1961: The 1913 Epsom Derby

In 1913, dramatist St John Ervine was working as a journalist. In this short excerpt from Time to Remember, he describes how, while reporting on the Epsom Derby, he witnessed a young woman, in a state of agitation, throw herself under the King's horse. He discovered later that the woman was Emily Davison, who became a martyr for the suffragette movement.

The plays of St John Ervine, who was born in Belfast in 1883, divide broadly into his drawing-room farces of the 1920s and his social and political Ulster dramas of the 1930s. He was a noted, if caustic, drama critic for the Observer and the Morning Star, as well as a novelist and the biographer of Irish literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

From the BBC Archive. Originally broadcast 16 June 1961.