suit, high-collared blouse and unobtrusive hat stood by the rails at Tattenham Corner, where the horses wheeled round, flashing colours against the sky. Inside her sleeve was a flag with the suffragette tricolour, purple, white and green, and another was wrapped round her waist. When the heavy pounding of the hooves was heard, and she saw Anmer leading the galloping herd, she stepped out, in front of the horse, raised her arms, and grabbed at the bridle. They all came down, jockey, horse, screaming woman, on the bloodstained turf. “Diamond” Jones lay still: he was concussed, and his shoulder was hurt. The scene was filmed: Davison can be seen, crumpled and dragged, like a damaged puppet, her skirts awry. Her head was smashed. They wrapped it in a newspaper. She was taken to Epsom Hospital, where her fellows hung her bed like a bier with purple, white and green bunting. She died four days later.
The fallen horse had risen, and cantered away. King George wrote in his diary “Poor Herbert Jones and Anmer were sent flying. It was a most disappointing day.”
Queen Mary sent Jones a telegram, commiserating with him after his “sad accident caused through the abominable conduct of a brutal, lunatic woman.”
Jones said, much later, that he was “haunted by that woman’s face.” He had little success on the racecourse after this event.
Emily Davison was buried with ceremony by the WSPU. There were ten brass bands and six thousand marching women. They carried purple silk banners embroidered with Joan of Arc’s last words: “Fight on, and God will give the Victory.” Davison’s flag, stained with grass, mud and blood, was retrieved and became a relic. Some men, and some women, threw bricks at the coffin. Hedda Wellwood, who had sat up late at night embroidering and hemming the banners, marched with the women, and turned a white face, full of contempt, towards the hecklers. Her feet kept time, the music held the women together, they were a creature with a purpose.
The group held her: the strangeness of all this wild, inventive, dangerous activity by creatures who were expected to be docile, timid, domestic and loving. Hedda as a child had been a rebel. She had stood outside groups—the Wellwood family, girls at school, Fabians. She subverted structures, she found out awkward truths. She could not find a purpose. And then she found it in a community of rebels, an army with a cause, and a programme of destruction. She enjoyed marching, hip to hip, skirt to skirt, shoulder to shoulder with women who had subdued their own needs and movements to a larger cause. Group life held and perturbed her, for she was naturally claustrophobic. Every now and then she thought they would crowd and crush her, like the Red and White Queens and the flying jury in
An army needs a general, as well as a martyr. Emmeline Pankhurst was now fragile with suffering through hunger-strikes and force-feedings. When the campaign of increasing violence induced the press to report that she was a wicked old woman, she replied “We do not intend you should be pleased.” Yet the army was increasingly, and paradoxically, directed by pretty Christabel, tending her pretty dog in her pretty apartment in Paris, arguing that a leader must remain safe, and out of custody, to plan strategy. Like many absolute leaders, she quarrelled with people, with the Pethick-Lawrences, Frederick and Emmeline, who had paid, planned and suffered for the women’s cause, with her sister Sylvia, who lived amongst the poor, in the East End, and upheld her socialist principles, whilst Christabel courted the rich, the Tories, the coteries of the famous and “influential.” She issued diktats. On Bastille Day in 1912, Emmeline’s birthday, Sylvia had organised a spectacular display in Hyde Park, caps, banners, smaller flags, all decorated with scarlet dragons and decked with white fringe. It was a huge success.
Christabel telegraphed from Paris. Sylvia was to burn down Nottingham Castle.
She refused. She didn’t believe in burning things down, or destroying works of art.
But there were those who did.
They wrote each other coded telegrams. “Fluff, feathers, wax, tar violets poppies powder.” They bought and secreted cans of paraffin and petrol. They put cayenne pepper and molten lead through letter-boxes. They grew braver and wilder as 1913 became 1914. In the first seven months of that year 107 buildings were set on fire. They burned castles in Scotland and set about the inherited culture of solid Britain. In 1913 they ripped valuable paintings in Manchester and smashed the orchid hothouse in Kew Gardens. They blew up Lloyd George’s new house at Walton-on-the-Hill. They cut telephone wires and slid pebbles into railway connections, to derail trains. They showed less and less reverence—ancient churches were burned down, mediaeval Bibles mutilated, the Carnegie Library in Birmingham burned. Like the anarchists before them, they exploded a bomb in Westminster Abbey and flooded the great organ in the august Albert Hall. They themselves were bashed, bullied, defrocked by police and angry crowds. Their breasts were twisted, their hair torn out. They interrupted King and Prime Minister with determined harangues and the suffragette anthem, which was sung to the tune of the Marseillaise. Mary Richardson set out methodically to mutilate Velasquez’s self-regarding, elegantly fleshly Venus, a painting she disliked. She waited until the watching detectives took a lunch-break (one was merely hiding his eyes behind a newspaper) and rushed at the painted woman, and her protective glass, with an axe. She got in one blow. The detective looked instinctively at the skylight. The attendant skidded on the polished floor. Four more blows were struck. German tourists helped to bring Miss Richardson down, by aiming Baedekers accurately at the back of her neck. And then she was back in Holloway prison, facing force- feeding.
These stories were circulated, in shocked whispers, with wild laughter. Emily Davison’s sacrifice seemed to mean that all women were called to act. The idea of “doing something” crept insidiously into Hedda’s mind. Sewing was not enough, marching was not enough, posting pepper and glue through respectable doors, or spreading tin-tacks on office floors, was not enough. An act was required.
The problem was, she was afraid. At first, the problem was to think of an appropriate act, and then, one day, when there was discussion of Emily Davison’s life, the act rose in her brain, golden and gleaming, quite literally, in the dark.
Emily Davison—whose speeches had been long and rambling, whose presence had often been creepy and irritating—had become sainted. She had once had the very clever idea of hiding at night in the House of Commons, and springing out—on the day of the census—to claim that Place as her address. She had been found in the broom- cupboard by a kindly cleaner, and given tea and toast and sent out to make her way to her real home. She had found other ways of making sure of prison. In prison she had leaped like an acrobat from a balcony, to what would have been certain death, if she had not been saved by wire netting. Carried upstairs, she had leaped again. And again, dashing herself on the iron staircase.
There were tales of suffering in cages, of force-feeding that amounted to torture—wooden gags between the teeth, or metal clamps, breaking them, the terrible tube forced in, whilst the warders held the struggling woman, by the ears, by the breast, by the hair, by the hands and legs. And the snaking pipe might miss the surging target, might enter the lung, might rupture the bowel—all this was known, and recounted, the tales of the heroines, women who went into their captivity looking forty and came out looking seventy. Sylvia Pankhurst had refused to eat or to drink, and had been hosed with water and fed with the foul tube. She had walked. All day and all night and all day and all night. Her eyes, Hedda had been told, had become suffused with blood, entirely. Her legs had swollen to bolsters. At night Hedda dreamed of this gaunt red-eyed figure, walking, walking, and woke up in a sweat.
Because she knew what she had to do, she also knew that she had to do it, or it would not have come to her. It came out of the true tale she had been told as a child, of the boy who had hidden in the basement in South Kensington—a tale told by Tom, and by Philip himself, of the way in through the van-loading bay, and the watching plaster casts, and the tombs. A woman could hide down there, and come out with stones, when all was quiet, and smash the cases with the cold gold and silver, and smash the metals to chips and dust.
She didn’t have real friends. It must be done on her own.
