13 December 1955: The death of Grace Gifford on this day. She was born in 1888. Grace Evelyn Gifford Plunkett came from a solid middle class family background in Dublin whose parents were of different religions. Her father was a Catholic and her mother a Protestant. She attended the upper middle class girl’s school Alexandra College and seemed to have had a fairly conventual upbringing. She was the second youngest in a family of 12 children and they lived in the fashionable Dublin suburb of Rathmines.
She took an early interest in Art and attended the National College of Art and Design and studied under Orpen who used her as one of his models and did a full portrait of her. At around this time, Gifford's talent for caricature was discovered and developed. In 1907 she attended the course in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art, London. However the World was changing fast around her and she was drawn into the movement of ‘The Celtic Revival’ which saw an upsurge of interest in Ireland’s National Identity through the mediums of Language, Culture and Art. After she returned to Ireland she attended Gaelic language lessons at St. Enda's School, or Scoil Éanna & it was here she met Joseph Mary Plunkett, a frail man but a poet with a passion for Ireland’s Right to be a free and independent Nation.
Her growing interest in the Catholic religion led to the deepening of Gifford and Plunkett's relationship as she began to discuss Catholic mystical ideas with him – he was from an arch-Catholic family, his father a Papal count. Plunkett proposed to her in 1915; Grace accepted and took formal instruction in Catholic doctrine. She was received into the Catholic Church in April 1916. They planned to get married at Easter that year. However their plans for matrimony were overturned as Joseph was deeply involved in plans to stage an uprising against British rule and luck would have it the day planned to undertake such an enterprise was Easter Sunday - their wedding day.
The Rising actually began one day later on Easter Monday and Joseph Mary Plunkett was in the thick of it from right from the start. He was too weak to fight himself but he took his stand inside the GPO along with the other leaders and was one of the signatories of the Proclamation. His signature on that document sealed his fate and he was sentenced to be executed by British Court Martial. On hearing the news Grace immediately set in plans to see her lover one last time and marry him. This was arranged through the offices of a Priest and Grace was taken into Kilmainham Jail to see Joseph and take their vows of Marriage to each other. On the 3rd May 1916 that night Grace Gifford entered Kilmainham Gaol. With a priest and two witnesses present she married Joseph. After a too brief encounter she had to leave him but was allowed to return later for just another 10 minutes with her husband. He was executed by firing squad a few hours later. She never married again.
She remained a convinced Republican and actively opposed the Treaty of 1921. For her troubles she was arrested and held in Kilmainham Jail - where her husband had met his end just over five years earlier. Her life after that was one that gave her some status in Republican circles & at one stage she was on the Executive Committee of Sinn Fein but it would seem an existence of genteel but reduced circumstances was her fate as a woman who struggled to make her way in this world as a female cartoonist. Her talent as an artist was her only real asset; her cartoons were published in various newspapers and magazines, including Dublin Opinion, the Irish Tattler, Sketch, and on one occasion in 1934, Punch! She illustrated W. B. Yeats' The Words upon the Window Pane in 1930.
Her difficulties did not end on her release and she struggled along moving from one rented apartment to another in the City. Things also became slightly better for her when she was awarded a small pension in 1932 when De Valera came into Power and honoured her position as the widow of a Leader of the 1916 Rising. But her husband’s family had wanted nothing to do with her and she eventually sued them as Joseph had left everything to her on his death and she received nothing of his inheritance. She was given £700 in an out of court settlement.
Life drifted on and by the late 1940s her health began to fail. She was moved to a Nursing Home and she died on this day in 1955. She was buried with full military honours among the attendees at her funeral was President Seán T. O'Kelly. She was interned close to the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
While a somewhat tragic figure and in some ways forgotten about outside of Republican circles her story and that of her sombre marriage had a new lease of life in the 1980s when the ballad ‘Grace’ was released by Frank and Seán O'Meara which is now a huge favourite at any location where ballads are sung by the Irish.
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