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Bobby Sands and the imprisoned voice

Continuing our series of blog posts as part of Trinity Week‘s theme of silence, we will today consider more closely the letter, currently on display in the Long Room, from Bobby Sands who died in prison after a hunger strike of 66 days in 1981.

Committed radical activists, if imprisoned, persevere in either recording their thoughts or communicating their beliefs using whatever material comes to hand. This is to undermine one of the purposes of imprisonment – the removal of the prisoner and his or her convictions from the national conversation. In the case of Bobby Sands he used toilet paper for his letter-writing campaign.

The Sands letter arrived in the Library in the late 1990s as part of the literary archives of the author John B. Keane (2018-2002). Keane was personally unknown to Sands whose strategy was to send letters to high profile individuals who, if they were persuaded to support his protest demands, could use their celebrity to advance them.

Letter from Bobby Sands (1954-1981), MP to John B. Keane (MS 10403/1b/1592)

The letter is written over several sheets of paper, in a cheap blue biro – obviously cheap because of the blots it produced. The writing is tiny, to save space, but clearly legible. The message is strong and coherent, as a result of Sands’ convictions and also, most likely, from the fact that he would have used the same phrases over and over in other letters to other recipients. The language is highly dramatic, as might be expected from an amateur poet, whether in telling of the torture the prisoners experienced or in the description of their appearances: ‘…faces … sharp and hollow … eyes piercing and intense … ghost-like, skeletal, ragged, wretched, naked …’.

The letter has been affixed to a slightly sturdier piece of paper upon which the recipient’s name is written. It is unknown when this was done or by whom; it may have been done by the person who smuggled the item out of Long Kesh prison. The Keane papers, when they arrived in the Library, were contained in several plastic fertiliser bags, each one containing hundreds of letters all of which had been impaled onto a length of heavy wire with a knot in the end. This seemingly bizarre treatment was not an unusual way to ‘file’ small-business records and is not unique in the Library’s collections. Thus the Sands letter, like all of Keane’s correspondence, has a small hole in it. Furthermore, due to the damage caused by storage in a bag in an outhouse, these papers spent their first months in Trinity in the Conservation Department, being ironed.

Mid-twentieth-century agricultural records ‘filed’ on a wire. (MS 11573)

This Trinity Week blog series has drawn attention to the artefactual nature of manuscripts which communicates information to the viewer separate from that communicated by the written text. It is certainly the case that the cheap paper used by Samuel Beckett is venerated because he touched it – but only by a particular audience. The Sands letter has attracted the same quality of veneration from a different audience, to whom the use of toilet paper adds to their appreciation of the sacrifice Sands made.