When Kathleen Alexanderson Wright, an arts student, was shot dead at a game of cricket in Trinity College Dublin during the War of Independence, she did not cry out in pain. In fact, she barely made a sound.
Her fiance, George Herbert Ardill, only realised something was wrong when he heard her gently moaning. “I opened the coat which she was wearing at the time and then I noticed blood on the front of her blouse,” he later said. “I tore open the blouse and saw a wound on the right side of the breast.”
By this point a crowd had gathered around Wright, who was 21. Three men stepped forward to help, saying they were doctors. An ambulance was called but one of the doctors remarked to the crowd that her “case was hopeless and that the lady would only live a few minutes”. Undeterred, Ardill carried her out to the ambulance.
Wright was pronounced dead on arrival at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Grand Canal Street.
READ MORE
She was shot at about 5.20pm in the evening. Play resumed in the cricket game for about 15 minutes before the Trinity provost, Dr JH Bernard, called for the match to be abandoned.
Thirty-four years later Pádraig Ó Conchubhair gave a statement to the Irish Bureau of Military History about his time in the IRA during the War of Independence. (The bureau, established in 1947, gathered 1,773 witness statements and other records from the conflict.) Ó Conchubhair described how he and fellow IRA man Jimmy McGuinness opened fire on the crowd watching the cricket match from behind the TCD boundary wall at Lincoln Place. They had been ordered to “stop this match taking place” as it was a charity game between the Gentlemen of Ireland and members of the British military, with tickets sold for the benefit of Great War veterans. As Ó Conchubhair put it: “After the first couple of rounds were fired, a lady spectator jumped up from one of the seats and got killed by a stray shot. The match was not proceeded with.” He never mentioned Wright by name.
Although this story is not well known to the public, it is familiar to some historians who specialise in the Irish Revolutionary period.
Wright’s killing was the moment when the reality of the War of Independence first struck many students of the university. “The tragic death of a lady student who was shot in College Park while looking on at a cricket match ... somehow, marked a closed chapter on the carefree days,” one student observed a year after the shooting.
What happened next, however, has never been publicly discussed. Like many other stories from those violent times, it was hidden among the voluminous records of the National Archives in Dublin.
I had not gone to the archives looking for information about Wright’s death. I had recently graduated from Trinity with a history degree and was starting research on a project that involved going through many of the War of Independence personal injury compensation files.
On my first day in the archive I was surprised to see the description for Wright’s file. Why had no one mentioned her when I was studying in the college, specialising in this period? The more I looked into her story, the more this struck me.
On the day that Wright was killed, June 3rd, 1921, Ireland was just over a month away from the Truce that was the key step towards the ending of the War of Independence. However, June 1921 saw the most military and police casualties of the conflict , meaning she died as levels of violence and disorder peaked. One regional newspaper, the Lurgan Mail, gave over just one small paragraph on the last page to her killing.
The war brought about a complete breakdown in long-established institutions of law and order. Nationalists contested the legitimacy of such structures, seeking to replace them with Republican Courts. In addition, the Westminster parliament passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act of August 1920. This law empowered the British military to imprison people without a trail and to hold trials behind closed doors with no juries and the authority to sentence people to death.
[ From Turmoil to Truce: A mature reflection on the War of IndependenceOpens in new window ]
Coroners’ courts, which sit after someone dies suspiciously or unnaturally to decide whether the case warrants further investigation, were suspended. They were replaced with private “military courts of inquiry”.
The “Court of Inquiry in lieu of Inquest” into Wright’s killing sat in Sir Patrick Dun’s, three days after she was declared dead there.
The witnesses included her fiance Ardill, who was from Sligo, and Dr William Bernard Pemberton, who had declared her dead. Evidence was also taken from Godfrey Marcus Goodbody, a member of the RIC who had arrived at the scene moments after the shooting.
The fourth and final witness was Joseph Marshall, then chief steward of the college. “Immediately after the shots were fired, I saw a young lady who had been sitting on a bench about three or four yards from where I was sitting lying on the ground. Some person remarked that she was ‘in a faint’. I looked at her and said, ‘no, she is dead’.”
In the moments before the shooting, Marshall “saw two gentlemen coming down Kildare Street whom I knew”. These men were heading in the direction of Lincoln Place, where the shooters opened fire on the crowd. None of the military personnel presiding over this inquiry asked any follow-up questions regarding the identity of the two men.
The written judgment was issued by Captain EJ Earle, president of the inquiry, and Lieutenant AV Greenfield and 2nd Lieutenant AC Gilbert: “Kathleen Wright of Trinity College Dublin died ... from shock and haemorrhage caused by gunshot wounds inflicted by some person or persons unknown, such person or persons being thereby guilty of willful murder.” No one was ever charged in relation to her death.
The only real insight we are offered into who Wright was as an individual, and who she might have become, is a letter of 1924 from her father, Rev Ernest Alexanderson Wright, an Irishman and vicar of All Saints, Clapham Park, London.
Three years after his daughter’s death, he instructed his London solicitors to write to the UK minister for Ireland to begin the process of making a claim for compensation for the expenses of her funeral. He had heard that other parents whose children were killed in Ireland had been reimbursed for the costs of their funeral and some of the expenses of their children’s education.
Wright’s funeral had been particularly expensive as her body had to be brought to London for burial. Though Rev Wright was born in Belfast to an Irish family, his job as a vicar had taken him across Britain and Ireland. He was ordained a priest in 1889 and had been the curate of churches in Cahir and Seapatrick, before moving to Liverpool, Hull and Brixton in South London.
The total funeral expenses came to just over £131. In the letter Rev Wright is described as “not being a man of means and holding only a small living”. His annual income was later reported as being £370, meaning the funeral had cost him more than a third of his pay for the year.
It is here that we get a glimpse into Wright’s plans and dreams for her future. When she died she “was about to earn her own living, [and] had expressed her intention of repaying her father the cost of her education”, said her father. In 1921 it was still something new for daughters of upstanding members of society to attend university, and even more unusual for them to desire to work outside the home.
TCD first admitted female students in January 1904, when three women were accepted into the college. By the time Wright studied there in the early 1920s, women made up about 15 per cent of the student population. Female students were subjected to strict rules meant to enforce the separation of men and women in all aspects of student life, apart from lectures and exams. Women were denied campus accommodation. At the time of her death Wright lived in Trinity Halls, Milltown, which was housing built for female students four kilometres from the city centre.
Rev Wright told an English newspaper that four or five generations of his family had studied in TCD. However, it is very likely that his daughter was the first women in her family to do so.
It is also possible that Wright faced pushback within her family for enrolling in university. Her uncle was Sir Almroth Edward Wright, a well-known bacteriologist. Eight years before her death he had published an uncompromising argument against giving women the vote.
In The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, Sir Almroth claimed women had innate “intellectual defects” that meant they could never equal men intellectually. He also railed against the notion that “women shall be included in ... every masculine foundation, university, school of learning, academy, trade union, professional corporation ... until we shall have everywhere one vast cock-and-hen show”. There was more: “The proposal to bring man and woman together everywhere into extremely intimate relationships raises very grave questions.”
In the end Rev Wright received £200 to cover the expenses of his daughter’s funeral and some of the costs of her education. The compensation came under a 50/50 arrangement whereby the British and Irish states each agreed to pay half of the compensation. This occurred in cases when it was unclear which government was liable for the victim’s death.
There was a certain morbidness in the state providing compensation for the costs of Wright’s education, as if returning funds for a failed investment.
Wright’s family were devastated by her death.
Her brother, Ruthven Alexanderson Wright, was also a TCD student. He had not been present at the fateful cricket match and found out about his sister’s murder from Ardill, who was “unable to say very much as he was in a state of collapse”.
A journalist for the London Evening Standard described her parents as “pitiful ... wandering about the house overcome with grief” when he visited them. Rev Wright had planned to travel to Ireland to bring her body to London for burial but “was advised not to make the journey” due to his emotional state.
Three years later, he expressed willingness to go Dublin or the hearing of this compensation claim if it was “absolutely necessary”. But in view of “the painful circumstances connected with it he trusts that it can be dealt with effectively in his absence”. Rev Wright died suddenly 11 months after sending that letter.
Ó Conchubhair went on to have a successful military career. On his retirement he became the governor of Limerick Prison and was awarded a pension for his service. In 1950 he recounted his experiences of fighting in the War of Independence, describing the decade after he joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913 as “the liveliest and best time of my life – so far”. He died of heart failure in 1953 and received a military funeral.
Today you can read his entry in the National Dictionary of Irish Biography, though you will not find mention of Wright in it.
There is no plaque, no memorial. In fact there is nothing at all to commemorate Wright on the TCD campus.
There is, however, a plaque for Private Arthur Charles Smith, a British soldier killed during the 1916 Easter Rising, whose body was initially buried in the college campus before being moved to Grangegorman. His plaque is on Trinity’s boundary wall, facing the cricket pitch where Kathleen Alexanderson Wright was shot.
