family history
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family history. Show all posts

Did Fanny Vote? by Sheena Wilkinson

In just over a week, on 14th December 2018 it will be the centenary of the election where some women in Britain and Ireland had the right to vote for the first time in a parliamentary election.

Last week in Dublin I saw commemorative posters of Constance Markievicz on almost every lamp-post. Markievicz was of course the first woman elected to Westminter, though as an Irish Republican she never took up that seat, recognising Dáil Eireann instead. I knew then that I’d have to find something fresh to say about the 1918 election for my upcoming History Girls post.


commemorative posters in Dublin 
Fresh? How? I’ve been living with this date for over two years, since I started writing my 2017 novel Star By Star which focuses on that election. I’ve done suffragist-themed events from Aberdeeen down to London, and from Derry to Kerry. I've written lots of relevant articles and blogs. I’m pretty much electioned-out, especially as during that time I also found myself campaigning in real life during both NI Assembly and UK Westminster elections. 



So today I’m thinking not of Constance Markiewicz, not even of Winifred Carney, who stood for Sinn Féin in an east Belfast seat she hadn’t a hope of winning, but of an obscure woman in a terraced parlour house in that same East Belfast electoral ward.

Fanny Duff 
Fanny Duff was my great-grandmother. I know very little about her. She was, according to my grandmother, her daughter Frances, a gentle and quiet woman. She brought up a large family. She saw her sons off to good skilled shipyard jobs like their father, and one to emigration. Two daughters went into shirt factories, and one died in her teens. Fanny was widowed young, and took in sewing to help provide for the family. She died suddenly in 1936, the day after my grandmother's 28th birthday. 

Was Fanny eligible to vote in 1918? I assume so. She was over 30, and married to the householder of a respectable three-story terrace house whose rateable value would have been over the necessary £5 threshold. 

She lived in an area that was then more mixed than it is today, but even so it was a safe unionist seat and Fanny’s family were unionists. The newspapers -- it is most likely the Duffs read The News Letter -- were full of exhortations to vote and instructions on how to do so. I love the idea of her defying family tradition – and possibly her husband, James, and casting her vote for a woman, feminism trumping tribal identity, but that was even less likely in 1918 Belfast than it would be today, and there is no evidence that Fanny was a feminist. 

Maybe she didn’t vote at all. In December 1918 the flu pandemic was still raging. It affected both the election campaigns and turnout. Fanny may have been nursing one of her children, or have been ill herself. Or she may have been well but reluctant to queue up at a crowded polling station and risk infection. 

I talked to my own granny a lot about what we both called the olden days. But I never asked about that election day when she was ten years old. I never asked if her mother went to vote or if politics was talked about in the house. There can be nobody alive now who remembers Fanny Duff, who died in 1936. She’s just one more working class woman who may, or may not, have played a part in that historic election. But she was my great-grandmother, and next Friday, on the 14thDecember, I choose to think of her striding proudly down Beechfield Street, perhaps on her husband’s arm, perhaps alone or with a group of neighbours, ready to cast her vote for the first time. 
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Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

Last month my family celebrated two big birthdays. On 11 August I took my parents out to dinner on what would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 1997 but a centenary seemed momentous and one of the things my mother and I have both inherited from her is the love of getting dressed up for a ‘wee race out’.

Granny at 50

I’ve been so busy this year thinking of 1918 as the centenary of women’s suffrage, the end of WW1 and the Spanish Flu, that I hadn’t really thought about its being Granny’s centenary too, and it was good to stop and reflect on it, and on what it meant to be born in that year, in that place. Granny (Elizabeth Rea Pleasants, née Hamilton, always known as Rea) was born and lived her whole life in Downpatrick, the county town of Down, where St Patrick is buried. When she was three, Ireland was partitioned and Down became part of the new Northern Ireland. She came of age as the Second World War broke out, and when she was 51, she saw Northern Ireland plunge into its own bloody war. She never let go of calling the Republican of Ireland the Free State, but in other ways she was the most modern of women. 


Like my other gran, Gran W, Granny P. lived through a great deal of history. Sometimes I wished I’d asked her more about it. But she was so busy, always rushing about. She lived in the moment, not the past. She had neither the time nor the patience to sit down and talk to a small girl about the olden days. But she took me to mass and to bingo. She slipped me embarrassingly generous amounts of money when she had it, which was not always because she was ridiculously generous to many people. The first pound note I ever held in my hand was a ninth birthday present from Granny P.

Downpatrick, 1920s, shortly after partition



1980, I'm 12; she's 62
She sang in the local operatic society and passed on to me her good, strong voice. Mummy remembers always being mortified that her own mummy sang so loudly at mass. After Vatican II she became the first woman lay reader in her local church. In the early 60s she adopted three children, two of them mixed race, an unusual undertaking in a small Northern Irish town. Whereas Gran W was a good plain traditional cook, and much given to baking, sewing, knitting and housekeeping, Granny P experimented with spaghetti and curry as far back as the fifties, but often my quiet granda did the cooking, as Granny was off to a whist drive. Gran W wore a frock and an overall, Granny P wore lipstick and trousers and a fake fur, and kept her hair jet back until well into old age.

I was born in 1968, the third of seventeen grandchildren. So yes, that’s the other big birthday we’ve been celebrating. I compare my granny at 50 to me, and my life to hers. At 50 she was very much the matriarch, whereas I’m single and childfree. Granny was bright, talented, and independent-spirited, but growing up in the twenties and thirties as a young Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, her expectations were marriage, church and family. She was very active in those areas, marrying at 21, but she also found time to work outside the house. She was in the Fire Service during the war, and even left home to work as a children’s nanny as a widow in her late sixties. She wouldn’t have had any thoughts of higher education but when I went off to university in 1987 she handed me £50, more money than I'd  ever had in my life, and typical of her generosity. 

Me at 50 -- not so different from Granny P after all 
She was very much of her time, and yet stood against it. When I do anything especially outré my mother will say, Granny the second! I always take it as a compliment. 
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