Tag: first world war

The World of The Pretender

An empire going up in smoke

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on An empire going up in smoke

tsar and anastasia

A father and daughter joshing for the camera, the father giving the daughter a “go” of his pipe. Not the sort of thing we would celebrate in the politically correct 21st century.  But this is a 20th century image, probably taken around 1913 and the father in the photograph is Tsar Nicholas 11, known as bloody Nicholas for his inept handling of the Russian empire, pictured with his daughter,the then 12-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia.

(Anastasia was the subject of my novel, The Pretender, which has just been reissued as an e-book by Jonathan Cape.)

The Romanov family were inveterate photograph-takers – Nicholas himself was an amateur snapper – and this image belongs to a time just before the outbreak of the First World War when the Tsar’s hold on power began to unravel. (As the above photo demonstrates, Nicholas was a devoted family man, though a weak, deluded and vacillating ruler.)

The experience of war for Russians was catastrophic. Millions of men were removed to the front, farms began to fail and what food there was, was being used to fuel the army. Prices rose, and there was famine in the winter of 1916/17.

The military handling of the war led to huge Russian defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes and matters took a turn for the worse when in late 1915, Nicholas insisted on taking personal charge of the army, leaving government affairs in the hands of his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra.  (The Tsar had reluctantly agreed to the setting-up of an elected legislative body, the Duma, in 1906.)  The religious Tsarina, however, was completely under the sway of the disreputable, self-proclaimed monk, Rasputin, whom she fervently believed could save their son, Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from haemophilia. This concatination of the personal and political was ruinous.

In March 1917, workers in St Petersburg went on strike protesting against the war and the prevailing conditions.  The marches turned into full-scale riots in which over 1,000 people were killed.  At first troops fired on the crowds, but after several days they mutinied and joined the rioters.   The Duma, under Alexander Kerensky, took power into their own hands and set up a ‘provisional government’.

The Tsar, hoping to wrest back control, left the front for St Petersburg but his train was stopped en route by members of the Duma who forced him to abdicate in March 1917.

Despite the abolition of the monarchy, the provisional government came under pressure almost immediately because of its decision to carry on with the war.  In April, the exiled Bolshevik leader Lenin returned to Russia and promised the people ‘Peace, Bread and Land’; by September the Bolsheviks could claim two million members and the stage was set for revolution.

Meanwhile, the Romanovs had been detained at the Alexander Palace, their summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo on the outskirts of St Petersburg.   Their life in captivity was a far cry from their previous gilded existence as an imperial family.  Under armed guard, they spent their time, according to family sources, in religious activities and walks in the grounds of the palace.

Some photos from this time are believed to have been taken by Pierre Gilliard, the royal children’s tutor, and are accompanied by a narrative that describes the Romanovs’ daily life from March to August 1917 at Tsarskoe Selo.

“On the 13th day of May,” Pierre Gilliard wrote, “the family decided to change the lawn, near the residence, into a kitchen garden. All were enthusiastic and everybody, family retinue, servants, and even several soldiers of the guard joined the work. . . . In June, the results of their labour were clearly shown, for all kinds of vegetables had grown, including 500 cabbages.”

romaovs tsarkoe selo
In captivity at Tsarskoe Selo – the Grand Duchesses Tatiana, Anastasia and Marie and the Tsarevich Alexei.

However, their existence in the Alexander Palace – built for Catherine the Great, in 1796, and considered one of the finest neo-classical buildings in Russia – if constrained and more pared back than what they had been used to, was a great deal more comfortable than what was to come and they still had the benefit of a large household staff and a certain civility from their captors.

As law and order began to break down outside the palace walls, however, and the provisional government faltered, it was decided to move the Romanovs out of St Petersburg because, as Kerensky informed the Tsar, he could no longer guarantee the family’s safety.

A hundred years ago this month, they began their fateful journey eastwards. On August 14, at 6.10 in the morning, they set out for Tobolsk in Siberia.   It took two trains to accommodate the retinue (53 in all), their baggage, the government representatives, the jailers and soldiers. The trip took five days –  by rail to Tiumen, and then by river steamer to Tobolsk.

Ironically, on August 18, the boat passed Pokrovskoie, the birthplace of Rasputin, where they could see clearly the humble house where the so-called holy man had been raised. Rasputin was, by this stage, dead. He had been murdered in December 1916 by distant relations of the Tsar’s, but years previously he had warned the Tsarina – “My death will be your death”  –  words that must have haunted this most superstitious of women standing on the boat deck.

The next day, August 19, 1917, they arrived in Tobolsk.  They would be held there in the Governor’s Mansion behind a stockade, until April 1918, when they were moved for the last time – to the site of their execution.

The World of Bella Casey

Killing your darlings

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Killing your darlings

fuy poster

The death of a fictional character is always difficult for an author. You’ve lovingly created them, you’ve spent several years in their company; then you have to kill them off.  The dilemma is further complicated if you’re writing about real people. And if you’re writing about historical figures, they already have a death assigned to them.

The eponymous heroine of my novel, The Rising of Bella Casey (Brandon) had the ill-luck of becoming an early victim of the Spanish ‘flu.

The epidemic swept through Europe and the US at the end of the First World War, and at its lowest estimate, claimed 21 million victims world-wide, a figure far higher than the war’s death-toll. (By comparison, the SARS outbreak in 2003 claimed 775 lives, while the avian ‘flu has killed 384 people in the last 10 years, according to the World Health Organization.)

The ‘flu came in two waves – in early 1918, and then again later in the year.  But the first outbreak of the Spanish ‘flu (so-called because in neutral Spain newspapers were publishing accounts of the spread of the disease) is now understood to have originated as early as 1916 in a British infantry depot in Etaples, 20 miles south of Boulogne. All newly-arrived British troops were sent for training at the northern French camp so that at any given time over 100,000 men were in residence.  Most lived in tents or temporary wooden barracks and conditions were overcrowded and unsanitary – a recipe for the spread of the respiratory virus.

In December 1916, dozens of soldiers at the camp began complaining of aches and pains, coughs and shortness of breath. As many as 40 % of these first victims died of what was described as “purulent  bronchitis”. It was a horrible death, where patients literally drowned in their own blood, their faces turning a peculiar lavender colour – indicating cyanosis (where the lungs cannot transfer oxygen into the blood) ─ a tell-tale trademark of the killer ‘flu. Other early outbreaks are placed in the US (Camp Funston, Kansas) and in China, both in 1917.

In Dublin, eye-witnesses remember it as the Black Flu. “The Black Flu came in 1918.  I was still a child.  It was a horrible old thing.  Well, my mother had the Black Flu and we only got her back from Heaven. Praying. And I remember sitting at her bedside and she was very, very sick. . . Oh, a dispensary doctor came up, but he had hundreds,” May Hanaphy told the author Kevin Kearns in Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History of the Dublin Slums.

The Spanish ‘flu felled the young and the healthy.  Bella Casey was neither.   Her health had already been compromised by erysipelas, a skin infection caused by the streptococcus bacteria. Known alternatively as “holy fire” or “St Anthony’s Fire”, the condition can cause high fever, shaking, chills, fevers, headaches and vomiting. The skin lesions enlarge rapidly and become inflamed. They are painful and hard to the touch transforming the affected skin so that it takes on the consistency of orange peel. Nowadays, it can be treated with antibiotics, but these were not available until 1928.  

In Bella’s case, the skin rash may have been caused by an allergy to cleaning products of    the time – predominantly soap and lye.  Although an educated woman, she spent the latter years of her life in poverty working as a charwoman .  In The Early Life of Sean O’Casey Martin Marguiles notes that “incongruously she always wore a pair of gloves and neighbours referred to her admiringly as ‘Lady Beaver’.” (Beaver was Bella’s married name.)

“She suffered from headaches which became progressively more frequent and severe, until she had to stop scrubbing floors.  The headaches – symptoms of erysipelas – became so painful that she took to wearing a shawl, which made her white gloves appear more incongruous still.”

In the end, however, the Spanish ‘flu claimed Bella Casey.  Her death certificate notes the cause of death as “Influenza, 10 Days Certified”. She was 52.  Bella Casey died on this day 97 years ago, New Year’s Day, 1918.

Bella, in happier times, with her daughter, Susan
Bella, in happier times, with her daughter, Susan

The World of Bella Casey

Bella Casey’s War

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Bella Casey’s War

ww1 poster

On  the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, I thought it would be fitting to chart the influence of the war on Bella Casey, the heroine of my novel, The Rising of Bella Casey (Brandon, 2013).

Bella (b.1865)  was the eldest of the family of five, which included Dublin’s premier playwright Sean O’Casey. The Protestant Caseys, and Bella in particular, were steeped in the tradition of service in the British Army. Two of Bella’s brothers had soldiered with the Army. Tom Casey saw active duty in the Boer War (he died in February 1914 ) and Mick, who had served in the Royal Engineers in the 1890s, re-enlisted in 1915. Bella’s teenage son, James “Sonny” Beaver, also joined the Royal Navy in 1915.

Bella’s husband, Nicholas Beaver, had been a career soldier with the King’s Liverpools regiment in the 1880s. Beaver was struck down with the mental effects of syphilis in 1905, and was committed to Dublin’s Richmond Asylum where he died in 1907. Bella was left destitute with five children to raise alone.

Her brother, Sean O’Casey, being an avowed socialist and staunch nationalist, would not have served in the British Army on principle but he often drew on his background of solid, working-class Protestant loyalism for his work. He might not have had personal sympathy for these beliefs, but there was no doubt he understood them.

Although he was fearless in tackling thorny political issues in his plays – the depiction of the Easter Rising in The Plough and the Stars, for example, caused riots in the Abbey Theatre when it was staged in 1926 –  it was to take O’Casey almost a decade to approach the horrors of the First World War. In 1928 he submitted his play, The Silver Tassie, to the Abbey Theatre.  It constitutes a different kind of war service, an unflinching polemic on the futility of battle.

In the first act we see Harry Heegan, a young Dublin sporting hero who plays on the winning team for a soccer trophy (the silver tassie of the title) on the day he is due to return to the front. The second act of the play is an operatic depiction of Heegan and his war-weary comrades set in the rain-soaked trenches of France. A ruined monastery forms the backdrop; a broken crucifix dominates the scene. Strange liturgical chanting mixed with parlour songs replace conventional dialogue, in a highly stylized rendering of the absurd horrors of war. Nothing in the play up to this prepares the audience for this daring expressionism. Acts Three and Four bring us back down to earth, but all has changed. Heegan, now confined to a wheelchair as a result of a war wound, returns to Dublin, embittered and disillusioned. His girlfriend has gone off with his best friend Barney, who has won the VC for saving Heegan on the battlefield. In the community where he was hailed once as a hero, he meets only bafflement and distaste. No one can understand the trauma he’s been through. This is so common a trope in war narratives now that it is barely remarkable, but at the time, it was a revolutionary perspective.

Director and founder of the Abbey, W.B.Yeats, and O’Casey’s friend, was not convinced, however.  He turned the play down out of hand. In the history of literary rejections, they don’t come more savage than this. Yeats claimed that O’Casey knew nothing about the First World War: “You have no subject,” he wrote, “You are not interested in the Great War, you never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals and so write out of your opinions. . . ” He dismissed the bravura second act as an interesting technical experiment; after that, he added, “there is nothing”.

Given O’Casey’s strong and enduring family ties with the British Army, Yeats’s accusation that O’Casey was not familiar with his subject matter could hardly have been more wrong. O’Casey was not a man to take such criticism lying down. He inquired tartly if Shakespeare had been at Actium before he wrote Antony and Cleopatra or visited Philippi in preparation for Julius Caesar. And had Yeats himself travelled to Tir na nÓg as a preparation for his esoteric dramas, O’Casey demanded. The battle lines between the two men were firmly drawn.

Furthermore, as well as having family members fighting in the war, O’Casey had talked to soldiers returned from the Front. In 1915, he was hospitalised with TB in St Vincent’s Hospital. The wards were thronged with wounded soldiers newly arrived from France. While recovering O’Casey recalled listening to accounts of the “slime, the blooded mud, the crater and the shell-hole” that had become “God’s kingdom on earth”. These first-hand accounts must surely have inspired the nightmarish visions of the second act of The Silver Tassie. But Yeats insisted that the play lacked unity of action.

In such criticism he missed O’Casey’s point entirely. The disconnect between Act Two and the rest of the play was absolutely intentional. As one contemporary critic has put it: “The experience of a foot soldier caught up in the madness of battle is impossible to reconcile with the world that exists outside it: it is a personal apocalypse that relates to nothing even as it changes everything.”

After its rejection by the Abbey, The Silver Tassie did find a home.  It was premiered in London at the Apollo Theatre in 1929, starring Charles Laughton and Barry Fitzgerald.  But the war between Yeats and O’Casey was to continue for several more years.  They eventually patched things up and The Silver Tassie was staged at the Abbey in 1935 but the relationship between the two was never quite the same again.

As for Bella, who had seen her husband and brothers serve with the British Army and her son fight in the war, she was the only member of the family who did not survive the First World War. On January 1, 1918, she died of the effects of influenza.  This was the beginning of the Spanish ‘flu  epidemic that was to sweep through Europe that year and claimed more victims than the hostilities did.

An edited version of this post was broadcast as part of  RTE’s Sunday Miscellany World War One Roadshow, August 3.  See http://www.rte.ie/radio1/sunday-miscellany/