An ACCIDENTAL martyr? The 100-year mystery of why suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under the king's horse

Racehorses are galloping at full speed around Tattenham Corner in the Epsom Derby. This is the last bend before the final straight and the winning post, where thousands of racegoers are cheering in the stands, and King George V and Queen Mary are watching from the Royal Box. 

There is a roar from the crowds as the horses round the long left turn. Then a woman ducks under the railings and runs on to the racecourse. In an instant, she is knocked flying by Anmer, a thoroughbred owned by the King. 

Anmer tumbles on its side, unseating its jockey. The horse stands but the rider lies still. Nearby, the woman lies on the turf, more like a heap of rags than a person. 

The crowd, who a moment before had been cheering, surges towards the turf and surrounds the prone figures. The time is 3.10pm, 4 June 1913. It will be remembered as the moment when a suffragette ‘threw herself under the King’s horse’.

Historic: The scene at Epsom's Tattenham Corner moments after Emily Davison was struck by Anmer

The iconic image of the suffragette being trampled by George V’s horse has come to symbolise the bitter struggle that women fought to win the right to vote in Britain. But though the incident was caught by British Pathé’s hand-cranked cinema cameras filming the Derby, the arguments about what actually happened that day have continued ever since.

The woman at the Derby is Emily Wilding Davison, a leading militant in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded in 1903. Four days later, Emily dies in hospital of her injuries without regaining consciousness. She is 40.

But the archive footage of Emily’s protest does not answer the nagging question: did she mean to commit suicide at the Derby?

Her protest was just the latest in a series of militant outrages that appalled polite Edwardian society. 

At the inquest into Emily’s death, the coroner seemed to speak for the nation when he said: ‘It is exceedingly sad that an educated lady should sacrifice her life in such a way.’ Parliament and the press were united in their conviction that Emily had crossed a line: this was no longer justified protest but ‘wicked madness’. 

The Morning Post reported the incident under the headline ‘Sensational Derby – suffragist’s mad act’. The ‘sensation’ was not the injuries to Emily; it was the fact that a 100-1 outsider, Aboyeur, had won the race. 

The paper was also concerned about the King’s jockey, Herbert Jones, 28, who had been thrown by Anmer. ‘The King,’ says The Post, ‘made immediate inquiries regarding his jockey who had no bones broken.’

Crowds watch Emily¿s coffin pass through Central London on its way to King¿s Cross station, 14 June 1913

Suffragettes at a demonstration in London

Emily made the front pages ¿ but only as an afterthought to the race details

A list of Emily¿s possessions from the Metropolitan Police, 10 June 1913

Two days later, while recuperating at home, Jones received a telegram from Buckingham Palace. It had been sent by a palace flunkey on behalf of Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother. ‘Queen Alexandra was very sorry indeed to hear of your sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal lunatic woman. I telegraph now by Her Majesty’s command to enquire how you are getting on and to express Her Majesty’s sincere hope that you may soon be all right.’

Emily remained in a coma after being rushed from the track to Epsom Cottage Hospital. Efforts were made to relieve the pressure on her brain, but she died on 8 June without regaining consciousness. The death certificate barely conceals the doctor’s outrage – ‘fracture of the base of the skull caused by being accidentally knocked down by a horse through wilfully rushing on to the racecourse at Epsom Downs during the progress of a race’.

The story of Emily’s death, and a little of her life, unfolded at the inquest, which was held in a cramped police court at Epsom on 10 June. Police Sergeant Frank Bunn gave an eyewitness account. He had been on duty ‘some 15 or 20 yards nearer the winning post. Several horses passed by when a woman, supposed Emily Davison, ran out from under the fence and held her hands up in front of HM King’s horse, whereby she was knocked down and rendered unconscious. The horse which pitched over on to its head stopped on the course. It received slight cuts to the face and body and injury to its off fore hoof.’

In his notes, Bunn listed the items that had been found on Emily. He discovered two suffragette flags, identifiable by their green, white and purple stripes, folded up and pinned to the back of her jacket, on the inside. They were one and a half yards long and three quarters of a yard wide – large enough for the racegoers to see if she had managed to unfurl them. On ‘her person’ he found a small square of orange cardboard, stamped with the number 0315. It is the return half of Emily’s third-class train ticket from Victoria to Epsom. Why would she have bought a return ticket if she had intended to take her life?

The day before the Derby, Emily had met her friend Mary Leigh. She seemed in high spirits and told Mary, ‘I’m going to the Derby tomorrow.’
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Mary.
‘Ah,’ she said, putting her head a little on one side, her eyes smiling. ‘Look in the evening paper,’ she added, ‘and you will see something.’

From left: suffragettes Emily Davison, Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Laurence, 1910

The jury decided (in the family’s favour) that Emily was an accidental martyr – suicide was a criminal offence for those who failed in their attempts, and a source of shame for families at the time. Having heard all the evidence – about her character, her state of mind and her railway ticket – the jury found there was not enough to return a verdict of suicide. Her death was simply a ‘misadventure’.

At the inquest, Police Constable Eady, who was standing on the opposite side of the track to Sergeant Bunn, was asked by the coroner whether it would have been possible for Emily to pick out any particular horse. ‘I do not think it would be possible, the way they were bunched together,’ he said. This corroborated Bunn’s evidence: ‘The horses came along in a heap, not strung out at all… It was a close race, and between the first horse and the last there was a distance of only a few yards.’ But on this point, they were both quite wrong; as Emily waited for the Derby to start at 3pm, she had marked her card for the preceding races and studied the form. She knew the horses and, crucially, she knew the colours of the riders’ silks. She could not miss the jockey wearing the King’s colours, even if she only had a split second to spy them: Herbert Jones’s silks were of rich red sleeves and a blue body.

The police and government clearly preferred the fiction that Emily was a mad woman, intent on a reckless act of martyrdom, and chose the King’s horse by accident. They did not want the public to hear that the true target of her shocking protest for women’s suffrage had been the monarchy. Any attack on the King (or his horse) was not only unthinkable, it was seditious. 

Had the coroner called for the Pathé film to be shown at the inquest, he would have tended to agree with accounts that she could not have identified the King’s horse in the split second before she was hit. However, if the jury had had the benefit of modern technology, they may have had a different view.

The Suffragette magazine gives Emily angelic status, 13 June 1913

In an enhanced version of the 1913 Derby film, far from being ‘in a heap’, the horses are strung out as they round Tattenham Corner into the final straight. Emily can be seen running through a gap in the horses. Then she stands quite calmly, well away from the rails. She lets one, two, three horses fly past her. She is taking her time to pick her horse. Anmer is near the back of the field. As the horse thunders towards her, she steps firmly towards it and puts up her hands. Half a ton of thoroughbred racehorse at full gallop smashes into her body. She is sent tumbling, her neck and head hitting the ground with each turn. 

The inquest never found a reason for her action, except as a mindless protest. But if she was not trying to kill herself under Anmer’s hooves, what was she trying to do? In addition to the two concealed flags, Emily also carried a scarf in the suffragettes’ colours, which was wrapped around her waist. Perhaps she intended to tie this scarf around Anmer’s bridle, so that the King’s horse would be carrying the suffragette colours across the finishing line. This would have been a very public petition to the King as he sat in the royal enclosure by the winning post, had she succeeded.

On 14 June 1913, Emily made the return journey from Epsom to Victoria Station, for which she had bought her return ticket, in an oak casket. Four black horses pulled the funeral carriage; six suffragettes, including Sylvia Pankhurst, marched alongside. The procession included 50 hunger strikers, some on release because of ill health, and hundreds of women ex-prisoners. At St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, an estimated 6,000 women took part in the service. More than 50,000 people turned out on the streets to watch the funeral pass by. 

The coffin was taken to King’s Cross station and then put into a goods van for its final journey to Morpeth in Northumberland. Huge crowds turned out the next day in Morpeth as Emily was buried in the family grave. The site is marked by a large stone monument with a cross on top and the suffragette slogan ‘Deeds not Words’. 

Parliament finally gave equal voting rights to women and men in 1928. Today, the right for which Emily Wilding Davison gave her life is taken for granted. In the village of Longhorsley, where Emily’s mother’s house still stands, Jane Cotton, who runs Pele Cottage bed and breakfast, reports that no one asks about Emily these days: ‘They don’t seem to realise she lived here.’

Emily is not completely forgotten.Thousands of visitors already troop past a glass case as they make their way to the public gallery of the House of Commons, perhaps little understanding its significance. It contains a faded, fragile silk scarf, with green, white and purple stripes, stained with mud. It is the scarf that Emily was wearing when she fell under the King’s horse.

(theo dailymail)