“Iris versicolor is also commonly known as the blue flag, harlequin blueflag, larger blue flag, northern blue flag, and poison flag, plus other variations of these names, and in Britain and Ireland as purple iris.” (Wikipedia)
Information in this post gathered from: Jessica Winter in the New Yorker of September 28, 2022; Wikipedia.
“The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger (Irish: an Gorta Mór), the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to “the bad life” and loosely translates to “the hard times”. The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as “Black ’47”. During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more fled the country, causing the country’s population to fall by 20–25% (in some towns, populations fell as much as 67%) between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.” (Wikipedia)
Jim Connell was born on 27 March 1852 in the townland of Rathniska near Kilskyre, to the north of Kells, County Meath.
Edith Nesbit was born on 15 August 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane, Kennington, Surrey. Her father ran an agricultural college there that his own father had founded. Daisy, as Edith was known, later recalled the school’s three-acre grounds. The family home “had a big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lillies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that smelt like heaven.” When she was three and a half, her father died of tuberculosis, and her mother took over management of the college.
As a teenager, Connell became involved in land agitation and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Aged 18 and a signatory to the Fenian Oath, he moved to Dublin where he worked as a docker until he became blacklisted for attempting to unionise the workers.
In 1875, he moved to London. He held a variety of jobs, including time as a staff journalist on Keir Hardie’s newspaper The Labour Leader, and was secretary of the Workingmen’s Legal Aid Society during the last 20 years of his life.
In 1877, at the age of 18, Nesbit met the bank clerk Hubert Bland, her elder by three years. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, but did not initially live with him, as Bland remained with his mother. Their marriage was tumultuous.
The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was established as Britain’s first organised socialist political party by H. M. Hyndman, and had its first meeting on 7 June 1881. Those joining the SDF included William Morris, George Lansbury, James Connolly and Eleanor Marx. However, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s long-term collaborator, refused to support Hyndman’s venture. Many of its early leading members had previously been active in the Manhood Suffrage League.
Nesbit admired the artist and Marxian socialist William Morris. She and her husband joined the founders of the Fabian Society (“the genteel Socialist salon that helped galvanize the start of the Labour Party”, Winter) in 1884, after which their son Fabian was named, and jointly edited its journal Today. Nesbit and Bland dallied with the Social Democratic Federation, but found it too radical. Nesbit was a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism in the 1880s. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics, which had been founded by other Fabian Society members.
The “merry little Bland children in aesthetic pinafores” were observed “running about the garden with bare feet!”.
For 10 years Connell was a member of the SDF, which supported the cause of Irish land reform and self-determination; both Connell and Hyndman were on the executive of the National Land League of Great Britain, which aimed to promote the need for land reform in Ireland amongst the workers in England.
Connell was inspired to write a socialist anthem (The Red Flag) after attending a lecture at a meeting of the SDF during the London Dock Strike of 1889…
“In the late summer of 1889, east London was the scene of great industrial unrest as workers from two key local industries – tailoring and the docks – fought for better pay and working conditions.
The tailors and dockers were inspired by the strike of the largely young female workforce of the Bryant & May match factory in Bow the previous year. The success of the 1888 match girls’ strike in achieving better working conditions and pay showed how a united front by unskilled and impoverished workers could, with public support become a force for change. The dockers’ and tailors’ strikes during August–September 1889 also reflected the growing influence of unions that encouraged mutual support of strikers across different industries.” (Museum of London Docklands)
…He set down the words while on a train journey from Charing Cross railway station to his home in Honor Oak, south London. It is generally accepted that he gained inspiration as he watched the train guard raise and lower the red signal flag on the platform…
“Guards were provided with a green flag to control the starting of their train as a signal of ‘right away’ with red for warning anyone of danger if the train were not to be started or to be stopped in an emergency, or to mark the rear of the train.” (London Transport Museum)
…It is normally sung to the tune of “Lauriger Horatius”
(better known as the German-language carol “O Tannenbaum”), though Connell had wanted it sung to “The White Cockade”, an old Scottish Jacobite song. Connell disapproved of the new rendition, calling it “church music…”.
Between 1894 and 1899 Edith Nesbit lived at Three Gables in Baring Road – roughly between the Ringway Centre and Stratfield House flats. Grove Park, southeast London, was then a popular middle-class residential area and still with a number of small farms. The home backed onto the railway and there are suggestions that it may have inspired the Railway Children. (Running Past blog)
In the late 1890s, Connell left the SDF and joined the Independent Labour Party.
Jessica Winter writes of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children and The House of Arden:
“Both show glimmers of the Socialist beliefs that guided much of Nesbit’s adult life. And, most crucially, both books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reënactment of the author’s own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief.”
The Railway Children, by Edith Nesbit, was originally serialised in The London Magazine during 1905 and published in book form in the same year. The conflict in this book is based on the Dreyfus Affair and the then ongoing Russo-Japanese War.
From Chapter 6: Saviours of the Train:
“ “If we had anything red, we could get down on the line and wave it.”
“But the train wouldn’t see us till it got round the corner, and then it could see the mound just as well as us,” said Phyllis; “better, because it’s much bigger than us.”
“If we only had something red,” Peter repeated, “we could go round the corner and wave to the train.”
“We might wave, anyway.”
“They’d only think it was just us, as usual. We’ve waved so often before. Anyway, let’s get down.”
They got down the steep stairs. Bobbie was pale and shivering. Peter’s face looked thinner than usual. Phyllis was red-faced and damp with anxiety.
“Oh, how hot I am!” she said; “and I thought it was going to be cold; I wish we hadn’t put on our — ” she stopped short, and then ended in quite a different tone — “our flannel petticoats.”
Bobbie turned at the bottom of the stairs.
“Oh, yes,” she cried; “They’re red! Let’s take them off.”
They did, and with the petticoats rolled up under their arms, ran along the railway, skirting the newly fallen mound of stones and rock and earth, and bent, crushed, twisted trees. They ran at their best pace. Peter led, but the girls were not far behind. They reached the corner that hid the mound from the straight line of railway that ran half a mile without curve or corner.
“Now,” said Peter, taking hold of the largest flannel petticoat.
“You’re not” — Phyllis faltered — “you’re not going to tear them?”
“Shut up,” said Peter, with brief sternness.
“Oh, yes,” said Bobbie, “tear them into little bits if you like. Don’t you see, Phil, if we can’t stop the train, there’ll be a real live accident, with people killed. Oh, horrible! Here, Peter, you’ll never tear it through the band!”
She took the red flannel petticoat from him and tore it off an inch from the band. Then she tore the other in the same way.
“There!” said Peter, tearing in his turn. He divided each petticoat into three pieces. “Now, we’ve got six flags.” He looked at the watch again. “And we’ve got seven minutes. We must have flagstaffs.”
The knives given to boys are, for some odd reason, seldom of the kind of steel that keeps sharp. The young saplings had to be broken off. Two came up by the roots. The leaves were stripped from them.
“We must cut holes in the flags, and run the sticks through the holes,” said Peter. And the holes were cut. The knife was sharp enough to cut flannel with. Two of the flags were set up in heaps of loose stones between the sleepers of the down line. Then Phyllis and Roberta took each a flag, and stood ready to wave it as soon as the train came in sight.
“I shall have the other two myself,” said Peter, “because it was my idea to wave something red.”
“They’re our petticoats, though,” Phyllis was beginning, but Bobbie interrupted:
“Oh, what does it matter who waves what, if we can only save the train?””
“The white flag is an internationally recognized protective sign of truce or ceasefire, and for negotiation. It is also used to symbolize surrender, since it is often the weaker party that requests negotiation. It is also flown on ships serving as cartels. A white flag signifies to all that an approaching negotiator is unarmed, with an intent to surrender or a desire to communicate. Persons carrying or waving a white flag are not to be fired upon, nor are they allowed to open fire. The use of the flag to request parley is included in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.” (Wikipedia)
From Chapter 12: What Bobbie Brought Home:
“ “The poor leg,” she told herself; “it ought to have a cushion — ah!”
She remembered the day when she and Phyllis had torn up their red flannel petticoats to make danger signals to stop the train and prevent an accident. Her flannel petticoat to-day was white, but it would be quite as soft as a red one. She took it off.
“Oh, what useful things flannel petticoats are!” she said; “the man who invented them ought to have a statue directed to him.” And she said it aloud, because it seemed that any voice, even her own, would be a comfort in that darkness.
“What ought to be directed? Who to?” asked the boy, suddenly and very feebly.
“Oh,” said Bobbie, “now you’re better! Hold your teeth and don’t let it hurt too much. Now!”
She had folded the petticoat, and lifting his leg laid it on the cushion of folded flannel.”
…Nesbit died in ‘The Long Boat’ at Jesson, St Mary’s Bay, New Romney, Kent, on 4 May 1924, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh.
Although Lenin dismissed the Independent Labour Party as bourgeois, he awarded Connell the Red Star Medal in 1922. Connell died in south London on 8 February 1929, and his funeral was held in Golders Green. He is commemorated by a plaque at 22a Stondon Park, SE23 in Crofton Park/Honor Oak, southeast London.
Julia Upton 