By Alf, PGC & WUN Member

Our recent delegation to Ireland opened our eyes to many things, such as the institutionalised sectarianism of Belfast and the dairy farm cooperatives who are now complicit in global imperialist capitalism. One thing impressed upon me was how the women who fought in the Easter Rising were remembered, one in particular stayed with me – Winifred Carney, ‘the typist with the Webley¹’ as she is now known.

The day before we joined the Bloody Sunday March For Justice in Derry, our comrades in the Connolly Youth Movement took us on a walking tour of Belfast which ended in Milltown Cemetery, the final resting spot of many Belfast residents, but also many Republicans who fought and often died for Ireland. One such grave was Winifred Carney, but who was she? What did she do?

‘The Typist With The Webley’

Winifred Carney was raised on Falls Road, Belfast, and was a trade unionist, Irish republican and suffrage campaigner. She was the elected Secretary of the Irish Textile Workers Union (ITWU), which was fraternal with the larger Irish Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU), headed up by James Connolly. James Connolly was and is a hero to Irish republicans, because of his role in the Easter Rising of 1916. If you don’t know the history of Ireland, the unionised workers of Ireland formed the paramilitary Irish Citizen Army who launched the Easter Rising of 1916, which was a predominantly Dublin based uprising that sought to remove the British state from Ireland. Winifred Carney’s leadership of the ITWU places her in a similarly potent political position and she worked closely with James Connolly in the uprising.

From the outset, we can see that Carney and Connolly were equals, and that they were close comrades. Carney was responsible for typing out the essays and oratory of James Connolly, and ensured that Ireland and then the world heard the words of the Irish Socialist-Republican. She was deeply involved in trade union organising in collaboration with Connolly who was greatly angered by the treatment of the workers of Belfast’s linen industry, who were predominantly women. He established the ITWU in 1911. Carney was soon elected as Secretary and co-signed, with Connolly and Ellen Gordon, the radical manifesto of this incredibly militant union in 1913.

But of all their collaboration, none was greater than the Easter Rising, and this is where Carney earned the title of ‘The Typist with the Webley’. From Liberty Hall, in the days leading up to Easter Monday, Carney typed out commands and missives which were sent all over Dublin and Ireland, calling the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers to arms to mobilise for the Irish Republic. On Easter Monday, 1916, the Irish Republic was proclaimed on the steps of the General Post Office (GPO). 

She entered the GPO, following its liberation by the Irish Citizen Army, armed with (you guessed it!) a typewriter and a Webley revolver – with the rank of Adjutant of the Irish Citizen Army. The GPO was the nexus of information in Dublin, and was vital to the Rising – they severed the communication network of the British state in Ireland, and turned it into the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. Carney served as James Connolly’s ‘Adjutant’ (a military administrative role) and was by his side constantly. Despite being the one of the smaller active Irish paramilitaries, the Easter Rising was dominated by the ICA who came out enmasse on the orders of Connolly, whilst the more cautious leaders of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Brotherhood sent out confused and contradictory orders. A few thousand faced off against 20,000 British troops, who over the course of a week, shelled Dublin from the sea and pushed in to surround the GPO. James Connolly, leader of the ICA, was shot three times in the fighting, and couldn’t move, however Carney stayed by his side, armed and ready to defend the Republic.

The surrender was called, and Carney was imprisoned until 1918 for her role in the uprising. 

Cumann na mBan

Winifred Carney was also a member of Cumann na Mban, a paramilitary women’s organisation which was auxiliary to the Irish Volunteers. Carney should not be remembered as a single woman in the ranks of thousands of men, but as one of hundreds of women that fought directly alongside thousands of men in the Easter Rising, through Cumann na mBan. The social crisis of Europe in 1916 placed women at the foreground of the ‘home front’, as men were fed to  slaughter in the ‘Great Imperialist War’ (World War One). This placed the question of democratic suffrage (the right to vote) as one of the arenas of struggle, as men (of a certain wealth and age) had gained the right to vote in Britain and in Ireland. However, in Ireland the struggle for suffrage, for women and universally (for all men), and the struggle for national liberation had become linked in an inseparable way. 

The suffrage and women’s movement of Ireland in 1916 had a Unionist side to it, this being those who wanted the vote for women and universally for men, but did not want to break away from Britain and claim Irish independence. Cumann na mBan, being a paramilitary auxiliary for women to the Irish Volunteers, did not agree with this view. The role they played in the Easter Rising and subsequent Irish War of Independence was deeply related to their womanhood, often being able to move around urban areas with less fear of being stopped, they transported weapons and ran safehouses. Across Ireland during the struggle for liberation, the women of Cumann na mBan would act as frontline fighters, medics,  gunrunners,  messengers and typists. 

The Irish War of Independence ended with the ‘Anglo-Irish Treaty’, which partitioned Ireland, with the ‘Free State’ in the south, and Northern Ireland in the North. Winifred Carney, born and raised in Belfast, Ireland, found herself in Belfast, ‘Northern Ireland’. She, and her comrades in Cumann na mBan, deeply opposed the ‘Treaty’, and sided overwhelmingly with the Irish Republican Army, who wanted to keep fighting to liberate all of Ireland. For this, the women who were crucial to the Irish War of Independence found their organisation outlawed by the ‘Irish Free State’. 

Cofiwch Winifred Carney

Winifred Carney lived a complex life after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. Complex meaning “we don’t want to talk about her”. This is exactly what happened, she married a Protestant socialist called George McBride, and they entered politics in the new state of ‘Northern Ireland’ together. Together, they fought for socialism, set up new organisations to bring together the Catholic and Protestant working class communities of Belfast, but they were always haunted by sectarianism. Carney was also a member of a banned organisation within the south, in the ‘Free State’, which adds even more to the ‘complexity’ of her life. Because she fought for the entire Irish working class, Protestant or Catholic, sectarian leaders of both the Protestant Unionist and the Catholic Nationalists refuse to remember her. All because she dared to fight for everyone, and refused to abandon the working class in the north of Ireland. 

She passed away in 1943, and was buried in Milltown Cemetery, not marked with the nice grave you see on the image, but in an unmarked plot. Mcbride passed away in the 1980s, and was barred from being buried next to his wife in Milltown, also buried in an unmarked grave in Bangor, Ireland. 

It took 40 years after Carneys death for her grave to gain a headstone, and a few more for an extra line with her husband’s name to also be engraved on it. 

So – cofiwch Winifred Carney, the principled socialist, Irish Republican, Suffragist and Trade Unionist. In life, she stayed true to the cause she believed in, betrayed by former comrades in the Free State and shunned for attempting to break down sectarian walls with class warfare. In death forgotten, lest she embarrass lesser men. 

1.  A ‘Webley’ is a revolver common in the early 1900s, and a common weapon used in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War Of Independence, and Irish Civil War ↩︎