‘Lockdown helped us grieve for Emily’
A year after Youtube star Emily Hartridge was killed riding an e-scooter, her sisters talk to Rosa Silverman
Almost exactly a year ago, the popular Youtuber Emily Hartridge was killed in the first fatal crash involving an electric scooter in Britain. The 35-year-old was on her way to a fertility clinic on an e-scooter bought for her by her boyfriend. She died after a collision with a lorry at a roundabout in Battersea, south-west London.
At the time, it was illegal to ride e-scooters on public roads in the UK. But earlier this year, as the coronavirus pandemic raged and public transport use was discouraged, government ministers announced they would bring forward trials to see how the vehicles could be safely introduced on British roads and streets. These trials began last Saturday, meaning people can now ride them in public legally for the first time, in designated test areas.
Smart, whizzy, and with strong environmental credentials, e-scooters appear, on the face of it, an appealing, safer alternative to packing on to train carriages or buses. As many as 200,000 are estimated to have been bought already.
But as Britain looks set for a new e-scooter boom, Emily’s older sister Charlotte sounds a note of caution.
“I do really worry about the state of the roads, especially in London,” she says. “Scooter wheels are small and not a great combination with potholes and uneven surfaces. In fact, it was this very combination that caused Emily’s accident.
“Ensuring roads, particularly cycle lanes, are well maintained for use by bikes and scooters must go hand in hand with the new legislation in order to reduce the risk of more accidents and deaths.”
It’s been a tough year for 38-year-old Charlotte and the other two Hartridge sisters, twins Alice and Jess, 32. In the preceding years, they had seen their middle sister build an enormous social media following with her quirky, frank, occasionally crass and often very funny posts about modern life. Her
“10 reasons why” videos gained hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube, with examples including: “Men are strange”, “It’s time to break up” and “Why women cheat”.
Coupled with an openness about her own mental health – she suffered from anxiety, had two breakdowns and spent time in rehab – this made her a hit with a millennial audience. Now, along with memories, the clips are all the surviving Hartridge sisters have left.
“It’s one of the worst things that could have happened,” says Charlotte when I speak to the three women on a video call. “I don’t think any of us can even put into words what a nightmare the whole thing has been. It’s always going to be, but you just learn to live with it and you cope because you have to, and because you have each other.” They don’t like to think too much about the way their sister died; it remains too painful to contemplate. But Alice says lockdown has helped her deal with the loss.
“The main thing that brings out my grief is socialising and doing normal things. It makes me think ‘why am I doing this? I shouldn’t be having fun’.” The sisters spent the first two weeks after Emily’s death in “a bubble of grief ” at their parents’ house in Hampshire, where their family’s 138-year-old soft drinks company, Hartridges, is based.
“It was quite a comforting bubble in a way because you’re constantly thinking about her and you don’t ever want to forget,” says Alice. “It’s going back to normal life that I’ve found the hardest. So isolating, where you can’t do anything else and if you feel like crying you can just go off and cry – I’ve found it OK.”
Jess also feels lockdown has, in a way, been helpful. “It does leave you a lot of time to think about things,” she says. “But that’s good. It’s good to force yourself to really face grief.” On Sunday, they will release a podcast together: called Sisters Uncensored, the first seven episodes were recorded with Emily before she died. Her sisters will record the last two without her. One will, perhaps inevitably, deal with loss and grief. The podcast was Emily’s idea; but the other three, who are charmingly honest and warm, seem more than willing to enter into the heart-on-sleeve vulnerability mixed with humour that was their sister’s trademark.
In episode one, the four of them discuss their sexuality. All but Charlotte, a mother of two who is amicably separated from her husband, identify as bisexual. “I don’t like to put labels on things. I like who I like,” she protests when the others rib her.
Alice, who is married and has a baby, says: “When I was 17 or 18 I was really depressed about the fact I liked girls and I knew I couldn’t be open about it.
I thought our parents might have kicked me out the house, though they wouldn’t have. I’ve only become open and comfortable to talk about it for about three or four years.
“My husband was quite surprised. But he’s fine with it because obviously I’m in love with him, it doesn’t change anything. But I still fancy girls, and it’s made me feel so much better talking about it.”
Emily, too, discovered she liked girls as well as boys, when she fell for a female friend. “It really freaked her out,” says Alice. “But once she started to accept it, it was cool because we’re all like that, apart from Charlotte.”
The sisters hope their openness will help make it easier for other women to discuss their sexuality, where previously they might have repressed certain feelings. The aim, they say, is to break down taboos, on this and other subjects, too.
There’s something bracing about them, and it’s hard not to be won over. Emily’s share-all spirit seemed to strike a chord with many for similar reasons. According to her sisters, fame was never her intention: she simply sought to entertain. But her no-filter style appealed to a generation hooked on authenticity.
“It’s all just completely real life,” says Alice. “It’s open, there’s no fakeness, and people like that, especially at this time when there are just so many false people online.
“I know how angry she got when celebrities would post videos and photos that had been filtered and were talking about stuff just because they were getting paid for it.”
The flood of messages from fans all over the world has provided comfort to the family since her death.
“People spent time writing about poignant times in their lives when Emily had really helped them,” says Jess. “She would have loved that so much. She wouldn’t have believed how many people reached out.”
“Once she started being vocal about her mental health, she was really good at talking about it,” adds Charlotte.
I ask the sisters what they think Emily’s legacy is. They say honesty, openness, and perhaps above all, not caring what other people thought.
“Life is too short,” says Alice. “For Emily, this proved to be the case.”
The Sisters Uncensored podcast is released on Sunday July 12 and available on all platforms
‘People wrote about when Emily had helped them. She would have loved that’