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 or early-morning placarding of the
bookies' stands.
Vivie however had been turning her thoughts to horse-racing as a
field of activity. She was amused and interested at the effect that
had been produced in ministerial circles by her interference with
the game of golf. If now something was done by the militants
seriously to impede the greatest of the sports, the national form of
gambling, the protected form of swindling, the main interest in life
of the working-class, of half the peerage, all the beerage, the
chief lure of the newspapers between October and July, and the
preoccupation of princes, she might awaken the male mind in a very
effectual way to the need for settling the Suffrage question.
So she determined also to see the running of the Derby, as a
preliminary to deciding on a plan of campaign. She had become
hardened to pushing and scrouging, so that the struggle to get a
seat in one of the fifty or sixty race trains leaving Waterloo or
Victoria left her comparatively calm.
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