This I did and immediately a very fat dame in spotless white apron and voluminous shawl leapt in front of us and beating her ample bosom with clenched fists called on me to ‘put it through me now for me son who’s out in France.’
Archer declined the challenge, and Béaslaí beat a hasty retreat. Left in charge, Archer proceeded to tour the area, deploying his men and taking a plain-clothes policeman prisoner in the process. A barricade was built outside the Franciscan Church in Church Street, and there was a confrontation with the friars when Volunteers attempted to use church seats to reinforce their position. The friars appear to have won this particular skirmish. Despite it, or perhaps because of it, two priests visited the men and gave absolution to any Volunteer who requested it.
Archer tried to make life bearable for civilians by allowing people returning home from bank holiday outings through the barricades, but he discouraged sightseers and confiscated the goods of looters returning from Sackville Street and Henry Street. ‘The people in the area were generally hostile for the first couple of days but later their attitude changed completely,’ he said. One reason was that he made sure the fresh bread from Monks’s bakery was widely distributed and not just eaten by his own men, whose home-made sandwiches barely lasted the first day. A supply of fresh tea also helped maintain the unit’s morale and to avert competition with residents for scarce supplies.
In retrospect, Archer would be critical of Volunteer Headquarters for not giving enough attention to logistics, both in supplying its own forces and in looking after the civilian population. The one act of requisition Archer permitted was the seizure of blankets and a consignment of stewed figs from abandoned residential quarters in the Jameson distillery.
Archer was also critical of his own men. Their discipline was poor, and many of them left their position to look for food or to call on pals who lived nearby. Only afterwards did he realise that he should have organised sentry rosters and tours of duty.41
Meanwhile the decision of Daly and the British to respect the neutrality of the Richmond Hospital42 had the bonus of ensuring medical attention for all casualties. Members of Cumann na mBan attached to Archer’s unit helped provide emergency first aid and ‘were outstanding in their courage and devotion.’43 The Franciscans in Church Street also opened their doors to the wounded.
The number of casualties mounted rapidly, with Volunteers repulsing attacks from the Royal Barracks to the west and Marlborough Barracks to the north. They even took some prisoners. Among the officers captured were Lord Dunsany, the poet, and a Captain Brereton, who paid his captors the supreme compliment: ‘They fought like gentlemen.’
On Friday, fighting in the North King Street area reached an even greater pitch of intensity than in the South Dublin Union. The barricades and narrow streets made progress by British troops slow, even with the support of armoured cars. Some of these had been improvised by mounting disused boilers from the Guinness brewery on a Leyland or Straker-Squire chassis, with slits for riflemen.44 The Sherwood Foresters, who had suffered so badly earlier in the week, were once more in action, along with the North Staffordshire and South Staffordshire Regiments. All three regiments sustained heavy casualties.
Daly had deployed his men well, so that the small groups at barricades received supporting fire from other positions. Both sides burrowed through the walls of houses to outflank enemy positions, often exchanging fire at point-blank range. Inevitably there were civilian casualties among the terrified residents trapped in the crossfire. At least fifteen civilians appear to have been killed in the North King Street area, and the British military authorities later had to investigate allegations that they had been murdered by soldiers. The truth was never established, but General Sir John Maxwell, who ordered the inquiry, confided to his wife that some civilians may have been killed in cold blood. He told Kitchener:
It must be borne in mind in these cases that there was a lot of house-to-house fighting going on, wild rumours in circulation and owing to darkness, conflagrations etc., apparently a good deal of ‘jumpiness.’ With young soldiers and under the circumstances I wonder there was not more.45
The area around the GPO was the only place where the British were able to use their artillery with effect, gradually demolishing buildings around the rebel headquarters and forcing the garrison into the evacuation that heralded military defeat. Some of the initial artillery batteries operated from Trinity College, which had the distinction of being the main indigenous centre of resistance to the rebels.
When the rising began there were only eight collegians on duty, members of the Dublin University Officers’ Training Corps. Despite its central position, the rebels made no attempt to seize the university complex, but students responded with alacrity to the summons to arms. Between members of the Officers’ Training Corps, off-duty soldiers and some members of the Dublin Veterans’ Corps, the garrison had increased to 44 by Monday evening and to 150 by Wednesday. The defenders concentrated initially on the eastern end of the perimeter closest to Westland Row and the railway station. The main entrance to the college in College Green was fortified, and windows suitable for firing positions were sandbagged and used for sniping.
By Tuesday regular military formations were infiltrating Trinity, cutting off the rebel headquarters in the GPO from units in the south city. By the end of the rising the college grounds accommodated a brigade of infantry, a battery of artillery and a regiment of cavalry. One college defender observed: ‘The spacious quadrangles and lawns afforded excellent accommodation for the troops and it was surely a sign that Trinity had given itself wholly over to the military when one found soldiers playing football on the tennis courts.’
It was indeed an oasis of support for the British war effort. More than half the students had joined the Officers’ Training Corps, and a total of 869 undergraduates gave up their studies to join the British army. As a consequence the college lost £50,000 in fees. The Officers’ Training Corps was overwhelmingly Protestant and upper middle class, and the handful of Catholic members tended to come from such schools as Blackrock College and Clongowes Wood. Other staff members, including academics, white-collar and manual workers, served in the armed forces, although the latter would have been enlisted men. The strong response reflected the ethos of an institution that saw itself as an integral part of the old Protestant Ascendancy under siege. It was the only place in Ireland where recruitment levels matched those of its British counterparts. Unlike other universities, however, its members saw active service on the home front.
The 120 members of the Officers’ Training Corps who defended the college in Easter Week were given silver cups and 15s each by the ‘grateful citizens and traders of Dublin City.’ Their officers were presented with ceremonial swords, and their commanding officer, Captain E. H. Alton, was awarded the Military Cross.46
The unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police disappeared from the streets once the fighting began, but two were shot dead by rebels at the start of the rising and a third in Store Street station through a window. Seven were wounded, of whom two were taken prisoner. However, in Co. Meath the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary was mobilised in force to deal with the most successful rebel unit of the week, Thomas Ashe’s Fingal flying column.
Undismayed by the low turn-out at Knocksedan Bridge on Easter Monday, Ashe immediately set about his main task, the disruption of communications between the capital and the north-east. He took Donabate police barracks after a brief fight and Garristown without one, as the RIC there had no rifles. By Friday his small force had gained some new recruits, the most important of whom was Richard Mulcahy, who joined Ashe after sabotaging telegraph communications between Dublin and Belfast. The column attacked Ashbourne barracks as a prelude to cutting the railway line between Dublin and Mullingar. In the process Ashe went on to win the only rebel victory of 1916, when a large RIC force on its way to relieve the Ashbourne garrison was forced to surrender.
A local man, John Austin, watched the fighting fr
om Limekiln Hill with friends, and afterwards they helped remove dead bodies from the road in a cart. Two policemen taken prisoner by the Volunteers helped. Austin recalled: ‘Tom Ashe and his men were at the crossroads. They were very excited after their victory and were cheering, as men would after a football match.’
The police had twenty-seven casualties all told, including a Sergeant Shanagher, who had served in Ashbourne for a number of years and was considered ‘a right bad one’ by local people. He had been guiding the relief force and ‘was shot right between the eyes as he left the car’ leading the convoy.47
After disarming the policemen, Ashe paroled them before marching away. John Austin said later:
When things had quietened down, the surviving police came down to the village and bought themselves some drink and food. They had money as the rebels had not interfered with any of their personal belongings. They were very shaken and shivering. One of them remarked to me that the rebels were great men and I replied, ‘If you had won, I know what you would do.’
Irishmen who had fought for the Crown were already sensing a different attitude to their own role and that of the rebels. Lieutenant Tom Kettle’s finely tuned antennae had picked up the signals. Having done his duty in Dublin and insisting on being sent to the front, he told a young family friend on the eve of departure: ‘These men will go down to history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down—if I go down at all—as a bloody British officer.’48
Irish units in the British army suffered 29 fatalities and 93 wounded, out of a military total of 103 fatalities and 397 wounded during the rising. These figures are quite low, given that the units involved were engaged longest in the fighting. This is probably due in part to their greater familiarity with the city. The unfortunate Sherwood Foresters contributed more than half the total British losses after blundering into the ambush at Mount Street Bridge. While they marched blindly into rebel fire, local clergymen and hospital staff managed to slip around the rebel positions largely unnoticed by combatants to ferry the wounded to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital in Grand Canal Street. James Grace’s sister and another Cumann na mBan member even managed to bring food through the lines for him and Malone, pushing the sandwiches through the letter-box at Northumberland Road.49
The total number of Dubliners who died while serving with the British army was nine, including three who were with non-Irish units: a gunner with the Royal Field Artillery, a Hussar and a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The most senior fatality was Colonel Henry Allat of the Royal Irish Rifles, who came out of retirement in the city to work as a draft conducting officer. He was killed in action at the South Dublin Union, as was Lieutenant Alan Rafferty of the Royal Irish Rifles. Lieutenant Gerald Neilan of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was shot during the attack on the Mendicity Institute.
The other dead were members of the Leinster Regiment and the Royal Irish Fusiliers. The Royal Irish Fusiliers’ fatalities included Sergeant-Major Patrick Brosnan, who was actually shot by his own side, as were two officers with King Edward’s Horse.50 Six Dublin members of the Royal Irish Rifles were wounded, three members of the Royal Irish Regiment and eighteen members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.51
But of course the great majority of casualties were civilians, although the exact numbers are unclear, as they were not disaggregated from rebel dead and wounded. It is thought that rebels accounted at most for a third of the 180 fatalities and 614 wounded who were not members of the Crown forces. While the Volunteers and Citizen Army certainly shot some civilians, most notably looters or people actively obstructing them, it would appear that the majority were the victims of military action.
There were two reasons for this. One was the difficulty soldiers had in distinguishing civilians from rebels, as some Volunteers had little or no uniform. Lieutenant A. M. Jameson of the Leinster Regiment captured the mood in a letter home.
My corporal saw a civilian walking where a lot of Sinn Feiners were so he said he didn’t know whether he was a Sinn Feiner or not, but anyhow he oughtn’t to be there so he’d ‘just shoot him in the foot.’ So he up with his rifle and fired, and the man hopped down the street on one leg!52
Several civilians seem to have been killed for failing to stop at military checkpoints, including a young boy on a bicycle and an old woman who was deaf.53
The other cause of serious civilian casualties was the decision to use artillery to clear rebels out of the city centre. Altogether 99,420 square yards of buildings were demolished as a result of bombardment and fire, primarily in the Sackville Street area, where 68,900 square yards were destroyed. Other badly affected areas included Mount Street, St Stephen’s Green and Bridge Street, which all witnessed heavy fighting, as well as the Linenhall Barracks in Lisburn Street, which was set alight by Volunteers to prevent its occupation by the enemy. Unfortunately the fire quickly spread to surrounding buildings, including a wholesale pharmacy, causing the worst conflagration in the city apart from that in Sackville Street. One witness said the district was
like a roaring furnace … Barrels of oil were projected high in the air and exploded with a loud report … On Thursday night it was as bright as day. A pin could be picked up by the glare.54
Similar scenes in Sackville Street included the destruction of the Dublin Bread Company’s premises. A journalist told readers:
The flames kissing the ball on the dome’s summit are singularly impressive. Standing high above the lower plane of flame and smoke, it is thrown into relief by a background of clouds. A scene of greater splendour I have never before witnessed, not even in the realms of cinematography.55
While the use of artillery brought maximum force to bear on the rebel positions, especially the headquarters in the GPO, and was an important factor in hastening the decision by the leaders to end the fighting to avoid further civilian casualties, it was also an admission by the British government that it was dealing with a serious insurrection, and left it open to the charge that it was inflicting casualties on civilians to save the lives of its soldiers. It was no wonder that pictures of bombed-out Dublin streets quickly appeared in German propaganda posters, newsreels and postcards.
Dealing out death and destruction was relatively easy for the opposing forces, but coping with the casualties was more difficult and at least as dangerous. The main task of rendering first aid to soldiers, rebels and civilians alike, as well as ferrying them to hospital, fell on the St John Ambulance Brigade. It also provided drivers for the Irish Automobile Club ambulance service. Meanwhile the Dublin Fire Brigade struggled to keep the fires under control. Both groups worked under the auspices of the Red Cross, and many St John Ambulance personnel were under the direction of the Royal Army Medical Corps, making them legitimate targets in the eyes of some Volunteers. Among the first casualties was Holden Stoddart, superintendent of the the St John Ambulance Brigade, who was killed while assisting stretcher-bearers with a wounded soldier near the Royal City of Dublin Hospital in Baggot Street.
Fortuitously, the Dublin Fire Brigade had received a brand-new ambulance, sponsored by the cinematograph trade, in November 1915, while fire tenders dealt with ninety-three fires during the week. Some idea of the intensity of the activity is given by the fact that the owners of 196 buildings destroyed during Easter Week claimed damages of £2½ million, compared with £41,200 claimed for all other fires in the city that year and £250,000 for malicious damage during the 1913 Lock-out.56
The large-scale mobilisation of women for the war effort, through the Voluntary Aid Detachments and the Red Cross Society, now began to pay unexpected dividends. The War Hospital Supply Depot in Merrion Square was converted into a hospital under the direction of Dr Ella Webb, district superintendent of the St John Ambulance Brigade, within three hours of hostilities breaking out. The first amputation took place in the improvised operating theatre at 5 p.m. Several auxiliary hospitals were equipped by other divisions. Two of them, Litton Hall in Leeson Park and the High School in Harcourt Street, became fully operation
al.
It was the last great flowering of Dublin’s voluntary Protestant middle class in action. No less than five silver medals were awarded to St John Ambulance personnel. They included three women, one of whom was Dr Webb. Twenty bronze medals were also awarded.
The only military award to a civilian went to Louisa Nolan for her heroic action in calling a ceasefire on Mount Street Bridge. She was the daughter of a retired RIC head constable, had two sisters working as nurses in England, a brother in the Royal Navy and two other brothers in the army. King George v presented her with the Military Medal at Buckingham Palace on 2 February 1917.57
Women also played a leading role in Red Cross mobilisation. Its offices at 29 Fitzwilliam Street were converted into a first-aid post, staffed by VAD personnel. Several Red Cross members nearby opened their homes to treat the wounded, and VADs provided the personnel to operate these ad hoc hospitals, which provided a hundred temporary beds. They braved gunfire in the area to carry wounded soldiers and civilians to the main hospitals. The great majority of stretcher-bearers were women. Ironically, the main obstacle to the full mobilisation of Red Cross, St John Ambulance and VAD personnel was the restrictions on movement throughout the city by the military.58
Several women played similar roles on the rebels’ side. Cumann na mBan detachments served with units throughout the city, except Boland’s Bakery, where de Valera refused them admission. They included a medical student, Brigid Lyons, and Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell in the GPO, while Madeleine ffrench-Mullen served as a first-aid officer with the Citizen Army garrison in St Stephen’s Green. Dr Kathleen Lynn, the Citizen Army’s medical officer, served as senior officer at City Hall after her superior, Seán Connolly, was killed. Dr Lynn was by far the best-known woman activist involved in the rising after Constance Markievicz. It is unlikely, however, that she played a direct military role in the rising: her medical duties appear to have taken precedence.
A City in Wartime Page 16
