referring to ‘the true suffragette … the true warrior … the perfect Amazon … who will sacrifice everything in order to win the Pearl of Freedom for her sex … the Vote’.

What was required to secure this ‘pearl’ is nothing less than a modern-day Joan of Arc, inspired by the call of God and empowered by His constant presence. Someone like Emily Davison.

Words gushed out of Davison with the constancy of a burst water-main. She bombarded the press with her assorted ramblings. No fewer than fifty-five of her letters and articles were published during the five months following her release from Holloway. The outlets ranged from nationals such as the Sunday Times, Daily Graphic, Daily Herald, Manchester Guardian and Evening Standard to provincial papers like the Newcastle Daily Journal, Birmingham Evening Dispatch and the Aberdeen Daily Journal. One letter, drafted in September, discusses the kind of ‘sacrifice’ required to win the Vote: ‘The sacrifice varies according to circumstances. It may be loss of livelihood, position, wealth, relatives and, not least common, loss of health or even possibly life.’ Another, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 26 August, ended with a prophecy: ‘But a time will come, which some of us may not see with our bodily eyes, when the nation will have exacted a sufficiently terrible crucifixion … but the price will have been gladly paid.’

Before that price was ‘paid’, Davison’s exploits plumbed farce. In late November she travelled to Edinburgh and then on to Aberdeen, being lent the money so to do by the firebrand Scottish suffragette Ethel Moorhead: there she was intent on disrupting a speech to be delivered by Lloyd George on Friday 29th. The following morning Lloyd George was due to leave on the 10.20 train to Kirkcaldy amid heavy police protection. Davison inveigled her way onto the train and sat down in his compartment where he was stood talking to a woman passenger. When her target made to leave shortly before the train was scheduled to depart, she leapt to her feet and drawing a dog-whip (the suffragette standard weapon of defence) from her skirt dealt him a series of stinging blows across the face, exclaiming ‘Villain, traitor! Take that – and that!’

Unfortunately, the man she was lashing wasn’t Lloyd George, but the Reverend Forbes Jackson, of Aberdeen’s Crown Terrace Baptist Church, who was seeing his wife off on her journey to Glasgow. With his thick moustache and silver curls, Jackson did bear a striking facial resemblance to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but even after he revealed his identity Davison continued to pummel him. ‘Oh, it’s all right, I know you are Lloyd George,’ she screamed. ‘You have disguised yourself but you cannot hide yourself!’

Davison was dragged from the train by policemen and passengers, though not before managing to strike Jackson twice more with her fists. Possibly, Jackson was lucky, for the police later found a carving knife secreted in her skirt. Davison gave her name as ‘Mary Brown’ (Mary Leigh’s birth-name) and was bailed to appear in Police Court. In the interim she told the Aberdeen Daily Journal: ‘You people in Aberdeen may think you are up against a soft thing in dealing with the suffragists, but you will find the wall harder to get over than you believe.’

The trial was notable for Davison’s long-winded oration. It elicited numerous outbreaks of laughter at her expense from the court officials and the public gallery. The Baillie fined her £2 or ten days’ imprisonment. She took the latter and left the dock shouting ‘I protest, sir!’ and, waving to the gallery, ‘No Surrender!’ However, there was a surrender of sorts, because after fasting for four days in Craiginches Prison her fine was paid. Although her action had degenerated into a shambles, Davison still got her publicity, particularly in America where the story was carried in newspapers from Oakland to Atlanta.

This Aberdeen episode raises another obvious question besides that of Davison’s grasp on reality. Why go so far north as Scotland to harry Lloyd George when, as she’d proved before, opportunities presented themselves all over England? The answer may lie with personal attachment rather than political principle. And in so doing raises the issue of Davison’s sexuality and its role in manufacturing a militant suffragette.

Davison preferred the companionship of women. Of that there can be no doubt. At the time of her death we know for a fact she was enjoying a relationship with an ‘intimate companion’. The point is franked by this lady being sat alongside Davison’s mother and sister in the leading carriage of the Morpeth funeral cortege and being identified as such by the Morpeth Herald. She was referred to as ‘Miss Morrison’. There are reasons to believe she may have had an Aberdeen connection.

Tainting Davison with the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ may seem gratuitous. However, the possibility can’t be ignored because lesbianism was certainly rife among the suffragette sisterhood and undoubtedly accentuated the ferocity of its anti-Establishment, i.e. anti-male, attitudes and behaviour. Davison lived among a community of passionate women; united by passion and driven by passion. Their gatherings were drenched with religious fervour; their marches evoked images of crusaders leaving for the Holy Land. They saw themselves, and were viewed by the public at large, as revolutionaries, law-breakers and outlaws, a persecuted minority. In this highly charged atmosphere the boundaries separating camaraderie and love might easily become blurred, and then crossed in the quest for emotional solace. These passionate women needed relationships to sustain them during times of enormous physical and psychological pressure and tension. It would be ridiculous to believe anything otherwise. And if that relationship was with a member of their own sex, so be it. After all, unlike homosexuality, lesbianism was not illegal despite all female sexual activity outside wedlock still being deemed immoral in the eyes of the public.

Even in the first decade of the twentieth century both politicians and the popular press weren’t averse to stooping to smear campaigns with regard to the sexuality of suffragettes. Since first being described as ‘she-males’, the press had taken to stating how WSPU organisers tended to be unmarried, as were 60 per cent of its subscribers; after one disturbance at the House of Commons, for example, the press made capital of the fact that eighty of the 108 arrested women were listed as ‘Miss’. The inference was crystal clear. In time, one writer would go so far as to describe the suffragette movement as the ‘pre-war lesbianism of daring ladies’.

These insinuations made no concession to prominent members of the movement. Many never married and several lived quite openly in single-sex relationships. One couple, Mary Gawthorpe and Dora Marsden, founded a journal called The Freewoman which actively discouraged marriage and condoned homosexuality. Mrs Pankhurst herself was pursued by the outlandish bisexual composer Dame Ethel Smyth who provided the music to March of the Women. Smyth’s preferred dress was tweeds, deerstalker and tie, making her look, as one writer put it, ‘forever poised for an assault on the Matterhorn’. Smyth drooled over her beau ideal’s ‘well-knit figure, the quick deft movement, the soft bright eyes that could emit lambent flame … if you were to come to me now all I could do would be to hold you in my arms … and be silent’. Mrs Pankhurst’s noisy, cross-dressing one-time chauffeur, Vera Holme, was another often mistaken for a man. She was known as ‘Jack’, and the bed she shared with the Hon. Evelina Haverfield had the initials ‘V.H.’ and ‘E.H.’ carved upon it.

Two of the Pankhurst girls were also objects of desire. Sylvia enjoyed a close relationship with the American Zelie Emerson that was described as ‘very intense, possibly even sexual’. However, it was Christabel, her tack-sharp intellect complemented by a set of chestnut curls and full-lips that might have been lifted from the finest Roman mosaic, who made many a female heart flutter. ‘Hundreds, perhaps thousands of young women,’ wrote her sister Sylvia, ‘adored her to distraction.’ None adored her more than Annie Kenney, an exceptionally pretty, blue-eyed and golden-haired ex-mill worker from Lancashire who had initially attached herself to Pethick-Lawrence, a woman of self-confessed confused sexuality. Pethick-Lawrence did marry, but her attraction to Kenney ‘was so emotional and so openly paraded’ that it frightened Teresa Billington-Greig. ‘I saw in it something unbalanced and primitive.’ In time Kenney switched her attention to Christabel Pankhurst. ‘Annie’s devotion,’ wrote Pethick-Lawrence, ‘took the form of unquestioning faith and absolute obedience, and the surrender of her whole personality.’ Others acidly referred to Kenney as ‘Christabel’s blotting paper’. Mary Blathwayt, supplanted in Christabel’s affections by Kenney, reacted cattily by alluding to Kenney’s promiscuity, recording in her diary that ‘Annie slept with someone else last night’ or ‘There was someone else in Annie’s bed this morning’.

Of course, women ‘sleeping’ together didn’t necessarily make them lesbians in the Edwardian sense of the term, let alone the modern: none of the sexual contact by which lesbianism has become defined may have occurred. Preferring the company of women and loving them to the exclusion of men may have involved nothing more erotic than holding hands and walking arm in arm. Furthermore, many suffragettes, like Davison herself, were short of funds; sharing accommodation and beds offered a material benefit to go with the emotional. Until the publication, and banning, of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928 the general public was largely ignorant of the physical aspects of female relationships.

Davison’s sexual orientation might be argued an irrelevance, yet it adds another combustible element to an already combustible personality. Certainly the issue has tended to be skirted, as it has in the context of the Pankhursts. The fact that by the age of forty Davison seemed to be living Faire Emelye’s ‘desire to be a maiden all my life, never will I be a lover or wife’, or that she’d spent her entire working and personal life in the company of women, in school, college and prison, doesn’t make her a lesbian. Indeed, cynics might argue that Davison’s expulsion from the WSPU’s ‘lesbian-dominated’ inner circle constitutes a strong case for her not being so inclined. Conversely, a well of Sapphic love might have served to intensify her passion for emancipation. If, as Dr Johnson suggested, patriotism is the last refuge of the nation’s scoundrels, then fanaticism may constitute the final port of call for its misfits, outcasts and outsiders. To those of a particular temperament this kind of unjust ostracism must be met with an equally outrageous response. In that context, Davison’s sexuality has significant relevance. Even in denial. There is a known correlation between denial of one’s sexuality and a propensity to self-destructive behaviour.

Fate and the WSPU had left Davison primed and ready to detonate; her actions might be acknowledged or they might not. How that knowledge must have rankled with someone described only a few years earlier as one ‘who has given up her whole life for the cause’. Bruised in body and soul, how she must have seethed.

In January 1913 she wrote to her college friend Rose Lamartine Yates from Longhorsley:

The letter ends with the plaintive thanks of an increasingly troubled soul:

Davison signed the letter ‘Emelye’. Her lifelong identification with Chaucer’s virginal Amazon showed no signs of waning. ‘Faire Emelye’ remained a male chattel. Davison still wished to be the Amazon who broke free; she even altered a key phrase in the first draft of The Price of Liberty to read ‘the perfect Amazon’ instead of ‘the perfect warrior’. But ‘Faire Emelye’ was consigned to the past. Prison had seen to that. Her golden mane was surrendering to grey; the skin stretched across her cheekbones like so much aged vellum; the dentures filling the gap on the right side of her mouth where two teeth were missing no longer fitted as snugly as they ought. However, she refused to yield. Every opportunity to spread ‘the word’ was seized, assailing passers-by from a grass verge, holding forth from an upturned tub in a farmyard, debating fiercely with her doctor and priest or addressing organised gatherings throughout the north. She pursued paid outlets for her writing talents at the Manchester Guardian, Daily Citizen and even the Nursing Times. Every day she filled fat sixty-page exercise books with essay after essay but not one editor deigned to offer her a job, considering her style too verbose and florid. ‘You can write, no doubt of that,’ replied the editor of the Daily Citizen. ‘You have only to learn the rules of journalism.’

Back in London, Christabel Pankhurst’s fire-bombing campaign was in full swing. Arsonists were deployed with rags, paraffin, wood shavings, candles and matches; the targets were empty, isolated buildings – rural railway stations, cricket pavilions and racecourse grandstands were tailor-made (though many of these blazes may have been insurance scams, with suffragette literature left as a smokescreen). So was the villa being built for Lloyd George adjacent to the golf course at Walton Heath; on 19 February it was ripped by a blast that rattled the window-panes of an inn 300 yards away. This outrage was attributed to Davison by Sylvia Pankhurst, but only after her death. Her participation seems unlikely. Home Office files omit any mention of her. More significantly, Davison’s modus operandi relied upon bare-faced defiance, the caught-red-handed attitude that had gained her the reputation as a publicity-seeker and earned the opprobrium of her leaders.

Mrs Pankhurst, as usual, accepted full responsibility and was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. The Suffragette announced a policy of ‘Guerilla Warfare – A Fight to the Finish.’ Houses were fired; empty railway stations and carriages bombed; the grandstands at Ayr and Cardiff racecourses were burned. On 7 May a bomb was discovered in the chancel of St Paul’s Cathedral. Suspicion immediately fell on the suffragettes. None claimed responsibility and the police failed to uncover any leads. This became another outrage with which Davison’s name was linked, but only once she was dead.

Nevertheless, Davison had no intention of being left on the sidelines even if her life continued to be nomadic during the first half of 1913. Her correspondence places her mainly in London: she was active on the streets of the East End collecting for the wives and children of the dockers; and served on the executive of the Marylebone branch of the Workers’ Educational Association that devoted itself to bringing higher education within reach of the masses. After years of living at 31 Coram Street in fashionable Bloomsbury, her London domicile was now 133 Clapham Road, the home of Mrs Alice Green, where she gratefully received the occasional contribution from her ‘loving sister Let’ – even if those letters did rub an open sore:

None came. Davison was reduced to applying for a job as a secretary with the Women’s Tax Resistance League. On Tuesday 3 June, the day before the Derby, she received a reply informing her the vacancy was only for a junior shorthand typist rather than a secretary; her testimonials were enclosed.

Thus, politically and personally, Davison could hardly sink any lower. If nothing could alleviate her private woes, something had to be done to relieve the political pressure. Parliament was blocking all hope of the Vote. Prison was endangering the lives of her colleagues. If their deaths were to be prevented it would only be as a result of public revulsion at their present treatment. In order to attract that public sympathy, only the most dramatic expression of suffragette zeal would suffice. Davison conceived plans for just such a demonstration. It would be the first of its kind. A copy-cat was not good enough. This escapade would forever be associated with her, and her alone. She saw how prominently sport figured in the mind of the average Englishman; she knew that his mind would be centred on the Derby. She would turn his excitement and expectation against him, forcing him to confront the crying needs of women instead of the selfish pleasures of men.

Stories abound concerning the motive, planning and execution of Davison’s actions: until any corroborating documentary evidence comes to light not one can be accepted with confidence. In his book One-way Ticket to Epsom, John Sleight recounts one Longhorsley slice of folklore referring to Davison being summoned to London by a mysterious telegram and discussing some kind of demonstration at Epsom with her mother before departing; Sleight quotes her cousin as asserting she left appearing ‘rather depressed and was not her usual self’. He goes on to relate how local suffragettes had drawn straws to decide who should carry out the demonstration and that the group saw Davison off at Morpeth station. None of this tallies with Davison’s known modus operandi by this late stage of her militant career viz planning and executing her actions in isolation. Nor was the story paid any kind of lip service by the WSPU on Davison’s death – which it surely would in its climate of manufactured martyrdom. Stanley and Morley’s book recounts a further Longhorsley tale of Davison practising for her forthcoming escapade on local horses. While this story might be taken to exemplify Davison’s penchant for meticulous planning, if proved to be true it merely serves to illustrate her declining grasp of reality since horses out in a field bear no relation to thoroughbreds racing at speeds approaching 35mph. The story’s veracity doesn’t pass inspection.

Whatever course of action Davison had in mind, we can be assured she kept it to herself. That Tuesday afternoon of 3 June she went to the WSPU’s grand summer fete, ‘All in a Garden Fair’, at the Empress Rooms on Kensington High Street where she met Mary Leigh. Her plans for the following afternoon weren’t even divulged to her closest friend and ally. They admired the hard work of the organisers; they smiled at the children dressed as brownies, elves and butterflies helping to serve strawberries and cream teas; and they laughed at the pillar-box marked ‘guaranteed safe’.

Finally, they paused before the large statue of Joan of Arc and Davison laid a wreath at its foot. Together they read the words of the movement’s patron saint carved on the pedestal, ‘Fight on and God will give the Victory’. According to Gertrude Colmore, Leigh asked Davison whether she would be attending all week.

‘I shall be at the fair all day every day except tomorrow. I’m going to the Derby tomorrow,’ replied Davison.

When pressed as to what she was going to do Davison cocked her head in that tantalising manner Leigh recognised as a precursor of impending mischief.

‘Ah!’ Davison replied. ‘Look in the evening paper and you will see.’