One of the features of the Rising was the Dublin mob who, once incredulity at the fact of no police appearing had worn off, began looting and setting fire to premises close to the GPO. In his book, On Another Man’s Wound, Ernie O’Malley gave a memorable description of the looters’ activities:49
…shops had been looted: Lawrence’s Toy Bazaar and some jewellers. Diamond rings and pocketfuls of gold watches were selling for sixpence and a shilling, and one was cursed if one did not buy. Women and girls, some clad in Russian leather boots, smart tweed skirts and a shawl, wore rings on every finger, throbbing rows of them, only the joints showing. Ragged boys wearing old boots, brown and black, tramped up and down with air rifles on their shoulders or played cowboys and Indians, armed with black pistols supplied with long rows of paper caps. Little girls hugged teddy bears and dolls as if they could hardly believe their good fortune. Kiddies carried golf bags and acted as caddies to young gentlemen in bright football jerseys and tall hats, who hit golf balls with their clubs, or indeed anything that came in their way. This was a holiday. Some of the women with wispy, greasy hair and blousy figures, walked around in evening dress. Young girls wore long silk dresses. A saucy girl flipped a fan with a hand wristleted by a thick gold chain; she wore a sable fur coat, the pockets overhung with stockings and pale pink drawers; on her head was a wide black hat to which she had pinned streamers of blue silk ribbon. She strutted in larkish delight calling to others less splendid: ‘How do yez like me now? Any chanst of yer washing, ma’am?’ In the back streets men and women sprawled about, drunk, piles of empty and smashed bottles lying around.
As the GPO was being fortified, the rebels moved through the city in groups of twenty-five and thirty to take over strongpoints which, it was initially envisaged, would be held by forces with at least a couple of noughts at the end of each number. The South Dublin Union, Jameson’s Distillery, Boland’s Bakery and its attendant vantage points, Clanwilliam House and 25 Northumberland Road; Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, the Four Courts and St Stephen’s Green. The tiny amount of manpower available to the rebels was the main reason why Dublin Castle, the most important target of all, was not seized by them. A party of Citizen Army men burst in the main Castle gate, killing a policeman, frightening away the sentry and capturing the soldiers manning the guardroom.
The Castle thus lay at their mercy, but not knowing that most of the officers who might have led a resistance were gone to watch the Irish Grand National at Fairyhouse Racecourse, the rebels hesitated. The party that burst into the Castle was not reinforced and instead a number of other vantage points were seized, including a gents outfitters facing the Castle, the Evening Mail office and City Hall. This dispersal of effort allowed the British to reinforce the Castle a couple of hours after the attack began, and so the chance of seizing and perhaps destroying this symbol of British rule in Ireland was lost. The leader of the rebels, John Connolly, who was accompanied in the assault by his fourteen-year-old brother Matthew, was shot dead on the roof of City Hall two hours after the Castle attack began.
Confusion and lack of manpower further complicated the ruin of the IRB’s plans. No effort was made to seize a number of strongpoints which would have been invaluable to the Volunteers, and whose loss proved correspondingly catastrophic. Trinity College, in the heart of Dublin, was not taken, nor was the Shelbourne Hotel, which overlooks St Stephen’s Green. Both were seized by the British. As a result, rebels under the command of Countess Markievicz and Commandant Michael Mallin found themselves looking up into the mouths of blazing machine guns as they desperately clawed for shelter in tulip beds. The insurgents were soon driven out of the Green and forced to commandeer instead the College of Surgeons where their subsequent sturdy defence indicated what they could have done had the Shelbourne and not the flowerbeds been taken over. Possibly the most telling loss was the Crown Alley Telephone Exchange. A party of Volunteers was on its way to seize this vital communication link when a Dublin ‘oul one’ appeared, seemingly to shout a helpful warning to the rebels: ‘Go back, boys, go back, the place is crammed with military’. Believing her, the rebels abandoned the effort to take the Exchange and five hours later it was taken over by the British military, having stood empty all day.
As teatime approached the British had begun to get a picture of what was happening and Baron Wimborne decided that it was time for him to get in on the Proclamation business which was to flourish throughout the week. He issued the following:
Whereas, an attempt, instigated and designed by the foreign enemies of our King and Country to incite rebellion in Ireland and thus endanger the safety of the United Kingdom, has been made by a reckless, though small, body of men, who have been guilty of insurrectionary acts in the City of Dublin:
Now, we, Ivor Churchill, Baron Wimborne, Lord Lieutenant-General and Governor-General of Ireland, do hereby warn all His Majesty’s subjects that the sternest measures are being, and will be, taken for the prompt suppression of the existing disturbances, and the restoration of order:
And we do hereby enjoin all loyal and law-abiding citizens to abstain from any acts of conduct which might interfere with the action of the Executive Government, and, in particular, we warn all citizens of the danger of unnecessarily frequenting the streets or public places, and of assembling in crowds:
Given under our seal, this 24th day of April, 1916.
History does not record any perceptible reaction from the GPO garrison to this document. Although the GPO was the headquarters of the Provisional Government, and became both the heart and the symbol of the Rising, all of the points seized saw fierce and bloody fighting. With one or two notable and nasty exceptions on the British side (which will be described later), there was neither cowardice nor deliberate cruelty from either side, although obviously a revolution staged in a crowded city was inevitably going to claim the lives of the innocent.
One of the earliest fatalities of the rebellion was also one of the saddest. The rebels attempted to blow up the high explosives depot in the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park around midday as a signal that the Rising had begun. But the charges had to be placed against the wall of an ammunition store instead because the officer in charge had taken the key of the explosives room with him to the races. Mrs Isabel Playfair, the wife of the fort’s commander who was away at the Great War with an Irish regiment, and her three children were given a few minutes to get clear while the rebels laid their charges and retreated. As they did so, they saw one of the Playfair children, a boy who had just turned seventeen, running to raise the alarm. The lad was banging frantically on a hall door when Volunteer Gary Holohan caught up with him and shot him dead just as the door opened.50 As he did so, the authorities were alerted anyhow because at that moment, 12.25 p.m., the gelignite that the rebels had planted went off.
Here two other strange notifications of the rebellion deserve to be mentioned. One was that given to the pope by Count Plunkett.51 In the months preceding the Rising, the Plunketts’ spacious home and gardens, Larkfield, in Kimmage, County Dublin had been host to a number of young men such as Michael Collins, who had returned to Dublin from London and elsewhere, so that they could fight for Ireland, not England. They passed their time in Larkfield drilling and learning how to make bombs, some of which went off accidentally from time to time, leaving those concerned entitled to count themselves extremely lucky to have survived long enough to get themselves killed in the Rising. But along with playing host to such anarchic activities, Pere Plunkett was also a Papal Count and he was chosen to go to Rome to inform Pope Benedict of the impending Rising, both as a matter of courtesy and to assure the Pontiff that there was nothing communistic about the proposed proceedings. The Count made it plain: ‘that it was the wish of the leaders of the movement to act entirely with the goodwill (or approval) of the pope and gave assurances that they would act as Catholics’. The pope was also assured that he need not be ‘shocked or alarmed’. This was a ‘purely national movement for independence, the same as every n
ation has a right to’.
The pope, however, was both shocked and alarmed and wanted to know ‘was there no peaceful way out of it’. When he was told ‘no’, he urged Plunkett to inform the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Walsh. When Plunkett got to the Archbishop’s House in Drumcondra, County Dublin that fateful Easter Monday he found that the Archbishop was ill. He was in the act of informing the Archbishop’s thunderstruck secretary, Father Curran, of what was afoot, when the priest’s phone rang to tell him that the GPO had just been attacked.
Christ having been put in the picture, Caesar’s turn now came. Casement’s arrest had at long last persuaded the British to act. Not long before Father Curran’s phone rang, another call had been placed, this time from Dublin Castle to the GPO, by the Under Secretary Sir Matthew Nathan. It was to Sir Hamilton Norway, the Secretary of the General Post Office, asking him to join Nathan and Major Ivor Price, the Military Intelligence Officer in the Castle, at once. Correctly surmising that the meeting was connected with a requirement to take over the telephone service for military use, Norway immediately vacated his office and headed for the Castle through Dublin’s peaceful, sun-lit streets. Behind him, ten minutes later the rebels walked into his office in the GPO. In the Castle, Norway was sitting in Nathan’s office drawing up the written order needed for the telephonic takeover when a volley of rifle fire signalled Connolly’s attack. The correct time of the commencement of the Rising had at long last been made known to the authorities in Dublin Castle.
The fighting was largely confined to Dublin, although throughout the country a few isolated engagements also passed into legend. The Fingal area of North County Dublin was largely taken over by a highly mobile party of fifty Volunteers led by Thomas Ashe and Richard Mulcahy, the precursor of the IRA ‘flying columns’ of the Anglo-Irish. Ashe had a motorbike and the rest had bicycles. They captured Swords, Donabate and Garretstown, and took part in a fairly significant assault at Ashbourne, County Meath, on Friday, 28 April. Ashe and his men laid successful siege to the RIC barracks in Ashbourne, but as the Volunteers were taking possession of the barracks, RIC reinforcements arrived from Navan in County Meath. A five-and-a-half-hour battle ensued in which eleven members of the RIC were killed, amongst them County Inspector Alexander Gray, who during the Land War of the 1880s had been a particular hate figure in Ashe’s home district, Corca Duibhne in West Kerry. Several of the RIC party were wounded. Two Volunteers were killed and five wounded. At the end of the week Ashe and his men were among the few units that could have fought on, but laid down their weapons with the rest when ordered to surrender by Pearse.
Another much-talked-about incident occurred at Castlelyons in County Cork where the three Kent brothers, David, Thomas and Richard barricaded themselves in their home against an assault by the RIC who came to arrest them. They drove off the police, killing a head constable and then withstood a siege by a party of soldiers, their mother loading and reloading their rifles for them. Only after Richard had been killed and David severely wounded did they surrender. But in Cork City itself the confusion and countermands caused the Volunteers to remain inactive. Similarly in Limerick City where the Plunkett plan had been relying on a particularly important strategic mobilisation. In Wexford a mobilisation did occur, but only on the Wednesday, resulting in the bloodless and short-lived occupation of the town of Enniscorthy. In Galway Liam Mellowes took to the hills in the classic fashion of Irish guerrillas though the centuries, but not surprisingly did not encounter any army or police in those regions and no hostilities ensued. In County Louth the rebels captured the three-man RIC barracks in Castlebellingham.
In Dublin, outside the GPO itself, the principal theatre of death was on a section of the main road between Dublin and Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) lying on either side of Mount Street Bridge, known on one side of the bridge as Northumberland Road and on the other as Lower Mount Street. Along this roadway a group of Volunteers under the command of Captain Michael Malone, made of the area what was described subsequently either as ‘Dublin’s Dardanelles’ or an ‘Irish Thermopylae’. Mount Street Bridge and its precincts were part of a wide area under Eamon de Valera’s command and included Boland’s Mill and Bakery, Westland Row Railway Station (now Pearse Station) and Beggars Bush Barracks.
The last three strongpoints saw little fighting, but along the Mount Street Bridge approaches, a handful of insurgents inflicted some half of all the casualties suffered by the British during that week. The battle site could legitimately be held up as a paradigm of all the slaughter and waste on the Western Front. It began when a tired, dusty corps of middle-aged men known as the Georgius Rex or ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’, as Dubliners referred to this unit of home-defence veterans, were unwittingly marched straight into fire from the Northumberland Road strongpoint at point-blank range. They had been on manoeuvres that Easter Monday morning using unloaded rifles and were marched the six miles or so from Kingstown by their officer, Major Harris of the Trinity College Officer Training Corps, as soon as news of the Rising reached them. Not knowing that they were unarmed, the Volunteers scythed them down. Later, in the same solicitous spirit with which they helped the owners of the commandeered house to put away all their valuables so that nothing would be damaged or stolen during the fighting, the Volunteers’ officers decided not to fire on men, even in khaki, who were not prepared for war.
But later in the week, when troops were landed at Kingstown, the Tommies were still unprepared. By then, especially after what had befallen the Georgius Rex, it should have been glaringly obvious that the posts were both dangerous and strongly held. Nevertheless the brass hats deliberately marched a squad of Sherwood Foresters, four deep, with no scouting parties, on to the rebels’ killing ground. The first volley alone claimed ten young Tommies who, like the rest of their companions, were probably suffering from the effects of seasickness and a sleepless night spent crossing the Irish Sea.
Redmond-Howard has left an unforgettable description of the carnage which in the initial stages merited more the title of Dardanelles than that of Thermopylae:52
Along this road the troops had to pass, and they crouched down in long rows of heads – like great khaki caterpillars – in a most terribly exposed order, so that if the rebel shot failed to hit the first head it was bound to hit the second head, provided the rifle was anywhere in the vertical line. For the most part the soldiers were boys in their early twenties, utterly ignorant of the district, with orders to take the town which was reported in the hands of a body of men whose very name was a mysterious puzzle in communication, and not an enemy in sight, only a mass of spectators up to within fifty yards of them, and directly in front, blocking the street – the rebel enemy meanwhile inside private houses to the right and left of the narrow bridgehead they knew not where.
The first of their killers to turn up for revolutionary duties the previous Easter Monday morning had been Volunteer James Grace. Punctiliously, he arrived at the appointed hour, eleven o’clock, and meeting point, the Catholic University at Earlsforth Terrace, wearing his Volunteer uniform and carrying his Lee Enfield rifle. Being a bank holiday there were very few people about, and none of them interested in revolution. Eventually, the man who was to be the leading actor in the Mount Street drama arrived on his bicycle. This was Captain Michael Malone, a likeable personality and a good shot. Presently Grace and Malone were joined by other Volunteers who stood around unconcernedly like members of a team waiting for the transport to take them to a football match.
By the time the company captain showed up, there were thirty-four Volunteers in all, a fraction of what had been expected; Company Captain Simon Donnelly had only been promoted to that rank a little earlier by Eamon de Valera because the original captain had refused to turn out.
Donnelly led twenty of the men to Boland’s Mill approximately a mile away towards the sea where de Valera was headquartered. Malone and Grace, accompanied by two boys, Paddy Byrne and Michael Rowe, cycled to No. 25 Northumberland Road, which commanded not onl
y the Kingstown Dublin Road, but a good view of Beggars Bush Barracks a couple of hundred yards to the east. Patrick Doyle and three men took over St Stephen’s Parochial Hall, which overlooked both Mount Street Bridge and the Grand Canal, and across the road Denis O’Donoghue and a couple of men occupied the Parochial School. On the Dublin side of the Canal, to the left coming from the city, stood Clanwilliam House which dominated the surrounding streets. George Reynolds and the remaining four members of the party headed for this house.
‘May we come in please?’ enquired Reynolds. Once in, his first instruction was to warn his men to behave as ‘representatives of the Irish Republic’. He ordered them to do as little damage as possible and to respect the inhabitants of the house. Later in the day, having fortified the premises as best he could, Reynolds suggested to one of the two ladies of the house that she gather up her valuables in a suitcase which could be locked away safely. The lady, a Miss Wilson, did as he suggested and Reynolds had one of his men carry the cases to a back bedroom, which was then locked and the key handed over to Miss Wilson. One of the rebels, a seventeen-year-old, had been unnerved by the Georgius Rex slaughter and sat shivering and sweating, incapable of action. He reacted with grateful alacrity when Reynolds suggested to him that he might like to go home for a spell and return later when he felt better. This left Clanwilliam House defended by only four men. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards to the east, Eamon de Valera, at the command post for the Mount Street area, had more men at his disposal, some 120 in all. Unfortunately, he also had a far greater area to cover.
1916- the Easter Rising Page 10