DAVISON (EMILY WILDING)

Group of correspondence and papers relating to the life and death of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison (1872-1913)

Footnotes

'WHAT ABOUT PILLAR-BOXES NOW? THINGS WILL HAVE TO BE VERY LIVELY THIS NEXT YEAR!!': Letters from the 'suffragette martyr' Emily Wilding Davison six months before her death, a poignant first-hand account of her injuries and messages from the grave.

After the Pankhursts, Emily Wilding Davison is arguably the best-known suffragette and the story of her death following injuries sustained at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913 has been the subject of much theory, speculation and conjecture. Whilst her motives remain unclear, by this final act she became forever a martyr to the cause and was accorded a spectacular funeral, attended by her closest friends and some six thousand mourners.

Emily Wilding Davison joined the WSPU in June 1908 and soon earned a reputation for her extreme and unauthorised militancy, prompting Sylvia Pankhurst to describe her as "one of the most daring and reckless of the militants", a recklessness which caused her to fall out of favour with the WSPU leadership: '...Hindsight has marked Emily Davison as the epitome of the militant suffragette... It is much more likely that... she was assessed by the WSPU leadership... as an independent and as a liability...' (Crawford, Elizabeth, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928, 1999, p.161). This fearless independence of action is demonstrated no better than in a letter here of 26 December 1912 recalling an incident at Aberdeen station on 30 November when she (seemingly spontaneously) took a horsewhip to a Baptist minister, mistaking him for the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George. Despite having spent four days in prison on hunger-strike and still suffering the effects of injuries sustained when she threw herself downstairs at Holloway prison as a protest earlier in the year, she is unrepentant, writing cheerfully "...It was a great pity I did not get L.G. wasn't it? Never mind, it no doubt gave him a fright & he can't always expect to have a double handy!...". On arrest she gave the name Mary Brown and was found to be in a possession of a knife. Subsequently she was (perhaps wrongly) implicated in the bombing of Lloyd George's new house at Walton in Surrey in February 1913.

The letters in our collection therefore reveal a woman of great determination and conviction. During her career '...Davison notably hid in the House of Commons three times... She was imprisoned eight times, for offences including obstruction, assault, stone-throwing, breaking windows, and setting fire to pillar boxes, during which she went on hunger strikes, suffered solitary confinement and force feeding, barricaded herself in her cell, had a hosepipe turned on her, and attempted suicide as a protest against the mistreatment of her fellow suffragette prisoners...' (Vera Di Campli San Vito, ODNB). She went on hunger strike seven times and was brutally force-fed on no less than forty-nine occasions. Our letter written from Holloway reveals a network of fellow-suffragettes and sympathisers smuggling in necessities and news from the outside. Even the ink she is writing with has been smuggled in. In her letter of December 1912 she is encouraging more arson attacks on pillar boxes, an action she instigated, and predicts that things will get even more "lively" next year. It is not clear how she supported herself as a full-time militant but as our letter of 5 March shows, in the months leading up to her death she was actively looking for work. It is known that Harriet Kerr wrote to the Manchester Guardian on her behalf and that Davison had also inquired about a job at the Nursing Times (Crawford, p.163). Taken with the fact that she was making appointments and plans for the future, this would perhaps indicate that her death was perhaps not the deliberate act of martyrdom it initially appeared to be.

After the incident Davison was taken to Epsom Cottage Hospital where she remained until her death, surrounded by friends and in a room draped with the WSPU colours, on 8th June. In a vivid first-hand account, Davison's close friend Eleanor Penn Gaskell reports on her condition the day after the event ("...The injury is to her head... no bones broken – her head struck the horse..."). It has generally been supposed that she did not regain consciousness but our letter reveals that she did actually regain some level of awareness although, tantalisingly, she was unable to explain her actions: "...Our heroine is now partially conscious that is to say she shows recognition when addressed by name & can take food but makes no attempt to speak...", she writes. Gaskell had nursed Davison back to health after her hunger strike in June 1912 and was part of a group of friends including Rose Lamartine Yates (whose husband represented the Davison family at Emily's funeral), and Una Dugdale Duval, one of the founders of the Suffragette Record Room which was set up to ensure the safekeeping of suffragette relics including Emily Wilding Davison's papers (now in the Fawcett Library). Also in the collection is a signed photograph of Charles Mansell-Moullin, an eminent surgeon, Vice-President of the Royal College of Surgeons and member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, whose wife Edith was also a close friend of Davison. A vociferous opponent of the practice of force-feeding, he operated on her in an attempt to save her life in her final days.

The identity of the recipient of the correspondence, Miss L. Dixon, has not been ascertained but is clear that, judging from her poignant pencilled annotations on the envelopes and letters, she and Davison were very close, and she that was a proponent of spiritualism. Addresses on the envelopes indicate that she lived in Hampstead and possibly worked for the Review of Reviews, the editor of which was the so-called 'pioneer of investigative journalism', suffrage campaigner and writer William Thomas Stead (1844-1912), who had died aboard the Titanic in April 1912. Stead founded the Review of Reviews in 1889 after several years editing the Pall Mall Gazette and also produced a spiritualist quarterly, Borderland. Bearing in mind Davison's well documented Christian faith, it is perhaps curious to see 'spirit letters' purportedly from her but, seen in the context of the cult of martyrdom that arose around her death, such messages of support from the afterlife must have been a comfort and support to Miss Dixon who is urged to continue in the cause and be reassured that Mr Stead is with her: "...Yes. Yes I have indeed [seen him] and he helped me in my journey across... Do not cry it is all right for us both and you are wanted to help the Cause, not do not grieve at all any more for him or for me... peg away at Votes for Women for all you are worth...".

Provenance: Sotheby's, 18 December 1985, lot 239 (part).