British prisons' policy of force-feeding hunger strikers

British prisons' policy of force-feeding hunger strikers made the refusal of food a direct confrontation between prisoners and the state over control of the body. At Brixton Prison, its use against Dolours Price transformed that conflict into a physical ordeal: officials restrained her and forced a mixture of raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan through a tube, but she vomited it up. The episode exposed the coercion behind a policy intended to prevent a hunger striker’s death without conceding her political demand.

The Brixton Intervention

Shortly after conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian Price were held as the only women in an overcrowded, overwhelmingly male Brixton Prison. Segregated in individual cells, they were escorted through the prison and allowed half an hour of exercise in the yard each day. Their hunger strike had begun before they arrived: they refused everything but water and intended to continue until death if necessary. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held at other prisons, joined them. The strikers demanded repatriation so they could serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland.

On 3 December, after the strike had lasted two and a half weeks, doctors and nurses took Dolours from her cell to a room and strapped her to a chair bolted to the floor. Weak from not eating, she struggled as officials held her down. One pair of hands prised open her jaws; another placed a wooden bit with a hole in it in her mouth and pushed a rubber tube through it and down her throat. The tube passed her tonsils as she gagged and struggled to breathe. She tried to bite it, but the wooden device prevented her from doing so. Liquid was then poured through the tube into her stomach.

The feeding took only minutes, though to Dolours it seemed to last an eternity. Before the tube had even been removed, she vomited the mixture. Her account of the episode included its specific contents: raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan, a concentrated blend of milk, minerals and vitamins. Afterward she was released to the exercise yard, where she told Marian what had happened and said she did not think she could endure it again. Marian answered that she could come off the strike. The encounter placed the policy’s physical force beside the sisters’ mutual support, while leaving the central demand for repatriation unresolved.

The Policy’s Limits and Reversal

The intervention did not end with Dolours Price’s ordeal. Marian Price was also subjected to force-feeding, and the medical records and later accounts make clear that the procedure was not a neutral act of nourishment: it involved physical restraint and the forced insertion of a tube. During one feeding, a radio was turned up to cover the prisoners’ screams. The sound was not incidental to the episode; it suggests how the institution managed what happened inside the cell as well as the prisoner’s body. When Bernadette Devlin visited the sisters, she was shocked by their condition. Their visible deterioration made the costs of the policy harder to confine to official medical language.

The practice exposed a conflict within the state’s response to hunger strikes. Officials feared that a death could provoke severe retaliatory violence, yet preventing death by force did not meet the sisters’ demand to be returned to Northern Ireland as political prisoners. The procedure kept the body alive on the state’s terms while leaving the political dispute intact. For the sisters, who had rejected prison food in order to assert their status and allegiance, feeding was not a compromise: it was a coercive intervention against the very act through which they were making their claim.

The policy later changed. Dolours Price recalled that the British Medical Council’s refusal to force-feed hunger strikers marked a decisive limit, while the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo formed part of the broader medical-ethical context in which such intervention came under scrutiny. Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would not be force-fed. The contrast with the Brixton episode became especially consequential during the later hunger strikes in the H Blocks: the state’s approach was no longer to use the same procedure to prevent a striker’s death. The change did not resolve the underlying contest over political status, but it established that forced feeding would not be the instrument by which that contest was managed.

Political Status and the Body as Evidence

The hunger strike belonged to a larger dispute over what an imprisoned republican was. After internment ended in 1975, paramilitary suspects were charged and confined as ordinary criminals. At Long Kesh, the new H Blocks replaced the relative freedom of association and civilian clothing available to many internees with individual cells and prison uniforms. To republican prisoners, the uniform collapsed the distinction between an IRA volunteer and a common thief; their demand for political status was therefore bound up with how the prison classified and managed them. The Prices’ demand for repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland arose from that same struggle over identity and recognition.

For Dolours Price, prison tested an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause, and refusing food made the body itself the means of insisting on that allegiance. The book places her defiance against the history of hunger in Ireland: the political meaning of hunger was turned back against the British state, as a form of resistance rather than an instrument imposed on the Irish. In this frame, force-feeding was not simply medical care applied to a weakening prisoner. It intervened in a protest whose physical danger was also its political argument, while leaving the demand for recognition unanswered.

The policy’s later abandonment marked a limit on the state’s use of that intervention, not a settlement of the argument over prisoners’ status. Dolours Price recalled the British Medical Council’s refusal to force-feed hunger strikers; the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo supplied a wider medical-ethical context, and Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would not be force-fed. The later H-Block hunger strikes thus took place under a different policy from the one imposed at Brixton. The change separated the question of whether the state would forcibly maintain a striker’s body from the unresolved question of whether it would recognize the political claim made through that body.

Martyrdom and the State’s Dilemma

Dolours Price framed the strike as a continuation of republican sacrifice beyond the prison walls. In a letter, she argued that the sisters’ deaths would be no different from those of volunteers killed on the streets of Belfast, and took pride in the possibility that they would be the first women to die in this way. She also invoked Terence MacSwiney, who had died in Brixton more than fifty years earlier, presenting a death there as evidence that the British Empire had failed to learn from its past. The government, meanwhile, feared that a hunger striker’s death could bring massive retaliatory violence. The resulting dilemma sharpened the political meaning of the policy: the state sought to prevent death, but the sisters understood the possibility of dying as part of their claim to be recognized as political prisoners.