O’Mahony was expected to win. He was a former Parnellite MP and had been sympathetic to the workers during the 1913 Lock-out, speaking at meetings and making a substantial donation to the strike fund, whereas Byrne had been excoriated by Larkin, who famously denounced the Vernon Bar as the resort of ‘slum landlords, scabs, prostitutes’ bullies … Hibs, Orangemen, Temperance humbugs … the brothel keeper, the white slaver,’ and other unpleasant characters.41 But Byrne won comfortably, with 2,200 votes to O’Mahony’s 917. The reason, besides the assiduous canvassing and constituency work for which he would become legendary, was that Byrne opposed conscription, the penal war taxes on Irish industry and the British war effort in general.
In contrast, O’Mahony was a strenuous recruiter for the British army. While Byrne shared anti-conscription platforms with Connolly, O’Mahony was addressing ever more disorderly election meetings. He vainly invoked the memory of Parnell and promised workers that a grateful British government would provide school meals for children, slum clearance and even munitions factories; but hecklers reminded him that the ‘Liberals killed Parnell.’ When a platform colleague of O’Mahony told them that the ‘Home Rule Bill’ was now an act, a wit cried back, ‘But not a fact,’ to loud laughter.
Farrell was never in the running. Despite his own anti-conscription stance at corporation meetings,42 he held to the party line on the war, and was considered a somewhat risqué figure, as he had opened one of Ireland’s first cinemas, the Pillar Picture House in Sackville Street, a few months earlier. A completely spurious rumour that he wanted to abolish Catholic schools was readily believed, and his two clerical sponsors were scared into disowning him on the eve of the election. They subsequently apologised sheepishly for their behaviour, but the damage had been done.43
Gallipoli had discredited the war effort in Dublin. The criticism of the young Irish troops by Sir Ian Hamilton, especially when it was contrasted with the favourable references by the War Office to the ANZAC forces and increasing evidence of poor logistical and operational planning, not only provided ammunition for militant nationalists but even shook the faith of Castle Catholics, such as Katherine Tynan, a confidante of the former Lord Lieutenant’s wife, Lady Aberdeen.
So many of our friends had gone out in the 10th Division to perish at Suvla. For the first time came bitterness, for we felt that their lives had been thrown away and their heroism had gone unrecognised. Suvla—the burning beach … and the blazing scrub, does not bear thinking on. Dublin was full of mourning.
On a visit to the Aberdeens she met two new war widows and a girl whose brother had died.
One got to know the look of new widows—hard bright eyes, burning for the relief of tears, a high, feverish flush in the cheeks, hands that trembled, and occasionally an uncertain movement of the young head.44
The Irish Times voiced the pious hope that
the Unionists and Nationalists who stormed the hill at Suvla have sealed a new bond of patriotism and the spirits of dead soldiers will cry trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of internecine strife in Ireland.45
But the northern unionist press was having none of it. The Northern Whig of Belfast used figures from a Protestant chaplain to claim that the majority of the 10th Division were neither Catholic nor Irish, which was probably true after British drafts made up for casualties. However, the records show that two-thirds of those who died or were wounded during the fighting had been domiciled in Ireland.46
The Northern Whig had a more legitimate argument when it pointed out that nationalists would not be able to claim political ownership of the 10th Division much longer, because recruitment had dried up at home. Major Bryan Cooper, a former Unionist MP for South Dublin who commanded a battalion of the Connaught Rangers at Suvla Bay, described the division as ‘shattered’ and felt increasingly demoralised by the fact that most of the replacements were British.
By the beginning of 1916 recruitment in Dublin had fallen below four hundred, the lowest figure for the entire war. But almost seventeen thousand had already signed up, and an additional eight thousand would do so before the war ended. In total, the Dublin metropolitan area provided more than 20 per cent of Ireland’s manpower to the war effort. This was by far the largest contribution outside the Belfast recruitment area, which contributed 36 per cent of recruits.47 Dublin was always a strong traditional recruitment area for the British army, with figures almost always exceeding those for Belfast. However, this pattern was strongly reversed during the First World War. (See tables 3 and 4.)
Table 3
Recruitment to the regular army, 1899–1913
Table 4
Recruitment, 1914–18
The flow of casualties from the front was an immediate reminder of the human cost of the war for everyone. By the end of 1915 there were five hundred war wounded in Dublin hospitals, often being treated side by side with other patients, such as Seán O’Casey, the future playwright, who was being cared for in St Vincent’s Hospital for TB. Years later O’Casey would remember Richard Francis Tobin, a former army surgeon whose bad hearing made him wield his ear trumpet ‘like a Field Marshal’s baton.’ Tobin’s only son, Paddy, had been a captain in the ‘Pals Battalion’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed on 15 August 1915. He often asked patients for news from the front, especially if they had been at Gallipoli. ‘He seemed to think when he was close to them, he was closer to his son.’48
Of course the cost of the conflict was also being felt by the wider community. Inflation continued to erode incomes. The activities of German submarines and the insatiable demands of the British war machine affected the price of everything. A good example was coal, which increased from 22s a ton to 40s between the start of the war and February 1915. The risk to transport in crossing the Irish Sea and the demand from war industries in Britain meant that even hospitals treating war casualties, such as St Vincent’s, were asked to reduce consumption.
Most widely affected were the ratepayers and electricity consumers. Both were mainly businesses and middle-class householders, as the poor still relied on paraffin lamps for light. The corporation’s coal bill would soar from £22,000 in the year ending 31 March 1915 to a projected £53,700 in the following twelve months.49 The Electricity Supply Committee reported that, although the city had acquired another 830 customers since the war began, mainly domestic subscribers, consumption had declined by 26,000 units, because of shortages and price rises. Some 21,000 units were accounted for by the hard-pressed middle classes, while theatres, cinemas and licensed premises consumed the rest, despite restricted opening hours and the ban on police and military personnel in public houses.50
The one bright spot on the horizon was the fact that the committee had stocked up on carbon electrodes for street lighting just before the war broke out. Unfortunately, replacements from the German supplier were no longer available, and Dublin would have to pay up to three times as much for poorer-quality British substitutes.51
The financial situation had become critical by mid-1915. If desperate measures were not adopted the respectable £9,600 profit for 1914/15 would be transformed into a loss of £23,000 by March 1916. The Electricity Supply Committee came up with two possible solutions: to meet the entire cost by putting an extra 1d on lighting and ½d on power, or to use up cash reserves and increase the rate for lighting by only ½d and for energy by a farthing (¼d). However, it noted that prices would have to remain at the new level—even if the war ended—until cash reserves were restored.
Not surprisingly, the councillors opted for the latter course, but only after deferring a decision for three months in the hope of better news from the front.52 The corporation was also paying 50 per cent more for cement, tar, wood and asphalt than before the war, and paying up to 10 per cent more in wages, including allowances for employees at the front.53
At least food prices had stabilised, and bakeries in particular showed considerable restraint in passing on costs. But demand from Britain, coupled with tax on luxuries such a
s tea and sugar, still exerted upward pressure on prices, even for such basic items as wheat and potatoes, by the autumn of 1915.54
Eating out was becoming significantly dearer, as restaurants had been another luxury area to be taxed. In September the Vegetarian Café in College Street raised the price of shilling teas by a penny ‘to cover the cost of everything, including the tea tax.’ The Red Bank Restaurant in D’Olier Street had already increased the price of shilling lunches by the same amount, but another penny was to be charged on a 4d pot of tea and 2d on an 8d pot. However, Bewley’s Cafés and Lemon and Company, the sweet manufacturers, said they would not increase prices while existing stocks lasted.55
There was uproar in the business community over the introduction of an excessive profits tax in the budget of September 1915. It was levied initially at 50 per cent and was to curb profiteering, particularly in armaments and clothing as well as cinemas and breweries near military bases.
The method of calculating excessive profit was to take the average return of businesses for the three years preceding the war as a base line. Unfortunately for Dublin, 1913 and 1914 had been particularly bad years, because of the lock-out and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the Citizens’ Association protested to the government and to John Redmond. As Sir Maurice Dockrell pointed out, ‘very few firms were making a profit in Dublin in 1913.’ Even companies not directly involved in the lock-out were affected, because, as Arthur Legg, whose firm made packing-cases, said, ‘we had no dispute with the men but they refused to handle “tainted goods”.’ He put his profits for 1913 at half the usual rate.
Such considerations cut little ice with the government. Its focus was firmly on the problems of wartime Britain, including the need to assuage public anger at profiteering.
By now it was relatively easy to direct public anger in Dublin at the British authorities, as the controversy over fodder and milk supplies demonstrated. In the autumn of 1915 rumours began to circulate that Major-General Friend, who commanded the British forces in Ireland, intended to commandeer the first cut of hay from farms within a ten-mile radius of the city. There was widespread fear that this would lead to shortages of fodder for Dublin’s five hundred dairies, on which the city depended for its milk. Any shortage of fodder would soon translate into falling milk supplies and rising prices for this vital commodity.
In fact the army was not commandeering the fodder but was paying market rates for the crop, and taking no more than it did in 1913. Most importantly, the first cut of hay was not normally fed to cattle anyway but used for horses. The army’s fodder-purchasing activities did not lead to milk shortages, or price increases, but it did give ammunition to increasingly vociferous critics of the war, as did the new import duty of 33 per cent on luxury goods, such as motor cars, bicycles, films, watches, clocks and musical instruments.
Another luxury item taxed was newspapers, a burden that the press was not slow to point out fell disproportionately on Ireland, whose papers lacked the mass circulation, large advertising market and better transport infrastructure of their Fleet Street rivals that could absorb the extra costs.56 The Freeman’s Journal made the telling point that people in rural Ireland were far more reliant on newspapers for information than were town-dwellers. It concluded that ‘no enterprise has been so hardly hit by the war … paper, metal etc. have gone up in price, and freight and insurance rates have almost doubled.’ Nor could costs be recouped through price increases, while ‘advertisements too have diminished.’57 Instead the size of newspapers shrank, and with them the amount of space given to parliamentary debates, ‘especially the speeches of the smaller fry among politicians.’58 This would have implications for the Irish Party at the national and the local level. In Dublin, the coverage of council meetings shrank to a fragment of the pre-war days.
Ratepayers were caught between the nether stone of rising pay demands from corporation employees and a reduced capacity to raise revenue. A debate on increases for 1,200 civic labourers in August to compensate them for wartime inflation revolved around the fact that it would break the ceiling of £2,000 on extra expenditure provided for by the agreed ½d increase in the rates. Eventually councillors voted for increases costing £7,000, with a proviso that, as with railway workers, the pay increases would be cancelled once the war ended.59
In October, resigned to having to break their own guidelines on expenditure again, the councillors adopted a report recommending that £8,000 be included in the 1916 estimates for a small working-class housing estate on the Ormond Market site. However, they failed to agree a means of raising the money.60 To clear all 14,000 slums in the city would cost £3 million, or three times the annual rateable valuation of the city. Yet Pembroke Urban District Council managed to raise £175,000 to complete 759 houses in Stella Gardens in Ringsend by September 1916. One factor behind the impressive housing record of this suburban township was undoubtedly the lower wage rates of its local authority employees; another was the relative prosperity of its ratepayers. But it also showed that progress was possible on the housing front, even in wartime, if there was the political will.61
Censorship added to the sense of powerlessness Dubliners felt in the crisis. Home news was restricted, and the mainstream press served up copy inspired by the War Office and obtained from the news agencies. These were sprinkled with letters and reports from individuals at the front, usually chaplains, who appeared less inhibited by the censors than other serving personnel. The poor quality of war coverage made it almost impossible to distinguish real victories from illusory ones. By the end of 1915 the only conclusions readers could safely draw were that the war was going to last a long time, that no reductions could be expected in the casualty rates and that more hardship was a certainty on the home front.
Chapter 4
‘WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD, THERE IS NO REDEMPTION’
Meanwhile anti-war feeling was stoked steadily by the radical nationalist press. In November 1914 the Irish Worker and Irish Freedom, journals of the labour movement and the IRB, respectively, were seized. Other publications, including Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteer, official organ of the Volunteers, undertook to moderate their tone to avoid closure.1
These mosquito titles enjoyed a very small circulation: most sold between 1,000 and 4,000 copies per issue. The largest circulation belonged to Nationality, one of Griffith’s many enterprises, which sold 8,000 copies. In contrast, the daily Irish Independent sold 100,000 and the Sunday Independent up to 70,000 copies, while a speech by John Redmond to troops at the front in 1915 had a print run of 240,000 when reproduced in pamphlet form. British army recruitment posters had a print run of anything from 500 to 40,000 copies each.2
Besides Griffith, the other leading figure in the production of anti-war material was James Connolly. Griffith had been a printer by trade before turning to journalism; Connolly had learnt the trade by turns between his work as a trade union activist, socialist propagandist and general rebel against the capitalist juggernaut. He saw the war as a particularly brutal manifestation of the system, and called for an equally brutal response. Unlike Griffith, he was not a free agent, and there were concerns in the ITGWU, of which he was acting general secretary during Larkin’s absence in America, that his activities would bring the wrath of Dublin Castle down upon the union.
The Irish Worker had been printed by members of the Socialist Labour Party in Glasgow, but this had left it vulnerable to interception by the police. When Connolly proposed buying a second-hand Furnival press and running off his new publication, the Workers’ Republic, in Liberty Hall, he fobbed off worried committee members with the explanation that the machine was ‘only a little one.’ They would have been deeply troubled if they could have overheard his discussions with Fred Bower and other Liverpool socialists when he went there in search of his Furnival. When Connolly told them that he felt the war provided an opportunity for revolution, Bower asked, not unnaturally, ‘But is the tim
e ripe?’ Connolly replied, ‘If you succeed the time is ripe, if not, then it is not ripe.’3
Despite the disadvantages under which anti-war propagandists such as Connolly and Griffith operated, they had two significant factors working in their favour. One was the hardship and loss the war inflicted daily on the people of the city; the other was the historic resonance that their stance against the traditional enemy struck. In contrast, constitutional nationalists could justify support for the war only on the grounds that England had changed its policy towards Ireland. This was the argument pushed by the first Irish winner of the Victoria Cross, the highest British award for bravery, Mick O’Leary from Inchigeelagh, Co. Cork, when he was heckled at recruiting meetings. He explained that England was no longer ruled by the landlord class that had oppressed the Irish but was a democracy that would treat Ireland decently. However, his father had told neighbours that if they did not join up ‘the Germans will come here and will do to you what the English have been doing for the last seven hundred years.’
As the war progressed, the evidence suggested that the fundamentals of English rule, especially such intangibles as a perceived lack of respect for Irish interests or recognition for Irish sacrifices, had not changed at all.4
Another growing weapon in the nationalist arsenal was fear of conscription. By the end of May 1915 the British army had suffered 258,069 casualties, an average of 860 a day, of whom 40 per cent were listed as killed or missing in action and therefore unavailable for return to the front line.5 There was increasing talk of conscription in Britain as the flow of volunteers failed to make good the losses. The main brake on its introduction was opposition from the British Labour Party; this led to the ironic situation where Labour politicians were among the most assiduous in addressing recruiting rallies, urging workers to enlist so that conscription would be unnecessary!
A City in Wartime Page 10