A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  The role of women in the rising was largely ignored until relatively recently. The official attitude was most graphically illustrated by Elizabeth O’Farrell’s role in providing Patrick Pearse with an extra pair of legs during the surrender ceremony. She had volunteered to open negotiations for the rebels with the military authorities under cover of a Red Cross flag. She was with Pearse in the final negotiations with Brigadier-General William Lowe, but in the photograph her body is obscured by Pearse; only the hem of her nurse’s uniform and her feet are visible below his greatcoat. The photograph would come to symbolise the largely invisible role of women in the fight for independence and in the new Irish state.

  The main burden of coping with casualties naturally fell on Dublin’s hospitals. All those within the combat zone experienced a flood of casualties—even the city’s maternity hospitals, such as the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street, where Nurse O’Farrell normally worked. But by far the busiest institution was Jervis Street Hospital, which treated between 600 and 700 cases, of whom 43 died; a further 38 people were brought in dead. In contrast, hospitals outside the combat zone, such as St Vincent’s Hospital in St Stephen’s Green, dealt with relatively few casualties.

  A problem facing hospitals at the centre of the fighting was a shortage of food. At the Richmond Hospital in North Brunswick Street the recently qualified Dr John Hackett Pollock (better known later as the writer ‘An Pilibín’) took two students on a horse and cart adorned with a white sheet bearing a sign reading ‘Richmond Hospital Supplies’ to the south side of the Liffey on several occasions in search of provisions, returning safely each time.59 Citizens in the north inner city had to do likewise and risk injury or death in pursuit of essential supplies. The high casualties there reflected not only the intensity of the fighting but also the death and injury inflicted on hapless civilians forced to seek the necessities of life amidst the carnage.

  Of all the killings that occurred during the fighting the one to cause the greatest public outcry was that of Francis Sheehy Skeffington. He and his wife, Hanna, had cancelled a planned weekend excursion to Howth at Easter after Connolly suggested that they stay in the city. Connolly was probably mindful of the role he hoped the couple would play in the formation of a civilian government if the rising lasted any length of time.

  As it happened, Francis Sheehy Skeffington was passing Dublin Castle shortly after the fighting broke out. Characteristically, he went to the aid of a wounded British officer lying in the street outside. ‘I could not let anyone bleed to death while I could help,’ he told Hanna later.

  Hanna was the more nationalist-minded of the two, and she promptly organised food supplies for the GPO garrison. She showed considerable foresight, because the need for secrecy meant that most rank-and-file insurgents had brought nothing with them except the sandwiches they would need for a day’s route march. When she arrived at the GPO she found her uncle, Father Eugene Sheehy, with the rebels. He said: ‘My God, Hanna, what are you doing here?’ She asked him the same question. He explained that he was there to offer spiritual consolation; she told him she had something more substantial to offer.60

  Several other priests visited rebel strongholds to offer spiritual consolation to civilians and British soldiers, often at considerable risk to themselves. Archbishop Walsh showed his usual independence and political canniness by rejecting a request from Dublin Castle to condemn the rising or to call on the rebels to surrender; instead he urged his flock to remain indoors until the fighting ended.

  Not content with her visit to the GPO, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, caught up in the spirit of the moment, organised another trip, this time to the Citizen Army outpost at the College of Surgeons in St Stephen’s Green, where she arrived with helpers laden with food parcels. They all sat down with the garrison to ‘a glorious meal’ of soup, ham and salmon, hosted by Constance Markievicz. Markievicz would recall later that, despite their many political differences, the Sheehy Skeffingtons ‘instinctively took the right side’ in any dispute.

  It is not clear whether one of their prisoners, the City Treasurer, Laurence Kettle, took part in the repast. It was an ironic fate for the first secretary of the Volunteers, who had adhered to Redmond after the split in September 1914.61

  Francis Sheehy Skeffington took an even more quixotic line of action than Hanna, trying to implement Connolly’s plans for the establishment of some sort of civil authority by organising a civic guard to stop the looting. It says something for the powers of habit that even in these extraordinary circumstances the Sheehy Skeffingtons met on Easter Monday and Tuesday evening at the offices of the Irish Women’s Franchise League over Eden Brothers in Westmorland Chambers to compare notes on their daily activities.

  While Hanna continued to carry messages for the rebels and give what help she could to the wounded, Francis was busy trying to persuade civic-minded individuals, including some priests, to put on armbands and mount patrols in their districts. Many who agreed appear to have returned to the safety of their homes once he moved on in search of more vigilantes.

  After meeting him for tea at five o’clock on Tuesday, Hanna walked home to care for their six-year-old son, Owen, in Rathmines, while Francis waited at Westmorland Chambers to see how many people answered his call for citizens ‘to police the streets … to prevent such spasmodic looting as has taken place.’ As a feminist he had insisted on extending the invitation to members of both sexes. It made no difference: no-one turned up, and Francis eventually headed home about an hour after Hanna.62

  As he crossed Portobello Bridge in Rathmines, some time between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., he was arrested by a military patrol and taken to Portobello Barracks, where two other journalists, Thomas Dickson and P. J. McIntyre, were already detained, along with some civilians. McIntyre was a rather sad figure. He had produced a rabidly anti-Larkinite news-sheet called the Toiler during the 1913 Lock-out and was now editing one called Searchlight. William Martin Murphy was suspected of funding the Toiler, and McIntyre’s latest venture, which supported the war effort from a Redmondite viewpoint, was funded by the British government. Dickson was the editor of another government-funded periodical, the Eye Opener, which was a loyalist mirror image of McIntyre’s publication.

  It was another Irishman, Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, who had arrested Dickson and McIntyre as suspected Sinn Féiners after finding them sheltering in James Kelly’s pub near Portobello Bridge on the first day of the rising.63 Kelly had been an unsuccessful self-proclaimed ‘Home Rule Labour’ candidate in the 1914 elections, and Bowen-Colthurst appears to have confused him with Alderman Tom Kelly, the well-known Sinn Féin figure.

  On arriving at Portobello Barracks, Sheehy Skeffington was placed in a cell on his own, ‘as being of a superior social position.’64 Next day, at 10 a.m., Bowen-Colthurst took the three men out into the yard for interrogation and then had them shot by an improvised firing squad as suspected ringleaders of the rising. There was some movement in Sheehy Skeffington’s leg, and a second firing party was convened to shoot him again.

  Possibly realising that he may have breached the boundaries of what was permissible under military law, even during an insurrection, Bowen-Colthurst proceeded to have the Sheehy Skeffingtons’ home raided for evidence to support his suspicion that the dead man had been engaged in rebel activities. The patrol was led by Colonel Henry Allat of the Royal Irish Rifles, who would soon be killed in the fighting around the South Dublin Union. The soldiers spent three hours ransacking the house in a futile search for incriminating papers. Hanna herself was imprisoned briefly.

  Captain Bowen-Colthurst shot at least two other men out of hand during the rising. One was a youth named James Coade who was passing Portobello Barracks on his way home from a sodality meeting; the other was a rebel prisoner, Captain Richard O’Carroll of the Irish Volunteers. O’Carroll was a Dublin city councillor, secretary of the Bricklayers’ Union and a member of the Dublin Trades Council. He was shot in the stomach for no apparent reason by
Bowen-Colthurst and left unattended for some hours. It took him nine days to die of his injuries.

  Bowen-Colthurst was never charged with either of these killings, and it is unlikely that he would have been charged with murdering the three journalists but for the prominence of Sheehy Skeffington, the determination of Hanna to bring the murderer to justice and the courage of another officer at Portobello Barracks, Major Sir Francis Vane.

  Unable to obtain satisfaction in Dublin, Vane met Lord Kitchener in London and persuaded him to order a court-martial. Bowen-Colthurst was found guilty of murder but insane. It was to be the most publicised atrocity of the rising; and the fact that it took until June for Bowen-Colthurst to be put on trial was a significant factor in turning Irish opinion in favour of the rebels. Sinn Féin propagandists could contrast the reluctant prosecution and relatively benign outcome with the speedy expedition of the 1916 leaders by firing squad.

  Chapter 6

  ‘THESE SINN FEINERS ARE A LOT OF MURDERERS’

  The initial reaction of most Dubliners to the rising was hostile. The abuse heaped by ‘separation women’ on the Volunteers and Citizen Army members when they surrendered is well recorded. Unfortunately, the rising coincided with the first anniversary of the attack on Saint-Julien in April 1915, where the Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffered heavy casualties.1 Ironically, these must have included many former ITGWU members, mostly reservists.

  Many of the separation women who shouted and spat at the prisoners may have been widows, sisters or mothers of the dead. Other women may simply have been angry at the dangers to which the rebels had exposed their families. In time, the separation women would come to symbolise for advanced nationalists the degradation of the Irish race and would elicit little sympathy from the British state or the loyalist community, happy enough to shed their husbands’ blood but embarrassed by their vulgarity.

  However, the women’s reaction was by no means unusual. On the Sunday afternoon after the rising, as young Wilmot Irwin watched a cavalry column heading out along the Finglas Road to deal with Thomas Ashe and his men, a usually taciturn neighbour who worked as a salesman with a firm in the city shouted, ‘They’re going to shoot those bastards. They should crucify them!’ At the same time a grudging admiration was emerging for the stand taken by the rebels. Irwin, a lifelong unionist who worked as a bookkeeper with an insurance broker at the time and whose brother-in-law was a British officer, admitted that Connolly’s bulletin to Volunteers on the Friday of Easter Week urging them to fight on when he lay wounded under artillery bombardment in the GPO ‘must have taken courage and endurance of a high order to pen.’

  The petty tyrannies of martial law also took their toll on public support. Even loyal citizens needed a written permit to go about their business. Another neighbour of Irwin, a senior manager in the city, was stopped within sight of his premises in Upper Sackville Street by a private of the Royal Irish Regiment on sentry duty.

  ‘Nobody permitted to pass here,’ he declared gruffly.

  ‘But I have a pass!’ protested the manager, displaying the hastily written sheet signed by an officer giving rank and regiment. The soldier glanced at it.

  ‘I have my orders,’ he said gruffly, then seemed to soften. He glanced around as if to make sure nobody was within earshot.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, sir … I’ll turn away a little piece and you make a dash for your office. It’ll be all right if I fire a shot over your head?’

  The manager declined the offer and went home.

  As suspected rebels were arrested, sympathy began to swing further in their direction, even in such respectable districts as Glasnevin, with its sizeable Protestant and unionist population.

  Many of the prisoners were themselves respectable middle-class citizens. Irwin watched a group of soldiers, accompanied by a member of the DMP, smash in a front door and drag out

  an elderly man with a grizzled moustache, the father of a young family. He was hoisted none too gently on to the lorry in full view of curious neighbours. It was then I had my first revulsion of feeling. All along I had been dead against the rebels but the sight of a neighbour under the armed guard of an old Bill type of Connaught Ranger was too much for me.

  ‘It’s a damn shame to exhibit him like this!’ I exclaimed hotly to a man beside me. He said nothing for a moment. He glowered at the Metropolitan policeman.

  ‘H’m,’ he muttered, ‘they ran into their holes quick enough when the firing started.’

  The inconstancy of public opinion, influenced in this case by a mixture of concern for a neighbour and snobbery at seeing common soldiers and policemen lording it over their betters, would prove malleable to the ideologically driven advocates of national regeneration. As Irwin himself said, the comments by the salesman about crucifying the Ashbourne men ‘would have cost him his life’ a few years later.2

  There was, of course, one very substantial group of Dubliners deeply concerned about events at home: the men at the front. The reaction of Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the trenches mirrored the anger of their comrades on active service in Dublin. Private Christopher Fox in the Transport Section of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, described ‘the Dublin riots’ as ‘disgraceful and makes us out here very uneasy.’ His family lived near Linenhall Barracks, and he feared for his parents’ lives. He concluded that

  these Sinn Feiners are a lot of murderers. The sooner Ireland gets rid of them the better. They have brought a nice disgrace on the Old Country. I can tell you some of the boys out here would like to catch a few of them and we would give them a rough time of it, but it’s all the work of the Germans. However it all failed … I must now finish, hoping to hear in your next letter that Dublin is enjoying peace and quietness once more.

  Fox was writing on the day James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada were executed and before news of the severity of the British military reaction to the rising was fully known. The wave of revulsion that swept Ireland in the wake of the executions and the grudging respect that even their opponents bestowed on the rebels for their stand appear to have made little impact in the trenches, at least initially. Sergeant John Brooks, a native of Co. Carlow who spent his leave in Dublin shortly after the rising, told Monica Roberts that he was warned by the police not to go out into the street in uniform. Writing to her a full month after the executions, Christopher Fox denounced ‘the Sinn Feiners’ work in Dublin.’ He had been out in France for twenty-one months, and he put the destruction of Dublin’s city centre solely down to the rebels.

  I think … it is scandalous for any civilised people to do such a thing, for when we heard it out here we would not believe it until we seen it personally and the old saying is seeing is believing. Well, I think I have said enough on the subject of Dublin, only if I had my way I would shoot every one of them.3

  The sense of betrayal continued to rankle for many months. Sergeant Edward Heafey of the 8th Battalion told Monica Roberts in July 1917 that ‘I would put every one of them out here and make sure they do some real fighting.’4 William de Comb, a driver attached to staff headquarters, described ‘those Sinn Feiners’ as ‘mad …’

  We have quite enough trouble without them. They want a few of us over there. We would smarten them up, no mercy. They are nothing more than traitors, don’t you think Miss? I think it’s simply disgraceful and I myself would deal very heavy with them.5

  If soldiers coming home on leave reacted angrily at the sight of the city centre in ruins, young unionist office workers such as Irwin felt they had lost the days of their carefree youth. Making his way into town on the Wednesday after the rising, he felt that

  the sight of Lower Sackville Street with the odour of burnt wood and debris of all kinds was enough to make angels weep. All the old familiar landmarks were gone. The General Post Office, Elvery’s Elephant House, the DBC Restaurant, the Metropole Hotel, the Coliseum Theatre where I had spent many enjoyable evenings, and the old Waxworks Exhibition in Henry Street, so often a haunt in wint
er months, were all gone in dust and debris … It was more depressing than walking through a graveyard.6

  Young Charlie Dalton, whose older brother Emmet was serving at the front, had very different memories of Easter Week and its aftermath. At night the family had gathered as usual before going to bed to say the Rosary ‘and to pray for the Volunteers.’ After the fighting ended he went into the city centre to ‘walk among the ruins … with a feeling of sadness, and at the same time of holiness and exultation.’ He searched out places mentioned in press reports and wanted ‘to meet some fellow-sympathisers, who would share my feelings but I did not know where to meet them.’

  A series of requiem masses in the city would provide the means. Going to one of these in Church Street he spotted a crowd, ‘mainly women, gathered around a young red haired man who began to sing “Rebel” songs, in which the crowd joined in if they knew the words.’ Dalton recognised him ‘as a senior school-fellow of mine, whose sympathies I had not suspected until that moment. He was Ernie O’Malley.’ Both would serve on the GHQ Staff of the Volunteers during the War of Independence.7

  While ruined buildings—including the Royal Hibernian Academy in Lower Abbey Street, where an estimated £40,000 worth of sculptures and paintings were lost—provided the most evocative evidence of the week’s events,8 more distressing for most Dubliners was the discovery of bodies in the rubble. Soldiers, rebels, looters and innocent civilians alike were found in buildings, laneways and back yards. The remains were taken first to the City Morgue, and more than sixty unidentified bodies were buried in pits at the rear of Dublin Castle. Business was so hectic for undertakers, particularly on the north side, that Glasnevin Cemetery allowed only one mourner per coffin. This was just as well, because an unusual feature of the proceedings was the mixture of civilian and military funerals, with Dubliners in the British army killed in action being buried alongside rebels. The aim in rationing mourners was to keep traffic moving rather than to reduce the risk of unseemly graveside rows, but some undertakers still complained of delays at military checkpoints.9