Emily Wilding Davison is most famous for her tragic death when running into the path of King George V’s horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913. Thousands of suffragettes accompanied the coffin and tens of thousands lined the streets on the day of her funeral.
Davison was a militant activist who fought for women’s suffrage. She was a member of the WSPU and gave up her job as a teacher to devote herself to the suffragette movement. She attended Royal Holloway College and Oxford University where she gained first class honours but women were not allowed degrees at the time.
She was frequently arrested due to the groups militant tactics and while imprisoned refused to eat in protest, leading to her being force fed on a number of occasions. In 1911 she broke into the house of commons and hid in a cupboard so that she could legitimately claim her place of residence for the 1911 census as the ‘House of Commons’. There is now a plaque commemorating the event.
It is now believed that her running out in front of King George V’s horse was an attempt at gaining attention for women’s suffrage, a ‘Votes for Women’ sash was found and she could have been attempting to throw it over the horse. Initially this backfired as Parliament claimed that if an educated women such as Davison was prone to such rash behaviour, only chaos would ensue if women were allowed to vote.