Tiny Histories by Dixe Wills

Author:Dixe Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Quadrille Publishing Ltd
Published: 2016-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Politics

Politics may be ‘the art of the possible’, as German statesman Otto von Bismarck opined, but it’s also subject to unpredictable and apparently inconsequential events that make possible the seemingly impossible too. A stroke of luck can prove decisive in setting the country on a new course, while a single misjudgment may change the political landscape entirely.

A young woman misjudges the path of a horse

Ask the woman or man in the street what the defining event of the suffragette movement was – aside from women actually winning the vote in 1928 – and chances are you’ll receive a reply along the lines of, ‘There was that woman who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of the King’s horse.’

And there’s no denying that they’d have a point (although many people mistakenly name Emmeline Pankhurst as having carried out the deed) for it caused a sensation at the time and the grainy 14-second film of the incident remains a popular, if ghoulish, view on the internet today. What the clip shows is a stream of horses galloping around Tattenham Corner at Epsom Racecourse on 4 June 1913, Derby Day. After the main field has gone by, a young woman, Emily Wilding Davison, steps out from the crowd, takes a few hurried paces onto the course and turns to face the final five runners. Two pass on the inside of her before she is struck at great speed by the third, Anmer, a racehorse owned by King George V. She tumbles over backwards. Anmer falls, unseating his jockey, Herbert Jones. The horse gets up but Jones lies flat out on the grass. The crowd catches its breath for a second before pouring onto the course, engulfing the two motionless figures.

Anmer finished the Derby jockey-less and went on to compete in several more races. Herbert Jones was mildly concussed but recovered soon afterwards. The 40-year-old Davison was knocked unconscious and died four days later in Epsom Cottage Hospital. She had suffered a fractured skull and other internal injuries.

The story – though horrifying – seems simple enough: Emily Davison, the well known activist with the militant Women’s Social and Political Union who had been arrested nine times for crimes that included arson, and who had been force-fed 49 times while on hunger strike in prison, had gone one step further and martyred herself for the cause of women’s suffrage, choosing the king’s horse to ram home her point.

Scratch below the surface, though, and it appears that this was not really what happened at all. The first problem with the story is that Davison was found to have purchased a return ticket to Epsom. Furthermore, she had made plans to go on holiday with her sister. Neither of these are the actions of a woman intent on ending her life.

So, if she was not trying to commit suicide, the question remains as to what exactly her intentions were that fateful June day.

Evidence has emerged that Davison was one of several suffragettes who, prior to the

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