A City in Wartime
Page 47
37. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 251, Richard Balfe; Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 215–19.
38. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117. Up to four hundred civilians found refuge there, mainly women and children.
39. One of the bakers who remained at work was among the civilians killed in the area.
40. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117.
41. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
42. In contrast, the British army put a machine gun post on the roof of Jervis Street Hospital to strafe the GPO garrison.
43. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 819, Liam Archer.
44. The original vehicles were imported in 1913 to combat mass pickets on the docks during the lock-out.
45. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 50–51, 269; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 120, 189.
46. The officer commanding the Dublin University Officers’ Training Corps, Major Harris, was conducting the field day with the Dublin Veterans’ Corps in Kingstown when the rising began. He took the main contingent safely back to Beggars’ Bush Barracks, while F. H. Browning led a smaller contingent towards the city—possibly against orders—with fatal consequences. Irish Times, 5 May 1916 and 7 August 1916. Many members of the OTC who had gone home for the Easter break reported for duty to the nearest military post. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 15–16; Dooney, ‘Trinity College and the War.’
47. According to some accounts he was shot straight through the heart. Either way death appears to have been instantaneous.
48. Lyons, The Enigma of Tom Kettle, p. 293.
49. O’Brien, Blood on the Streets, p. 67–8. Among the clergymen was Father Thomas McNevin from Westland Row, who had gained some notoriety in the 1913 Lock-out as a prosecution witness against Dora Montefiore and Lucille Rand for ‘kidnapping’ strikers’ children. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 310, James Grace.
50. Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion, p. 124. Brosnan was on leave with his family in Dublin when the rising occurred. He immediately went to offer his services to the army. He disarmed a rebel outside Dublin Castle but was still wearing civilian clothes and so was mistaken for a rebel and shot. Several British soldiers with Irish regiments were also killed or injured.
51. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 49–53.
52. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 187.
53. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 184.
54. John J. Reynolds, ‘The Four Courts and North King Street area in 1916,’ An tÓglach, 15 and 29 May 1926, quoted by Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 116.
55. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 209.
56. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45; Geraghty and Whitehead, The Dublin Fire Brigade, p. 148.
57. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 280–81.
58. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45.
59. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 232–45.
60. One of Father Eugene Sheehy’s altar boys in Bruree had been Éamon de Valera, later commandant of the 3rd Battalion, holding the south-east quadrant of the city, who owed much of his early political as well as religious formation to the priest.
61. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 155.
62. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 155; Levenson and Natterstad, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 78.
63. 1916 Rebellion Handbook; Shooting of Three Men in Portobello Barracks, Royal Commission of Inquiry, p. 215.
64. Shooting of Three Men in Portobello Barracks, Royal Commission of Inquiry, p. 215.
Chapter 6: ‘These Sinn Feiners are a lot of murderers’
1. Yeates, Lockout, p. 577.
2. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 32–4.
3. Letter to Monica Roberts, 14 June 1916, Roberts Collection. Of course soldiers who felt differently would hardly have confided such seditious thoughts to Monica Roberts.
4. Letter to Monica Roberts, 18 July 1917, Roberts Collection.
5. William de Comb to Monica Roberts, 25 July 1917, Roberts Collection.
6. Irwin, Betrayal in Ireland, p. 35.
7. Dalton, With the Dublin Brigade, p. 40–43.
8. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 269.
9. Irish Independent, 4 May 1916; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 263.
10. Irish Independent, 4 May 1916.
11. Irish Times, 11 May 1916.
12. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 117; Irish Independent and Irish Times, 4 May 1916.
13. Irish Times, 15 May 1916.
14. Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 206.
15. Murphy always denied any prior knowledge of the editorial.
16. Irish Times, 5 May 1916.
17. Dangerfield, The Damnable Question, p. 213–17.
18. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 7 July 1916.
19. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 5 June 1916.
20. Geraghty and Whitehead, The Dublin Fire Brigade, p. 148; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 210.
21. Irish Times, 15 June 1916.
22. When Arthur Lynch, MP for Clare, raised in the House of Commons the issue of compensation for wrongful imprisonment on behalf of one prominent Dubliner, Arthur Griffith, who was ‘head of a lawful political association,’ namely Sinn Féin, Griffith wrote an angry letter to the papers from Reading Prison denouncing Lynch’s ‘reprehensible’ conduct. ‘Your questions I regard as an insult in their suggestion that I dissociate myself in any way from the actions of my brother Irishmen now dead or in prison.’
23. Report of the Dublin Metropolitan Police for 1916, Parliamentary Papers, 1919; Irish Independent, 25 May, 4 August and 8 August 1916 and 24 March and 8 April 1917. The rate was reduced by 1s 6d to 10s 11d in the pound north of the Liffey and 10s 2d on the south side.
24. McManus, Dublin, p. 68–74; Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 152–3.
25. McManus, Dublin, p. 68–75; O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, p. 271–4; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution’; Dublin Metropolitan Police Report for 1916, Parliamentary Papers, 1919.
26. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 268, W. T. Cosgrave.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 10 May 1916; Irish Times, 11 May 1916.
Chapter 7: The ‘calamity of rebellion’
1. Cosgrave’s motion remained on the order paper even though he was in prison.
2. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916. The ETU comparators were craftsmen in the corporation’s Stanley Street workshop.
3. Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War, p. 39; Fingall, Seventy Years Young, p. 348. Nor did Kitchener receive any credit for ordering the court-martial of Bowen-Colthurst for the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, which began the day beforehand: that went to Major Vane.
4. Irish Times, 12 June 1916.
5. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 5 and 19 June 1916. The unsuccessful Unionist nominee was W. E. Taylor, a wholesale printer and stationer.
6. Dangerfield, The Damnable Question, p. 195. Though committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, Bowen-Colthurst was released after twenty months and emigrated to Canada on a military pension.
7. Irish Times, 13 and 16 May 1916; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 2 August 1916; Foy and Barton, The Easter Rising, p. 188.
8. Dillon represented Mayo in the House of Commons.
9. Lyons, John Dillon, p. 372–83.
10. Irish Independent, 22 May 1916.
11. Irish Times, 8 June 1915; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 3 July 1916.
12. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916.
13. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 26.
14. Allan was a former senior figure in the IRB who resigned all positions in the organisation in 1910 after serious policy differences with Tom Clarke; nevertheless he remained committed to old comrades in the organisation. John MacBride, later executed for his role in the Easter Rising, stayed in Allan’
s house on the night before the rising began. Allan later worked for Michael Collins, and his position in the corporation provided the latter with invaluable contacts and information.
15. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916; Irish Times, 4 December 1917; Irish Times, 25 February 1919.
16. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 15.
17. Irish Times, 7 July 1917.
18. Irish Times, 27 October 1915.
19. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 202; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 25.
20. Irish Times, 1 February 1915 and 8 May 1915. In fact sailing under false colours became the rule, with German submarines flying Royal Navy ensigns when approaching potential victims and British ‘Q ships’ flying the colours of neutral countries as they hunted German submarines, leading to the notorious Baralong incident in August 1915, when a Q ship of that name, flying American colours, sank a German submarine and then shot all the survivors. Irish Times, 19 August 1915.
21. The Irish Times, 2 November 1917, cited the examples of a six-year-old vessel with a premium of £54,000, compared with £39,800 in 1914, and a fourteen-year-old vessel on which the premium had risen from £27,000 to £44,500.
22. The Dublin Corporation Electricity Supplies Committee, which was also battling with higher fuel prices, could increase prices for consumers or seek subsidies from the city. See chap. 2 above.
23. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 2 October 1916.
24. Irish Independent, 9 January 1917.
25. Irish Times, 26 October 1917
26. Irish Times, 26 March 1918, and Irish Independent, 26 March 1918.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 7 August 1916. The corporation’s representatives on the Pensions Committee consisted mainly of nationalist councillors, with one Unionist. Besides Mrs Williams, the committee included two hoteliers, a tobacconist, a cigar merchant and a builder. None appeared to have skills particularly requisite, but they may have seen membership as a valuable source of political patronage that would yield votes from servicemen and their families when the war was over.
28. Irish Times, 25 November 1916. Midwives earned between £23 and £24 per annum. Ó Móráin, Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery, p. 20.
29. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, p. 200.
30. Edith Cavell was the British matron of the Berkendael Medical Institute who was shot by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape.
31. Ó Móráin, Irish Association of Directors of Nursing and Midwifery, p. 27.
32. Irish Times, 8 and 19 August, 1 September and 1 November 1916; Minutes of Grand Lodge, 7 December 1916; Grand Lodge Annual Report, 1917. A doctor and former army officer, Geddes was the Unionist MP for Basingstoke and was Minister of National Service in 1917. His Dublin connection was a result of his appointment as professor of anatomy at the College of Surgeons from 1909 to 1913. He was probably recruited to the Freemasons through the Chief Medical Officer for Dublin and deputy grand master in Ireland, Sir Charles Cameron.
33. Irish Independent, 4 October 1916. Besides Lord Donoughmore as grand master, Sir William Goulding was a junior grand warden and Sir Maurice Dockrell a junior grand deacon in the Masons. Grand Lodge Annual Report, 1917.
34. Irish Times, 18 November 1916.
35. Irish Independent, 21 October 1916; Irish Times, 27 November 1916.
36. Irish Independent, 17 and 27 November and 19 December 1916; Irish Times, 12, 13, 15 and 18 December.
Chapter 8: ‘Would anyone seriously suggest for a moment that Willie Cosgrave was a criminal?’
1. Irish Times, 3 and 6 July; Irish Independent, 3, 4 and 10 July.
2. Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 209–10. In fact it was a mine that sank the Hampshire.
3. Irish Times, 10 October 1916.
4. Irish Independent, 5 September 1916.
5. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 22 January 1917.
6. Irish Independent, 10 October 1916.
7. Irish Times, 9 September 1916.
8. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.
9. Details of the admittedly small sample are available at www.glasnevintrust.ie. I have excluded from the figures an English naval petty officer, Robert Glaister, shot in the 1916 Rising. The remainder are all from Dublin city and county.
10. Johnston, Home or Away, p. 214–15; Dungan, They Shall Not Grow Old, p. 38–9. That there were no references to the raid in the press could be due to military censorship; but the fact that an operation on such a scale, which would have virtually rearmed the Dublin Brigade, passed unremarked in rebel circles suggests that the number of weapons taken was relatively small.
11. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 4 September 1917; Irish Independent, 5 September 1917.
12. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 46.
13. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 51.
14. Irish Times, 3 July 1915. It was chaired by Patrick J. Leonard, president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.
15. Other members of the committee included Richard W. Booth, Arthur W. Spence, David Baird and Henry Dockrell.
16. Grigg, Lloyd George, p. 256; Irish Times, 8 August and 25 September 1915; O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 11–13. The other plants were established in Cork, Limerick and Galway.
17. Smellie would later provide a detailed account of the company’s activities, Ship Building and Repairing in Dublin, 1901–1923 [1935], from which most of the following details are taken.
18. Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding, p. 78–82. In 1923 the Helga became the Muirchú, the Irish Free State’s first (and only) naval vessel.
19. See, for example, letter from William O’Brien, secretary of Dublin United Trades Council and Labour League, to Dublin Corporation, 5 March 1917, and reports of a stormy meeting of the Ports and Docks Board, Irish Times and Irish Independent, 20 April 1917.
20. Fourteen vessels were built in British yards to this model and ten in Dublin. Sweeney, Liffey Ships and Shipbuilding, p. 107.
21. While £520 was subscribed to the Prince of Wales Fund by the end of the war, more than £1,500 was subscribed to war loans in early 1917 alone through a Post Office Savings Bank scheme.
22. Smellie, Ship Building and Repairing in Dublin, chap. 9.
23. Labour Gazette, Report on Employment of Women in Munitions Factories, February 1916.
24. Weekly Irish Times, 25 December 1916.
25. Labour Gazette, January 1916; Irish Times, 8 March 1917. Margaret Culhane was one of a growing band of middle-class women who sought careers as much out of necessity as choice. She turned to professional social work to support her two children after her husband, Frank, a solicitor, died.
26. Irish Independent, 12 February 1917.
27. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 October 1916.
28. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 October 1916 and 2 April 1917; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 61.
29. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 173, and 1918, no. 272. Mrs Smith was one of the few female members of the Corporation Inspectorate, starting off as a sanitary sub-officer in 1890 and progressing to full sanitary inspector in 1913. She was later appointed an inspector under the Shops Acts. Although at the top of the salary scale by then, she was paid £20 a year less than her male counterparts, until December 1920, when the councillors approved a pay parity increase. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 8.
30. Irish Independent, 27 July 1918; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 243.
31. It kept this basic format through a series of incarnations before its final closure in 1962. See Zimmermann, The History of Dublin Cinemas, p. 169–70.
32. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1920, no. 243. The cinema closed in 1919 and reopened under new management in 1921.
33. Collins, The Cosgrave Legacy, p. 12–13. Collins and Cosgrave family lore is wrong to imagine that Cosgrave was
in the first wave of releases: like others convicted of serious offences, he had to wait until June.
34. Geraghty, William Patrick Partridge and His Times, p. 276–94.
35. Maguire, The Civil Service and the Revolution in Ireland, p. 35–7. McElligott took up a successful career in journalism, editing the Statist, and returned to Ireland in 1923 to take up the position of assistant secretary of the Department of Finance in the new Free State government. He succeeded Joseph Brennan as secretary in 1927 and retired in 1953, becoming governor of the Central Bank.
36. Hart, Mick, p. 38–9.
37. Hart, Mick, p. 115.
38. National Archives, CO 904/193/11a.
39. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1916, vol. 3; Dublin Corporation Minutes, 10 February and 19 and 23 June 1917; Irish Times, 15 April and 3 and 4 August 1919.
40. Irish Independent, 4 September 1917; Irish Times, 17 September 1917.
Chapter 9: ‘The baby was then nine or ten days old, and the girl said that she would drown it’
1. Irish Independent, 24 January 1917.
2. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 248; Irish Times, 1 July 1916.
3. 1916 Rebellion Handbook, p. 27–8.
4. Irish Independent, 28 July 1917; Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659; Irish Times, 12 December 1916 and 3 December 1917.
5. Irish Times, 1 January 1917.
6. Irish Independent, 6 June 1917.
7. Irish Independent, 30 March 1917; Finnan, John Redmond and Irish Unity, p. 152–3.
8. National Archives, CSORP/1918/5778, 25183–25271.
9. Maurice Headlam and Sir John J. Taylor (the latter knighted for his services in 1919) were both protégés of Walter Long, a former leader of the Unionist Party and MP for South County Dublin.
10. O’Halpin, The Decline of the Union, p. 209.
11. Memo by Sir William F. Byrne, Under-Secretary, 1916–18, National Archives, CSORP 25183–25271.
12. Mrs Mackenzie’s business must have revived, as she was still trading in the mid-1920s.
13. Irish Independent, 9 February 1917; Irish Times, 9 February 1917.
14. The wealthiest widow was Nannie, wife of Michael O’Rahilly, who refused to take anything from the fund. Ironically, one of Lillie Connolly’s minor benefactors was a Catholic priest.