by Anne Clare
Pearse’s exhausted men, who had sniped all week from windows and high roofs or burrowed their way from building to building, were now ordered to make a dash for it, in small groups and at sporadic intervals, to the comparative safety of Henry Place, parallel to Sackville Street and leading circuitously to Moore Street, where the military council eventually holed up in Nos 15 and 16. The last act of Pearse, Clarke and The O’Rahilly had been to free their prisoners from the basement, where they had been housed for safety from the battered roof and its falling timbers. There is a street now called after The O’Rahilly, close to where that wealthy head of his clan was killed as he led a small group to Parnell Street.
It was being confronted by the devastation of the streets around them and reluctance to lose more lives that persuaded Pearse to surrender. The badly wounded Connolly was not enthusiastic about giving up. They had discussed the possibility of retreating through Jervis Street, but he agreed eventually to allow the intrepid Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell, under a white flag, to initiate the surrender. That lady’s extraordinary bravery, her coolness as she walked towards the enemy ranks, reflected the dedication of the women involved. Shamefully, the figure of Nurse O’Farrell was airbrushed out in the familiar photograph of Pearse surrendering.
The Four Courts garrison surrendered immediately after the GPO evacuation. The Jacob’s garrison, as well as those at Bolands Mills, under Éamon de Valera, and the South Dublin Union, under Ceannt, were still well entrenched in their positions when the surrender order arrived. MacDonagh, now in overall charge with the arrest of the headquarters’ staff, was reluctant to surrender. Brigadier General Lowe went out of his way to encourage him to do so, perhaps influenced not only by his regard for Pearse but also by the presence of a remarkable Anglo-Irish officer, Captain Henry de Courcy Wheeler, whose neighbours in Robertstown, County Kildare, including the Volunteers, had given him an affectionate farewell on his way to the trenches in 1914. Lowe offered his car to two Capuchin friars, Fathers Aloysius and Augustine, who reached Jacob’s and persuaded MacDonagh how essential it was to obey Pearse and Connolly’s surrender order. He agreed to meet Brigadier General Lowe at St Patrick’s Park, which was as near as Lowe’s car could safely reach, and at that meeting MacDonagh explained that it would be advisable for him to contact Éamonn Ceannt personally at the South Dublin Union. Lowe agreed, and MacDonagh honoured his promise by returning to St Patrick’s Park at 3 p.m. and formally handing over his belt and revolver in the age-old ceremony of surrender. He had persuaded a reluctant Ceannt to do likewise.
Éamon de Valera had awaited MacDonagh’s decision. He had shown himself a very able commandant, hoisting his flag on a building close to his garrison so that the firing from the British gunboat, Helga, was deflected there, but now he, too, surrendered.
The personnel at the Royal College of Surgeons were also still well entrenched in their positions when the surrender order came. But it was obeyed, again reluctantly. Nellie Gifford found fresh towels, and the dishevelled men cleaned themselves up before the doors opened and they followed their two commandants to Captain Wheeler, waiting outside to receive their surrender. Countess Markievicz refused the captain’s offer of a lift to prison, saying she preferred to walk at the head of her men. She kissed her Mauser before handing it over to him. Then, looking defeat in the eye and turning it on its head, she remarked: ‘We have done better than Emmet anyhow.’[1]
The women were sent first to Ship Street Station, from there to Richmond Barracks, and finally to Kilmainham Gaol, where they were lodged four to a cell. The Countess was placed in a cell on her own from where she was sent to England. Nellie wound up in a cell with three others. For the first time in her life – but not the last – Isabella Gifford, niece of Sir Frederick Burton, had a jailbird daughter.
Not all the military dealt with their prisoners as honourably as Brigadier General Lowe, both at the headquarters surrender by Pearse and in his later negotiations with MacDonagh. Nevertheless, sympathetic discretion was shown by other British officers, some of whom quietly sent the youngest, teenage Volunteers home to their parents with nothing more than a dismissive cuff on the cheek. Others were vicious in their behaviour. On 26 April 1916, the day on which Seán Heuston’s surrendered garrison was treated with contempt, a far more heinous act was committed on three unarmed civilians at Portobello Barracks. Captain Bowen Colthurst ordered the killing, without trial, of three civilians, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Thomas Dickson and Patrick J. McIntyre. Sheehy Skeffington was a pacifist and had been trying to stop looting.
Another military crime was committed at 177 North King Street, a licensed premises owned by a Mrs O’Rourke. Two bodies were discovered, fully dressed and buried twelve inches below the cellar floor. One was the mutilated remains of Patrick Bealon, foreman at the premises, and the other that of James Healy, a clerk at Jameson’s Distillery. At the subsequent inquest on Patrick Bealon, Lieutenant Colonel H. Taylor, commanding the 2nd/6th South Staffords, denied that his troops were culpable. The jury found otherwise:
We find that the said Patrick Bealon died from shock and haemorrhage, resulting from bullet wounds inflicted by a soldier, or soldiers, in whose custody he was, an unarmed and unoffending prisoner. We consider that the explanation given by the military authorities is very unsatisfactory, and we believe that if the military authorities had any inclination they could produce the officer in charge.[2]
A similar verdict was passed in the case of James Healy. The two victims were neither armed nor in the Volunteers – and neither were the other eleven men and two teenagers who were killed by Taylor’s men, who went on a murderous rampage in the area.[3]
In the limited ground space outside the Rotunda, where the Volunteers had been founded so auspiciously three years before, upward of 400 prisoners from the GPO and the Four Courts, including some women, were packed together. It was a chilly night, and they did not receive as much as a drink of water for thirty hours. Even before he became really drunk, the officer in charge, Captain Lee Wilson, behaved atrociously towards them. He called his prisoners animals and would not allow them to get up to relieve themselves. He is said to have contemptuously snatched Joseph Plunkett’s will, leaving everything to Grace, from his pocket, sneering that it was proof that the rebels knew they would be defeated. He knocked the walking stick away from Seán Mac Diarmada, and he had Thomas Clarke, the senior leader, stripped to the buff so that he could be searched, during which search he passed derogatory remarks. The veteran Clarke, survivor of the notorious imprisonment meted out to the Fenians, was stoical.[4]
You cannot indict a whole army for the vicious behaviour of some of its members, and the surrenders effected ‘by the book’ must balance the others. It should be remembered also that the women involved were not subjected to any indignities, beyond a few ribald remarks. Most of the GPO ladies found their extremely hazardous way home, but Winnie Carney had refused to leave the wounded Connolly. In fact, Winnie recorded that on reaching Richmond Barracks, chilled to the bone from their ordeal at the Rotunda, the women were shown great kindness by Captain Robert Barton. She asked him if they could have tea, and when he had it brought to them with it were also very welcome ‘sticky buns’.[5]It was to be their last food and drink until the next day. In fact, this Captain Barton was so taken with the spirit and thinking of the rebels that he later embraced their freedom ethos and became a Sinn Féin delegate at the Treaty talks in 1921. Nor was he the only convert from the British side.
Sometimes a junior officer’s kind intent was overruled, as when Lieutenant Lindsay assured Ned Daly at the Four Courts that Dr Brigid Lyons and the other young women would be taken home. His superiors decided otherwise, and the women were jailed.
Notes
[1]Nellie wrote ‘Wolfe Tone’ in her description, but others recorded ‘Emmet’.
[2]These facts are in a privately published booklet, A Fragment of 1916 History (undated) and include statements by the widows and neighbours of the murdered me
n and two teenagers: Ann Fennel, Kate Ennis, Mrs Byrne, Mrs Hickey, Kate Kelly, Mrs Connolly, Sally Hughes, Ellen Walsh, Mrs Healy, Mary O’Rourke, Roseanna Knowles and Elizabeth Beirnes, p. 19. Bureau of Military History (1913–21): CD 227/3/5. Used courtesy of the Military Archives, Cathal Brugha Barracks.
[3]A Fragment of 1916 History, pp. 27–28.
[4]Captain Wilson paid with his life for his ridicule. During the ensuing War of Independence, which was born of Easter Week, he was shot dead, by order of Michael Collins it is believed, who had been there, smouldering with resentment, in the grounds of the Rotunda, watching Wilson’s iniquities.
[5]R. M. Fox, ‘Women of the Rising’, The Irish Press, 9 March 1966.
18 - Sixteen Funerals and a Wedding
James Connolly had prophesied, before the insurgents had manned their posts, ‘We are all going out to be slaughtered.’[1]Certainly, whatever the kindness shown to the rebels by some of the British forces, the official reaction was otherwise. Retribution was swift. The man appointed to effect it was General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the forces in Ireland.
Maxwell approved Lowe’s handling of the military situation and confined his ire to the Castle politicians who had allowed the Irish to arm and carry out their manoeuvres all over the country. He first made public his intention of burning to the ground all buildings harbouring rebels and then decided that the execution of 100 rebels would put manners on the unruly Irish: ‘I am going to ensure that there will be no treason whispered for 100 years.’ That he was to ensure the very opposite was not due to carelessness on his part; the arrangements for the executions and burials were meticulous:
After each prisoner has been shot, a medical officer will certify that he is dead and his body will immediately be removed to an ambulance, with a label pinned on his breast giving his name. When the ambulance is full, it will be sent to Arbour Hill Detention Barracks, entering by the gate at the garrison chapel. A party there will put the bodies close alongside one another in the grave (now being dug), cover them thickly with quicklime (ordered) and commence filling in the grave. One of the officers with this party is to keep a note of the position of each body in the grave, taking the name from the label.[2]
Both the size of the grave, more of a pit in that it measured twenty-nine by nine feet, and the disintegrating nature of the quicklime, suggest reasons for affixing labels, though that directive was not carried out.[3]
No time was lost. The executions started five days after the sur-render, on 3 May 1916, in the execution yard attached to Kilmainham Gaol. Within hours of the ‘trials’ (with no defence), the shootings began. The first of the ‘funerals’ – though the unceremonious disposal of the bodies could hardly be so-called – were those of Pádraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Clarke. No one was in the yard excepting the firing party and the attendant priest who stayed with them to the end. A lorry awaited at the side gate of the yard, and the remains of the three men were driven to the pit at Arbour Hill.
Thomas MacDonagh had kept photographs of his two children with him in prison. He sent them to Muriel, whose attempt to visit him in Kilmainham had been frustrated and to whom he sent also his last, loving tributes. His son, Donagh MacDonagh, has left this recollection of news of his father’s death being brought to Oakley Road, when he was a very small boy:
One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of Fr Aloysius coming to our house in Oakley Road with the news of the executions. I was playing in a rockery and fled in terror from the bogeyman who came riding on a bread van with news which terrified; and later I remember the British soldiers lying on the ground with their guns sighted on our house as we walked away.
In 1908, Thomas MacDonagh had written a play, produced by the Abbey, called When the Dawn Is Come. It had foreseen a future Ireland in which, oddly prophetically, seven captains would lay down their lives for their country. He was the third of the seven signatories of the Proclamation to be executed. A British officer said of him: ‘They all died well but MacDonagh died like a prince.’[4]
Fr Augustine, OFM, Cap., saw Joseph Plunkett at Richmond Barracks, resting with a group of other tired Volunteers on a stretch of grass, his body thrown back slightly, and his position supported by his two hands pressed against the grass. Plunkett had been in a fainting condition after the march from the Rotunda, and Seán Mac Diarmada, who had also found it a huge strain, suggested that Plunkett be given an old quilt from the Royal College of Surgeons, which was rolled up to form a pillow. Easter Week in the GPO, a night in the chill air outside the Rotunda with nothing to eat or drink and a forced march on an empty stomach: these were hardly the doctor’s orders for a tubercular surgery convalescent. Fr Augustine may not have known all this, but he was told the young commandant was awaiting court martial, and he recorded that his heart went out to him, resting there on the grass.
The banns for the marriage of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Evelyn Vandeleur Gifford had been read out, in Rathmines church, weeks before the proposed wedding to be held there on Easter Sunday. The wedding, in fact, took place in Kilmainham Gaol. No bride can have had more distressing eve-of-wedding preparations, all to be accomplished in a few short hours.
Ironically, while Joseph Plunkett’s letter dated 29 April (the sixth day of the Republic as he so dated it) was not received until Winnie Carney’s release, his last letter to Grace, dated 2 May, was delivered to her without delay by the British soldier to whom it was entrusted. More ironically still, this final letter was written on the back of Plunkett’s Last Will and Testament which had lain in his pocket for nine days and which had been the subject of Captain Wilson’s ribald comment. It reads as follows:
The Will of Joseph Mary Plunkett, 23rd April, 1916.
I give and bequeath everything of which I am possessed or may become possessed to Grace Evelyn (Mary Vandeleur) Gifford.
Signed: Joseph Mary Plunkett
Witnessed: George Oliver Plunkett.[5]
The letter on the back of the document appears to have been written after Plunkett’s court martial but before sentencing.
Richmond Barracks,
Tuesday May 2nd, 1916.
My darling child,
This is my first chance of sending you a line since we were taken. I have no notion what they intend to do with me but I have heard a rumour that I am to be sent to England.
The only thing I care about is that I am not with you – everything else is cheerful. I am told that Thomas was brought in yesterday. George and Jack (Plun) [sic] are both here and well. We have not had one word of news from outside since Monday 24th April except wild rumours. Listen – if I live it might be possible to get the Church to marry us by proxy – there is such a thing but it is very difficult I am told. Father Sherwin might be able to do it. You know how I love you. That is all I have time to say. I know you love me and so I am very happy.
Your own,
Joe
The Fr Sherwin mentioned was the priest who had received Grace into the Catholic Church in the University Church on St Stephen’s Green. Whether she consulted him or her parish priest at Rathmines – perhaps both – she was obviously advised that the clergy at James’ Street looked after the Kilmainham area and if permission for the wedding was granted by the prison authorities a priest from that parish would attend. Permission was granted, but although the couple had discussed various possibilities when the Rising cancelled their Easter Sunday wedding, Grace was now faced with implementing them. She knew that her mother, occupied in caring for her sick father, disapproved of the marriage. Nellie was in jail, and the family was also trying to cope with Muriel, who was stunned at the sentencing to death of her beloved husband. It was no wonder that the jeweller from whom Grace bought the plain gold band, Dermot Stoker of Grafton Street, was taken aback when a young woman emerged from a taxi which stopped outside at closing time, entered his shop and asked to buy a wedding ring. She cried a little as the purchase was completed, and he, now upset hi
mself, asked the reason for her tears. She told him simply that she was to marry Joseph Plunkett that evening, a little while before his execution.
On her wedding day, Grace Gifford wore a gingham dress with white collar and cuffs and a brimmed straw hat with a veil. This is the ensemble shown in her passport picture of 1928. It was questioned if a twelve-year-old picture would have been acceptable for passport purposes. The Catholic Bulletin of February 1917 comes to the rescue and shows the identical picture of Grace, with the great sad eyes of a woman, still in her twenties, who has lost a young brother, a brother-in-law and her husband.[6]It is one of the most sorrowful faces in the pages of Irish photography. There is another picture, taken at Larkfield, where she went after the Rising, wearing a pretty, flounced dress and cuddling a kitten. Such a dress might have been out of place at the wretched ceremony in Kilmainham.
It is best to allow Grace herself to tell the details of that sombre wedding:
I entered Kilmainham Jail on Wednesday, May 2nd, at 6 p.m., when I saw him for the first time in the prison chapel, where the marriage was gone through and no speech allowed. He was taken back to his cell, and I left the prison with Fr Eugene MacCarthy [sic], of James’ Street. We tried to get shelter for the night, and I was finally lodged at the house of Mr Byrne – bell founder – in James’ Street. I went to bed at 1.30, and was wakened at 2 o’clock by a policeman, with a letter from the prison commandant – Major Lennon – asking me to visit Joseph Plunkett. I was brought there in a motor, and saw my husband in his cell, the interview occupying ten minutes. During the interview the cell was packed with officers, and a sergeant, who kept a watch in his hand and closed the interview by saying: ‘Your time is now up.’[7]
Other facts emerged: that her groom had come to her handcuffed; that the ‘cuffs’ were removed for the ceremony and the signing of the register and were then replaced immediately before he was marched away; that because of a gas failure the prison was in darkness, light provided by a soldier holding a candle, with another soldier acting as witness to the wedding. Grace said, even years afterwards, that she could still see that soldier’s face.