Emily Davison

Emily Wilding Davison was born on October 11, 1867, in Blackheath, then on the southeastern edge of London, to Charles Davison, a retired merchant from Northumberland, and his second wife Margaret, who came from the village of Longhorsley in the same county ^[1]. The family was comfortable during Emily's childhood, and the Northumberland connection ran deep: she spent parts of her youth in the North East and would return there throughout her life, so much so that the county later claimed her as its own ^[2].

She was a clever, restless child who read widely and did well at school. She attended Kensington High School and won a bursary to Royal Holloway College in 1891 to read literature. Her father's death in 1893 cut that plan short, because her mother could no longer afford the fees, and Margaret Davison moved back to Longhorsley where she ran a small shop ^[1]. Emily took work as a governess to save money and kept studying in the evenings.

Her persistence paid off. She earned enough to enrol for a term at St Hugh's Hall in Oxford, where she sat the final examinations in English Language and Literature and achieved first-class honours in 1895 ^[3]. The result counted for less than it should have: Oxford did not award degrees to women at the time, a restriction that remained in place until 1920. She later completed a degree externally through the University of London, graduating in 1908 ^[1]. The experience of excelling in a system that refused to recognise her stayed with her, and it is hard to read her later militancy without remembering it.

For roughly a decade Davison earned her living as a teacher and governess, including posts at a church school in Edgbaston, at Seabury in Worthing, and with a family in Berkshire ^[1]. Teaching was one of the few professions fully open to educated women, but it offered her little scope for the intellectual ambition she had shown at Oxford. Friends recalled a woman of strong opinions, deep religious conviction, and a dry sense of humour ^[2].

In November 1906 she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant suffrage organisation founded three years earlier by Emmeline Pankhurst ^[3]. The WSPU had broken from the older, constitutional suffragist societies out of frustration with decades of polite lobbying that had produced no parliamentary progress. Its slogan was "Deeds, not words," and Davison took the phrase literally. By 1908 she had given up regular teaching to devote herself to the cause, supporting herself precariously through occasional work and the movement ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Emily Davison before 1906 would have found an able, underemployed schoolmistress. Within three years she had become one of the most arrested women in Britain. That transformation, from governess to full-time militant, is central to any honest Emily Davison biography, because it shows how the suffrage campaign absorbed talented women whom Edwardian society had given no other outlet ^[3].

Davison's record of direct action was extreme even by WSPU standards. Between 1909 and 1912 she was arrested on numerous occasions and served multiple prison sentences for offences that included obstruction, stone-throwing, breaking windows, setting fire to post boxes, and assaulting a Baptist minister she had mistaken for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George ^[1]. The post box arson campaign of December 1911 was largely her own initiative, undertaken without WSPU authorisation, and it signalled her willingness to escalate beyond the leadership's official tactics ^[3].

Like many imprisoned suffragettes she went on hunger strike, and like many she was force-fed, an ordeal she endured dozens of times across her prison terms ^[2]. Force-feeding involved restraining the prisoner while a tube was pushed through the nose or mouth into the stomach, and campaigners publicised it as state torture. In 1909, while held in Strangeways prison in Manchester, Davison barricaded herself in her cell to resist the procedure, and a prison officer forced a hose through the window and flooded the cell with cold water. She later sued the prison authorities and was awarded forty shillings in damages ^[1].

In June 1912, during a sentence in Holloway, she threw herself down an iron staircase in protest at the mass force-feeding of fellow prisoners, an act she described afterwards as an attempt to draw attention through one great tragedy to the suffering of the others ^[3]. She survived with serious spinal injuries. The episode has been cited ever since in the debate over whether her actions at Epsom the following year were intended to be fatal.

One of the best known Emily Davison facts dates from the night of the 1911 census, April 2, when she hid in a cupboard in the crypt chapel area of the Palace of Westminster so that she could truthfully record the House of Commons as her place of residence, a witty protest against a Parliament in which women had no vote ^[4]. The census enumerator found her and she was recorded there, and a plaque later placed in the Palace by Tony Benn commemorates the episode.

On June 4, 1913, Davison travelled to the Epsom Derby, England's most famous horse race, attended that year by King George V and Queen Mary. As the field rounded Tattenham Corner she ducked under the railing and stepped onto the course into the path of the oncoming horses. She was struck by Anmer, the King's horse, ridden by jockey Herbert Jones. The collision, captured by newsreel cameras, threw her violently to the ground ^[5].

She never regained consciousness. Davison died of a fractured skull on June 8, 1913, at Epsom Cottage Hospital, four days after the race ^[1]. Herbert Jones suffered concussion and other injuries but recovered, though he later said the memory haunted him; he attended Emmeline Pankhurst's funeral in 1928 to lay a wreath in Davison's memory ^[2].

What exactly she intended has been argued over for more than a century. She bought a return rail ticket and held a ticket to a suffragette dance later that week, details often cited as evidence that she did not plan to die ^[3]. Modern analysis of the newsreel footage, undertaken for a Channel 4 documentary in 2013, suggested she was trying to attach a suffragette scarf or flag to the King's horse rather than to pull it down or throw herself under it ^[5]. Two WSPU flags were found on her, pinned inside her coat. Most historians now describe her death as a protest that went catastrophically wrong rather than a premeditated suicide, though the question cannot be settled beyond doubt ^[3].

Davison never married and had no children. Her closest bonds were with her mother, to whom she remained devoted, and with fellow campaigners, particularly Mary Leigh, a working-class militant who became a lifelong keeper of her memory and led annual pilgrimages to her grave for decades ^[2]. Davison lived frugally in lodgings in London, often short of money after she gave up teaching, and depended at times on support from sympathisers within the movement.

She was a committed Anglican whose faith shaped her politics. Her personal motto, drawn from her belief that the struggle for the vote was a spiritual as well as a political cause, was reflected in her writing, including an essay titled "The Price of Liberty" that was published after her death, in which she argued that the true suffragette must be willing to give up everything, even life itself, for the freedom of women ^[3]. Friends described her as warm and funny in private, a keen swimmer and cyclist, fond of amateur theatricals, quite unlike the grim fanatic of hostile press caricature ^[1].

The WSPU, which had sometimes kept its distance from Davison's freelance militancy in life, embraced her fully in death. On June 14, 1913, her coffin was escorted through central London by a procession of several thousand suffragettes in white, purple, and black, watched by enormous crowds, in one of the great political funerals of the era ^[4]. After a service at St George's, Bloomsbury, her body was taken north by train for burial in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at Morpeth in Northumberland, near her mother's home ^[2].

Her gravestone carries the WSPU motto, "Deeds not words." The press response at the time was divided and often hostile: some newspapers mourned the injured jockey and the horse more prominently than the dead woman, and questioned her sanity ^[5]. Within the movement, however, she became at once its foremost martyr, and the WSPU newspaper The Suffragette presented her as a soldier fallen in a holy war ^[3].

Among Emily Davison achievements, none was planned in a committee room. Her contribution was to force the suffrage question onto front pages worldwide at a moment when the government hoped militancy could be contained and ignored. The vote did not come quickly: war intervened, and it was 1918 before women over thirty gained the parliamentary franchise, with equal suffrage following in 1928 ^[4].

Davison occupies a singular place in British memory. The newsreel of the Derby collision is among the most replayed pieces of early twentieth-century film, and her name appears in virtually every account of the suffrage movement ^[5]. Historians continue to debate her intentions and her tactics; biographies by Liz Stanley and Ann Morley in 1988 and by Lucy Fisher in 2013 re-examined the evidence and pushed back against the simple label of suicide ^[3].

Physical memorials have multiplied. Besides her Morpeth grave and the plaque in the Palace of Westminster cupboard, a statue of Davison by Ray Lonsdale was unveiled in Carlisle Park, Morpeth, in 2018, the centenary year of partial women's suffrage, and Epsom marks the site of her fatal protest ^[2]. Royal Holloway and St Hugh's College, Oxford, both commemorate their former student, and Davison features prominently in the 2015 feature film Suffragette, which closes with footage of her funeral ^[4].

Her legacy is contested in a way that keeps it alive. Some historians argue that militancy alienated moderate opinion and delayed the vote; others reply that decades of moderation had achieved nothing and that women like Davison made the question impossible to shelve ^[3]. What is not in dispute is the scale of her commitment. She was jailed repeatedly, force-fed, injured, and finally killed in pursuit of a right that every British woman now holds, and that is why, more than a century on, people still ask what Emily Davison did and why she did it.