Come Here To Me!

“Looted!” (From an unknown British publication, May 1916)

Where would you have been in 1916?

It’s a question many people will no doubt be asking each other in the year ahead, most likely in a pub. Would you be risking life and limb in a European trench to feed your family, or defending the newly proclaimed Irish Republic on the streets of Dublin? Maybe hiding under the bed? Perhaps though, you might have been somewhere entirely different. Clery’s, Elvery’s or even McDowell’s jewellers? Indeed, that is the choice many people made. In his classic study Dear, Dirty Dublin: A City in Distress, 1899-1916, Joseph O’Brien wrote that “according to police statistics for 1916, 425 persons were proceeded against for looting during the rebellion and 398 of these were either fined or imprisoned.”

The widespread looting that occurred during the Easter Rising is one aspect of the week that participants frequently spoke of in later years when interviewed by the Bureau of Military History. It is also an aspect of the week that filled plenty of column inches in the days and weeks that followed the end of the event, as looters found themselves on trial for their actions. Justifying what they had done, a mother and daughter on trial simply told a policeman that “we were looting, like the rest.”

Easter Monday 1916 began as a beautiful day of fine weather,  ideal for the Fairyhouse Races which were getting underway. Sean O’Casey recalled that:

It was a day on which to make merry, and crowded streets proclaimed that the influences of the sun’s geniality was making melody in the hearts of man. Many were climbing joyously on to the trains to seek in Nature’s bosom a place that would hide them for a few hours “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,” while distinct gatherings of people stood by near Nelson Pillar and found happy moments in the contemplation of the passing activities of human life. Curious glances were flung at passing vehicles, burdened with hopeful crews, flashing swiftly by on their way to Fairyhouse Races, and the pulse of human anxiety was scarcely felt besides the quick-beating pulse of human enjoyment.

The beginning of the Rising may have taken many people by surprise, but the breakdown of law and order came almost immediately. In his entertaining memoir On Another Man’s Wound, Ernie O’Malley recalled arriving onto O’Connell Street, or Sackville Street as it was then known, as the insurrection was in its infancy:

Diamond rings and pocketsful of gold watches were selling for sixpence and a shilling, and one was cursed if one did not buy…. Ragged boys wearing old boots, brown and black, tramped up and down with air rifles on their shoulders or played cowboys and Indians, armed with black pistols supplied with long rows of paper caps. Little girls hugged teddy bears and dolls as if they could hardly believe their good fortune.

Where were the police in all of this? The decision of Colonel R. Johnstone to withdraw the 1,100 Dublin Metropolitan Police officers from the streets of the city no doubt facilitated the widespread looting, and as Brian Barton has noted “it soon reached endemic proportions, far beyond the capacity of either the troops or the insurgents to prevent or contain.”

An advertisement for Noblett’s, described as one of the first shops to be looted.

The looting on Sackville Street began in broad daylight, and not long after the declaration of the Republic. Among those who arrived on the street trying to stop the looting were Catholic clergy from the Pro Cathedral. Monsignor Curran, who was serving as Secretary to Archbishop Walsh in Dublin at the time of the Rising, told the Bureau of Military History that:

Before 2 pm the crowds had greatly increased in numbers. Already the first looting had begun; the first victim was Noblett’s sweetshop. It soon spread to the neighbouring shops. I was much disgusted and I did my best to try to stop the looting. Except for two or three minutes, it had no effect. I went over and informed the Volunteers about the G.P.O.

Five or six Volunteers did their best and cleared the looters for some five or ten minutes, but it began again. At first all the ringleaders were women; then the boys came along. Later, about 3.30 p.m. when the military were withdrawn from the Rotunda, young men arrived and the looting became systematic and general, so that Fr. John Flanagan of the Pro-Cathedral, who had joined me, gave up the attempt to repress it and I left too.

One Volunteer described the scene at Noblett’s sweet shop after the windows came crashing in. He remembered the sight of “a gay shower of sweetstuffs,chocolate boxes and huge slabs of toffee” being tossed about by the young crowd.Desmond Ryan of the GPO Garrison also recalled that Seán MacDiarmada made his way across the street and protested “vehemently, his hands raised passionately above his head.”

Jeremiah Joseph O’Leary, later to serve as Sinn Féin Director of Elections in the Pembroke constituency in 1918, recalled attempts to stop the looting. He also remembered entering the General Post Office and being confronted by the sight of two of the rebel leaders enjoying a quick bite:

In the late afternoon (Monday) I observed big crowds in Earl Street and Abbey Street, breaking shop windows and beginning to loot the contents. I went into the General Post Office which, at that time, was apparently a quite easy thing to do, and saw Padraig Pearse and James Connolly sitting on high stools in a little enclosure in the middle of the main hall drinking tea and eating sandwiches.

I went out to the front of the G.P.O., stood up on one of the stones that front the pillars and made a short speech, denouncing the looting and calling for volunteers to help to suppress it. A number of men came forward whom I lined up in front of the G.P.O. And, taking one or two of them in, we collected the batons and distributed them to the men. I then instructed them to parade the main shops and thoroughfares opposite the G.P.O. to try to keep the crowds on the move, and prevent them doing damage. We moved over towards Earl Street, but there was such a dense, milling crowd there that we became broken up and submerged by the crowd immediately. I spent the rest of the night vainly trying to keep people on the move and prevent looting, but with very little success.

Clery’s was an unsurprising target for looters. (1915 advertisement)

What was the motivating factor in deciding to loot certain shops and not others. One contemporary source made the claim that “the rougher element that existed in the city” seemed to be targeting “stores that bore English names or were known to be owned by the foreigners. In this they followed the example set by the mobs in London who raided and looted German stores in that city as an act of retaliation for the Zeplin raids made during the war.”  Personally, I don’t think there is much merit to that line, as public houses, shoe shops and more besides owned by Irish business people were among the first to go. As an aside, there had been politically motivated looting of German pork butchers in August 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War.

Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the well-known pacifist and feminist campaigner in Dublin, made his way into the city of Dublin early in the uprising to attempt to restore law and order,seeking to establish a Citizen Patrol to keep the peace among the civilian population. Eileen Costello of the Gaelic League recalled that:

I saw a man speaking to a crowd of people from the top of an empty tram-car near the O’Connell Monument. It was Sheehy Skeffington appealing to the people to be quiet and orderly, to go home quietly, to stay in their homes and to keep the peace. I saw people from the slums breaking and looting a shop. It was Laurence’s toy shop. I saw the looters inside the shop throwing out toys and cameras to their friends outside. I felt very great disgust. Later on I saw people in the Gresham Hotel with jewellery they had bought from the looters. I saw a woman with a ring and another with a brooch.

Francis P. Jones also mentions Skeffy, as he was popularly known, in his  History of the Sinn Féin Movement and the Irish Rebellion of 1916, published not long after the Rising during the War of Independence.  He recalled that “a small man, dressed in an Irish tweed knickerbocker suit” appealed to the crowds not to loot, but that “the rabble merely laughed at him and continued its work of destruction.” Jones claimed that:

The man who made the appeal was Sheehy-Skeffington.,one of the best-known figures in Dublin — a man who was not in any way identified with the Rebellion or the men who led it. He was, in the first place, just as much opposed to the Geimans as to the English in the World War, and was certainly opposed to any revolutionary movement.

This isn’t quite true. While Skeffington was a pacifist, he was also a committed republican, as was his wife, and moved in revolutionary circles. He may have disagreed with the means the rebels deployed, but he certainly shared the goal.

Sheehy Skeffington had not come onto the streets to partake in the Rising, yet he would lose his life that week, murdered in Portobello Barracks having been arrested by the crazed Captain Bowen-Culthurst. He would later be arrested and charged with murder, though he would successfully plead insanity. By April of 1921, he was found to be cured, and even received a pension. Padraic Colum would write in the immediate aftermath of the Rising about his friend Skeffy that: “He was not a bearer of arms in the insurrection, he was a pacifist…..But Skeffington is dead now, and the spiritual life of Ireland has been depleted by as much of the highest courage, the highest sincerity and the highest devotion as a single man could embody.”

Francis Sheehy Skeffington (Image Credit: http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/316)

The fires that spread throughout Sackville Street created problems for the Dublin Fire Brigade, and DFB historian Las Fallon has noted in his book Dublin Fire Brigade and the Irish Revolution that “apart from the Magazine fort [in the Phoenix Park], the first two major fires fought by the DFB on the first day of the Rising were in shoe shops, the Cable Shop Company and the True Form shoe shop, both in Sackville Street, which were looted and burned. Dublin’s barefoot poor were taking advantage of the rebellion.” In his book, Las reproduces the Annual Report for the Year 1916, submitted by Thomas Purcell, then Chief Officer of the Dublin Fire Brigade. Purcell’s account details the madness of the events perfectly. He noted that on the Tuesday of the Rising, as Lawrence’s was burning, “two persons trapped in an upper room by fire and taken down by fire escape proved to be looters.” Not everyone that stuck around was looting of course,  the generally curious where also present.  Jones remembered in his history of Sinn Féin that even after the first shots had been fired “people were walking up and down O’Connell Street in the usual manner, but taking the keenest interest in the work that was being done by the Republicans.”

The General Post Office area as shown on a map issued by the Hibernian Fire and General Insurance Company shortly after the Rising. (O’Mahony
Collection) (Image Credit: National Library of Ireland, http://www.nli.ie/1916/pdf/7.2.pdf)

The language used to describe those looting by some participants in the Rising is interesting in itself. In the account of one Volunteer, it’s noted that “despite repeated efforts of the Republican forces the looting of shops by denizens of the slums became more general.” The language of the media was similar. The Illustrated Sunday Herald proclaimed that:

When the fighting started all the hooligans of the city were soon drawn to the spot in search of loot. Half the shops in Sackville Street were sacked. Children who have never possessed two pence of their own were imitating Charlie Chaplin with stolen silk hats in the middle of the turmoil and murder.

In five minutes the crowd emptied the windows of Noblett’s sweetshop. Then they went on to neighbouring shops. McDowell’s, the jewellers, was broken into and some thousands of pounds worth of jewellery taken. Taafe’s, the hosiers; Lewer’s, Dunn’s hat shop, the Cable shoe shop, all were gutted, and their contents, when not wanted, were thrown pell-mell into the street.

Members of the British forces pose with the captured ‘Irish Republic’ flag at the Parnell statue.

In a similar vein, Trinity College Dublin student Thomas Rentol Brown complained in the Dublin Evening Mail of 13 May of “the rabble…breaking plate-glass windows and seizing articles in the shops.” Yet, looting wasn’t only the preserve of the “rabble” or the “denizens of the slums.” The Irish Life ‘Record of the Rebellion’, published soon afterwards, claimed that “the looters were by no means confined to the submerged slum population. A remarkable proportion were well dressed and belonged to the wage-earning working class, or perhaps to classes still more respectable.” The same source claims that the volley of a rifle from the rooftop of Trinity College Dublin was enough to stop some looting at the bottom of Grafton Street.

It’s not surprising that toy shops and sweet shops were among the first raided. Eamon Bulfin, a Volunteer in the perilous enough position of the rooftop of the GPO, remembered fireworks exploding in the street, having been looted by children from Lawrence’s toy shop: “We had our bombs on top of the Post Office, and these fireworks were shooting up in the sky. We were very nervous. There were Catherine Wheels going up O’Connell Street and Catherine Wheels coming down O’Connell Street.” Still, the diversity of the items looted is surprising. Michael O’Flanagan, who had been active with the IRB in Glasgow before taking part in the rebellion, remembered the very unusual sight of a piano passing him by:

On Wednesday afternoon we noticed four or five men and women coming from the direction of Mary’s Lane. Between them they were carrying a piano which we concluded they had stolen from some business premises. We called on them to halt but they refused to do so. We fired a few shots over their heads as a warning and they dropped the piano and made off.

In children were predictable in looting toy shops, adults proved likewise. One victim of the week of Conway’s public house, and the presence of drunk people on the street added to the confusion and panic.

News of the Rising travelled quickly. Oklahoma City Times, 29 April 1916.

If toys were the order of the day for children during the week, for adults it was equally predictable. In a 1926 article for An t-Óglách, the magazine of the army, a story was recounted of alcohol being looted from a pub in Henry Street and offered to the rebels:

The looters had pillaged a public house opposite the GPO in Henry Street, and a woman offered the Volunteers some bottles of stout. These were refused by all except one man, who took a bottle and had it to his lips when an officer appeared on the scene and dashed it to pieces. Having referred to the order on the subject he announced that the next men found taking a drink without permission would be shot without warning. Such measures had their effect.

The looting wasn’t just a phenomenon of the early hours of the Rising. The Irish Life publication remembered that by the third day of the Rising, the enthusiasm of the looters remained:

In Sackville Street on Wednesday evening the scene was of the weirdest description. An immense crowd of sightseers was promenading up and down the centre of the street under a blaze of electric light. All along the east side of the street the looters were working with frenzied energy. Every now and then the shouts from the shops would be drowned by the crash of glass as another window was hammered.

Nor was it confined to one area of the city. At Jacob’s biscuit factory, where Thomas MacDonagh and Major John MacBride were in control of the imposing factory complex, there was little in the line of direct engagement with the British, who decided instead to largely leave the garrison in isolation there and focus efforts elsewhere. Father Aloysius of the Capuchin Friary, who visited the garrison towards the end of the Rising when it was clear surrender was the only option, remembered that:

… a Volunteer came to tell us that the looters had smashed the window and were breaking in to the offices at Bishop Street side…The looters were busy and we found them getting out into the street with the stolen goods. I stood at the window and addressed than – if ever I managed to put fire into my words it was then. Side by side with the manly and straight forward conduct of those who had borne the brunt of the trying week, I thought their conduct wretched and despicable and I did not mince my words. The result was that the crowd promised to leave and go to their homes and the looters at least a goodly number of them threw back the looted articles.

If there was one area where the Rising was unpopular, it seems to have been that around Jacob’s, which is not entirely surprising. Jacob’s was a significant employer of women in the area, while the company also encouraged male staff to participate in the First World War, promising that their jobs would remain.  Thomas Pugh, who fought at Jacob’s during the week , remembered that “the women around the Coombe were in a terrible state, they were like French revolution furies.”

The problem of looting was so out of control that by the Thursday of Easter Week, the ‘Provisional Government’ based in the General Post Office  had to acknowledge the actions of the looters, noting that “the Provisional Government strongly condemns looting and the wanton destruction of property. The looting that has taken place has been done by the hangers-on of the British forces.” In reality, it was primarily being carried out by the very poor, in a city which was home to horrific tenement squalor, with some of the worst housing in the city only a short stroll from the GPO. The dilemma around what to do with the looters has found its way into fiction too, with Roddy Doyle including an episode in his A Star Called Henry where members of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers debate the best course of action:

One of the Volunteer offices, a red-faced chap called Smith, came storming towards our section. He was unbuckling his holster as he went but his fury made his fingers hopeless. “We’ll have to make an example of them, he shouts. Or we’ll be hanging our heads in shame among the nations of the world.”

Newspaper reports in the aftermath of the Rising detail the rather severe sentences handed down to convicted looters. At Sir John Rogerson Quay, the British and Irish Steampacket Company premises was raided, with damage estimated at about £5,000. At the Police Court in Dublin Castle on 11 May, three men were charged with “stealing a valuable quantity of flour, etc, and with being the leaders of a disorderly crowd which attacked the company’s premises, and did wanton and malicious damage.” The manager of the premises stated that “telephones and electric fittings were broken, 400 sacks of flour were completely taken, as were 400 cases of tea and a quantity of sugar. Of thirty-five cargo trucks, all with the exception of two were completely destroyed.”

Bargains after the Rising.

The Irish Independent reported on 11 May 1916 of a mother and daughter, charged with being in illegal possession of “two mattresses, one pillow, eight window curtains, one lady’s corset.. one top coat, two ladies coats, five ladies hats and four chairs.” In the same news report, it was noted that two ladies from Camden Street had been prosecuted for being in possession of , among other things, “3lbs of tea, 12 boxes of sweet herbs…some lemonade and cornflower.” The constable told the court that the accused told him “we were looting, like the rest. We had a bit out of it, too!” They were sentenced to a month in prison each. Mary E Bernard of Lower Dominick Street was fined as a result of the finding of “two boys’ suits, an overcoat, trousers, a jacket, a piece of tweed, a large enamel kettle and two enamel jugs” in  her tenement home. Interestingly, the same newspaper report noted that two “respectably attired young women” were charged with looting shoes, as well as “one bottle of rum, two boxes of jellies, some lemonade and cornflour.”

While a lot of looted goods were recovered, some looters were never prosecuted. A Sergeant Flethcher-Desborough of the Royal Irish Regiment remembered that “months after the end of the Rising, flower sellers and paper vendors round the pillar, sported fur coats and bejewelled fingers, which in the usual way, they could never have bought with the profits from their flower selling.”

Did the rebels partake in a bit of looting themselves? The Kerry Sentinel carried a report on May 3rd from an eyewitness who claimed that “it was a common sight to see womenfolk of the rebels trying on the latest thing in hats in public”, but it’s important to note all kinds of wild claims appeared in the press in the weeks after the Rising. More intriguingly, Bridget Foley remembered being sent into Clery’s to acquire anything that could be used for bandages by the Volunteers, and that:

First of all we went into Clery’s shop on the instructions of Captain Weafer. We got aprons, sheets and towels, soaps and dishcloth and anything that would be useful to tear up into bandages. We must have been very simple, because in the middle of our activities we started trying on fur coats.

As this August 1916 advertisement shows, Clery’s were open for business within weeks in a temporary premises.

The waxworks of Henry Street had some of its contents removed by young Volunteers, with one later remembering:

With the accessibility of all that the Waxworks had to offer, it was not long til’ a number of our troops were arrayed in various uniforms and costumes from the wax figures, and musical instruments were also acquired, such as mouth organs, melodeons and fiddles,the playing of which and the singing which accompanied them, made a good deal of the time pass very pleasantly.

Understandably, Dublin business owners sought some kind of compensation for their losses. It was reported on 17 May, five days after the last executions in Kilmainham Gaol, that “”It is officially announced that the State will assume liability to the amount of the insurance for the destruction of buildings and their contents in Dublin during the recent outbreak. This liability covers looting.”

So, what has survived of the loot? The wonderful blog ‘The Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland’ aims to highlight some of the more unusual items in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, including a small toffee hammer from the week, which it notes was “more than likely taken from a confectioner’s shop”. How did it end up in the National Museum? It was kept as a souvenir by a Mr Daly “after it was thrown at him, hitting his hat, by a looter in Sackville Street during the week of the Rising. It was given to the National Museum in 1980.”