The tinkle of broken glass wandered down the whole street, and people were pushing and pulling each other, till through broken windows all the treasures of India, Arabia and Samarkand were open before them … They pulled boxes down on top of themselves, flung clothing all over the place; tried to pull new garments over their old ones; while one woman, stripped naked, was trying on camisole after camisole, ending with calm touches that smoothed out the light-blue one that satisfied her at last. All who were underdressed before, were overdressed now, and for the first time in their frosty lives the heat of good warm things encircled them.21
A member of Fianna Éireann, Éamonn Bulfin, watched Lawrence’s from the roof of the GPO as ‘all the kids brought out a lot of fireworks … and set fire to them.’ He recalled the Volunteers’ own bombs on the roof of the GPO as rockets ‘were shooting up in the sky. We were very nervous. There were Catherine wheels going up Sackville Street.’22
As overall rebel commander of the city, Connolly tried to restore order. When the looters ignored pleas from such public figures as Sheehy Skeffington and Seán T. O’Kelly to desist from ‘dishonouring Ireland’ by their behaviour, Connolly ordered out sections of riflemen to fire over their heads. The effect was only momentary. Even when looters were shot by Volunteers or fell victim to the increasingly deadly crossfire between the insurgents and military, the spree continued. Only when British artillery began demolishing the very buildings being robbed did the looters finally desist.
Grafton Street was spared a similar fate through a combination of volleys from the Dublin University Officers’ Training Corps in Trinity College, who scattered the first forays of the looters, and the efforts of the Lord Mayor, James Gallagher, in mobilising enough respectable citizens, including shop owners and managers, to block access to the most fashionable shops in the city. Moral force succeeded where Volunteers and British army snipers failed. Quite possibly the mere semblance of order allowed this commercial oasis to exist amidst the chaos. The Lord Mayor was subsequently knighted for his efforts.
The greatest damage was not to a shop but to the warehouse of the British and Irish Steam Packet Company on the North Wall, from which looters made off with an estimated £5,000 worth of merchandise.
More than four hundred people would later be fined or imprisoned for looting during the rising, but many more escaped unscathed with their booty.23
Table 5
Prosecutions for offences connected with the rising
Nor was it only looters who caused problems for the rebels. James Stephens, writer, poet and registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland, was on his way home on Monday when he encountered a rebel with a revolver—‘no more than a boy’—who told him, ‘We have taken the city. We are expecting an attack from the military at any moment, and those people’—he indicated knots of idle onlookers clustered towards the end of the Green—‘won’t go home for me.’
Worse was to come later that day when Stephens saw a man shot for pulling a cart from a rebel barricade. The man, Michael Cavanagh, was a guest at the Shelbourne Hotel in St Stephen’s Green and was the owner of the commandeered vehicle. He had been told he could retrieve some of his effects but took this to mean he could retrieve the cart as well. He was told to put it back or he was ‘a dead man.’ Instead he raised his hand ‘as though he was going to make a speech … A rifle spat at him, and in two undulating movements the man sank on himself and sagged to the ground.’ Some civilians carried him to the kerb, and onlookers jeered the Citizen Army men or knelt down to pray for the soul of the victim.24
In other places it was the civilians who sought to make order out of mayhem. At Boland’s Bakery a group of determined bakers refused to leave until they had finished work. Despite being prodded with bayonets and threats of being shot, they convinced the commandant, Éamon de Valera, to allow at least some of them to remain, or else people in the area would face starvation during the fighting. As a result, food distribution was added to the Volunteers’ duties at the bakery.25
Food supplies rapidly became the concern of all, for, as James Stephens recounted, rumour ‘had to serve many Dublin people in place of bread.’ Among them was Wilmot Irwin, who found by Tuesday that he had grown used to the gunfire but not to the hunger, as he sat down to ‘a somewhat meagre dinner.’ Local shopkeepers put up their shutters for fear the looting in the city centre would spread to the northern suburbs. However, some normality returned on Wednesday, when the British had little difficulty clearing the rebel outposts in Cabra and Phibsborough.26
Soldiers on the south side of the city were less fortunate. Thanks to Malone’s skilful deployment of his men, the bloodiest encounters of the week took place around Mount Street Bridge. On Wednesday morning thousands of soldiers from the 59th Division, a reserve force encamped astride the railway lines around London to repel any German landings in England, found themselves bound for Kingstown. Fears that rebels had seized the township were unfounded. Far from meeting any hostility, the soldiers were feted as they marched through the most loyal district in Ireland apart from Belfast. The columns were plied with tea, sandwiches and fresh fruit as they marched through south Co. Dublin.
Among those who came out to greet them were the Rev. William Roberts and his daughter Monica in Stillorgan. The Band of Helpers to the Soldiers suddenly found work to do much closer to home. There was a special welcome for Captain Frederick Dietrichsen of the Sherwood Foresters when his column reached Blackrock, for his wife, who had returned to her parents’ home for the duration of the war, came out to greet him with their children.
But the reception for the 2,000-strong column would be very different when it marched into the Volunteer positions at Northumberland Road and Mount Street Bridge. Michael Malone’s under-strength platoon made up in determination to deny the enemy the bridge for what it lacked in numbers and equipment. They waited until the first units had passed well into the killing zone before opening fire. Among the first to fall was Captain Dietrichsen.27
It took more than thirty hours of fierce fighting by the attacking column, made up largely of inexperienced recruits, to capture the rebel positions. The unit’s officers had strict instructions to capture or destroy any rebel stronghold before continuing the advance. Denied any variation in their route, they formed what one Volunteer described as ‘a giant human khaki-coloured caterpillar,’ impossible to miss as the soldiers pushed forward.28
Clanwilliam House was the last building taken. By 7:30 p.m. on Thursday the Wilson residence had ‘become a perfect inferno.’ The sash windows that George Reynolds had insisted that his men open rather than smash had been carried away by rifle and machine-gun fire.
The curtains and hangings were torn to ribbons; pictures from the walls, glass mirrors, chandeliers, lay on the floor shattered into pieces, the plaster had fallen from the ceiling and almost every square foot of walls inside was studded with bullets.
The rooms were filled with smoke, and sheets of flame lit the evening sky.29
Yet most of the Volunteers managed to escape, leaving behind five dead, including Malone and Reynolds. British casualties amounted to 234 either killed or wounded. The Sherwood Foresters’ horrific casualties rendered them of limited value in the fighting ahead, and their commander, Colonel Ernest Maconchy, paid the defenders a back-handed compliment by explaining the losses as the work of ‘paid mercenaries.’ Another officer, Captain Arthur Lee, considered the impact all the more distressing because the battalion was community-based in Nottinghamshire and the officers and men ‘all knew each other and each other’s parents and relations, and to see their lifelong pals shot down beside them by their own countrymen was a shock.’
Nevertheless the regiment showed restraint in handling its prisoners. There was only one instance of military discipline breaking down. This occurred when Joe Clarke, from the contingent based in the parochial hall in Northumberland Road, was captured with a concealed revolver. He was put against the back door of the hall, and an officer pointed h
is revolver at his head. He fired, but at the last moment Clarke ducked and the bullet pierced the door, narrowly missing an army doctor and the wounded soldiers he was treating in the garden outside. The doctor roundly abused his fellow-officer and ordered Clarke and the other men to be taken into custody.30
In another instance Volunteer Jimmy Doyle, one of the Clanwilliam House garrison, was taken prisoner by angry residents in Mount Street as he tried to flee; but before he could be handed over to the military a rival group of local people intervened and secured his release.
But the most remarkable incident of all had occurred in the middle of the fighting when a teenage girl, Louisa Nolan, ran onto Mount Street Bridge and held up her hands and called for the shooting to stop. The firing from Clanwilliam House ceased immediately, and the British followed suit. A group of doctors and nurses from Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital then came forward with a Red Cross flag to tend the wounded and remove them to safety.31 The spontaneous ceasefire ended when a group of British soldiers tried to use the evacuation as cover to rush the bridge.32
De Valera has been criticised for not providing more support to Malone’s unit, but the same could be said of the passivity of other commandants, such as Thomas MacDonagh, who had seized Jacob’s biscuit factory in Bishop Street and remained in situ. For all their lectures and route marches, the Volunteer leadership lacked the expertise to deploy men effectively at more than section or platoon level. Besides, the confusion caused by MacNeill’s countermanding order meant there were not enough Volunteers to conduct an active or coherent defence. De Valera, like MacDonagh, was reluctant to reinforce outposts such as Mount Street bridge because he was convinced that the British would ultimately launch a major assault on his main position and he would need to conserve his manpower.
On the positive side, however inadvertently, the rebel leaders’ lack of aggression helped keep the number of casualties down, reducing the intensity and length of the battle for the city.
One of the ironies of the rising was that many of the soldiers involved in suppressing it were Irish.
If a full mobilisation of the Volunteers had taken place on Easter Sunday, as planned, the city would have been theirs for the taking. There were only four hundred British troops in ‘immediate readiness’ for action in the city: approximately one hundred at each of the four main barracks and a guard of six men at Dublin Castle. On Easter Monday many officers were at the races in Fairyhouse, and the general officer commanding the forces in Ireland, Major-General Friend, was spending the bank holiday weekend in London. His deputy, Colonel H. V. Cowan, had a total of 2,385 men available to him, including those at the races or on a day’s leave elsewhere in the city.
Apart from the 6th Cavalry Reserve Regiment at Marlborough Barracks, every unit in the city was part of an Irish regiment. The 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment was at Richmond Barracks, the 10th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was in the Royal Barracks, and the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles was in Portobello Barracks.33 The first troops in action were the 5th (Royal Irish) Lancers, despatched from Marlborough Barracks to the GPO only to be scattered by rebel fire in Sackville Street, leaving behind a dead horse.
But substantial reinforcements were on their way. The military authorities suspended all civilian traffic on the GSWR line. Between 1:17 and 5:30 p.m. special trains rushed three thousand men from the Curragh to Dublin, all of them from Irish regiments.34 The first Irish troops deployed were the men of the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment. Two hundred of them were quickly assembled at Richmond Barracks and easily drove in the rebel outposts at Mount Brown and the western perimeter of the South Dublin Union (now St James’s Hospital) before meeting strong resistance in close-quarter fighting within the main workhouse complex.35 The Royal Irish Regiment was joined by members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had made their way across the River Liffey from the Royal Barracks to help secure Dublin Castle and contain Ceannt’s men in the workhouse area.
The South Dublin Union covered 52 acres and had more than 3,200 inmates in its complex of dormitories, workshops, hospitals, churches and sheds as well as residences for the staff and open grounds. The occupants included the unemployed, the sick, the mentally ill and the elderly. In early twentieth-century Dublin nine-tenths of working-class people could expect to end their days destitute, in the South Dublin Union or its counterpart, the North Dublin Union, on the other side of the Liffey. The South Dublin Union was the larger of the two, and Commandant Éamonn Ceannt had only 120 out of the 700 men of the 4th Battalion available to defend it. Despite rapidly mounting odds, he managed to hold out to the bitter end. The main stronghold was the Night Nurses’ Home, a large three-storey stone building that dominated James’s Street and gave a field of fire as far as Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal. Its military potential was pointed out by Lieutenant William Cosgrave, leader of the Sinn Féin group on Dublin Corporation. His grocery and wine shop was close by, and he knew the area intimately. His immediate superior was Cathal Brugha, who would make a legendary stand that prevented the home being captured by a British infantry attack on Thursday. Unlike Michael Malone at Mount Street, Brugha survived, though badly wounded, to become a national hero.
The fighting was mainly confined to the built-up areas, on what are now the hospital grounds. As one account put it, combat in the complex was like ‘a walk through a shooting gallery,’ where the wiliest combatants took off their boots and dug into blind corners to catch the unsuspecting passer-by. There were relatively few civilian casualties, and these seem to have been caused in the main by British troops, who suffered from the handicap of having to attack in an unfamiliar environment. One of the worst incidents was when a soldier threw a hand grenade into a room containing what he thought was a group of rebels but turned out to be inmates. One man was killed and most of the others severely injured. A nurse, Margaretta Keogh, was shot when two soldiers opened up at the sight of her white uniform in a hospital corridor.
The sympathy of local people seems to have swung behind the rebels. When Ceannt’s garrison finally surrendered, one of the Volunteers, Peadar Doyle, recalled that ‘all along the route … we were greeted with great jubilation, particularly in the poorer districts.’36
Just north of the South Dublin Union a similar conflict took place, on a smaller scale, around the Mendicity Institute at Usher’s Island. The Mendicity had been a forerunner of the workhouse and still dealt with the poorest of the poor. It was soon cleared of inmates by its small garrison, commanded by a nineteen-year-old former Fianna boy, Seán Heuston, promoted to commandant on Monday morning by James Connolly because there was no-one more experienced to hand. Many members of Heuston’s tiny garrison of less than twenty men were as young as their commander. No-one expected them to impede the approach of the 10th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers from the Royal Barracks for long; but they held out for two days, inflicting many casualties.
A final assault with grenades on Wednesday overwhelmed them. Heuston’s second in command, Richard Balfe, another former Fianna member, was one of those hit by the grenades and lost the use of his arms and legs. Forced to surrender, Heuston’s youthful garrison were roughed up by Royal Dublin Fusiliers, angered at their own losses. Balfe was too badly injured to move, and the Fusiliers threatened to bayonet or shoot him where he lay until a medical officer arrived on the scene. Balfe recalled that the officer ‘claimed me as his prisoner, saying that there had been enough … dirty work.’ Balfe was removed to King George v Military Hospital (later St Bricin’s Hospital) in Infirmary Road.37
The officer’s remarks may have referred to ugly incidents in the city just across the river. The defence of the Mendicity Institute had made it hard for the military to mount any sort of determined attack on the Four Courts, and they were sustaining heavy casualties. In a rare occurrence, the North Dublin Union at Grangegorman and the adjoining Richmond Hospital were treated as neutral territory by the Volunteers and the military,
thanks largely to the courageous stand of Dr Joe O’Carroll in defence of his patients. Instead of a battleground like the South Dublin Union, Grangegorman became a place of refuge for civilians in the surrounding area.38 Unlike de Valera, the commandant of the 1st Battalion, Ned Daly, encouraged the local bakery to continue operating throughout the rising, providing bread for local people and Volunteers alike.39 In many respects Daly and Ceannt proved the most effective of the Volunteer commanders, making up in energy, common sense, humanity and above all determination for their lack of experience. There were ugly scenes, however, in the warren of streets behind the Four Courts when the military requirements of the insurgents involved the seizure of private property. A seventy-year-old man was shot through the eye in one altercation with the Volunteers.40
Liam Archer’s experience was typical. After his all-night card game with Michael Collins in North Frederick Street he was told to mobilise his section at the Colmcille Hall in Blackhall Place, a regular meeting place for Volunteers, by 10 a.m. on Easter Monday. The depleted ranks created by the confusion surrounding MacNeill’s countermanding order resulted in Archer being promoted to lieutenant by Daly’s vice-commandant, Piaras Béaslaí, and he was taken with twenty men to the Bow Street and Mary’s Lane area behind the Four Courts. They encountered some hostility there, and Béaslaí ordered Archer to fix his bayonet.
A City in Wartime Page 15
