Emily Davison, icon of the suffragettes, was a deeply disturbed and suicidal terrorist

There was more to the woman who threw herself beneath a horse during the 1913 Derby than most people are aware

On the evening of Saturday, November 30^th 1912, a Baptist minister stood alone on a platform of Aberdeen’s railway station. This blameless and inoffensive clergyman was about to become the victim of a senseless and brutal assault.

     There was nothing remarkable or noteworthy about the Reverend Forbes Jackson, minister of the Crown Terrace Baptist Church in Aberdeen. He was just an ordinary, respectable man waiting quietly on the platform; minding his own business and bothering nobody. He could hardly have been more surprised when a middle aged  woman rushed up to him and began slashing him viciously across the face with a whip, shouting, “I see through your disguise, Lloyd George. You cowardly hound, I‘ll punish you!” This apparently mad woman was restrained by porters and handed over to the police. She gave her name as Mary Smith and explained her reason for attacking the Reverend Jackson. It was because she believed that he was not a genuine clergyman at all, but was in reality none other than  Chancellor of the Exchequer  David Lloyd George; travelling under a heavy and convincing disguise! She did not tell the officers why she thought that one of the best known and  most instantly recognisable men in the whole country should think it a good idea to put on a dog collar and try to pass himself off as a vicar.

     By the time the case came to court, Mary Smith had, not unexpectedly, been revealed as a pseudonym or nom de guerre. The real name of the forty year-old woman who had behaved so ferociously towards the innocent and law-abiding minister was Emily Davison and she was well  known to the police as one of the most militant of suffragettes.

     Even now, a century after her violent death, Emily Davison is widely regarded as a secular saint in the struggle for women’s rights. She is perhaps the only suffragette, other than the Pankhursts, whose name is still recognised a hundred years later by the average person.  The scenes  shot by the Pathe film crews at the 1913 Derby, showing Emily Davison falling beneath the hooves of the King’s horse,  are among the most iconic newsreel footage of the 20^th Century. She is today revered in some quarters for her supposed martyrdom in the cause of women’s rights.

      In 2012, for example,  a petition was organised calling for a minute’s silence at the following  year’s Derby as a mark of respect for Emily Davison on the centenary of her actions at Derby Day in 1913. Among the founder members of this campaign was the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Danny Boyle, who choreographed the opening ceremony of the  2012 Olympic Games, said that the whole pageant had been inspired by Emily Davison and her supposed martyrdom. Her death during the 1913 Derby Day was re-enacted during the opening ceremony,  with her being carried with her arms outstretched in a deliberate pastiche of Christian iconography; the audience were invited to compare her sacrifice with that of Christ.

     Davison’s name is still, at least for some at least,  a by-word for selfless devotion and readiness to sacrifice one’s life for a just cause. This popular image is undeserved. She may well have thrown her own life away, but Emily Davison was far from being a gentle martyr. In fact she was an extremely volatile and unpredictable  woman; rootless and unemployed. She was responsible for injuring at least one person so severely that she almost faced a charge of causing grievous bodily harm, as well as  being the first suffragette to use arson as a weapon and also responsible for  carrying out the first bomb attack in twentieth century England. In many ways, Emily Davison epitomises the more aggressive type of suffragette, those who cheerfully engaged in acts of violence and destruction, giving no thought at all to those who might be injured or lose their lives in the process.

     Emily Wilding Davison was born in South London on October 11^th 1872. When she was three, her family moved to Hertfordshire and then later back to London. A bright girl, she attended the Kensington High School, where she did very well, both academically and in more athletic pursuits such as swimming, for which she won a gold medal. At the age of nineteen, she was awarded a bursary to study English at the Royal Holloway College. She later spent a term at Oxford University and then studied for an honours degree from the University of London.

     After she had completed her studies, Emily Davison worked as a teacher and governess in various parts of the country.  Until she was in her mid thirties, there is no evidence that Davison took any interest in politics and it was not until the autumn of 1905, when she read about the imprisonment of Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney that she became intrigued by  the new and militant form of suffragism which was being promoted. She was then  thirty three.

     Over the next few years, Emily Davison was drawn into the activities of the Women’s Social and Political Union. By 1908, she was acting as one of the chief stewards on the “Women’s Sunday” rally which took place in Hyde park that year. The following year, Davison was arrested for the first time and sent to prison for a month after a protest at the Houses of Parliament.

     In the summer of 1909, Emily Davison was back in prison for disrupting a meeting which was being addressed by Lloyd George. She related that as soon as she was placed in her cell, she at once smashed seventeen panes of glass. On being moved to another cell, she broke seven more. Nobody had thought to search her and she had actually brought a hammer into the prison with her. Later that year, Davison found herself in prison again for disrupting a political meeting and was subjected to force feeding after she went on hunger strike. After this experience, she barricaded herself in her cell and the warders directed water from hoses through the window of the cell in an effort to subdue her.

     During 1910, Emily Davison wrote articles for the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, as well as sending innumerable letters to magazines and newspapers of all types, demanding that women be given the parliamentary vote. Twice that year, she received short prison sentences for breaking windows.

     For most of 1911, the WSPU maintained a “truce”, abstaining from militant acts. This was in the expectation that a bill then passing through parliament could be amended to include a clause on women’s suffrage. When the truce ended, Davison made the decision to ratchet up the violence by resorting to arson. This was the first time that this tactic had been used by the suffragettes and marks a new and dangerous departure from previous militant acts. It could be said that this was the moment at which the suffragettes moved from simple vandalism to the first stages of terrorism. The deliberate setting of fires has always been viewed as a grave crime, because of course flames are indiscriminate and uncontrollable. Once you begin a fire, there is no telling where or when it will stop. Arson became a major weapon in the armoury of the Women’s Social and Political Union; quite possibly leading to deaths. The first step though, taken by Emily Davison on Friday, December 8^th 1911, was a small one.

     On the morning of December 8^th, Davison went to the Post Office at 43 Fleet Street in London, with a specially prepared package. This was cloth soaked in kerosene and contained in a paper envelope. A post box was built into the front of the Fleet Street Post Office and after setting fire to her package, Emily Davison dropped the whole thing through the slot and into the Post Office. Fortunately, it went out almost immediately. Had it not done so, the consequences could have been serious, because the letters posted here all dropped into a wooden box. Had the fire taken hold, the Post Office itself, as well as those who worked in it,  could have been in jeopardy.

     When the letters from the Fleet Street Post Office were delivered to the Mount Pleasant sorting office, later that day, the crude incendiary device was found, although nobody thought to report it. After seeing nothing about the attack in the newspapers over the weekend, Emily Davison marched up to police constable 185 on Monday and demanded to be arrested. He treated her as a crank and took no notice.

     Later that week, on Thursday, December 14^th, Davison set fire to two pillar boxes in the City of London; one at Leadenhall  Street and the other near the Mansion House.  Then she went to Whitehall and tried to set fire to the Post Office in Parliament Street by putting a lighted match to some kerosene soaked rags, which she hoped to push into the post-box set into the front of the building. She was caught in the act by a policeman and taken to nearby Scotland Yard, where she freely confessed what she had done. Later that day, Emily Davison was taken to Cannon Row police station and charged with arson.

     In January 1912, Davison was tried at the Old bailey and sent to prison for six months  for arson; a lenient enough sentence, given the nature of the crime. It was while in prison for this offence that Emily Davison’s mind turned, according to her own account, to self-destruction. It is impossible to know what prompted these thoughts; whether the motive was purely political or if she was in fact a sad and disturbed  woman with little to live for, who thought that though her life was pointless,  her death could serve some purpose. The events of this time in prison have a good deal of bearing on what subsequently befell this unhappy woman.

    There were a fair number of suffragettes in London’s Holloway prison at the time that Emily Davison was serving her sentence there for arson. As before, she went on hunger strike, along with  other prisoners. On June 22^nd, the suffragette prisoners decided to barricade themselves in their cells as a protest against the continued force feeding to which they were being subjected. The prison authorities managed to force open the cell doors and resume the force feeding. After she had again been forcibly fed, Davison smashed the remaining panes of glass in her cell and then lay on her bed to think the matter through. She decided that if she gave her life, then, in her own words, “One big tragedy may save many others”. The cell in which Davison was confined was on the top floor of the prison wing, with the door leading out onto a narrow walkway which overlooked a considerable drop.

     When her cell door was opened later that afternoon, Emily Davison rushed out of the cell and threw herself over the railings. Her intention was to fall to her death in the central hall of the prison. In her excitement, she had apparently forgotten that wire netting was stretched over the hall at the level of the first floor; for the very purpose of frustrating suicides of this sort. The warders brought her back up the stairs, whereupon she dived over the railings once more, trying to fall away from the edge of the wire netting, so that she could land on an iron staircase. Once more, she ended up on the wire netting and her frantic bid for suicide was rapidly descending into farce. At last, she succeeded in injuring herself, because before the warders were able to retrieve her once more from the wire netting, she jumped head first onto the iron staircase; a drop of ten feet or so. Davison landed on her head, knocking herself out.

    There cannot be  the slightest doubt that Emily Davison, a year before her death at the Derby, was genuinely trying to end her life. She wrote later of this this whole episode in Holloway, “If I had been successful, I should undoubtedly have been killed”. It is hard to imagine a clearer statement of an intended suicide than this.

    The final dive, head first onto the iron staircase, resulted in concussion and two cracked vertebrae in Davison’s spine. She was plagued by pains from these injuries for the rest of her life.

    After her release, following her suicide attempt, Emily Davison resumed her activities on behalf of the suffragettes. Which brings us to the extraordinary attack on the Reverend Jackson at Aberdeen railway station. Lloyd George was giving a speech in Aberdeen in November 1912, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer would hardly travel to and from London alone. As for the idea that he would do so in fancy dress, pretending to be a vicar; it is safe to assume that no normal, sane and well balanced person would entertain this notion for a moment. But was Emily Davison normal and well balanced at that time? The evidence tends to suggest otherwise. Persuading one’s self that a passing clergyman is really a famous politician in disguise and then falling upon him and whipping him round the face is hardly the action of a sane individual. Perhaps we should consider Davison‘s mental state.

    There is a common misconception that Emily Davison was a young woman when she died shortly after that fateful Derby. Accounts of her life often aim deliberately to give this impression, perhaps because a girl sacrificing her life is more likely to tug at the heart-strings than the death of an older woman. The official website of the BBC History Magazine, for instance has a piece on the suffragettes which states that:

     As the government struggled to prevent scores dying

     in prison, one young woman successfully provided the

     cause with its first martyr. In June 1913, Emily

     Davison was killed by the King’s horse at the Epsom

     Derby.

     Young woman, indeed! Davison was a few months short of her forty first birthday when she died; hardly a “young woman” by any standard. Even depicting her as a young woman is not enough for some modern writers. A popular book about Emily Davison’s life  is entitled, Emily Davison: The Girl Who gave her Life for her Cause (Claudia Fitzherbert, Short Books, 2004). A 40 year-old girl; this is not only preposterous, it is downright offensive to describe a woman of that age as a “girl”.

      What sort of life was Davison leading in the weeks and months leading up to her death? The answer is, not a very happy one. Stripped of a century’s hagiography, Emily Davison’s life was not an enviable one. She had no family of her own, was unemployed and her health was poor. She had been in and out of prison for the last couple of years, which would not make getting a job any easier; indeed, it rendered her all but unemployable as a governess or teacher.  Without the struggle for female emancipation, she would have been just one more lonely,  Edwardian spinster, eking out a wretched, hand to mouth existence, with no prospect of any improvement in her life as she grew older. She was wholly  dependent upon the charity of friends, having no resources at all of her own.

     A letter written to an old school friend gives us some insight into Emily Davison’s life in the early part of 1913. She wrote;

      I am at present with my mother, who is glad to have

      me…The last four days’ hunger strike in Aberdeen

      have, of course, found out my weakness, and I have

      had    some rheumatism in my neck and back, where I

      fell    on that iron staircase. If it is wet or I

      am tired,  both parts ache…At present I have no

      settled work    here or in town…I wish I could hear

      of some work   though…

     Davison was constantly applying for jobs, right up to her death, without any luck. Her mother was evidently a little bitter about the fact that although she had devoted her life to the suffragette cause, the WSPU would not give her a salaried position. Sending her a postal order, her cousin said in the letter which accompanied this gift of money,  “I do think the militants might remember your services and give you something”.

     We saw earlier that Davison had been the first suffragette to adopt arson as a weapon.  She was also instrumental in carrying out one of  the first bombings in connection with the struggle for women’s suffrage; in other words, she was one of the first  suffragette terrorists.

     On February 19^th, 1913, two bombs, each containing five pounds of explosive, were planted in a house that the Chancellor was having built in Surrey. One of these went off, causing a great deal of damage. Indeed, a crack in one of the walls may be seen to this day; a century later. This bomb attack was carried out without any regard for the lives of the men working on the house.

     According to Sylvia Pankhurst, writing almost twenty years after the event, the bombing of Lloyd George’s house was carried out by Emily Davison and others. Sylvia Pankhurst was in the best possible position to know about such a thing and had no conceivable reason to lie about it.  This shows Davison to have   been very careless not only of her own life, but also those of other people. The bomb exploded only twenty minutes or so before a group of workmen arrived at the house. Those who planted that bomb really did not  care whether or not they harmed others in the process.

     Sylvia Pankhurst was not the only associate of Emily Davison to know about her forays into terrorism. More evidence of what she was up to is to be found in the words of one of her close friends; Edith Mansell-Moullin. This woman, who together with her husband was closely involved with the campaign for women’s suffrage, wrote an account of Emily Davison’s life. Before doing so, she asked, in a letter to a mutual friend, whether she should, “leave out the bombs?“ The fact that this close friend and Sylvia Pankhurst both  thought that Davison had been handling bombs puts the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Both thought very highly of Davison and neither had any reason for inventing such a thing.

     And so we come to that most famous incident in Emily Davison’s life;  the only event in her life of which most people have even heard. On June 4^th, 1913, she bought a return ticket to Epsom. Earlier that day, she had visited the WSPU offices to pick up two suffragette flags in green white and purple. When asked why she needed them, she was evasive. She told one woman that if she read the evening paper that day, then she might see something about the business.

     Much has been made about the significance of Davison’s choosing to buy a return ticket to Epsom, as though this sheds some light upon her state of mind. In fact, for excursions to Derby Day, it was no cheaper to buy a single than it was to purchase a return. Besides which, even if Emily Davison had been intending only a protest which would not entail her own death, she would surely have realised that arrest was inevitable. Whatever she planned, it must have been pretty clear when she bought that return ticket that she would not in fact be using the return half. Either she would be in a police cell, hospital or mortuary.

     In later years, stories emerged that Davison, perhaps in the company of friends, had been practicing grabbing horses and attaching things to their bridles. Shortly before the Derby, she had visited the village of Longhorsely, not far from her mother’s home in Northumberland. While there, she had supposedly been seen at Longhorsely racecourse, trying to grab the bridles of moving horses.  It is worth noting that this story did not come to light until years after Davison’s death. The idea that it would be possible to attach a flag to the bridle of a horse travelling at   thirty or forty   miles an hour is so preposterous, that it may probably be discounted. If that was really the object of the exercise when Emily Davison went to the Derby that year, then it suggests that her mental state was even more fragile than anybody could have guessed.

     Once she arrived at Epsom, Davison made her way to the racecourse and positioned herself at Tattenham Corner, which was where the Pathe newsreel cameras were filming the race. Whether this was deliberate or mere coincidence, it means that we have a filmed record of what happened when the horses thundered round the bend.

     Most of the riders had passed, leaving four or five trailing behind. One of these was the King’s horse; Anmar, ridden by Herbert Jones. The figure of a woman ducks under the barrier and runs out onto the racetrack. One horse swerves slightly and avoids her. Then the woman raises both arms above her head and appears to be  standing in front of, or clutching at, Anmar. When a horse weighing half a ton and travelling at thirty five miles an hour hits a human body under such circumstances, the result will surprise nobody. The woman is knocked under the flying hooves and as the animal’s legs become tangled up, it trips and performs a somersault, throwing the rider and landing on top of him.

     In recent years, there has been a lot of debate as to Emily Davison’s intentions that day. Was she trying to get herself killed or was her aim only to disrupt the race? Could she have been trying to pin one of the suffragette flags to the horse’s reins, or possibly slip a scarf over its head,  so that the King’s horse carried the green, white and purple colours past the finishing line? A scarf in the suffragette colours was found near her; might she have hoped to loop this round the horse’s neck as it thundered past? Much has been made of the fact that she had bought a return ticket from Victoria Station in London to Epsom; surely an odd thing to do if one is planning to commit suicide?

     In 2013, the centenary of her death, a television documentary subjected the film of that fateful Derby to modern analysis. It was claimed that this showed clearly that Davison was trying to grab at or pin something on the horse’s reins and not throwing herself deliberately beneath the horse at all.

     The debates about Emily Davison’s precise motives on Derby Day, 1913,  miss the point in the most spectacular way imaginable. Her intentions are, in a sense, utterly irrelevant; it is her actions which show what sort of person she was and these indicate clearly that she did not care in the least who she harmed that day. She chose to run in front of and interfere with a galloping horse carrying a rider. Her own injuries were certainly caused by her  actions,  but there was another victim of her behaviour; one who is almost never mentioned in accounts of that day.

     Any reasonably intelligent person, and we must remember that Emily Davison was a university  graduate who had studied at  Oxford, must surely know that if you deliberately block the path of a galloping horse then you are risking not only your own life, but also that of whoever is riding the horse. It was little short of a miracle that Herbert Jones, the jockey of the horse in front of which Davison ran, was not killed that day as well as Emily Davison. His horse turned a complete somersault and landed on top of him. He could have been killed, but in the event suffered only concussion and a dislocated shoulder. The legal position when somebody behaves in such a dangerous fashion though is quite clear; Emily Davison was legally and morally responsible for the injuries to the jockey. She had evidently not cared in the least if somebody else was hurt as a consequence of what she did that day. While she was laying unconscious in hospital, the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that, “if Miss Davison recovers, it will be possible to charge her with doing an act calculated to cause grievous bodily harm“.

     It is just one more minor detail which is left out of the reckoning when Emily Davison’s story is recounted today; that she was without doubt guilty of inflicting GBH upon a man with whom she could have no possible quarrel. Combining this with the unprovoked attack on the Reverend Jackson, the attempted arson at two post offices and the bombing of Lloyd George’s house begins to give us a more rounded portrait of the suffragettes’ most famous heroine.

     Herbert Jones said in later years that he was “haunted by that poor woman’s face” and he was greatly affected psychologically by Davison’s death beneath the hooves of his horse. He himself committed suicide many years later and there is at least a suspicion that his inadvertent  role in Emily Davison’s death was connected with his own suicide.

     Perhaps it would make matters a little clearer if we were to transplant Emily Davison’s actions to the present day, strip them of any political meaning and forget about whether she did or did not have it in mind to kill herself. Let us look for a moment at what she actually did.

     Near to my home on the outskirts of London is an area of countryside  where riders from a nearby riding school often gallop their horses. Imagine that I conceal myself in some bushes and then wait until a group of riders is practically upon me. At the last second, I jump up and run out in front of the horses, with a large piece of brightly coloured material fluttering in my hands. I then raise my arms and give the impression that I am about to block the path of, grab the reins  or otherwise interfere with, one of the horses.

     My personal motives for performing this hazardous action, whether malice, foolishness or the desire to end my own life, do not matter in the least. What is very plain is that I am setting out to spook some horses and that an almost inevitable consequence will be that at least one of the riders will be thrown. You do not need to know much about horses to realise that holding a flapping cloth in front of a galloping horse in that way is not likely to end well for the person riding the animal!

     Reading the contemporary newspaper accounts of this race is a disconcerting experience. In retrospect, the only possible point of interest that day can surely have been Emily Davison’s behaviour? Actually, even The Times was more concerned with the fact that the favourite, Craganour, although the first horse past the post, was subsequently disqualified by a stewards’ enquiry and the race given to Aboyeur. It was the first time in many years that such a thing had happened at a Derby and for most newspaper readers, this was of far more consequence than another suffragette protest.

     The suffragettes had finally found the martyr they needed and Emily Davison’s funeral was turned into a grand exercise in propaganda. The inquest into her death, held in Guildford on June 10^th, brought in a verdict of accidental death from a fractured skull, caused by;

     being accidentally knocked down by a horse through

     wilfully rushing onto the race course at Epsom Downs

     Surrey on the 4^th June 1913, during the progress of a

     race.

      For the WSPU it was infinitely more advantageous to depict her as a suicide and martyr to the cause of women’s suffrage, than to have her death treated as merely  an accident. Writing in the popular newspaper, the Daily Sketch, Christabel Pankhurst said that;

      The government’s refusal to grant the vote drove

      her to make her protest. Argument has not convinced

      Mr Asquith of the seriousness of the position, but

      perhaps a woman’s death will.

      It was plain that the WSPU intended to milk this death for all that it was worth.

     Not unnaturally, Emily Davison’s mother in Northumberland wanted her daughter to be buried near to her, but it was still possible for the WSPU  to make capital from the death by an ostentatious  funeral procession in the capital. It would interesting to know what Mrs Davison made of this attempt to ring every advantage from her daughter’s death. She seemed herself to regard the suffragette movement with a certain amount of disfavour, at least in their dealings with her daughter. She could not have expected her daughter to die, because she wrote a letter to her at the hospital in Epsom, saying;

      I cannot believe that you could have done such a

     dreadful act, even for the cause which I know you

     have given up your heart and soul to. It has done so

     little in return for you.

     It would be interesting to know why Mrs Davison thought that the cause had done, “so little”, for her daughter. There were hints after her death that the leadership of the WSPU regarded Emily Davison with a certain reserve and did not feel that she was really one of them. She was never given a paid role in the organisation, which meant that she was constantly struggling for money.

     There is something distinctly distasteful about a corpse being hijacked for political purposes and yet that is, in effect, what happened to Emily Davison’s body when it arrived in London. Her body was brought from Epsom to Victoria Station and transported across London to Kings Cross, where it travelled north to Davison’s mother’s home. A spectacular  parade was laid on through central London, with mourners dressed in the suffragettes’ colours marching along behind the hearse. What the dead woman’s mother would have made of this exploitation of her daughter’s death can only be imagined.

     Between Emily Davison’s action at the Derby and her funeral in Northumberland on June 15^th, there were a number of suffragette attacks, including one which caused over £7,000 worth of damage, the equivalent of over £500,000 today, at another racecourse.

     On the night of June 8^th, a patrolling police constable noticed flames coming from some wooden buildings at Hurst Park. An off duty fireman gave evidence that he had seen two women heading towards Hurst Park at about 10.45 PM. They were each carrying a bag, but when seen later, had nothing in their hands. Copies of The Suffragette were found near the burnt out stand at the race track.

     When the police learned that the WSPU had it in mind to hold a spectacular demonstration to coincide with the transfer of Emily Davison’s body from Victoria Station, where it was due to arrive from Epsom, to King’s Cross, where it would be returned to her mother’s home town of Morpeth; there was some uneasiness. They suspected, quite correctly as it turned out, that the suffragettes were planning to exploit the passage of the body through central London for political ends. Writing on behalf of the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, Chief Clerk, W. H Kendall sent a letter  to Mary Allen, who was organising the procession for the Women’s Social and Political Union. In it, he said:

     Madam, - Having regard to the traffic conditions in

     the streets through which the funeral procession has

     to pass, I am directed to warn you that as all

     reasonable facilities must be given to the ordinary

     traffic, the progress of the proposed funeral

     cortege may be greatly hindered,   and if the crowd

     of sightseers is more than usually large, it may

     prove impractical  for the hearse to reach the

     church in time for the service there.

          In order to convey the remains from one railway

     station to another in a seemly and reverent manner,

     the hearse should be accompanied by a limited number

     of mourners only and taken through streets where

     traffic conditions will not interfere with its

     progress. The police will be prepared to indicate a

     suitable route.

     This is a curious letter. It sounds very much as though the police feared that the suffragettes would be turning Emily Davison’s funeral into a three-ring circus; references to a “crowd of sightseers” and the need for a  “seemly and reverential manner” certainly appear to hint at such an attitude.

     That the police proved themselves prescient on this point may be seen from the actual arrangements made for what was destined to the  last great public display by the WSPU. The advice that the hearse should be, “taken through streets where traffic conditions will not interfere with its progress” was hardly adhered to; the procession behind the hearse passing through some of the busiest streets in the capital, including Piccadilly, Shaftsbury Avenue and Euston Road. Nor were, “a limited number  of mourners” involved. The WSPU worked frantically to ensure that as many of their members as were able, came to London for the day. Traffic came to a standstill on Saturday, June 14^th, as apart from the many suffragettes marching behind the hearse, thousands of people thronged the streets to watch the show.

     The cynicism of the WSPU in using Emily Davison’s death in this way as a propaganda coup can be more readily appreciated when we learn that her mother, who was intending to bury her daughter in Northumberland, the following day, very nearly had to cancel her funeral arrangements. The suffragettes held a service of their own at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury and what with the high numbers of mourners that they had laid on and the crowds which they had courted, combined with a   route which passed deliberately through the most congested streets of the capital; everything took far longer than had been planned for. The train which was scheduled to carry Davison’s remains to the north of England was due to leave King’s Cross at 5.30. The grand spectacle laid on by the WSPU took so long, that the coffin arrived at King’s Cross precisely one minute before the train left. The coffin was hurriedly loaded on board the train in a manner which was anything but “seemly and reverential”. Two minutes more and Mrs Davison would not have been able to bury her child on the day of her choice.

     This then was the life and death of the first suffragette arsonist and  bomber. A disturbed and aggressive woman of forty, who had no permanent home of her own and  was constantly hard up and unable to get a job. A woman who was quite capable of injuring others if it served her own ends and whose mental state must surely have been precarious. Who, in her right mind, could honestly believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer would travel about the country dressed as a clergyman? Who, except somebody quite heedless of the lives of others would try to block the path of a galloping horse? When looked at without prejudice, it is hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed by Queen Mary when writing to the unfortunate Herbert Jones. She commiserated with him on his, “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal, lunatic woman.”

     Although the WSPU had worked long and hard to find themselves a suitable martyr who could be manipulated as part of a public relations exercise to blacken the name of  Asquith and his government, reactions were not all that could have been desired. It is true that the actions of Emily Davison garnered a huge amount of publicity for the suffragette cause and captured the front pages of all the newspapers. Whether by accident or design, Emily Davison chose the perfect spot to carry out her mad protest. Not only were there many newspaper photographers on hand, the newsreel cameras were also running and film of the incident appeared in cinemas across the country. Emily Davison,  and of course the cause for which she died, became tremendously famous overnight.  Her funeral procession through central London was also a media event, lapped up by the papers and newsreels. 

     Getting publicity is one thing; ensuring that those viewing that publicity take away with them the right message is something else again.  Emily Davison’s death changed the way that people regarded the suffragettes in two very different ways. On the one hand, it was undeniable that here was a cause for which people had now shown that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. This is a sobering reflection, whatever you might personally feel about the cause for which a life has been given. The other change in perspective was not so desirable for the WSPU. The question began to be asked,  if this is how a highly intelligent, middle aged university graduate behaves; what does this tell us about the fitness for women to have the vote? If even the most educated, older women are liable to carry on like this, whatever must the mental state of the uneducated, younger ones be like? Were all the suffragettes as unbalanced as this?

     There was a bizarre sequel to Emily Davison’s mad act at the 1913 Derby, which did nothing to dispel the idea that such behaviour verged on lunacy. Most people in Britain are vaguely aware of Emily Davison’s name and the protest for which she is remembered, but few now recall the name of Harry Hewitt. This is surprising, because two weeks after Emily Davison’s protest, Harry Hewitt did precisely the same thing, under similar circumstances and perhaps  for the same reason.

     The next major horse racing event after the 1913 Derby was the Ascot Gold Cup, held on June 19^th. It was a beautiful summer’s day and most people had forgotten all about the unfortunate incident at the Derby. Herbert Smith, the jockey who had been injured by Emily Davison, had recovered and was attending the Gold Cup as a spectator. As the horses came into the final curve before they thundered past the stands, Tracery, ridden by Albert “Snowy” Whalley, was in the lead. A smartly dressed man, wearing a grey suit, ducked under the fence surrounding the track and walked calmly out in front of the horses. He looked so respectable, that many in the watching crowd formed the impression that he was an official, connected in some way with the race. Then, he produced a suffragette flag in one hand and a revolver in the other and  ran straight into the path of the leading horse.

     What followed was virtually a carbon copy of the Derby. Tracery crashed into the man, knocking him down and then the horse itself went down, throwing Albert Whalley in the process. The following horses managed to avoid the tangled group, although one of them clipped the man who had disrupted the race with its hoof.

     The jockey suffered from concussion, but  Harry Hewitt, the man who had made the protest, needed surgery; a piece of bone having been driven into his brain by the kick which he received from one of the horses. He was later removed to an asylum, from which he escaped and fled to Canada. Pity poor Herbert Jones, who had come to spend a day at the races largely in order to forget about his role in Emily Davison’s death. The copycat incident at Ascot showed how easily one irrational person can encourage others who are slightly unbalanced to emulate them.

     Over a century has passed since the death of Emily Davison;  the first of the  Women’s Social and Political Union’s  arsonists and bombers. We are in a position to make a fairly balanced and  objective judgement about the woman and her actions at the 1913 Derby after the passage of so much time and the verdict is not a favourable one to her. We know that Emily Davison inflicted Grievous Bodily Harm upon Herbert Smith, the King’s jockey. There is also no doubt that she was willing to slash a complete stranger across the face with a whip, because he bore a passing resemblance to a well-known politician.  This same woman did not hesitate to detonate five pounds of explosives in such a way that there was an excellent chance of killing somebody. Not only that; she also tried to set fire to two post offices.

     It is almost beyond belief that a century later, such a woman as this could be put forward as somebody deserving of our admiration and respect. Never the less, almost everybody writing about Emily Davison today apparently feels obliged to pay lip service to the legend, without bothering to examine the facts. The very name, “Emily Davison”, is spoken reverently, as though it is taken as read that she was a remarkable, and indeed wonderful, human being. When Danny Boyle said that he had been inspired by Emily Davison’s actions, it was considered very right and proper that he should feel that way; who wouldn’t be inspired by such a woman?

     In one way at least, Emily Davison was indeed remarkable. She was a pioneer of terrorism, being the first suffragette in England to resort to arson and bombing to further the aims of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Where Davison led, others followed. The  bombing of Lloyd George’s house was the opening shot in a campaign of violence which swept the country during the course of 1913 and 1914.