Emily Wilding Davison’s death after being hit by the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby was one of the most shocking acts of Britain’s suffragette movement. And 100 years on, it remains a mystery.
A militant campaigner for the women’s vote, Davison’s disruption of the world-famous flat race in front of thousands of spectators eclipsed every other protest.
She stepped into the path of more than a dozen thundering horses and was knocked down by Anmer, the thoroughbred owned by King George V. Four days later, on June 8, 1913, she died.
While the suffragette movement hailed her as a martyr, the 40-year-old former governess was condemned by many in the establishment as a lunatic who endangered the lives of the jockeys and the horses.
It is still unclear what Davison intended that day, but the centenary of her death has shone a light on the oft-forgotten history of the violent fight by British women for the vote.
Davison belonged to the Women’s Political and Social Union (WPSU), an organisation set up in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst to breathe new energy into the campaign for women’s rights.
Decades of peaceful activism had won important advances in property rights but the vote, granted to women in New Zealand in 1893, appeared as far off as ever.
“They felt that the women’s movement had been going on for such a long time and yet nothing had been brought to fruition,” said Lucinda Hawksley, author of “March, Women, March”.
Members of the WPSU, which had the slogan “deeds not words”, took increasingly direct action, with Davison one of the most radical.
She broke into the Houses of Parliament several times, spending the night of the 1911 census in a broom cupboard so she could be recorded as a resident.
In the early 1990s, Labour lawmaker Tony Benn placed a plaque in her memory on the cupboard door but had to do it in secret, a reminder of how controversial she remained.
Davison and her fellow militant suffragettes employed what today might be called terror tactics, firebombing buildings, setting fire to post boxes and smashing windows.
They were regularly sent to jail, where they staged hunger strikes and were brutally force-fed through the mouth and nose.
Davison was imprisoned eight times and force-fed 49 times. Once, she barricaded herself in her cell, and the prison staff broke through a window and trained a hose on her for 15 minutes until they could get through the door.
Many of the women were radicalised by the authorities’ treatment of them, which included physical assault and sexual harassment by police at demonstrations.
A year before her death, Davison threw herself off the railings at London’s Holloway Prison in protest at the force-feeding, remarking that one big tragedy may be enough to save everybody else. She was injured but recovered.
“The escalation of militancy was a response to the state violence against women,” said Katherine Connelly, of the Emily Wilding Davison Memorial Campaign.
Even among the suffragettes Davison was viewed as something of a maverick, and she did not share her plans to disrupt the Derby.
On the morning of race day, she travelled to Epsom by train with two large flags in the suffragette colours — green, white and purple stripes — folded and pinned inside her jacket.
Grainy footage shot by British Pathe shows her slipping under the barriers and stepping into the path of the horses as they raced round Tattenham Corner.
Critics say Davison did not have time to target Anmer, who was trailing at the back, but close examination of the film shows her clearly positioning herself to catch the king’s horse.
It is now widely thought she did not intend to kill herself — she had a return train ticket back to London and a ticket for a dance that night — and was instead trying to pin her suffragette colours to the horse.
“She was possibly just very naive about horses, how fast they were and the power of them,” Hawksley told AFP.
Whatever her motivation, Davison suffered a fractured skull and never regained consciousness.
The horse and jockey Herbert Jones also fell to the ground but escaped without long-lasting injuries.
In a telegram to Jones, the king’s mother, Queen Alexandra, said she was sad to hear of his accident “caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman”.
This view was not shared by Davison’s colleagues, or many trade unionists, who turned out in their thousands for her funeral and then to escort her coffin back home to Morpeth, northeast England.
Today, Davison is widely viewed as a courageous campaigner, although some women’s groups are unhappy that the Derby organisers refused to agree to a minute’s silence at this year’s race which takes place Saturday.
Instead, in consultation with her descendants, they put up a plaque to the suffragette and created a photo montage about her life which will be shown on large screens on race day.
Women in Britain over the age of 30 finally won the vote in 1918, and ten years later this was lowered to 21, the same age as for men.
Mystery of suffragette killed by the king's horse
