Wild Irish Women (2)

by Tim Vicary

One Sunday afternoon in July 1916 two women, Eva Gore-Booth and her friend Esther Roper, were talking quietly in a flat they shared in London. They were discussing Eva’s sister Constance, whom she hadn’t seen for months. Suddenly, Esther stood up. ‘We must go to Euston Station to meet the Irish Mail,’ she said.  She couldn’t explain why this was so urgent, but Eva agreed.

At the station Esther stood near the ticket barrier while Eva went to the far of the platform. When the train came in, Eva looked into a carriage and saw her sister, Constance. Delighted, Constance got out and the two sisters embraced.

Esther, waiting at the ticket barrier, saw some people approaching through the steam on the platform.  It was ‘the strangest little procession ever seen by astonished eyes. First a brown cocker spaniel, well known in Dublin as “The Poppet”, then a couple of soldiers with rifles, then Eva and Constance together smiling and talking hard. Lastly an officer with a drawn sword, looking very agitated.’

Outside the station Constance was hurried into a taxi, the spaniel jumping in after her. ‘Holloway Prison,’ a detective told the driver. ‘Send the dog to our flat, if they won’t let him in!’ Eva shouted as the taxi drove away. 

A long way from their wild upbringing in the west of Ireland? Or perhaps not. For Constance’s charisma was due to her gender and social class as well as her character. Both sisters were free spirits, but Constance was the wild one. As a child she was injured jumping her pony over a sleeping cow (the cow stood up at the wrong moment); she sailed her dinghy single-handed across Galway Bay; she had a pet monkey and a tame snake; she loved practical jokes; she was an excellent horsewoman, riding in point-to-points as well as drag hunts for the Sligo Harriers; she confounded one of her early suitors by throwing his cap in the air and shooting holes in it. She’d been presented to Queen Victoria. She’d married a Polish Count. And her father owned 60,000 acres.

No wonder the officer waved his sword so feebly, and let her keep her spaniel! These Anglo-Irish women were not so easily intimidated.

But it was another side to Constance that had got her in trouble. Although her father was a benevolent landlord, lowering rents in time of hardship, many Anglo-Irish landlords were not. As a child she knew many poor tenant families who lived off potatoes and shared their one-roomed hut with a pig or cow. That was bad, but at least they were surrounded by fresh air. In Dublin, she found similar families living in smoky tenements ten or twelve to a room, with a single shared toilet down four flights of stairs and across a yard.  That was what persuaded her that society had to change.

The Great Lockout of 1913 pitted the Irish trade unions, led by James Larkin, against ruthless employers led by William Murphy. Murphy kept wages down by employing men in two categories: permanent and casual. If a permanent man was late or absent for any reason he was immediately sacked and demoted to the bottom of the casual list, while the man at the top of that list took his place. When Larkin called a strike, the employers locked their workers out, and tried to starve them into submission. Larkin was hunted by the police, and hid for a while in Constance’s house.

Injustices like that made her join James Connolly’s Citizen Army. Like Connolly, she wanted Irish independence not just as a symbol, but to improve the lot of the poor. Connolly said: ‘Ireland as distinct from her people is nothing to me.’ As I described in a previous post, in 1916 she was a leader in the Easter Rising and sentenced to death for treason. Then, because she was a woman, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she was put on a train to England (with her spaniel).

The spaniel was released but Constance served a year.  The prison was cold, damp and dirty, the food was grim, the sanitation filthy, and the hard labour unceasing. One day she stole a raw turnip and ate it. Her weight fell to seven stones.

When she was released, she became the first women ever to be elected to the UK Parliament. (while she was in prison again) As I described before, she refused to go, like all Sinn Fein members. But she did visit briefly, smiling ironically at her name on the peg which was helpfully provided for each MP to hang his sword on (!)

Instead, Constance became Minister of Labour in the self-proclaimed Parliament of the Irish Republic, Dail Eireann. 1919 and 1920 saw a terrorist campaign in which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) led by Michael Collins, was at war with the British Army and the brutal para-military police, the Black and Tans. Then a Sinn Fein delegation, led by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, negotiated a peace treaty in London with the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Ireland was free at last!

And then it all went wrong. Why? How?

Well, the Treaty was a compromise. It gave the 26 counties of southern Ireland their own parliament, their own taxation system, full control over Irish law, education, health, employment – all the things that most affect the lives of ordinary people. It gave Ireland Dominion Status – the same form of independence achieved by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Ireland had achieved more freedom in one generation, Collins argued, than in the past 400 years.

So what was the problem?

There were three sticky issues – the King remained the head of state, though he had no power; the UK retained two naval bases in Ireland; and the 6 Protestant counties of northern Ireland had the right to opt out and stay British (which they promptly did) Which do you think was the most important?

Strangely, it was the first one - the oath which every member of the new Irish Parliament was required to swear to King George. THAT was what many people could not stomach. The words of an oath, which could be said in a moment, and then ignored.

Michael Collins was happy to do that. But not Constance.  In the Dail she said: ‘I would sooner die than give a declaration of fidelity to King George or the British Empire.’  Eamonn de Valera agreed, like many others. And so, instead of peace, there was a new civil war, in which each group of Irish revolutionaries fought the other. Many of their best leaders, like Michael Collins, were killed.

To me this seems sad, and hard to understand. Constance had worked hard to help the poor people of Ireland. That was why she had supported James Larkin, joined the Citizen Army, been Minister of Labour. Did the poor people of Ireland really care more about this form of words, this oath of allegiance, than about practical changes which would give them jobs, hospitals, schools – all of which were possible under the Treaty? For her, it seems, the answer was yes.

She died in July 1926, a month after her sister Eva. Enormous crowds attended her funeral, bringing eight lorry loads of flowers. A year later, Eamonn de Valera, who spoke her funeral oration, changed his mind, and took the oath after all.

*****

Tim Vicary’s Anglo-Irish historical novels Cat and Mouse and The Blood Upon the Rose are available as ebooks on Amazon US and Amazon UK. You can read more about them on his website and his blog.

All pictures from Wikimedia Commons 

Wild Irish Women

by Tim Vicary

Who was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons? Nancy Astor, you say – every schoolgirl knows that.

But sorry, schoolgirls, that’s wrong. Read the question again, more carefully, as your teacher told you to do. It’s true that Nancy Astor was the first woman to TAKE HER SEAT in the Commons, in December 1919. But a quite different woman was ELECTED to the House of Commons, a whole year earlier, in December 1918.

Constance

A feisty lady from Dublin, with the traditional Irish surname of, er, Markiewicz.

Markiewicz? Irish? Come on. If she was really elected, why didn’t she take her seat? Explain, please. This doesn’t make much sense.

Lissadell

Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, in 1868, a little girl called Constance was born. She was born in London, so she wasn’t really Irish, but her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth, was an Anglo-Irish landlord. So Constance Gore-Booth and her younger sister Eva spent much of their childhood at the beautifully named family home of Lissadell, which is in the county Sligo, a large portion of which their father owned.

W.B. Yeats, 1900

Like all Anglo-Irish girls they learned to ride and shoot from an early age, but they also developed a commendable concern for the poor Irish peasants they saw around them, as well as an interest in art and poetry. One of the many artistic guests at Lissadell was the poet W.B.Yeats; much later he wrote a poem about the sisters: “Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle.”

Maud Gonne

Constance trained to be a painter, and in Paris in 1900 she married a Polish widower, Count Casimir Markiewicz – thus becoming the Countess Marciewicz. They settled in Dublin and she became a landscape painter. But Constance was also passionately interested in women’s rights, and the idea of Irish independence.  In 1908 she joined Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland) the women’s branch of Sinn Fein, whose first president was Maud Gonne, about whom W.B. Yeats wrote many more poems. Although many members of the society were working class women, the Countess arrived at her first meeting after attending a ball at Dublin Castle, still wearing a diamond tiara.

These Anglo-Irish aristocratic women had immense self confidence and energy: they had been brought up to believe the world belonged to them and if they didn’t like the way it was, they were about to change it. Constance, like Maud Gonne, acted in Yeats’s plays at the Abbey Theatre; and with her sister Eva she campaigned for women’s suffrage. At a political rally in Manchester, where Winston Churchill – an opponent of women’s votes - was standing in a by-election, Constance appeared driving a carriage with four white horses. ‘Can you cook a dinner, woman?’ a male heckler challenged. ‘Of course I can,’ Constance replied scornfully. ‘Can you drive a coach and four?’

As you see, she was no shrinking violet. In 1909 she founded Fianna Eireann, an Irish nationalist scouts association which trained teenagers to use guns. In 1911 she was jailed for protesting against the visit of King George V to Ireland. She had thrown stones at the King and Queen’s portraits and burned Union flags. In 1913 there was a major strike in Dublin, and she joined James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army to protect the strikers. She set up soup kitchens and sold her jewellery to feed their families. Landscape painting seemed far behind!

Lieutenant Markiewicz

Her true moment of glory came during the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, when Connolly’s Citizen Army joined Padraig Pearse in occupying the Dublin’s General Post Office and reading out a stirring declaration of Irish independence. The Countess, as Lieutenant Markiewicz, ordered her Citizen Army Volunteers to occupy St Stephen’s Green and - absurdly  - to defend it by digging trenches in the park, like those on the Western Front.  Enthusiasm, however, is one thing, military tactics another: it had apparently not occurred to her how easy it would be for British soldiers to climb onto the rooftops around the park and shoot directly down into the trenches below! Her soldiers withdrew hurriedly to the more defensible College of Surgeons, where she surrendered six days later.

And that might well have been the end of the story. As one of the leaders of a rebellion which had tried to get guns from Germany in the middle of a war, she was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But she was a woman! And so, unlike Pearse and Connolly and 13 others, she was spared.

Her bust in St Stephen's Green

And so we come, at last to her election to Parliament. All those Irish rebels who had not been shot were imprisoned for 6 months and then released, and at the 1918 General Election, inspired by the martyrs of the Easter Rising, they joined Sinn Fein and stood for Parliament. Constance herself was back in prison, for campaigning against conscription, but she was a Sinn Fein candidate too. And she won! She was elected for the constituency of Dublin St Patrick’s with 66% of the vote, thus making her the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons and beating Nancy Astor by 12 whole months!

But, er … she didn’t take her seat? Ah, no. You see, none of them did. Her party, Sinn Fein, won 73 out of 105 Irish seats, but no Sinn Fein MPs went to Westminster. Why not? Well, because as far as they were concerned, they were standing for independence, in support of the declaration which Pearse and Connolly had read out on the steps of the General Post office in 1916. That’s what the Irish people had voted for, they said. They hadn’t elected their Sinn Fein MPs to attend Parliament in some foreign city like London or Vladivostok or Timbuctoo, had they? No, they’d elected them to form an Irish government, in Dublin. And that’s what they did.

So Constance never took her seat in the House of Commons after all. Which is a pity, really, because it might have been quite dramatic.  Rather like a female Guy Fawkes sitting on the back benches and wondering: ok - what next?

There’s a lot more to tell about Constance (and Eva) but no space for it here. But if you’ve enjoyed this post you may understand why I felt inspired to write two novels about Anglo-Irish women in this period. They had a lot of courage and energy, a lot to protest about, and they surely lived their lives to the full!

Something to read about, while great-granny nods off beside the fire.

****

Tim Vicary’s Anglo-Irish historical novels Cat and Mouse and The Blood Upon the Rose are available as ebooks on Amazon US and Amazon UK. You can read more about them on his website and his blog.

All pictures from Wikimedia Commons