by Anne Clare
Ginnell, as well as being an MP, was also a barrister of the Middle Temple in London and took the unusual step, for a barrister, of also becoming a sort of highwayman and cattle rustler. His method was to watch carefully the movements of the RIC, his sworn enemies, and to enter a field as remote as possible, under cover of darkness, to drive the cattle onto the road. The field was then ploughed, leaving it unfit for grazing, and notices were pinned to the cow’s horns, bearing such messages as:
The land is for the people
and the road is for us.
or
Blessed are the cattle drivers
for they shall inherit the land.
He acquired a committed following, none more keen than Nellie and ‘John’, who became infected with Nellie’s enthusiasm. Both Nellie and ‘John’ also supported Ginnell’s Dublin demonstrations in 1911, joined by their sister Grace, protesting against the visit of Edward VII. In time, after 1916, Ginnell became known at Westminster, with a mixture of toleration and affection, as ‘the member for Ireland’. The Meath designation was not big enough to encompass his activities. During the ensuing struggle between England and Ireland, the pockets in the tails of his regulation parliamentary frock coat became a sort of illicit mailbag, carrying messages to and from imprisoned rebels.[6]
The next Irish figure in the political limelight with whom Nellie and ‘John’ associated, this time actively, was James Larkin, especially on one historic occasion which put Nellie in considerable danger but for which her personal courage is rarely credited. This giant of a man, six feet four inches in height, who had escaped from the Liverpool slums, had a leonine head to crown his stature and a heart that felt a deep, abiding compassion for the exploited manual workers of his day – often unfettered slaves of unscrupulous masters. With the fabled Larkin compassion went an iron will and a modus operandi in which courage and determination were the driving forces. His character was forged in an extremely harsh childhood, and his statue in O’Connell Street has perfectly caught the man. Hands outstretched, a mob orator, he could mould the mood and the actions of huge crowds, captured in the web of his impassioned words. None knew more than he the sour fruits of exploitation. When only seven years of age, he was already working in the slums of Liverpool, to which city his parents had emigrated from Newry. He was apprenticed two years later to a decorator, and at eleven became an engineer’s apprentice. When Larkin was fourteen, his father died, and things got even worse: he had to fight to keep starvation at bay. Caught as a stowaway with ten others on a ship bound for Buenos Aires, they were badly treated by the ship’s captain, who demanded excessive labour and gave them poor food. The young Larkin organised a strike. It was three ‘firsts’ for him: his first strike, his first success (ultimately) and his first imprisonment for his stand. His confinement for one night, in irons, in the ship’s hold, with just a drink of water and a swarm of rats for company, was a remembered nightmare.
Later, in Liverpool, Larkin founded the National Union of Dock Labourers and, back in Ireland in 1909, he tried to instil his courage into the poorest and least skilled of the workers, the dockers. They were already doing strenuous work for ten hours a day, barefoot and barebacked in a hold with dust-polluted air, dodging trolleys which were a danger to life and limb, especially to exhausted men. Their required output was approximately 100 tons of cargo a day, but that was not enough for their employers, and by an unfair system of bonuses their output was hiked to 200 tons a day. Even the strongest tottered at the end of three days, knowing all too well that there were dozens lining the quays to take their place. Added to this, their exploiters entered into an unholy franchise with publicans: the men were paid in the pubs only, where they were required, if they did not want to lose their pitiful jobs, to spend some of this sweated money. In return, the publicans paid a divvy to the bosses. After a day of curses, physical violence and the ever-present fear of losing their precious jobs, all too often the exhausted men spent money on drink which was needed to put bread on the family table.
James Larkin met this exploitation with his own brand of militant, fearless trade unionism. His method, facing the employers in unbending confrontation, using the strike weapon and involving other workers in any given strike, became known as Larkinism. He was a zealot and said himself that he was ‘fighting a holy war’.[7] He was operating in a slumland which was physically rotting at its core. The putrid tenements actually collapsed in places, their decaying walls no longer able to sustain the structure of a roof, maiming, killing and entombing some of their wretched inhabitants.
On 26 August 1913, the tramway workers, whose employer was William Martin Murphy, had gone on strike and had abandoned their trams on the streets. Murphy was reassured by Dublin Castle that the RIC, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and even the British army of occupation would support him in a confrontation with the trade unionists. At a strike meeting in Beresford Place, the DMP arrested Larkin on a charge of ‘seditious conspiracy, of disturbing the peace and raising discontent and hatred among certain classes of His Majesty’s subjects, of inciting hatred and contempt of the government, and of inciting murder’. Though he was released on bail, the magistrate, Swift (a shareholder in Murphy’s Tramway Company), issued a proclamation as the DMP had asked him to, that banned a meeting arranged by Larkin for Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, on 31 August. Typically defiant, Larkin burned the ban and swore that he would speak in Sackville Street as arranged.
During that weekend the Dublin streets saw bloody confrontations and even death. Seán O’Casey, the playwright and a member of the Irish Citizen Army, went to pay his respects to one of the victims, a fellow trade unionist, young James Nolan, as he lay in his coffin. In Drums Under the Window, O’Casey described the scene:
There he was asprawl under a snowy sheet, looking like a mask on a totem pole, one eye gone, the other askew, the nose cracked at the bridge and bent sideways: the forehead and cheek royal purple: from a distance it looked like a fading iris on a wide patch of snow. The mighty baton![8]
On his release from custody, Larkin had taken refuge in the Markievicz residence in Rathmines, a house which was habitually a refuge for the poor, for nationalists and for artistic friends. The Count lived there when he returned from looking after his estates in his native Poland, and, though among his wife’s many friends James Larkin was not a favourite of his. Nevertheless he went along with a scheme to throw the watching authorities off the scent, which enabled Larkin to go to Sackville Street as promised. The Countess gave a big party, allegedly for her husband’s friends to celebrate his return from Poland, and the place was full of lights, laughter and music – not at all a venue where one would expect to find a socialist hideaway. The bohemian revelry was not what the authorities associated with Larkin, so the DMP withdrew.
But there was another problem: how to get the six-foot-four Larkin to the main street of the city and past the watchful DMP. The plan required first that a young student from the College of Science, Gussie McGrath, go to the Imperial Hotel in Sackville Street (opposite the General Post Office and owned by William Martin Murphy), to book a balconied front room for a Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Donnelly, who would be brought there by his niece. The niece was necessary because the reverend clergyman had to be deaf – his Liverpudlian accent would give him away otherwise – and this obliged his ‘niece’ to do all the talking. He would have to stoop to conceal his giveaway height.
Nellie Gifford was chosen to act as the niece because, owing to her absence in Meath, she was unknown to the DMP. The balcony outside the room would be Larkin’s platform. A frock coat belonging to the Count, glasses to shorten his long nose, black hair powdered grey and a grey beard and whiskers completed the disguise. The stage was set. The uncle and his niece arrived in a cab and were admitted to the hotel, Nellie doing the talking.
When Larkin found the window of his room impeded by flowerpots, he flew out and into another room, tearing away at his false beard and whi
skers to the astonishment of hotel guests. The arrangement had been that he was to signal to Nellie when he was ready to speak so that she could slip away. But in the charge to another room he forgot, and the police took her into custody.[9]As Larkin began to address the assembled crowd there was a triumphant roar from the packed street. He had kept his promise, even though he was not allowed to say very much before the DMP stormed his ‘platform’ – but what he said did not matter. What mattered was his moral victory. For her courageous and very necessary part, Nellie Gifford is given little or no credit. At best she is referred to as ‘Miss Gifford, a schoolteacher’. A newspaper cutting among her papers credited ‘Miss Helena Molony’ with her role, and even the excellent Life of James Larkin by Donal Nevin accords her sister, Sidney Gifford, the honour of being the Rev. Donnelly’s ‘niece’.
Cameras recorded the devastation of the scene in Sackville Street. The frenzied police, over 300 of them, wielded their batons indiscriminately. The pictures are reminiscent of those we see of the Russian Revolution and the batoning of nationalists by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at Drumcree in Northern Ireland in 1996. To move was to invite a baton blow. Some lay on the streets, especially in Prince’s Street, which had been blocked. Constance Markievicz was injured by a baton.[10]The hospitals were overcrowded with the injured, both policemen and strikers. That Sunday was international news, and Larkin’s name became a byword worldwide.
William Martin Murphy’s reaction was swift: the following Wednesday, 3 September, he chaired a meeting of some 400 employers who decided to lock out from employment any member of Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. Appalling misery followed. Despite food ships sent by the British Trades Union Congress, and in spite of the efforts of the food kitchen in Liberty Hall, the lock-out by Murphy and his Federated Union of Employers broke the strike. The agonised men had to watch the hunger of their families. Many intellectuals railed against the employers, including Joseph Plunkett, W. B. Yeats, the Sheehy Skeffingtons, Thomas MacDonagh, Pádraig Pearse and George Bernard Shaw. It was the Giffords’ old friend from their teenage debut, George Russell (Æ), who gave voice most strongly in his criticism of the employers. In his famous open letter, he addressed them with cutting vituperation:
You determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the population of this city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives, and the hunger of their children.
We read in the dark ages of the rack and the thumb screw. But these iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men, in dungeons and torture chambers … It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly on starving one hundred thousand people and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride.[11]
The workers, the intellectuals and Larkin lost that battle, but they were not to lose the war that lay ahead. The strike triggered off the formation of two bodies that brought enormous changes to Ireland. Larkin’s sense of nationalism played second fiddle to his deep and abiding pity for the poor – but it surfaced now and then. In his presidential address to the Irish Trade Union conference at City Hall on 1 June 1914, he said, ‘I claim we have the opportunity given us of achieving much in the future of our beloved country, to work and live for, and if needs be die to win back, in the words of Erin’s greatest living poet, for Cathleen Ní Houlihan, her four beautiful fields.’
Larkin left Ireland for America in 1914, but his ‘failed’ general strike had a domino effect on the fate of Cathleen and her fields. To harness the bitter antagonism of the Dublin workers, the Irish Citizen Army was founded on 19 November 1913, initially to protect the workers from the DMP. Jack White, a former officer of the British army and son of Field Marshal Sir George White, trained and drilled this new Irish ‘army’ of two companies, 500 men and inadequate weaponry, whose aims, defensive or otherwise, were both socialist and republican. Its membership dwindled gradually as want increased and the desperate men went back to work, but Larkin, with James Connolly’s committed support, was determined that it should not be allowed to die. It acquired a constitution and a flag: ‘The Plough and The Stars’. A successful recruiting drive brought in new members, including Countess Markievicz.
As a result of her part in the Imperial Hotel drama, Nellie Gifford was dismissed from her post in County Meath. She had always intimated that a certain amount of ‘pull’ (Protestant and unionist) had got her the job, and these two categories now quickly rejected her.[12] She came back to Dublin, and, not long afterwards, this daughter of the Ascendancy class in Ireland donned the uniform of the Citizen Army and stepped out with the dockers and labourers of Dublin. Nellie was the only one of the Temple Villas sisters to join what was an armed force of the Irish Ireland movement, though she was seen as a ‘field cook’, rather than a soldier. Her mother’s thoughts on the matter may well be imagined.
Notes
[1]Nora Connolly O’Brien, Portrait of a Rebel Father, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1935, p. 119.
[2]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 46; NGDPs.
[3]Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925.
[4]NGDPs.
[5]Ibid.
[6]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, pp. 38–39.
[7]James Larkin, address to enquiry chaired by Sir George Asquith, Dublin Castle, 5 October 1913.
[8]Sean O’Casey, Drums Under the Window, London: Macmillan, 1945.
[9]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, pp. 61–62.
[10]Ibid., p. 63.
[11]George Russell (Æ), ‘Open Letter to the Dublin Employers’, The Irish Times, 7 October 1913.
[12]NGDPs.
9 - Introductions
It is the way of things that as young people who share a common dream meet each other, many romances will result. Such was the case with the Irish Ireland movement. Moreover, there can have been no pre-revolutionary country where women played a greater part than Ireland in those years. So it was hardly surprising that two of the Gifford daughters found romance through the movement.
Pádraig Pearse had acquired for his boarding school a fine old building standing on its own grounds, Cullenswood House on Oakley Road, Ranelagh, and invited Nora Dryhurst to a celebratory open day in 1911. Poets and writers knew Mrs Dryhurst well and had often availed of her kindness and hospitality. She had taken Ernest Gifford’s sisters under her wing and brought Muriel, Grace and ‘John’ along for the occasion. It was a lovely summer’s afternoon, and Mrs Dryhurst and the three girls were greeted on the steps by Pádraig and Willie Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett. ‘Now I want you to fall in love with these girls and marry them’ was her humorous introduction.[1] Two of the men obliged her: Thomas married Muriel, and Joseph married Grace – a good score for a matchmaker. It was typical of MacDonagh’s ease of manner that he came down to the sisters, arms outstretched, and said it would be difficult to choose in such company.[2] Gracious it was, but tongue-in-cheek, because very soon he was a kilted visitor to Temple Villas, courting Muriel and scandalising the West British neighbourhood with his traditional Gaelic dress.
In fact, his choice was immediate and mutual, though Muriel was not his first love. The legendary MacDonagh charm had not been in cold storage up to then, and the young ladies he escorted were a great source of interest for his pupils at St Enda’s. One such lady, fleetingly mentioned, was called Veronica. A name that stayed the course a good deal longer belonged to Mary Maguire. Mary had been at boarding school at the Sacred Heart Convent at Blumenthal in Holland, along with Rose Fitzgerald, who married Joseph Kennedy and gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Mary’s career was less dramatic. She became headmistress of St Ita’s (established as an equivalent girls’ school when Pearse moved his boys to Rathfarnham) and married Padraic Colum the poet, a friend of MacDonagh and Pearse.
The pupils sensed more than a passing affair when this red-haired young lady appeared on the scene. Muriel Giff
ord, who had also had a previous, mild romantic attachment, was described poetically in an article of 1917 in The Monitor as fairly tall with a roseleaf complexion, dark eyes and masses of Titian hair, coiled in plaits and held in place by a bandeau. The Romeo of these tragic lovers was of average height, had dark, crisp hair, grey eyes and great personal charisma, which was eventually to charm Isabella, despite his Catholicism, his politics and even despite his kilt and matching brat (a traditional short cloak) and Tara brooch. But then this was an aspiring professor coming to court her daughter. Besides, it became obvious that the two families had much in common. Both matresfamilias came from Protestant backgrounds, though Thomas’ mother, Mary Parker, had converted to Catholicism when she was still in her teens, before she met Joe MacDonagh. The children of both households ‘published’ a family bulletin, and, like the Giffords, the MacDonagh offspring also staged plays. Another parallel was that two of Thomas’ brothers joined the British army. Furthermore, Thomas had spent some time abroad studying art, and – an odd little likeness – he, like Bridget Hamill, was given to quoting St Columcille.
There was also, however, much that was utterly dissimilar in their upbringing. Mary MacDonagh, though a daughter of an immigrant compositor of Greek at the Trinity College Press, taught her Cloughjordan students Irish songs – with an eye out for the inspector, of course, whose appearance would cut short such un-English activity which was enough to merit a reprimand or even dismissal. When the MacDonagh parents moved to Cloughjordan in County Tipperary they were the first Catholics ever to teach there and, even more extraordinarily, young men (some of them moustached) from their previous posting followed the MacDonaghs to complete their national-school education during the winter months. They financed themselves with summer jobs and had their lunch, not in the school yard with the children, but across the way in Bowles, a pub where they could have a pint and a sandwich. Such was the need and greed for education among those who had been denied it for so long.[3] There is one thing certain – the anglicising jingle proposed by Britain for the schools it financed in Ireland would not have been given the breath of life in the school run by Joe and Mary MacDonagh. It ran: