Unlikely Rebels

by Anne Clare

  However, The New York Sun, whose editor was a woman, printed ‘John’s’ submitted articles, and she began to feel more confident that she would be able to earn her living and help Ireland in the ways she had promised her friends at home. After England had declared war on Germany, in August 1914, the arrival of two of those friends, Padraic Colum and his wife Mary, meant that things began to look up for ‘John’. The Colums were popular and well known in American literary circles, and ‘John’ was soon meeting distinguished writers and artists, many of them with an interest in Ireland. Three chief topics of interest emerged: the vicious spread of anti-Irish slander from such groups as the American Vigilantes, the case against conscription for both Ireland and America in the First World War and, of course, the great surge towards Irish independence. Colum was parodying Burke’s Peerage one evening, in an assumed upper-class English accent, when a deceived American, taking Colum for a member of the House of Lords, spoke rapturously of King Arthur and his Knights. Colum debunked his adulation so effectively that, to use ‘John’s’ description: ‘You could hear coronets rattling to the ground as he revealed how this commoner had got his title as a reward for political jobbery, that one for paying a royal prince’s gambling debts, and others for their dark deeds in the British colonies.’[7]

  But all this was merely a prelude to her drive to fulfil her promise to her friends at home: that she would collect funds for them and that she would start an American branch of Cumann na mBan. Clan na Gael, not surprisingly, excluded women from membership, though the AOH at least had a ladies’ auxiliary committee.

  One evening, ‘John’ attended a lecture hosted by the Gaelic League and given by Teresa Brayton who had written the well-known song ‘The Old Bog Road’ during a visit to Ireland and who was giving her views on what she had seen and heard. Roused by something Teresa Brayton had said, ‘John’ Gifford rose and made a brief, impromptu speech on the Irish Volunteers, followed in the same vein by other members of the audience, including the brother of Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who would later die for Ireland on hunger strike. The chairman of the meeting called a halt, on the grounds that the Gaelic League was cultural and apolitical, the non-militant ideology approved of by Douglas Hyde. However, after the meeting, Gertrude Kelly, a member of the audience, invited ‘John’ to address a meeting in the McAlpine Hotel on the Irish Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. ‘John’ agreed but almost committed a gaffe on this, the first occasion on which she addressed a public meeting in the USA. Roundly castigating the AOH in Ireland for its support of Redmond during the Volunteer split, she became aware that the chairperson was frantically nudging her. Unaware that the bulk of her audience were members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Committee of the AOH, the day was saved when the Chair diplomatically pointed out that the Irish AOH, to which Miss Gifford had referred, was, of course, a very different body from its American counterpart. This distinction was greeted with loud applause and cheers.

  The president of this Ladies’ Auxiliary AOH, Mary MacWhorter, invited ‘John’ to address their convention on the Irish situation. She agreed and won over that body, heart and purse, when she spoke to them glowingly of a familiar subject, the Irish Volunteers. This body of Irish-American women worked very hard for Ireland and the impending War of Independence, and, following that address by ‘John’ Gifford, the first American branch of Cumann na mBan was founded, followed soon after by a second. Who wanted John Devoy when they could have Mary MacWhorter and ‘John’ Gifford?[8]

  Then Devoy began to interfere in the affairs of the New York Cumann na mBan and even labelled as spies those who disagreed with him. He seemed to see himself as a sort of Irish leader in absentia and certainly as leader of all Irish Americans. In an effort to make money for a Volunteer arms fund, ‘John’ took it upon herself to write to the author Seumas McManus, asking him for a signed copy of one of his books for an ‘arms’ raffle. He obliged with six copies of his own books and those of his deceased wife, Eithne Carbery. For this most fruitful try, Devoy rebuked ‘John’, because she had not asked permission to write to McManus.

  Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the pro-Gaelic pacifist, was also poorly received by the Clan. ‘John’ gave him a list of Irish Americans to avoid, which saved him a great deal of trouble. She also gave a great welcome to Nora, daughter of James Connolly, who arrived with a letter from Countess Markievicz asking ‘John’ to help. That help was readily given. Nora Connolly’s mission to America was a peculiar one: her father wanted her to contact the German Ambassador to America, Count von Bernsdorff, to tell him that the British were building bogus ships in Belfast. These dummy ships were to lure the German fleet to the Kiev Canal where the British guns would strike. Von Skal, a German agent in New York, arranged a meeting for Nora Connolly with the German Ambassador in Washington, and ‘John’ Gifford went with her. Von Skal’s wife had been deeply impressed by what she called clever Irish intelligence because the Irish girls knew her husband would be at home on the very day they called – after a year’s absence. ‘John’ and Nora Connolly basked in this glory, unprepared to admit that their chance calling on that day was just the luck of the Irish.[9]Connolly had impressed on his daughter not to disclose to James Larkin the purpose of her visit and not to contact him until just before she was returning home. It was perhaps a justifiable precaution – the fewer people who knew the better – but it is interesting to note that ‘John’ Gifford was not precluded from the secret message.

  After Redmond committed his Volunteers to Britain’s war effort following the outbreak of the First World War, ‘John’ received a bundle of papers from Ireland which featured, among other items, news of the arrest of prominent Sinn Féiners for anti-recruiting activities. This name ‘Sinn Féiners’, borrowed from Griffith’s newspaper and his followers, was applied indiscriminately in Britain to all those who were to take part in the Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. In Griffith’s paper, Sinn Féin, she read a quotation from the Liverpool Post of 12 September 1914:

  Half a million recruits cannot be raised in this country without a derangement of industry. It is our sincere belief that if the Government of Ireland Bill received immediate signature of the King, then His Majesty could make a triumphal tour of Ireland … there would be 300,000 Irishmen of all creeds volunteer for the front in less than a week.

  It was an ingenious proposition: Irishmen would face German guns so that British tradesmen would be spared. Griffith’s reply was, as usual, factual. His estimate, based statistically, was that there were 7,116,000 Englishmen between the ages of twenty and forty-five. In Ireland, he judged, there were only one-tenth of that number. In Britain, the standard height for enlistment was 5 feet and 6 inches; in Ireland it was 5 feet and 3 inches. Griffith claimed the extra three inches was to exclude some English tradesmen who could thus be kept at home. He concluded his propagandist article with one of his aphorisms: ‘England expects every Irishman to do his duty.’

  Delighted with her ex-editor’s handling of the question, ‘John’ Gifford brought the particular issue of the newspaper to John Devoy, thinking he would be eager to publish it in support of the Clan’s own anti-recruitment drive. True to form, because he would not associate with the non-militant Griffith, Devoy rejected the offer. ‘John’ brought it straight to another publisher, Patrick Ford, whose Irish World had up to then represented the more right-wing, conservative Irish-American readership. He printed both the Liverpool Post article and Griffith’s rebuttal. Congratulatory letters flooded in, and the reaction was so palpable that the paper’s policy changed from being pro-Redmonite to being supportive of the Irish Volunteers. If Irishmen were to fight, it was to be for their own country, not for their age-old oppressor. ‘John’ Gifford was responsible for this important change and became a frequent contributor to the ‘new look’ paper, writing about Irish organisations and profiling their leaders. She had become a conduit for the Irish-Ireland ethos to the Irish in the USA.[10]

  It must be remember
ed also that ‘John’ was not sent as an agent to America. She went of her own free will. The British government, on the other hand, was determinedly sending specially trained agents to woo the various strata of American society into a military commitment against Germany. They proposed England as ‘The Mother Country of America’ which, to many, it was. But an Irishman, Hugh Harkins, retaliated with a street-wide banner from his house bearing the message: ‘Europe: Mother of America’.[11] Neither mentioned the native American Indians.

  Newspapers took sides. The bulletin board of one paper which later became the New York Herald Tribune displayed daily news favourable to the Allies. A mêlée of people congregated at the board each day, infiltrated by British agents who spread their good news; sometimes they enforced their arguments with fisticuffs if any Irish contradicted them. Tom Tuite, an old Fenian and then secretary to Thomas Addis Emmet (Robert Emmet’s grand-nephew), was badly beaten by British agents when he denounced them as warmongers at a pro-war demonstration in Madison Square. The police warned him – probably for his own good – to stay away from such demonstrations.[12]

  During ‘John’ Gifford’s work in Ireland as a propagandist journalist for Seán Mac Diarmada’s Irish Freedom, Mac Diarmada had commissioned her to write a serial summary of the memoirs of the old patriot Myles Byrne, another Fenian. Thomas Addis Emmet had so enjoyed this series that he invited ‘John’ to work in his New York library translating some old pamphlets and texts into modern English. Among them was the original copy of Oliver Cromwell’s order to the dispossessed Irish: To hell or to Connaught.

  Addis Emmet, a wheelchair invalid with enormous influence in New York’s intellectual circles, loved Ireland passionately. From behind the screen in the library where she worked, ‘John’ heard several requests from British agents that Addis Emmet lend his voice to their recruiting campaign. His answer was always ‘no’.

  Before the 1916 Rising, ‘John’ met two members of the Plunkett family in America: Mimi and her brother Joseph. Joseph Plunkett wrote to her from a New York address, asking that she meet him. She observed in her memoirs that he was not engaged to her sister Grace at the time but that he was ‘friendly’ with her. However, she was obviously piqued because neither of them told her the purpose of their visit. They went to lunch in a Turkish restaurant and spent the afternoon chatting. Perhaps the fact that he told her neither that he had been in Germany nor the reason for his presence in New York may have dictated her reaction to his visit. It seems wise that he should disclose his attempt to negotiate for German arms to as few people as possible, and this visit he obviously saw in the nature of a social call on his girlfriend’s sister.[13]Though she considered he looked well, and he himself said he was a new man since he had joined the Irish Volunteers, ‘John’s’ other observations are certainly not adulatory. Nellie had liked Plunkett, and she, and those who knew him well, always spoke of his pleasant laughter which often cloaked the pain of his illness. ‘John’s’ summing up was, however, that she had always found him ‘reserved and incapable of light conversation’. It does not match any other description of Joseph Plunkett’s personality. She may have met him when he was quite ill in Ireland, and she was perhaps influenced on that afternoon in America by his diplomatic reticence. She never saw him again after that lunch.

  Notes

  [1]Andrew J. Kettle, The Material for Victory: Being the Memoirs of Andrew J. Kettle, Dublin: C. J. Fallon, 1958, p. 119.

  [2]NGDPs.

  [3]Ibid.

  [4]Arthur Read and David Fisher, Colonel Z: The Life and Times of a Master of Spies, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.

  [5]NGDPs.

  [6]Gifford-Czira, The Years Flew By, p. 67.

  [7]Ibid., p. 68.

  [8]Ibid., p. 71.

  [9]Ibid., p. 73.

  [10]Ibid., p. 74.

  [11]Ibid., p. 75.

  [12]Ibid., pp. 75–76.

  [13]In her 1949 statement to the Bureau of Military History (1913–21), Grace stated that Joseph told her very little of his military affairs: WS 257, file no. S.395.

  14 - Romance and Rebellion

  Meanwhile, events in the Gifford family in Ireland were following their course. Claude left the legal practice shared with his father to become an officer in the British army. Ernest was pursuing his career as an electrical engineer in England. Kate returned from Germany, married a man named Walter Wilson in Wales in 1909 and settled in Dublin, involving herself in the movement. Muriel lived happily in Oakley Road, Ranelagh, with her two children, Donagh and Barbara, and her husband, Thomas, who was co-opted, in April 1916, to the military council of the Irish Volunteers. Nellie continued to run her ‘Burra’ in Dawson Street, a much more ongoing and demanding activity than her 1913 role as stand-in niece to the militant trade unionist James Larkin.

  Grace had been quietly working away on The Irish Review and falling in love with its young editor, Joseph Plunkett. Closeness fostered their affection, and so did their interest in Catholicism, as stated by Grace.[1]There was a tentative suggestion made in the emotional aftermath of the troubled times, as the whole period from the Rising to the ending of the Civil War was described, to publish in their entirety the love letters Joseph Plunkett wrote to Grace. Happily, better judgement prevailed. Reading such letters may leave the reader with the presumption that nothing is sacred, even the most personal expressions of human affection. Nonetheless, the only record we have of the progress of this most tragic love affair lies in the young mystic poet’s letters to Grace. Enough may be quoted to reveal the measure of his love while leaving the rest in the relative privacy of the archives.[2]

  The first letter is dated 28 November 1915. The salutations, deepening in affection, are indicative of the writer’s growing love for his lady, and it is significant that when Grace became ill in her declining years and when money troubles were pressing, and she negotiated the sale of some of her husband’s military documentation, the love letters were never proffered.

  All Plunkett’s moods are there. He is passionate, prayerful, playful, tired, longing, whimsical, determined. He quotes from G. K. Chesterton and from Francis Thompson. He encloses a mystical poem he has written for Grace. Occasionally Volunteer material creeps in. His ill health is shrugged off. In that first November letter the salutation is a sober ‘Dear Grace’ and is signed ‘Joseph’, but it contains his ideas on mystical love and finishes, ‘All things are in some way beautiful but of all things on earth the most beautiful are the human soul and body for these are the likest God [sic].’[3]

  Two letters were sent on 2 December 1915. The salutations have become much warmer and the message very clear: ‘Darling Grace, you will marry me and nobody else.’ The question of their marriage is pursued: ‘Dear, dear Grace, I hope to become more worthy of loving you … By the way I am actually a beggar. I have no income and am earning nothing. Moreover, there are other things desperate, practically speaking, to prevent anyone marrying me.’ He is presumably referring to his ill health. But two days later he forgets such doubts and writes playfully, ‘By the way don’t forget I have it [your heart] and don’t go looking for it – also don’t give mine away … I haven’t been but at Heartquarters and Headquarters.’ Six days after that he tells her, banteringly, that Seán Mac Diarmada has been speaking to him about their engagement, so he suggests it would be a good idea for her to make the usual press announcement: ‘Of course it should be done by your mother!’ The exclamation mark is significant. Isabella did not approve of the engagement on account, it is believed, of Plunkett’s health. The announcement eventually appeared on 11 February 1916.

  On St Stephen’s Day 1915, in a letter marked ‘midnight’, Joseph had addressed Grace as ‘my darling child’, though he is only a year her senior. In the same letter he called her the Arabic ‘Babbaly’ and told her, ‘You have taken the harm out of all my troubles and made the whole world beautiful for me. You have made me happy – never forget that, whatever happens.’

  Sometimes in this correspon
dence he makes appointments to see Grace at Sibley’s restaurant, at a Percy French burlesque or to dine in his family home. Jocosely, on another occasion, he uses Dublin idiom: ‘Of a Friday January 7th in this year of Grace, Sweetheart … Could you drop down to Oakley tonight (or anywhere else) and let me know by this messenger. If you are not … able to bunk out, well then how about tomorrow?’

  He has started to sign his letters with the symbol that reflects the name of his book of poetry which Thomas MacDonagh had edited, The Circle and the Sword. He addresses Grace by her two Christian names: ‘Grace Evelyn, I mean my darling dear.’ There is playful flirtation. His Volunteer work is treated flippantly, cloaking its importance to him. He borrows the concluding phrase from Pepys:

  I went to my sixteen-hundred sub-committees and then tea … in the DBC [Dublin Bread Company] and at eight a hellish old staff meeting (to decide the war) and congrats from Padraic Ó Riain and Shane Lester on my approaching marriage (their words) and … back here bloody awful late … and so to bed.

  This letter ends with a veritable litany of endearments: