Contrary to Marina Warner’s assertion in the
current issue of the London Review of Books (4-7-13 pp.19-20), it is hardly
true to assert that “the circumstances of [Emily Wilding Davison’s] death are waiting
for their historian.” Those circumstances are quite thoroughly examined in a
recent book, Michael Tanner’s The Suffragette Derby (Robson Press,
2013). One problem is that they are embedded in an equally exhaustive and longer horse-racing
story; another, that the key scene
is recounted in the manner of a drama-documentary, not badly done in its way
but not to be confused with history. In Chapter13, “I Will!” the author,
while stating that “It is idle to speculate [about what thoughts might have
been going through EWD’s head,] yet somewhat unavoidable”, supplies a screenplay scenario or radio script complete
with those supposed thoughts.
The
other relevant chapters, however, make it a useful, well-documented source for
the actual history behind
the myths and rhetoric – if you by-pass the author’s own lapses into rhetorical
clichés and put-downs which he seems unable to resist. (Thus on p.174, Emily
making a protest in the dock is “stamping her foot in a fit of pique”; her
photo showing the effects of prison shows
“the battleaxe she became by 1913..” etc.) At the same time there is an
attempt to empathise: p.175 “Goaded beyond reason by months of political
indifference and state-sanctioned torture...”
Michael Tanner, as historian of the Derby, was
one of the contributors to a Radio 4 programme
‘Deeds
not Words’, broadcast at 11 a.m. on 10th May, in which crime fiction
writer Val
McDermid [spoiler alert in case of repeats] plausibly concluded by attributing to
EWD a fatalistic state of mind which accepted the possibility or likelihood of
a fatal outcome but was not totally committed to that result.
Sylvia
Pankhurst too left the question of intention
unresolved. Her account is among those of which the accuracy is cast in doubt
by Tanner’s book, although she was no doubt writing in good faith, 18 years or
so after the event and relying on others’ reports (E. Sylvia The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and
Ideals, first published 1931, Virago 1977, pp.467-70). She views her own immediate emotional
response with some detachment, reproducing in full “Some sentences” she wrote which were
“thrust into the letter-box of the Daily Mail, chosen as the typical organ of
the unheeding world”:
O Deed Majestic! O
Triumphant Death! Mean, sordid things they
write of her … Parliament
sits, a House of Mockery! It proses on… O
dullard minds in power that cannot see great Freedom’s history making, great
tragic acts under their very eyes!
Then she adds: “Strangely
enough, the editor desired to publish this eccentric manifesto… returned it to
me by post for confirmation. No longer wishing it to appear, I laid it aside.”
