She attacked a vicar with a whip and hid a carving knife in her skirt — the truth about

the suffragette who ran in front of the King’s horse

Emily Wilding Davison was killed by George V's colt Anmer

Belief that she threw herself in front of horse questioned



Her sacrifice was a 'protest that went wrong'

Suffragette had a return ticket to Epsom, and did not intend to kill herself



Fellow votes for women campaigners viewed her as 'loose cannon'



Firebrand: Suffragette Emily Wilding Davison had become uncontrollably militant and was labelled a 'self-dramatising individualist' by fellow campaigners

Good manners prevailed as a 40-year-old woman in a grey felt hat and navy blue skirt started to push her way through the crowd.

Pressed ten-deep against the rail, the men lifted their flat caps and boaters and courteously stood aside. Soon, Emily Wilding Davison was right at the front, with a clear view of the most eagerly anticipated race of the season: the 1913 Derby.

Although it was highly unusual to see a respectably-dressed lone woman at Epsom Downs, no one was paying her any attention. ‘Here they come!’ shouted the punters, as they heard the thunder of hooves in the distance.

Only the man standing next to Emily registered that something was amiss. ‘Madam! You mustn’t do that!’ he said, as she bent to bob under the rail.

‘I will!’ she replied tartly, in her braying, upper-class accent. They were the last words anyone ever heard Emily Davison say.

Shaking herself free as the man made an attempt to restrain her, she ran out on to the racecourse. Almost instantly, the first nine horses galloped past at a terrifying 35 miles an hour, missing her by a comfortable margin.

What in heaven’s name did the woman think she was doing? As the Derby crowd gawped in horror, she seemed to be crippled with stage fright. Tottering like an absent-minded old lady, Emily took a couple more steps. As she turned her head to the right, she saw a large brown shape hurtling straight at her.

It was Agadir, an outsider. Fortunately, his jockey managed to swerve at the last moment — a manoeuvre that strained the horse’s forelegs and left him lame.

Having narrowly escaped one collision, Emily then dodged another as a horse called Nimbus brushed past her right shoulder. But within seconds, yet another horse, Anmer, was bearing down on her — so fast that its colours were a blur.

This time, she seemed to come to a decision: taking a few steps towards it, she stretched out her arms as if in a forlorn attempt to catch its reins.



Although Emily did not know it, the colt belonged to King George V, who was watching the race with Queen Mary. Emily’s arms proved no defence against the momentum of half a ton of racehorse galloping downhill. Anmer struck her almost head-on, then cart-wheeled head over heels, rolling on top of its jockey Herbert Jones before sliding to a halt on its side.



Derby Disaster: King George V's horse Anmer hits suffragette Emily Wilding Davison during the 1913 Epsom Derby

As one spectator recalled, Emily was ‘bowled over like a ninepin’. The force of the collision tossed her through the air and sent her hat spinning across the turf. She rolled several times before landing flat on her back, her knees drawn up as if to protect her modesty.

After the final stragglers had gone past, spectators surged on to the track to gawp at Emily and the jockey, both now unconscious and bleeding profusely.

No one had any idea that she was a suffragette, let alone that she was about to go down in history as a martyr for the feminist cause.

Both horse and jockey survived to race again, but Emily died four days later, on June 8 1913, never having regained consciousness. She was instantly sanctified by her fellow suffragettes as a martyr, who’d been cruelly mown down in her prime by the ‘King’s executioner’ as they called his innocent colt.

There could be no doubt, said her friend and fellow-suffragette Mary Leigh, that Joan of Arc herself had welcomed Emily in Heaven as a kindred soul. Other suffragettes praised her ‘almost superhuman courage’ in risking her life — because ‘she knew that suffering and outraged womanhood looked to her to do her utmost to release them from bondage’.

History has continued to be kind to Emily. Even now, almost 100 years to the day since she died, it’s still widely believed that she valiantly threw herself under the King’s horse. Today she is still seen as a shining heroine who played a definitive role in the fight to get women the vote.

The truth, however, is considerably more cloudy.

The florid tributes that followed her death conceal the fact that her fellow suffragettes viewed her during her lifetime as an unmanageable renegade. Indeed, even within the radical Women’s Social and Political Union, headed by Emmeline Pankhurst, she’d been labelled as ‘a self-dramatising individualist, insufficiently capable of acting in the confines of official instructions, clever but headstrong’.

Thus Emily Davison was not only a rebel with a cause. She was a rebel within her cause — a loose cannon primed to go off without warning.

Most damaging of all to the myth of Emily as a feminist martyr, however, is the fact that she never meant to kill herself at all. Her glorious sacrifice was, in the end, nothing more than a protest that went spectacularly wrong.

Martyr: Emily was instantly sanctified by her fellow suffragettes as a martyr, who'd been cruelly mown down in her prime by the 'King's executioner' as they called his innocent colt

Tragedy: Both horse and jockey survived to race again, but Emily died four days later, on June 8 1913, never having regained consciousness

So who was this tall, thin and austere-looking woman whose impetuosity guaranteed her prominence in the history of the suffragette movement?

Like many of her comrades, she was a product of the bourgeoisie. She was brought up in London at Gaston House, an imposing Georgian mansion in Greenwich. For the first nine years of her life, she was looked after by a governess, a nanny, two housemaids, a footman and a cook. But from an early age, Emily was high-spirited and mischievous.

‘Miss Emily, would you please return to the nursery,’ her nanny would tell her. ‘Now, be a good girl and do as I ask.’ Emily would stand against the wall at the top of the stairs, fold her arms and firmly plant her feet. Then she’d give her stock reply: ‘No! I don’t want to be good!’

She had no interest in dolls, preferring toy soldiers. And when she played with other children, if she didn’t get her way, she would run off in a huff.

She was also fiercely bright. By five, she was already reading from her father’s copy of The Times and able to recite lengthy chunks of poetry.

At the fee-paying Kensington High School, she excelled in English literature, drama and French, and became fervently religious.

Rebel with a cause: Emily's fellow suffragettes viewed as an unmanageable renegade and 'a self-dramatising individualist'

Unusually for a young woman of her day, she went on to study for a degree at Royal Holloway College, where she gained a first in English language and literature.

In 1906, after years spent teaching and working as a governess, she joined the newly-founded Women’s Social and Political Union, whose motto was ‘Deeds Not Words’. Under the leadership of Mrs Pankhurst, the WSPU became increasingly confrontational — leading the Daily Mail to call this new breed of violent activists ‘suffragettes’ to distinguish them from the mild-mannered ‘suffragists’ of the Victorian era.

The name stuck. As for Emily, at the age of 34, she threw herself into the campaign for women’s rights, which she regarded as nothing less than a holy war to which she’d been summoned by a call from God.

An acquaintance from this period recalled her saying: ‘If you get me a flying machine and take me to the top of the Houses of Parliament, I’ll blow them up!’

Another remembered her as ‘a fanatic — really two people in one. She could be cool and calm one minute, then some impulse would cause her brain to explode like fireworks the next’.

In March, 1909, she was charged with assaulting four police officers at a demonstration in Parliament Square and sentenced to a month in Holloway Prison. There she slept on a bed of planks and had to wear the same unwashed outfit for the duration.

Three months later, she served another two-month sentence for attempting to disrupt a political meeting addressed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. This time, she smashed the windows of her prison cell and went on hunger strike, forcing the exasperated authorities to release her after only five days.

Emily was on a roll. That September, she was arrested in Manchester for throwing iron balls through the windows of a concert hall, for which she got two months in the city’s Strangeways prison, but was again released a few days after going on hunger strike.

The suffragette leadership began to view her as a rogue element, who never sought prior approval for her actions. Not that Emily cared. She was happily pursuing politicians all over the country, hurling stones at Lloyd George’s car in Newcastle and smashing windows of a hall in Lancashire where a cabinet minister was speaking.

The hunger strike get-out-of-jail free card could only last so long, however. The next time Emily stopped eating — during her fourth prison sentence — she was fed by force.

In memory: Suffragettes guard Emily Davison's coffin and cortege at Victoria Station on the day of her funeral in 1913

Along with other suffragettes, she had tubes pushed down her throat or up her nostrils, through which milk was poured. Each woman had to listen to the agonised moans and cries of her colleagues. The force-feeding was so traumatic that many lost teeth or had sore and bleeding gums. Emily Davison went through this brutal indignity 49 times.

This torture served only to enflame her sense of injustice. Released once more, she went straight to the House of Commons and broke a window, which led to another sentence and more force-feeding.

But it was what she did next that really infuriated the WSPU leadership.

Wrapping boxes of matches in linen soaked with kerosene, she lit them and dropped them into letterboxes in the streets adjoining the Houses of Parliament.

That got her six months in Holloway, which resulted in yet more force-feeding. She also dramatically hurled herself 10ft down the prison’s iron staircase, injuring her head, shoulder and two vertebrae. ‘The idea in my mind was one big tragedy may save many others,’ she said later.

By the time she left Holloway, she’d lost well over 2st and looked more like a woman of 60. Three years on the treadmill of fasting and forcible-feeding had also driven her to the brink of insanity.

Votes for women: Emily Davison, left, with fellow campaigners (l-r) Sylvia Pankhurst, Christabel Pankhurst and Mrs Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence in 1910

In November 1912, she boarded a train to Scotland, intent on disrupting a speech to be delivered there by Lloyd George. She was astonished to find the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself sitting in her compartment.

Drawing a dog whip from her skirt, she dealt him a series of stinging blows across the face, exclaiming ‘Villain, traitor! Take that — and that!’

Unfortunately, she’d got the wrong man. The Reverend Forbes Jackson did indeed bear a striking resemblance to the chancellor — but even after he revealed his identity, Emily continued to whip him.

‘Oh, it’s all right — I know you’re Lloyd George,’ she screamed. ‘You’ve disguised yourself but you cannot hide yourself!’

She had to be dragged from the train by policemen and passengers, though not before managing to strike the blameless clergyman twice more with her fists. Jackson may have got off lightly, however: the police later found a carving knife secreted in her skirt.

In the final months of her life, she bombarded various newspapers with screeds of dense religious zealotry. It must have seemed clear to at least some of her colleagues that she was losing her grip on reality.

Having decided to disrupt the Derby, she told no one of her plans. That morning she bought a third-class ticket to Epsom Downs, placing the return half in her black suede purse. The very fact she bought a return ticket suggests she believed the protest would be a success.

Disembarking at Epsom, she joined the great ant-heap of humanity flocking to the racecourse through the morning drizzle. At the track itself, she stopped at the first vantage point overlooked by newsreel cameras.

Campaigner: A silk suffragette sash reputed to have been worn by Emily Davison during her demonstration at the Epsom Derby

With her complete ignorance of racing, Emily was not to know that the inside of Tattenham Corner was the most dangerous position she could possibly have chosen. Just before the bend, the terrain dropped 40ft within 300 yards, which meant the horses approached it at maximum speed. Not only that, but Emily was on the inside of the bend, so she could only see six yards in either direction.

It was a fatal mistake. The horses passed in a blur, leaving Emily’s body and those of horse and rider on the turf. She was taken to hospital in a private motor car.

There, it was established that she was suffering from concussion. Her only signs of injury were a bruise on her left temple and blood seeping from her nose.

In the papers, sympathy for Emily was in short supply. The Times called her ‘demented’, the London Evening Standard denounced her as ‘entirely unbalanced’, and the Daily Mail labelled her ‘a notorious militant with a thirst for martyrdom’. There was an immediate flood of poison-pen letters from the public.

As her life ebbed away, she was visited by fellow suffragettes, two of whom draped a suffragette flag on the screen around her bed. But only medical staff were present when she took her last breath at 4.50pm on Sunday, June 8.

At the inquest into her death, two days later, her half-brother Henry said he felt sure that she hadn’t meant to kill herself. The fact that she’d acted alone was down to her ‘pathetic loneliness’, he added.

She certainly wasn’t in a suicidal frame of mind when she tottered on to the Derby racetrack and became an accidental martyr. Nor is it evident that her death in any way hastened the law that gave women the vote.

But in Emily Davison’s case, the myth is likely to outlast the truth. A hundred years from now, she’ll no doubt still be celebrated as the brave suffragette who deliberately threw herself under the king’s horse.

The Suffragette Derby by Michael Tanner, is published by The Robson Press at £20. © 2013 Michael Tanner. To order a copy for £14.99 (incl p&p) call 0844 472 4157.