Dixie Elliot ✒ This is a powerful image in many ways.

It is a moment frozen in time. A time of Unionist apartheid.

It was taken in the early 1960s when two mothers, Sally Collett and Kitty Lynch led a protest against the appalling conditions in Springtown Camp outside Derry.

After WW2 the Americans had left the camp, locked the gates and marched off up the narrow country road to Derry on the first leg of their journey home. Desperate families in need of a home of any kind broke open the locks to the gates and squatted into the Nissen huts.

Springtown Camp became a shanty town. The 304 huts were occupied by close to 400 families because married sons or daughters were forced to move in with their parents as they had nowhere else to live.

Sally Collett was still a young woman, the passage of time and poverty hadn't yet taken her youthful beauty. Kitty Lynch was an older woman who had known a lifetime of discrimination and hardship. They both stood together in defiance and lit a tiny spark which became a burning flame as it spread across the north.

The small boy on the left of the photo, Gerard Craig, standing in front of his brother John, became a volunteer in the IRA. He died on active service alongside Volunteer Davy Russell, a Protestant, on the 24th June 1974. They were 17 and 18 years old at the time of their deaths.

This photo should be enlarged and placed in the Guildhall as a lasting testimony to the courage of the mothers of our generation. The generation which saw the beginning of the end of Unionist apartheid ...
Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie


Springtown Camp

Dixie Elliot ✒ This is a powerful image in many ways.

It is a moment frozen in time. A time of Unionist apartheid.

It was taken in the early 1960s when two mothers, Sally Collett and Kitty Lynch led a protest against the appalling conditions in Springtown Camp outside Derry.

After WW2 the Americans had left the camp, locked the gates and marched off up the narrow country road to Derry on the first leg of their journey home. Desperate families in need of a home of any kind broke open the locks to the gates and squatted into the Nissen huts.

Springtown Camp became a shanty town. The 304 huts were occupied by close to 400 families because married sons or daughters were forced to move in with their parents as they had nowhere else to live.

Sally Collett was still a young woman, the passage of time and poverty hadn't yet taken her youthful beauty. Kitty Lynch was an older woman who had known a lifetime of discrimination and hardship. They both stood together in defiance and lit a tiny spark which became a burning flame as it spread across the north.

The small boy on the left of the photo, Gerard Craig, standing in front of his brother John, became a volunteer in the IRA. He died on active service alongside Volunteer Davy Russell, a Protestant, on the 24th June 1974. They were 17 and 18 years old at the time of their deaths.

This photo should be enlarged and placed in the Guildhall as a lasting testimony to the courage of the mothers of our generation. The generation which saw the beginning of the end of Unionist apartheid ...
Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie


3 comments:

  1. Dixie - a great story. A lot of history there. And when you see the image of the child Gerard Craig, is it really that hard for people to grasp why people when they came of age in that city might chooses to join the IRA. And when you think of Davy Russell - what baggage he much have shaken off to join the IRA. Most of us at his age who were in the IRA, had we be been born and brought up a couple of hundred yards away would have bought into the communal narrative and joined the loyalists groups.

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  2. An appalling, abhorrent state-of affairs.

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  3. Very true, Steve R. People corralled in tin huts like cattle. And this happened within living memory.

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