Fenner Brockway

Fenner Brockway was a veteran member of the House of Lords who supported Dolours Price and Marian Price during their imprisonment in Britain. He became more than a sympathetic correspondent: the sisters’ letters gave him a channel to convey their changing relationship to violence to the government, and he personally appealed to Margaret Thatcher for Dolours Price’s release. His efforts placed him between the prisoners’ accounts of remorse and suffering and a government that remained unconvinced that release would be safe or warranted.

A parliamentary supporter and correspondent

Brockway had supported the Price sisters during their confinement at Brixton Prison. After their transfer to Armagh, correspondence continued. Dolours Price wrote to him about the life she and Marian shared in prison, including the activities that filled their days: painting, letter-writing, correspondence courses, and handicrafts made to raise money for the cause. She was making a leather wallet for Brockway’s ninety-second birthday. The gift carried a joke as well as affection: she told him not to mistake the small parcel from Northern Ireland for a bomb. The detail shows a relationship sustained across prison walls through practical news, personal attention, and humor shaped by the circumstances of their imprisonment.

The letters also gave Brockway access to the sisters’ political doubts. In Armagh, Dolours Price had resigned from the Irish Republican Army after refusing an order to avoid women who had abstained from a prison protest. Her doubts had deepened amid questions about the movement’s violence, including the deaths of civilians in the 1978 bombing of the La Mon House hotel. Brockway wrote to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland that Dolours and Marian had become convinced that the violence of the IRA was wrong. His description did not rest on a single public statement: it drew on the sisters’ private correspondence and on his conversations with them as they reconsidered the politics for which they had been imprisoned.

From letters to an appeal for release

By 1980, the sisters’ position and their physical condition were both central to Brockway’s advocacy. Dolours Price wrote to him of numb, empty days and of a life she feared had been consumed by prison. She was approaching her thirtieth birthday and grieved that she might never have a child. The separation from Marian, who had been released earlier, intensified her loneliness; when Marian visited, Dolours clung to her as she prepared to leave. Her letters also expressed anger at the length of her sentence and at being treated as an outcast by a movement to which she no longer gave even lip service, while she continued to identify with the hunger strikers at Long Kesh.

Brockway carried these accounts to Thatcher in an appeal that joined political judgment to personal concern. He argued that the sisters had been caught up in adolescent emotion when they carried out the London bombing and that they had participated only on the condition that no one would be harmed. He told Thatcher that they had become convinced violence was wrong and said that, if released, Dolours would urge fellow Catholics to refrain from violence, despite the dangers. He described himself as almost the sisters’ spiritual adviser. His case was therefore both humanitarian and political: he presented release not simply as leniency, but as a possible consequence of their repudiation of violent methods.

Thatcher’s response and the limits of persuasion

Thatcher acknowledged that Brockway believed Dolours Price had renounced violence, but questioned whether he had accepted the sisters’ assurances too readily. She cited medical assessments that Dolours was a tougher personality than Marian and remained concerned about her republican sympathies. In her view, old associates might not leave Dolours alone if she were released. Brockway’s confidence in their change thus met the government’s concern that political attachment and personal danger could persist even after a prisoner rejected violence.

Thatcher’s reply also revealed how closely she associated the sisters with one another. She remarked that Marian visited Dolours only rarely and wondered whether this was disturbing for a twin, though the sisters were not twins. The mistake registered their closeness while also underscoring the distance between government correspondence and the intimate prison experience Brockway was trying to convey. His appeal made that experience legible to Thatcher, but it did not overcome her doubts.

Narrative significance

Brockway’s role is defined by mediation rather than by direct involvement in the conflict. He did not control the sisters’ release or settle the question of how complete their renunciation of violence was. Instead, he translated letters, memories, and expressions of distress into a case addressed to the British government. The exchange preserves competing readings of the same women: Brockway saw evidence of a genuine change and a basis for release, while Thatcher saw continuing sympathies and risks that made their assurances uncertain.

The correspondence also offers a view of change that is neither sudden nor complete. Dolours Price could reject the IRA’s violence, feel estranged from the organization, and still express solidarity with imprisoned hunger strikers. Brockway’s advocacy kept these distinctions before the government. His importance lies in the record of that effort: he treated the sisters’ own words as grounds for political reconsideration, while the response from Thatcher showed how difficult it was for a former prisoner’s account of change to outweigh doubts about allegiance, credibility, and what might happen after release.