Emily Wilding Davison, born in Blackheath in 1872, was educated at Holloway College and St. Hugh's Hall, Oxford. In November 1906 the Women's Social and Political Union enrolled Emily Davison. She was thirty-four years old and employed as governess to the four children of Sir Francis Layland-Barratt, the Liberal MP for Torquay and High Sheriff for Cornwall. While her involvement with the WSPU remained low-key she continued working for the family until, eighteen months later, her urge to 'come out' as a militant would lead her to resign and join the campaign. She become a full-time campaigner for the vote in 1909, although she was never formally employed or paid as a WSPU Organiser. Although a member of the Women's Social and Political Union and a regular contributor to the newspaper Votes for Women, she operated independently and was increasingly distanced by the leadership of the WSPU.
She served nine prison sentences and endured many sessions of hunger strike and force-feeding for a range of offences including obstruction, stone throwing, window smashing and assaulting a Baptist minister she mistook for the Liberal MP David Lloyd George. Her protests tended towards the individual and flamboyant, including hiding in the cellar of the Houses of Parliament on the night of the 1911 census, so that she could record the Palace of Westminster as her place of residence.
She bravely participated in various forms of prison resistance, including barricading herself in her cell in Manchester's Strangeways prison in 1909. A prison warden forced a hose into the cell and doused Emily in ice-cold water, an act for which Davison subsquently sued the prison. She won and was awarded 40 shillings.
In Holloway in 1912, serving her ninth and final sentence, Emily protested the constant force-feeding by hurling herself head-first down a flight of stairs. She was knocked unconcious and suffered neck and back pains for the rest of her life. Her increasing willingness to endanger her life alarmed both the British authorities and her Suffragette allies, and has prompted great speculation as to the motivations of her final and fatal act of protest.
On Derby Day, 4 June 1913, Emily Davison ran onto the track and attempted to pin a Suffragette banner onto the King's horse, Anmar. The galloping horse ran into and over Emily, causing severe head wounds and injuring its jockey. Unconcious, Emily was taken to Epsom Cottage Hospital where she died on 8 June, surrounded by admiring Suffragettes. She was embraced by the WSPU in death as she had not been in life, proclaimed the first Suffragette martyr. Her funeral, on 14 June 1913, brought London to a standstill with great processions of six thousand women, carrying banners reading 'Fight On and God Will Give Victory'.