The Price sisters’ hunger strike for transfer to Northern Ireland was a 206-day prison protest by Dolours Price and Marian Price, joined by Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, that turned the sisters’ bodies into the ground on which the British government’s refusal to recognise their political status was contested. At Brixton Prison, their demand for transfer was met not with release or immediate agreement but with force-feeding: a daily medical procedure that became a prolonged struggle over who controlled their bodies and how their imprisonment would be defined.

Background and Demands

The hunger strike followed the sisters’ conviction in connection with the London bombings. A November 1973 newspaper headline reported that eight people had begun a strike after being jailed for life. The Price sisters entered Brixton determined to continue until death if necessary, rather than treat hunger as a brief gesture. Their demand was specific: to be transferred to prisons in Northern Ireland and recognised as political prisoners. Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, held in different prisons, joined them.

The demand drew its force from a much older republican tradition of hunger striking. In 1920, Terence MacSwiney had refused food in Brixton for seventy-four days, seeking release from imprisonment on sedition charges; he died in custody. His death, followed by public mourning and international protest, helped establish self-sacrifice through hunger as a powerful language of Irish republican resistance. MacSwiney’s declaration that “It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer” gave that tradition a moral framework. The Price sisters’ protest revived it in the same prison, but the immediate objective was transfer and political status, not release.

Their surroundings sharpened the sense of confinement. Brixton was a crowded, overwhelmingly male prison; Dolours and Marian were the only women held there. They were kept in separate cells, escorted through the corridors, and permitted half an hour of exercise in the yard each day. Dolours was assigned the number 286185, an institutional identity that stood in stark contrast to the political identity she and her sister insisted upon. They accepted water but refused food, maintaining a strike that the wider prison system could not simply treat as an ordinary disciplinary refusal.

Force-Feeding at Brixton

On 3 December, after the strike had been underway for two and a half weeks, doctors and nurses took Dolours from her cell and restrained her in a chair bolted to the floor. She was secured with bedsheets. Already weakened by more than two weeks without food, she struggled as medical staff prised open her jaws and forced a wooden device with a hole through her mouth so that feeding could begin. The procedure was a physical imposition carried out under medical authority; its clinical setting did not make it less coercive.

Two days later, the doctors began force-feeding Marian as well. The visits became a daily ritual: at ten each morning, doctors and nurses entered the sisters’ cells, tied them down, and fed them through tubes. The food included raw eggs, orange juice, and liquid Complan. Dolours described the early experience in a letter, writing, “We are learning to breathe a bit more easily when the tube is down.” The matter-of-fact sentence records an adaptation to danger, not consent to the procedure. During the feedings, a radio was turned up to cover the sisters’ screams.

Force-feeding created a stalemate. The intervention kept the women alive, but it also inflicted physical and mental trauma and did not secure their cooperation with the policy they opposed. In May, the British government decided to stop the procedure. By then the sisters had spent months trying to endure it without showing fear. They changed tactics, offering what Dolours called “maximum resistance”: struggling against restraint and clamps so fiercely that it became difficult for doctors to insert the tubes safely. Her account described the indignity and pain of the struggle, including the pressure of a steel clamp on her gums. Their resistance made the medical operation harder to carry out and withdrew the cooperation it required.

A Political and Medical Stalemate

The government faced the prospect that either sister might die in custody. Officials feared that a death could provoke “massive retaliatory violence,” and the republican movement was preparing for the possibility of a violent response. Yet the authorities did not grant the sisters’ demand at once. Instead, the dispute narrowed around the practice of artificial feeding, and around whether a prisoner’s body could be compelled to sustain a life that the prisoner was risking to make a political claim.

Roy Jenkins later explained the policy change in Parliament. He described force-feeding as a “distasteful task” and said that after 167 days the doctors at Brixton had stopped because “the minimal cooperation necessary for this process was withdrawn by the sisters”. He also blamed Albert Price and Chrissie Price, alleging that rather than discouraging their daughters from what he called a “slow suicide,” they had urged them on. The government’s account framed the feeding as a medical process and the strike as self-destruction; the sisters’ account insisted that they had not set out to die, but to obtain defined political demands. That difference in framing was central to the conflict, not a minor dispute over terminology.

Ending and Aftermath

On 8 June, Dolours and Marian issued a statement with Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney announcing that they would end the strike. They said that 206 days earlier they had begun it to demand political-prisoner status and transfer to Northern Ireland. They cited Jenkins’s assurance that they would be returned and stated, “Ours was never a suicide mission,” explaining that their purpose had been to secure what they regarded as just and minimal demands. The statement presented the end of the strike as a response to an undertaking, not a renunciation of the political claim that had sustained it.

The promised transfer did not follow immediately. Reports placed the sisters in Durham in December 1974, months after the announcement that the strike would end. The delay made the outcome partial: the strike stopped, but the practical fulfilment of the transfer demand remained pending. The episode’s chronology therefore resists a simple account of victory or defeat. The women survived, force-feeding ended, and an assurance of transfer was given; yet it took months for the promised relocation to occur.

The strike also belongs to the Price sisters’ broader trajectory from protest into armed republican activity and, later, political change. Dolours had joined the Irish Republican Army in 1971, when women were admitted as full members for the first time; her own republican lineage and ambition were described as likely factors in that change, alongside the mass imprisonment of men. After her release, she eventually abandoned violence as her own means of pursuing a united Ireland while continuing to support republican politics and canvassing for Sinn Féin. Against that later turn, the Brixton strike marks a different kind of confrontation: a demand made from inside prison, where political identity was asserted through refusal, endurance, and the struggle over the treatment of the body.