A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  Dublin Castle immediately denounced it as a forgery; but the timing was impeccable. The House of Commons was in the middle of the great debate that would lead to the introduction of conscription in Britain. On 11 April, in response to a parliamentary question about the increasingly provocative activities of the Irish Volunteers, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, assured the house that plans existed for dealing with that organisation.

  MacNeill was certainly convinced of the document’s authenticity and issued a countermanding order calling off a mass mobilisation of the Volunteers for Easter Sunday only after news broke that the Royal Navy had intercepted the German arms shipment meant for the rebels off the Kerry coast on 20 April. It was clear then that the crucial mobilisation of the properly armed provincial units necessary to make the seizure of Dublin a serious military proposition was no longer possible. MacNeill could see this; but members of the Military Council had invested far too much of themselves in the insurrection to call it off. To do so would leave them open to ridicule and recrimination by the whole nationalist community, as well as retribution from the authorities.3

  The attitude of Thomas Ashe, already a senior figure within the IRB, was probably typical. He heard rumours of a countermanding order from Diarmuid Lynch, secretary of the IRB executive, while on a visit to the city.4 Ashe ordered his men to assemble at Rathbeale Cross on Easter Sunday anyway and had them practise tactics until an order arrived definitely cancelling the rising. He told the Volunteers to ‘guard your arms as you would guard your lives’ and went to see Connolly at Liberty Hall. When Connolly said the rising would go ahead on Easter Monday regardless of MacNeill’s order, Ashe returned to Lusk and used the IRB network, supplemented by a motorbike, to tell as many men as possible to mobilise at Knocksedan Bridge outside Swords next morning.

  Only a handful turned up5; but the poor turn-out did not deter Ashe. The intense nationalism of the Volunteers, reinforced by the extreme religiousness of the era, made the prospect of defeat less forbidding for these men than it would have been for many of their more materially minded revolutionary contemporaries on the Continent. Ashe’s last act as principal of Corduff National School had been to cut all the flowers in bloom in the garden and ask his assistant, Mary Monks, to put them on the altar in front of the Blessed Sacrament after he was gone.6

  A local priest heard the confession of any volunteer who wanted it at Knocksedan, and most volunteers in the city who had any inkling of what was about to take place made it a priority to attend to their religious duties. Even avowed socialists such as Sergeant Frank Robbins of the Irish Citizen Army did so. As described by one of Ashe’s lieutenants, Joe Lawless—the man who had accidentally fired his revolver in the confrontation with soldiers at Fairview in 1914—English propaganda sought to misrepresent them

  as anarchical, communistic, pro-German and various other things, but the fact is that the Irish nationalist gospel was based upon, not only the right of Ireland to be free, but the absolute necessity to … pursue her destiny in accordance with her people’s conception of the Divine plan.

  For him the outbreak of war in Europe was ‘a providential opportunity to strike for freedom.’7

  An air of inevitability about the coming confrontation had been skilfully cultivated by members of the Military Council. Frank Henderson, captain of F Company of the 2nd Battalion, recalled regular talks and training exercises geared to a confrontation with the British in the city. Connolly lectured them on street fighting in early 1916, and the whole battalion mobilised one Saturday night in February when it was feared an abortive arms raid by the police on the home of Volunteers across the river in Great Brunswick Street presaged arrests throughout the city.

  Military equipment of all sorts was brought out and we waited in disciplined groups in the streets at Fairview and Ballybough … I suppose we must have been a couple of hours on the streets. That was a great test for the men themselves, because there was always the doubt before that as to how many … would turn out when it would come to the point.

  Other conditioning included the commandant of the Fourth Battalion, Éamonn Ceannt, telling men that he had made his will. A couple of weeks before the rising Pearse attended a meeting of all the officers of the Dublin Brigade at Volunteer headquarters in Dawson Street. He asked them: ‘Is every man here prepared to meet his God? Any man who was not in earnest should leave.’ Henderson recalled: ‘Only a very small number, one or two men, did not turn up after that.’8

  In contrast, Connolly, who had a relatively small number of men (and women) to deal with, met each member of the Citizen Army individually and asked if they were willing to take part in a rising. Each member who replied in the affirmative was given a mobilisation number. On receipt of a message bearing the number they would present themselves, fully equipped, for action. The simplicity of the system helped ensure the high turn-out of Citizen Army members in the rising.

  Frank Robbins, who had left his job in the Dublin Dockyard to be on stand-by for emergencies at Liberty Hall, spent his spare hours making grenades, converting shotgun cartridges for use in military weapons and ferrying weapons around the city, while the civil servant Liam Archer spent his Easter holidays on guard duty at the Keating Branch premises, 18 North Frederick Street, where some members of the Volunteer Executive were living on the run.

  Archer and his comrades spent Easter Sunday night playing cards. Michael Collins joined them from the Larkfield estate of the Plunkett family, where he had helped with the accounts as well as military preparations. Archer wrote:

  His entrance was characteristic of him as I later knew him. He forced his way to a seat at the table, produced two revolvers and announced he would ensure there would be nothing crooked about this game. Not to be outdone, we all produced our weapons.9

  Meanwhile Christopher Brady, a printer who worked for the ITGWU, was busy printing the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in the basement of Liberty Hall, assisted by the compositors Michael Molloy and Billy O’Brien. It had been a difficult job, because the press they were using was ‘so dilapidated that parts had to be propped up with bricks,’ wrong fonts were pressed into service, and new letters were even manufactured with sealing-wax.10

  The proclamation, almost certainly written by Pearse and Connolly, contained significant elements from the constitution of the Irish Citizen Army, which had declared as its ‘first and last principle … the avowal that the ownership of Ireland, moral and material, is vested of right in the people of Ireland.’ It also committed members to ‘the principle of equal rights and opportunities for the Irish people,’ which it adopted in practice with the admission of women to full membership.

  The proclamation declared ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.’ It also declared that ‘the Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.’

  The Citizen Army constitution had been written by Seán O’Casey, who could thus claim to have influenced the drafting of the seminal tract of the Irish revolution that he would later lampoon in his plays.

  Documents such as the constitution of the Irish Citizen Army and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic could not have been drafted, let alone adopted as political manifestos, anywhere in Ireland but Dublin. The unique milieu of radical nationalists, syndicalists, suffragists and socialists had injected revolutionary concepts into Irish political discourse that no amount of revision by the right would ever exorcise completely.11

  About the time that Constance Markievicz was explaining to the casual eavesdropper in Liberty Hall that they were rehearsing a play ‘for grown-ups,’ the Citizen Army bugler, William Oman, sounded the ‘Fall in’. A group of Irish Volunteers arrived immediately afterwards to form a joi
nt detachment with the Citizen Army for seizing the GPO. It was 11:45 a.m. Another section, composed entirely of Citizen Army personnel, including Markievicz, made its way to St Stephen’s Green. Every unit was supposed to be in place by noon. The Angelus bell, ringing from the numerous Catholic steeples of the capital, provided the synchronisation signal.

  Two members of the Volunteers caught by surprise decided to join the Citizen Army contingent in St Stephen’s Green rather than try to reach their own unit. One was Harry Nicholls, the Dublin Corporation engineer; the other was Liam Ó Briain, lecturer in Romance languages at University College, Galway. They clambered over the railings, and as Ó Briain’s feet touched the ground he felt he was standing ‘in a different world to the ordinary, every day, shabbily genteel existence of dear old Dublin.’12

  Like all great public events, the rising did indeed have some elements of street theatre about it, but it was on such a modest and parochial scale that it took a while for ordinary citizens, let alone the authorities, to realise that something more than routine paramilitary manoeuvres were taking place.

  An Irish Times correspondent reported nothing unusual as he approached the city centre from the north side: ‘the streets, to all appearances, were in their usual Bank holiday guise.’ He noted that trams heading for the zoo in the Phoenix Park were packed with passengers keen to avail of half-price admission. ‘Around the Nelson Pillar was the usual group of holiday idlers. Then his attention

  was attracted by a slight commotion in front of the General Post Office … A small group was gathered around a young man in the uniform of a Volunteer—either a Sinn Feiner or one of the Larkinite Citizen Army—who was standing between two pillars under the portico. This young man had a rifle with a fixed bayonet in his left hand, whilst in his right he held a bright-edged axe.

  The journalist still did not realise anything was seriously amiss until he noticed other uniformed men smashing windows. The ‘majority of onlookers seemed to regard the entire proceedings as a joke,’ he wrote.

  As he walked towards the Irish Times offices in D’Olier Street he noticed Volunteers taking furniture out of Mooney’s pub in Lower Abbey Street to form a barricade, and similar activity was taking place at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk, where the premises of M. Kelly and Son, which sold gunpowder as well as fishing tackle, were being ransacked. Crossing the bridge, he found nothing untoward in Westmorland Street, ‘but from the direction of Dame Street, Parliament Street and Capel Street could be heard the ominous crackling of rifle shots.’13 Soon, ‘people in the streets were becoming somewhat excited and alarmed, and saying in a half-credulous way, that a Sinn Fein revolution had broken out.’ The crowds of holiday-makers grew ‘thinner and thinner,’ while ‘the noise of rifle shots grew louder and louder. An attack was being made on Dublin Castle—policemen had been shot down—such was the talk that passed from lip to lip.’ Yet, ‘despite the fusillade and the occasional patter of bullets upon the walls, people passed up and down Cork Hill with assumed indifference.’14

  One bemused observer was sixteen-year-old Wilmot Irwin, who had accompanied his father on the tram from Glasnevin to Nelson’s Pillar in Sackville Street. They walked as far as Grafton Street, window-shopping.

  I noticed … the fine young Metropolitan Policeman on point duty at the junction of South King Street and Stephen’s Green. Though I did not know it then it was Constable Michael Lahiff, 125B, aged 28 years. When I saw him he had less than twenty minutes to live. Everything seemed normal as we turned to go home. Just as we neared the end of Grafton Street a column of Citizen Army volunteers with shouldered rifles swung along towards the Green. We paid little attention to them as parades of armed and semi-uniformed men of unofficial armies were all too common.

  As they returned to the Pillar they saw a convoy of lorries pass up the north side of the quays towards the Royal Barracks but still did not suspect that ‘anything was amiss’ until they reached the GPO and had to step out onto the road to avoid a ‘shower of broken glass.’ Irwin ‘glimpsed a white-faced, tensed volunteer in the slouch hat of the Citizen Army smash away the panes … as if his life depended on it, with the butt end of his rifle.’ Despite the commotion, the trams were still running, and the two men made it safely home. ‘My father hardly opened his mouth during the short journey to Lindsay Road,’ Irwin wrote. ‘I think even then he knew it was the end of an era.’15

  In contrast, the Irish Times reported that as late as midnight, in spite of intensifying rifle fire,

  a number of persons of both sexes, some of them very young, were parading the principal streets … singing and shouting, apparently much excited by the events happening around them.

  No less than twelve British soldiers were reported to have died in the city’s hospitals that night, compared with one ‘Sinn Fein Volunteer’ and four civilians, one of them a fourteen-year-old girl from Fumbally Lane, Ella Warbrooke.16 Among the first military casualties were Private James Nolan, just arrived home on leave from service with the Royal Irish Rangers in France, and Frank Browning, sub-commandant of the Dublin Veterans’ Corps.

  Browning, who had initiated the ‘Pals Battalion’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, had gone on to establish the Dublin Veterans’ Corps for former soldiers and civilians too old for active service in France. Members wore an armband with the letters GR, for Georgius Rex (King George), and were promptly dubbed by wits the Gorgeous Wrecks. The unit was training in Kingstown when news of the disturbances reached it. It split in two, the main section returning to its base at Beggars’ Bush Barracks in Haddington Road and Browning advancing—possibly against orders—directly towards the city centre to assist the authorities.

  His men were in uniform and fully equipped but had no ammunition in their rifles when they marched down Northumberland Road into the Mount Street Bridge outpost of Éamon de Valera’s 3rd Battalion. The result was a small massacre. Five members of the Dublin Veterans’ Corps were killed and seven wounded. The Volunteers eventually held their fire to allow a doctor in a motor car to carry the wounded to nearby houses for treatment. Browning was among those fatally wounded.17

  The commander of the ambush party was Lieutenant Michael Malone, whose brother William had been killed while serving as a sergeant with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the battle for Mouse Trap Farm the previous year. Malone was the best marksman in the battalion, a committed separatist and a member of the IRB.

  While the attack on the Dublin Veterans’ Corps has been portrayed as an unfortunate mistake, the identity of the unit was well known to Malone and his men. ‘We took a special interest in the “GRs” in Dublin,’ Volunteer Richard Balfe recalled later. In 1915 a detachment of Irish Volunteers had managed to obtain Veterans’ Corps cap badges and insignia and presented themselves at Beggars’ Bush Barracks to be armed in preparation for a display before the new Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, at Trinity College. After winning accolades for their smart drill routine they disappeared with their newly acquired weapons.18 As far as Malone was concerned, the ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ marching into view that morning were a legitimate target, though he may not have realised they had no ammunition.

  Anticipating that more British soldiers would be channelled along this stretch of quiet suburban road leading into the city centre, Malone, ever the good soldier, deployed his men at posts in Northumberland Road and Lower Mount Street to create an intensive field of fire commanding the canal crossing. He himself took the most exposed position, number 25 Northumberland Road, along with James Grace, another IRB man, who had deserted from the Canadian forces to take part in the rising.

  The key to the crossing was Clanwilliam House, which overlooked Mount Street Bridge from the town side of the canal. It was a large three-storey residence occupied by a widow, Mrs Wilson, and her daughter. On taking it over, Section Leader George Reynolds told his men: ‘We’re representatives of the Irish Republic, so I don’t want you to behave like hooligans.’ He set an example by raising the lower sash
windows to facilitate rifle fire, rather than smashing them.

  However, no amount of good manners could erase the violent nature of the venture they were engaged upon. A brutal demonstration was provided for civilians at Boland’s Bakery a short distance away in Grand Canal Street. An off-duty Irish soldier returning unarmed to Beggars’ Bush Barracks was shot when he responded to a call to ‘clear off’ by telling the Volunteers they were ‘nothing but bloody traitors.’ A big mill worker was cheered by local people when he carried the wounded man to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital across the street.19

  The only leading insurrectionist who appears to have devoted much attention to the problem of creating a civil administration for the city was James Connolly. He had discussed the matter with two close friends and comrades, William O’Brien and Francis Sheehy Skeffington. O’Brien was a leading trade unionist in the city and former president of the Dublin Trades Council; Sheehy Skeffington was an ardent campaigner against all forms of social injustice. O’Brien’s club foot prevented him from playing an active role in the rising, while Sheehy Skeffington was debarred by his pacifism.

  It was agreed that the other members of any civilian administration would be Arthur Griffith, Alderman Tom Kelly and Councillor Seán T. O’Kelly—all members of Sinn Féin—and Sheehy Skeffington’s wife, Hanna, who was a leading suffragist and social campaigner.20 Politically it was a well-balanced coalition from the rebels’ point of view, though it is not clear if the proposed Sinn Féin members were aware of the role marked out for them. In the event, only Francis Sheehy Skeffington attempted to act on his brief, with tragic consequences.

  The sheer scale of the problem emerged almost as soon as the rebels seized the centre of the city and it dawned on slum-dwellers in streets close by that law and order no longer existed. Noblett’s, a confectioner’s shop on the corner of Sackville Street and North Earl Street, was the first to have its glass window smashed in. Before long other shops followed, including that of the jewellers Hopkins and Hopkins, Lawrence’s toy shop and the cornucopia of Clery’s department store. Seán O’Casey, former secretary of the Citizen Army but now a determined non-combatant because of his political differences with Connolly and other former comrades, recorded the mayhem.