Cesca Chenevix Trench

Cesca Chenevix Trench (3 February 1891 – 30 October 1918) was a British-born Irish nationalist and illustrator. She took the Irish name Sadhbh Trinseach. Biography Francesca Georgina Chenevix Trench was born in the vicarage of St John the Baptist Church, Tuebrook, Liverpool. She was the granddaughter of Richard Chenevix Trench, the Archbishop of Dublin and grew up in a vicarage in Kent. Her mother was a Unionist. Cesca became an Irish nationalist. Her uncle, classicist Henry Butcher, was a Unionist MP for Cambridge; they drew apart after 1910 when he did not support the move to make Irish compulsory in the new National University. Trench studied at a boarding school in Malvern from 1906 to 1908, where she began to support Irish Home Rule in public. In 1908–1913 she lived in Folkestone but spent each summer in Ireland and attended summer school in 1909–1913, notably the influential Scoil Acla on Achill Island. There she met Diarmid Coffey, her future husband, as well as others influential in Conradh na Gaeilge, Claud Chavasse, Ella Young, Lily Williams, and Agnes O'Farrelly. Trench's older cousin, Dermot Chenevix Trench, the model for "Haines" in Ulysses and her sister, Margot, were also Irish nationalists. Dermot first taught her to speak Irish, and influenced her entry into the Irish-Ireland movement, whose members bought Irish-made goods for preference, and fostered Irish literature, art and culture. Cesca opened an account at Gleason's, a shop in Dublin that sold only Irish products, and swore off drink and tobacco unless they were produced in Ireland. When a new campaign for Home Rule begun in 1912, Cesca and Margot collected signatures for a petition that all Irish taxes should be lodged in an Irish treasury. They collected Irish folklore, customs and traditions. Dermot committed suicide in 1909. "He might have done so much with such ability", she wrote to her brother Herbert after Dermot shot himself.