The figures for Dublin Corporation probably reflect the general recruitment pattern and attitude to the war in the city more accurately than those in such firms as Guinness, where a paternalist corporate culture promoted loyalty to the legislative Union and the Crown.
Table 1
Dublin Corporation recruits, 1914–16
The greatest ‘pull’ factor of all for most working-class recruits in Dublin was the announcement on 8 August that separation allowances would be paid to the wives of soldiers. Given the low wages and high unemployment for unskilled workers in the city, army pay was relatively attractive, especially for a married man with children. A labourer could expect to earn between 16s and 18s for a 48-hour week; in comparison, the weekly separation rate for a wife was 12s 6d, while the serving husband was receiving 1s a day as well as free board and lodging. If the couple had children the family was very much better off, with rates rising to £1 a week for a wife and three children and £1 2s if there were four children. The rates were higher again if the husband secured promotion.71
Table 2
Weekly separation allowances72
Given the high proportion of Dublin working-class families with British army connections, and the relative strength of the radical separatist tradition in the city, attitudes towards soldiers were bound to be quite complex. Even within families a situation frequently arose where different brothers served in the army and in the Volunteers, most famously in the case of the Daltons and the Malones.73
The veteran republican Todd Andrews later wrote of the years before the First World War that
the soldiers … with their red coats, their reviews, their trooping of the colour outside the Bank of Ireland were accepted by us as soldiers. Many of the lads around Summerhill had been at Colenso or Mafeking but they were still ‘us’.74
His fellow-Dubliner Wilmot Irwin recollected much tenser relations. He lived in the former unionist township of Drumcondra, not far from Summerhill, and came from a lower middle-class Protestant background. At one cavalry review in Marlborough Barracks (now McKee Barracks) he recalled that ‘a number of civilians omitted to uncover during the playing of the British National Anthem and sundry troopers started to knock them [their headgear] off.’ On another occasion a military band performing in the Hollow in the Phoenix Park had to abandon the anthem after being ‘assailed by a shower of stones from spectators.’
Both these incidents occurred well before the lock-out or the Bachelor’s Walk shooting.
At the same time, Irwin recalled that the declaration of war and Redmond’s support for it made ‘the whole population … extremely pro-British. It seemed that militant strikes, civil clashes and gun-running episodes had been forgotten.’ The ‘only signs of the impending trouble were the route marches of the Irish Citizen Army … and the Irish Volunteers, both sections now carrying rifles openly in the streets.’75
Chapter 3
‘BLOOD, HORROR, SHRIEKS AND GROANS’
The honeymoon with the British war effort was doomed to be short-lived. For one thing, Dublin, unlike Belfast and many British cities, possessed no war industries. Those products it did manufacture, such as biscuits, beer, whiskey, and confectionery, would not budge the front line ‘by even an inch.’1 However, they could help pay for munitions that would.
The first war budget, in November 1914, showed the shape of things to come. Income tax was doubled, from 3¾ to 7½ per cent, but the threshold for liability remained at £160 a year, well above the annual income of skilled workers and most of Dublin’s lower middle classes. Far more serious was the decision to increase duties on consumer items such as tea, from 5d to 8d in the pound, and to increase taxes on porter, stout and strong ales by between 17s and 19s a barrel.
The thinking behind such measures was to reduce spending on luxury items, improve public health and provide badly needed funds for war industries.2 Whatever the impact in Britain, the implications for Ireland’s drinks industry were disastrous. With the prospect of a protracted conflict, a second war budget was introduced in May 1915, which was even worse. Not only was duty on beer almost doubled for the second time in six months but the duty on whiskey, which had escaped an increase in November, was doubled from the pre-war rates. As if to add insult to injury, the light ales brewed in Britain were spared.3
Irish public opinion took offence at British Liberal politicians who felt that more abstemious habits were a small price to pay for victory. The Irish Independent proclaimed:
In Ireland the public have something more serious to consider than mere interference with their daily habits. Here we have at stake the existence of industries which are the most important in some of our largest centres, and which are the actual main stay of smaller towns.
It predicted that thousands of investors would suffer and that state intervention would be required to deal with the resultant unemployment. The new taxes represented ‘prohibition without compensation.’ Not only did the rest of the nationalist press agree but so did the Irish Times, voice of southern Unionism.4
On Sunday 2 May a mass meeting was held at the Nine Acres in the Phoenix Park. It was the last great demonstration of constitutional nationalism in the city, and already its patriotic credentials were being called into question. William Field, one of the longest-serving and most radical Parnellite MPs in the city, was heckled for not voting against the new legislation. He told the crowd:
It was arranged by the head of the Party [Redmond] that we were not to vote, and I am a member of that Party and under the discipline of it. I am obliged to obey orders.5
What infuriated many nationalists was that previous big increases in the duty on whiskey had been introduced by the same Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in 1909, when the Irish Party had tamely accepted it as part of the price for keeping the Liberals in power and securing home rule. The Cork Free Press wrote that no-one knew better than John Redmond
the terrible effects Mr. Lloyd George’s frightful … taxes will have on Irish trade. His own speech is clear and irrevocable evidence that he regarded Mr. Lloyd George’s proposals as fatal to Ireland … Yet when he got the opportunity to back his words with votes he collapsed.
Such was the rancour in nationalist ranks that the Irish Independent reprinted this comment, despite its traditional antipathy towards the rival publication.6
In fact there was little that nationalist Ireland could do. The Liberal government had the support of the Tory opposition, and the military. The war had fundamentally changed the political equation in the House of Commons, something Redmond understood but the Irish nationalist voter did not.
Things would become a lot worse in August 1916, when the Output of Beer (Restriction) Act limited production to 85 per cent of the previous year’s output. Distillers had production cut even more drastically, to 30 per cent of the average yearly output. The Immature Spirits (Restriction) Act (1915) had already banned the sale of any stock produced in the previous three years, and in December the Irish distilleries were taken over by the Ministry of Munitions and converted to the production of industrial alcohol.
By then about half the work force in the brewing and distilling industries had been laid off, many of them constituents of William Field, who had been heckled in the Phoenix Park. Not surprisingly, brewers and distillers with surplus employees were among the most enthusiastic in co-operating with the Department of Recruiting in supplying men to meet the butcher’s bill in Flanders.7
One of Field’s old colleagues in the Irish Party had died only days before the Phoenix Park rally, opening the way for Dublin’s first by-election of the war. John Nannetti, the long-serving Nationalist MP for College Green, was already incapacitated by the series of strokes he had suffered. A printer by trade and the founding father of the Dublin Trades Council, he had been Redmond’s chief link with the trade unions and his adviser on labour matters. He represented the dominance of the craft unions in the labour world of the previous century and had long been out of fa
vour with the younger generation of more militant leaders. When he died there were few of the usual tributes, and one old comrade on the trades council, Peadar Macken, described him as ‘an example of what a labour man ought not to be … tied up with a party inimical to Labour.’8
In fact the timing of his death could not have been better from the trades council’s point of view. Its new leadership had just taken over the Labour Party organisation in the city, and it quickly nominated Thomas Farren of the Stonecutters’ Union to fight the election. His opponent was the secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, John Dillon Nugent. A native of Keady, Co. Armagh, Nugent was a close ally of the northern nationalist leader Joe Devlin and had been associated with the strong-arm tactics used by the AOH against opponents within the nationalist movement—and outside it, such as suffragists and socialists. He had become one of the city’s leading insurance brokers through the AOH’s own company, the Hibernian Insurance Fund.
Devlin, who had a strong working-class base in west Belfast, liked to portray himself as a champion of labour and to remind audiences that ‘whatever rights labour enjoys in Ireland, it owes them to the [British] Labour Party.’9 He invited the Dublin Trades Council to send delegates to the convention at which Nugent was selected, but the union leaders had not forgotten Nugent’s role in the 1913 lock-out, when, besides using the AOH organisation in the city to undermine them, he had joined with the Catholic clergy in inciting mobs against Dora Montefiore and her helpers when they tried to bring strikers’ children to temporary homes in England.10
Farren had been one of the 1913 leaders, though he was not as well known as Jim Larkin or James Connolly. It was Connolly who wrote Farren’s election address. He described the selection of Nugent as ‘a studied insult to the Dublin working class’11 and Nugent himself as ‘the malevolent enemy of trade unionism on every occasion, great and small, where he could exercise his influence.’12 Farren’s brief electoral address attacked the Irish Party for blocking the extension to Ireland of ‘the best provisions of every social reform’ passed by the House of Commons.
The Labour candidate also declared his opposition to partition, and called for votes for women.13 The Irish Citizen, weekly paper of the women’s suffrage movement, reciprocated by supporting Farren’s campaign. On election day, 11 June, Farren obtained 1,816 votes, against 2,445 for Nugent. Most worrying from the nationalist viewpoint was the fact that only 4,261 voters out of more than 8,000 bothered to turn out.
It was a very creditable performance, considering that Farren entered the contest only seven days beforehand and that there had been no systematic canvass or organised campaign to combat the AOH and UIL machines. Nor, apart from the Citizen, did Farren receive a sympathetic press. Nugent’s campaign accused Farren of ‘Larkinism and Syndicalism combined with pro-Germanism,’ as well as being opposed to the war effort and to the Catholic Church. Socialist though he might be, Farren took the opportunity of the vote of thanks to the returning officer to tell the crowd he was secretary of the largest men’s confraternity in Dublin and had been a member for twenty-two years.
Nugent had a tough time from hecklers at the count, who accused him of being a bailiff and an employer of scab labour. Farren had to appeal for quiet to allow his successful opponent to conclude his election speech.14
While some of the Labour activists, such as William O’Brien, had worried that their anti-war stance had told against them, the attractions of the Redmondite position were fast fading. On 25 May the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, announced a grand wartime coalition. Among the new Tory ministers was Carson; but Redmond opted to remain outside the Cabinet. Nationalist Ireland saw it as yet another blow to the cause of home rule. The comment of the Dundalk Examiner was typical of a mood of deepening disillusion in nationalist ranks.
The Irish Party has been playing a certain game for ten years. The denouement has now come, and it is only too manifest that they cut a sorry figure.
Nor was the news from the front good. Dubliners had been treated to lavish if inaccurate war news from the outbreak of hostilities, including the doings of local units, such as a report of how thirteen members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers made it back to their lines with the help of Belgian farmers. Their graphic description of the German ambush of their unit near Courtois—‘they shot us down by scores’15—was hardly reassuring to would-be recruits or their families. But these were men of the tiny regular army, who often had few ties outside their units. It would be 1915 before the impact of the conflict hit the home front, as Kitchener’s ‘first 100,000’ completed their training and entered the fray.
The last act of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ came in the spring. On 22 April 1915 the Germans launched the Second Battle of Ypres to try to capture the town. On 25 April the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers took part in the counter-attack at Saint-Julien. Observers noted that they advanced in ‘faultless order’ into the morning mist, to be swept away by machine-gun fire. One detachment managed to reach the town under Captain Tobin Maunsell but was forced to withdraw for lack of support. The battalion had lost 510 members in the attack. Incredibly, the remnants of the unit raised ‘three cheers for Jim Larkin’ when they returned to the trenches, as if they had just attended a rally outside Liberty Hall. Undoubtedly the unit contained elements of the ITGWU, probably reservists forced to rejoin the regiment when hostilities began.
The battalion, reconstituted with reinforcements, was back in action a month later at Château du Nord, renamed by British soldiers Mouse Trap Farm. It was supposed to be recuperating when it was the target of a strong German attack on 24 May. By the time relief forces arrived it had suffered 583 casualties. The farm remained in allied hands, a heap of ‘mud and rubbish,’ but the battalion had practically ceased to exist, as had its sister unit, the 1st Battalion, which had lost 569 dead in the Gallipoli landings at Seddülbahir (called Sedd el-Bahr by the British army), which had taken place on 25 April.
What made the sacrifice of the Dubliners there all the more futile was that the naval crews bringing them ashore were all killed by Turkish fire from the shore, and the onslaught continued remorselessly as the boats drifted in a reddening sea. Some men drowned, weighed down by their equipment, as they leapt overboard and tried to reach the shore. Those who succeeded were caught on the underwater barbed wire the Turks had laid and were shot as they tried to struggle free.16
Little of the horror of war, especially as it affected Dublin units, seeped past the military censors. Of more immediate import was news that Brigadier-General Hill had put all licensed premises in Dublin off limits to soldiers—in the interests of discipline. The order included sailors and policemen, and applied also to restaurants and theatres where drink was sold. The Licensed Vintners’ Association ‘thoroughly agreed’ with the decision, and so did most civilians.17
By the summer of 1915 the war was visibly affecting mainstream politics in the city. At the corporation’s meeting on 14 July a maverick nationalist councillor, John Ryan, proposed a motion demanding that the Government of Ireland Act (1914)—which granted a measure of home rule but had been suspended for a year—be implemented ‘for all Ireland on September 17th next’ at the latest. Two UIL stalwarts, Councillors William Delaney and Thomas Murty O’Beirne, quickly proposed an amendment that the corporation ‘look with confidence to Mr. Redmond and the Irish Party, to select the best and speediest means and the proper moment for bringing the Home Rule settlement into operation by the summoning of the Irish Parliament.’ Although the amendment was adopted, it was only by 30 votes to 22, with several nationalist councillors voting for the original motion, alongside Labour and Sinn Féin members.18
Even the watered-down version was too much for Redmond, who wrote back from Aghavannagh, Co. Wicklow, on 20 July expressing concern at the damage the motion could do in ‘extremely critical times,’ when ‘a single false step might ruin the work of 35 years.’ He assured Dublin Corporation that
nothing can undo the enactment
of Home Rule by the Imperial Parliament. But let us recognise the great and overshadowing fact that the war … dominates all other issues … [The] highest duty and most vital interest of Ireland … is to do everything in her power to support the cause of the Allies.
Ironically, he also warned of the need to maintain ‘the Volunteer Movement, and to stand ready for any emergency that might arise.’ No-one could tell
when the war may take a turn which may bring Ireland’s hour; and I appeal … to my countrymen to organise and prepare, so that, when that hour does come, they may be ready.
At the meeting of 6 September the letter was incorporated in the minutes on the proposal of the High Sheriff, Councillor Patrick Shortall, a builder who had locked his employees out in 1913, and seconded by Councillor William O’Hara, who owed his narrow victory over Labour in the 1914 municipal elections to strong clerical support.19 Redmond would become increasingly dependent on the most conservative and unpopular elements in the UIL and AOH in the city.
A City in Wartime Page 8