Revisiting the world of over a century ago
New light is shed on suffragette terrorism and the horrors of the 1922-23 Irish civil war after the war of independence, writes David Robinson
Odd, isn’t it, how it’s often only a century later that we start to fully understand the past? Take suffragette terrorism. On Saturday morning, after an interminable (well, actually 13 minutes: it just seemed longer) chair’s introduction, Fern Riddell talked about Death in Ten Minutes her book about music hall star Kitty Marion and the trail of destruction she and her fellow-suffragettes left in their wake all over Edwardian Britain.
Appearing alongside Helen Pankhurst (great-grand-daughter of Emmeline, grand-daughter of the even more radical Sylvia), she made a good case that the sheer scale of suffragette terrorism has been completely downplayed.
The seditious threats made by Pankhurst’s great-aunt Christabel (“It is not only war we have declared. We are fighting for a revolution”) were, after all, matched by a campaign that was, in 1913 running at a rate of more than 50 bombing and arson attacks – like the one at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill in Edinburgh – a month. In her own talk, Pankhurst looked as much towards the future – and what needs to be done to achieve equality in the next ten years – as the past. It is important, she stressed to avoid self-congratulation, and issues such as pension inequality or Glasgow council’s threat to cut services to implement equal pay – both raised in audience questions – show how much there’s still to do.
Over in the Main Tent, Fergal Keane was giving a masterclass in Irish history 1916-23: the years in which, according to the nationalist orthodoxy he imbibed at junior school, a new country was born in a blaze of heroism. Later, the Troubles forced him to take a more nuanced view of Ireland’s past, and his work as a foreign correspondent broadened his horizons still further.
He is, like his actor father Eamonn, an enthralling storyteller, and he eloquently explained how the war of independence and the civil war that followed had marked the lives of his north Kerry family. These were people, he said, who would at one stage never have dreamt of killing anyone; yet here they were shooting a police inspector in the back of the head as he went home for lunch.
Only now, he said, was Ireland finally facing up to the horrors of the 1922-3 civil war. Even the Brits never committed e story atrocity like the 1923 Ballyseedy massacre, when troops exploded a landmine near Tralee with nine prisoners tied to it. The victims’ remains were hastily shovelled into coffins and these were opened by their loved ones back in the army barracks, a band played the jaunty tune The Sheikh of Araby as they did so. “I struggle,” said Keane, “to understand the viciousness of that.” And this from a man who seen the horrors of Rwanda.
In her 30 years as a palliative care doctor in Newcastle, Kathryn Mannix has also witnessed plenty of death. These days, she says, we are happy to shroud death in a conspiracy of silence and wilful ignorance and use bogus phrases like “passed away”. Cinema is no help, and neither is TV, because the deaths they show are dramatic, whereas the real thing is “as exciting as watching paint dry”.
We’d have all known this 100 years ago: how a dying person’s energy drains progressively away, how sleep patterns gradually become
“The suffragette terror campaign ran at a rate of more than 50 bombing and arson attacks a month”
longer, and all the changes in our breathing patterns that can be expected. Just by spelling out the last stages of life so clearly, Mannix demystified death more effectively than anyone I’ve ever heard.
She did even more than that: and in explaining how to prepare friends and family for our deaths, how to make the most of our last months, and how palliative care needs to be extended to more than a minority of cases, she gave a talk that was as compassionate and wise as anyone in the audience could have wished to hear.