![]() ![]() She demonstrates how forensic scrutiny of available records can bring the characters to life, with the gaps filled by the author’s imagination. Wide-ranging in scope, the author describes living conditions, at times harrowing, in rural Ireland, Borders towns, Edinburgh, Clydeside, Keswick and London, and the ongoing social changes and attitudes of the times. And suddenly, her backstory was gone, to be later painstakingly unearthed by her granddaughter Ursula, who describes finding Bessie with her family in the 1881 census, shattering the later family myth that Bessie had been an orphan. They and their father were devastated when Bessie died in 1919, of Spanish flu, her system probably compromised previously by TB. They settled at newly-built Hampstead Garden Suburb, where they raised two sons, one of whom was the author’s father. She later met Ebenezer’s son Cecil, whom she married in 1907 and thereafter told nothing of her previous life. There she attended a talk by Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City movement, which campaigned for improvements in urban planning in order to improve the condition of their residents. In 1904 her life changed when working in Keswick, where she met various liberalminded reformers. As they grew, Bessie and her siblings chased jobs, moving between the Borders, Lothians and Clydebank, where two brothers worked in the Singer sewing machine factory before the family split and Bessie moved South. The book narrates how Bessie’s parents, from the worst-affected West of Ireland, were part of the vast diaspora fleeing the “Great Hunger” of the 1840s, and followed different and circuitous routes before they met father Owen Quinn from County Leitrim via Liverpool and Haddington, and mother Mary (Lyons) from County Sligo, via Glasgow, Haddington and Walkerburn. Subtitled “From Galashiels Mills to Garden Cities - The Story of an Irish family in Scotland 1845-1922”, is the compelling story of the author Ursula Howard’s paternal grandmother, Bessie Quinn, born to Irish immigrants living at the time in Galashiels, where she spent nearly half her eventful life. ![]() Her personality is deftly sketched from the bare facts of her life as passed down anecdotally through the generations, through painstaking research and imaginative recreation – her selflessness, reserve, poise, unconventionality, fierce loyalty her shyness, resourcefulness, determination and above all, her bravery.īessie Quinn : Survivor SpiritReview date: 14th March 2023 Bessie, though, with her central enigma, remains the star of the show. The precariousness of their situation is set out un-sentimentally yet with warmth and empathy: descriptions of the ravages of poverty and tuberculosis, dangerously inadequate housing, unemployment, appalling working conditions and cruelly shortened lives make for sobering reading and we become as emotionally invested in the fates of the entire Quinn family as with that of Bessie herself. Bessie’s life, as the eighth child of ten who all, incredibly, survived to adulthood, is intimately entwined with that of her immediate family. This is as much a hidden history of nineteenth-century working-class life as it is one woman’s story. This is no ordinary tale of rags to riches but instead, as the author makes clear in a radical, class conscious argument, a journey that was made possible by the very resilience borne of her family's lifelong oppression.Īs much social history as personal biography, the text weaves anecdote, conjecture and fact with a meticulous historicism, always flagging up as such any flights into fantasy, these being, however, eminently plausible when set within the wider socio-historical context. From these few prized objects and the scant cold facts about a person’s life as set out in Victorian/Edwardian officialdom, like censuses, birth and death certificates (although, for fascinating reasons we discover along the way, the details of these public records are notoriously unreliable), the writer breathes miraculous life into one woman’s remarkable journey from the slums of Galashiels to the utopian Hampstead Garden City Suburb where Bohemianism flourishes alongside the passion for social and political change. Bessie, almost wholly obliterated from inter-generational memory within the family as a result of her husband’s all-consuming grief and attempt to destroy all traces of her existence, was also condemned to obscurity by her position in social history as a working-class woman and second-generation Irish immigrant whose family had fled the horrors of the Great Famine as penniless refugees, seeking work and a new life in Scotland. Ursula Howard sets out to recreate the life of her grandmother, Bessie Quinn, with only a few precious objects as clues to her fascinating past. A moving and deeply engaging Review date: 7th April 2022
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