On a summer evening in 1916, Fenner Brockway, a 28 year old anti-war campaigner imprisoned in Pentonville Prison, stood on a stool in his cell and looked out over an exercise yard ‘bathed in sunshine’.
Suddenly, he heard the turning of a lock. Two warders entered the yard followed by Roger Casement, the humanitarian crusader sentenced to death for conspiring with Germany to garner support for an Irish insurrection.
Casement stood with his hands behind his back and looked up towards the sun. Within days he would be hanged and buried within the same prison grounds.
From his cell, the young prisoner was witnessing one of Roger Casement’s final moments in the open air. The warders signalled Casement to return inside but, an hour later, Brockway heard footsteps. Casement was back outside once more.
‘Just before going in he again turned to the sun, which was then setting, and again the warders allowed him to stand thus for a moment or two,’ Brockway recalled. ‘These two glimpses have left a very moving and vivid impression on my mind.’
The same evening, a warder told Brockway he was free to go. In his 1942 memoir, Brockway described feeling frustrated by news of his liberation. He felt a desire ‘to remain near Sir Roger Casement until his end.’ ‘I realise that this desire had no rational basis’, Brockway wrote, ‘but during those moments when he had looked into the sun I had become very close to him. I did not wish to leave him.’
On 30 January 1972, Ivan Cooper, an Irish nationalist politician and leading figure in the civil rights movement, heard gunshots and threw the octogenarian peace activist Lord Fenner Brockway to the floor. A peaceful demonstration was about to become a massacre as British soldiers opened fire on civilians in Derry.
As Parachute Regiment soldiers continued firing, Cooper, the elderly Brockway and Bernadette Devlin lay down in the back of the truck that was due to serve as their platform.
When Devlin raised her head, she saw that the street in front of her was clear ‘except for soldiers and scattered bodies of people.’ ‘We then got off the lorry’, she told the British Parliament, ‘taking Lord Brockway first to safety, and then tried to calm and reassure hysterical women.’
Speaking before the House of Lords a few days after the events, Brockway declared: ‘not only one who has followed Irish history but anyone who was present at the events last Sunday must be overwhelmed in mind and in emotions at what may now happen in Ireland.’ ‘Derry last Sunday will be to Ireland what Amritsar was to India’, Brockway stated, ‘what Warsaw was to Poland; what Easter, 1916, was to Southern Ireland, and what Sharpeville was to South Africa.’
Roger Casement’s final days in the summer of 1916 and Derry’s Bloody Sunday in 1972 are events that exist within the same sweep of history.
Even so, I was surprised to learn that there was at least one person, the longstanding figurehead of Britain’s independent left Fenner Brockway, who witnessed them both.
Postscript
Love & War: I will be one of the speakers at the creatively realised conference ‘Love & War’ at Queen’s University Belfast from 15-17 May. It’s a brilliant line-up, so do join if you can. I am particularly excited to chair a session featuring Olesya Khromeychuk, who wrote the vital and moving The Death of a Soldier Told by his Sister.
Newsletter & site redesign: In preparation for my book coming out this August (more on that soon), I redesigned this newsletter and my personal site. All of the design work is based off of a single source used in the book. It’s good to use my Photoshop subscription on something other than surrealist edits of group photos with my friends.
kia ora - thanks for this moving anecdote - the commonality of activism and mortality of those who fought for freedom across generations is beautiful and terrible...and still playing out globally.