Come Here To Me!

Wendy Wood (1892 -1981) was a remarkable woman. A committed Scottish nationalist and separatist, she was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, which later became the Scottish National Party. Fond of a political stunt, she seized upon Bannockburn Day (the celebration of a Scottish military victory) in 1932 to lead a gang of protesting Scottish nationalists into Stirling Castle, tearing down its Union flag and raising a Scottish flag in its place. She later recalled how “I held the wad of red, white and blue in my hand….I thought of Gandhi facing death, of Connolly, of young Pearse, or Burmese driven to wander, of frightened Arabs, or broken faith with Egypt.”

Scottish nationalism, much like its Irish equivalent, produced a wide variety of ideologies. Even the SNP, today a social democratic party, produced a pamphlet in the 1930s which warned of the ‘Green Terror’ of Irish migration. Still, Wood was firmly of the left, and was arrested for protesting against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement in the 1930s. She remained politically active into subsequent decades, even going on hungerstrike in 1972 to demand Home Rule for Scotland.

Wendy Wood, by Florence St John Cadell, National Galleries of Scotland.

Not long after her escapades at Stirling Castle, Wood arrived in Dublin, something she details in her autobiography I Like Life. Boarding a ship in Glasgow, she was captivated by Dublin from the very beginning, though she viewed the island through rose-tinted glasses:

The names of the streets, the public notices and the advertisements in Gaelic thrilled me and I never read the bracketed translations any more than I would spoil a visit to France by searching for English. The indefinable feeling of a ‘capital’ centre of direction, the core of a genuine working culture as reflected in Dublin,  made the memory of Edinburgh, even with its beauty, seem insipid in comparison.

On a brief visit to the capital, Wood appears to have visited the Dáil, the St. Enda’s School of Pearse and attended a meeting of Cumann na mBan. The beautiful St. Enda’s school remained as a model to the ideas of Patrick Pearse, though it struggled financially to sustain itself and would not make it to the end of the decade. Wood recounted an encounter with a sister of Pearse, who murmured that “one must try to forgive.” She was struck by the artifacts on display, including “the block on which a patriot had been executed by the Saxon”, this being the block on which Robert Emmet’s head was reputed to have been severed from his body, and at which Michael Collins sold ‘Dáil Bonds’ to prominent republicans during the War of Independence.

Of the Dáil, Wood writes of the body as if it was still the revolutionary gathering of the Mansion House and not the considerably more timid Leinster House assembly. She found it to be “a dignified but simple and business-like gathering which even with its limited powers, made the London House of Commons appear like a mad hatters’ tea party.” She was struck by how “the artistry and skill of the Celt showed in all printed matter, in decoration and in fabrics, and in the patterned carpets in the Dáil.” The monument of Queen Victoria outside the parliament (today sitting outside a shopping centre in Australia) was a surprise,though she joked of how “an Irishman explained that it was such an insult to the Queen that it seemed a pity to blow it up.”

If the Dáil was a great symbol of Irishness to Wood, there were others who rejected its very being. She attended “a meeting of the Irish Women” and was struck by the intensity of feeling. The Dublin of the early 1930s seemed to her an exciting place, if not slightly dangerous:

That night I was at a friend’s house where a few had gathered that we might exchange views. coffee was being handed round when a revolver shot was heard down the street. Had it been in Scotland everyone would have left to their feet with exclamations. In Dublin, no one moved…

As the late Bob Purdie rightly noted, there was a certain irony in Wood being so moved both by the Dáil and the meeting of Cumann na mBan:

She seems not to have thought it significant that she was the guest of an organisation which aimed to overthrow the political institution she had just been admiring from the gallery. She was like an amnesiac, wandering around not understanding the history of what she was seeing, but judging only on the basis of immediate impressions.

To Wood, Dublin was a city where she saw her vision of a future Scotland, with its native language being spoken in formalities, where she could rejoice “in the good designs of the Irish coins” and where there was “a determined spirit of self-sacrifice amongst all ranks.” While to many in Irish public life (like Seán Ó Faoláin and Peadar O’Donnell, both veterans of the revolution) the Ireland of the 1930s was a failure of a revolutionary vision, to her it was its realisation.

Not all Scottish nationalists would be so welcomed in the Dublin of the 1930s. In 1939, the curious separatist Ronald MacDonald Douglas arrived in Ireland on board his yacht the Ron Bhan and with his family.  MacDonald Douglas, who had previously sought Nazi assistance for the cause of Scottish separatism, attracted the attention of military intelligence, who noted that “he is clearly an adventurer, an intriguer and potentially dangerous, and his deportation is recommended.”

Wendy Wood embodied a different political tradition however. To her, James Connolly resonated as clearly as Robert Burns or William Wallace.