Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  Though Nellie lost her job as a result of her involvement with Larkin’s Bloody Sunday, she was never a lady to sit around doing nothing and was soon immersed in a very different sphere of the movement. Her role in helping Larkin to keep his promise to address the workers in Sackville Street had been carried out fearlessly and effectively. Her next involvement with the movement, however, came from her own initiative and that of her friends Helena Molony (also a member of the Citizen Army) and Máire Perolz.

  From 1914 on, both in England and in Ireland, conscription was the word of the day. Anti-conscriptionism, even in the earlier Boer War, had been very much a feature of Irish nationalism. The Boers had been making a determined fight, but British recruiting sergeants scoured Irish towns and villages to lure Irishmen into their army. Anti-recruitment propaganda declared that obstruction of this recruitment was for Ireland’s honour and a help to the Boers struggling against their common enemy. Inghínidhe na hÉireann had been active anti-recruitment workers, and some lady enthusiasts even went into pubs (not socially acceptable at that time) and, under the watchful antagonism of the recruiting sergeant, handed out anti-recruitment literature.

  The Great War, however, needed far more recruits than the war against the Boer farmers. Nellie Gifford, remembering all the lost Anglo-Irish friends and relatives of her tender years who had fought Britain’s battles abroad, sometimes with fatal results, entered the anti-recruitment arena with fervour. To use her own words: ‘I, so to speak, “took fire” and made plans in my mind to avert this horror for Ireland.’[2] Nellie may have been attracted to James Connolly’s ‘army’ because of her admiration for Countess Markievicz and her experiences of the abjectness of Dublin’s poor at St Audeon’s, but there was also the moral divide between an army of aggression and one seeking freedom.

  One Sunday she arranged to meet Helena Molony and Máire Perolz outside Liberty Hall. They had been invited to the Reddin house on the north side of Dublin, one of whose sons was a student at Pádraig Pearse’s School, St Enda’s. It was a house set in fields and boasted a small theatre for entertainment. A banquet would round off the evening. All the guests were going to be very much in favour of an Irish Ireland.

  Before they started out, however, Nellie, who had been too busy on anti-recruitment work to see the daily papers, asked the others for news about the feared conscription for Ireland. ‘It’s all right,’ she was told, ‘we’re not called.’ She was pleased and bought a paper to read the good news, but the wording of the report worried her: Ireland was excluded – but what about Irishmen living in Britain? Helena Molony suggested that the only way to deal with that was to have an Irish MP ask a question in the House of Commons. The parliament, however, sat on Tuesday, in two days’ time. The Irish MPs had already left for England – all but one, Alfie Byrne. Nellie insisted that they should contact him; his home was quite near Amiens Street Station (now Connolly Station), just around the corner from Liberty Hall.

  They found Alfie had left to visit a friend before taking the boat for Holyhead. Undaunted, the three ladies set out for his friend’s house. There they learned that he had gone on to another house, and they just missed him there too. They decided to go back to his home and wait. The MP himself answered the door. At first he thought they were on feminist business (to which he also gave his support), but when they put their plan to him he immediately agreed and on the Tuesday asked, in the House of Commons, if conscription applied to Irishmen living in Britain. Asking the question, recorded in Hansard, was enough. It was a signal for an influx of Irishmen from all over Britain back to Ireland.

  Some of the men who returned found jobs through Nellie Gifford’s employment agency, which was her next move in opposing recruitment for the British army, and among them was Michael Collins.[3] There were three faces to the ubiquitous recruiting drives in Ireland: the trams and several public places were plastered with posters of brave Irishmen wearing khaki and going off to fight for ‘poor little Catholic Belgium’; there was ‘the gallantry of the Irish’ – propaganda which deceived few and irritated many; and there were also the wives of those serving in the British army who were not going to rock the boat that provided them with a welcome income. Added to all this there were the employers – the vast majority of them Anglo-Irish – who actually had leaflets printed after any unsuccessful recruiting drive. The wording was brief: ‘Your country needs you; we don’t.’[4] The message was clear: if their employees did not enlist, they were to be made unemployed and their jobs could easily be filled by older men.

  Nellie decided she would seek refuge for those who were dismissed and perhaps get them some work among her many friends in County Meath. She set off with Máire Perolz to visit the shops where the employers’ leaflets had been given out and took the names and addresses of the victims from sympathetic colleagues. In return, she gave them her own address at Temple Villas as a point of contact. Her enterprise proved, understandably, to be too intrusive for her parents, apart altogether from the ideological gaps existing between them, with sons in the armed forces and daughters who were proving to be rather in the nature of loose cannons. When Nellie lost the Temple Villas facility, Countess Markievicz stepped into the breach and offered a room at the top floor of 6 Harcourt Terrace where the work could be carried out.

  The whole undertaking, however, was becoming more complex than finding shelter and work for dismissed young men. Shelter certainly was required in cases where fired apprentices had been housed over shops as part of their remuneration and also where those who had been made unemployed could not afford to rent. Some of the men who had come back from England and who were occasionally, and apparently unjustifiably, being questioned and even arrested by hostile DMP, were obviously Volunteer material.

  Finally, Nellie’s brother-in-law, Thomas MacDonagh, put it to a meeting of the Volunteers that she be given a room at its headquarters at 2 Dawson Street, an upstairs back room which had a comforting fire, table and chairs and a blackboard. She contributed a lawyer’s tin box for documents, a ledger and an exercise book (the last two are still extant). She provided her own packed lunch, and, though the work was purely voluntary, she kept strict office hours. Because a detective from Dublin Castle constantly stood guard at the street door, watching those who crossed its threshold, she legitimised her business by calling it the Employment Bureau, which indeed it was. Dubliners make their own of any language. Their nonchalant rendering of the French language knows such gems as bone chewer (bonjour) and a Jew (adieu). So Nellie’s bureau became the burrow and even the burra.

  She had to be careful, and some of the names and addresses were written deliberately in erasable pencil. She had a code for names and job descriptions, but it is not very obvious, unless those recommended had their sponsor’s name inserted. These were well-known republican names such as Pearse, Plunkett, Mellows and J. J. Walsh. What is quite clear, however, is that the skills going a-begging were manifold and included housepainter, watchmaker, porter, van driver, grocer, draughtsman, cabinet-maker, law clerk, bookkeeper, chemistry student, gardener and coremaker (a brass foundry craftsman). The addresses, mostly in Dublin, range from Kilmore Cottages in Artane to inner-city areas such as Emerald Street, Sherrard Street and Charlemont Street. Advertisements for clients and jobs were put in the papers, but most of the men came through Volunteer referral because those answering advertisements might be spies.

  In her ledger, Nellie recorded her first impression of Michael Collins, who had come back from London and was seeking a job at her agency: ‘A tall, loose-limbed young man, very much at home with himself. He gave me his reference and answered the routine questions.’[5]Joseph Plunkett, no longer with time enough to manage the family estate because of his involvement with the Volunteers, had turned to the good efforts of Nellie’s ‘Burra’, and she recommended Collins to be his assistant:

  Joseph came in his motor car – one of the first in Dublin. He had a lot of gaiety and a tremendous amount of vitality, so he breezed in, quite
confident that out of the young men who sat around every day waiting, I would find someone to do the secretarial work he required.

  Collins, on the other hand, was dour. Nellie’s comment was that a stranger looking on might well think that Joseph was seeking the job and that Collins had the giving of it. She introduced Joseph and Michael Collins, watched them have a hurried chat, and they left together. The vacancy was filled.[6]

  ‘The Burra’ handled hundreds of cases, and acted as a meeting place for new arrivals, satisfied employers and employees. It also served as a recruiting mechanism for membership of the Irish Volunteers. It was both the brainchild and success of Nellie Gifford, a member of the Irish Citizen Army who lived in Anglo-Irish unionist Rathmines, a fact that is rarely, if ever, mentioned in accounts of the period.

  Notes

  [1]NGDPs.

  [2]Ibid.

  [3]Ibid.

  [4]Ibid.

  [5]Ibid.

  [6]Ibid.

  13 - Her Exiled Gifford Children

  In his proclamation of Ireland’s independence, Pádraig Pearse was to speak not only on behalf of her ‘dead’ generations but also of ‘her exiled children in America’. Like flocks of birds seeking better feeding grounds, they had taken flight to America from the seventeenth century on, each century’s quota increasing with the advent of persecutions, famine and dire economic need. It was none of these factors, however, that motivated six of the Gifford family to sail there; being members of the Protestant ruling class, they were fairly sure of a decent livelihood at home. Whatever it was that moved them, there was a distinct dichotomy between the approach of the brothers Liebert, Edward Cecil and Gabriel and that of their sisters, Ada, ‘John’ and Nellie. The first two brothers were absorbed into army and navy careers, while Gabriel quickly blended into the heterogeneous American social and artistic milieux. Not so his sisters. They not only entered Irish-American society, but took part in it and initiated some of its most anti-British activities.

  The Irish-American enclave had, for centuries, experienced from the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) the same bitter discrimination as at home. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ frequently accompanied advertisements for jobs, but the brute labour required for opening up the vast continent by canal, rail and road needed spade work, and the masters of these huge enterprises were forced to employ both Irish and Chinese workers, as well as the more acceptable Scots and Welsh.

  Gradually, the Irish immigrants began to improve their lot, unconsciously forming ghetto-like supportive groups, often under their parish priests. From the very beginning, they saw education and politics as the twin saviours of their degraded status. The hedge schools and the Penal Laws had taught them lessons.

  When you list the Irish insurrectionists who visited America you have a Who’s Who of Irish history: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians (Devoy, O’Donovan Rossa and John Boyle O’Reilly), the New Departure disciples (Parnell, Davitt and Dillon), Labour personalities (Connolly and Larkin), the Irish Ireland insurrectionists (Casement, Pearse, Plunkett, Griffith, Collins and de Valera). They went in a steady stream, and they received warm welcomes and a great deal of money. Parnell and Dillon were invited to address Congress and were seen off by the Irish-American 69th Infantry Regiment. The American Land League was founded, and by June 1881, 12,000 branches had been formed and £100,000 sent to the Land League in Ireland.[1]

  However, despite the help of Irish-American immigrants, Ada, ‘John’ and (later) Nellie Gifford had to contend with two impediments in their American endeavours. One was the fact that the very determined anti-Irish faction was trying, from 1914 on, to lure America into the First World War; the other was the dictatorial, anti-feminist leadership of Clan na Gael, particularly in the person of the old Fenian, John Devoy.

  It was ironic that Isabella’s three daughters experienced such hostility from the race to which their mother always claimed allegiance. The blessed, socially accepted ones in America embodied not only English emigrants but also their Welsh and Scottish neighbours. It was the natives of the neighbouring island, the fractious Irish, who were the undesirables, along with Blacks, Jews, Hispanics and other reviled peoples. Even more unacceptable to ‘John’ and Nellie was the disinterest, and even opposition, of Clan na Gael, which still embraced the old Fenian and IRB mores: armed insurrection to oust Britain forever from Ireland; social matters would then take care of themselves.

  No more than Parnell, who treated his sister Anna’s very successful solution to evictions with such overt disinterest and even contempt, so John Devoy saw women as wives, mothers and daughters, bakers of bread and laundresses of linen, not as shapers of politics nor its institutions. The old independent Gaelic queen from the west of Ireland, Gráinne Ó Mháille, would have given John Devoy nightmares. He had no idea of how, in Ireland, women were contributing to the movement. He had none of the pro-feminism of Griffith, Clarke or Connolly. Even Pearse and de Valera would not have patronised women emissaries as some of the old Clan na Gael leaders did.

  The Gifford migration to America might be partly explained by the fact that their maternal ancestors, the Huguenot Bissets, had settled there. There was also the fact that they received family help in migrating: Ada had her passage paid out of Nellie’s earnings as a domestic-science instructress, and when Gabriel had flown the maternal coop for America in 1915, his father had given him financial help.[2]

  There is no suggestion anywhere that the Gifford men took any interest in Irish Ireland, either at home or abroad. Neither is there any indication that they had anything to do with the pro-British vigilantes. Gabriel became immersed in earning his artistic livelihood, in wooing and marrying his adored American wife, whom he met in the not unlikely Gifford ambience of amateur dramatics, and, later, in rearing lovingly their only child, Geraldine.

  With Ada it was different, though she too settled well in America and kept in touch with her family intermittently. An early family story sets her in a neighbourhood in New York where dark-haired, olive-skinned children from southern Italy were fascinated by her golden-red hair. On one occasion they actually staked out her lodgings to see if the colour in this Irish lady’s hair would wash out in the rinsing basin.[3]Apart from her artistic output – and family opinion placed her artistically very high – Ada had the distinction of being the first self-appointed woman spy engaged in working for the Irish-Ireland movement, a not-altogether-surprising activity for one whose independence of spirit had once expressed itself in the defiant drowning of two childhood hats. This most wayward of Isabella’s daughters decided to spy for Irish Ireland and approached on her own initiative the vigilantes – anglophiles whose particular mission was to hinder any sympathy for the Irish-Ireland movement in America.

  To appreciate her courage in taking on these men, it must be remembered that Dublin Castle was like a huge spider, spreading its webs not only over Ireland but over Europe and America as well. Claude Dansey, one of their master spies and arguably the most ruthless, saw killing as part of his job.[4] There is no doubt that Ada Gifford, in her own amateur spying for the Irish cause, was swimming in shark-infested waters. Her name, religion and accent were her protection. This Protestant lady was no mass-going Bridget Murphy with an Irish brogue, so it was easy enough for her to pass herself off as pro-British and to ingratiate herself into the American Vigilantes, set up by an Englishman named Moffat and comprising English expatriates. When Ada presented herself for membership, she coined a name for a non-existent club to which she alleged she had belonged – the Betsy Ross Club – a very Daughters-of-America sort of name. On top of that, her own name, religion and accent were enough. She became an accepted member of the American Vigilantes.

  A chief ploy of theirs was to insinuate that the Irish were German spies and to send gangs to break up Irish meetings. Ada was able to warn Clan na Gael when its meetings were to be attacked and was successful until her cover was blown when she was spotted in the company of known Mellows adherents
and her career as a spy abruptly terminated. In a postcard photograph she sent to her mother at this time, bearing the words ‘Greetings – hoping to hear from you soon’, she looks like a young Mata Hari, dressed very stylishly in velvet coat, hat and fur stole and muff, trimmed with a bunch of violets. Was the picture saying, perhaps, ‘Look Mother, your wild one has done well’? Isabella might have had a stroke had she known exactly what her wild one was up to.

  When ‘John’ arrived in America in June 1914, her sister Ada was there to welcome her. She gave as her reason for going – against the advice of Thomas Clarke – that she wanted to acquire experience of American journalism, but travel was a natural eventuality for someone of her temperament. She did not return to Ireland for eight years, and during her time in America she married an émigré Hungarian lawyer, Arpad Czira, when they were both twenty-seven, and bore him a son in 1917 whom she called Finian, true to her Irish-Ireland sentiments.[5]

  One of her first calls on her arrival in New York was to the offices of the Gaelic American, of which Devoy was editor, bearing a letter of introduction and recommendation from his close friend Thomas Clarke. ‘John’ was used to the men in the Volunteers accepting women as part of the movement: Inghínidhe na hÉireann, Cumann na mBan, its paper The Bean, Countess Markievicz’s Fianna, her sister Nellie’s part in Larkin’s appearance in Sackville Street, Nellie’s and Helena Molony’s membership of the Citizen Army, Maud Gonne’s enthusiasm, Arthur Griffith’s acceptance of women’s role in journalism, her sister Grace’s contributions to The Irish Review, Alfie Byrne’s willingness to support women’s franchise: this was the pro-feminist atmosphere in which ‘John’ had matured politically. Instead of this accustomed good fellowship, however, Devoy treated her, in her own words, like ‘a benevolent uncle who, to humour an impetuous child, pretends to ponder solemnly over her foolish chatter’.[6]‘John’ referred to her articles which had been published at home, in both Sinn Féin and Irish Freedom. She offered her services to Devoy, on a purely voluntary basis, to promote Irish propaganda in the USA. He offered nothing, and she left his office, which she had entered enthusiastically and with high hopes, deeply disappointed.