Opinion

Echoes of the Easter Rising down through the decades

First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster chats with British ambassador Dominick Chilcott as they attend an event to mark the 1916 Rising at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson, Press Association
First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster chats with British ambassador Dominick Chilcott as they attend an event to mark the 1916 Rising at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson, Press Association First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster chats with British ambassador Dominick Chilcott as they attend an event to mark the 1916 Rising at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. Picture by Niall Carson, Press Association

1916, rightly, still echoes more widely than ever: Easter Week took on new significance very quickly. It also ripped families apart. Rebellion by the gallant few lost nothing in the telling, especially if you truly did have father, brother or a sister fighting to the last against the ‘great big guns’ blasting from the Liffey. But some of the same families had soldiers in a hugely different battlefield, the never-ending Somme.

DUP leader Arlene Foster did something wise and thoughtful by heading to Christ Church Cathedral to hear historians reflect on that Easter Monday, and where it led. She could go south in good conscience, having used her first moments as first minister to say she would join no celebration of violence against the Union, inspiration to the IRA who tried to kill her father. But she would listen to another narrative.

It isn’t only the divided north that must hold the Rising in mind at the same time as the ‘War to End Wars’. In the emerging Republic, where you or your father had fought in 1916 made the difference for some between jobs and no job. 

In some families, memories linger thanks to a long-lived survivor, big numbers of children. Past concertinas into present and removes false piety.

In 1996, Lily Kempson died in Seattle aged 99, described by her American family as ‘The Last Survivor’ of the Rising. In London today Liz Becker is a fine conversationalist in her 70s, Dublin accent still clear. She is Lily’s niece, not her grand-niece. Her father was Lily’s brother.

While Lily was with Countess Markiewicz in Stephen’s Green, with a revolver she had never held before, two of her brothers and her father were in the British Army, all of them off to fight from two tenement rooms shared between a dozen people. Lily at 19 was a strong trade unionist, a striker at 14 in Jacob’s biscuit factory, jailed for a week during the 1913 Lockout, perhaps (the story is pieced together by many hands) living for a time with James Connolly’s family in Belfast. A small book written by her great grandson Casey McNerthney opened the story out from a local newspaper photograph in her ‘retirement home’, a strong-faced, curly-haired old woman beside the headline: ‘73 years ago she toted a gun at Ireland’s birth’.

In spring 1916 Dublin headlines said ‘House to house searches for arms and fugitives’. The Seattle version has Lily ferrying messages when the surrender happened, hiding, then shouting to a sister in the street ‘Tell Mom I’m off to America’. Her brother, Liz’s father, was at the battle of Ypres as well as the Somme, lost a finger, was sent back to be a stretcher-bearer, came home and ‘never said anything about it.’

He struggled to find work. And Liz grew up cut off from Lily the heroine of the Rising not only by the Atlantic, but by her father’s war service, now unpopular, and family hostility towards his marriage to Liz’s mother, a ‘widow woman’ with children.

Liz was her mother’s 14th and last child: four died at birth, three very young. ‘Aren’t we lucky living now!’ The family lived in various parts of Dublin. The oldest remembered tenements, Liz a ‘very small normal house. I was the charmed one.’ Her mother died when Liz was fourteen. At 16 she went to London to a sister, married young and has lived there ever since. ‘The nuns said London was the home of the Devil but I met lovely people.’

A woman in her first job asked her name, she said ‘Lily’ shyly and quietly, the woman introduced her around as Nellie and she was too shy to correct her. ‘So in my next job I said my name was Elizabeth.’ Which was how Lily was registered too on Ellis Island, landing in New York before the train to an uncle in Seattle, marriage to a Co Down man in 1917, and seven children.

When Lily visited Dublin in 1940, Liz’s family didn’t see her. But in the fifties clothes and comics came from America. ‘The comics went in the back of the fire – my mother said we had to read a proper book instead.’

Liz has an invitation to the GPO on Easter Sunday and looks forward to celebrating with the Irish connection plus ‘hundreds of Americans.’ Remembering wretched fifties Dublin, happy in England, she is still impressed by 1916’s rebels. ‘They were maybe foolhardy but they were really brave, and they kicked off independence.’