1916

by Gabriel Doherty

  Throughout Wednesday and Thursday Butterfield and Cohalan continued to negotiate with Captain Dickie until an agreement was eventually reached. The Volunteers would hand up their arms to the lord mayor on the following Monday for safekeeping, and in return no action would be taken against them.

  On Friday Butterfield and Cohalan returned to the Volunteer Hall and put these terms to MacCurtain, together with a threat from Dickie that the Volunteer Hall would be shelled if he refused to accept them. MacCurtain agreed in principle but sought clarification on the following questions: would the matter be kept out of the newspapers; would the arms handed-in be returned to the Volunteers once the crisis was over; would the RIC cease harassing his men; and would MacCurtain and MacSwiney be permitted to visit Volunteer units in Limerick and Kerry to inform them of the situation in Cork and recommend acceptance of similar terms?

  These queries were transmitted to General Stafford and later that night Captain Dickie met with Bishop Cohalan at his residence and informed him that as far as the GOC was concerned the arms would be returned once the crisis had passed – but he couldn’t speak for parliament or the civil authority. He also stated that the GOC would use his influence to curb the activities of the RIC and to ensure that the terms of the agreement were kept out of the press. He would also issue the travel permits requested by MacCurtain and if these terms were accepted he would agree to a general amnesty for all the Volunteers in his area other than those found in treasonable correspondence with the enemy.34

  Satisfied with this news Butterfield, accompanied by Captain Dickie, returned to the Volunteer Hall at around 2am on Saturday morning, and met MacCurtain, MacSwiney, and Seán O’Sullivan. The five of them sat around the fire in deep discussion until 5am, when the following terms were agreed:

  Having spent the night without sleep agonising over the decisions they had taken, MacCurtain and MacSwiney departed for Limerick and Kerry on the 8am train, unaware that their comrades in Dublin were on the verge of surrender, or that the Cork Constitution was carrying a report which stated: ‘The Cork Sinn Féiners have handed up their rifles to the police.’36 This was a flagrant breach of the terms agreed just hours before and caused considerable unrest amongst the Volunteers in the city. The situation was made worse later on Saturday night when Captain Dickie arrived at Volunteer Hall to see MacCurtain on his return from Limerick, and demanded that all arms now be handed up by midnight on Sunday, rather than on Monday as previously agreed. MacCurtain was incensed by this demand and Dickie’s failure to keep the matter out of the newspapers. The following morning (Sunday 30 April), accompanied by MacSwiney, he again met with the bishop and lord mayor, and informed them that under the current circumstances he could not possibly ask his men to hand over their arms. After lengthy debate Cohalan eventually persuaded the brigade commander to put the matter before a general meeting of the Volunteers at 8pm on Monday, at which time both he and the lord mayor would also address them. Butterfield then wrote to Dickie outlining explaining the Volunteer’s and suggesting a meeting at noon the following day.

  While all of these discussions were taking place the Cork Brigade did actually manage to take some offensive military action – but without either MacCurtain’s approval or knowledge. On Sunday, 30 April, a small party of Volunteers apprehended, searched and threatened Sergeant Crean of the RIC barracks at Ballinadee in west Cork. They then moved on and cut the telegraph wires between Clonakilty and the war signal station at Galley Head.37 Clearly these Volunteers wanted to make some contribution to the Rising, but by then it was far too late.

  Unknown to them, however, their very limited action probably did have an impact, because when Captain Dickie met with Butterfield and Cohalan in the City Club at noon the following day (Monday, 1 May), his manner was far from conciliatory. In fact he delivered the following ultimatum:

  The agreement between the Asst. Bishop of Cork, the Lord Mayor of Cork, the Cork City Branch of Irish Volunteers, and the General Commanding in the South of Ireland, has not been complied with as agreed on, and the General can no longer hold himself bound by the concessions agreed on. If however, all arms, ammunition and explosives of any kind in the possession of any member of that body be handed over by them to the custody of the Lord Mayor of Cork, before 8pm, on this date, the General will make every effort to ensure that the concessions agreed on will be carried out. He cannot guarantee this, as the matter now rests with the Commander in Chief, Ireland. In the event of arms not being handed over as agreed, it will be the General’s duty to consider all concerned as offering opposition to H.M. Forces and they will be dealt with accordingly as rebels in arms against the Crown.

  Signed at Cork at noon, on May 1, 1916, on behalf of the General Officer Commanding the South Irish Area.

  F.W. Dickie

  Captain, ADC and Intelligence Officer, General Staff.38

  Later that afternoon Cohalan received a phone call from Dickie confirming that all guarantees previously given by the British authorities were now withdrawn. When the bishop protested vehemently at this development Dickie assured him that although the formal guarantees were withdrawn, the arrangements agreed to would go through and it was on this basis that the bishop and the lord mayor went to speak to the rank and file Volunteers that night.39

  Some 140 Volunteers had gathered in the hall and they heard Butterfield and Cohalan urge them to accept the terms of the agreement and hand up their weapons. In the subsequent ballot 90 per cent of those present voted in favour of the agreement and once the meeting was over some of these Volunteers immediately marched down to the lord mayor’s home at 68 South Mall and handed in their guns. Those who disagreed with this decision were adamant that the British would again renege on their commitments, with Second Lieut. Donal Óg O’Callaghan, B Company, Cork City Battalion, declaring: ‘There will be treachery. The leopard does not change his spots.’40 Accordingly, they either retained their arms at secret locations around the city or, in a final act of defiance, removed the firing pins to render the weapons unserviceable. From MacCurtain’s perspective the week-long crisis had now been brought to an end without bloodshed; the Cork Brigade remained intact; he genuinely expected the British authorities to honour the terms of the agreement; and all things considered he was convinced he had taken the correct course of action.

  However, the agreement lasted a mere twenty four hours because on the morning of Tuesday, 2 May, the homes of known Volunteers across the city were raided with MacCurtain, his brother Seán, and nine others arrested and incarcerated in the county gaol.41 The lord mayor later managed to negotiate MacCurtain’s release but it was abundantly clear that the agreement was not worth the paper upon which it was written.

  THOMAS KENT

  On that same day the last major incident of the Easter Rising occurred, not in Dublin or in Cork city, but at a farmhouse owned by the Kent family at Bawnard, Castlelyons, County Cork. A party of RIC had been dispatched to arrest the Kent brothers – Thomas, David, Richard, and William – as part of the ongoing nationwide round-up of known Volunteers. They were not expecting any violent resistance but that was precisely what they encountered. When called upon to surrender the brothers refused and a gun battle erupted that lasted three hours and only came to an end when David was wounded and all of their ammunition had been expended.

  During the fighting Head Constable Rowe had been shot and killed. In reprisal the RIC now decided to summarily execute all four brothers. This was stopped when a British army officer intervened, but when Richard Kent then attempted to escape he was shot and seriously wounded.

  The two wounded brothers were taken to the military hospital in Fermoy, but Thomas and William were moved to Cork and incarcerated in the Military Detention Barracks.42 When they were court martialled on 4 May William was acquitted, but Thomas was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad in the exercise yard of the barracks at dawn on 9 May.

  The circumstances of that court martial, however, the qualit
y and quantity of the evidence produced, the speed with which the entire proceedings were conducted, and the legality of the sentence imposed raised a number of serious issues. In the first instance, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed by parliament on 8 August 1914, vested extraordinary powers in the hands of the military. Thus when Kent appeared in Victoria Barracks to be charged he found himself standing not before a judge and jury but rather a field general court martial. He was then charged with contravening the Act:

  In that he took part in an armed rebellion and in waging war against His Majesty the King, such act being prejudicial to the Defence of the Realm and being done with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy.43

  When proceedings got underway he found himself faced with a raft of evidence presented by the policemen and soldiers who had been involved in the gun battle – none of which, however connected Kent to the death of Head Constable Rowe or proved that he had even fired a single shot. Unrepresented by counsel he asked only nine questions in cross-examination, offered a mere seventy one words in a rebuttal statement, and was not permitted to call witnesses to speak on his behalf.

  It was also clear that none of the Kent brothers had been involved in what by any stretch of the imagination could be called an armed rebellion. They had neither heard of nor seen the Proclamation of the Republic, and they were certainly not waging a war or assisting the enemy (in this case Germany). In fact the events of Easter Week had completely passed them by. By the time they were arrested Pearse had surrendered in Dublin and MacCurtain had negotiated the agreement in Cork. Therefore if the Kents were ‘guilty’ of anything it was nothing more than following MacNeill’s order of 19 April (cited above) to prevent themselves from being forcibly disarmed – which in this context might have amounted at most to causing an affray or engaging in violent disorder. Accordingly, the charge as presented against Thomas Kent made no sense whatever, especially given that his brother William was acquitted and both of them had been in the same place at the same time in exactly the same circumstances. This begs the question why one was found guilty and one was not – and the answer is obvious.

  In the summer of 1915 Thomas Kent had become closely involved with Terrence MacSwiney in arranging public meetings to attract new Volunteers. He was also well known to the RIC, having disrupted a number of British army recruitment meetings, and by Easter 1916 he had become a commandant in the Galtee Battalion. Aged fifty one, he was sentenced to death on 4 May 1916, not for his actions at Bawnard, because there is no evidence in his court martial documentation to suggest that he did anything except surrender. He was sentenced to death because of who he was and because of the leadership position he held within the Volunteer movement. In Dublin General Maxwell wanted to make an example of the Volunteer leadership and Thomas Kent was another convenient scapegoat.44 He paid for Maxwell’s policy with his life, but the charges against him remain unproven. Thomas Kent was not guilty as charged at his court martial and the documentary evidence that survives leaves this matter in no doubt whatsoever.

  INCARCERATION

  The death of Thomas Kent was not the end of the matter. While he was being court martialled large numbers of Volunteers were being rounded up and also locked behind bars in the Detention Barracks. In fact most of them were woken from their sleep on the morning of 9 May by the volley of shots that terminated Kent’s life. Captain Michael Leahy, the officer commanding the Cobh Company, later recalled that in an effort to find out where he and other officers from his unit had hidden their weapons:

  We were told the same fate [as Kent’s] would be ours. Another argument that was used to get us to give up our rifles was telling us that the Cork men had given up theirs and that none of them had been arrested. Why should we hold out? … [However] we continued to refuse to give any information.45

  In fact Crown forces had been busy arresting Volunteers all over Cork city and county since 2 May, and although MacCurtain remained at large he was powerless to intervene. He later recalled the anguish of seeing his fellow Volunteers being taken into custody and not being able to do anything about it:

  It was a wretched business that week to be looking at them and hundreds of boys arrested by them. Often I said to myself that it was a great pity that I myself had not been kept in jail when I was there instead of looking at those fine men tied up by them and being brought from every part of the country.46

  Eventually MacCurtain was also apprehended when, at 7.15pm on the evening of 11 May, the RIC raided his home at 40 Thomas Davis Street and re-arrested him:

  Siobhan, my wife’s sister, started to cry when I was leaving the house but Eilís (my wife) did not say a word. She did not want to put any trouble on me along with what I had already and she told me to have courage. This was a great help to me. I kissed Siobhan and Síle and Tomas Óg who was in the cot and went with the peelers … I was put in the Detention Barracks … I was searched and everything I had was taken from me except for the copy of the Imitation of Christ that I had in English, it was a very small little book and a great comfort to me – I was put into the cell … Eilís gave me a glass of milk before I left the house and I was not hungry … After all the work I was very tired … I put the board on the floor of my cell and went to sleep.47

  The following morning he got his first real taste of prison life when a bell awoke him at 6am in order that he and the other prisoners could wash themselves before breakfast and commencement of the daily routine:

  I was given a mug of some stuff at 8 o’clock and a piece of bread – I think the drink was a mixture of chocolate and cocoa – immediately I had that breakfast eaten a solder came to the door to me and said ‘Do not be afraid of anyone here but raise your head and look them between the two eyes.’ That encouraged me and lifted the spirit in me and I did so … We were all let out in the air from 11 to 12 o’clock and a guard of soldiers around us. We would be walking around after one another – about six feet apart and we would not be allowed to say a word to one another. We got a dinner which was not too bad altogether and what we got for breakfast we got again in the evening for supper. We had another ‘in the air’ between four and five o’clock … it was in the yard in which we used to walk that Tomás Ceannt was buried after he was shot.48

  By now 140 members of the Cork Brigade were incarcerated in the Detention Barracks where they remained in complete ignorance of their fate for three weeks.

  Then, on the evening of 21 May, they were told to be ‘ready for road’ the following morning. At 7.30am the Volunteers of the Cork Brigade, together with men from other units who had been locked up in Cork, were all handcuffed together in pairs and marched off under military escort to the Great Southern and Western Railway station on the Lower Glanmire Road. They whistled and sang as they marched down Military Hill, through St Luke’s Cross, and down Grattan Hill to the station where a large crowd of terrified relatives and friends had gathered. Amid chaotic scenes of anguish and distress the military escort would not permit any contact between the Volunteers and their families and instead herded the captives on board a train bound for Dublin where they were detained in Richmond Barracks.

  At this stage fifteen rebel leaders had been executed and a public outcry had begun to reverberate throughout the country. Afraid of alienating the nationalist population of Ireland and aware of pubic opinion in America, the British government decided to stop the executions and intern the rebels in Britain instead. MacCurtain and many of the men under his command left Richmond Barracks on 1 June and, as a sign of the shift in public opinion that was then taking place, they were cheered as they marched through the streets of Dublin to board a cattle ship at the North Wall that would take them into exile.

  Upon arrival in Britain they were divided into two groups – one being sent to Wakefield Detention Barracks and the other to Knutsford prison. Later that month MacCurtain, MacSwiney and a number of other Cork Volunteers from both locations were transferred to an interment camp in north Wales at a place called
Frongoch.49 It was here, in a rat-infested former distillery, which until recently had been used to house German prisoners of war, that the Irish internees established their ‘university of revolution’, with classes soon commencing in Irish history, language and culture. More importantly, it was here that the Volunteers from the Cork Brigade came together with people like Michael Collins, and began a detailed analysis of the failure of the rebellion.

  On 11 July MacCurtain was transferred to Reading gaol, where he remained haunted by what had happened and by the perception of his own personal failure. After many long, lonely hours of deliberation he finally reached a conclusion and confided it to his diary:

  it is nearly five months ago now and it is many a turn I have had since, and my judgement in the matter is that we could not have done otherwise than we did.50

  Nevertheless, the failure of the Cork Brigade of Irish Volunteers to take part in the Easter Rising continued to be the cause of much concern at local and national level. Donal Óg O’Callagahan’s statement that the brigade had been led by ‘three incompetent men in a state of blue funk’ represented the view of a militant minority in Cork, while a general concern remained amongst the surviving leaders of both the IRB and Irish Volunteers.51 Accordingly, after the Volunteers returned to Ireland in 1917, MacCurtain and other senior brigade officers requested Volunteer headquarters to hold an inquiry into their activities during Easter Week.52