For a woman with a fragile hold on the tiller of reality one may yet imagine Davison striding down Kingsway in the direction of the WSPU headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn House with a firmness of purpose on the morning of Wednesday 4 June 1913. After glancing at its window display (including postcard portraits of leading suffragettes – though not one of herself), she went inside and demonstrated her high spirits via an exchange as cryptic as that with Leigh in the Empress Rooms. She requested two flags. When asked their purpose, according to Colmore, she cocked her head to one side. ‘Perhaps I’d better not ask,’ said the knowing suffragette behind the counter. ‘No,’ Davison replied, ‘don’t ask me.’

Davison tucked the suffragette tricolours under her arm. On reaching Victoria station she counted out eight shillings and sixpence to buy a third-class return ticket to Epsom Downs. After presenting it at the barrier, she boarded one of many Derby Day ‘specials’. She placed the return half of her ticket inside her black suede clip purse. In her other pocket, a handkerchief competed with her door key and a black ‘memo’ book whose well-scuffed appearance reflected frequent usage and testified to her thrift. Each page was tightly packed with meticulous entries of her daily expenditure. Wedged between the pages were two loose postal order counterfoils; a railway insurance ticket (issued on 10 May: 25 shillings per week if she should be disabled and £200 to be paid in the event of death); some stationery and stamps; and her helper’s pass for that day’s ‘All in a Garden Fair’. She had to be back in Kensington for the evening session.

Davison joined the multitude that had been building since dawn. The manual worker had either walked the sixteen miles from London or come by charabanc; the tradesman had kept her company on one of the ‘specials’; the businessman and gentleman had taken to the road in their chaise, carriage or fashionable (albeit unreliable) motor-car, seeking periodic respite from the choking dust to wet their whistles at The Swan in Clapham and The Cock in Sutton. She braved the odd spot of rain to complete the final uphill leg of her trek on foot just as the King and Queen stepped from their special train at one o’clock to conclude theirs in a landau. King George looked splendid in black silk topper and dark grey frock-coat, a white carnation in his buttonhole and wearing the Guards tie; Queen Mary was dressed in navy blue crepe de chine over white, and a hat trimmed with pink and red roses. The King received a round of cheers, to which he and Queen Mary responded with limp waves born of protocol. One or two called out ‘Happy Birthday, Your Majesty!’ Yesterday was the King’s forty-eighth birthday and George could be excused if his mind was already contemplating the evening’s banquet at Buckingham Palace.

Epsom was now so congested that roads leading to the course were closed at 11.30. The panorama greeting Davison was one to take her breath away: this was a fete in stark contrast to the refined sort she’d frequented the previous evening in the Empress Rooms. The Downs resembled a vast ant-heap of humanity, its busy army of punters impersonating ‘workers’ while the profusion of carriages, motor cars and motor-omnibuses edged around more sedately in the manner of so many stray beetles. Every person had his or her place: each enclosure was distinguishable by its dress code, a tell-tale sign of the English class system. The flat caps, mufflers and cigarettes cupped furtively in backs of hands that predominated at the bottom of the scale on the Downs gave way to boaters and mackintoshes neatly folded over arms in the Silver Ring; then bowlers, stiff collars and umbrellas in the grandstand; until, finally, top hats and morning suits held sway in the Members’ enclosure. Stretching out up the straight against the inside running rail was ‘Charabanc City’ where some 200 scarlet motor-omnibuses provided mobile grandstands; between them were rows of trestle tables laden with food and drink at which sat countless Pearlie kings and queens, their heavy, button-encrusted coats bringing rivulets of sweat to their jolly red faces. The Downs’s beating heart was the gypsy encampment, the annual summer congregation of Romanies, tinkers and travellers from all over the British Isles. Washing-lines pegged-out with clothes were strung between the brightly painted caravans; motley collections of ponies were tethered to stakes; goats, chickens and dogs roamed at will. Groups of women, their faces burnt nut-brown by many summers on the open road, their shiny plaited and pigtailed black hair just visible beneath colourful bandannas and headscarves, gold hoops swinging from one ear and a pink carnation behind the other, toiled over a succession of large black cauldrons while their menfolk played pitch ’n’ toss and their children spun tops.

Davison was assailed by the overpowering sensations of sound and smell. The aroma of rich fare wafted across the track from the distant grandstand. In one massive kitchen alone chefs were cooking 400 lobsters, 130 legs of lamb, sixty-five saddles of lamb, 130 shoulders of lamb, 150 ox tongues, 100 sirloins of beef, 500 spring chickens and 350 pigeon pies. Closer to hand, stalls offered fish ’n’ chips, pie ’n’ mash and jellied eels to feed the working-class stomach while occasional banners declaring ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ offered mobile mission stations prepared to feed their souls.

Cutting through this fug was the noise of Babel. There was no charge for spectators on the Downs and it was a raucous playground for the proletariat to enjoy their unofficial holiday. There were grinding hurdy-gurdies; shrill organ music accompanied the carousels enabling would-be jockeys to sit a horse. Touts like ‘Donkey Jimmy’ fished for mug-punters with desperate promises of ‘an outsider to beat the field’. Three-card tricksters enticed the gauche with insidious patter; the proprietors of boxing booths bellowed challenges to the foolhardy; rifle galleries, menageries and peep shows competed for custom just as raucously. Ventriloquists and fiddlers, negro tap-dancers and banjoists, strong-men, acrobats and magicians: all readily entertained at the toss of a coin into a welcoming hat. Noise assaulted the senses from every angle. It was enough to make anyone’s head spin. Especially if, like Emily Davison, they were unused to it.

Not for her the limelight of the biplane trailing its advertising banner; or the man on the cross-bar suspended beneath a balloon who was throwing out handbills. She knew her spotlight would glare from a newsreel camera.

Eustace Loder had seen it all before, yet he felt on edge as he drove into Epsom with his nephew Merrik Burrell. He needed another Classic winner, preferably a Derby winner; moreover, unlike Spearmint, one of his own breeding. Loder would have needed cast iron for brains to deaden the recurring chorus in his head: if only he and Noble Johnson had kept Veneration II, it would be his colours, not Bower Ismay’s, that Craganour would be carrying in the Derby.

Although his loathing for Ismay remained constant, the issue gnawing deepest, as it had for over six months now, was an occurrence dreaded by every breeder of bloodstock: disease. The previous autumn an influenza epidemic had erupted on one of his stud farms, Old Connell, located just three miles from Eyrefield Lodge.

Loder acquired the 560 acres of rich Liffey floodplain for £12,500 in 1906. He spent the same amount again to transform a run-down cattle farm into an up-to-date stud farm, constructing stallion boxes, foaling units and stabling for visiting mares. The six-feet of alluvial soil at Old Connell yielded lush grass ideal for mares and stallions and became home to Spearmint. On 10 November 1912 Loder heard from Noble Johnson that one of his mares at Old Connell, Glimmerglass, had gone down with a high temperature and a distressing cough. She recovered, but on the 28th of the month May Race (the Irish Oaks winner of 1900) was struck by the same symptoms and died eight days later. By this time a third mare, Gallantry, was also afflicted and she, too, succumbed. Then a fourth mare, Martellina, died. ‘Every possible precaution was taken to keep the affected animals isolated from the rest of the stud,’ Johnson wrote later, ‘and the men tending them were not allowed to go near other stock.’ Even so, a fifth mare, Sweetbread, was to die on 18 January.

Eyrefield Lodge, home to Pretty Polly and the choicest mares, was unaffected. One of those mares was Auspicious and, early in December, she was sent to England to be mated with the 2000 Guineas winner of 1910, Lord Rosebery’s Neil Gow, who stood at the Adstock Manor Stud in Buckinghamshire, belonging to Charles Prior. One other mare from Eyrefield accompanied Auspicious to England along with six from nearby Conyngham Lodge. Prior expressed surprise that the mares had been sent so early and, in due course, that no indication of any epidemic at Old Connell had been provided by Johnson or Loder at that juncture. When he queried why mares were being moved a good eleven to fourteen weeks before their foaling dates – and thus earliest covering dates – Johnson confined his answer to insisting ‘he liked to get the mares away early as the weather was uncertain’. Auspicious had been at Adstock for a month when she fell ill; within weeks twenty-four mares on Prior’s farm went down with contagious influenza, six of them fatally.

Prior made no bones about expressing his views. He said that despite numerous letters and telegrams, he was not informed of the problems at Old Connell until as late as 24 February, and that, self-evidently, Loder had sent him an infected mare. More to the point, he suggested Loder must have known Auspicious might be infected before he sent her to England. The Old Connell outbreak had begun, he declared, as early as September – which accounted for her being sent away before Christmas for a covering season that never commenced before 14 February. Why else, he asked, would the priceless commodity that was Pretty Polly be moved on 5 December to the Fort Union Stud in Adare, well in advance of her intended covering by Desmond, if it were not for Loder and Johnson being fully alert to the dangers of the epidemic spreading? Prior demanded £20,000 in damages – the equivalent of winning all five Classics in one season, or very nearly £1 million in modern currency.

Loder was appalled. It was an unforgivable slur on his personal and professional integrity to suggest that he, a breeder of Classic winners and a Steward of the Jockey Club, might stoop to such subterfuge and endanger other breeders’ stock. He pointed out that none of the other mares sent to England with Auspicious had become ill. Therefore, she must have contracted the sickness at Adstock. Moreover, he disputed Prior’s claim that her symptoms were the same as those exhibited by the sick animals at Old Connell. Prior stated Auspicious ‘had turned very queer and had a sort of fit and suffered total loss of appetite’. Loder maintained this seemed commensurate with an old liver complaint Auspicious developed whenever over-fed. ‘It never entered into Major Loder’s or my head there was the slightest danger in sending these mares from Eyrefield,’ said Johnson, ‘and we acted in good faith.’

Prior wouldn’t be mollified. The dispute was bound for the High Court, alleging ‘breach of implied warranty and negligence in sending a mare … when she was infected with contagious influenza’, and that his business was ‘greatly injured … completely ruined and closed’. He saved his most damning indictment until last: ‘If a man knew, or ought to have known, of any infection or vice in a horse which he sold or sent to another man’s stable, and did not disclose it, he was liable for the consequences.’

Eustace Loder was stymied. Settle or counter attack? Eyrefield owned a name beyond reproach, even before he acquired the property, and thanks to the exploits of Pretty Polly and her kin, he’d built on that reputation to the degree that there had never been the slightest breath of a suspicion or suggestion against the management or conduct of the stud or of his horses. Now their names were being traduced. Pay up, concede Prior was correct, and his reputation was besmirched. But if he fought back, only to lose the case in the courts, he would face losing even greater kudos among his peers. The situation was intolerable.

‘Major Loder was about the very last man in the world to run any risk of damage to any stud,’ wrote Johnson, ‘and I think through all the subsequent worry of the lawsuit nothing troubled him more than the action of Prior in accusing him of this very act.’ Johnson’s recollection of a meeting with Loder in London in early 1913 isn’t without significance for subsequent events:

In fact, Eustace Loder hadn’t been feeling well. The occasional headache was hardly cause for concern, but the dull ache that frequently made itself felt at the base of his back and into his groin most definitely was. Even more so when he found blood in his urine. His doctor confirmed Bright’s Disease, an affliction of the kidneys. No money could buy a cure. It was a disease that had claimed the life of Czar Alexander III and President Arthur of the United States, Lord Rosebery’s wife Hannah and Bower Ismay’s own mother six years earlier. Blood-letting, diuretics and laxatives were all the medical profession could offer beyond advising complete bed-rest in preparation for the inevitable. Loder’s breathing and eyesight would fail, his blood pressure would rise, his face would grow puffier through oedema, the aches and vomiting increase. He was a dead man walking.

First Ismay’s shenanigans with his sister-in-law. His home-bred Craganour in another man’s colours. Then Prior’s accusations. Now failing health. On Wednesday 4 June 1913, it’s fair to say that Eustace Loder had a lot on his mind.

The course over which the race would be contested posed the supreme test of a thoroughbred, demanding a blend of speed and stamina, adaptability and agility in equal balance. Balance, in point of fact, was a key requirement for any Derby candidate, for the vagaries of the Epsom course had long since led it to be regarded an unsuitable venue for identifying the country’s best three-year-old. ‘It is a singular Turf anomaly,’ the Illustrated London News had once observed, ‘that the greatest race in the world should be run over perhaps the worst and most dangerous course we have. Jockeys dread it not a little.’

Nothing had changed. The track still went up and down, demanding horses to gallop uphill one moment and then, with the ground falling away beneath their hooves, downhill the next. It switched one way and the other, right and left. In places changes of gradient and direction came simultaneously. The inherent dangers to man and beast were obvious and were exacerbated by Epsom’s racing surface. The chalk sub-soil of the Downs was highly porous and, in an age lacking any form of artificial watering and next to no track husbandry, promoted only the shortest cover of grass which by high summer could ensure hard underfoot conditions akin to a road. To make the situation worse, the Downs were public land, much walked over and ridden on, which compacted the cover and did little to assist turf growth. Finally, in addition to these physical demands placed on its participants, the Derby insisted on mental toughness, the equable temperament to absorb this fusillade of physical challenges amid a barrage of noise from 250,000 spectators and their engines of entertainment in the centre of the course.

The gauntlet to be run started opposite the grandstand, across Langley Bottom, alongside the trees in front of Downs House. Before the introduction of the starting gate in 1900, the start could be shambolic: there were no fewer than fourteen false starts in 1830, for example, and in 1857 the field was at the post for an hour before a successful start was effected. Horses were now obliged to stand almost motionless behind the gate instead of approaching at the canter in anticipation of getting a ‘flyer’ when the starter let them go. Even so, a horse might still whip round and lose valuable ground once the tapes rose. From the gate the course dog-legs to the right through the opening quarter-mile before bearing left at Captain Durand’s Corner and straightening out. All the while it’s rising, attaining its highest point just short of the six-furlong pole where it’s 134 feet above the start point. This is where stamina has been tapped: any horse that uses too much energy in the first, uphill, section of the race will have no reserves to fight out the finish. There follows 300 yards of level ground along the crest of the hill before the course begins the left-handed bend that prefaces the hair-raising descent down Tattenham Hill and its notoriously sharp corner into the straight. This critical section of the track was much straighter in alignment before the First World War and even more redolent of plunging down a cliff and turning sharp left on hitting the beach. Hereabout a horse needs courage; his rider must be fearless, nerveless. Fred Archer tackled the descent as if he were abseiling. His great rival, possibly even his superior, George Fordham, detested the Hill. Among contemporary jockeys in 1913, Danny Maher considered it dangerous whereas it brought the best out of Steve Donoghue.

When the runners swing round Tattenham Corner they have dropped forty feet inside 300 yards and are approaching speeds of 35mph. Early pace-setters will be dropping back while patiently ridden horses try to advance. Heels can be clipped and horses tumble, as happened to Sir Martin, the favourite in 1909. This is where agility and balance come into play. If a horse has travelled badly down the hill, time spent recovering balance at the top of the straight may cost the race. The three-and-a-half furlong straight that beckons continues to drop away in front of the runners until well inside the final furlong where there’s a gradual rise to the finishing line which, though of just three feet, may assume the appearance of a mountain too far.

There’s one more obstacle lying in wait: the straight is far from level, possessing a noticeable camber: the ground on the stands side of the track is some six feet higher than that on the inside rail. It’s a trap waiting to ambush many a tiring horse or rider through the final surge to the winning post. Hit an exhausted animal on his right flank and he might easily roll down the camber into the rail or any opponents on his inside. This ordeal will take the winner somewhere between the two minutes 35.2 seconds recorded by Lemberg in 1910 and two minutes 45.4 recorded by St Amant in 1904, depending on the conditions and early pace. The track record stood to Pretty Polly, who clocked two minutes 33.8 in the 1905 Coronation Cup. If any horse was going to challenge that time it would surely be her kinsman Craganour.

Tattenham Corner was the first location Emily Davison encountered that offered the opportunity she craved: direct exposure to the newsreel cameras. The ‘Newsreels’ of the day were known as ‘Topicals’ i.e. showing items of ‘topical’ interest. They usually ran up to five minutes and changed twice weekly along with the cinema main feature. The leaders in this field were Pathé’s Animated Gazette and Gaumont Graphic (both from 1910), Topical Budget (1911) and Williamson’s Animated News (1913). Coverage featured crowd scenes, parade, canter, start, Tattenham Corner, the finish and the lead-in. Since these companies jostled for the same locations there were few variations in camera angles or content. At just short of seven minutes, Pathé’s footage was the longest, showing the start from both behind and in front of the tapes, but it lacked the detailed post-race scenes carried by Gaumont.

Davison chose to cross the track to stand on the inside of the bend, rather than on the outside, below the hordings lining Tattenham Corner station. She wove her way between the carriages pressed into service as makeshift grandstands that surround the flagpole, its Union Jack twitching limply in the occasional breath of air, to find a crowd some ten-deep barring her path to the rail. She waited for her chance to make inroads, which came between the first two races when the crowd thinned momentarily as punters wandered away to place bets. Gradually she edged forward with society’s courtesies scrupulously observed. Boaters and caps were duly raised in her direction and the lady given the freedom to pass through to find a prime spot against the running rail, beside one of its supports.

She examined her race-card, or ‘Dorling’s List of Epsom Races’ as it was still grandly titled. The horses in the first race, the Caterham Plate, dashed past on the far side of the track and, in due course, she marked her card with the result: a one beside the name Honeywood; a two for King’s Scholar. In her understandably heightened sense of anticipation, instead of a three beside the name of Sylva she inadvertently repeated its race-card number of nine. The second race came and went at five past two. Again she marked her card: first Marco Prunella; second Sweet Slumbers; third the unnamed daughter of Cinder.

Far away to her left Jack Robinson was introducing Johnny Reiff to Bower Ismay. ‘You have seen the horse, haven’t you?’ asked the trainer. ‘Yes,’ replied Reiff. ‘Do the best you can, and ride your own race.’ The jockey conferred with the owner before being legged up onto Craganour. Nearby, Stanley Wootton assisted his father in saddling Shogun under the attentive eye of Lord Derby, while Leo de Rothschild was heard telling anyone who listened that ‘Day Comet is a different horse to what you saw at Newmarket.’ According to the market it made no difference to the outcome of the Derby. Craganour was being backed as if he was a certainty. Second favourite Shogun drifted out to sixes. It was 10/1 bar these.

Anmer led the fifteen runners for the Derby onto the track where they fell under the critical gaze of Robert Sievier:

Bringing up the rear was number sixteen on the race-card (non-runner Radiant was number twelve). Aboyeur was so unconsidered that The Sporting Life’s correspondent did not bother taking any note of his appearance or well-being. With the benefit of hindsight, Sievier wrote in The Winning Post:

At the last minute Percy Cunliffe decided to encourage the Druid’s Lodge contender with one final wager and instructed his commission agent Walter Fry to invest £250 each way; Fry sought out Ladbrokes’s on-course representative Helen Vernet and placed the bet at 100/1.

The runners filed past the grandstand and enclosures before turning and cantering back past the winning post. Declared The Times:

The Life disagreed:

Sievier, as ever, was his own man: he awarded the ‘palm’ in the preliminary canter to Nimbus.

The King re-adjusted his white carnation and chatted to the Crown Princess of Sweden. Queen Mary leant sideways to speak a few words to the Duke of Connaught. Through poised race-glasses, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein focused on the runners going to post.

Bower Ismay seemed outwardly calm but his complexion – described, surprisingly so for a disciple of the African sun, as ‘pallid’ – implied otherwise; counterpointed by the darkness of his moustache and the solemnity of his frock coat, it lent him the aura of the principal mourner at a funeral – if not the undertaker himself. In the Jockey Club box, Eustace Loder unsheathed his race-glasses and suppressed the tensions coursing through his system, determined to exercise his authority and do his duty as a Steward.

Behind the tapes Johnny Reiff kept Craganour on the move, cluck-clucking at him as they circled to the right of the starter, eager to anticipate the break: he was drawn in the middle of the field at seven; Louvois (two) and Aboyeur (three) were on his inside; Shogun (eleven) and Anmer (fourteen) to his outside. Billy Saxby’s brow furrowed in concentration upon Louvois: playing out in his mind the tactics necessary to secure victory for himself – or ignominious defeat for Reiff – but he needed mercury in his veins not to have cast a covetous eye at the favourite. Edwin Piper’s priority was to prevent the blinkered Aboyeur’s volatile temperament from cracking under the strain. Herbert Jones, meanwhile, sat proudly in the Royal colours aboard Anmer, hoping his slow-coach of a partner would not bring them into disrepute.

Meanwhile, down at Tattenham Corner, Police Sergeant Frank Bunn scanned the crowd for potential troublemakers – but saw none. Davison checked the suffragette flags pinned inside her jacket were still securely fastened, before closing her eyes and asking her God, in the manner of Joan of Arc, to sanction the deed she was about to commit for, as she frequently assured her mother, ‘I never do any of the things except under the Influence.’

The Jockey Club’s senior starter, Ernest Willoughby, pocketed his timepiece. The sun slipped behind a cover of cloud encouraging the oppressiveness of the afternoon to assert itself. Women fanned themselves and men ran fingers inside collars. The tingle of mass anticipation was palpable. A monastic hush settled over the Downs, the stillness of an overnight carpet of snow. Ears strained for any sound suggesting the field had been sent on its way. A clap of thunder was heard in the far distance.

Finally, at one minute past three o’clock, the tension was broken. Like the swelling of a giant wave the traditional words swept over the course: ‘They’re off!’