Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  Back in Dublin after his marriage breakdown, MacBride wasn’t taken seriously as a rebel until he stumbled by accident into the 2nd Battalion of Thomas MacDonagh, who appointed him second-in-command of the assault on the biscuit factory.

  Thomas MacDonagh had at one time prepared to become a priest, but he had a crisis of faith and became a teacher, poet, writer and revolutionary instead. He changed from Christianity to neo-Platonism, spurning what he considered to be the piety and humourlessness of the Irish language movement with whom he was involved. He became a poet, a career move that was helped along by a thwarted love affair. As a commander of men, he was famous for his congenial humour and indecision. He kept changing his mind and dithering. Such indecision can be stressful for control freaks in a conflict situation. On Easter Monday 1916, his men disobeyed his direct order and fired on a small advance party of British troops, destroying the chance to ambush the main party bringing up the rear and inflict heavy casualties. But most of the time his men drank tea and ate biscuits.

  On their first evening in occupation of the factory, a plain-clothes policeman stood outside taking copious notes. This being a civilised revolution, he was politely asked to move away but he refused, so he was fired on and killed.

  By now, crowds of spectators were gathering at the various rebel strongholds to watch the rebellion as it unfolded. When the rebels in the biscuit factory made an occasional sortie outside they were often booed and pelted with rubbish by the local women, many of whom had husbands and sons fighting in the British Army against the Germans. For the rest of the time they remained barricaded in the biscuit factory, where they were effectively besieged by the locals. At one stage, when the mob outside was at its worst, an old priest appeared and blessed the walls of the factory, one side at a time. The crowd became silent, joining in the prayers and eventually melting away quietly.

  At night all the rebels withdrew into the factory building. While the rebels crowded at the Bishop St entrance to the factory to get through a barricaded door guarded by their comrades, a mob of women would regularly attack them with kitchen utensils, beating them around their heads and knocking their hats off. The mob would then try to break through the door while the frantic rebels squeezed inside. When the rebels sallied out during the day, scuffles broke out between them and the locals. A local man, who wanted a gun to shoot the rebels, was shot while trying to grab a rifle from one of them.

  The women of the Coombe threw their arms around the necks of policemen taken prisoner by the rebels, hugging and kissing them to the disgust of both the rebels and the prisoners themselves. Every day, one of the smallest and youngest of the rebels, armed with a shotgun, escorted two huge policemen prisoners to their assigned job, which was to peel spuds for the dinner of the rebel troops.

  In the weeks before the Rising, MacDonagh had refined his tactics for the factory with James Connolly (1868–1916), the commander of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Citizen Army, whom he would meet in the Kevin St public toilets so they could plot rebellion together. Despite this, MacDonagh kept changing his mind about his orders during the week in the factory. He couldn’t commit to making a sortie out to relieve his comrades in the many battles raging in the other rebel strongholds around the city. The factory seemed impregnable, if strategically unimportant, so he stayed put.

  The bored rebels had formed a book club in the library on the top floor of the factory, which had a glass roof and windows. The book club had a particular interest in quoting military aphorisms from Julius Caesar. At one point during the week, a rebel went to the library to get a book to read. A bullet came through a library window while he was browsing for a distracting read, so he retreated downstairs. On another floor, there were piano recitals. To pass the time, a dance was organised and dancing partners were found amongst the women of Cumann na mBan27 and the Clan na Gael28 girl scouts. There was a gramophone with a record of “God Save the King”. This was played when MacDonagh and MacBride made their tours of inspection.

  The rebels became increasingly bored as the week passed. As a distraction, they searched the factory and gorged themselves on tonnes of crystallised fruit and chocolate, and dreamed of plain bread. A Fianna29 boy ate an entire fruitcake and became so violently sick that his comrades encouraged him to go home to his mother. He refused.

  By the weekend the biscuit factory garrison knew that the Rising would soon be over. From the roof they could see the General Post Office burning across the river. But they had resolved to fight to the death. Early on Sunday morning, MacDonagh swore he would never surrender. By 3.00 p.m. he agreed to surrender after the commander of the British forces in Dublin, General Lowe, personally gave him a graphic description of what would happen if he didn’t surrender. But they had plenty of food and could hold out for months so maybe they shouldn’t surrender. No, they were not surrendering.

  Then another priest, Father Monaghan, arrived to beg the men in the factory to go home. So they thought that maybe they should surrender. MacDonagh decided to put it to a vote. He promised that he would definitely go with the majority decision, maybe. The debate raged on amongst the rebels. When they eventually decided to surrender, MacDonagh cried, probably having changed his mind again. Widespread weeping, wailing and hysteria amongst the ranks followed. A woman from Cumann na mBan fainted when she received the order to surrender.

  Those not in uniform were encouraged to drift away into the crowds outside, but most stayed. At last, the doors opened and, lining up outside, they marched out in formation to surrender. The crowd outside formed a cordon that led to the British forces that were awaiting them. Some rebels blended into the crowd or were pulled in by their mothers and disappeared home with a clout across the ear. However, the officers felt honour-bound to hand themselves over. They were escorted into prison. The leaders of the Rising, with the exception of Constance Georgine Markievicz (1868–1927), Eamonn de Valera (1882–1975) and Thomas Ashe (1885–1917),30 would be executed by the authorities.

  In Kilmainham Gaol awaiting execution, MacBride told a fellow prisoner that he had said three Hail Marys every day since the Boer War that he would not die until he had fought the British again. His prayers had been answered, so he died happy when he was executed the following morning. When stood in front of the firing squad, he refused a blindfold, stating that he had looked down the barrels of guns all his life.

  On 3 May, on the morning of his execution, MacDonagh came down the stairs to the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol whistling a tune. The firing squad was so nervous that, according to a witness, they could hardly aim and were waving their guns around “like a field of corn”. Yeats, in criticising MacDonagh’s poetry, argued that he was just finding his true poetic voice when he was shot.

  Meanwhile, while marching a crowd of rank and file rebels down Ormond Quay to be put onto ships and sent to prison in Britain, soldiers pushed a tiny old man sitting on some steps into the group of prisoners and marched him away. He was a Russian sailor just off a boat in the port. He ended up in prison in Knutsford in England, getting himself unexpectedly into Irish history because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Only Men Go Out with a Bang

  When it came to shooting women, the British were shameless sexists. Constance Georgine Markievicz (1868–1927) was one of the many women who took part in the 1916 Rising. Markievicz was the daughter of the explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth of Lissadell, Co. Sligo. She was born in London and had a privileged upbringing, receiving private tuition at home in the essential rebel syllabus of music, art and poetry. In 1886 she undertook a Grand Tour of Europe with her governess. She was presented to Queen Victoria in 1887.

  While studying Art in Paris, she met and married fellow art student Count Dunin-Markievicz in 1900. They had a daughter, Maeve, whom they gave to her grandparents to raise, as you do, while they enjoyed the cultural scene in Dublin. They painted, talked about painting and acted in plays at the Abbey Theatre,31 wh
ich was the thing to do, especially if you had no gift for acting. The Markieviczes separated in 1909.

  Markievicz joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann32 in 1908. In 1909 she formed a paramilitary organisation that instructed children in the use of firearms. By 1913 she was a strike advocate in the lockout33 of that year, and she organised soup kitchens in the Dublin slums. She supported a split within the rebels over the issue of Irish participation in the First World War.

  During the Easter 1916 Rising, Markievicz was second-in-command with the rank of colonel at St Stephen’s Green park under Michael Mallin (1874–1916), and thereafter at the Royal College of Surgeons when the park had to be abandoned. Markievicz was the only female member of the Irish Citizen Army to wear breeches to the rebellion. In general, she enjoyed wearing uniforms and carrying sidearms.

  On their first night in St Stephen’s Green, the rebels slept satisfied with having held the park for an entire day. Initially, they had had difficulty persuading the people relaxing in the park that they should get out because they needed it for a revolution. However, thus far this rebellion compared very favourably with Emmet’s, which had lasted just two hours. In defence of Emmet, he did set achievable standards for future rebellions. While the rebels were asleep, the British placed a machine gun in the Shelbourne Hotel, which overlooked their positions in the park. In the morning when they awoke to the sound of rapid gunfire, the rebels had to retreat to the nearby Royal College of Surgeons. There they found skeletons and organs in jars under the supervision of the caretaker and his wife. Markievicz had an epiphany during the week amongst the skeletons and converted to Catholicism without the inconvenience of understanding its doctrines.

  After a week of heavy fighting, Markievicz surrendered and was confined in Kilmainham Gaol with the other leaders while awaiting sentencing. She was found guilty by a court martial and sentenced to death by firing squad. Her sister Eva was working frantically behind the scenes in Dublin to save her. Her brother Sir Josslyn was working significantly less frantically behind the scenes in London. Her fellow Anglo-Irish aristocrat Lord Powerscourt, who seemed committed to equality, was begging the authorities to shoot her. Her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life because she was a woman. She told the officer who brought her this verdict, “I wish you had the decency to shoot me.” This indelicacy was typical of the meanness of the British authorities of the time. They would never oblige anyone. She was eventually released from prison on general amnesty in 1917.

  Markievicz was the first woman ever elected to Westminster Parliament, but she did not take her seat. She was also the first woman in the world to be chosen as a cabinet minister when she became a member of the new Irish Free State Government. Again, she didn’t take her seat.

  Following periods in gaol, boycotting Parliament and on the run, her health broke down in 1927. She was elected to the Dáil that same year but she died in hospital as a self-declared pauper before she could take up her seat. Her posh Anglo-Irish connections combined with her being a woman had often caused her republican comrades to distrust her. She knew that they would have to trust her if she was shot. Think how happy she could have been if the British had shot her in 1916. Think how happy some of her posh relatives would have been.

  Murder in a Time of War

  You might imagine that if you were going to murder people you could do so with impunity during a battle. Who is going to make a fuss about a few extra bodies? But that is not always the case. Apparently, even in the middle of a rebellion you can’t just shoot whoever you like. John Colthurst Bowen-Colthurst (1880–1965) discovered this inconvenience during the 1916 Rising.

  Bowen-Colthurst, born into landed gentry in Co. Cork, fought on the side of the British Empire in the Second Boer War and was taken prisoner in 1900. He received the Queen’s Medal with four clasps for his service to South Africa. He then served in India between 1901 and 1908, taking part in Francis Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet in 1904, for which, on this occasion, he received a medal with only one clasp.

  In India he underwent a religious conversion, as you do, and became a fanatical Christian. This was before it was fashionable to become a fanatical Buddhist after touring Tibet or India. Except for his religious views, Bowen-Colthurst seems to have been quite sane before the First World War, refusing to shoot fellow Irishmen during the Curragh Mutiny34 in the summer of 1914. In September of that year, while fighting in the First World War, he made a frenzied attack without orders on a German position during the Battle of the Marne. He was wounded in the chest and arm and was beaten back. When he was discharged from hospital he was suffering from “nervous exhaustion”, which was the common medical term used in 1914 for being buck mad. He was posted back to a barracks in Ireland, where it was assumed he could do little harm.

  During the Easter Rising of 1916 he was back in a frenzy of activity directed at attempting to singlehandedly put down the rebellion. When his barracks came under attack, he sallied forth, firing at silhouettes in windows, believing them to be snipers, and randomly lobbing bombs into shops and buildings. He led a raid on a tobacco shop belonging to J.J. Kelly – who was a Home Ruler and thus most definitely not a rebel – because he believed the shop belonged to Tom Kelly or maybe even Séan T. O’Kelly35 – who definitely were rebels.

  On the way to the raid on the wrong Kelly’s shop, Bowen-Colthurst shot dead a man whom he’d stopped outside a church, apparently to ask directions. He lobbed a bomb into Kelly’s tobacco shop and took captive two customers who were inside at the time. These customers happened to be journalists. One of the journalists, Patrick McIntyre, wrote for the conservative newspaper The Searchlight, and not the rebel paper The Spark, as Bowen-Colthurst seemed to believe.

  The next morning he ordered the shooting of the two journalists and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (1878–1916), all of whom were in military custody. The evening before, Sheehy-Skeffington was on his way home from having organised a group to prevent the looting of shops when he was arrested for crossing a bridge. Okay, maybe Sheehy-Skeffington was asking for it because as well as being a writer, a supporter of women’s suffrage and a school friend of James Joyce (1882–1941),36 he was also a pacifist. He shouldn’t have been out and about during a rebellion since he couldn’t fight back. Later that day, Bowen-Colthurst shot Labour Councillor Richard O’Carroll, leaving him to die in the street.

  At Portobello Barracks, Major Sir Francis Fletcher Vane, Bowen-Colthurst’s commanding officer, protested to the barracks commander that Bowen-Colthurst was just not playing cricket with the rebels. Bowen-Colthurst responded by claiming that Vane may himself be a rebel because he had been against the shooting of civilians during the Boer War, and should be shot himself. General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell, in supreme command in Dublin after martial law was declared following the Rising, thought that Bowen-Colthurst was just a “hot-headed Irishman” and should be left alone to play cricket with the locals whatever way he liked. Eventually, Herbert Kitchener37 himself ordered Bowen-Colthurst’s arrest.

  He was court-martialed in Dublin in 1916, and found guilty but insane. He was committed to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane. Insanity was a recurring condition amongst the rich in Irish history. While the poor couldn’t afford even a diagnosis, a private asylum was de rigueur for the insanely rich, with prompt release into the arms of their nervous relatives being common. In Irish history, insanity is a state of social status rather than a state of mind. Witnesses testified that Bowen-Colthurst had tried to falsify evidence that could have undermined his insanity plea because, according to the M’Naghten Rules38 on insanity, to qualify as insane you should either be ignorant of the nature of your actions or be unaware that they were wrong. Shell shock was accepted as a legal defence if you were an officer. However, an ordinary soldier claiming shell shock as a defence would naturally be shot because the ranks couldn’t suffer from shock – they were too obtuse.

  When his family
moved Bowen-Colthurst to a private asylum in January 1919 he was soon released as sane, and was encouraged to emigrate to Canada. His family home in Cork was understandably completely destroyed by the IRA in 1920 to prevent him returning home. Obviously, the IRA had little faith in psychiatric medicine at that time.

  You Would Have to Be Mad to Rebel

  An urbane madman whose name we don’t know was detained in the Richmond Lunatic Asylum in Dublin for a single unspecified form of insanity in the late nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that he was a failed revolutionary who wisely played the insanity card in court. This lunatic was an actor before his singular insanity set in. When his former friend and fellow thespian, the most highly regarded Mr Mollison, came to the Gaiety Theatre to perform his famous Hamlet, he begged Dr Connolly Norman, the resident medical superintendent, for temporary release to attend an evening performance.

  The doctor relented and three seats were reserved in a box: one for the lunatic and one each for his two minders from the hospital. While the hamming on stage got underway, the two minders retired to the theatre bar for a drink. Realising that prices were much higher in the theatre, they retreated down the road to a cheaper pub and settled into the snug for all five acts and twenty scenes of Hamlet.