A Young Nationalist in the Easter Rising

Anthony Fletcher uses the papers of his artistic great-aunt, who, as a young nationalist, wrote an eyewitness account of the Easter Rising, to explore her youthful patriotism and vigorous activism.

Anthony Fletcher | Published in History Today Volume 56 Issue 4 April 2006

Conflict between soldiers and civilians on the streets of Dublin during the Rising. 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.