#Violet Albina Gibson

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini. Once…

[aiiaiiiyo]

Violet Albina Gibson, the woman who attempted to kill Benito Mussolini the 7th of April 1926. Rome, 1926. [620x340] Check this blog!

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

According to Find a Grave, she is buried in Kingsthorpe Cemetery, Northamptonshire, in case anyone nearby would like to pay their respects.

On this day, 7 April 1926, Violet Gibson, a 49-year-old Irish aristocrat and peace activist attempted to assassinate Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in Rome. She had armed herself with a pistol wrapped in a shawl, and a rock to break his car window if needed. As she fired at his head, Mussolini moved, meaning that the bullet hit his nose, travelling through both nostrils. She tried to fire again but the gun misfired. She was violently beaten and almost killed by an angry mob, until she was arrested by police. Gibson endeavoured to obtain release by convincing doctors she was mad. While her conversations and correspondence were lucid and rational, her absence of children was interpreted as psychologically abnormal. Along with a previous suicide attempt, and a violent reaction she had to a fascist inmate, she was deemed “insane”. She was deported to Britain, where she spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital. No one attended her funeral. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1959078047610669/?type=3

[robbialy]

From • @ladies.in.war Violet Albina Gibson (31 August 1876 – 2 May 1956) was an Anglo-Irish woman who attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini in 1926. On 7 April 1926, Gibson shot Mussolini, as he walked among the crowd in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. She had armed herself with a rock to break Mussolini's car window if necessary, and a Modèle 1892 revolver disguised in a black shawl. She fired once, but Mussolini moved his head at that moment and the shot hit his nose; she tried again, but the gun misfired. Gibson was almost lynched on the spot by an angry mob, but police intervened and took her away for questioning.  She told interrogators that she shot Mussolini "to glorify God" who had kindly sent an angel to keep her arm steady. She was deported to Britain after being released without charge at the request of Mussolini, an act for which he received the thanks of the British government. (@ladies.in.war) #resistance #ladiesinwarsofficialhashtag #militarywomen #weapon #ww1 #italy #womeninhistory #gun #womenshistory #herstory #photography #ladiesinwars #protest #soldier #womenshistory #womenshistorymonth #mussolini https://www.instagram.com/p/CO0g2lPpVNMgBsJfhErK1xpkprtwTUzBdPP1fs0/?igshid=1xdjxhcnq2cja

[annavaught-posts]

‘But what do you know, who has not been mad?’

So, rather wonderfully, the proofs of my new book, Saving Lucia, are out and about. Bluemoose will be putting its new subscription service into action soon too, so watch out for that, because, if you have liked the sound of Saving Lucia so far, as a subscriber, you’d get to read it two months early; in February, rather than April.

There is something I thought I would share with you today, though. As I have said elsewhere, the idea for Saving Lucia came from a chance sighting of this photograph.

Who was this? Elderly and (perhaps?) frail-looking; facing away from the camera; arms in a beautiful pose and look how she is covered with birds! It caught my eye. This lady was a Lady. She was The Honourable Violet Albina Gibson, an irish aristocrat, and she loved the birds of the air. I found out that there were pouches sewn into her clothes and that these were to be filled with birdseed. Actually, I interviewed one of the nurses (now in her 90s) who cared for her – again because of a chance sighting of an article on psychiatric nursing – and gradually a book took shape. In 1926 Violet Gibson went to Rome and shot Mussolini. She missed, grazing across his nose – but she came closer than anyone else. Imprisoned, then deported, she was certified mad in Harley Street and sent to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton where she remained for the rest of her life.

I will not say more of her story now, because we, as a team, will reveal and discuss things over the coming months – and of course I hope you will read the book.

But here is the thing I mentioned I wanted to share with you.

The book is about sanity. About madness. Our shifting definitions of what this is.

The book is about the imagination.

About its power and ability to sustain and transform a world. Yes, in the books we read which have sprung like fresh miracle from others’ imaginations, but also in that landscape inside our heads. The stories we tell ourselves and our reveries and daydreams and also the detailed imaginative freewheeling that may occur when circumstances press in on us and circumscribe our physical and psychological freedom. The latter is something I learned in very early childhood and have written about elsewhere: because I did not feel safe in the world I inhabited, I invented a lot of imaginary friends with whom I would have dialogue. This was not madness, but survival and company – and in essence it lasted into adolescence because the impact  of early and sustained experience had catastrophic effects on my sense of identity, coping skills, resilience, responses to stress and on my mental health broadly. So, I have coped with OCD, depression, generalised anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks and dissociative episodes for large parts of my life. These seemed to grow from complex trauma. I feel like I would not have survived these things – and sometimes it has been a close thing; those of you have received crisis care from our mental health teams will know what I mean – without all the worlds inside my head. Stories, reams of poetry, landscapes I would invent and populate.

So you see, Saving Lucia sprang from a chance sighting of a photo. Then I realised that Lucia Joyce, daughter of the novelist James Joyce, was a co-patient of Violet Gibson. And that was someone whose well-explored – and circumscribed, thanks (I am sorry if this is too harsh) to the efforts of the keeper of the Joyce estate – life and truths I longed to ponder. And there were other women, too. And poets, dictators, theosophists, priests, neurologists – and many more I wished to think about.

But there was something else that it sprang from, and this was my feelings about the power of the imagination to provide for us when we are laid low; when we are, in one way or another, confined. That is partly the reason why I have Violet, who has extraordinary adventures in the book, say,  ‘For those who are confined have the best imaginations.’ I didn’t mean it lightly.

Ah well, I hope we can talk a lot more about this book in the coming months. In the meantime, here is the beginning of an essay I have coming out also in April. It’s a book about art and mental health and my focus here, as you see, is on the imagination and very specifically about reading, without which I doubt I would have survived. Trauma: Art as Response to Mental Health, from Dodo Ink edited by Thom Cuell and Sam Mills. I hope you will read that, too.

Anna x

  ‘Do not read, as children do, for the sake of entertainment, or, like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Flaubert

And read, read, read in order to build and rebuild. Listen, too, to stories; to new words and worlds. This is how it was for me, reading to set the darkness echoing and to know that I was not alone. You may think (as Flaubert) that young children do not feel this way about books, but even as a young child, I read both for entertainment and safety, because I could find spaces with characters, or just linger with the feelings that words gave me when I ate them or jumbled them about in my mouth. I would talk to the characters in books and ask their advice; tell them how I felt. Or read passages again and again for security; they were as a private talisman to me. I think, looking back, that I savoured scansion or the weight of a line for its mnemonic qualities and the comfort that afforded.

In bed, as a kid, I would hear shouting or groaning; diffuse sounds. Arguments. Later, my father whimpering and screaming, because he went mad before he died, though no-one spoke about it. I would hear stertorous breathing and feel frightened, but there was no-one to tell. And I think that the sounds outside my room got mixed up with the sounds in my head. When I was very young, I also began a series of rebarbative and ruminating thoughts, the roots of obsessive compulsive patterns I suppose, in which I imagined that if I thought something bad, then it would happen to something. That if I thought something unkind or even allowed the words egress into my mind, then those words will billow out and do things. This was, I knew even then, because my mother had instilled in me an idea that I was bringing of bad things. Looking back, I don’t know why she did this; I don’t know why she wasn’t prevented. Even now, if I am not careful, I slip into this position if someone is particularly caustic to me because I may struggle to believe, despite the pressing of my rational mind, that it could be them, and not me. I turn to reading. Every time.’

  For those who are confined have the best imaginations. 'But what do you know, who has not been mad?' So, rather wonderfully, the proofs of my new book, …

[londranotizie24]

Il complotto inglese per uccidere Mussolini svelato da Alfio Bernabei

Di Pietro Nigro @ItalyinLDN @ICCIUK @ItalyinUk @inigoinLND Lo storico italo inglese Alfio Bernabei pubblica su History Today di settembre i dettagli finora sconosciuti di un complotto forse organizzato dal Secret Service britannico per uccidere Mussolini nel 1936. Alfio Bernabei svela il falso complotto del Secret Service per uccidere Mussolini nel 1936 Di atentati più o meno organizzati per uccidere Benito Mussolini ne sono stati tentati in gran numero, durante tutta la vita politica dell'agitatore socialista prima e del Duce e capo de Governo poi. Alcuni da avversari politici, altri da mitomani, e altri ancora da squilibrati, e altri ancora - così si sospettava durante il Ventennio - perfino dalla stessa polizia politica, che cercava di sfruttare l'effetto emotivo dei falliti attentati per soffiare la gran cassa della propaganda. Ma tutti questi attentati sono stati per lo più pensati e organizzati in Italia e da italiani, non all'estero. In un solo caso le cronache e la storia riportano un attentato alla persona del Duce tentato da una cittadina britannica, Lady Violet Albina Gibson, figlia di un nobile anglo-irlandese e Pari di Inghilterra, che il 7 aprile del 1926 tentò di sparare al volto di Mussolini mentre usciva dal Campidoglio a Roma, ma la cui pistola si inceppò. Quella donna, imbevuta di misticismo cattolico e che aveva già subito diversi ricoveri, venne poi assolta dal Tribunale speciale per manifesta infermità di mente e ricoverata in un manicomio. Mai, invece, si è saputo finora di un attentato la cui organizzazione sia avvenuta in Gran Bretagna, e addirittura in ambienti istituzionali. Per questo fa scalpore la notizia di un attentato organizzato addirittura dal Secret Service di Sua Maestà, nel 1936, i cui dettagli sono stati scoperti da Alfio Bernabei, storico itaiano residente a Londra da tempo. Bernabei, che ha scoperto questa spy-story spulciando tra i documenti ufficiali italiani, ha ricostruito questo misterioso complotto "organizzato da inglesi" in un articolo che sarà pubblicato sul numero di settembre della rivista History Today (qui il sito della rivista https://www.historytoday.com/ e qui il link all'articolo https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/george-mcmahon-fascist-assassin-or-british-spy). ... Continua a leggere su www. Read the full article

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini. Once…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini. Once…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini.

Once…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini.

Once…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini. Once…

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

#OTD in 1926 – Dublin-born, Violet Albina Gibson, daughter of Lord Ashbourne, shot Benito Mussolini in Rome on this date.

Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of mental illness, standing among the crowd, just feet from Mussolini.

Once…