Conflicting thoughts on the heroine of Epsom Downs
I can never pass this spot without stopping. A simple plaque, in a high place, on a fatal curve, where the course turns decisively for home. They’ll be all over it again this month: the high-spirited, behatted, lubricated throng that rolls up for Derby Day on the Downs. But it’s on quiet days, when emotion is recollected in tranquillity, that the plaque speaks.
Emily Wilding Davison was a peculiar hero. The precise thoughts behind her immortal deed – debated to distraction on the centenary of the event five years ago – will remain forever shrouded in a sepia summer haze.
Heading for Epsom that Derby Day, destined for a collision that would impact history as firmly as her own shattered skull, she had given no hints. Her fellow suffragettes may have wasted no time in claiming her as a martyr, but in truth this was a hasty pirouette. Until then she had been the headstrong maverick, distrusted by colleagues, unwilling to wait for instructions – the sort of person who might, on a sudden, throw herself into the path of His Majesty’s horse.
She didn’t, of course. Upgraded analysis of the ancient footage suggests that she was endeavouring to attach a suffragette scarf to the horse’s bridle when she was felled to the astonished turf.
But in stories of this kind, perception is nine-tenths of the law. In our family – never exactly a hotbed of radical insurrection – the attitude was generally one of disdain. My mother voted happily enough throughout her life, but when she first told me the tale of this extravagant deed, it was with a whiff of distaste for the untamed lioness who had, as she believed, hurled herself beneath the thundering hooves.
Some of this has rubbed off on me. Even on a bright day, standing beside the plaque beneath a broad downland sky, I feel the churn of futility. In June 1913, Emily Davison could not have known how quickly the wheels of history would turn; how soon the silver lining of partial female suffrage would come to lace the clouds of war. But still the question lingers: might not the desired end, in any case, have been achieved without recourse to such catastrophic means?
On the other hand, there is also a sense of awe: the proper, instinctive regard of the civilian for the warrior; an admiration born from having spent one’s life cocooned in freedom, security and peace. Viewed from that privileged plain, the deeds of anyone who has risked all assume an aspect of lofty reproach.
Yet what fills me most on this spot is a sense of irrevocable consequence and of the inalienable authority of the will. Boarding the Epsom train that morning, clutching the return ticket she would never need, Emily Davison had a world of possibilities before her. When the Derby field came careering round Tattenham Corner, she still did.
Then she stepped out. A spectator, who tried to grab her, reported her final words: “I will.” And four seconds later she had consigned herself to eternity, committed for ever to the path of no possible return.
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