Anthony Fletcher uses the papers of his artistic great-aunt, who, as a young nationalist, wrote an eyewitness account of the Easter Rising ninety years ago this month, to explore her youthful patriotism and vigorous activism.
The life of Cesca Chenevix Trench (1881-1918), who took the Irish name Sadhbh Trinseach, is revealed by a remarkable archive in the family’s hands in County Wicklow. Containing a mass of letters, sketches and personal papers, as well as her diary of the years 1913 to 1916, this archive illuminates and explains how a girl from a leading Anglo-Irish Protestant family, brought up in a vicarage in Kent, adopted the identity of an Irish Irelander and became a staunch nationalist. Returning to Dublin from her training to be an artist in the Paris studios in 1914, Cesca was swept into an active role in Irish politics in the first months of the Great War. When the Easter Rising broke out on April 24th, 1916, she felt bound to act, though, living with a Unionist and deeply British mother, she felt constrained in how to do so. Her diary records the hopes and fears of a nationalist who believed in Ireland’s freedom but saw a Rising just then as a tragic tactical blunder. After the Rising she was thrilled by the progress of the rejuvenated Sinn Fein party. She saw how cathartic action had created a new Irish politics. More than once between 1913 and 1918, Cesca recorded her sense of living in a historic time.
