For 40 years – from the mid-1860s to the turn of the century – British women’s suffrage campaigners had asked for the vote politely. Then, in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) at their home in Manchester to demand equal voting rights with men. Their slogan ‘Deeds Not Words’, which they deployed to astonishing effect, shook the Edwardian establishment to its core. In the early years of the movement, their tactics of interrupting political meetings and ‘pestering’ politicians to set a date when women would be granted the vote were regarded as ‘militant’ (we would probably describe them as shocking) – and earned them the condescending nickname ‘suffragettes’ in 1906. It was the Daily Mail that coined this diminutive, but the women of the WSPU simply embraced the insult with humour and made it their own.

One of the several remarkable elements of the suffragettes’ campaign for the vote was their pioneering of political marketing and merchandising. Their creative and highly successful treasurer, Mrs Emmeline PethickLawrence, created what we would now recognise as the suffragette ‘brand’.

Within 18 months of opening their London headquarters at Clement’s Inn, a distinctive purple, white and green colour scheme was being worn by suffragettes to identify their supporters. The symbolism of the colours was explained by Mrs Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, also the co-editor of the weekly newspaper Votes for Women. “Purple as everyone knows is the royal colour. It stands for the royal blood that flows in the veins of every suffragette, … the instinct of freedom and dignity … white stands for purity in private and public life … and green is the colour of hope and the emblem of spring."

Today, of the thousands of suffragettes who were the militant campaigners for votes for women between 1903 and 1914, Emily Wilding Davison (1872-1913) is probably the best known. Being trampled by the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913, and her subsequent death from head injuries, made her the ultimate martyr for the cause of women’s suffrage.

By the time of her death, the 40-year-old former governess was an ardent, high-profile member of the Women’s Social and Political Union. A career suffragette, Davison enthusiastically embraced every kind of militancy in the WSPU’s portfolio of protest. After joining the WSPU in 1906, Davison was arrested and imprisoned several times for obstruction, stone-throwing, smashing windows at the House of Commons, assaulting a man she mistook for the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, and invented a new form of protest – setting fire to post boxes, destroying hundreds of letters – a tactic that was much copied by suffragettes all over Britain. She was a committed hunger-striker and was force-fed on dozens of occasions. A foot soldier for the cause, her distinguished career ended in martyrdom, captured jerkily on a hundred feet of silver nitrate film. Her posterity and legacy were guaranteed.

Davison would have been pleased with her posthumous life. As a martyr and secular saint her name lived on, her relics taken to important occasions. Her good friend Mary Leigh (imprisoned in 1908 for smashing windows at 10 Downing Street) unfurled the purple, white and green tricolour flag Emily had taken to the Derby at George Bernard Shaw’s funeral in 1950, yelling that he had been a good friend to the suffragettes. In 1956, it was flown at the re-dedication of Emmeline Pankhurst’s statue in Victoria Tower Gardens; and it always made an appearance at suffragette gatherings held in Caxton Hall until the late 1960s.

Diane Atkinson is the author of Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)