An Artist Drawn to Ireland – Frank McNally on Cesca Chenevix Trench

During a tragically short life that began 130 years ago this week, Cesca Chenevix Trench made a long political journey. Born in Liverpool of Anglo-Irish, unionist, and clerical stock – her grandfather had been an Archbishop of Dublin – she became over time a Gaeilgeoir and a nationalist and played a part in the events of 1916. When she died two years later, the Gaelic League eulogised her as Sadhbh Trinseach, the version of her name she had adopted in many Irish language classes.

She may have been part of a phenomenon noted by Roy Foster in his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890 – 1923 – whereby some people used the wider struggle as a vehicle for personal rebellion against family and social background.

Other examples included the Gifford sisters and Albinia Broderick (an aristocrat who had an even more dramatic transformation en route to becoming a nurse named Gobnait Ní Bruadair). It was a tendency more marked among women, probably because the advantages of being part of the old ascendancy were not as much use then if you were female. But in this case, at least, the trend was partly bucked. One of Cesca's mentors was her older brother, Richard Samuel Trench, an Eton-and-Oxford-educated Irish enthusiast, who eventually changed his Christian name by deed-poll to Dermot, although he is immortalised in literature by a third name over which he had no control.

Visiting Dublin in 1904, RS Trench spent some nights in the Martello Tower at Sandyford, with his friend Oliver St Gogarty. Even the many readers who have given up on Ulysses after Chapter 1 will remember him, because disguised as "Haines", he's the man who had a nightmare about a black panther and fired a gunshot over the bed of another lodger, James Joyce.

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As Buck Mulligan, Gogarty mocks the Englishman's pursuit of insights about Ireland for a scholarly book: "Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind." In the event, the real-life Haines published only a pamphlet before shooting himself dead aged 27.

The "weird sisters" there were WB Yeats's siblings, "Lily" and "Lollie", who ran an arts-and-crafts co-operative, including printing press, in Dundrum. Which brings us by a circuitous route back to Cesca. Because when she got married in Dublin in 1918, Lily Yeats would help make her wedding dress.

In the meantime, even at English boarding school, Trench had developed nationalist sympathies. Then, starting in her teens, she spent several summers in Ireland, attending languages classes on Achill Island, among other places. By the time she moved to Paris to study art in 1913, her output included political cartoons in support of home rule.

The following July, she was standing on the quay at Howth when the Asgard guns were landed, an event rhapsodised in her diary (as quoted by Foster): “…we cheered and cheered and cheered, and waved anything we had, and cheered again […] To see and hear, that was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. We went to some policemen who were standing there and said, ‘Isn’t it grand?’. ‘It is,’ they said, ‘it’s great,’ and broad smiles all over their faces.”

RS apart, the Trenches typified the conflict in such families. Cesca's sister Margot experienced a similar political evolution to her, but three other brothers served in the British army during the war. One – Reggie, to whom she was especially close – was a member of the Sherwood Foresters, who suffered heavy losses during the Easter Rising, although he himself was not posted to Dublin until May.

Her feelings about those events were understandably mixed. As a first-aid volunteer, she delivered supplies to the GPO, but afterwards came to consider the rebellion a tragic mistake. She was not in any case fated to see its long-term consequences.

As well as being part of Ireland’s revolutionary generation, Trench may also have been part of an unfortunate cohort doomed early in life by exposure – however harmless at the time – to the great pandemic of 1889-91, the Russian Flu. That’s one of the theories for why the even more deadly Spanish Flu a generation later wreaked such havoc among people in their mid-to-late 20s. It may be that in coping with the earlier virus as babies, their immune system was in some way made vulnerable to the later one. In any case, Trench caught the bug only months after her wedding and died in October 1918, aged 27. A plaque on her birthplace records her name in English but describes her as an “Artist and Gaelic Leaguer”.