On Sunday 9 June there was a small demonstration of the widening gulf between the majority of the Protestant unionist community and their co-religionists who had embraced the nationalist position. A group of Protestant anti-conscription women arrived early at Christ Church Cathedral to hold a private prayer session. They had written to the Dean notifying him of their intention. Although they had received no reply, they were surprised to find the doors closed. The group, which included such well-known figures as Alice Stopford Green, Sarah Harrison, Susan Mitchell, Nelly O’Brien and Alice Milligan, knelt down in the pouring rain to hold their prayer meeting. As they were about to leave, an unidentified church official came out, took a copy of the anti-conscription pledge from one of the women and tore it to pieces, saying he ‘would not allow any rubbish of that kind in the church.’39
The prayer meeting and the rain were both a foretaste of ‘Woman’s Day’, when thousands of women took to the streets of Dublin and braved gales of up to 55 miles per hour and torrential rain to demonstrate their opposition to conscription. Up to fifteen thousand signatures were collected for the anti-conscription pledge in the vestibule of City Hall, a short distance from Christ Church. Many women’s groups marched to City Hall and other venues to take the pledge. The largest was the contingent of 2,400 from the Irish Women Workers’ Union, who marched from Denmark House in Great Denmark Street,40 with Louie Bennett at their head.
Louie Bennett was a member of that remarkable generation of women activists to emerge from Dublin’s Protestant middle classes to campaign for social justice. The daughter of an auctioneer in Killiney, who was himself shunned by his family for being ‘in trade,’ Louie showed her independence from an early age when she formed an ‘Irish League’ at the boarding school she was sent to in London. Her time there either led to, or reinforced, feelings of ‘intense hatred of the English people,’ but her primary interest was female suffrage and women’s rights. In her late forties by 1918, she was highly regarded for her work in such bodies as the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation and her editorship of the Irish Citizen. By then she had become a convinced pacifist, although one ready to engage in strenuous and sustained passive resistance when necessary in pursuit of her objectives. After the rising the IWWU was in crisis, as its leading figures, Helena Molony and Winifred Carney, both members of the Irish Citizen Army, were in prison for their activities. Bennett agreed reluctantly to take up the baton but soon realised that trade union organisation provided an ideal vehicle for mobilising women, especially working women, to demand their rights. Her first recruit was her lifelong friend Helen Chenevix, a neighbour in Killiney who was the daughter of a Church of Ireland bishop and, like Bennett, a combination of militant suffragist and advocate of passive resistance.41
Other large contingents included 1,400 members of the Irish Tailoresses’ Society and 700 members of Cumann na mBan, which did not prevent the latter claiming ownership of the event.42 Similar demonstrations were organised at Rathmines Town Hall and the Bottle Makers’ Hall in Ringsend.
While Christ Church may have disowned some of its flock, Archbishop William Walsh encouraged expressions of unity of purpose between the anti-conscription movement and the Catholic Church. There were two processions to the Carmelite church in Whitefriars’ Street by two thousand women and girls, on each occasion combining a demonstration against conscription with attendance at the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Another two thousand women and girls attended the Passionist church at Mount Argus in Harold’s Cross, where special devotions took place, including recitations of the Rosary and the Consecration of the Sacred Heart, to accompany the taking of the anti-conscription pledge. A group of two hundred IWWU members attended Mount Argus bearing banners, while the priest at the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar allowed ‘an energetic committee of ladies’ to collect 1,100 signatures.
In the working-class area around Sheriff Street hundreds of local women signed the anti-conscription pledge after Mass in St Laurence O’Toole’s Christian Brothers’ School and then marched in a body to City Hall. Similar demonstrations took place late into the evening at Fairview, Inchicore, Goldenbridge and St James’s churches, where thousands of women braved the rain and wind. Altogether an estimated forty thousand signatures were collected in Dublin, dwarfing the numbers elsewhere.43 It was yet another example of how the anti-conscription campaign was reasserting the traditional bonds of nationality and religion in new ways.
Equally remarkable in its own way was the extraordinary general meeting of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce five days later. When the traditional address of welcome to the new Lord Lieutenant, Field-Marshal French, was proposed by the president, E. H. Andrews, there were ‘wild scenes of disorder and confusion.’ Gone was the unity of 1913, when Catholic and Protestant employers stood shoulder to shoulder against the threat of Larkinism. On that occasion William Martin Murphy had been the first Catholic to hold the presidency of the chamber, and Andrews had been his lieutenant, organising the Loyal Tramway Fund so that grateful citizens could pay a handsome bonus to strike-breakers.
On this occasion Murphy was absent, but members of one group who had remained largely silent during the lock-out, the city’s Irish Party MPs, now found their voice. William Field, Alfie Byrne and Patrick J. Brady were vocal in their opposition to the proposal, as were a number of councillors. E. J. Carton, an egg and poultry merchant, said the address was inopportune, given the state of the country. It might have been traditional to offer such addresses in the past, but he reminded the president that the rules had been amended as far back as 1915 to ban such initiatives as being outside the chamber’s remit. The address was unnecessarily contentious. Belfast Chamber of Commerce had offered no address to the Lord Lieutenant, nor had the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, and was anyone suggesting that its founder, Sir Horace Plunkett, was disloyal?
However, the former unionist councillor Sir Maurice Dockrell, who ran the city’s largest builders’ providers and was junior grand deacon of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Ireland, insisted that merchants in the city would be labouring under a disadvantage if they could not protect their property against sedition by upholding the lawfully constituted authority of the state. Alderman Quaid, who had opposed the holding of the Mansion House Conference against conscription in April, supported Dockrell; and at that point ‘pandemonium’ broke out.
James Brady, a solicitor who had been one of Murphy’s few critics during the lock-out, mounted the platform and attempted to speak, only to be drowned out by cries of ‘Vote’ from the dominant unionist faction. A heated exchange followed between Andrews and Byrne, who denounced ‘the old Tory regime’ and threatened to hold a public meeting on the steps outside. The language grew stronger, with shouts of ‘Low bounder’ being thrown and members having to be separated.
Alderman Byrne, amid a deafening uproar, sprang on a chair and, gesticulating wildly, cried out, ‘I claim you must listen to minorities.’ The uproar increased rather than subsided and Alderman Byrne threw the chair on the floor. A member approached him in a very threatening manner and a collision appeared imminent, all of the members having risen and joined in the general yelling. The President here put the question and declared it carried.
But the opposition refused to accept defeat and accused the president and his sixteen fellow-members of the executive of speaking for no-one but themselves. Byrne, once more in full flight, shouted:
The address was prepared by seventeen gentlemen, every one of whom is seeking a title. They do not care how they represent the views of the traders so long as they get their titles from a coercionist, conscriptionist Lord Lieutenant.44
He hoped that French would be informed of the true state of affairs. There was little doubt that he would, given the coverage the meeting received in the newspapers.
In fact French had already retreated significantly over conscription. On 1 June he had issued a proclamation seeking no more than 50,000 volunteers by October, �
��to replenish the Irish Divisions in the field, and after that date to raise 2,000 to 3,000 recruits per month in order to maintain those divisions.’ The proclamation stated that there was ‘no intention to disturb farming interests or food production … hamper or curtail the essential industry of the country’: instead ‘the Government look almost entirely to the large number of young men in the towns, far greater than is required to carry on ordinary retail trade, to furnish the necessary contingent.’
In an effort to attract these men, many of whom had come from rural Ireland to work as clerks, barmen or drapers’ assistants, the proclamation contained vague assurances that steps would be taken, ‘as far as possible,’ to provide land for volunteers when the war was over. It was a far cry from the 200,000 men that conscription would have yielded; and the appeal fell largely on deaf ears.
Dublin supplied a mere 3,990 recruits between January and the end of November 1918. Even Belfast managed only 6,549. Nor, to the disgust of the Irish Times, were there any proposals to drive the large number of young men of military age out from ‘under the gigantic umbrella of the Irish Civil Service’ in Dublin to the front. It described Lord French’s ‘astonishing moderation’ as a ‘final test of Ireland’s loyalty to the Allied cause and, therefore, of her fitness to self government.’45
One of those sheltering under the civil service umbrella was Patrick Belton, assistant clerk at the Land Commission. He had escaped dismissal with a warning not to engage in political activities after the investigation of his actions during the Easter Rising and his foray into the South Longford by-election during 1917.46 He was in trouble again by June 1918. However, the most striking aspect of Belton’s treatment was how bungling, how fair and how bureaucratic the instruments of repression were in dealing with an inveterate rebel.
When local RIC men reported on Belton’s activities in Co. Longford they were required to travel to Dublin and pick him out among the commission’s staff to make sure it was not a case of mistaken identity. Belton was unable to deny that he spoke from a Sinn Féin election platform alongside Michael Collins, but his denial of the statements recorded by the RIC note-takers was accepted. The case ended up on the desk of the Under-Secretary, Sir William Byrne. He concluded that Belton was ‘a slippery and rather defiant person,’ whose loyalty was ‘doubtful’ but who had a knack for ‘explaining away’ his actions. The fact that Belton’s case came to the most senior civil servant in the Irish establishment, and that Belton was merely instructed ‘to be more circumspect in his conduct,’ showed how ill prepared bureaucratically or psychologically the British state was for confronting serious disaffection in Ireland.
Meanwhile Belton, convinced that he had enemies within the Land Commission who would keep the authorities posted on his activities, requested a transfer to the Department of Agriculture, on the grounds of his farming background. T. P. Gill refused to take him. Police reports from Finglas that Belton had ‘poisoned the minds of the youth and made them all Sinn Feiners’ could not have helped his career prospects, and the note that ‘he himself keeps far from all danger of detection’ no doubt confirmed the judgements already made by his superiors.
In June 1917 Belton moved from Finglas to Belfield Park in Drumcondra to become a tenant farmer in his spare time. Presumably Collins, the Irish Volunteers or some other agency helped finance the move. It was to become part of a recurring pattern in Belton’s career, in which politics and business developed a symbiotic relationship. The police reported in May 1918 that ‘large bodies of Sinn Feiners assembled on his lands … and carried out drilling in secluded parts of his fields, where they could not be observed.’ Besides the drilling there was a steady stream of visitors, and after a particularly large group descended on the farm, the police carried out a raid on 30 July. A number of the visitors managed to escape, but Belton and another man calling himself John Murphy were still on the premises, as were two revolvers and more than fifty rounds of ammunition. Belton’s papers were found to include subscription forms for the Irish National Aid Volunteer Dependants’ Fund, various Sinn Féin pamphlets and rebel songs, and documents showing that Belton was a member of the executive of the Dependants’ Fund and the Patriot Graves Committee. There was a pass admitting the bearer to the graveside of Thomas Ashe on the day of the martyr’s funeral and correspondence from Patrick Sheehan, secretary of Sinn Féin.
On 31 August, Belton was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. He had already written to his employers while in custody in Mountjoy Prison explaining that his annual leave had expired but that his host had prevailed on him to stay a little longer ‘and revel in the romantic scenery.’ The Land Commission suspended Belton without pay but stopped short of dismissing him, as he had appealed the conviction for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition on the grounds that he needed them to protect his poultry from thieves. It took until 14 September 1918 for his appeal to be rejected, and it was 7 January 1919 before he was finally dismissed from the Land Commission.47 By then things had gone from bad to much worse in Dublin as far as his superiors were concerned.
While the activities of men such as Belton attracted police interest and newspaper reports, it was the burden of war on the quality of life in the city that caused alienation among ordinary Dubliners. On the same day as Lord French’s proclamation rowing back on the threat of conscription the corporation received a letter from Fred Allan, in his capacity as secretary of its Electricity Supply Committee, on a matter of more immediate and greater consequence. It was a warning that continuing restrictions on coal imports meant that the city would receive no more than three-quarters of the 1917 figure. Imports that year had been between 7,000 and 8,000 tons short, and the demand for electricity had been met by eating into the fuel stockpiled from previous years.
Unfortunately H. G. Burgess, wartime Director-General of Transport, Shipping Controller and Coal Controller, had rejected pleas to facilitate the shipping of extra coal needed to make up the shortfall. No more than 18,000 tons was approved, or 45 per cent of what was required. There was also the added problem of cost. Coal was now 33s 7d a ton, compared with 9s 6d before the war. Fred Allan and P. T. Daly, chairman of the Coal Committee, decided to go over Burgess’s head, but their trip to England proved unfruitful and was probably not helped by the fact that as former veteran Fenians (and in Allan’s case a reactivated Fenian) their movements were kept under police surveillance.48 They may well have reminisced on the mail boat about their exploits together in the early 1900s.49
On their return Burgess rejected Allan’s figures and, while admitting that there would have to be a significant cut in supplies for domestic users, assured him that it was intended to ensure adequate supplies to maintain essential utilities, such as the sewage and water works.
Further pressure was put on electricity generation by military requirements. The Admiralty had commandeered supplies from the corporation for the Dublin Dockyard Company, and when the corporation sought to secure replacement supplies from the DUTC power station the army claimed precedence so that it could use its power to process fodder for the cavalry at its depot at the East Wall. In desperation, the corporation decided to apply for a loan of £175,000 to buy new plant and equipment to boost electricity production from its dwindling fuel stocks. This in turn provoked protests from the Citizens’ Association and the City House Owners’ Property Association, fearful of further increases in the rates.
Subsequently the corporation’s plans to augment its electricity-generating capacity were bogged down in a Local Government Board inquiry that summer. The Town Clerk, Sir Henry Campbell, an old Parnellite MP not normally given to intemperate language, told the hearing that it was ‘a scandal’ for Dublin Corporation to be treated in this fashion. ‘I warn the Government that it is this sort of pin-pricking that will irritate the people, and make it impossible for the proper Government of this country to go on.’50
Chapter 13
‘THE TORPEDO EXPLODED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE POST
OFFICE, DESTROYING THE STAIRS, THE ONLY MEANS OF ESCAPE’
On 12 July 1918 the commander in chief of the forces in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Frederick Shaw, proclaimed Sinn Féin, the Irish Volunteers, Cumann na mBan and the Gaelic League as ‘dangerous organisations.’1 No meetings could be held except with police permission, and public addresses in Irish were banned. A number of race meetings and football matches also fell victim to the ban. As the proclamation was only announced on the Twelfth, Orange marches that day were not affected, neither were loyalist demonstrations that were planned for the coming weekend.
While the move caused widespread anger outside Ulster, the Dublin ratepayer had other matters to consider. On 3 July the boards of the city’s two workhouses were notified that they were to be amalgamated. The issue, which had been debated for years, made sense in that it would lead to a better use of resources and provision of services, as well as (it was hoped) reducing the financial burden on the city. But the final decision was the result of military diktat. The British army requisitioned the North Dublin Union complex as winter quarters for troops, and the guardians were given until 1 September to transfer inmates across the river. Any surplus could be sent to the workhouses at Pelletstown, near Dunshaughlin, and Cabra.
Outrage among the guardians was only partially mitigated by the expectation of economies that might accrue for ratepayers from this forced rationalisation. When those paladins of the ratepayers, the Dublin Citizens’ Association, met for their annual general meeting the following week they speculated in celebratory mood that with good management the savings could be between £20,000 and £30,000 a year. There was also heated speculation by members, councillors and guardians alike (often the same people) about how much the military might pay in compensation for the use of the North Dublin workhouse, which was valued at £87,688.2
A City in Wartime Page 35