Come Here To Me!

(Thanks to Brian Kirby of the Capuchin Archives for bringing my attention to this)

Fascinating photo showing a handmade sign made by German soldiers in the trenches during World War 1, telling the Irish regiment of the British Army in the trench ahead of them that Dublin was being bombarded in response to the Easter Rising.

The wooden board with pinned paper message reads:

Irishmen! Heavy uproa[.] in Ireland, english guns are firing at your wives and children | 1st May 1916

1916 Trench Sign – Irish Regiment. Copyright – The Great War Archive, University of Oxford / Primary Contributor.

The photograph was uploaded by Peter Carolan onto the The First World War Poetry Digital Archive website. Regarding the photo’s background, he has said:

… it given to my granddad by a Major Hand in the 1930’s. My granddad was working for the Major (a retried British Army Officer) as a gardener in Mooncoin, Co. Kilkenny … the Major told my Granddad that they fired a few rounds at the sign and did not believe or understand what the sign was about till weeks later when the news filtered through about the 1916 rising … The Major took the photo, after the British had captured the German trench a month later.

Massive thanks to Damian Shiels (Rubicon Heritage) who sent us on this picture.

Raid to capture sign. Credit – Imperial War Museum.

He told us:

… (the trench sign) was placed across from a battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (if I remember correctly) who opened fire on the sign, and actually launched a trench raid to capture it. They afterwards officially presented it to the King to show their loyalty, and it was from there it eventually ended up in the IWM. It got quite a bit of coverage at the time, and a number of periodicals ran sketches of the Dubs taking the sign during the raid…

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‘The Last Hour of the Night’ (Harry Clarke, 1922)

Dating back to 1922, this image from the celebrated stained-glass artist and illustrator Harry Clarke shows the ruins of the revolution in Dublin. The General Post Office, Four Courts and Custom House are all shown destroyed and in flames, while to the right a miserable Dublin tenement can be seen. While many talk about independence as heralding a new era for the city and nation, Clarke showed that Dublin lay in ruins, and that the shocking poverty of the city was unavoidable.

The work served as frontispiece to Patrick Abercrombie’s Dublin of the Future: The New Town Plan (1922) This very interesting work, published under the auspices of the Civics Institute of Ireland, put forward a number of proposals for the city. Originally aimed for publication in 1914, by 1922 the work would include detail of the destruction caused to Dublin during the Easter Rising and later Civil War fighting. It is available to read in full here.

Few towns but have suffered a change, physical and psychological, during these intervening years of war, trade boom and subsequent depression : but Dublin has added the double tragedy of war and civil war within her gates. Of her six glorious buildings in the Renaissance manner only three remain—Post Office, Custom House and Four Courts at intervals of years or months have been destroyed ;her greatest street has been twice bombarded and part once renewed.

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Dublin is a city of fantastic archives, but many of us will only ever explore a small selection of them, if we can find the time to explore any at all! In recent years social media has allowed archives and institutions like the National Library to share some of the items within their collections with the general public. One particularly interesting archive which has recently begun sharing some of its items on Facebook is the Capuchin Archive on Church Street. The friars of the Capuchin Order from Church Street attended those executed in 1916 at Kilmainham Gaol and administered the last rites, and their archive contains incredible items from the Irish revolutionary period and beyond.

Do you know of any other archives or institutions sharing their content in this way?

Civil War propaganda poster from the Anti-Treaty side, ‘Easter Week Repeats Itself’. Posted to Facebook by Capuchin Archive.

c.1964, a brilliant photograph of Admiral Nelson gazing down over O’Connell Street. Posted to Facebook by Capuchin Archives.

(more…)

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At the minute I’m reading David Boulton’s study on the Ulster Volunteer Force, UVF: An Anatomy of Loyalist Rebellion, which was published in 1973. Writing a study of anything as the story is still unfolding is a difficult task, but it’s a pretty enjoyable read. The books cover is the work of Cor Klaasen, and some of you may remember the brilliant exhibition of his work in Dublin back in 2010.

One of the key characters in the work is Major Ronald Bunting, described by Tim Pat Coogan as the “henchman” of Ian Paisley during the worst days of the troubles. Bunting had a history of service to the British Armed Forces,but is perhaps best remembered for his physical opposition to the People’s Democracy movement. Video footage of Bunting and Paisley discussing a planned People’s Democracy march in Derry in January 1969 appears on the RTE Archive website, and can be viewed here. Bunting outlined his opposition to “anarchists, revolutionary socialists and republicans” to the media.

People’s Democracy, a radical movement of socialist principles which campaigned for civil rights in the north, planned a ‘long march’ from Belfast to Derry, in the spirit of marches like the Selma to Montgomery march in the United States. This march was attacked on several occasions, most notably at Burntollet Bridge. Bunting was directly responsible for the violence at Burntollet Bridge, having encouraged loyalists who “wished to play a manly role” in stopping the People’s Democracy march to “arm themselves with whatever protective measures they feel to be suitable.” A crowd of 200 attacked the demonstration. That incident has been remembered in song by both loyalists and republicans, for example in Seamus Robinson’s ‘Democracy’:

T’was at Burntollet Bridge we bled, yet never turned to flee
As bloodied but unbowed we stayed to win democracy

Major Bunting outlines his opposition to the Peoples Democracy movement.

Of considerable embarrassment to Bunting was the manner in which his son, Ronnie, would become a committed republican-socialist. Active with the Marxist Official IRA, and later leading the Irish National Liberation Army, the son of Major Bunting was gunned down in his home in 1980. Major Bunting insisted his son be buried in a family plot, and not alongside other INLA members.

One of the most interesting anecdotes in Boulton’s book on the UVF relates to Major Bunting, when it is noted:

He became a ‘loyalist’ hero overnight in 1966 when he gate-crashed a 1916 commemoration service in Dublin to lay a wreath in memory of British troops killed in putting the rising down.

This story is also told in Patrick Marrinan’s biography of Ian Paisley, and Ed Moloney and Andrew Pollak’s biography of Paisley, where they note that at Easter 1966 “he went to St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin to lay a wreath in memory of British soldiers killed in the 1916 Rising.”

This interference from Bunting caused considerable embarrassment for many parties, as the Church of Ireland had sought to mark the jubilee in a fitting manner. In his remarks at the official ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Archbishop George Simms noted:

There is much for which to give thanks on our commemorative occasion. We are grateful across the span of the last 50 years for the goodwill, tolerance and freedom expressed and upheld among and between those of differing outlooks and religious allegiances. The words of the Proclamation that guarantee ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and opportunities to all citizens’ have brought help and encouragement to minorities during this period. There is a rock like quality about such elements in the formation of a State.

An excellent article on the Church of Ireland and the 1966 commemorations appears in the Autumn 2012 edition of Search, A Church of Ireland journal. It can be read here.

This wasn’t to be the last time Paisley or one of his henchmen interfered with commemorations or the symbols of the Easter Rising. Almost twenty years later, at Easter 1984, Ian Paisley and some supporters postered the GPO with the message ‘ULSTER IS BRITISH’. At the time Paisley told the newspapers that the photo of him postering at the GPO would take “pride of place” in his home, and that he was “glad to stand where the 1916 proclamation was read”.

Irish Independent, May 3 1984.

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Back in August, Dublin street artist and CHTM favourite ADW ended up in hot water with the Gardaí for a piece of street art he painted as part of the Kings of Concrete Festival. In a city where Justice has always looked a little funny, (“The Statue of Justice, mark well her station, her face to the castle and her arse to the nation!”) ADW placed her over the knee of a riot-squad officer, which led to this scene:

Image by Damian Duggan, taken from ADW’s Facebook.

In the latest edition of Rabble, ADW discusses this piece and what it meant, as well as the response of the police to it:

The blindfold represents her decisions to be objective and impartial and not to be influenced by wealth, power, status or politics. In one hand she holds the scales of justice which represents her careful weighing the claims of each side. Her sword which represents her willingness to defend her decisions lies broken beside the riot shield.

Thankfully, he has repainted the piece. Here she is, in all her glory.

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Regardless of what you think about Geldof today, he has been on the ball a few times down the years.

His 1980 single ‘Banana Republic’, with that great reggae bassline, summed up the country quite well and rallied against all the ills of nationalist, conservative Ireland:

And I wonder do you wonder while you’re sleeping with your whore?

Sharing beds with history is like licking runnin’ sores

Forty shades of green yeah, sixty shades of red

Heroes going cheap these days, price a bullet in the head
Banana Republic, Septic Isle Sufferin’ in the screamin’ sea, sounds like dyin’

Everywhere I go, yeah everywhere I see

The black and blue uniforms, Police and Priests

In 1985, Geldof was honoured with a civic reception go mark his African famine relief work. In front of the Lord Mayor, the City Manager and other dignitaries, he rallied against the destruction of his home town:

This city has become increasingly brutalised. The people have lost some of their openness, and I think a lot is largely due to the destruction of the city itself, which was once one of the prettiest cities in these islands and is now a shambolic mess, at best.

Tomorrow, I have to bring some of the BBC around the city to show them some of the things I remember and love about the place. Unfortunately, when I went through the list of my memories, 50 per cent of the things I liked had disappeared, to be replaced by the most mediocre, unaesthetic, architecturally inarticulate buildings I’ve ever seen in my life. They are a scandal. They can only be the product of back-handers, political corruption and moral degradation.

His words ring true today as they did then:

When a city is being destroyed by its custodians, then what are the people who live in it supposed to think? The brutalisation seeps through, in the increased use of drugs, which is epidemic in this city, the street violence and the rudeness that is almost everywhere. And I’m sorry if my image clashes with the tourist image of it, but that’s what I’ve seen over thirty-two years. As I say, it’s very nice to come home and it’s particularly nice to be honoured in this way. But please stop destroying Dublin, and please get rid of those buildings that offend us all, that make us so depressed. And, please, bring back to this city some of the life and beauty that was there when I grew up with, and make it somewhere that’s nice to come home to…

The above quote was taken from Frank McDonald’s must-read The Destruction of Dublin, published in 1985.

Front cover. Frank McDonald, The Destruction of Dublin (1985)

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Newcomen Bank (now the Rates office), Castle Street. Credit – Flickr user milezero

Most Dubliners pass the Rates office building on Castle Street without giving it a second glance. Few know the story of scandal, bankruptcy and suicide which still haunts its corridors.

In 1722, a banker by the name of William Gleadowe married into the Newcomen family of Carriglass in Co. Longford and assumed their name. In 1781 he was knighted and elected to the Irish Parliament. Here, he  voted in favour of the Act of Union. Sir William Gleadow-Newcomen’s wife was rewarded with a peerage as thanks.

In 1778, he commissioned architect Thomas Ivory to build a new bank at 16 Castle Street next to City Hall which traded as Newcomen & co. Bank. It was completed in 1781.

At time of his death in 1807, he was in £74,000 in debt to his own bank. Hhis son Thomas Viscount Newcomen inherited his mother’s title and the management of the Bank.

Thomas followed his father’s example by borrowing £44,000 from the same source. Additionally, he borrowed elsewhere to the tune of £163,000.

He soon turned into a despondent, isolated, Scrooge like figure.

William John Fitzpatrick in his memoir 1892 memoir Secret Service Under Pitt, described how he:

For years he lived alone in the bank, gloating, it was wildly whispered, over ingots of treasure, with no lamp to guide him but the luminous diamonds which had been left for safe keeping in his hands. Moore would have compared him to ‘the gloomy gnone that dwells in the dark gold mine‘. Wrapped in a sullen misanthropy, he was sometimes seen emerging at twilight from his iron clamped abode.

From 1825, the mismanaged bank suffered a number of failures and eventually had to close.

Newcomen, then forty-eight and still unmarried, could not face the scandal. He returned home to Killester House, went into his office and turned a gun on himself.

After his death the title became extinct.

In 1831, the building was sold to the Hibernian bank and it later became the Rates office.

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Over the years we’ve looked at many of Dublin’s brilliant and controversial statues, but one which I’d not stumbled across was the statue to the great Socrates in the Botanic Gardens. My brother was strolling through the grounds and took a photograph, and I wonder how many others are unaware of its presence in Dublin.

Socrates in the Botanic Gardens. (L.Fallon)

Not quite a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation or anything else you might expect of a man immortalised in this form in Dublin, Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) is one of the founders of Western philosophy, celebrated for his contributions in the field of ethics in particular. Does anyone have any information on the origins of this brilliant statue, and how it came to be placed in Dublin?

A friend joked it must be in honour of his time spent playing the beautiful game with UCD AFC. A brilliant joke, but that was another Socrates, and he never kicked a ball apparently.

Socrates in the Botanic Gardens (Irish Independent, January 1966)

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One of the strangest grave markers in Dublin lies in the “Stranger’s Bank” at the old Saint Mary’s Abbey in Howth. This section of the cemetery was usually used to bury unidentified victims of disasters at sea.

During the building of the Dollymount to Howth tram line in the 1890s, a young Englishman, track-layer died suddenly on it. He left no clue as to his origins or surname.

Vincent Caprani in his book A View from the Dart (1986) fleshed out the story:

Unable to contact his family (if he had any), his tramway mates had him rest in the strangers plot and they fashioned a ‘tombstone’ for him from a piece of grooved tram rail. This humble yet enduring ‘monument’ … to my mind one of the most poignant grave markers in Ireland.

It is sill there to this day.

Grave to the ‘Unknown Tram Man’. © 2007 Bernd Biege

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One of James Malton’s famed illustrations of eighteenth century Dublin, showing the Irish Parliament on College Green. (c.1793, NLI)

Dublin history is littered with famous gangs, from the Liberty Boys to the Animal Gangs. These gangs have entered the folklore, songs and popular history of the city. One rather unusual gang who haven’t quite received the same amount of attention are the ‘Pinking Dindies’ of the eighteenth century. The ‘Pinking Dindies’ are an interesting phenomenon in that they sprang from the upper-echelons of society, while gang violence often has its roots in lower socio-economic groups. When we think of gangs in Dublin we think of times of poverty and areas of misery, but this gang existed at a time of great prosperity in Dublin.

Margaret Leeson was Ireland’s first brothel owning ‘madam’, and a fascinating woman. Born in Killough, Co. Westmeath, she would become the most famous of Dublin’s eighteenth century madams, and even published her memoirs in 1797, opening the work by noting “I shall now commence with the most memorable epoch of my unfortunate life….”

Her first brothel in Dublin was opened on Drogheda Street, and I had read that this premises was closed owing to the vandalism of a group called the ‘Pinking Dindies’. In Leeson’s work she complains that Dublin was home to many men who “however they might be deemed gentlemen at their birth, or connexions, yet, by their actions, deserved no other appellation than that of RUFFIANS.” Researching this group, I found plenty of information within J.D Herbert’s book Irish varieties, for the last fifty years: written from recollections. Published in 1836, this book is a fascinating insight into the gangs and characters of Ireland once upon a time.

Writing about ‘Pinking Dindies’, Herbert notes that:

It is now upwards of fifty years since Dublin was infested by an organised body of dissolute characters, composed of persons; some were sons of respectable parents, who permitted them to get up to man’s estates in idle habits, without adequate means of support; others were professional students, who having tasted the alluring fruits of dissipation, abandoned their studies and took a shorter road to gain supplies, by means no matter how fraudulent.

Herbert writes about a gang of wealthy men who roamed the streets, men of “imposing appearance, being handsome and well made in general”. In a time before the establishment of the Dublin Metropolitan Police force, Herbert writes that these men were so well prepared for violence that the “ancient and quiet watchmen” who guarded Dublin were no match for them. These wealthy men would “assail passengers in the street, to levy contributions, or perhaps, take a lady from her protector, and many females were destroyed by that lawless banditti.”

The account Herbert provides of these ‘Pinking Dindies’ is grim, noting that one manner in which they would raise funds was through extorting girls who worked within brothels, “by exacting from unfortunate girls, at houses of ill-fame, their share of what they deemed booty.” The gangs would also be frequently found at a gambling house on Essex Street, which when unsuccessful they would emerge from “enraged at their loss, and repaired them, by robbing the first eligible subject they met in the streets.”

Well-dressed and presented, the standard plan of attack for the men was to jostle a victim meant for prey, and then, with their swords “just protruded, they pricked him in various parts, and if he did not throw down his watch and money,two others came and took it by force.”

What became of the Pinking Dindies? Herbert claimed that the gang were ” never finally extirpated until the police was established. That useful institution, though decried by many, was more salutary and timely to the city of Dublin than any plan that has been since devised”. He noted that “several went to London,
and became expert at gaming-tables ; two of them were enabled to obtain admission to clubs in St. James’s-street, and I have often seen them walking and conversing familiarly with high fashionables.”

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