A City in Wartime Read online

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

  AOH Ancient Order of Hibernians

  DMP Dublin Metropolitan Police

  DSER Dublin and South-Eastern Railway

  DUTC Dublin United Tramways Company

  GSWR Great Southern and Western Railway

  INTO Irish National Teachers’ Organisation

  IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood

  ITGWU Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union

  ITUC Irish Trades Union Congress

  ITUC&LP Irish Trades Union Congress and Labour Party

  KC King’s counsel

  MGWR Midland Great Western Railway

  NSPCC National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children

  RDS Royal Dublin Society

  RIC Royal Irish Constabulary

  TCD Trinity College, Dublin

  UIL United Irish League

  WNHA Women’s National Health Association

  A note on place-names

  Because various streets and buildings have been renamed since 1914, the first reference to each gives both titles, for example ‘Royal Barracks (now Collins Barracks)’; ‘Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street)’. Subsequent references use whichever name is most appropriate in the text.

  A note on money

  The pound (£) was divided into twenty shillings (s) and the shilling into twelve pence (d). Intermediate amounts were written in a combination of denominations, e.g. 3s 6d; £2 3s. Some relatively small amounts in pounds might be written entirely in shillings, e.g. 42s (£2 2s).

  Dublin 1914–16

  Chapter 1

  FIRST BLOOD

  Dublin on the eve of the First World War

  The First World War came early to Dublin. From 9:30 a.m. on Sunday 26 July 1914, companies of Irish Volunteers from the city’s north side began assembling in Father Mathew Park, Fairview, for a march.

  It had been posted as a routine martial excursion for Ireland’s recently formed amateur nationalist militia, the third in as many weeks. But by the time ranks had been dressed and the men moved off at 10:30 the north-siders found that all the south-side companies had been mustered as well, and they began to wonder if something special was up. If it was, the authorities were taken unawares, and there was only a token posse of the Dublin Metropolitan Police to accompany the Volunteers.

  All over Europe armies were mobilising after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo a month earlier; but the honour of first blood would fall this day to these weekend soldiers, a handful of Scottish infantry and, above all, the ordinary citizens of Dublin.

  The archduke, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had been the victim of bad timing and poor traffic management. The bad timing consisted of paying a state visit to the capital city of the empire’s South Slav province of Bosnia on the anniversary of the Serbs’ historic defeat by the Turks at Kosovo and their subsequent loss of independence 360 years before; and it was a wrong turn by the Archduke’s cavalcade that gave the dissident Serbian student Gavrilo Princip the opportunity to shoot the town’s distinguished visitor.

  By contrast, what was about to happen in the capital city of Britain’s Irish province was the product of superb timing and organisation. The men, between two and three thousand strong, first realised there was something different about their route march when they saw groups of cyclists posted at junctions directing them towards the fishing village of Howth, nine miles north of the city, a favourite excursion spot for day-trippers. It was a long march for citizen-soldiers, and they sang military songs, such as ‘Clare’s Dragoons,’ ‘Step Together’ and the soon to be ubiquitous ‘Soldier’s Song’ to keep their spirits up between the showers that spliced the summer sunshine.

  As the men approached the village a gap in the trees gave them a glimpse of the sea and a yacht tacking off Lambay Island, five miles to the north. Some jokingly called to each other, ‘She must be the boat bringing us the guns.’

  By 12:30 p.m. the long column of Volunteers filled Harbour Road, but the men were not allowed to fall out. When the yacht they had seen off Lambay entered the harbour the lead companies were sent up the East Pier at the double to clear it of civilians while the rear companies blocked all access to that end of the harbour. By 1 p.m. hundreds of German Mauser rifles were being passed up from the deck of the Asgard into eager outstretched hands. Thousands of rounds of ammunition had already been spirited away in five motor cars.

  One unusual aspect of the operation, little commented on at the time, was that the unloading and distribution of the weapons was not carried out by the Volunteers but by members of Fianna Éireann, the republican boy-scout organisation whose members, despite their years, were better organised and drilled than their elders.

  The small detachment of Royal Irish Constabulary resident in the village was powerless to intervene, and when a more enterprising Coastguard patrol put out from the far side of the harbour to approach the gun-runners they quickly withdrew when Volunteers levelled rifles in their direction.

  The harbourmaster, W. T. Protherow, was made of sterner stuff. Having hastily donned his uniform, he rushed down the pier, to be met by ‘a living wall’ of men. He demanded to be let through, regardless of threats to ‘put a lump of lead in his head’ and turned away defeated only when his RIC escort, making a more realistic assessment of the situation, refused to clear the way.

  To cheers from crowds of local people, the ebullient Volunteers marched back towards Dublin. One of the organisers, Michael O’Rahilly (also known by his invented title ‘the O’Rahilly’), captured the mood and could be forgiven the hyperbole when he wrote: ‘For the first time in a century one thousand Irishmen with guns on their shoulders marched on Dublin town.’

  The telegraph wires to Howth had been cut, and the Coastguard had to send a man by bicycle to Baldoyle to raise the alarm. The first, totally inadequate contingent of police arrived by tram to intercept the Volunteers at Kilbarrack. The constables took one look at the opposition and boarded the next tram back to the city. At the village of Raheny, more than half way back to Dublin, the Volunteers encountered a larger contingent of police. Far from attempting to obstruct the march or seize the weapons, however, the police cheered them on, and the marchers, allowed a badly needed break, showed off their new rifles to the equally enthusiastic constables. According to some press reports, the two groups joined in a rendition of ‘A Nation Once Again’ before the march resumed.

  This was not as strange or unusual as it might appear. Nationalist Ireland believed itself on the brink of home rule. When the nationalist leaders John Redmond and John Dillon had arrived at Buckingham Palace for talks with the British government and Unionist leaders a few days earlier, members of the Irish Guards regiment had cheered; and on Saturday a detachment of Royal Dublin Fusiliers at summer camp in Youghal marched down the Main Street on their return from the rifle range also singing ‘A Nation Once Again.’ True, the conference at Buckingham Palace had broken down, but most nationalists still believed that their unionist fellow-countrymen would eventually be won over to the goal of self-government. Many of them felt grateful to Ulster unionists for founding their own armed militia, the Ulster Volunteers (later the Ulster Volunteer Force), and creating a precedent that nationalists could emulate.

  The previous April, under cover of night, the Ulstermen had brought in thousands of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition with impunity in order to resist home rule by force. Now the Irish Volunteers had carried out an almost identical operation in broad daylight; and if their feebler financial resources could stretch only to nine hundred rifles, it was certain that more would come. Most importantly, the Howth gun-runni
ng was a statement of intent that would stiffen the resolve of the Liberal government to face down militant unionism.

  But the government did not see it that way at all. It wanted to keep guns out of Ireland, and in 1913 a royal proclamation had been issued that banned the continued importation of weapons. Firearms, mainly intended for Ulster, had been seized with amazing regularity en route through the ferry ports to the north. That very weekend some 55,000 rounds of ammunition, thought to be intended for the Ulster Volunteers, had been seized in Birmingham, the home of British small arms manufacturing and the power base of England’s leading unionist political dynasty, the Chamberlains.

  When the Assistant Commissioner of the DMP, William Vesey Harrel, received word of the Howth episode he telephoned the Under-Secretary for Ireland, Sir James Dougherty. Dougherty arranged to meet Harrel at Dublin Castle to discuss the situation. Harrel failed to show up, and Dougherty began to fret—with good reason. The under-secretary was a member of a fast-vanishing breed of radical Ulster Presbyterian liberals committed to the cause of home rule. Harrel was also an Ulsterman but from a vehemently unionist tradition.

  Dougherty sent a note belatedly to Harrel’s headquarters, advising him that ‘forcible disarmament of the men on the march into Dublin with these arms should not, in the circumstances, be attempted.’ Harrel was not in his office to receive the warning: he was busy gathering policemen to block the Howth Road where it debouched near the Volunteers’ rendezvous that morning in Fairview. He had sent for urgent military reinforcements, and two tramloads of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers arrived in the nick of time to block the Volunteer column as it reached Fairview. The Volunteers swung smartly right into the Crescent and onto the adjoining Malahide Road to avoid the military, but Harrel was equally quick and sealed off the new escape route. He then demanded the surrender of the guns.

  A tense confrontation ensued. Darrell Figgis, a Dublin journalist and writer who had helped organise the gun-running, invited Harrel to step into a front garden to discuss the problem. Figgis argued that parades through Irish towns by paramilitary bodies were commonplace and that only the previous Sunday a similar march had been held through Belfast by the Ulster Volunteers. He accepted that the gun-running was illegal, and that he was guilty, and he offered to surrender himself into police custody. It was a creative compromise, and a potential face-saver for the authorities, but Harrel would have none of it. When he was informed that Volunteers were taking advantage of the lull to spirit guns away through open fields towards the city, he ordered the first rank of policemen to seize the rifles. They made a half-hearted attempt to carry out this order before the Volunteers drove them back with rifle butts, hurleys and home-made truncheons. According to Figgis, the police were so unenthusiastic that when they inadvertently captured him in a scuffle he was thrust back into the Volunteer ranks with an injunction ‘to keep to the thinking and leave the fighting alone.’ The second line of police refused point blank to assist their heavily outnumbered colleagues. According to most reports, they even cheered the Volunteers.

  Harrel, who had held the 160-strong military contingent in reserve, now ordered them forward with fixed bayonets, but with little effect. Some nineteen Mausers were seized, but the soldiers lost two of their own Lee-Enfields. One member of the Volunteers, Captain Michael J. Judge, who found himself fighting for his country less than a mile from his home in Clonliffe Avenue, collapsed after being bayoneted by a soldier through the left arm and chest. A few ranks back Joseph Lawless, a young Volunteer from Saucerstown, near Swords, climbed onto the coping of a low wall to see Judge, his company commander, fall. He drew his revolver, and when another officer tried to grab it Lawless accidentally discharged it.1 The melee came to an abrupt halt. The two sides drew apart, with honours even: three Volunteers, two soldiers and one constable had been injured.

  Perhaps the most telling tale of the changing balance of forces was in the manner of their removal. The injured constable had to make his own way to hospital, assisted by colleagues, on a tram; the two soldiers had to wait for an army ambulance; but the Volunteers were driven post-haste by private motor car to the Mater Hospital.2

  Now began the long retreat of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers to the Royal Barracks (now Collins Barracks) at the other side of the city. Their distinctive headgear advertised their place of origin, and even in the relatively respectable lower middle-class suburb of Fairview the ‘crowd groaned, hissed and hooted the soldiers … and told them to go back to their own country.’ The ‘lady spectators were even more intensely indignant and outspoken than the men,’ according to the Irish Independent. Words were supplemented by occasional missiles as the soldiers neared the inner-city slums, and there was a bayonet charge on the North Strand, where civilians fled down side streets or into local shops. By the time the contingent reached Sackville Street (O’Connell Street) it had acquired a taunting tail of about two hundred Dubliners, mostly young men and boys. As the Freeman’s Journal noted afterwards, further trouble could have been avoided if there had been a police presence, but after the melee at Fairview the DMP had left the soldiers to their own devices.

  The soldiers turned again on their tormentors, almost on the spot of the previous year’s ‘Bloody Sunday,’ when hundreds of civilians had fallen victims to DMP batons during labour disturbances. The soldiers now lashed out with equal lack of discrimination at passers-by. And worse was to follow.

  When the contingent reached the north quays and the narrower confines of Bachelor’s Walk, the crowd swelled and grew closer. Stones flew, one soldier was kicked to the ground and another stunned by a flower pot thrown from a house as a new mob poured down Liffey Street to threaten the unit’s flank. It was at this point, by the Ha’penny Bridge, that the rear ranks turned and fired two volleys. Whether they acted on impulse or on the order of an officer was never properly established, but the fusillade left three people dead and eighty-five wounded, at least thirty of them seriously. The three dead were Mary Duffy, a 56-year-old widow who had a son in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Patrick Quinn, a coal porter and father of six, and James Brennan, a seventeen-year-old messenger.

  That night all troops were confined to barracks, and one soldier with a Scottish accent who was foolish enough to venture out in civvies was thrown in the Liffey. The Lord Lieutenant, Lord Aberdeen, wanted to visit the injured in hospital but his officials refused to allow him risk his person, given the mood in the city.3

  Dublin was plunged into mourning, and there was a huge turn-out the following Wednesday for the funerals. The crowds were reminiscent of those that followed the procession of labour martyrs during the Great Lock-out a few months earlier. Businesses closed and, as if to reprimand the futility of Assistant Commissioner Harrel’s activities, the procession was headed by Volunteers equipped with their recently acquired Howth Mausers. Besides the principal mourners, who included Mary Duffy’s son, Private Thomas Tighe, in dress uniform, was the whole spectrum of nationalist Ireland. The Lord Mayor, Lorcan Sherlock, led the city’s aldermen and councillors, followed by contingents of the United Irish League, the National Foresters in their Robert Emmet uniforms, trade unions, the Volunteers’ female auxiliary, Cumann na mBan, Fianna Éireann, and groups as disparate as two hundred students from the College of Science and sixty Christian Brothers.

  The procession wended its way from the Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street to the scene of the crime at Bachelor’s Walk before proceeding to Glasnevin Cemetery. The crowd was packed so closely as it approached the Ha’penny Bridge that it could barely move. ‘The assembled thousands became overwhelmed with grief … Hundreds wept and sobbed aloud,’ the Freeman’s Journal reported. People walked up the south quays in a parallel procession; others leaned out of office windows, climbed lamp-posts and even clambered onto the roof of the Mater Hospital to catch a glimpse of the procession passing by. There were no political speeches, but the Freeman’s Journal, mouthpiece of moderate nationalists and the Irish Party, took comfort i
n the fact that ‘mingled with the sorrow for the dead, was a feeling of pride in the splendid discipline and manly bearing of the Volunteers.’4

  Even as the crowds gathered by the Liffeyside to mourn their fellow-citizens, Austrian gunboats had begun to bombard the Serbian capital, Belgrade, in the opening salvoes of what would become the First World War. Within the week the United Kingdom would be at war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its powerful ally Germany. The enormity of these events would quickly overshadow Dublin’s street brawl; but Princip’s opportunist shots and Darrell Figgis’s well-planned arms delivery were both indications that Europe’s young generation of militant nationalists, for all their ragamuffin uniforms and inexperience, were going to be more effective in obtaining their objectives than the bemedalled and titled rulers of the vast imperial prisons in which so many small and competing nationalities languished.

  Dublin was already trying to recover from the traumatic social upheaval of the previous year. Between August 1913 and February 1914 the city had experienced the greatest industrial conflict in Irish history. More than four hundred employers had banded together to lock out fifteen thousand workers and to smash the nascent syndicalist Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. Another ten thousand workers had been laid off as a result of the dispute, which saw a third of the city’s population on the bread line. It bore hardest of all on the enormous underclass of casual labourers, hawkers, street dealers and beggars, who had no union and precious little Christian charity to fall back on.5

  The Great Lock-out of 1913 had been far more than an industrial dispute: it had been a political contest, a public debate played out as street theatre—much of it bloody—about the type of society people wanted under home rule. On one side had been the new Irish ruling class in waiting, Catholic, conservative and grasping; on the other had been a loose coalition of socialists, suffragists, trade unionists and radical nationalists who had varying visions of a more democratic, outward-looking and secular society. It was also the first occasion—and the last for many decades—when an urban protest movement dominated the Irish political landscape.