🕯️ A Dark Age
In a country ruled by a queen, women lived under the absolute rule of men. They had no vote. University degrees were forbidden to them. Their wages were half a man's, and even then, work was scarce. Poor women sold themselves just to survive.
She had to fight the dark side of the nineteenth century. She was an activist who took up the only weapon of the powerless — the hunger strike.
🏇 4 June 1913, the Derby
On this day, 4 June 1913, the suffragist Emily Davison climbed over the rail at the Derby Stakes, the greatest horse race in the world, and threw herself onto the track. She ran straight toward one of the galloping horses. Then she collided with a horse owned by King George V. In her hand was a flag for women's suffrage.
People worried about the health of the king's horse. She died four days later.
🐎 The Jockey Left Behind
The king's horse was Anmer, and the rider on its back was Herbert Jones. Jones broke a rib and was bruised, but he recovered quickly — two weeks after the Derby he was riding the king's horse again. George V wrote in his diary that "poor Herbert Jones and Anmer had been sent flying," calling it a most disappointing day. Queen Alexandra sent Jones a telegram of sympathy, blaming the accident on a "brutal lunatic woman." In the face of a woman's death, what the crown worried about was the horse and the jockey.
Later, a story spread that Jones had spent his whole life "haunted by that woman's face" before taking his own life. But that tale was refuted by later accounts — both his family and a researcher dismissed it as nonsense.
⚰️ A Funeral That Became a March
Her funeral was no mere mourning; it became a vast demonstration. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) organized the procession, and thousands lined the streets of central London. Her body was carried north to Morpeth, in her home county of Northumberland, and laid to rest. The epitaph her mother chose read: "Welcome home the Northumbrian hunger striker." Beneath it stood the movement's motto — Deeds not words.
The public reaction did not flow one way. The collision was caught on film and soon became an infamous moment in history; some called her a martyr, others a madwoman. Even on her hospital bed she received hate mail. That division over a single person was, itself, the face of the age.
🌅 What Finally Came
Five years after Davison's death, in 1918, Britain granted the vote for the first time to women over thirty who met certain qualifications. In 1928 that right was widened to all women over twenty-one, equal with men. Before women could stand on the same line as men, there was the death of one woman who had raised a flag on the track.
Source for the opening and the Derby scene: Geert Mak, In Europe
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