A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  15. Matthews, Renegades, p. 160–71.

  16. Rigney, ‘Military service and GSWR staff.’

  17. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659.

  18. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659.

  19. Irish Railway Record Society Archive, GSWR, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 2659, and DSER, Sinn Féin Rebellion, file 1404.

  20. They were W. E. H. Lecky, the liberal Unionist and historian who wrote the landmark History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, and Edward Dowden, professor of English literature, an imperial Unionist who dismissed the Irish literary movement of Yeats and Lady Gregory as ‘flapping green banners.’ He declined to intensify his ‘spiritual brogue’ on their behalf.

  21. Irish Times, 3 and 6 February 1917.

  22. Plunkett was generally referred to as Count Plunkett after being made a Papal count in 1877.

  23. Irish Independent, 6 February 1917.

  24. Irish Independent, 6 February 1917; Irish Times, 7 February 1917.

  25. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.

  26. Irish Independent, 1 January and 10 February 1917.

  27. Irish Times, 8 February 1917.

  28. Lord Barmbrack would later be prosecuted for overcharging on ‘war’ bread but pleaded, successfully, that the law applied to retailers whereas he was a wholesale baker. Irish Independent, 18 October 1917.

  29. Irish Independent, 12 February 1917. Russell was a former Ulster Unionist MP who had defected to the Liberals.

  30. Irish Times, 8 March and 13 April 1917; Irish Independent, 20 October 1917.

  31. Irish Independent, 27 March 1917.

  32. Weekly Irish Times, 7 April 1917.

  Chapter 10: ‘The most destructive bird that could possibly be’

  1. Irish Times, 23 January 1917.

  2. Irish Times, 18 September 1916.

  3. Irish Times, 17 February, 29 March, 25 September and 9 October 1916 and 13 November 1917.

  4. Irish Times, 14 October 1917.

  5. Irish Times, 20 September and 14 October 1917.

  6. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 2 December 1916.

  7. Irish Times, 6 March 1917.

  8. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 5 February and 6 March 1917.

  9. Irish Times, 11 July 1919; Meenan, The Irish Economy, p. 90–91.

  10. It would be a persistent problem: boundary walls on railways were raised and barbed wire used as late as 1918 to deter gangs. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1918, no. 207.

  11. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 27, 48; Irish Independent, 13 January 1917.

  12. The reference is to Cathedral Street, where the fire consumed Lawrence’s toy shop.

  13. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 7 February 1917; Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 266.

  14. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 267. A new scale of £150 to £200 a year was approved, with annual increments of £10. The Belfast rate was £156, plus a war bonus of £23 8s. The Dublin war bonus was only £13.

  15. Sir Charles Cameron, The Quality of the Milk Used in Dublin, appendix to Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 122.

  16. Dublin Corporation Reports, Pubic Health Reports, 1916–17.

  17. See chap. 6 above.

  18. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917.

  19. Irish Times, 4 December 1917.

  20. Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 25–6.

  21. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917; Irish Times, 12 December 1917.

  22. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 8 March 1917.

  23. Quoted by Devine, Organising History, p. 90. Ironically, in later life O’Brien would become a virulent anti-communist.

  24. Devine, Organising History, p. 68, 89–93. The figure may well have dropped to as low as 3,500 in early 1916.

  25. Morrissey, A Man Called Hughes, p. 90.

  26. Irish Times, 9 and 10 April 1917; Irish Independent, 10 April 1917.

  27. Irish Independent, 10 April 1917.

  28. Irish Times, 4, 9 and 13 April 1917.

  29. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 20 April 1917.

  30. Irish Independent, 30 April and 11 May 1917; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 120–23.

  31. Morrissey, William J. Walsh, p. 300–22; Coleman, County Longford and the Irish Revolution, p. 62–4.

  32. Irish Times, 11 and 13 June 1917.

  33. Robbins, Under the Starry Plough, p. 151. He gives the date of his release as August 1916, but this is not possible. The details suggest it was June 1917, when all the convicted prisoners were released.

  34. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 18, 19 and 20 June 1917; Weekly Irish Times, 23 June 1917.

  35. Irish Times, 31 January 1910.

  36. Irish Times, 10 and 26 June and 7 July 1917. A contest almost ensued nevertheless when at two minutes to the close of nominations a woman appeared with a male companion seeking to place her brother, Captain Charles Vincent Fox VC, on the ballot paper. She said he had recently escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp and would soon be in a position to take up his duties if elected. However, representatives of the other parties were not prepared to take her word, and Hearn was duly declared elected unopposed.

  37. McDowell, The Irish Convention, p. 103.

  38. Irish Independent, 7 August 1917.

  39. Irish Times, 13 August 1917.

  40. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 9 September 1917.

  41. Dublin Corporation Minutes, 8 October 1917.

  42. Irish Independent, 9 October 1917.

  Chapter 11: ‘I die in a good cause’

  1. One of his cousins was the American actor Gregory Peck.

  2. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 140–41.

  3. Irish Times, 4 September 1917.

  4. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 157–64.

  5. Ashe had a penchant for poetry and doggerel. In contrast to ‘Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord’ he also penned the following item in his American Diary: ‘And when I die don’t bury me at all, But pitch my bones in alcohol, Put a bottle of boose [sic] at my head and feet, And then my bones, they will surely keep. My story is told and you’ll agree, That this is what boose [sic] has done to me.’ Mss 46,788, NLI. Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause; O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 16.

  6. Irish Times, 2 October 1917.

  7. O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, p. 16; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 174–82.

  8. Irish Times, 6 November 1917.

  9. Sir Bryan Mahon was later nominated to the Free State Senate by W. T. Cosgrave in recognition of the role he played during this difficult period. Cosgrave had been chairman of the Estates Committee. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statements, WS 268, W. T. Cosgrave.

  10. Irish Independent, 1 and 4 October 1917; Ó Lúing, I Die in a Good Cause, p. 175–82.

  11. After their release from Mountjoy, Thomas Ashe’s fellow hunger-strikers visited the graveside and took a vow that if they were ever rearrested they would immediately go on hunger strike. One of them, Seán Treacy, decided he would never again go to prison. He was killed three years later resisting arrest in Talbot Street, Dublin.

  12. Irish Independent, 12 January and 23 February 1918.

  13. Irish Times, 20 April 1917.

  14. Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 232.

  15. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland, p. 118.

  16. Irish Times, 26 October 1917.

  17. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, p. 99–100.

  18. Irish Times, 26 October 1917.

  19. Irish Times, 26 October 1917; Pádraig Yeates, ‘Craft workers during the Irish revolution,’ Saothar, 33.

  20. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 128.

  21. Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 26.

  22. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1917, no. 275.

  23. Irish Times, 3 November 1917.

  24. Dublin Corporati
on Reports, 1918, no. 13; Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 328–33; Yeates, Lockout, p. 108.

  25. The occupations are listed separately for first-class tenements and the rest. However, as there is no significant divergence between individuals within occupations, their earnings, and which class of tenement they inhabited, the totals have been combined.

  26. See Mona Hearn, ‘Life for domestic servants in Dublin,’ in Luddy and Murphy, Women Surviving; McCaffrey, ‘Jacob’s women workers in the 1913 lock-out.’

  27. Labour Gazette, May 1919.

  28. Irish Times, 28 August and 11 December 1917.

  29. Quoted by Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, p. 290–91; Irish Independent, 27 August 1917; Irish Times, 1 September 1917.

  30. Irish Independent, 6 January 1917.

  Chapter 12: ‘A coercionist, conscriptionist Lord Lieutenant’

  1. Irish Independent, 25 January 1918.

  2. Irish Independent, 26 January 1918.

  3. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 6 April 1918. Gaisford St Lawrence was a frequent contributor to charities, across the religious divide: see, for example, the Society of St Vincent de Paul subscription lists.

  4. Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the First World War, p. 79–80. Between 1914 and 1918 only one German submarine was sunk in the Irish Sea, out of a total of 178. Irish Times, 15 March 1918.

  5. Irish Independent, 2 January 1918.

  6. Irish Independent, 26 February 1918.

  7. See chap. 6 above for the milk price controversy.

  8. Irish Independent, 26 January 1918.

  9. Irish Times, 6 February 1918.

  10. Dalton, With the Dublin Brigade, p. 51–5.

  11. Irish Times, 27 April 1918.

  12. Irish Times, 5 February 1918.

  13. Irish Independent, 5 February 1918; Irish Times, 9 February 1918.

  14. See, for example, Irish Times, 9 February 1918.

  15. London Express, 4 February 1918, editorial comment.

  16. See chap. 9 above.

  17. Devine, Organising History, p. 92.

  18. Devine, Organising History. See also chap. 4 and 7 above. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour; Theresa Moriarty, ‘Work, warfare and wages: Industrial controls and Irish trade unionism in the First World War,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War. The British National Federation of Women Workers was heavily dependent for growth in membership on the munitions industry, and when the industry was wound down in 1919 its Irish membership collapsed fairly rapidly. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 5 and 6 November 1917; Labour Gazette.

  19. Labour Gazette, January 1919.

  20. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 31 October 1917.

  21. Some 56 per cent of Irish recruits in 1918 joined the newly formed Royal Air Force. Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War, p. 6.

  22. Irish Times, 26 January 1918.

  23. Adrian Gregory, ‘You might as well recruit Germans,’ in Gregory and Pašeta, Ireland and the Great War, p. 113–32.

  24. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 146–7. O’Brien succeeded in sidelining his main rival, P. T. Daly, secretary of the ITUC, by proposing that the congress delegation consist of one delegate from Belfast, another from Cork, and himself as president.

  25. John Redmond had died on 6 March 1918.

  26. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 9 April 1918.

  27. McDowell, The Irish Convention, p. 103. Many public bodies in the South, including the Dublin Trades Council, had refused to nominate delegates to the convention, although Northern trade union organisations did so.

  28. Irish Independent, 19 April 1918.

  29. Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 147–8.

  30. Irish Independent, 19 April 1918.

  31. Irish Times, 22 April 1918.

  32. Irish Independent, 24 April 1918.

  33. The details of the night are well recorded by sources as varied as Taylor, Michael Collins, p. 70, Dwyer, The Squad and the Intelligence Operations of Michael Collins, p. 8–12, and Foy, Michael Collins’s Intelligence War, p. 11–14; McMahon, British Spies and Irish Rebels, p. 24–5.

  34. National Archives, CAB/24/59.

  35. The ‘advanced Sinn Feiner’ editing the journal could have been Frank Gallagher or Cathal O’Shannon. Gallagher later joined the Sinn Féin publicity department, and O’Shannon was a veteran member of the IRB and the Labour Party. The journal changed its name from Irish Opinion to Voice of Labour in January 1918. It was financed by J. Malcolm Lyon, a British businessman who tried, unsuccessfully, to wean Irish Labour away from Sinn Féin. The Dublin link was E. A. Aston, a consultant engineer who came from a liberal Unionist background and was active in the Dublin Citizens’ Association. Over time suspicions developed that British intelligence might be behind the funding operation.

  36. National Archives, CAB/24/59.

  37. The Irish Independent put the crowd at the Cullen funeral at five thousand and the DMP at two thousand. National Archives, CAB/24/59; Irish Independent, 3 June 1918; Irish Times, 15 June 1918.

  38. Irish Times, 10 June 1918.

  39. Irish Independent, 10 June 1918.

  40. Denmark House was a former nursing home in Great Denmark Street that had been converted to offices for use by various groups of women workers.

  41. See Jones, These Obstreperous Lassies, and Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett. Bennett would go on to become the first woman to be elected president of the ITUC and served two terms, 1932 and 1948. Helena Molony was elected president in 1937 and Helen Chenevix in 1951.

  42. Matthews, Renegades, p. 218.

  43. Irish Independent, 10 June 1918.

  44. Irish Independent and Irish Times, 10 June 1918.

  45. Irish Times, 4 June 1918.

  46. See chap. 5 above.

  47. The former director of intelligence for the Volunteers, Éamonn Duggan, was his solicitor. Duggan would later serve as a Sinn Féin MP and was one of the negotiators at the talks on the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

  48. Irish Times, 4 June 1918; National Archives, CAB/24/59.

  49. Irish Independent, 14 June 1918; and see Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, for Daly and Allan.

  50. Irish Independent, 14 June 1918.

  Chapter 13: ‘The torpedo exploded in the middle of the Post Office, destroying the stairs, the only means of escape’

  1. The ban on the Gaelic League surprised many observers; it was included by mistake for the Gaelic Athletic Association. The GAA thus escaped the ban.

  2. Irish Times and Irish Independent, 4, 9, 10 and 23 July 1918.

  3. An added cost was that Rathdown Rural District Union in south Co. Dublin availed of the reorganisation to close its workhouse and export the problem to Dublin.

  4. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 98–9.

  5. Wolfe, Labour Supply and Regulation, chap. 13.

  6. Irish Times, 4 to 7 September 12918.

  7. Irish Times, 7 September 1918.

  8. Weekly Irish Times, 16 November 1918.

  9. Dublin Corporation Minutes, p. 502–4, 558–60.

  10. Irish Times, 9 September 1918.

  11. See McCracken, MacBride’s Brigade, chap. 7.

  12. Irish Times, 31 August 1918.

  13. National Archives, CAB 24/70.

  14. See chap. 8 above.

  15. Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 121.

  16. Mitchell, Labour in Irish Politics, p. 92–3; Morrissey, William O’Brien, p. 154–5; Cody et al., The Parliament of Labour, p. 111–21. For Louie Bennett see chap. 8 above, Fox, Louie Bennett, and Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett, p. 41–3. Neil O’Flanagan, in ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ argues that the Daly-O’Brien split was the main reason for Labour’s failure to dominate politics in Dublin after the Easter Rising.

  17. Irish Times, 12 October 1918.

  18. See chap. 4 above.

  19. Irish Times, 12 October 1918; Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 46.

  20. Higgins, �
��The sinking of the RMS Leinster recalled.’

  21. Irish Independent, 12 October 1918, and Michael Lee.

  22. Irish Times, 12 October 1918.

  23. Novick, Conceiving Revolution, p. 76–9.

  24. Among the naval vessels to race to the scene and pick up survivors was the Helga, which had shelled Liberty Hall during the rising.

  25. National Archives, CAB/24/70; Stokes, Death in the Irish Sea, p. 136. The sinking of the Leinster may have boosted recruitment, because Dublin’s figures rose to 2,591 by the end of October.

  26. See chap. 3 above.

  27. See chap. 4 above.

  28. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Annual Reports.

  29. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Annual Report, 1919–1920.

  30. Jane Leonard, ‘Survivors,’ in Horne, Our War.

  31. Most offences under the Shops Acts involved employers failing to give employees their half day off.

  32. Irish Independent, 21 December 1918; Irish Times, 27 February 1919.

  33. Irish Independent, 16 December 1918.

  34. Labour Gazette.

  35. Labour Gazette.

  36. O’Flanagan, ‘Dublin City in an Age of War and Revolution,’ p. 90–95; Raftery and O’Sullivan, Suffer Little Children, p. 69–72; Robbins, Fools and Mad, p. 183–95

  37. Robbins, Fools and Mad, p. 183; Robbins, Grangegorman, p. 210–19.

  38. Irish Times, 5 November 1917.

  39. Dublin Corporation Reports, 1919, no. 194.

  40. Irish Times, 18 September and 3 November 1914, 1 January, 31 March and 10 May 1915, 3 April 1916, 1 January and 28 May 1917, and 3 September 1919.

  Chapter 14: ‘You haven’t got a republic yet, so get out of the way!’

  1. Dublin Corporation, Quarterly Breviate Reports of Public Health Committee, 1913–1920.

  2. Irish Times, 29 June and 9 July 1918.

  3. In the week ending 3 July, 25 deaths out of 120 in Dublin were among children aged one to five years old and a further 15 were of children under twelve months, according to the Irish Independent, 4 July 1918. The Irish Times of 6 July 1918 reported that there had been five deaths from influenza in the city for the same period (all of them adults).

  4. Irish Times, 2 and 6 July 1918.

  5. Irish Times, 20 July 1918. Other deaths were accounted for as follows: 31 from TB, 14 from heart disease and 12 from bronchitis.