Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
A note on sources
Main characters
Maps
Part One | April 1916 |
Part Two | The politics that created F Company |
Part Three | The scrap begins |
Part Four | Troop trains |
Part Five | Gunfire |
Part Six | Shellfire |
Part Seven | Hellfire |
Part Eight | Victory in defeat, defeat in victory |
Epilogue | What became of the survivors? |
Sources
Thanks
Picture acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Also by Gene Kerrigan
Copyright
Round Up the Usual Suspects (with Derek Dunne)
Nothing But the Truth
Goodbye to All That (with Derek Speirs)
Hard Cases
Another Country
This Great Little Nation (with Pat Brennan)
Never Make a Promise You Can’t Break
The Big Lie
Little Criminals
The Midnight Choir
Dark Times in the City
The Rage
TRANSWORLD IRELAND PUBLISHERS
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Transworld Ireland is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the UK and Ireland in 2015
by Doubleday Ireland
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Gene Kerrigan 2015
Gene Kerrigan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540408
ISBN 9781781620359
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The Countess told me about a fortnight before the rising that the scrap was definitely fixed for Easter.
Marie Perolz, WS246
One of them told me the scrap was starting and that they were going to the GPO.
Catherine Rooney, WS648
When passing through Upper Fitzwilliam Street we heard the sound of rifle firing. Tannam turned to me and said, ‘The scrap is on’.
Seamus Murray, WS308
There was a bit of a scrap there with some British troops and a number of them were killed.
Thomas Harris, WS320
MacBride turned and bade each of us goodbye … ‘All we can do is have a scrap and send it on to the next generation’.
Christopher M. Byrne, WS1014
This is for Derek Speirs
This is the true story of members of F Company, 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, and their experience of the rising at Easter 1916. It’s based on first-hand evidence.
In the 1940s, the Bureau of Military History took statements from hundreds of witnesses to the 1913–23 struggle for Irish independence. The remarkable detail they left allows us to construct a close-up view of a major turning point in British and Irish history.
The idea behind the book was to choose a small unit of ordinary rebels, pretty much at random, and follow them through the rising – along with the people they encountered and alongside whom they fought. We see the rebellion as they saw it, in the context of some of the major events of that week.
Members of F Company were active in the GPO, in Jacob’s factory and in the frightening and heartbreaking last phase of the rising, in Moore Street. People such as Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Tom Clarke and Michael Collins became the stuff of legends and monuments – here we see them through the eyes of the rank and file, junior officers, nurses and others.
This is a writer’s work, not an historian’s – so there are no footnotes. But if in this story there are tears in a man’s eyes it’s not made up. If sparks fly from horses’ hooves when Lancers gallop on cobblestones, it’s not poetic licence. It’s there in the remarkable military archives.
The story of F Company reflects the larger one: a small band of mostly young men and women challenged an empire that comprised a fifth of the world’s population – and lost. And then won.
Charlie Saurin – student, F Company, aged 20
Frank Henderson – clerk, captain, F Company, aged 30
Oscar Traynor – professional footballer, lieutenant, F Company, aged 30
Arthur ‘Boss’ Shields – Abbey Theatre actor, F Company, aged 20
Harry Colley – rate collector, F Company, aged 25
Seamus Daly – fitter, F Company, aged 32
Harry Boland – merchant and tailor, F Company, aged 29
Vincent Poole – sewer worker, captain, Irish Citizen Army, aged 36
Nora O’Daly – nurse, Cumann na mBan, aged 33
Joe Good – electrician, London Volunteer, aged 21
Helena Molony – union organizer, Citizen Army, aged 31
Kathleen Lynn – doctor, Citizen Army, aged 42
Mattie Connolly – Citizen Army, aged 16
Matt Stafford – Fenian, aged 64
Scenes in the narrative are built sometimes from one or two statements, often from several viewpoints, with additional detail from secondary sources. Where the memories of witnesses differed I cross-checked accounts and made judgements about the sequence of events most likely to be accurate.
Where speech is within quote marks it’s taken directly from witness statements. Where speech is without quote marks it’s from indirect speech as recalled by participants.
Where one person might be variously called James, Jim, Jimmy or Seamus, I’ve used the least confusing version of names, depending on circumstances. I’ve adopted in most cases the casual form of names, as used by friends and comrades – i.e. Tom, Joe and Katie, not Thomas, Joseph and Catherine, etc.
The bullet wound in his arm was fresh. It was understood, without anyone having to say anything, that this was a special case, to be handled sensitively.
He didn’t tell the nursing staff at Dublin’s Mater Hospital how the wound happened. They guessed it had something to do with drilling and training. Anyone who knew Mr Clarke knew he was the kind of man who probably did a bit of drilling and training.
Tom Clarke was thin, with the frail appearance of an old man, although he was just fifty-eight. It was the fifteen years in jail did that to him. The beatings, the torture.
He was taken to St Vincent’s ward. A senior surgeon, Denis Farnan, a man of strong nationalist sympathies, examined the patient’s wound.
It was standard practice for a patient in a Catholic hospital undergoing a serious procedure to receive the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist. Clarke refused the sacraments, causing unease among the nursing sisters, who were aware that any procedure could go wrong.
Dr Farnan took out the bullet and dressed the wound.
Ideally, such a procedure would be followed by a period of recuperation. Clarke left the hospital in a hurry, his arm in a sling. He had things to do. The arrangements for the rising were almost complete, the wording of the Proclamation of the Republic had yet to be agreed.
The hospital chart disappeared and no record of the visit was entered in the hospital register.
Tom MacDonagh was a romantic poet, but when he addressed his officers this evening he spoke of raincoats, leggings and marching boots.
Needles and thread, too.
Pins, bandages, rations for several days.
Arms and ammunition, of course.
Horlicks malted milk tablets, for quick nourishment.
Tinned beef, chocolate and cheese.
A box of matches.
The good soldier is equipped for every eventuality.
MacDonagh was a poet, novelist and teacher, Officer Commanding 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. He had recently been appointed the seventh member of the secret Military Council that was planning the rising. His was the final appointment, joining Tom Clarke, Patrick Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, Sean MacDermott, Joe Plunkett and James Connolly.
In front of him in the packed room sat the men who would carry through their plans – the junior officers of the Dublin Brigade.
MacDonagh, a cheery, emotional man of thirty-eight, was on personal terms with many of the officers here this evening. None more so than Frank Henderson and Oscar Traynor, the captain and lieutenant of F Company, 2nd Battalion. The company was informally known among some of the Volunteers as ‘MacDonagh’s Own’.
It was a Saturday evening early in April 1916. The meeting was held in the headquarters of the Irish Volunteers, at 2 Dawson Street, Dublin. The rumours had multiplied in recent weeks. Everyone in the audience believed the scrap was coming soon, few knew exactly when.
When MacDonagh was finished, another member of the Military Council, Eamonn Ceannt, rose. You will receive your orders, he said. ‘I myself don’t know when that order may come, but I do know it can’t be far distant.’
Ceannt said he’d made his will.
‘We’ve organised a fund in America to look after the wives and dependants of those who will go down. And each man is to hand in the names of his dependants to his Company Captain immediately. Prepare yourselves for the day and put your souls in order.’
The audience having been warmed up, the star turn made his appearance.
Patrick Pearse, wearing a greatcoat and a slouch hat, a green uniform with yellow tabs to indicate senior officer status, moved towards the top of the room. A teacher, a non-practising barrister, a poet in his mid-thirties, Pearse was a self-consciously romantic figure, his life totally consumed by the idea of Irish independence from the Empire. He ran a school, St Enda’s, in Rathfarnham. Tom MacDonagh worked alongside him there.
When he reached the top of the room Pearse turned and faced the officers. He passed his slouch hat to his brother Willie. His brother helped him take off the heavy overcoat.
Pearse stood, amid complete silence, his head lowered.
He let the tension build. The seconds ticked by – ten, twenty, thirty – and he stood there, silent, poised, head down.
He raised his head quickly and said, ‘Is every man here prepared to meet his God?’
He spoke not loudly but with great intensity.
In the audience, the words hit Oscar Traynor like an electric jolt. He was aware that the men around him were similarly moved.
‘I know that you’ve been preparing your bodies for this great struggle that lies before us, but have you also been preparing your souls?’
Again, a long pause.
Then came the core message of Pearse’s appearance here – the warning, without specifics or times or places, that the drilling and training were almost over.
For any man not in earnest, Pearse said, this is the time to get out.
The rest of his speech merely repeated earlier suggestions about practical preparations for the battle. It was the opening lines, the drama of that moment, which stuck in the minds of his audience.
Raincoats and leggings, needles and thread, make your will and cleanse your soul. The movement had always been a mixture of the secular and the divine, the mundane and the romantic. It would continue so into its climax, and long beyond.
The authorities at Dublin Castle knew rebellion was a possibility. There were two schools of thought about how to deal with the paramilitary pretensions of the Irish nationalists. Crack down on them, or let them march and drill like toy soldiers.
The Irish Volunteers were one small part of the nationalist movement, which in turn was just one element in a country securely held for the Empire. One point of view said such dissidence could be easily overwhelmed by the force of the British Army, shot, locked up and intimidated out of existence.
The other point of view was that cracking down might provoke the insurrection the authorities were hoping to avoid. It would inflame other nationalists, who weren’t members of the Volunteers, who might be radicalized by the suppression. Leave the Volunteers alone, let them burn up their anger and ambition in playing at being soldiers. The extremists among them were, after all, a bunch of amateurs with little support among the people.
The day after the officer meeting addressed by Pearse, police raided the Volunteer training ground at Fr. Mathew Park, off Philipsburg Avenue, in Fairview. They wanted to search for a consignment of guns received from Volunteers in Wexford.
F Company’s lieutenant, Oscar Traynor, quickly organized a defence and the police were held off at gunpoint: ‘Not one step further or I order fire.’
Word spread. Captain Frank Henderson was among the F Company men who rushed to the park and forced the police to back down.
One thing the authorities could do, they decided, was stop the printing and sale of seditious literature. A range of small newspapers openly championed everything from intellectual rejection of the Empire to detailed analysis of the tactics of insurrection. The police raided printworks in Capel Street and Liffey Street, then hurried down Eden Quay and raided the shop in Liberty Hall, offices of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, where the papers were sold.
On the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 the Irish Citizen Army had decorated the front of Liberty Hall with a large banner: ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’.
Two policemen entered the union’s Co-op shop. They told Rosie Hackett they were taking the newspapers. Already a veteran trade unionist at the age of twenty-three, Hackett was also a member of the Irish Citizen Army. ‘Wait ’til I get the head,’ she told them and sent a printer to find James Connolly.
By the time Connolly came down, Helena Molony, secretary of the Irish Women Workers’ Union, had entered the shop. She was a separatist, a socialist, a feminist and a member of the Citizen Army. She also on occasion acted at the Abbey Theatre.
When Connolly arrived he was armed, and accompanied by the shop manager, Jenny Shanahan.
The police had already begun confiscating the seditious newspapers. The Workers’ Republic was currently carrying educational articles by Connolly, describing how a small army might engage an occupying force in street fighting.
One policeman told Connolly, ‘We’ve come to seize the paper.’
‘You can’t,’ Connolly said.
‘I have my orders.’
Connolly raised his gun. ‘Drop them,’ he said, ‘or I’ll drop you.’
Behind the police, Helena Molony had drawn her revolver. Caught between the two, the police officers backed down and left the shop.
Connolly knew they’d be back. And this time they’d likely be out to suppress more than the newspapers. Already, plainclothes policemen routinely watched the building.
He hurried upstairs to his office. Minutes later, he came out on to the landing and spotted Jimmy O’Shea, a member of the Citizen Army. ‘Come up at once to No. 7.’
The Irish Citizen Army had originated as a group formed to protect strikers from the beatings they regularly received from police batons. Over the previous two years, under James Connolly, it had become an armed force of about three hundred that drilled regularly and intensely. Jimmy O’Shea, who worked in a foundry that built Guinness barges, was one of the Citizen Army’s most committed members.
When O’Shea entered room No. 7 he saw Constance Markievicz, nationalist, suffragette and member of the Citizen Army. Markievicz had become a countess when she married a Polish aristocrat. Now, she was writing quickly on a series of small pieces of paper. Nearby, Nora Connolly – the union leader’s daughter – was doing the same. There was a .45 revolver on the table in front of James Connolly. Markievicz too had a gun beside her.
Connolly asked O’Shea if he could evade the detectives watching the building and deliver these mobilization papers.
O’Shea said he’d try.
There was a standing order in the Citizen Army: if any member received a mobilization paper signed by Connolly they had to leave wherever they were – work, bed, home – and get to the place specified on the paper.
After the raid on the Co-op shop, and the resistance to the confiscation of the newspapers, Connolly feared that the police would return in force to close down the building and carry out arrests.
Three months earlier, Connolly had secretly become a member of the Military Council planning the rising – a socialist along with six nationalists. While Patrick Pearse had assumed the position of commander-in-chief, it was agreed that Connolly would direct military operations in Dublin. Knowing how close the rising was, he feared that a successful police assault on Liberty Hall would put the Citizen Army out of business – disrupting the plans, perhaps fatally. To prevent that, he now decided that Liberty Hall, up to the day of the insurrection, would become a fortress.
Within a few minutes the mobilization papers were ready. Connolly told Jimmy O’Shea to get them to the Citizen Army mobilizing officer, Tom Kain, who had a shop on Arran Quay.
Constance Markievicz put the papers down the back of O’Shea’s shirt.
At the office downstairs, knowing the detectives watching from outside could see him, O’Shea made a show of paying his union subs. He’d been working at the foundry that morning and was streaked with grime, so he looked the part. Resisting the urge to hurry, he strolled past the detectives, lighting a cigarette. He crossed over to the quayside and walked up towards Marlborough Street. Only when he was out of sight of the detectives did he break into a run. He didn’t stop until he had run a mile alongside the Liffey, to Capel Street Bridge.
At a premises there, O’Shea passed the mobilization papers to Tom Kain, who began circulating them to Citizen Army members, who in turn alerted others.
Jimmy O’Shea continued on to Emmet Hall, in Inchicore, where Mike Mallin, James Connolly’s second in command, lived. O’Shea and Mallin armed themselves with rifles and bandoliers and set out for Liberty Hall.
They came to the union offices, scores of armed men, from foundries, fitting shops, forges and construction sites. These weren’t casual members of the Citizen Army, in the way that many nationalists were casual members of the Irish Volunteers. They were committed, often hardened, soldiers.
Some carters had time to stable their horses, others brought them to Liberty Hall. Men arrived at the union hall in their greasy smocks, some with whips hanging from their belts, many flecked with coal, mud or cement.
Sean Connolly was there, captain in the Citizen Army, dressed in accordance with his job as a clerk in the rates department of City Hall.
Whatever their working clothes, they came with bandoliers and weapons. Each window and entrance was allocated an armed guard.
Everyone else went to a large room inside Liberty Hall, where James Connolly addressed them. The police had attempted to raid the building today, he said. They may come again, and we have to be prepared for anything. From here on, guards will be posted day and night. Each man will do two nights a week, plus Saturday and Sunday. Those who are unemployed will take the day shifts.
In the days that followed, there were armed members on landings and in corridors, women preparing knapsacks, young boys collecting bread from bakeries, large hams being cooked for when they’d be needed.
You walk into a room and there’s someone with a blowtorch heating a French bayonet, to bend it to fit a rifle for which it was never meant. Someone else is brewing tea on one side of a glowing fireplace; on the other side of the fireplace there’s a pot of melted lead, to make bullets. The building was now not so much a union hall as a military barracks in the days before a battle.
In the early hours of Wednesday, 19 April, Tom Clarke arrived at his home in Richmond Road. He told his wife Kathleen about tonight’s meeting of the Military Council, at which the wording for the Proclamation of the Republic had finally been agreed.
Clarke had been a nationalist activist since his teens, a nineteenth-century Fenian – believing the Empire wouldn’t release its grip on Ireland without an armed fight. At age twenty-six he had been sentenced to jail, convicted of planning to blow up London Bridge. On release, after fifteen years, he went to the United States. He lived there for ten years and he and Kathleen married there. In 1907 he returned to Ireland, where he opened a tobacco shop in the centre of Dublin. Now, his record as an activist, and his selfless dedication to the cause, had won him a solid reputation among nationalists.
Pearse had this evening produced a draft version of the Proclamation. The Military Council discussed and amended it. Clarke was the first of the men to sign. He initially refused that honour, but Tom MacDonagh praised the Fenian’s courage and example to the younger men. ‘No man will precede you with my consent.’
The Proclamation addressed ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’. It took a stand with the suffragettes, endorsing ‘the suffrages of all her men and women’. That was Connolly, a supporter of feminism. One of the seven signatories opposed the inclusion of equal opportunities and votes for women. Six of them supported it. Clarke told his wife which of the men had rejected the idea, but she would never reveal the name – other than to say it wasn’t Tom.
On Holy Thursday, F Company paraded at Fr. Mathew Park and was addressed by Tom MacDonagh. He tried to prepare the rank-and-file Volunteers without telling them outright that they were within days of the rising. He spoke for longer than usual. The training manoeuvres that were to be held on Sunday were very important, he said. Any man who wasn’t up for a fight should drop out now, and no one would think less of them. If you choose to fight, don’t worry about your families. Our friends in America have provided sufficient funds to ensure they’ll be looked after.
Tomorrow, he said, was Good Friday; Sunday was Easter, a time of resurgence.
When the parade finished, MacDonagh said he wanted to have a chat with Frank Henderson. The captain put him off – he had a couple of hours of company work to do. Would it be all right if …
Of course, said MacDonagh. Sure, we’ll talk again.
They never did.
Even now there would be obstacles and setbacks, but nothing could stop the rising. The Citizen Army would throw two or three hundred people into the fight; there were perhaps three thousand Irish Volunteers around the country.
In the event, two-thirds of those Volunteers would not come out, due to conflict among their leaders and to lack of arms. Those who did come out would have few modern weapons. Some would carry old guns more dangerous to themselves than to the enemy.
Somewhere in Dublin, preparing to take on the Empire within the next few days, a Volunteer from Dublin’s 4th Battalion was patiently improvising a bayonet. He drilled a single blade from a pair of garden shears, then banded and bolted it to his shotgun.
They were taking on tens of thousands of troops, many of them battle-hardened in an army experienced in suppressing opposition throughout the Empire. An army with unlimited access to modern rifles, machine guns and artillery.
Sean O’Casey was singing ‘Herself and Myself’, a gentle romantic song about an old couple dancing at the wedding of a young friend and recalling their own youth.
It was 1912, O’Casey was aged thirty-two. It would be another five years before he would begin writing plays, and eleven years before the Abbey Theatre would first accept one of his works – leading to his emergence as an internationally acclaimed writer. For now, he was Sean, the Dublin labourer with the perpetually sore eyes, enjoying himself at another social evening at the St Laurence O’Toole hurling club.
The club was named after a twelfth-century archbishop of Dublin, the songs sung there were of lost heroes and lost loves – ‘Jackets Green’ or ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’.
This apparently placid cultural moment was a tiny part of a political shift taking place within Ireland, and between Ireland and its imperial owner. The governance of Ireland had become an issue, after a century in which Ireland was administered arrogantly and disastrously. In 1841 there were six and a half million people on the island. Then came famine and its consequences. By 1911, starvation and flight had cut the population to just over three million.
The imperial government felt strongly about not interfering with the free market. And Irish farmers and merchants felt equally strongly about their right to sell to the highest bidder, regardless of the consequences. In the words of the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland: ‘No-one could now venture to dispute the fact that Ireland had been sacrificed to the London corn-dealers … and that no distress would have occurred if the exportation of Irish grain had been prohibited.’
Every day, as people starved to death, shiploads of food left Irish ports.
For an age, Ireland had been held firmly within the Empire. The imperial power – despite its ideological hang-up about intervening in the free market – imposed oppressive controls on land; put limits on industrial and commercial development; suppressed political and administrative control; and responded with rigid and disastrous policies to the famines. In every aspect of government, what always counted was what best suited the interests and beliefs of those who ran the Empire.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the result was a battered, deferential country, annually paying extortionate amounts of tax to the Empire. According to Sir Robert Giffen, chief statistical adviser to the UK government, ‘Ireland ought to pay about £3,500,000 and it pays nearly £7,000,000.’
Ireland was also submissive culturally – speaking the language of the Empire, playing its games, singing its songs, performing and listening to its music. The history taught in schools was history as seen by the Empire. The Irish had adopted the mindset of the colonized, in which subservience to a foreign monarch was the natural order of things.
The shift that was occurring in political attitudes would continue throughout the next decade, culminating in the wrenching of Ireland from the grasp of the British Empire, and the partition of the island into Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist enclaves.
One of the strands in that shift in attitudes was cultural. As a counter to the culture of the Empire, there had been an upsurge of interest in Ireland’s Gaelic past. The Gaelic League promoted the Irish language, music and dance. The Gaelic Athletic Association promoted native games. The Abbey Theatre promoted national drama, and would in time see the emergence of a generation of celebrated writers – including O’Casey, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.
The St Laurence O’Toole club was run by the GAA. Like the great number of such clubs, it held social evenings to encourage interest in Irish culture, as well as concerts, dances and open-air festivals where a range of activities were staged.
Frank Henderson, the future captain of F Company, was master of ceremonies at the St Laurence O’Toole social club and a friend of Sean O’Casey’s. He was aged twenty-six, a member of the GAA and the Gaelic League, an avid reader of the political newspapers that flowered in the atmosphere of Celtic revival.
Henderson shared with O’Casey a sympathy for the trade union efforts to reduce the squalor of working-class life. He flirted with socialist ideas: ‘The common people were downtrodden at the time and under heavy oppression and there was no relief forthcoming but by uniting together and striking a blow against their bosses.’
But Henderson believed that breaking the imperial bond was more important than socialism: ‘political freedom was a better objective and to break the connection with English rule in Ireland.’ Besides, someone told him socialists would never tolerate his devotion to Catholicism, so he drew back.
Politically, the shift in nationalist attitudes was dominated by the Irish Parliamentary Party – led by John Redmond MP. After campaigning for thirty years, the Irish Party had finally in 1912 got a Home Rule Bill enacted by the British parliament. It was due to be brought into effect within two years. This would set up an Irish parliament, with limited powers, within the Empire.
There was another strand of nationalism, stemming from the old Fenian tradition, which said the British would concede no real power without a fight. They would have to be kicked out.
Behind the scenes, the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood was spreading the doctrine of physical force. The organization had been founded half a century earlier, among Irish emigrants in America, and had for several years been burrowing away covertly inside the nationalist cultural and political movement. By 1912 it had about 1,700 members in Ireland.
However, it wasn’t the nationalists whose activities caused the Empire the most worry. Between 1912 and 1914 there was a real fear of conflict between the Empire and its loyal subjects in Ireland.
The violent events of 1912–16 would be driven largely by the unionists’ preparations to resist Home Rule. Their resolute leader, Sir Edward Carson, a southern unionist, a widely respected lawyer with a successful practice in London, began organizing armed militias in 1912, with the explicit intent to resist the will of parliament. These eventually became the Ulster Volunteer Force. Having fought and lost their case politically, the unionists threatened civil war rather than allow the UK government to implement parliament’s Home Rule legislation.
Like Patrick Pearse would later do, Carson presided over a Military Council. By the summer of 1914, he and his comrades had formally constituted a provisional government.
The British establishment didn’t seek to put down this incipient rebellion. They were deeply respectful of the upper-class figures involved. Treasonous British Army officers at the Curragh camp warned that they would not obey any order to act against the unionists, and were treated respectfully by the authorities.
Imitating the example of the unionists, nationalists held a rally in Dublin and set up the Irish Volunteers. They armed themselves as best they could and engaged in intensive training. The Empire’s toleration of Carson’s seditious forces now made it difficult for the British to act aggressively against the Irish Volunteers.
The titular head of the Volunteers was Professor Eoin MacNeill, from University College Dublin, an academic specializing in early and medieval Irish history. Behind the scenes, the IRB subtly nudged here and pushed there – a quiet word, a planted idea.
Like the unionists, the Volunteers bought guns in Germany. The Kaiser’s people, anticipating war with the United Kingdom, hoped that by providing weapons to both sides they might create an Irish civil war that would distract the British.
Frank Henderson and his brother Leo were involved in organizing the rally that saw the creation of the Volunteers. They enlisted in B Company, 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade. The 2nd Battalion training ground at Fr. Mathew Park was just across the road from their home at Windsor Villas.
Sean O’Casey was a member of the IRB. He approached Frank Henderson and invited him to join. This was an honour, a sign of trust and high regard by the hidden inner circle of Irish nationalism.
Frank’s brother Leo – seven years younger – was already a member of the IRB, but Frank was not. He thought about it for a week, then said no. On the one hand he believed that there would never be an effective rebellion against the Empire unless there was some secretive body working away in the background – an open organization would be prey to spies and informers. However, the Catholic bishops had issued a Pastoral letter in which they ruled that it was sinful for Catholics to join secret, oath-bound societies. Frank’s nationalism clashed with his strong Catholic beliefs, and his deep religious commitment won out.
Charlie Saurin and his friend Arthur Shields had grown up together on Vernon Terrace, Clontarf, a few doors away from one another. Saurin was a student. Shields, who attended Maguire’s Business College, had just begun a career as an actor with the Abbey Theatre. They had young men’s interests, and they didn’t get involved in politics.
Oscar Traynor was a professional footballer. Born in Dublin, he played in goal for Belfast Celtic, a highly successful club. After the team won the inaugural Gold Cup and Charity Cup in 1911/12, they toured Europe, winning five of six matches in Prague, and drawing the sixth.
Although inclined towards separatism, Traynor wasn’t too enthusiastic about the nationalist organizations of the day, and his job as a footballer kept him too busy to get involved.
Harry Colley, a young man who worked as a rate collector, was interested in politics but he had a slight hearing defect that made it difficult for him to hear the orders during drilling sessions, so after a brief time in the Volunteers he dropped out.
When Carson’s unionists brought twenty-five thousand rifles ashore at Larne in April 1914, the British authorities turned a blind eye.
Three months later, the Irish Volunteers brought nine hundred ancient Mauser rifles ashore at Howth. A detachment of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers tried but failed to confiscate the guns and were jeered by a nationalist crowd at Bachelors Walk in the centre of Dublin. The soldiers shot dead three unarmed civilians and wounded thirty-eight.
The lesson was plain – unionists could organize and arm to resist parliament, with no comeback. Nationalists organized and their supporters got shot. The killings sent a storm of rage through nationalist Ireland, and the Volunteers recruited in large numbers.
Among those recruited in the wake of the killings at Bachelors Walk were Charlie Saurin, Arthur Shields, Oscar Traynor and Harry Colley. Saurin and Shields were then eighteen, Traynor was ten years older, Colley was twenty-three. Charlie Saurin’s younger brother Frank, aged thirteen, joined the Fianna, a kind of nationalist Boy Scouts.
Soon the Volunteers numbered about 180,000. It became such a significant force that John Redmond, head of the Irish Party, used his clout to demand a leadership role.
Dublin’s 2nd Battalion now had A, B, C, D and E companies. B Company had so many members it was split in two, and the new unit was designated F Company. It was based around the Fairview–North Strand–Ballybough area of the city, but some members of the company lived in Clontarf, others as far away as Dollymount.
Charlie Saurin, Arthur Shields, Oscar Traynor and Harry Colley ended up in F Company, with Frank Henderson. As Henderson moved up the ranks to become captain of the company, Oscar Traynor moved up to become lieutenant.
In a society in which duties and rights were strictly divided by gender, nationalist men who wanted to get involved joined the Volunteers. Boys joined the Fianna. And women joined Cumann na mBan (the Women’s Association). The Irish Citizen Army was alone in not being segregated.
The Irish Citizen Army grew out of the 1913 Lockout, when Dublin employers tried to break the trade unions and the unions fought back by withdrawing their labour, in sympathetic strikes. The Dublin Metropolitan Police acted as the employers’ enforcers, swinging batons, breaking heads, occasionally killing strikers. The Citizen Army started as a protective force. Then, under union leader James Connolly, it became a potential insurrectionary army.
It and the Volunteers were at first belligerent, then wary, then cooperative. At a recent aeridheacht – open-air festival – at Pearse’s school in Rathfarnham, the Citizen Army had twice beaten the Volunteers in drilling competitions. It was smaller than the Volunteers, but it trained just as intensely and many of its members were considerably tougher.
Vincent Poole, for example. Aged thirty-six, he was a hard, experienced man from Dublin’s inner city. He’d been in the British Army, fighting against the Boers. Once out of the army, back home in 1910, he’d found work with Dublin Corporation, in the sewers beneath the city, at a wage of £1 a week.
Mature, seasoned, Vincent Poole was aware of the place assigned to him as a subject of the Empire. He was also aware of his place as a working-class man in a city where the Lockout resulted in a victory for the employers, who were unsparing in the cruelty of their conquest. It was inevitable that he would join the Citizen Army. He was made a captain. His brothers Kit, Patrick and John also joined.
He was small, about five foot three, but he knew how to look after himself. ‘Truculent’ was a word applied to Vincent. Some preferred ‘irascible’. Quick to take offence, fond of a drink, he had eighteen criminal convictions. The last one was in 1915, when he got into trouble at a British Army recruitment meeting outside the Custom House. He got six months for making ‘statements prejudicial to the recruitment of His Majesty’s forces’.
A few months before the rising, Poole’s truculence led to a row and he left the Citizen Army – whether he was kicked out or left by agreement is unclear. Sometime before the rising he rejoined, still as a captain.
While the Citizen Army was born out of class conflict – and James Connolly saw the rising as a first step towards a social revolution – the political leanings of the Irish Volunteers were diverse. Frank Henderson, for instance, detested the foul conditions people had to endure in the tenements. He admired the likes of Connolly, Jim Larkin and Bill O’Brien, who led the trade union fightback. Other Volunteers, such as William Cosgrave – future founder and leader of Fine Gael – were far over to the right. In between, there were all kinds of views.
Dublin had become a place of riches and slums. Famine had driven the starving to the city, in search of shelter, food and work. As the decades passed, the prosperous middle classes moved to independently governed townships like Rathmines, Pembroke and Rathgar, where they didn’t have to pay municipal rates for the upkeep of such facilities as hospitals and workhouses. The old Georgian mansions they left behind decayed and were bought up cheaply by landlords. Hungry for multiple rents, the landlords subdivided the tenements into tiny rooms and rented them to families desperate for shelter – a family per room. Dozens of people lived in each tenement – houses once the homes of single families. There was usually one foul toilet in the back yard, shared by everyone in the house. The yard also had a single tap to provide water to all.
Thirty per cent of Dubliners lived in the slums, where damp oozed from the walls, and poisonous fumes seeped into basements from sewage pipes. About twelve thousand people per year died of the tuberculosis that raged through the over-crowded tenements.
The slums provided a reserve army of cheap and eager labour, which could be hired and discarded as required, despite the efforts of the trade unions to improve conditions.
The steadily growing nationalist movement had little to say about such social squalor. There were some among the nationalists who spoke movingly of their desire for Irish freedom and who at the same time benefited, as landlords or as employers of cheap labour, from relentlessly oppressing their fellow Irish people.
There was little agreement – or even debate – on what shape Irish freedom would take. The assumption was that the creation of an Irish parliament – whether within the Empire, under Home Rule, or after complete separation – would constitute freedom. The gross inequality that resulted in the slums was to many within nationalism as natural as the rising and setting of the sun.
Meanwhile, there were global political forces at play, and they were about to tear apart the Irish Volunteer movement.
Within days of the gun-running at Howth, the Great War started. Soon, there would be a continent-wide bloodbath as empires sought to preserve their territories, alliances and the spoils of imperialism.
John Redmond and the Irish Party rowed in behind the British government recruitment campaign. About two hundred thousand Irish men would go to fight the Germans, many of them from the slums, many of them at the urging of Redmond.
Redmond and his party believed in defending the Empire, but even had they not felt that way they had little choice. They were committed to Home Rule, and any position other than urging their supporters to fight for the Empire would have killed the Home Rule project.
As it was, Home Rule was formally put on hold for the duration of the war.
The Volunteers split. About 170,000 went with Redmond into what was called the National Volunteers, and about 11,000 stayed with the Irish Volunteers. The issue was decided at meetings of the rank and file. When the discussion ended, the Volunteers went to different sides of the room, voting with their feet. Men shed tears as friends took opposing sides.
Of the hundred or so members of F Company, about sixty went with Redmond and forty stayed. And, as time went by, many of those forty drifted away, some joining Redmond’s outfit. At one stage F Company was down to a dozen men or fewer. Among them were Frank Henderson, Charlie Saurin, Arthur Shields, Harry Colley, Harry Boland, Seamus Daly, Michael McDonnell, Frank Murtagh, Jim Slattery and Oscar Traynor. Around this nucleus, F Company would have to gradually build anew.
The IRB now had a much smaller Volunteer organization within which to work, but a more cohesive, single-minded outfit, committed to Irish separatism. And it was more easily manipulated. Immediately, the IRB Military Council resolved that before this war ended – and no one thought it would last four years – the Brotherhood would launch an insurrection. Joe Plunkett was given the job of drawing up detailed military plans for a rising.
Frank Henderson was for a second time invited to join the IRB. Again, his religious conviction against secret oath-bound societies led him to say no.
By 1916, the expectations of a rebellion were high. Patrick Pearse announced plans for training manoeuvres on Easter Sunday and many with IRB connections expected the rising to be triggered by those manoeuvres.
Sir Roger Casement, knighted for his humanitarian work exposing the effects of colonialism in Africa, was now in Germany seeking guns for a rising. The IRB had bought another twenty thousand rifles from Germany, and they were scheduled to arrive by boat off the coast of Kerry at Easter. James Connolly had been taken on to the Military Council, and the Volunteers were now working with the Citizen Army – Liberty Hall had become the hub of preparation.
On Thursday of Easter Week, three days before the expected rising, Frank Henderson was at home at Windsor Villas when Volunteer Michael O’Hanrahan came visiting. He, like Frank’s brother Leo, was a member of the IRB.
‘Well, Michael,’ Frank asked, ‘are we going out on Sunday and not coming back again?’
‘Yes, we’re going out,’ O’Hanrahan answered. ‘And not coming back.’
The following evening, Good Friday, young Charlie Saurin was helping Seamus Daly, also from F Company, a fitter, make primitive bombs at the house where Daly lived, on the seafront down in Clontarf. They had been at it most of the week. Daly, a dozen years older, was in the IRB. He confided in Saurin that the Sunday manoeuvres would be ‘the real thing’. The exercise would begin at 3pm and the rising would kick off at 6pm.
Saurin’s friend Arthur Shields was in England, touring with the Abbey Theatre. He was due back on Sunday morning, just in time for the manoeuvres.
On Saturday, Harry Colley had some business in Summerhill and he separately bumped into two F Company men, Matty Parnell and Paddy Mahon.
Everyone’s saying it’s tomorrow, Matty told him.
Is tomorrow the day, do you think? Harry asked Paddy Mahon.
Yes, Paddy said, tomorrow is indeed ‘der tag’.
That morning, Patrick Pearse and his brother Willie went to Dominick Street church. They went up to the altar rail and asked an altar boy to get a priest. A Fr Ryan came out and spoke with them.
Further down the church, Volunteer Sean Price, waiting to attend Confession, watched as Patrick seemed to argue with the priest. After a while, the priest went into the sacristy and returned with a chalice. He gave them both Communion and the two men left.
Even as individual Volunteers prepared for the day and Pearse put his soul in order, divisions within the leadership of the Volunteers – unknown to the rank and file – were in the process of aborting the rising.
That Saturday evening, after F Company had completed a drill session at Fr. Mathew Park, Captain Frank Henderson took Lieutenant Oscar Traynor aside.
‘Do you know anything?’ Henderson asked.
‘I know there’s going to be trouble, but that’s all I know.’ Traynor was a member of the IRB, but not a senior one.
Henderson said, ‘There’s going to be an insurrection tomorrow.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘I’m certain of it.’
The headquarters staff is split, Henderson said. ‘Some are in favour of the rising and some are against it. And it may be necessary to arrest some of the members of the staff.’
‘An extraordinary state of affairs,’ said Traynor. ‘Do you know what Pearse’s attitude is?’
‘Strongly in favour.’
Traynor said, ‘That’s good enough for me.’
Liberty Hall was so crowded that someone pasted a notice on the stairs: ‘Please Keep to the Right’.
As he prepared to sleep, James Connolly gave strict instructions that under no circumstances should he be woken. It might, he said, be the last night’s sleep he’d ever have.
Bulmer Hobson was a major figure within the IRB. He’d been a member since 1904 and served on its Supreme Council. He’d helped found the Irish Volunteers and he’d played a key role in organizing the Howth gun-running.
And, now, as the rising approached, he was an outsider.
When John Redmond and the Irish Party had demanded control of the Irish Volunteers, Hobson wanted to avoid splitting the movement, so he gave in and supported Redmond. For this, Clarke, Pearse and the other IRB leaders considered him a traitor to the Brotherhood.
As April 1916 approached, and rumours multiplied, Hobson concluded the hardliners were about to launch an insurrection. He believed it would be a disaster – there simply wasn’t any way that a poorly armed force of three thousand or so Volunteers could shift the British Empire.
Hobson wasn’t against armed action – he believed the Volunteers could use arms to resist conscription of Irish men to fight the Empire’s Great War. Or to defend themselves in the event of a state crackdown. He believed that when the Volunteers had grown in numbers and in arms they might legitimately fight a revolutionary war that would wear the enemy down. Such a war would be fought using guerrilla tactics.
To stage a set-piece insurrection, taking buildings and waiting for a greatly more powerful enemy to attack, was, Hobson believed, madness. He suspected that people like Pearse were infatuated with the need to go down in history as having given their all for Ireland. In a recent speech, without naming anyone, Hobson had damned the blood-sacrifice faction: ‘No man has a right to risk the fortunes of the country in order to create for himself a niche in history.’
Hobson’s views were largely shared by other Volunteer leaders, such as Eoin MacNeill and Michael O’Rahilly.
For the Pearse faction – including Tom Clarke, Sean MacDermott and Tom MacDonagh – the rising had two aims. The first – almost certain to fail – was that of removing the British. They knew the Volunteers couldn’t hold Dublin for long. Plans for an insurrection outside Dublin were hazy. They had vague ideas of retreating to the countryside to continue the fight, but victory was extremely unlikely.
The second aim was perhaps achievable. The rising would challenge the anglicized state of mind that dominated the country – one that accepted that the natural order of things was that Ireland was forever a subservient colony, to be used according to the needs of the Empire.