Come Here To Me!

The Unlock NAMA occupation today has really grabbed peoples imagination, and I thought it was a great touch that alongside the information on NAMA and the properties under its ownership, the group behind the occupation included a history of the building to show what it was in past lives.

One picture stood out instantly, taken from here at Come Here To Me. 66-67 Great Strand Street were occupied today, but right next door at 64 occurred one of the most unusual events of the 1930s in Dublin, in the form of the storming of Connolly House following a rather heated mass at the Pro Cathedral.

Bob Doyle, who went on to fight fascism in Spain, was ironically enough among the crowd who stormed Great Strand Street. He wrote in his memoirs years later:

I had attended the evening mission on Monday 27 March 1933 at the Pro-Cathedral, during the period of Lent where the preacher was a Jesuit. The cathedral was full. He was standing in the pulpit talking about the state of the country, I remember him saying – which scared me – “Here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these voile creatures of Communism are within our midst.” Immediately after the sermon everybody then began leaving singing and gathered in a crowd outside, we must have been a thousand singing “To Jesus Heart All Burning” and “Faith of our Fathers, Holy Faith”. We marched down towards Great Strand Street, to the headquarters of the socialist and anti-Fascist groups in Connolly House. I was inspired, of you could use that expression, by the message of the Jesuit. There was no attempt by the police to stop us.

We’ve already looked at the event in some detail before, over here, but with the day that is in it I thought I’d repost the image as it appeared in the Unlock NAMA history today. Below is a rare image showing two police officers alongside the petrol cans used during the burning of Connolly House. It came into my possession as a gift, and I’m chuffed to share it.

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DFallon’s great piece on Ettie Steinberg yesterday got me thinking about another unusual tale regarding the Irish and the Second World War. That is the story of John McGrath of Roscommon who became the only Irishman to be imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.

If you stand in the Schubraum section of the Museum Building in Dachau, you will see a large map of Europe on the wall. Over each country is a number,  indicating how many of their citizens were imprisoned in the camp. The number ‘1’ is marked over Ireland.

John McGrath (c1893 – Nov 27 1946), was born in Elphin, Roscommon and educated at the Christian Brothers’ Schools in Carrick-On-Shannon. Joining the British Army, he saw action in France in World War One.

John McGrath. Sunday Independent, Apr 17, 1932.

Returning home safely he worked, as an administrative staff assistant, with the Gordon Hotel in London and then was involved with the organising of the Grand Prix Motor Race in the Phoenix Park and the Military Tattoo in Landsdowne Road in the late 1920s

He became the first House Manager of the new Savoy Cinema in Dublin in 1929, staying there for two years. When the Savoy Cinema in Cork was opened, he was sent down to manage it and worked there for a further two years. Returning to Dublin, in 1935, to manage the Theatre Royal on Hawkins Street, McGrath was recalled up to the British Army, as major, at the outbreak of war in 1939.

Theatre Royal, Hakins St. nd. (Picture credit -Damntheweather)

Landing with the Allies in Dunkirk in May 1940, McGrath was one of the ‘small Allied band’ who fought in France after the evacuation. He was wounded twice in battle near Rouen, Normandy before finally being captured by the Nazis. McGrath, now a Colonel, along with other captured POWs were then forced to march over four hundred miles to Germany. At least two hundred of the captured men died of exhaustion en route.

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Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. With that in mind, I dipped into an old Come Here To Me article which was the popular review we carried out of the Jewish Museum in Portobello.

A small, touching plaque features upstairs in the restored synagogue to Ettie Steinberg. Herself and her son were to become the only Irish citizens to perish in the Holocaust. Ettie was raised in Raymond Terrace. The horrific figure of six million can be difficult to comprehend, but when the story of one individual is brought to life, not least a Dubliner born only a short walk from the Museum, the horror of those years becomes clearer.

Ettie’s family were oiginally from Czechoslovakia, and had come to Ireland from London in 1926. She married a Belgian man in 1937, and moved to Belgium with him before going on to Paris two years later. In 1942, Ettie and her young son, born in Paris, were transported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. In his wonderful work Jews In Twentieth-Century Ireland , Dermot Keough wrote that:

By a strange irony, the Steinberg’s in Dublin had secured visas for Ettie and her family through the British Home Office in Belfast. The visas were sent immediately to Toulouse but they arrived too late. Ettie and her family had been rounded up the day before and sent to the camp at Drancy, outside Paris. They were transported to Auschwitz and to their immediate death.

The map below shows that area that once made up ‘Dublin’s Little Jerusalem’, and was first uploaded to Come Here To Me by jaycarax here, at the time of a fascinating documentary on the murders of two Jewish men in the area in the early 1920s.

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Snap of Eoin O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade returning from Spain after a pretty disastrous and embarassing campaign which only lasted six months. Getting drunk regularly and, in their first action, coming under friendly fire from an allied Falangist unit from the Canary Islands, it is likely that Franco was glad to see the back of the Irish Brigade.

Brendan Behan famously quipped that “they certainly made history (as) they seemed to be the only army that went out to war, ever, and came back with more”. This is because a number of Irish men in the Spanish Legion(?) decided to get a lift home with O’Duffy and co. when they were leaving.

1937, Dublin, Ireland --- Irish Brigade Returns from Spain --- Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

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I wanted to follow up a a recent post looking at some vintage book covers by scanning some more, as they hold a huge appeal to people for various reasons. Friends with a love of design as much as those with a love of history are fascinated by the book covers of old of course.

The below, almost entirely, come from the collection of my brother. The Behan biography is one of my favourite book covers of all time, but they’re all excellent in their one way.

If this is your thing, pop over to the hitone vintage Irish book cover blog from designer Niall McCormack, his collection is stunning.

Rae Jeffs, Brendan Behan: Man and Showman (Corgi, 1968)

Emmet Larkin- James Larkin (New English Library, 1968)

Micháel Ó hAodha- The O’Casey Enigma (Mercier, 1980)

Peadar O’Donnell- Islanders (Mercier, 1965)

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