A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  Table 8

  Numbers and earnings of craft workers in north inner-city tenements

  The other large occupational group was that of the the 303 shopkeepers, although there were only 21 shop assistants, suggesting that the shops were mainly family-run businesses operating on the ground floor of tenements. The income of these shopkeepers ranged from a surprisingly modest 14s to 30s a week, while no income at all was listed for 51. In contrast, shop assistants earned between 6s and 40s a week, which means that most if not all worked in the large department stores in the main commercial streets nearby.

  Another 92 people are listed as house-owners or landlords, with no income given. This suggests that they did not let out rooms. They may also have included individuals such as William Holmes, the tea-room owner wounded in the rising whose properties had been closed down as unfit for human habitation. There were three lodging-house keepers, with incomes of between 35s and 40s a week.

  Three other large groups played an important social and economic role in the tenements, although they were not engaged in any occupation. The first, and the largest after labourers, was that of soldiers’ dependants. Some 1,705 adult dependants are listed, with incomes ranging from 6s to 60s. This suggests that the category covered everyone from a mother or other relative partly dependent on a young private to the wives of senior NCOs, warrant officers and possibly even some officers, as some senior NCOs were promoted to fill gaps created by the high casualty rate among junior officers. There were also 34 war widows, receiving incomes between 12s 6d and 35s a week. Women in both categories with large families could also help account for the higher incomes.

  These War Office payments were very significant and no doubt played a role in ensuring that there was a steady trickle of recruits from working-class districts. The changing pattern of recruitment in 1917 and 1918, with the majority of recruits able to apply to technical branches and learn valuable trades, also increased the attractions of what had once been solely the resort of the unemployed or the adventurous.

  The other large groups in the tenements were pensioners and widows. There were 460 old-age pensioners living in the north inner city, all of them on the standard pension of 7s 6d a week. Practically all would probably have been consigned to the workhouse before the introduction of Lloyd George’s scheme, which allowed them to remain in the community and to contribute to the local economy. Another 296 pensioners, presumably with occupational pensions predating the state scheme, were receiving between 5s and 60s a week.

  There were 222 women listed in the tenements as widows with an income derived from family earnings that ranged from 5s to 40s a week.

  Surprisingly, given the image that has come down to us of tenement life, there were only 24 people listed as receiving outdoor relief. While many tenement-dwellers were poor, the vast majority were economically very active.

  Finally, there were small numbers of professionals and middle-class tenants living in the area, including a dentist, a chemist, three civil servants and fifteen nurses. There was one piano-tuner and six musicians, but only one of the latter was a street musician.

  Table 9

  Occupancy of first-class tenements

  Table 10

  Earnings of heads of families in first-class tenements

  Table 11

  Second-class and third-class tenements

  Table 12

  Earnings of heads of families in second-class and third-class tenements

  The rising cost of living contributed to a resurgence of trade union militancy in 1917, though it was more marked in the provinces than in Dublin. Often the threat of strikes in the city could secure significant pay increases, as P. T. Daly demonstrated yet again in Dublin Corporation. In March 1917 the corporation had agreed to extend the war bonus of 3s a week from men earning up to £100 a year to those earning up to £200, which meant it would cover craftsmen and semi-skilled workers as well as labourers. In August he proposed that the bonus be paid to all male employees earning up to £250 a year, and that it be increased to 5s a week, backdated to 1 October 1916. When the only female member of the Corporation, the nationalist Martha Williams, asked why it was not being extended to female employees, Daly readily accepted an amendment to that effect.

  There were strong objections from the usual champions of the ratepayers, including all the unionist councillors. Alderman David Quaid of Drumcondra said the cost could not be met in a city devastated by war and suffering from a serious loss of rates revenue because of the destruction visited on its commercial centre. Councillor Sir Andrew Beattie, who also represented the predominantly middle-class Drumcondra ward, said he sympathised with the low-paid corporation employees but sympathised even more with the unemployed and small shopkeepers.

  Councillor W. T. Cosgrave proposed that the matter be referred to the Estates and Finance Committee for consideration, but Daly refused to withdraw the motion. Cosgrave then agreed to support Daly’s motion, though he would have preferred it to go through his own committee so that Sinn Féin could claim the credit for any subsequent pay increase. Daly must have had his votes counted, for the motion was passed, by 34 to 18. Besides securing all the Labour and Sinn Féin votes, it obtained the support of the Lord Mayor, of Martha Williams, and of a large segment of nationalist councillors who realised that to refuse the pay increase was to invite serious industrial unrest.

  However, councillors reacted very differently to a motion put forward by John Saturninus Kelly at the end of the year, presumably in the hope of invoking the Christmas spirit, when he proposed that the war bonus be extended to corporation employees serving in the forces. There was certainly a logic to Kelly’s argument that the men fighting the war should benefit from the war bonus; but he could find no seconder. Even unionist councillors opted to put the ratepayers’ interests first, while it was now impossible for nationalist councillors to support such a deeply unpopular move.28 There was no longer any credit to be obtained from supporting a highly unpopular war.

  If the casualties from the bloody battles on the western front in 1917 did not have the same emotional impact in Dublin as those of earlier years, one reason was that the falling off in recruitment meant that the ranks of Irish regiments were increasingly filled by British conscripts. As early as the summer of 1916 the Irish Times had condemned the antagonism with which bemused young recruits from England were met en route to regimental depots; and by 1917 a majority of men in the 10th and 16th divisions were not Irish. After a stint in the Balkans following Gallipoli, the 10th Division had been transferred to Egypt, where casualties were lower and replacements came largely from the Indian army.

  The last bloodletting for the 16th Division would be in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 and the resistance to the German spring offensive of 1918. After that it was effectually stood down as an operational force.

  There was one loss at Ypres that did register in the wider public consciousness, and that was the death of Father Willie Doyle SJ. He had served as chaplain with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at the front from November 1915 and had taken risks few other chaplains matched in tending the wounded and dying. He had been mentioned in despatches on numerous occasions and was awarded the Military Cross. On 17 August 1917 he had insisted on going forward to give the last sacraments, and four men had been killed by shell fire as he attended to them. Then a nearby shell-burst killed him too. He was deeply mourned as well in the 36th (Ulster) Division ‘for his saintliness.’ The Evening News (Glasgow) quoted one Ulsterman as saying:

  Father Doyle was a good deal among us. We couldn’t possibly agree with his religious opinions, but we simply worshipped him for other things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he didn’t know what bigotry was. He was as ready to risk his life to take a drop of water to a wounded Ulsterman as to assist men of his own faith and regiment.29

  It was one of the last flares of generosity born of the ‘common sacrifice’ of Irish soldiers at the front that John Redmond had set so much store by in 191
4. The only newspaper that still paid homage to the idea was the Weekly Irish Times. In September 1915 it began publishing a block of photographs of ‘Irish Heroes Killed and Wounded’ on its front page every week. It also included members of the armed forces who received awards for bravery, such as the Military Cross and Military Medal, and men attached to the Royal Flying Corps who died as a result of accidents.

  The list was far from exhaustive and reflected the newspaper’s constituency, with greater prominence being given to officers and to members of unionist families. By far the greatest number of those featured were from Ulster, but Dublin provided the next-largest contingent. In the first half of 1917 men from Dublin, or with Dublin connections in the case of Commonwealth units, amounted to 138 out of 484 featured. A significant minority of those mentioned were private soldiers from a working-class Catholic background in the city.

  By contrast, the Irish Independent restricted itself to lists of dead, missing and wounded, with only the occasional mention of particularly prominent individuals, such as Major Willie Redmond or Captain James O’Shaughnessy Beveridge of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who was a son of the late J. B. Beveridge, former Town Clerk of Dublin.30

  Chapter 12

  ‘A COERCIONIST, CONSCRIPTIONIST LORD LIEUTENANT’

  As the last year of the war dawned in Ireland, the dominant thought in the minds of most Dubliners was food. Exports from Ireland to Britain were virtually uncontrolled, but Dublin was subjected to the same controls on imports as any British city. These shortages helped ensure that prices rose much faster than wages.

  Communal kitchens were now a reality in the city. Some were in traditional venues from the lock-out, such as the ITGWU head offices in Liberty Hall and the Little Flower in Meath Street, but others were new, such as the canteen run by a British charity, the White Ribbon Society, in Charlemont Street. A typical White Ribbon menu consisted of stew twice a week and corned beef with turnip or cabbage on other days. During the previous year its twenty women volunteers and a paid cook provided twelve thousand dinners.1

  If submarine warfare in the Irish Sea was not as intensive as elsewhere, it was still sufficient to disrupt services. Between May and December 1917 nine vessels had been sunk in the central corridor between Dublin and Holyhead, compared with seventeen in the North Channel between Belfast and the Clyde and more than fifty off the south coast of Ireland. Many of the losses, such as Tedcastle’s coal ship Adela off Holyhead on 27 December 1917, with the loss of twenty-five lives, were at first kept from the public by the military censors. Then, on 31 March, the submarine war was brought home with the sinking of two fishing smacks off Howth, the Geraldine and the St Michan, with the loss of five lives.

  The incident led to fierce controversy in Dublin, with rumours abounding that it was the work of a British submarine. Eventually the Rev. James Williams, a Presbyterian minister in Howth trying to raise funds for the victims’ families, including the eight men and three boys who survived the attack, wrote to the newspapers to point out, not unreasonably, that the Royal Navy would hardly attack fishing vessels when one of its strategic priorities was the protection of food supplies. He sought to stem the rumours because they were affecting subscriptions to the relief fund. He probably did not help his cause by adding that one of the survivors had been ‘a strong Sinn Feiner, pro-German, and anti-English’ but was now ‘a Britisher, longing to take service in the Navy that he may have an opportunity of avenging the injury and outrage caused by this German submarine.’

  As this letter demonstrates, fund-raising activities had become highly politicised. A general Submarine Victims Fund set up in Dublin the previous year had raised little more than £700 by the end of 1917, reflecting the relatively low impact of the U-boat campaign on the life of the city in lives lost. As with so many funds directly related to the war effort, subscriptions tended to come primarily from the Protestant community. The largest donation was from the Dublin Dockyard Company, which gave £100. Unionist councillors and Protestant clergymen were also prominent among the donors.2

  A separate Howth Submarine Victims Fund was set up in April 1918, and the list of subscribers was headed by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, with a donation of £100. While Commander J. C. Gaisford St Lawrence, Lord of Howth, also gave £100 and Alexander Findlater and Company another £25, the great majority of other donations, large and small, came from members of the Catholic community and nationalist politicians, including the local MP, J. J. Clancy.3

  All told, the number of Dubliners losing their lives so far in the war at sea had been a small fraction of those on the five hundred British merchant vessels sunk during the previous eight months; but that did not make Dublin immune from the relentless squeeze on supplies that the submarine war was causing. As well as food it included essential materials for industry and trade, newspapers, and even construction materials needed for the rebuilding of Sackville Street.4

  The prospect of more merchant shipping being diverted from civilian use in 1918 to meet the needs of the American Expeditionary Force in France led the British Food Controller, Lord Rhondda, to try to manage the expectations of civilians by predicting that ‘food is going to be scarce throughout the world in 1918 and 1919, and probably long afterwards.’ Although his comments were directed as much at the British as the Irish public, they reinforced the view in Dublin that, in the words of the Irish Independent, British ‘Food Controllers’ and ‘Economy Controllers’ were ‘no exception to the rule of discrimination against Ireland … and … are indifferent to the fate of this country.’5 The famine analogy was never far away. Constance Markievicz, commenting on the disappearance of animals from piggeries in the city, said that if things got any worse Sinn Féin would have to ‘consider how they could get and hold food for the poorer people. Ireland was not going to allow England to starve her this time.’6

  The ITUC representatives on the Irish Food Control Committee resigned on 7 January 1918 in protest at what they regarded as official interference in their activities. One of them was Thomas Farren, the Stonecutters’ leader, veteran of the 1913 lock-out and Labour candidate in the College Green by-election of 1915, who represented Dublin on the committee. The last straw had been a decision by the vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, T. W. Russell, to amend the price of milk in Dublin and of bread in Derry before the committee had completed its own investigations. The Executive Council of the ITUC promptly endorsed the decision of its representatives to resign, and the president of the congress, William O’Brien, personally congratulated Farren.

  The fact that Russell had cut milk prices and imposed tighter controls on exports appears to have weighed not at all with the union representatives.7 It was another example of the growing resentment against any manifestation of British control, even when the effects were beneficial. As Farren put it, Russell’s decision had exposed the ‘fatuity’ of Irish efforts to tackle problems that were a direct result of Britain’s fateful decision to go to war.

  The British authorities were well aware of the problem. T. P. Gill, secretary of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, told a meeting of allotment-holders in Blackrock Town Hall that it would be counter-productive to impose controls on food, because most imports were ‘the cheap necessaries of the poor, while the exports from Ireland were mainly the dearer luxuries of the well to do.’ He assured his audience that ‘the farmer is not a profiteer and could not be expected to do his business at a loss.’ However, there was a widespread belief that someone was profiteering; and on the same night that Gill was making his speech the Irish Clerical Workers’ Union was proposing that a Vigilance Committee be set up in Dublin by workers to carry out house-to-house searches and expose ‘the hoarders of food.’8

  There was a steady trickle of prosecutions of profiteering shopkeepers through the magistrates’ courts. Persistent offenders who overcharged on staples such as bread, butter, jam, margarine and bacon would receive fines of up to £10 for �
��slight errors of judgement,’ as defendants usually described their behaviour. This in turn provoked criticism of the magistrates by the Dublin Retail Purveyors’, Family Grocers’ and Off-Licence Holders’ Association over what it claimed were entrapment tactics by inspectors. The fact that the association called in long-standing political debts by forcing some UIL councillors to support its claims cannot have helped the Irish Party’s election prospects in the city. The association’s special pleading received short shrift from the Irish Times, which commented that infringements of food orders were far more harshly punished in Britain. Dublin’s magistrates were ‘scrupulously fair,’ and ‘if £10 fines do not suffice to cure these “slight errors of judgement” … committed at the expense of the poor of Dublin, the penalties will be increased.’9 Official statistics supported the popular view. For instance, live pig exports in the year ending 24 April 1918 came to 2,297, compared with only 686 over the previous twelve months.

  Eventually it was not Sinn Féin or the labour movement that took action along the lines threatened by Constance Markievicz but the Irish Volunteers. At the end of April 1918 a series of consignments of pigs were intercepted at the corporation pens in Portland Place en route for export from the North Wall nearby. When one young Volunteer, Charlie Dalton, reported for duty he found

  twenty or thirty Volunteers at work. The yard was strewn with carcasses of pigs, which had been slaughtered by one of the Volunteers who was a butcher by trade … I was given a yard brush and was told to sweep up the blood which was being hosed into the channel. I felt very superior engaged in this work of national importance.

  According to Dalton (whose older brother was serving with the British army in France), the main reaction of the watching crowd was to bemoan the loss of all the blood, ‘which would make such grand black puddings.’ At last the carcases were loaded on lorries and taken to local curing factories. Afterwards the Volunteers were plied with tea and slices of bread. Dalton commented: