woman with a resolution to give her life
as a protest in the manner most calculated to impress the male mind
of the British public.

CHAPTER XV

IMPRISONMENT

Prior to the Derby day of 1913, Vivie had heard of Emily Wilding
Davison as a Northumbrian woman, distantly related to the Rossiters
and also to the Lady Shillito she had once defended. She came from
Morpeth in Northumberland and had had a very distinguished
University career at Oxford and in London, of which latter
university she was a B.A. The theme of the electoral enfranchisement
of Women had gradually possessed her mind to the exclusion of all
other subjects; she became in fact a fanatic in the cause and a
predestined martyr to it. In 1909 she had received her first
sentence of imprisonment for making a constitutional protest, and to
escape forcible feeding had barricaded her cell. The Visiting
Committee had driven her from this position by directing the warders
to turn a hose pipe on her and knock her senseless with a douche of
cold water; for which irregularity they were afterwards fined and
mulcted in costs. Two years later, for another Suffragist offence
(setting fire to a pillar box after giving warning of her intention)
she went to prison for six months. Here the tortures of forcible
feeding so overcame her reason--it was alleged--that she flung
herself from an upper gallery, believing she would be smashed on the
pavement below and that her death under such circumstances might
call attention to the agony of forcible feeding and the reckless
disregard of consequences which now inspired educated women who were
resolved to obtain the enfranchisement of their sex. But an iron
wire grating eight feet below broke her fall and only cut her face
and hands. The accident or attempted suicide, however, procured the
shortening of her sentence.

Vivie and she often met in the early months of 1913, and on the
first day of June she confided to a few of the W.S.P.U. her
intention of making at Epsom a public protest against public
indifference to the cause of the Woman's Franchise. This protest was
to be made in the most striking manner possible at the supreme
moment of the Derby race on the 4th of June. Probably no one to whom
she mentioned the matter thought she contemplated offering up her
own life; at most they must have imagined some speech from the Grand
Stand, some address to Royalty thrown into the Royal pavilion, some
waving of a Suffrage Flag o