Although his letter was adopted by the councillors, at the same meeting they also passed a motion ‘that we declare we will not have Conscription.’ It was proposed by Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin and passed by 31 votes to 7. This arose out of a conference hosted in the council chamber on Tuesday 20 July, chaired by another radical nationalist councillor, Laurence O’Neill. The conference attracted a wide audience, and even some of the establishment figures on the platform made speeches that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. A former Lord Mayor, Alderman J. J. Farrell, said:
In Dublin young men have been advised to go to war by the effective means of depriving them of work. In England there are millions of men fit to fight if they were only willing. The Government do not want anything from Dublin or the South but blood and money. If the two Volunteer forces in Ireland made up their minds that there should be no conscription there would be none.
Other nationalist councillors and the maverick Irish Party MP Laurence Ginnell shared the platform with Farrell, along with James Connolly, Councillor William T. Cosgrave of Sinn Féin and members of the Catholic clergy. In fact no fewer than six Catholic clergymen, including four parish priests, wrote public letters of support for the meeting, while apologising for not being able to attend.20 Incipient respectability was descending on a cause that had been the solitary haven of Connolly’s Irish Neutrality League when war broke out. The seven members of the corporation who voted against the anti-conscription motion included the few remaining unionists and a former unionist councillor, Andrew Beattie, who now sat as an independent ratepayers’ representative for the South City ward, as well as some moderate or independent nationalists who represented areas such as Drumcondra and Glasnevin, which had significant Protestant-unionist electorates. The eccentric, deeply corrupt and contrary-minded ‘Labour’ councillor John Saturninus Kelly also opposed the motion, fuelling rumours that he was ‘on the take’ from Dublin Castle.21
In August there was more bad news from Gallipoli. As a concession to the Irish Party, Field-Marshal Kitchener had reluctantly agreed that the 10th Division, recruited almost entirely in Ireland, would be dubbed an Irish division. Its volunteers landed at Suvla Bay on 7 August, on the opposite side of the Gallipoli peninsula to the embattled forces at Seddülbahir. The objective was to take the Turks in the rear and clear the way to Istanbul.
It was another debacle. A third of the division’s strength was diverted to the Seddülbahir beach-head, and command of the rest constantly changed until its commander, Lieutenant-General Bryan Mahon, resigned in protest.22
In less than a week the Dublin Fusiliers ‘Pals’ were reduced from 239 to 106. One of the field ambulance brigades working with them lost 23 out of 33 men, killed, wounded or captured in three days of intense fighting to capture the heights of Kiretch Tepe above the bay. German officers with the Turkish troops would later report that the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and Royal Munster Fusiliers who took part in the operation came close to capturing the ridge. When they failed, the defeated troops were trapped in a beach-head rarely free from enemy fire and so congested that the stretchers of the wounded were set side by side on the sand. The lack of hospital tents meant they had to lie in the sun, amid human faeces and clouds of flies. Lack of adequate supplies of fresh water was a constant problem, and the men subsisted on tinned meat that was sometimes rotten, because the cans had been punctured in transit. Meanwhile rows of British bayonets glinted on the slopes above them, marking the spot where their dead owners lay.
Altogether the 10th Division suffered more than two thousand fatalities at Gallipoli in August, 569 of them from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. When the wounded are taken into account, the division lost half its fighting strength. An officer of the 7th Battalion wrote with unconscious irony: ‘Ireland may mourn, but the Irish may hold up their heads and be proud of their Tommies.’23
The truth emerged slowly. Reports controlled by the War Office had given all credit for the repulse of the German attack at Saint-Julien on the western front in April to the Canadian units involved, while the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps received what little credit there was to be gleaned from the Seddülbahir landings in the same month. In August despatches also concentrated initially on the efforts of the ANZAC forces to push northwards up the peninsula to link up with the 10th Division at Suvla. Even then the coverage was significantly less than that given to the western and eastern fronts, or indeed to the crash of the Holyhead mail train near Rugby on Saturday 14 August, in which ten people died—four of them Irish women and one a Dublin Fusilier.
The torpedoing of the troopship Royal Edward in the Mediterranean with the loss of a thousand men shortly afterwards, and the sinking of the transatlantic liner Arabica off Cork in the same week, further distracted attention from the costly failures at Gallipoli. A writer to the Irish Independent expressed his frustration at the lack of coverage in a brief but sharp letter.
One is … struck by the entire absence of mention of the two Irish regiments who, at terrible losses in officers and men, made this landing good. Viz.—1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers: The 6th and 7th Battalions of both these famous regiments are now ‘somewhere’ in or near the Gallipoli Peninsula, and, given an opportunity, they will no doubt emulate the deeds of their line battalions. It is to be hoped … that they will not be officially passed over.24
The letter was signed ‘Dubster.’25
On 24 August the immensity of the losses began to emerge in the Irish press, coinciding with news that the Government of Ireland Act was now likely to be suspended until after the war, or even longer. John Redmond called on nationalist Ireland to rally behind him so that the country could speak with ‘one voice’ and ensure that this threat was defeated. He received short shrift from the Irish Independent, which pointed out that ‘the time to have exhibited strength was five years ago.’ It put his present problems down to a ‘lamentable initial weakness’ in tackling opposition to home rule.
The next day’s edition published a group photograph of officers taken at Portobello Barracks (now Cathal Brugha Barracks) before their departure for the Dardanelles. Of the 25 men in the picture, 18 were listed as killed or wounded.26 But it was only on 27 August that Dubliners began to learn of the full scale of the disaster at Gallipoli. On the same day, sections of a despatch on the landings written by the commanding officer in the military theatre of operations, General Sir Ian Hamilton, also appeared in the press. ‘The young troops of the new divisions did not get on fast enough, and the first advantage of surprise was lost,’ he wrote. As a result, gains made by veteran New Zealanders had to be given up.
Details of the despatch, widely circulated in British newspapers, added insult and hurt to bereaved families in Ireland. The Irish Independent counselled that it
would be better for the public to suspend judgement until the facts are fully ascertained. The casualty lists, at any rate, show that the Irish troops fought bravely and suffered heavily.’27
It was another nail in John Redmond’s political coffin. Even his request that the 10th Division be allowed to undergo its baptism of fire under the command of its own Irish commander had been ignored.
Over the coming days Irish papers published horrific stories of the carnage. Father J. Fahey, a recently ordained Catholic priest and chaplain, described the scene at Suvla.
An inferno broke loose. It was appalling. The men were packed so closely that one bullet would wound or kill three men. There was dreadful slaughter in the boats.
I could see only what was happening in my own. First the ‘cox’ was shot; then an oarsman fell dead across my feet; then a bullet came through the boat and grazed the puttees on my leg; then another of the men collapsed without a sound … I never expected to reach the shore alive.
There was only one anxiety amongst the men—to reach the shore and rush the Turks with the bayonet.
However, the boat struck the bottom about twenty yards from the shore, and the
men had to wade the rest of the way. As Father Fahey jumped into the water a bullet went through the sleeve of his jacket ‘and caught a lad behind me. A [piece of] shrapnel splashed a man’s brains over me,’ while a shot that hit the gunwale
almost blinded me with splinters. I got on the beach exhausted and had to lie down amongst the falling bullets to get my breath.
A soldier trying to dig a foxhole in the sand beside him was shot through the heart. Looking back, Father Fahey saw that
the beach was strewn with dead and wounded. Two boats landed about 50 yards from where I was. They held 50 soldiers each but only 20 came ashore altogether. They came under fire from a maxim gun. But these 20 had their revenge; they captured the gun and bayoneted every member of the crew.28
The pages of the newspapers began to fill with photographs of dead and wounded Fusiliers officers. Two brothers reported wounded were Captain J. A. D. Dempsey and Lieutenant P. H. D. Dempsey. Captain Dempsey was ‘very popular in musical and dramatic circles in Dublin’ and had served on the entertainments committee of the battalion.
Personal details of private soldiers who were casualties were rare, but an exception was Corporal F. J. Murphy. While thousands of his comrades were being buried at Suvla, he was awarded the honour of a funeral with military honours through the streets of Dublin because he had been one of the fatalities on the Holyhead mail train the previous Saturday. Dubliners were also able to examine replicas of a dug-out and a shooting trench in the grounds of Iveagh House as part of the Royal Horticultural Society show, transferred from the RDS grounds, now under military occupation. These were reportedly the most popular attractions.29
The next day’s Irish Independent published a group photograph of twenty-eight officers of the ‘Pals Battalion’, of whom nine had been killed and a further six wounded. The wounded included the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Downing, and Lieutenant Ernest Julian, Reid professor of law at TCD. Julian had died in fact on 8 August, three weeks before the photograph was published. Errors in news reports were compounded by censorship and slow communications. Page Dickinson described Julian as ‘brilliant in his career and … making his name as fast as man can at his own calling.’30 It is a measure of the impact that the Dardanelles fiasco was having that Dickinson—an architect from a staunch unionist background who left Ireland in the 1920s rather than live under the Free State—felt ‘unable to speak of Gallipoli: of all the horrible, ill-thought-out phases of the war that reflect discredit on those in authority, it was the worst.’31
Lieutenant Ewen Cameron, an officer in the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, died without even reaching the front. The Irish Independent reported with brutal clarity:
He was found shot dead in a lavatory of the 10.15 a.m. train from Dublin, between Greystones and Newcastle. The door was bolted from the inside. The bullet, which had been discharged from an automatic pistol, pierced the brain.32
Cameron’s brother Charles had served as a captain in the same regiment before perishing in a drowning accident shortly before the war broke out. Ewen had been
vigorously assisting in the recruiting campaign, with the result that for the past few days he had shown serious signs of complete nervous breakdown. The news of the numerous fatalities and casualties among his fellow officers, it is said, also depressed him deeply.
Their father, Sir Charles Cameron, was deputy grand master of Ireland’s Freemasons, though he was better known for the previous half-century as Dublin’s chief medical officer. ‘This terrible blow will [make] the little of life left to me meaningless,’ he recorded in his diary that night.33
Another family deeply affected by events at Gallipoli was that of Edward Lee. A Methodist of modest origins from Cornahir, near Tyrrellspass, Co. Westmeath, he was known as the local man who went to Dublin and became a millionaire. He owned a string of drapery shops in Dublin and its suburbs. He had married Annie Shackleton, a member of the well-known Quaker business family, and had earlier worked for another well-known Quaker family, the Pims, at their drapery shop in South Great George’s Street. In 1885 he established his own shop in Bray and the same year a second one in Kingstown. Other branches followed in Rathmines and the city centre.
Lee was renowned for two things. In 1889 he initiated a half-day holiday on Thursdays for his staff, which was later adopted by most shops in the city, and in 1913 he was almost alone among employers in Dublin in opposing the lock-out. He was certainly the most consistent and vociferous opponent of William Martin Murphy’s strategy of starving the workers into submission. He joined the Industrial Peace Committee established by Tom Kettle,34 which tried unsuccessfully to arrange a settlement to the dispute.
Lee had served as chairman of Bray Urban District Council in 1908, sponsored by Lord Powerscourt, in the Unionist interest. The first toast at the dinner held to celebrate his election was ‘The King.’ Two years later there was a luncheon in the Royal Marine Hotel in Kingstown to mark his handing over of the Dungar Terrace housing development, which he had built at his own expense for employees, to the urban district council. When the war came he would make his premises available for collecting fruit, fresh vegetables and game for wounded soldiers convalescing in the city’s hospitals.
Life must have seemed idyllic in the summer of 1914, although Edward and Annie Lee had already known tragedy in their lives, with the deaths of five of their nine children in infancy. The surviving children lived with their parents in a big house, Bellevue, in Cross Avenue, with large grounds and tennis courts. Two of the sons, Edward and Tennyson, would follow their father into the family firm, while Robert became a doctor and Joe a barrister. A dinner was held in the Dolphin Hotel in East Essex Street, Dublin, to celebrate the calling of Joseph Bagnall Lee to the bar. Again the first toast was ‘The King,’ followed by ‘Mr. Joseph Bagnall Lee,’ ‘The Irish Bar,’ and ‘Prosperity to Ireland.’
Joe Lee was a brilliant student at Trinity. He was senior moderator (in first place among honours graduates) in legal and political science, joint author of a book on criminal injuries and auditor of the Law Students’ Debating Society. The Lord Chancellor, Sir Samuel Walker, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, were in the audience at King’s Inns for his inaugural address on the subject of ‘The Law and the Problems of Poverty.’
It was an unremarkable performance, however. Lee sought reforms in the old workhouse system and the new labour exchanges to ensure greater discrimination between the ‘deserving poor,’ who should be helped, and ‘the loafer and semicriminal with whom they have no option but to associate.’ The greatest excitement came when suffragists in the audience heckled Birrell.
With the outbreak of war, three of the Lee sons volunteered. Joe and Tennyson were sponsored by a family friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Verschoyle T. Worship, and received commissions as officers in the 6th Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, his own unit. Robert, the doctor in the family, was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Joe Lee was killed within hours of landing at Suvla Bay, leading his men in the assault on the hotly disputed Kiretch Tepe ridge. Tennyson, who saw his brother’s dead body being brought back into the lines, was severely wounded in the left arm. A month later and a thousand miles away their brother Robert was promoted captain for his work under fire at a field hospital in the battle for ‘Hill 60’ at Ypres. His companion, O. S. Watkins, a Methodist chaplain, wrote of their experiences:
All through the night the ghastly stream poured in. I will not attempt to picture that dressing station—blood, horror, shrieks and groans. I wish I could forget it myself, and do not desire that anybody else should have to carry the burden of that memory.35
But the horrors of war, or at least its consequences, were beginning to make themselves visible in Dublin. On 7 September, just as the battle of Hill 60 was opening, no less than 611 war wounded arrived at the North Wall on the hospital ship Oxfordshire from Le Havre. Half of them were despatched, ‘in a dismal downpour of rai
n,’ to various hospitals in Dublin and the rest to Belfast, Cork and the Curragh. Members of the Automobile Association organised private transport to bring many of the wounded to local hospitals.
The death of yet another of Dublin’s ageing nationalist MPs passed almost unnoticed in the clamour of war. William Abraham had few connections with the capital. Like Nannetti, he had been a craft union stalwart in his day, representing the Carpenters and Joiners at the British Trades Union Congress in Dublin in 1880. Like Nannetti, he was out of tune and out of touch with the younger generation of radical labour leaders. Unlike Nannetti, he had first come to prominence through his work for the Land League and had been imposed on the electorate of the Harbour division by the Irish Party machine in 1910 when local UIL branches could not agree on a candidate. Since his election he had hardly visited the city, and he even deprived the party of the bonus of a political funeral in Dublin by being buried in the Nonconformist section of St Pancras Cemetery in London.36
‘It’s the best Labour seat in Dublin, and win it we must,’37 was William O’Brien’s assessment of the Harbour division; yet Labour never contested the election. Connolly was pressed to run but refused: he was already embarked upon a course of revolutionary violence that would lead to a firing squad eight months later. He believed that the war had made elections a distraction for the working class. As early as August 1914 he had expressed the hope that ‘Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.’38
The president of the Dublin branch of the Railway Clerks’ Association, W. B. McMahon, was prevailed upon to run instead but withdrew within twenty-four hours, pleading ill-health.39
In the event, the writ was not moved until 24 September, nominations closed on 28 September, and the election took place on 1 October, making it one of the shortest election campaigns on record. It was also one of the dirtiest—a three-cornered dogfight between three nationalists, Alderman J. J. Farrell, Pierce O’Mahony (better known as ‘the O’Mahony’) and a local publican called Alfie Byrne. Byrne cheerfully admitted that he wanted an MP’s salary because he could not make a living from ‘my little pub’ (the Vernon Bar in Talbot Street).40
A City in Wartime Page 9