It took only a few minutes for the substance to slosh down into her, but to Dolours it felt like an eternity. Before they had even removed the tube, she vomited the food up. ‘The feed’, as she came to think of this forcibly administered diet, consisted of a combination of foods that had been whipped together in a blender – raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan, a concentrated blend of milk, minerals and vitamins. After the force-feeding, Dolours was released to the exercise yard, where she saw Marian, who had not yet been subjected to it. Dolours told her sister about the ordeal and said that she did not think she could go through it again. You don’t need to, Marian said. You can come off the strike.
No, Dolours replied. We’ll come off together or not at all.
Two days later, the prison doctors started force-feeding Marian as well. It became a gruesome ritual. Each morning at ten o’clock, the crew of doctors and nurses would arrive in their cells, tie them down, and pour the food down their throats. ‘We are learning to breathe a bit more easily when the tube is down,’ Dolours wrote in a letter.
Force-feeding was a controversial practice that had been used on another group of unruly women, the suffragettes. After being force-fed in Holloway Prison in 1913, one of the suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst, called it torture, noting that ‘infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation’.
‘I don’t want the stuff forced down me,’ Dolours wrote in a letter. ‘And while I am not in a position to offer physical resistance, that’s not to say that I can’t mentally resist and reject the whole horrible happening.’ Sometimes one of the sisters would vomit while the tube was still down her throat and nearly choke to death. Some of their letters were published in the press, and there was a great outcry about the force-feeding. The Home Office responded, at least initially, with a claim that these measures were being taken simply in the interests of helping the strikers, and that British prison officials were not in the habit of allowing their inmates to kill themselves.
In January, Bernadette Devlin, the student leader from the People’s Democracy march at Burntollet Bridge, who had gone on to win a seat in Parliament at Westminster, paid a visit to the Price sisters. Devlin was shocked by the sight of Dolours. Her hair, which had been a rich dark red, ‘has lost colour to the extent that it is fair, and actually white at the roots’, Devlin said. Because she had begun to struggle with her captors during the feed, biting down on the wooden bit, Dolours’s teeth had started to loosen and decay. Both sisters’ complexions had grown waxy. They shuffled when they walked.
Some of the personnel who administered the force-feeding were cruel. One doctor mocked the sisters’ conviction, joking during feeding sessions that it was ‘all for the cause’. A female attendant made a comment about the Ulster Irish breeding ‘like rabbits’ and living off the English.
‘We built your roads!’ Dolours snapped back, not so enfeebled that she would shrink from an argument. ‘We were happy in our own country ’til you English took it away from us … The Irish are here because of youse!’
Other officials were more kind. The sisters had a good rapport with the prison doctor, a man named Ian Blyth. He called them ‘my girls’, and as the hunger strike progressed, he would challenge them to arm-wrestling contests. They gamely played along, knowing full well that the purpose of this pantomime was to register how rapidly their strength was dissipating. A psychiatrist was sent by the Home Office to examine them. He certified that the Price sisters knew exactly what they were doing. In summarising his diagnosis, Marian said, ‘The problem was we were too sane.’ The psychiatrist knew Roy Jenkins, the British home secretary, and Marian asked him if Jenkins might come himself to see them. Jenkins would never meet them face to face, the psychiatrist told her, because he knew that if he did, he would send them straight home.
For the government, this was an impossible crisis. Even as their bodies continued to shrink and wither, the Price sisters took on an iconic dimension. ‘They were the stuff of which Irish martyrs could be made: two young, slim, dark girls, devout yet dedicated to terrorism,’ Jenkins later recalled. He feared that the ramifications of ‘the death of these charismatic colleens’ would be incalculable. Privately, Jenkins regarded their demand for repatriation to be ‘not totally unreasonable’. But he felt that the government could not appear to be making any concessions under such duress. Terrorism was a ‘contagion’, Jenkins believed. Bending to the demands of the hunger strikers would only validate their methods and encourage others to adopt them.
But if the alternative was force-feeding, it was turning out to be a public-relations fiasco. Many members of the British public regarded the practice as a form of torture. According to their medical records, the Price sisters sometimes fainted during the procedure. On one occasion, when the sisters resisted the feeding, they were forcibly gagged, and a radio was turned up to cover their screams. Speaking at a protest outside the home of the British ambassador in Dublin, a psychiatrist decried the practice, likening it to rape. ‘The doctor here told us that he thought the first couple of times they force-fed Dotes they’d break her,’ Marian wrote in a letter to her family. ‘But it takes more than that to break our kid, some pup she is.’
Some parents, seeing their daughters, who were barely out of school, proposing to starve themselves to death, might try to prevail upon them to give up the fight. Not the Prices. ‘An awful lot of people come onto earth, eat, work and die and never contribute anything to the world,’ Albert Price told a reporter. ‘If they die, at least they will have done something.’
Their mother, Chrissie, sounded a similar note. ‘I raised them to do their duty to their country,’ she said. ‘I am heartbroken looking at them suffering, yet I am proud of them. I will not ask them to give up. I know they will win in the end.’
When Chrissie saw her daughters in prison, she kept a brave face, chatting animatedly about everything but the hunger strike until the end of the visit. Then, just as she was about to leave, she said, ‘What are you taking now?’
‘We’re taking water, Mum. We’re just drinking water,’ Dolours said.
‘Well,’ Chrissie said, with gruff composure, ‘drink plenty of water.’
There is a morbid but undeniable entertainment in watching a hunger strike unfold. As a test of the limits of human endurance, it can become a spectacle for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France, except that the stakes are life and death. It is also a game of chicken between the strikers and the authorities. The case became hugely notorious. Bands like the Dubliners played benefit concerts in support of the Price sisters, Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly. There were regular protests outside the walls of Brixton Prison. Sixty women turned up at Roy Jenkins’s London home, chanting in support of the strikers. The father of a young girl who had been badly injured in the London bombing called for the sisters to be returned to Ireland. Even one of the loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defence Association, asked the British government to either return the girls to Northern Ireland or simply let them die. (Dolours was ‘amazed’ by that endorsement, she wrote to her family, adding, ‘It just goes to show that when it comes to the crunch, we’re all Irish together.’)
The sisters closely monitored their own coverage, listening to daily broadcasts about their condition. This was a strange experience for Dolours. She processed the stories of these two Irish girls on hunger strike as if they were about somebody else. She could never quite believe that they were talking about her. Nevertheless, she was well attuned to the propaganda value of such coverage, and she knew that the letters she wrote home about her condition would be circulated to the press. After a lifetime of being introduced as one of ‘Albert’s daughters’, Dolours was tickled to have achieved a notoriety of her own. She teased Albert about it, telling Chrissie, in one letter, to ask him ‘how does he like being called “Dolours and Marian’s father”?’
Nearly a year had passed since the bombings, and the sisters were still being force-fed, when the case took a bizarre turn
. In February 1974, a seventeenth-century painting by Vermeer, of a young girl plucking a narrow guitar, was stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead. A pair of anonymous typewritten letters arrived at The Times, demanding that Dolours and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland and threatening that if they weren’t, the painting would ‘be burnt on St Patrick’s night with much cavorting about in the true lunatic fashion’. As proof that this threat was sincere, one of the letters contained a sliver of canvas from the Vermeer. In a strange coincidence, on a trip to London two years earlier, Dolours had visited Kenwood House and had stopped to look at that very painting. In a statement, Chrissie Price appealed to whoever it was that took the artwork to return it unharmed. She noted that Dolours – ‘who is an art student’ – had made a special plea on behalf of the painting.
One evening in May, a suspicious package appeared in a churchyard near Smithfield Market, in London. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. A squad of officers arrived at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great. In this atmosphere of heightened tension, the package could be a bomb. But it wasn’t: it was the painting, which had been returned, just as Dolours had requested.
During this same period, a second art theft was perpetrated in the name of the Price sisters. A collection of old masters worth millions of pounds was stolen from a house in County Wicklow, in Ireland. Among the paintings that went missing were a Velázquez, a Vermeer, a Rubens, a Goya and a Metsu. Once again, a ransom letter appeared, demanding that the hunger strikers be returned ‘at once to serve their sentences in Ireland’. These paintings, too, were later recovered.
In June, an elderly Irish earl and his wife returned to their home in Tipperary after a formal dinner one night to discover several strange men lurking in their driveway. One of the men pistol-whipped the earl. Then they dragged his wife across the gravel, shoved them into a vehicle, blindfolded them both, and drove away. The kidnappers informed the couple that they were being held as ‘hostages for the Price sisters’. They were confined for several days in a dark room at gunpoint, but the prisoners ended up taking a liking to their captors and came to regard the whole experience as something of an adventure. The kidnappers ‘could not have been kinder’, the earl said afterwards, adding that he had been well fed with a full Irish breakfast each morning and steaks and chops for lunch. The hostage takers had even supplied him with the racing pages. The earl and his wife were eventually released, because of a dramatic turn in the case.
In May, the British government had decided to stop force-feeding the Prices. Up to that point, the sisters had suffered through the procedure with as much dignity as they could muster. They did not want to show any fear. But at a certain point, it seemed that they had reached a stalemate: the force-feeding might be inflicting mental and physical trauma on them, but it was also keeping them alive. So, rather than endure the feeding in hostile submission, the sisters opted to change their strategy. One day, they offered ‘maximum resistance’, as Dolours recounted in a letter, ‘which involved the expected, undignified scenes of struggling, holding down, steel clamps, and – in my case – screaming, because believe me, that steel clamp hurts the old gums’. It was a battle. The sisters struggled so hard that it became difficult for the doctors to insert the tubes safely into their stomachs. They informed the doctors that they were giving them ‘the privilege of killing us’ if something went wrong. After a few of these fraught encounters, the doctors simply stopped, refusing to continue with the procedure, because it was just too dangerous. It was a clinical judgement, not a political one, that ended the force-feeding.
Just the same, it would fall to Roy Jenkins to explain the change in policy, and he announced that after carrying out the ‘distasteful task’ of artificial feeding for 167 days, the doctors at Brixton had stopped because ‘the minimal cooperation necessary for this process was withdrawn by the sisters’. Jenkins laid some blame on Albert and Chrissie Price, who, rather than discourage their daughters from a ‘slow suicide’, had instead ‘urged them on’.
Dolours and Marian were thrilled that the force-feeding had stopped. Almost immediately, they began to lose a pound a day. Dolours counted each pound as she shed it, weighing herself at intervals, marvelling at her control over her own body. ‘We are now reinforced by the fact that we no longer desire or crave food,’ she wrote to a friend. She began to see her own organism in the most clinical, mechanical terms. ‘I am now my own tool,’ she mused. ‘I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.’
There was talk, in Brixton, of a place called the terminal ward. It had always sounded ominous to Dolours, but when she and Marian were finally moved there, it seemed positively luxurious. Now, rather than live in separate cells, the sisters could be in the same room. There was even a private toilet next to the room, so when they needed to urinate (because all they produced at this point was urine), they no longer had to rely on a chamber pot. ‘Getting nearer to Paradise by the minute!’ Dolours joked. There was a mirror in the cell, and she would stare at herself, her long nightdress hanging from her skeletal frame, and imagine that she looked like the ghost of some former inmate, haunting the wing.
By this point, in the assessment of one of the doctors treating them, the Price sisters were ‘living entirely off their own bodies’. They had become so weak that even walking across the room could leave Dolours fatigued, her heart thumping in her rib cage like a drum. They could not sit or lie in any one position for long or they would get bedsores from their bones pressing against their skin; to alleviate this, their beds were fitted with ‘ripple mattresses’ that had a thin cushion of circulating air.
‘Each day passes and we fade a little more,’ Dolours wrote to her mother. The sisters lay side by side in their beds, with three prison officers on constant guard. Dolours worried about Marian – worried that she was more anxious to die, more ready to accept it. Sometimes Dolours would be talking to her, reminiscing or gossiping, a valiant facsimile of their old animated chatter, and she would look across and see Marian, dreadfully pale and thin, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her fingers long and spindly from starvation. The sight of her sister frightened Dolours, and she would say, ‘Marian, wake up.’ Don’t go first, she would think. Don’t go first.
‘The likelihood that the sisters may end their lives must now clearly be envisaged,’ Jenkins warned in early June. He had considered going to see the Prices, hoping, perhaps, that he might be able to dissuade them from dying. But he decided against it, on the grounds that, as the person charged with deciding their fate, he had a duty to ‘stand back a little’ and be dispassionate.
Albert Price, after a visit to his daughters in the terminal ward, emerged and told the press that they were ready to meet their fate. ‘They are happy,’ he said. ‘Happy about dying.’ The Provisionals braced for violence, warning that if the sisters died, ‘the consequences for the British Government will be devastating’.
Reports in the press claimed that a priest had visited the sisters and administered the last rites. In a letter to a friend, Dolours wrote, ‘Well, please give our love to our family and all our friends.’ She concluded, ‘We’re ready for what is ahead.’
Then Britain blinked. On 3 June, another Irish hunger striker, Michael Gaughan, died in Parkhurst Prison, on the Isle of Wight. Gaughan was also an IRA volunteer, though he had played no role in the bombing mission. He was imprisoned for robbing a bank in London, and when he went on hunger strike, Dolours Price had been annoyed. She’d been striking since November when he started in April, and she felt that Gaughan was a Johnny-come-lately, ‘getting in at the heels of my hunt’. She was watching TV when the news was announced, and when she heard the words ‘One of the IRA prisoners on hunger strike has died,’ her stomach seized and she wondered if it was Hugh Feeney or Gerry Kelly. The authorities would claim that Gaughan had died of pneumonia, but his family suspected that his death had been precipitated by complications associated with force-feeding, a scenario that was
hardly difficult to imagine.
Roy Jenkins was starting to have what he later described as ‘forebodings of menace’. He had been thinking, lately, of Terence MacSwiney and the huge wave of recrimination to which his death had given rise. What kind of reaction might ensue if the Price sisters died? Jenkins was loath to give the impression that he would make any decision under duress, but privately he began to fear that if Dolours and Marian succeeded, he himself could be a target for the rest of his life. This wouldn’t just mean that he would have to forgo holidays in South Armagh. The Irish were everywhere. Nowhere would be safe: if those damned girls delivered on their intention, he worried, ‘I might never again be able to walk in freedom and security down a street in Boston or New York or Chicago.’ Reluctantly, Jenkins decided that he had no choice but to capitulate.
On 8 June, Dolours, Marian, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney released a statement. ‘We went on hunger strike 206 days ago in support of our demand for Political Prisoner status and transfer to prison in Northern Ireland,’ they wrote. Roy Jenkins had assured them that they would be returned to Northern Ireland, they continued. So they had decided to terminate the strike. ‘Ours was never a suicide mission,’ they maintained, ‘since we did not set out to kill ourselves but only to secure just and indeed minimal demands.’
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