On the afternoon of June 4, 1913, a 40-year-old woman ducked under the white rail at Tattenham Corner at Epsom Downs as the King’s horse rounded the bend. Her name was Emily Wilding Davidson. Sewn into the lining of her dark coat were two suffragette flags in purple, white, and green. In her pocket was a return train ticket to Epsom.
She raised her hands toward the bridle of the King’s three-year-old colt, Anmer. Four days later, she was dead. The King’s first telegram of the afternoon asked after his jockey. Emily Wilding Davidson’s name did not appear.
She was born on October 11, 1872, at Roxra House in Blackheath, southeast London. Her father, Charles Davidson, was a retired merchant from Morpeth; her mother, Margaret Kesley, was his much younger second wife. The family was middle class by income, upper middle class by manners. Emily attended Kensington High School and, in 1891, Royal Holloway College, a women’s college built only five years earlier.
She read English and was, by every account, gifted, opinionated, and impatient. Then two events broke the architecture of her life. In 1893, her father died suddenly. The estate shrank after debts and the children of his first marriage were paid.
Emily could no longer afford Royal Holloway. She withdrew and took paid work as a teacher and governess. By 1895, she had saved enough to register as an external student at St Hugh’s Hall, Oxford. She took the final honors school in English language and literature in the summer of 1895 and was awarded a first-class result—the highest classification the university could confer.
She was not awarded a degree. Women were not permitted to graduate from Oxford until 1920. She left carrying her examiner’s certificate in a leather wallet and the beginning of a rage that would last the rest of her life. The 1901 census listed her, aged 28, as a teacher, boarder, single, lodging in Worthing on the Sussex coast.
Her wage was roughly £65 a year plus board. She sent part of it to her widowed mother in Northumberland and saved the rest. The teaching life was a closed circuit: governess in a country house, assistant teacher in a girls’ school, or, very rarely, headmistress of a small private establishment. A man with the same education could expect £200 a year and a house.
She could be counted by the British state every ten years and taxed every year, but she could not influence any government that took her taxes. Single women could own property and sign contracts, but they could not vote, serve on a jury, stand for Parliament, or, in many cases, keep their own children after a separation. In October 1906, Emily attended a meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union in London. The speaker was Annie Kenney, a former Lancashire mill girl who had been arrested for obstruction outside a meeting in Manchester the year before.
Kenney spoke about her time in Strangeways Prison. Emily, who had spent years asking and being ignored, listened. In November 1906, she signed her membership card. Her annual subscription was one shilling.
On census night, April 2, 1911, the WSPU organized a census resistance campaign. Members were urged to refuse to be enumerated by leaving their houses overnight, or to spoil their forms with the slogan “No vote, no census. ” Emily took the protest further. She did not refuse to be counted.
She arranged to be counted at an address chosen with deliberate symbolic care: the House of Commons. She entered the Palace of Westminster on the afternoon of Saturday, April 1, 1911, alongside a public tour. Near Westminster Hall, she slipped away from the group, descended to the crypt level, and let herself into a small broom cupboard off the crypt’s ventilation passage. The cupboard was roughly three feet wide and seven feet deep, with a single wooden door and a stone floor.
She closed the door behind her. She had brought sandwiches, a notebook, and a small lamp. She stayed there through Saturday, Sunday, and most of Monday. On Monday morning, a cleaner opened the cupboard door and discovered her.
She was escorted to the police office. A constable named Frank Kearney filled in a supplementary census schedule on her behalf. In the column headed “where staying on the night of April 2nd, 1911,” it reads: “Found hiding in the crypt of Westminster Hall since Saturday. ”
Her landlady, not knowing where her tenant had gone, had also entered her on the household schedule at the lodging house.
Emily Wilding Davidson is, as a result, the only known person to appear twice on the same census, in two different locations, on the same night. She walked out of the Palace of Westminster on the morning of April 3, 1911, untouched and unarrested. The Speaker ordered the cupboard locked. By March 1912, Emily was in Holloway Prison for the seventh time.
The sentence was six months for window-breaking in Whitehall. The Home Office decided, on its own initiative and without her requesting it, that her general health required her to be force-fed. The first feeding was on February 29, 1912. By the time of her death fifteen months later, she had been force-fed 49 times.
The procedure was carried out twice a day, generally at 8 a. m. and 4 p. m.
Two female warders held the prisoner’s arms and shoulders. A leather gag, like a horse bit, was forced between the teeth. If the jaws were held closed, a steel wedge was used to lever them open and a metal gag was screwed into place. The doctor then pushed a rubber tube down the throat, or more commonly up through one nostril and down into the stomach, and poured in a pint of warm milk, raw egg, beef tea, glucose, and occasionally bromide or brandy.
It took about twenty minutes. The tube tore the lining of the throat and esophagus. Many prisoners vomited the contents back through the tube. The aspiration of vomit into the lungs caused pneumonia.
The repeated insertion of the tube through the nose tore the cartilage and caused chronic bleeding. Doctors who refused to perform the procedure, including assistant medical officer Frank Moxon, resigned and gave public evidence. Emily bled from her nose for weeks. She lost two teeth.
She wrote a series of articles, smuggled out of the prison and printed by the WSPU, about what was being done to her. Her own notes were clinical, brief, and oddly serene. She had begun to think of her body as a kind of building. “The body,” she wrote, “is the architecture in which the spirit is housed.
If the architecture is to be ruined for a cause, let the cause be one worth the ruin. ”
In June 1912, she walked out of her cell, climbed onto the iron balcony of Holloway’s D-wing rotunda, approximately thirty feet above the flagstone floor below, and jumped. Halfway down, the prison authorities had recently fitted a horizontal mesh of wire netting, an explicit response to the increase in suicide attempts among hunger-striking suffragettes. The netting broke her fall.
She rolled off and dropped a further fifteen feet. She was unconscious. The prison doctor diagnosed a fractured collarbone, two cracked ribs, severe spinal bruising, and a head injury. She regained consciousness within the hour.
By the afternoon, she had refused food. She was force-fed again that evening. In the article she wrote in the days that followed, titled “The Price of Liberty,” she wrote: “The idea in my mind was that one big tragedy may save many others. ” And: “I felt that by nothing but the sacrifice of human life would the nation be brought to realize the horrible torture our women face.
” The article was published in The Suffragette in May 1913, less than four weeks before Epsom. Emily had also become a coordinator of militant operations. Letterbox attacks were her particular specialism. The first known suffragette letterbox attack was carried out by Emily on December 8, 1911, on a pillar box in Parliament Square.
The vials contained a mixture of yellow phosphorus and potassium chlorate, which, once oxygen reached it, smoldered and caught fire. She was arrested two streets later and charged with arson of His Majesty’s mails. The sentence was six months. Over the following eighteen months, the Post Office reported 5,000 letters destroyed in the first six months of 1913.
In the spring of 1913, the Home Office passed the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, immediately known as the Cat and Mouse Act. The new law allowed the Home Office to release a hunger-striking prisoner on a temporary license as soon as her health became critical, and to rearrest her once she had recovered. The Home Office calculated this would diffuse the martyrdom narrative. It calculated wrongly.
For Emily, the Act had three consequences. It removed her most reliable form of personal protest. It confirmed that the British state was capable of indefinite tactical innovation. And it removed the moral pressure of public sympathy for force-fed prisoners.
On the morning of June 2, 1913, Emily wrote her last article for The Suffragette. It argued that the cause now required more than ever a single act of public visibility the state could not absorb. She posted it to Christabel Pankhurst in Paris. The Derby was forty-eight hours away.
On the morning of June 4, 1913, Emily woke at her lodgings in Coram Street, Bloomsbury, where she had lived since her release from Holloway the previous October. The landlady was a Mrs. Green, a widow with two small children. Emily washed in cold water and dressed in her best clothes: a dark gray wool skirt, a high-collared cream blouse, a black wool coat that reached almost to her ankles, and a wide-brimmed straw hat.
The night before, she had sewn two flags into the inner lining of the coat. They were each approximately eighteen inches wide and twenty-four inches long, in the suffragette colors of purple, white, and green. Their long edges were finished with bias binding. To free them, she would only have to slide her hand into the coat and pull two release strings.
She ate breakfast. She wrote a short note to her mother which she did not post. She left a second note on the kitchen table for Mrs. Green, thanking her for her kindness and asking her, in the event of any difficulty, to telegraph Edith How Martyn at the WSPU office.
She walked to Russell Square, took the underground to Charing Cross, walked to Victoria station, and bought a return ticket to Epsom Downs. The ticket read: Victoria to Epsom Downs, second-class return, 9s. 5d. The fact of the return ticket has confused historians for more than a century.
A woman intending suicide does not usually buy a return ticket. A woman intending a public demonstration with a fifty-fifty chance of survival might. She boarded the trains and arrived at Epsom Downs shortly after midday. She stopped at a refreshment tent and bought a glass of weak lemonade.
By 2 p. m. she had taken her place at Tattenham Corner, the long left-handed bend six furlongs from the finish where the field rounds the most dangerous turn of the course. She stood among the spectators against the inside white rail.
She did not bet. She waited. The race began at 3:15 p. m.
As the leaders rounded Tattenham Corner, Emily ducked smoothly under the white wooden rail. She stepped onto the turf. She did not run. She walked forward perhaps two yards.
The first four horses, including the favorite Craganour, passed her at full gallop. She turned to face the next group of runners. The King’s horse, Anmer, ridden by Herbert Jones, was at the back of this group. She raised her hands.
Slowed film footage, analyzed frame by frame in a 2013 Channel 4 documentary, shows her hands rose toward the bridle of Anmer, not its body. The analysis concluded she was attempting to fix one of her flags either over the bridle or to the saddle. She had between one and two seconds to make contact. Anmer was traveling at approximately 35 mph.
Emily’s right shoulder struck the horse’s chest. The horse’s lower legs caught her at the level of her waist. She was thrown to the ground. Anmer’s hooves came down on her head and chest.
The horse somersaulted forward. Herbert Jones was thrown clear and landed heavily on the turf about twelve feet beyond. The remaining horses swerved around the obstacle and continued the race. The total elapsed time between Emily stepping onto the track and being struck was approximately six seconds.
Emily was carried on a stretcher to the medical tent and from there by ambulance to Epsom Cottage Hospital. She was admitted at 4:10 p. m. with a fractured skull, a fractured base of the spine, and severe internal bruising.
The senior surgeon on duty, Dr. Hubert Peacock, recorded that she was unconscious with shallow breathing and expected her to die within hours. She did not die within hours. She lay in a single bed in a small ward for four days.
Two suffragette nurses were permitted to attend her. Telegrams of abuse were also delivered. One read, in coarse capitals: “Hope you suffer torture until you die. ”
The Pathé News footage of the collision was screened in every cinema in Britain within forty-eight hours.
By the evening of June 5, 1913, an estimated four million people had seen the moving image of Emily Davidson’s collision with the King’s horse. It was by a wide margin the largest single audience for a piece of news film in the history of the United Kingdom up to that point. The press was divided immediately. The Times described her as a desperate woman whose action was condemned by all reasonable people.
The Daily Mirror, which printed the only clear photograph of the collision, called the event a tragedy. The Manchester Guardian, alone among the major papers, argued that whatever the merits of her tactic, her sincerity could not be questioned. Christabel Pankhurst, writing from Paris, declared that Emily had intended a deliberate martyrdom. Sylvia Pankhurst took a more careful position, believing Emily had intended a high-risk demonstration, not a certain death.
Edith How Martyn, who knew Emily personally, said only that Emily had been preparing herself for the possibility of her own death for at least a year. The strongest evidence for deliberate martyrdom is her own article, “The Price of Liberty,” published only weeks before. The strongest evidence against deliberate suicide is the return train ticket in her pocket, the contents of her shopping basket, and the fact that she had paid for her room a week in advance. The 2013 forensic film analysis suggested an in-between possibility: she had intended a public demonstration of overwhelming visibility, calculated the chance of survival at perhaps fifty percent, and judged that an acceptable risk for the cause.
Emily Wilding Davidson died at quarter to five on the afternoon of June 8, 1913. The cause of death was fracture of the base of the skull. She was forty years and eight months old. The coroner’s inquest at the town hall in Epsom on June 10, 1913, returned a verdict of death by misadventure.
The coroner formally instructed the jury that there was no clear evidence of an intention to die. The verdict satisfied no one. Christabel Pankhurst, in her editorial in The Suffragette that week, called her “the first martyr of the women’s movement. ”
The funeral took place on Saturday, June 14, 1913.
The WSPU organized a procession from Victoria station up Buckingham Palace Road, past Buckingham Palace itself, along the Mall, through Trafalgar Square, up Charing Cross Road, along Bloomsbury Way, to St. George’s Church, Bloomsbury. Total distance, roughly three and a half miles. The route was lined by an estimated 50,000 spectators.
Contemporary reports describe a striking silence in the crowd. There was no cheering. There was no jeering. At the head of the procession walked a guard of suffragette officers in academic dress, including those who, like Emily, held first-class results from Oxford and Cambridge they had not been allowed to graduate from.
Behind the guard rode a single woman on a white horse dressed in white robes holding a wooden cross. Behind the honor guard came the horse-drawn hearse, an open carriage drawn by four black horses with purple, white, and green plumes. The coffin lay open to view, draped in a purple silk pall embroidered with the word “Ascendancy. ” Two banners flanked the coffin, one carrying the text of Emily’s last published article, “The Price of Liberty.
”
Behind the hearse walked, in separate blocks, the unmarried suffragette officers in white, the married suffragettes in black, the graduates the universities had refused to graduate in academic dress, the trade union and East End women in working clothes, and professional women in the dress of various professions. Behind them walked the men of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. Total marchers: just over 6,000. At St.
George’s Church, the eulogy described Emily as a woman who had given her life for the freedom of her sisters in obedience to her conscience. The coffin was then taken to King’s Cross station, placed aboard the 4:10 p. m. Newcastle Express, and carried north.
A smaller procession of approximately 400 Northumberland suffragettes was waiting at Morpeth station. The burial took place on Monday, June 16, 1913, at St. Mary the Virgin Churchyard in Morpeth. The headstone ordered by her mother was carved with the words: “Emily Wilding Davidson, BA, who gave her life for the cause of liberty.
” Beneath the inscription: “Deeds, not words. ”
Herbert Jones, the jockey who had ridden Anmer, never forgot the collision. He was twenty-two years old at the time, concussed, and released from the same Epsom Cottage Hospital within twenty-four hours. He returned to riding and won twelve more races over the next three years.
He told his second wife that he saw Emily Davidson’s face every time he closed his eyes. In a 1940 interview with Sporting Life, he said he had been haunted by “that poor woman’s face” for twenty-seven years. In 1928, fifteen years after the Derby, Herbert Jones laid a wreath at Emmeline Pankhurst’s funeral. The card read: “To do honor to the memory of Mrs.
Pankhurst and of Miss Emily Davidson. ” Jones retired from race riding in 1923 after a leg injury. He developed depression in the late 1940s and suffered from gas poisoning from a faulty geyser in his Epsom kitchen in 1950. On July 17, 1951, he hanged himself in the kitchen of his home in Epsom.
He was 69 years old. His obituary in The Times mentioned the Derby. It did not mention Emily Davidson by name. The Equal Franchise Act of 1928 extended the parliamentary vote to all women on the same terms as men.
Approximately five million additional women were enfranchised. Combined with the ten million women enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act of 1918, the total number of women added to the British electorate as a direct result of the suffragette campaign was approximately fifteen million. Three places in Britain still hold Emily Wilding Davidson’s memory. The first is the small wooden cupboard in the crypt of St.
Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster, marked with a brass plaque fixed there by the Labour MP Tony Benn in 2000. The plaque records that Emily hid in the cupboard on the night of April 2, 1911, to give her census address as the House of Commons. It is now part of the official parliamentary tour. The second is a small wooden bench at Tattenham Corner on Epsom Downs Racecourse, placed there by the local council in 1993 on the eightieth anniversary of her death.
The bronze inset plaque reads: “On this spot on the 4th of June 1913, Emily Wilding Davidson stepped onto the racecourse and was struck by His Majesty’s horse Anmer. She died four days later for the cause of women’s suffrage. ”
The third is an empty space. Holloway Prison was closed in July 2016.
The site was sold to a housing developer for £281 million and the buildings were demolished between 2018 and 2022. The footprint of the prison is now a housing estate. A walking trail through the new estate marks the line of the D-wing rotunda. Visitors can stand on the precise spot where Emily threw herself off the iron balcony in June 1912.
There is no plaque. In 2018, on the 105th anniversary of her death, a bronze statue of Emily Wilding Davidson was unveiled in Morpeth town centre by Maxine Peake. The statue shows her standing in her dark coat, holding one of the two flags she had sewn into the lining of that coat 105 years before. The flag is open.
The wind sculpted into the bronze is at her back.