condition would be circulated to the press. After a lifetime of being introduced as one of ‘Albert’s daughters’, Dolours was tickled to have achieved a notoriety of her own. She teased Albert about it, telling Chrissie, in one letter, to ask him ‘how does he like being called “Dolours and Marian’s father”?’
Nearly a year had passed since the bombings, and the sisters were still being force-fed, when the case took a bizarre turn. In February 1974, a seventeenth-century painting by Vermeer, of a young girl plucking a narrow guitar, was stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead. A pair of anonymous typewritten letters arrived at The Times, demanding that Dolours and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland and threatening that if they weren’t, the painting would ‘be burnt on St Patrick’s night with much cavorting about in the true lunatic fashion’. As proof that this threat was sincere, one of the letters contained a sliver of canvas from the Vermeer. In a strange coincidence, on a trip to London two years earlier, Dolours had visited Kenwood House and had stopped to look at that very painting. In a statement, Chrissie Price appealed to whoever it was that took the artwork to return it unharmed. She noted that Dolours – ‘who is an art student’ – had made a special plea on behalf of the painting.
One evening in May, a suspicious package appeared in a churchyard near Smithfield Market, in London. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. A squad of officers arrived at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great. In this atmosphere of heightened tension, the package could be a bomb. But it wasn’t: it was the painting, which had been returned, just as Dolours had requested.
During this same period, a second art theft was perpetrated in the name of the Price sisters. A collection of old masters worth millions of pounds was stolen from a house in County Wicklow, in Ireland. Among the paintings that went missing were a Velázquez, a Vermeer, a Rubens, a Goya and a Metsu. Once again, a ransom letter appeared, demanding that the hunger strikers be returned ‘at once to serve their sentences in Ireland’. These paintings, too, were later recovered.
In June, an elderly Irish earl and his wife returned to their home in Tipperary after a formal dinner one night to discover several strange men lurking in their driveway. One of the men pistol-whipped the earl. Then they dragged his wife across the gravel, shoved them into a vehicle, blindfolded them both, and drove away. The kidnappers informed the couple that they were being held as ‘hostages for the Price sisters’. They were confined for several days in a dark room at gunpoint, but the prisoners ended up taking a liking to their captors and came to regard the whole experience as something of an adventure. The kidnappers ‘could not have been kinder’, the earl said afterwards, adding that he had been well fed with a full Irish breakfast each morning and steaks and chops for lunch. The hostage takers had even supplied him with the racing pages. The earl and his wife were eventually released, because of a dramatic turn in the case.
In May, the British government had decided to stop force-feeding the Prices. Up to that point, the sisters had suffered through the procedure with as much dignity as they could muster. They did not want to show any fear. But at a certain point, it seemed that they had reached a stalemate: the force-feeding might be inflicting mental and physical trauma on them, but it was also keeping them alive. So, rather than endure the feeding in hostile submission, the sisters opted to change their strategy. One day, they offered ‘maximum resistance’, as Dolours recounted in a letter, ‘which involved the expected, undignified scenes of struggling, holding down, steel clamps, and – in my case – screaming, because believe me, that steel clamp hurts the old gums’. It was a battle. The sisters struggled so hard that it became difficult for the doctors to insert the tubes safely into their stomachs. They informed the doctors that they were giving them ‘the privilege of killing us’ if something went wrong. After a few of these fraught encounters, the doctors simply stopped, refusing to continue with the procedure, because it was just too dangerous. It was a clinical judgement, not a political one, that ended the force-feeding.
Just the same, it would fall to Roy Jenkins to explain the change