A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  However, Lady Lawrence’s ‘knitters’ would give way to a more professional approach as full-time welfare superintendents and paid catering staff took over the task of feeding the workers. This new system had been piloted in British munitions factories and was found to be superior to the voluntary networks, although they continued to exist.

  The superintendent appointed in Parkgate Street was Margaret Culhane, a sister of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. When objections were raised in the House of Commons to her appointment, the Parliamentary Secretary to Lloyd George, Worthington Evans, told members that the appointment of professional social workers and managers such as Mrs Culhane was done through the proper procedures and had led to significant improvements on the voluntary system it had replaced.25

  By early 1917 four-fifths of the munitions workers in the Dublin Dockyard were female; but this revolution in employment appears to have passed the city fathers by.26 They remained preoccupied with the rapidly changing political situation rather than the feminisation of industry. Concern over the fate of fellow-members and employees of the corporation imprisoned as a result of the rising or who had lost their job as a result of the carnage provided a humanitarian issue on which councillors could unite without having to take positions on the war. In October it was agreed to compensate workers who had lost their employment because of the rising, although the hope was also expressed that the sums to meet this generous policy could be secured from the British exchequer.

  The corporation responded sympathetically to a request from the Irish National Aid Association that city employees interned for their part in the rising should retain their positions. No doubt it helped that one of the honorary secretaries of the association, Fred Allan, was also secretary to the corporation as well as a former secretary of the Supreme Council of the IRB. Alfie Byrne went a step further and proposed that the corporation call upon ‘the Irish nation … [to] unite in demanding the release of our fellow countrymen and women interned in English prisons without trial’ and for ‘an amnesty for those who have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment,’ pending which they should be given the status of political prisoners. The motion was seconded by Michael Brohoon, a Labour councillor. Not only did the corporation overwhelmingly support it but councillors agreed to having a representative from each ward actively campaign to establish an all-Ireland convention with various national and labour bodies to establish a Political Prisoners’ Amnesty Association.

  The same meeting adopted another motion from Byrne condemning conscription, seconded by the recently released Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin.27

  The threats posed by the war to public morality were never far from the thoughts of the councillors, or indeed of many respectable Dubliners brought up in an environment of Victorian rectitude. When representatives of the Vigilance Association attended a corporation meeting in October 1916 their views were given careful consideration. A Catholic body, its deputation was headed by Canon Dunne, president of Holy Cross College and a close friend of Archbishop Walsh. Representatives of the Irish National Foresters, AOH and many Catholic sodalities in the city accompanied the canon to express concern at the lack of adequate supervision in cinemas. Their view was shared by the Juvenile Advisory Committee of the Board of Trade Labour Exchange in Lord Edward Street. It wrote separately to the corporation, alerting councillors to the dangers facing idle adolescents who ventured into ‘certain censored films’ in any of the city’s twenty-six picture houses.

  The Cinematograph Act (1909) provided for the appointment of censors and inspectors, but the corporation had never appointed any. The earliest it could now do so would be 1917, because, as the law agent, Ignatius Rice, pointed out, it would be illegal in 1916, as no funds had been voted for the purpose. The speed of the councillors’ response suggests that the lobbying power of Canon Dunne and his constituency was considerable. While powerless to finance the appointment of inspectors until 1917, the corporation readily agreed to reject an application for picture houses to be opened at 8 p.m. on Sundays rather than 8:30 p.m. It was feared that the earlier opening time could distract the faithful from evening devotions.

  In October it also appointed two honorary censors, Eugene McGough JP, a gentleman ‘of independent means and education,’ and A. J. Murray, headmaster of the Central Model School. Both men would still be acting in an unpaid capacity in 1920, when they requested £78 each to cover expenses for the previous three years.28 Two honorary lady inspectors, Mrs E. M. Smith and Mrs A. O’Brien, were recruited in early 1917, when a paid corporation employee, Walter Butler, took overall charge. The ‘honorary’ was a courtesy title, as both women were full-time sanitary inspectors and monitored cinemas as an additional duty. Nor did it mean a pay increase, although their salaries were between £20 and £25 a year less than those of their male counterparts.29

  The first complaint Walter Butler had to deal with was in early 1917 when a Mr M. J. Barry complained about an ‘impure, filthy poster’ exhibited by the Carlton Cinema in Upper Sackville Street for a film entitled The Circus of Death. ‘For sheer audacious and suggestive indecency,’ Barry said, it ‘had never been surpassed in his experience.’ Butler disagreed and found nothing indecent in the poster. Regrettably, no copies appear to have survived.

  The emphasis in early inspections was more on safety regulations in cinemas and theatres than on the performances, in ensuring that panic bolts were installed on exit doors and that cinemas adhered to licensed opening hours, especially on Sundays. However, the Dublin Vigilance Committee was soon active again, supplemented by the activities of a Morality Sub-committee of a self-appointed Dublin Watch Committee. This group lodged a complaint about a play entitled Five Nights, written by ‘Victoria Cross’ and performed at the Gaiety Theatre in July 1918. Dublin audiences were spared the film version, which had been banned in some British cities. Charles Eason first raised the matter after refusing to print or distribute advertising material. The controversy was sufficient to persuade the Under-Secretary, James McMahon, to ask the Commissioner of the DMP to investigate, and the manager of the Gaiety was warned that ‘if anything grossly immoral were to be shewn in the play’ he could lose his licence.

  But no action was taken. According to the theatre critic of the Irish Independent, the leading man in the play was an artist who ‘talks tosh, paints pictures and messes about with his models.’ He ‘strains after witticisms about models being scarce owing to girls with looks and no brains being employed on Government service.’ The female lead is his cousin, who composes ‘weird music. Being endowed with the “artistic soul,” they feel they are above and beyond all other mere people and must act differently.’30

  One probable source of irritation was the popularity of the play with British officers. Soldiers generally were great patrons of the theatres and music halls. This could pose problems, as the DMP was responsible for ‘policing immorality’ in these establishments as far as civilians were concerned but the War Office dealt with military personnel. Much of the material Dubliners found morally objectionable not alone had the blessing of the War Office but was sometimes commissioned by it to boost the morale of the soldiers.

  Censorship in the cinemas was less of a problem. This was the beginning of cinema’s great era of expansion. When the censorship regime came in there were twenty-two cinemas in the city, including the ‘picture houses’ that were now being built, as well as theatres that occasionally showed films, such as the Gaiety Theatre and Theatre Royal. Films featured daily as part of the Theatre Royal’s variety programme.31

  One of the few cinemas to fail was the Volta in Mary Street, once managed by James Joyce, in a converted builders’ supplies and ironmongery premises. It could not compete with purpose-built new entrants to the market or, apparently, observe safety regulations and control its patrons. On 18 July 1918 there was a complaint that when patrons rushed to the exits after a fire scare they found them padlocked. In his defence the managing director claimed that on the night in question

>   about 100 persons had rushed in without paying and one of these shouted “fire” … The operator immediately stopped showing the film and switched on the lights. No one was injured.

  Surprisingly, no fine was imposed, although cinemas were regularly fined from £1 to £20 over inadequate access to exits.32

  1918 was the first full year in which cinemas were monitored. Butler and Smith made 393 inspections of premises, and they or the voluntary censors viewed 707 films. Of these, 600 were approved without changes, 55 were banned ‘on account of their immoral tone or suggestions of evil,’ and 52 were passed after excisions were made ‘to render them free from objection.’

  What effect the production of lewd cinema posters or films had on republican prisoners being released from British prisons does not appear to have been recorded in any memoirs of the period. It was just before Christmas 1916, the eve of the censorship era, when the British government released a large number of internees, including the Labour councillor P. T. Daly.

  Two Sinn Féin councillors, Seán T. O’Kelly (or Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh, as he now became) and W. T. Cosgrave, were less fortunate, as was Daly’s Labour colleague William Partridge. Ó Ceallaigh took the trouble to write from Reading Prison, explaining that it was not for lack of interest that he was absent from meetings. Ó Ceallaigh, Cosgrave and Partridge, unlike Daly, had been tried and sentenced for their part in the rising and not merely interned.

  Lieutenant Cosgrave, the man who had identified the Nurses’ Home as the key to the defence of the South Dublin Union, had been sentenced to death, only to have his court-martial recommend a reprieve because he seemed ‘a decent man’ who had been ‘rushed into this.’ In January 1917 a corporation motion calling for his release asked rhetorically, ‘Would anyone seriously suggest for a moment that Willie Cosgrave was a criminal?’33 Councillors expressed no opinion of the character of Captain William Patrick Partridge of the Irish Citizen Army, who had been condemned to fifteen years’ penal servitude, commuted to ten years.

  Undeterred by government policy, or the law, Dublin Corporation members unanimously co-opted the three imprisoned councillors in January 1917, thus making good the vacancies created by their enforced absence. This action was in marked contrast to the way in which the vacancy created by the death of the unionist councillor John Thornton had been dealt with the previous June, when the seat had been hijacked by a nationalist nominee.

  The act was purely symbolic in Partridge’s case. He contracted Bright’s disease (nephritis) and was released from prison on 20 April 1917. Too ill to resume political or trade union work, he returned to his native Ballaghaderreen, Co. Mayo, where he died of a heart attack in July.34

  While councillors thumbed their noses at the laws governing their own proceedings, held open jobs for rebel prisoners (as they did for employees serving with the Crown forces) and routinely condemned British oppression, the state they saw as the embodiment of foreign tyranny was finding it very hard to sack its own employees suspected of rebel activities. Dealing with subversion, even in a time of war and rebellion, was constrained by the snares of legality, not to mention uncertain guidance from above as well as resistance from employees and nationalist and labour organisations from below. A good example was provided by the case of Patrick Belton, an employee of the Land Commission, who went on to enjoy a colourful career in Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, the Centre Party and finally Fine Gael.

  After the rising the government established a committee under Lord Justice Sankey to investigate the cases of some 1,800 detainees and other suspects. These included 90 civil servants, half of them employees of the Post Office. It was a cursory trawl, and subsequently Sir William Byrne, an English Catholic recently appointed Assistant Under-Secretary, and another career civil servant, Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson, conducted a discreet investigation into those ‘civil servants who have been suspended from their duties owing to their suspected complicity with the recent Rebellion.’ Because of the increasing public hostility to British rule and its agents, the two men adopted a low profile, taking private rooms in Hume Street to conduct interviews rather than using Dublin Castle. They also indicated to departmental heads that they intended recommending whenever possible the reinstatement of civil servants who had been arrested or suspended. They later declared themselves appalled at the advanced views expressed unapologetically by many of those interviewed. One man, who openly admitted participating in the rising, demanded that he be reinstated because circumstances had not allowed him to shoot any British soldiers.

  Of the 42 people examined, 23 were dismissed, 1 pensioned off and 18 reinstated. The most senior civil servant dismissed was J. J. McElligott, a first-class clerk who had fought in the GPO and later had a distinguished career in the Free State civil service.35 In contrast, Belton was only an assistant clerk and does not appear to have participated in the rising, possibly because he feared that it might lead to dismissal and he had a young family to feed. But he was a member of the IRB and has been credited with helping to bring Michael Collins into the organisation when they were both young emigrants in London.36 His suspected association with the rebels was first brought to the attention of his employer by the RIC. The local sergeant in Finglas reported seeing Belton ‘marching’ towards his home, Ashgrove House, in the company of four armed Volunteers on 25 April 1916. The Volunteers were encamped in a field nearby. Ordered to investigate further, the sergeant wrote back that a member of the local branch of the National Volunteers told him that Belton spoke ‘in a very derisive manner’ about their own lack of activity and said, ‘Now we are going to get some of our own back.’

  While Belton was seen visiting the rebel encampment there was no evidence that he himself carried arms or wore a uniform. The sergeant admitted that the evidence was ‘meagre’ and that Belton had not previously come to the attention of the police. ‘But from what I hear recently I believe he is a dangerous man and one who would cause dissension so long as he could keep out of the conflict himself,’ the sergeant commented in a note to his superior at district headquarters in Howth. On receiving the police reports, by way of Dublin Castle, Belton’s superiors in the Land Commission ordered him to account for himself during Easter Week. He duly did so in a written statement. He told the commission he spent the Saturday afternoon working in the garden. On Sunday he walked into town ‘for papers’ after 8:30 mass in Finglas. On Easter Monday he

  took a message from my wife to Miss Quin’s Hospital, 27 Mountjoy Square. Cycled round by Pillar and found that rioting had broken out. Then I went home and walked into town in evening for news, food, tobacco &c. Sojourned in my own house.

  On the Tuesday he ‘came into town for news, went home and worked in the garden.’ On Wednesday,

  friends en route to Cork from London called and remained for a couple of days. They were anxious about their brother in 10th Dublin’s whom they believed was in a Barracks convenient to the Park. I went in direction of Park to make inquiries of military, but there was heavy firing in that direction and I came home and sojourned in my own house.

  On Thursday, Belton ‘heard there was fighting beyond Finglas & cycled out to inquire so that in case of danger I would remove my family to friends in Clonee.’ On Friday he ‘cycled out on same errand and heard there was firing at Ashbourne.’ He returned home and ‘sojourned’ there once more.

  On Saturday, the last day of the fighting in Dublin, he said he went into the city and arranged for a messenger boy to deliver flour to his home from the North City Mills. On Sunday he was once more drawn towards Ashbourne. ‘Cycled out to ascertain if the fighting was coming near Finglas and was held on road by Volunteer Sentry and Police Officers who informed me all was over.’ Sunday was spent, as it must have been for countless civilians, seeking food, tobacco and other essentials in the city.

  Belton’s account, given on 5 May, was probably not very different from those that could have been given by most contemporaries. But it could equally cover a multitude of subversive activities;
and, unlike McElligott, Belton had no intention of making his dismissal easy for his employers.

  Now that he had come to the attention of the authorities, Belton was kept under observation, and in July the RIC in Limerick and in Finglas, and the head of British military intelligence, Major Ivor Price, were reporting that Belton was collecting substantial sums for prisoners on behalf of the National Aid Association. All of this was regarded as ‘unseemly’ on the part of a government employee, and the Chief Secretary’s Office demanded that action be taken.

  The Land Commission said it had no information on the aims of the National Aid Association; the police admitted that those collecting the money were not in Sinn Féin; and, crucially, there was nothing in any of the police reports to suggest ‘that Mr. Belton is guilty of complicity in the late rebellion.’ In fact the commission wrote to the National Aid Association and received a reply that it had no information on Belton, and had not received the funds referred to. This was being somewhat economical with the truth, as Belton was a member of the association’s executive committee and had certainly been fund-raising for it.37

  The commission also consulted the Lords Justices but was informed that ‘their Excellencies do not propose to give any directions in the matter, which is one resting directly with the responsible Heads of the Department.’ The commission conceded in a letter to the Chief Secretary in September that while Belton ‘no doubt … would have sympathy for the dependants of those who were killed on the rebel side’ he was being recommended by the investigating commission for reinstatement. ‘I think the matter may be allowed to drop,’ the head of the commission added.