Belfast 1921 by Sheena Wilkinson

 A photo can tell you so much. 

When I was writing Hope against Hope, set in Belfast and along the new Irish border in 1921, I spent a lot of time walking round East Belfast and trying to see it as it would have been one hundred years ago when I placed my fictional girls' hostel there.  I also pored over old photos. Some streets and buildings – terraced houses, churches and mission halls and shops – haven’t changed too much, but there are new housing estates where once were factories; new motorway links and huge junctions have replaced back allies and tramlines.

 

Belfast in 1921 was on fire – often literally. Northern Ireland, which commemorates its centenary this year, was born from compromise and conflict, an expedient solution to an age-old problem. It was not really designed or expected to succeed; many would argue that it has not. But this is not a political post. This is about two little girls who had their photo taken in East Belfast in the early 1920s – it might not have been 1921, but I like to imagine it was because of the novel. 

Their names are Frances and Annie Duff. Frances is about thirteen and Annie nine or ten. They are my grandmother and my great aunt. They smile out, both with the expressions I remember so well from their later lives as elderly women. (They both lived into their nineties.)  They are well dressed, with the extravagant hair bows I remember from early school story illustrations. Both wear pearls and Annie has a wristwatch. This is clearly An Occasion. 

I like to think that it is June 1921 and that they are all dressed up to go and see the King and Queen open the first Northern Irish parliament at City Hall, as thousands of other unionists did. But possibly not. Gran, an inveterate teller of Stories of the Olden Days,  never mentioned such an outing. But then I knew nothing of this visit myself until I did the research for Hope against Hope, so perhaps I just didn’t ask the right questions. When I look closer at their frocks – all their lives they would call dresses frocks -- I see that they are fashionably short, but with huge hems –  made to last. They contrast with the lace edgings of their best frocks in the photo taken some years before – and I think this is not just a change in fashion, but a change in family fortunes. Their mother, Fanny, made their clothes, and took in sewing after their father died – which I believe was in between the two photos. As was the death of their big sister Sadie. 

 

Unlike the first photo, which was definitely taken in a photographic studio, I fancy this one was taken at home in Beechfield Street. I imagine that I remember that very vase, that little table with its barley-twist legs, but both would have been commonplace in 1921, so they may well have been in a studio.  Wherever they are, I do know that outside was a troubled city, disturbed by rioting and burnings. I know their local Catholic church was attacked in 1920, and that same year, thousands of Catholic workers were run out of the shipyard where Frances and Annie’s father and brothers worked. Nothing of that shows in the photo, but then neither does the tragedy even closer to home – except that Frances, now unexpectedly the Big Sister instead of the middle one, leans rather protectively into Annie – perhaps she is thinking of how fragile a sister’s hold on life can be. Or perhaps she is just doing what the photographer asked: all her life she was a gentle and compliant woman, unlike her granddaughter.

My favourite scene in Hope against Hope is a garden party, where the girls of the hostel at the centre of the story invite neighbouring families for tea, sports and entertainment. Of course I know that’s not where Frances and Annie are going, a treat after the family deaths, a distraction from the troubled city outside their front door. Because I made it up.

But without Gran’s stories, and photos like this, I couldn’t have. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Putting Words In Their Mouths by Sheena Wilkinson

There’s historical fiction and historical fiction.

I’ve never written about real people. Much as I admire, for example, Wolf Hall, I can’t imagine having the confidence, or the desire, to breathe fictional life into a well-known historical figure. My historical novels for teens, Name Upon Name (2015) and Star By Star (out 26 October) are about ordinary people living through times of political and social upheaval (something any sentient person in 2017 knows a great deal about.)

 My characters are often on the fringes of activity, because of their youth or their gender. Star By Star is about 15-year-old Stella, who has always looked forward to changing the world. It's what she was brought up to do, by a suffragette mother who knew all about fighting and rebellion. But it's November 1918. The flu pandemic sweeping the world has robbed Stella of her mother and her home, and she's alone in a strange country (Ireland).  But change is coming - the war is over, and women are about to vote for the first time. History is being made, and Stella wants to help make it, even if that simply means helping one woman – former suffragette hunger striker Rose, to cast her vote.

Many active suffragettes, who had suffered for the cause, still weren’t old enough to vote in 1918, or didn’t fulfill the ‘householder or married to a householder’ criteria. Rose is old enough, and keen to vote beside her husband – as a working class man, it’s his first time being enfranchised as well – but she’s living on an isolated farm, heavily pregnant, and has no way to get to the polling station. How many woman in 1918 would have loved to vote, but, like Rose, were prevented by practical difficulties – not least, the fact that the world was in the grip of one of the deadliest pandemics in human history?

Unlike most suffragette narratives, Star By Star is a suffragette novel set after the fight; after the campaigns and the hunger strikes and the fighting, when the vote has been (partially) won. Stella’s heroines are from the generation above her – her mother and her friends, women like Rose. As a young feminist in the 1980s, I too looked to the generation above me, the ‘second wave’ feminists of the sixties and seventies, whose Women’s Movement gave me a context and a language to explore what it meant to be a young woman at the end of the twentieth century.

I must admit, I didn’t pin pictures of feminist icons on my teenage walls but Stella does: I arranged my magazine pictures of my heroines, Sylvia Pankhurst and Winifred Carney, who both fought for women’s rights.

Winifred Carney 

Readers of this blog will recognise Sylvia Pankhurst’s name, but possibly not that of Winifred Carney? Maria Winifred (Winnie) Carney was a leading Irish suffragist, but like most early twentieth century revolutionaries, she was a great deal more: heavily involved in the fight for Irish independence and workers’ rights, she was famously at James Connolly’s side in the GPO at the Easter Rising in 1916. She was one of the first female parliamentary candidates, standing as a candidate for Sinn Féin in 1918. Given that my novel was set around the election and that Winifred was Stella’s heroine, I had to include this in Star By Star.

 ‘Winifred is standing in Belfast!’ [Rose] said one day.

…She made a face. ‘East Belfast. Safe unionist seat.’ She sighed. ‘She hasn’t got a hope. Not like Countess Markievicz in Dublin. She’ll get in all right.’

‘But there must be lots of women – factory workers and the like – who’d vote for Winifred because of her trade unionism. I mean, she stands for workers’ rights and –’

‘Of course she does. But she was in the GPO in 1916, and then imprisoned by the British government. Unionist women will see that before they see what she’s done for working women.’

‘But that’s awful!’ Instantly I wanted to go to Belfast and help Winifred to campaign. I imagined myself standing on a soapbox, shouting Vote for Carney! Vote for a woman!

Rose shrugged. ‘It’s how it is here. Being a unionist or a nationalist trumps anything else.’

‘Maybe that’ll change*,’ I suggested.

(*It hasn’t. Sadly.)

Researching for the novel, I became fascinated by Winifred Carney, who embodies so many of the contradictions of Irish history. I even broke my own rule of not putting words into the mouths of real historical figures, by inventing a conversation between Winifred and Rose. Rose’s husband Charlie is one of the many thousands of Irish nationalists who fought in the British army in the Great War. Often they were shunned by their communities on their return, and until recently the Irish state has been reluctant to acknowledge their sacrifice. Winifred Carney, in 1928, married George McBride, a fellow trade unionist and socialist who had fought at the Somme. Far from being a nationalist, he was in fact a former UVF volunteer, and Winfred, like the fictional Rose, incurred the wrath of the Republican movement. I risked giving the real Winifred an opinion on the fictional Rose’s situation, based on her own subsequent history:

 ‘Winnie!’ Rose said. ‘I knew her quite well in Belfast.’

‘Really? Oh my!’

‘We went to a lot of the same meetings. Some of the people in the Republican cause weren’t happy when I married Charlie – him having fought for the King – but Winnie stood by me. She said the cause of labour was bigger than that.’

Winifred and George McBride

This is as close as I’ve ever got to trying to breath life into an actual historical figure. I hope Winifred would approve. I know Stella and Rose do.