``Tell Mom I'm off to America''
The story of Lily Kempson and her fight for freedom
By Laura Friel
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As a courier, the more unremarkable her dress the easier it would
have been to pass unnoticed through the city streets. There were
no goodbyes, no entreaties to take care. Leaving undetected, Lily
would never return home
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There were no cheering crowds. No relatives to weep and wave. No
friends to bid a fond farewell. Elizabeth Ann `Lily' Kempson, a
19-year-old unemployed factory worker from Dublin, stood alone on
Liverpool docks about to embark on the most momentous journey of
her life.
It was 1916. Only four years earlier the ill fated Titanic had
sailed from Southampton amidst the furore of brass bands and
headline seeking newspaper reporters. But this was Liverpool. A
trading port which had built its reputation on `King Cotton', the
infamous triangle of slaves to the Americas, raw cotton to
England and manufactured goods to the colonies. Slavery,
transportation and forced emigration, Liverpool had seen it all.
The White Star Line, Britain's most prestigious trans-Atlantic
shipping company, had made its fortune during mass emigration in
the nineteenth century. From 1840 to 1925 3,750,000 Irish men and
women emigrated to the USA. Another million travelled to Canada
and Australia. The `Olympic' and `Titanic' owed much of their
magnificence to the misery of Ireland's poor.
But there were no luxury cruise liners docked in Liverpool on
that particular day. When Lily Kempson stood in line waiting to
board a common cargo ship to New York she was not, as she
appeared, just another emigrant. She was an Irish Rebel, wanted
by the British authorities and on the run.
The heart of British rule in Ireland, Dublin city in the early
twentieth century, held the dreary distinction of having the
worst housing in Europe. In the north of the city, homes
abandoned by the gentry who had moved south of the Liffey, had
become tenement slums for the poor. Amidst the ``ruins of
grandeur'' families lived eight, ten, fifteen, twenty to a room.
It was not unknown for several families to share a single room.
Without sanitation, inadequate heating and limited access to
water the slums of Dublin rivalled the cholera infested hovels of
Calcutta.
In the early 1900s twenty thousand Dublin families lived in one
room accommodation. Five thousand families rented two rooms, of
which almost half were in property condemned as unfit for human
habitation. When Margaret Skinnider was shown ``the poorest part
of Dublin'' by Constance Markiewicz, she wrote, ``I do not believe
there is a worse place in the world.'' The street was ``a hollow
full of sewage and refuse'', she recorded, and the building ``as
full of holes as if it had been under shellfire''.
Born into the ranks of Dublin's poor, Lily Kempson shared two
rooms with her 92-year-old grandmother, her parents and eight
siblings. Ravaged by hunger and disease, Dublin's poor lived like
war-torn refugees in their own country. ``It was terrible,'' Lily
would tell her great granddaughter eighty years later.
Before dawn on 24 April 1916 Lily dressed quietly, mindful of
those still sleeping beside her. On that particular Easter Monday
morning, no one now knows if she chose to wear the uniform of the
Irish Citizen Army. We know she had a uniform and had worn it
before. A photograph of Lily taken in 1915 is still treasured by
her 116 American-born descendants of today. Under a broad hat, a
young woman stares unflinchingly into the camera's lens. Her gaze
is steady, her expression calm and resolved. A ``dark Irish
beauty,'' Lily would later be described in the American press.
In a pocket close to her heart, a bunch of daisies adorns her
uniform, a simple affirmation of her humanity and hope. No one
woke as Lily left her sleeping siblings undisturbed in their
dreams. Civilian clothing would have been her most likely choice.
As a courier, the more unremarkable her dress the easier it would
have been to pass unnoticed through the city streets. There were
no goodbyes, no entreaties to take care. Leaving undetected, Lily
would never return home.
In the early 1900s, the job market for women was ``unattractive
and small''. Large scale industrial development was restricted to
the linen factories of Ulster where women and children could earn
twelve shillings a week, half the wage of a male employee. In
Dublin domestic service remained the main source of female
employment. One notable exception was Jacob's biscuit factory, a
thriving industry in the heart of the city which employed over
3,000 women workers. But while a series of strikes in the North
had improved wages, in Ireland's capital the desperation of the
poor allowed employers to keep hours long and wages small. A male
day labourer could expect to work a 70 hour week for 14
shillings, women worked 90 hours for just over a third of a male
wage.
The year Lily Kempson began working at Jacob's, women workers at
the factory went on strike for higher wages and won. It was 1911
and Lily was fourteen years of age. The biscuit factory strike
was the first major industrial dispute involving women workers in
the city. It was a lesson in collective action which many would
never forget.
In the Great Lockout of 1913, women from Jacob's factory were
described as ``amongst the most militant''. Spearheaded by business
tycoon William Martin Murphy, the Lockout conspiracy sought to
break the unions by starving the workforce into signing non-union
agreements. Jacob's strikers utilised their organisational skills
to run mass soup kitchens at Larkin's trade union headquarters
Liberty Hall. Lily Kempson was most likely amongst the army of
women who organised meals for 25,000 workers and their families.
At the height of the struggle, Lily was jailed for two weeks for
trade union activities. With the Irish Transport and General
Workers' Union on the verge of collapse, in the summer of 1914 an
exhausted Larkin left Dublin for America. By October the task of
rebuilding passed to Belfast organiser, James Connolly. Like Lily
Kempson, many of the most militant women sacked from Jacob's
factory during the lockout would later join Connolly's Irish
Citizens Army.
In the fields of France, amidst the mud and blood of trench
warfare, James Kempson would have been unaware of his daughter's
resolve as she walked through Dublin on that Easter Monday
morning. Poverty and despair had driven James and two of his sons
into a war where, beyond a meal and a few shillings to send home,
they had little to gain. Poverty and hope spurred Lily to chose
another set of dice with which to cast life's chances.
When Lily arrived at Liberty Hall preparations for the Rising
were already well underway, the banner proclaiming ``Neither King
nor Kaiser but Ireland'' still adorning the building's stone
facade. Weeks earlier Constance Markiewicz and other women
members of the Citizens Army, perhaps Lily amongst them, had
stacked grenades and ammunition in the basement. Now this
weaponry, already dispersed throughout the city, would be used to
defend the proclamation of an Irish Republic. ``We are going out
to be slaughtered,'' Lily overheard James Connolly remark to
William O'Brien. ``Is there no chance of success?'' O'Brien asked.
``None whatever,'' came the reply.
The occupation of St Stephen's Green by the Republican forces was
``an act of suicide'', Frank Robbins, a fighter in the Irish
Citizens Army would write in his `Recollections'. It
``demonstrated how adversely our plans were affected by the lack
of manpower,'' writes Robbins. Commandant Michael Mallin ``had
actually to avail of the services of members of the women's
section.....Madame Markiewicz, Lily Kempson and Mary Hyland gave
invaluable assistance''.
The initial plan for women to primarily take care of the wounded
was scrapped. Attached to the Red Cross unit, Lily Kempson and
her female comrades were swiftly incorporated within the main
body of the fight. Lily was armed with a revolver. ``Lily, you've
got to use this, but be careful who you hit,'' she remembered one
of her comrades saying. ``I will,'' she replied.
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At the Green she collects explosive devices to carry back to the
College. In the College she helps tend the wounded and prepares
food in the kitchens. Throughout the five day siege, she carries
messages to and fro, avoiding bullets and evading capture. As the
College contingent prepares to surrender Lily is chosen to carry
the garrison's last dispatches to addresses throughout the city
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A handful of women, who had already played a key role in securing
access to the Green, set about evacuating civilians and guarding
the gates. The insurgents dug in but they were unable to secure
surrounding buildings because of a chronic shortage of personnel.
It was a fundamental strategic flaw.
As dawn broke on Tuesday morning Lily was woken by the rattle of
machine gun fire which cut through a summerhouse where she and
her comrades were resting. The British had occupied the
Shelbourne, a hotel overlooking the park. The insurgents would
hold the Green for less than twenty hours. ``If you're any bloody
good come in and fight for Ireland,'' Bob de Coeur of the
Citizen's Army shouted from the Green to three passing Cumann na
mBan women. They didn't need to be asked twice.
The superior firepower of the British and the strategic advantage
of the Shelbourne made evacuation of the park as inevitable as it
was urgent. A line of retreat had already been secured. In an
advance party of three men and three women, Lily Kempson had
accompanied Constance Markiewicz and Mary Hyland to seize the
College of Surgeons, a sturdy building overlooking the north of
the Green. It was here the Green's contingent would make their
heroic last stand. Holding the ground for five days, they
surrendered only after receiving a dispatch directly from the
GPO.
Writing of Cumann na mBan and the GPO, Desmond Ryan in his
account ``The Rising'' describes their courageous role. Ryan could
equally have been describing Lily Kempson and her Irish Citizen
Army comrades in the College of Surgeons, their experience was
much the same. ``Until almost the end, the Cumann na mBan shared
the dangers, the fire, the bullets, all the ordeals of the
fighters, in the most dangerous areas, on the barricades, through
the bullet-swept streets and quaysides, carrying dispatches,
explosives and ammunition through the thick of the fray...''
There is very little specifically recorded about Lily Kempson.
She left no memoir, no diary, no written record of her life. Yet
a careful search reveals snippets of information which taken
together begin to weave the fabric of her story. Lily is recorded
escorting an ``important prisoner'', a possible British spy. Lily
admonishes a young man in St Stephen's Green she discovers
``trying to go home''. ``We're all away from home now,'' she
prophetically tells him. A cart carrying bread is held at
gunpoint as Lily seizes the contents to add to the rebels'
dwindling food supplies. She is sent from the Green to the
College to retrieve and transport weaponry belonging to the
Surgeon's Officers' Training Corps. At the Green she collects
explosive devices to carry back to the College. In the College
she helps tend the wounded and prepares food in the kitchens.
Throughout the five day siege, she carries messages to and fro,
avoiding bullets and evading capture. As the College contingent
prepares to surrender Lily is chosen to carry the garrison's last
dispatches to addresses throughout the city.
Lily Kempson died at the age of ninety-nine, just two years ago.
In her final years she attracted the attention of her local
American press. Each Easter she briefly became a celebrity, ``The
Last Survivor'', as her story was retold.
In 1996, a few short months after Lily's death, her great
granddaughter wrote to An Phoblacht. She was hoping to compile a
biography and was asking for advice. To my shame I did not find
the time to reply. Happily, as a true descendant of her `feisty'
great grandmother, this did not deter Casey McNerthney and a
pamphlet celebrating Lily's contribution towards Irish freedom
was published within the same year. In the immediate aftermath of
The Rising, the Kempsons' Dublin home was raided by the British
army, but Lily had not returned. When Lily's name appeared on a
list of wanted suspects, it was time to leave. Using her sister's
passport, Lily travelled to England, boarded a ship to New York,
then sailed on to Seattle.
Just before she left Dublin, Lily had spotted one of her sisters
in a street, ``Tell mom I'm off to America,'' she called. Then she
was gone.
``Neither King nor Kaiser, But Ireland'', the story of Lily
Kempson, is available by mail from Casey McNerthney, PO box
27462, Seattle, Washington, USA, 98125-2462, price $3 and
postage.
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