Time to Remember | St John Ervine Remembers the 1913 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.