Roamer: Pioneering ecumenist woman’s record of turbulent Ireland

Today’s heavenly glow is green sludge, Miss M remains anonymous but the pro-Belfast author of the journal was Rosamond Emily Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s cousin.

Rosamond was born in London in 1868, ninth of ten children of High Court judge Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and wife Mary Richenda Cunningham.

Sir James’s younger brother - writer, mountaineer and academic Sir Leslie Stephen - was Virginia Woolf’s father.

Rosamond’s grandfather, Sir James Stephen, was a British Colonial Under-Secretary and acclaimed Cambridge University professor.

Appropriate to her rarefied, cultural upbringing, Rosamund established a 5,000-book lending library - on Belfast’s Crumlin Road!

It formed the nucleus of today’s Representative Church Body Library (RCB), founded in Dublin in 1931 after Rosamund donated it to the Church of Ireland, augmented by some of her father’s and grandfather’s books.

The RCB Library is now online, worldwide.

As well as her books Rosamond kept a unique record of events during turbulent times in Irish history, mainly through letters to relatives - also available online.

It’s a vivid account of life in Belfast and Dublin from 1912 to 1923 and beyond, with an in-depth assessment by eminent academic and historian Dr Ian d’Alton.

Drawing on a quote from Rosamond’s records, his assessment is entitled: ‘We have all got to go on living together’.

Dr d’Alton examines her place as an “insider-outsider” viewing Ireland, north and south, paying particular attention to both her politics and role as recorder of ‘oral history’.

He describes Rosamond as an Anglo-Irish “chronicler of the ordinary, a person of faith who nevertheless recognises and accepts the genuineness of a different faith in others.”

Her large archive of letters and documents clearly shows that she was “an acute and perceptive observer of the Irish revolutionary period.”

She had a “firm politics which barely wavers over these turbulent years,” Dr d’Alton stresses “a tolerant politics with a recognition of reality.”

She was a unionist “but hers was a relatively ‘soft’ and pragmatic unionism” he writes, adding “she had an instinctive empathy with attempts to bridge the unionist-nationalist divide.”

She admitted in an early-1917 letter that she was “most awfully afraid that there will be more fighting before all is done…it is a real wild revolutionary temper everywhere…”

Rosamond was brought up in “a vaguely God-believing household but with no denominational affiliation…and eventually found an amenable and amiable home within the Church of Ireland, being confirmed in 1896.”

Holidaying in County Louth in the late nineteenth century seems to have awakened her love for Ireland. She moved to Belfast in 1901, describing herself as a church worker – basically a lay missionary - serving both Protestants and Roman Catholics.

In the same year she formed the Guild of Witness, the purpose of which was a prayerful encouragement of “patriotism and (to) discover fresh ways by which the Church could fulfil her mission to the nation”.

This became the Irish Guild of Witness in 1918 with an emphasis on Irishness, including the language.

Rosamond left Belfast in 1919, bound for Dublin with her library.

She was an ecumenist “ahead of her time” says Dr d’Alton. She tried to bring Catholics and Protestants together, writing pamphlets and tracts and handing them out on the streets.

“Some form of modernism must arise,” Rosamond emphasised “and if Roman modernists can effect some alliance with the Church of Ireland I can think of nothing better. It would nearly make the revolution worthwhile.”

Dr d’Alton highlights Rosamond’s eye for the “big things and little things” during the Irish revolutionary period.

It’s an unusual record for its time, containing women’s voices - ordinary Orange women in Belfast, Nationalists in Dublin, and Rosamond’s in both.

Dr d’Alton finds no deep political insights therein, nothing new - “what’s new is the tone” - a tone which was being drowned out by war and politics.

Rosamond Stephen’s record can be viewed online at https://esearch.informa.ie/rcbrstephen