A City in Wartime

by Pádraig Yeates

  Sixteen-year-old Thomas Kavanagh was less fortunate. In 1920 his father, Patrick, who had fifty years’ service with the GSWR, was still seeking his reinstatement. In a letter to the chief engineer, E. A. Watson, he wrote:

  I beg to address you on behalf of the boy. My son entered the Works in May 1914, being attached to the Fitting and Machine Shop. He was then 14 years of age and then in April 1916, when the Rebellion occurred, he was unfortunately and unconsciously lured into it as a result of which he had to forfeit his job at your works. He was at the time arrested by the Military but owing to his age was released.

  Now you will understand what foolish things youths of his age will do, especially when they are led by older and irresponsible persons and only years show them the follies of youth. The boy is now 19 years old with about 40 years more sense than he had when he was 14. Under the circumstances and seeing the boy’s foolishness was forgiven by the Military Authorities, I honestly appeal to you to place the matter before the boards and ask the directors to consider the case and give the boy a chance to start afresh.

  But even the fact that the boy had lost his mother a year after he was born and was now living with his sister beside the Inchicore works failed to move the directors. Those who were deemed absent from work through no fault of their own, such as signalling staff and the women who cleaned the head office, were refused payment for lost time during the rebellion.

  In contrast, the Midland Great Western Railway provided half-pay for all its employees, and the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway provided full pay and even some bonuses, ranging from 10s to £2 5s, to employees who ‘went about their work in a whole hearted and loyal way.’ P. Franklin, a chargehand smith, and J. Barnwell, a chargehand wagonmaker, received 10s each as a reward for retrieving stolen property from ‘a number of boys’ on the line near Lansdowne Road station and securing the stores although ‘Sinn Feiners’ were occupying the premises at the time. Ganger Kearney received an award after being twice arrested by rebels in Enniscorthy. He managed to make his way back to Dublin with ‘very useful information … on the state of the lines.’ The same man was struck with a rifle by a rebel in Harcourt Street station for obstructing their activities.

  While seventeen employees qualified for a reward, ninety-six absented themselves for anything from one to four days, of whom only five were considered to have acceptable excuses. It is not clear what happened to the remainder.

  Passengers of the Dublin and South-Eastern Railway also fared poorly. Requests for refunds on tickets were rejected, on the grounds that the military authorities had ordered the cessation of traffic and, in some cases, had removed track. This did not prevent the company seeking compensation for lost receipts.19

  It was against this background of the little war in Dublin compounding the hardship caused by the Great War in Europe that two parliamentary by-elections took place early in 1917. One was in North Roscommon, caused by the death of the sitting home-rule MP, the former Fenian J. J. O’Kelly. The other was for the vacancy in the University of Dublin caused by the elevation of the junior member, Sir James Campbell, to the bench as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Like the mayoralty, both reflected the realignments taking place in Irish politics.

  The University of Dublin contest was between the eminent surgeon Sir Robert Woods and Arthur Warren Samuels KC, a distinguished barrister who had previously run unsuccessfully against Campbell. The senior member for the university was another lawyer, Sir Edward Carson, and the challenge from Woods had as much to do with opposition to the near-monopoly the legal profession held on the seats as with the intricacies of southern unionist politics. Since the Act of Union only two MPs for the university had not been lawyers.20

  The refusal of Woods to espouse any party allegiance alarmed many of the electorate. After he won the seat on a show of hands on 3 February and was carried in triumph by undergraduates up and down Grafton Street, Samuels demanded a full vote by all eligible graduates. He denounced the ‘bathos’ of an election between a doctor and a lawyer being made the primary issue when the electorate was ‘overwhelmingly’ composed of southern unionists. It was with some relief that the Irish Times subsequently reported the barrister’s comfortable election by 1,481 votes to 679 and that Samuels would take his place in Parliament alongside ‘our greatest Irishman, Sir Edward Carson.’21 Samuels would go on to serve as Irish Attorney-General until the general election in 1918.

  The North Roscommon election understandably elicited a lot more interest in the city than the contest in the university. The first major political test of public opinion since the rising was the nomination of George Noble Plunkett,22 father of the 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett, by a radical nationalist coalition conveniently dubbed ‘Sinn Féin’. The fact that Plunkett had always been a Whig in politics served to reassure conservative nationalists, while the income he derived from his slum properties in Dublin mattered not a jot.

  Dublin’s premier Catholic capitalist, William Martin Murphy, had lost all sympathy for what he regarded as Redmond’s capitulationist policy on home rule and partition. From now on the Irish Independent and its sister publications had free rein to hound the Irish Party establishment in the same way that it had once hounded Larkin and Connolly. When the Roscommon result came in, the Independent crowed that the Irish Party machine was ‘routed hopelessly.’ Plunkett secured 3,022 votes to 1,708 for the UIL candidate, T. J. Devine, and 687 for Jasper Tully, a former Irish Party MP who ran as an independent nationalist.

  A certain piquancy was added to the contest by the candidature of Count Plunkett, just home from his post-rebellion banishment, hot on the heels of his expulsion by the Royal Dublin Society, and with the memory of the execution of one of his sons and the imprisonment of two others for association with the rebellion still fresh in the public mind.23

  The Irish Catholic, like the Independent a mouthpiece for Murphy, said the result ‘sounded the death knell’ for UIL constituency machines, although it was sceptical about Plunkett’s ‘erratic politics.’ In a reference to his previous career as director of the National Museum it said ‘his capacity for practical usefulness was greater in the Museum than it will ever be in Parliament.’ The Irish Times dismissed Plunkett as

  a person of no importance, but the Sinn Feiners found in his family’s association with the late rebellion an occasion to advertise their disloyalty, and the constitutional Nationalists voted for him—would have voted for anybody—in order to advertise their discontent with the official party.

  The Times succinctly identified the Irish Party’s twin mistakes as acquiescing in the partition of Ireland and agreeing to become ‘a hewer of wood and drawer of water to the people who gloried and still glory in the rebellion.’ The two sins were equally unforgivable to southern unionists, for whom partition was as abhorrent as it was for nationalists.

  Dublin Corporation was in full session when the Roscommon result was announced. Members greeted it with ‘wild excitement and much cheering and waving of hats by councillors and the crowd in the gallery.’ Alderman J. J. Kelly pinned a celebratory note on the curtains over the Lord Mayor’s chair, and Alderman Corrigan, another former stalwart of the United Irish League, proposed the adjournment of the council. The incoming Lord Mayor, Alderman O’Neill, seconded the motion. It was defeated by 39 votes to 24, but only by unionists voting en bloc with the main UIL faction.24

  The reaction of the corporation members was mirrored on the streets. When Plunkett’s train stopped at Mullingar on its way to Dublin local councillors and other notables presented him with an address that declared: ‘By opposing your candidature in this election your opponents have sounded the doom of their political influence in Ireland.’ Their ‘puerile policy of inaction, jobbery and sycophancy’ had been ‘wiped out in a storm of popular indignation.’

  In Dublin large crowds awaited the train, which did not complete its triumphal progress into Broadstone station until 10 p.m. Like Sir Robert Woods a few days earlier, Plunkett was carried
shoulder-high to a waiting motor car and escorted by crowds through the main thoroughfares to his residence in Fitzwilliam Square. His escort sang nationalist anthems, such as ‘The West’s Awake’, ‘God Save Ireland’ and ‘The Soldier’s Song’.

  The next day the Irish Times correspondent, who had been traversing the snows of North Roscommon on the campaign trail, gave a new view on Plunkett’s victory. He attributed it to the activities of ‘the Rev. Michael O’Flanagan, the Roman Catholic curate of Crossna … For twelve days and nights he was up and down the constituency, going like a whirlwind.’ The burden of Father O’Flanagan’s election speeches was that

  conscription would have been applied to Ireland last year were it not for the rebellion … As Father O’Flanagan put it in all his speeches, it was better and easier for the young men to carry their fathers on their backs to the polls to vote for Plunkett than to serve as conscripts in the trenches of Flanders. This appeal went straight home to the parental instincts of the voters with sons of military age.25

  In Dublin the war itself found myriad ways of exacerbating divisions between local unionists and the new breed of nationalist. Four days after the Roscommon by-election a war loan was launched at a public meeting in the city. The new president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, R. W. Booth, urged the banks and life assurance companies to encourage clients to purchase the new bonds, and Sir Maurice Dockrell told the audience that ‘if the Empire went down, Ireland would go down with it.’26

  The Central Advisory Committee of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers’ Association passed a resolution the same day thanking the Dublin Women’s Unionist Club

  for so kindly during the past year granting the use of their office and the services of their secretary … and bearing the administrative expenses of the branch, thus enabling the grants … to be spent on … food and tobacco for the men.

  There was no longer even a semblance of nationalist involvement in the Central Advisory Committee: the membership, from Lady Arnott down, was staunchly unionist.27

  Black bread or ‘war bread’ was introduced at the beginning of the year,28 and potatoes were becoming a luxury by the time of the by-elections. Although the government had introduced some food controls in late 1916, including fixed prices, there was virtually no enforcement of the regulations. Neither the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, Dublin Corporation nor the DMP accepted responsibility.

  The official price of potatoes was set at £9 a ton, but the retail price in the shops was between £1s 8d and £1s 10d a pound, equivalent to between £13 16s 8d and £14 a ton. Even retailers buying in bulk had to pay farmers at least £10 a ton, plus freight and delivery. A ban on potato exports introduced in early 1917 failed to bring prices down. Potato factors in Dublin accused farmers of holding back up to half the crop, and growers could quite legally sell their produce in areas outside Dublin that were not covered by the prices orders, or export them. The vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, T. W. Russell, told the Irish Independent that if ‘British merchants and Ulster exporters had their way … there would not be a potato left in the country.’29

  Worse was to follow. The budget for school meals in Dublin ran out at the end of February, and the new rate would not be struck until the end of March. The id rate provided £4,150 a year for school dinners in Dublin, but the cost of providing meals for five days a week throughout the year had risen to £12,000, starkly illustrating the shortfall in nutrition for thousands of children in the poorer districts. Unfortunately the corporation could not afford such largesse, nor could private charity. In Britain a grant in aid from the exchequer could make up the difference for local authorities, but the Local Government Board in Ireland lacked such resources. For the same reason appeals to set up communal kitchens similar to those operating in deprived areas of London fell at first on deaf ears. This sort of discrimination was one of the few things that united loyalist and nationalist in Dublin, particularly women activists in the community.30

  Later in March a probation officer, Miss Gargan, told the Irish Independent that starvation was widespread among the poorer classes because of food prices. School meals had temporarily stopped, and even ‘Army separation allowances, with the utmost economy, are barely sufficient to provide a family with food—and nothing can be allowed for clothing.’ She criticised mothers ‘who squandered the allowance on drink,’ and she advocated drastic steps ‘to stop the rush of women from the post offices to the public houses. I have no hesitation in saying that such women are starving their children.’

  Of the 1,500 families on the books of the Women’s National Health Association she estimated that 500 of the main breadwinners earned between 15s and 25s a week and most of the rest were dependent on casual work, or were not fit for work. She gave an example from the previous week of a family of eight where the father gave 22s of his weekly pay of 24s to the mother. She spent 16s on twenty-eight loaves of bread, a half pound of tea, a pound of sugar and a pound of margarine. The rent was 3s, and the remaining 2s 4d went on fuel, light and milk. ‘Absolutely no provision could be made for meat or cheese and the wage earner had to work hard on his share of the poor quality of food.’

  A WNHA doctor said that almost all the fifty-nine children treated in February suffered from malnutrition, and even families with a regular wage coming in were living on dry bread and tea, ‘often very black tea.’ A clinic had been opened recently to ensure that mothers ate adequately, because ‘it was found utterly hopeless to do anything for the children while the mothers were starving.’ By making the women eat on the premises it was possible to make sure they would not take the food home to give their children: but only about twenty meals a day could be provided.

  The migration of men to jobs in England was aggravating the situation. The WNHA found that the average remittance was only 10s a week and many men left in Dublin were too ill or unfit for work. Miss Gargan said that rebuilding the city centre should be a priority to get the able-bodied back to work, and light employment schemes suitable for ‘weak workers’ should be developed.31

  So serious was the potato shortage that in early April the military authorities took the unusual step of opening some of their own stores and setting up a market at Amiens Street station, where retailers were offered produce at the current official price of £11 a ton. Small shopkeepers and community groups were allowed to pool their resources to purchase produce if they could not afford to pay for large orders individually.32 The measure had at least the temporary effect of forcing large farmers to release stock ahead of the more plentiful supplies that would be available in the summer.

  Chapter 10

  ‘THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE BIRD THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE’

  It was hardly surprising, given the widespread food shortages, that the allotment movement came into its own in Dublin during 1917. It was already a massive success in British cities and in Belfast.

  The Vacant Land Cultivation Society had been established in Dublin in 1909 by Sarah Harrison, an artist by profession, a sister of Charles Stewart Parnell’s secretary, Henry Harrison, and the first woman to be elected to Dublin Corporation, as an independent (Parnellite) nationalist. The society made little progress until 1915, when food shortages and price increases were posing problems for the city’s lower middle class as well as for the poor. In response to the crisis the corporation gave Harrison ten acres at Fairbrother’s Fields, between Donore Avenue and Cork Street, which had been earmarked for housing before the war. It acquired other fields and derelict sites in or near the city for allotments.1 By the end of the year the society had 31 acres under cultivation and by the end of 1917 more than 60 acres.

  The Rathmines Technical College and the School of Gardening for Women in Upper Kimmage provided expert advice to smallholders, and the first exhibition of produce at the Leo Hall, Inchicore, in September 1916 was graced by ‘massive cabbages’ from allotments on the Pigeon House Road, ‘burly potatoes’ from Broadstone and ‘huge onions
’ from Inchicore. Neither politics nor religion intruded on the society’s activities. Harrison served as secretary; other members included the distinguished Trinity College botanist Sir Frederick Moore, the Presbyterian minister for the north inner city, Rev. Dr Denham Osborne, and the Rev J. McDonnell SJ, who served as president.2

  The benefits of the scheme were evident from the experience of allotment-holders elsewhere. In Belfast eight hundred plots had been established by the end of 1915, with produce worth about £10,000 being grown to feed local people, and the lower prices of staple vegetables in Belfast were attributed in part to the ‘homegrown’ competition faced by farmers. Dublin’s smallholders soon proved they could be every bit as productive as their northern counterparts, although removing rubbish, levelling the ground and clearing it of weeds and slugs were problems at first. A more persistent threat was sparrows, which Sir Frederick Moore described as ‘the most destructive bird that could possibly be.’

  An eighth of an acre was found to be the optimum size for a plot cultivated by a man in his spare time. Women and children joined in, especially when it came to clearing sites of cinders, refuse and old brickwork. Sites varied in price from 6s to 16s 8d, with a proportion set aside for casual labourers and the unemployed to work free of charge.

  Sites were taken by a wide spectrum of people, including labourers in full-time employment, skilled workers, teachers, clerks, policemen and a large contingent of Guinness employees. The allotment-holders formed their own committees to allocate sites, organise work, collect rents and purchase seed. Subletting was prohibited; and anyone who failed to work their plot might forfeit it. They erected fences, sometimes with barbed wire, to prevent thefts, such as a dawn raid on a hundred freshly dibbled cabbages from a railway worker’s plot in the port in early 1917.