Come Here To Me!

The late 1950s saw a number of world-renown singers record covers of Irish republican folk songs.

These include Paul Robeson’s version of ‘Kevin Barry’ which was first released as single on Topic Records in 1957. Robeson was an acclaimed African-American left-wing activist, actor and singer who visited Dublin a number of times in the 1930s.

Two years later, Odetta recorded a haunting version of ‘Foggy Dew’ for her third album My Eyes Have Seen (Vanguard records, 1959). Often referred to as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement”, the African-American Civil Rights activist, actress and singer’s debut album ‘Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues‘ was released on Tradition Records whose president and director was Paddy Clancy of the Clancy Brothers.

Adding to this small but impressive number, I’ve just uploaded onto YouTube a late 1950s cover of ‘The Dying Rebel’ by “The King of Skiffle” Lonnie Donegan.

Donegan (1931-2002) was a Glasgow-born singer and songwriter who was a major influence on 1960s British pop music. He was the only son of an Irish mother from Omagh, Co. Tyrone and a Scottish father. The family moved to East Ham, London when Donegan was two years old.

Lonnie Donegan – Lonnie (November 1957). Credit – windmill-records.co.uk

Patrick Humphries in his biography ‘Lonnie Donegan and the Birth of British Rock & Roll’ (2012) briefly mentions The Dying Rebel and a cover of Kevin Barry which was released to great acclaim :

Late in 1958 an EP, Relax with Lonnie’, was shipped containing ‘Kevin Barry’ and ‘My Lagan Love’ – familiar songs from the bedrock of Irish republicanism and among Donegan’s most extraordinary performances of the period.

Another song in the same vein – ‘My Only Son Was Killed in Dublin (The Dying Rebel)’ – was recorded around the same time, but remained unreleased until 1993.

‘My Only Son Was Killed in Dublin’, most commonly known as ‘The Dying Rebel,’ was likely to have been written by Seamus Kavanagh. It tells the story of a man standing alone on Dublin’s O’Connell Street who meets a “grey-haired father searching for his only son” then a “fair hair maiden” kneeling by her lovers side and finally a “dying rebel” whose last words are “God bless the cause for which I die.” While the song does not specifically mention the Easter Rising, it is generally assumed that the song is set during its immediate aftermath.

Donegan’s adaption begins “The night was still” while most versions open with “The night was dark”. The other noticeable difference is that the rebel cries “God bless my sweet home in Tipperary” as opposed to the much more common reference to Cork.

As mentioned in the extract above, the song was not commercially released at the time and only became available to the public on an eight CD boxset of Donegan’s work called ‘More Than “Pye in the Sky”‘ in 1993.

Here is the recording of Donegan’s cover of Kevin Barry:

In an undated interview republished in the same book, Donegan told English broadcaster Mike Harding:

I listened to a lot of Irish folk songs because my mother was Irish. I actually did learn Danny Boy on my mother’s knee. Kevin Barry, which I also learned from mum pre-dates the [current] IRA … (it) goes back to the natural aversion people have to being subjugated by somebody else.

Further Irish links include Rory Gallagher appearing on Donegan’s 1978 comeback album Puttin’ on the Style and a live album recorded in Belfast in 2000 with Van Morrison.

After his death in 2002, The Guardian newspaper wrote:

Lonnie Donegan … was the first British pop superstar and the founding father of British pop music, and the musician who provided the original inspiration for John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and a host of others. By the time the Beatles shook up the music world in the mid-1960s Donegan’s glory days were over, and he had retreated to comedy and cabaret, but between 1956 and 1962 he notched up an incredible 26 hits.

Donegan was a musical phenomenon. As the leader of the skiffle craze, he inspired the formation of literally thousands of do-it-yourself bands across the country, and was directly responsible for the 1960s pop explosion that – ironically – was to severely damage his own career.

From African-American cultural icons with no Irish links to British pop music luminaries of Irish descent, listening back to these three remarkable covers from the late 1950s is a must for any music fans.

Ernest Kavanagh, born in Dublin in 1884, was a political radical aligned to Liberty Hall. He worked for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and as a cartoonist with a biting wit, he frequently lampooned the establishment in the pages of Jim Larkin’s newspaper The Irish Worker. Dublin employers, constitutional nationalist leaders like John Redmond and those who opposed extending the franchise to women were among his most frequent targets. His work, signed E.K, nicely complemented the style of Larkin’s paper. The publication poured scorn on its enemies; Dermot Keogh has described the paper as “vitriolic and scurrilous”, with certain editions a “libel a line”. To John Newsinger, it was the ferocity of the attacks on “slum landlords, sweat-shop employers, lying journalists, various scabs, corrupt politicians” and more besides that made people want to read the paper. Larkin “was out to diminish them by ridicule, to cut them down to seize and show them up as moral pygmies.” Kavanagh’s cartoons were one of the most powerful weapons at Larkin’s disposal in this task.

Masthead of the Larkinite newspaper, The Irish Worker.

In recent years, Kavanagh has achieved some much-deserved recognition, thanks to historian James Curry, who compiled a collection of Kavanagh’s cartoons under the title Artist of the Revolution: The Cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh. Of his subject, Curry has written:

During the Lockout he viciously attacked William Martin Murphy and the Dublin police on a regular basis. The latter were frequently portrayed as brutish, bloodthirsty, drunken tyrants who were controlled by politicians and employers and all too ready to administer a beating to the city’s working class population with their batons, especially if the unfortunate recipient happened to be a woman or child.

On the opposing side, the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent newspapers attached to Murphy produced their own cartoons. While lacking the satirical edge of The Irish Worker, they were nonetheless part of a propaganda war; they aimed to present Larkin as well-fed and content, at a time when Dublin workers suffered hardship.

Of all the Kavanagh cartoons, one has always intrigued me, because it’s a little out of theme with much of his work, depicting an internationally famed piece of art. An ancient and celebrated Greek statue, the Aphrodite of Milos, better known as the Venus de Milo, is today on display in the Louvre of Paris. In 1912, Kavanagh found himself drawing her wrapped in a coat, in contrast with her semi-naked form in Paris:

Ernest Kavanagh – ‘Venus, as the Alleged Moralists would have her.’ (The Irish Worker)

On 4 July 1912, a curious report of window breaking in Dublin appeared in the Freeman’s Journal:

In the Southern Court of Tuesday, Mr. Swifte, KC, had before him a man named John McMahon, described as a house painter, 2 Fleet Street, who was charged with willfully and maliciously breaking three panes of glass in the windows of Morrow’s Library, 12 Nassau Street, on the previous evening by deliberately throwing stones at them. the damage was estimated at £14 15s 2d.

The paper noted that Morrow’s had received anonymous postcards objecting to the presence of a postcard of Venus de Milo in their window display, and that someone had even taken it upon themselves in the past to smear their windows in mud, no doubt in the hope they would remove the image. They didn’t, and in July 1912 it seems their windows paid the price for this stand. It was all a bit mad, and Kavanagh captured the absurdity perfectly.

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Scottish historian and left-wing political activist Bob Purdie (1940-2014) published a number of autobiographical passages on his Facebook profile not long before he passed away. Two were focused on Dublin and I thought they would be worth sharing here for a larger audience.

Irish Left Archive: “Ireland Unfree” Bob Purdie, Rep Pamphlets 2, International Marxist Group, 1972. Credit – Cedar Lounge Revolution

The first piece comes from 1970 and Purdie recalls his early opinions of the Dublin and the various left-wing and republican activists that he met.

“I remember … My first visit to Dublin.”

I had become deeply involved in Ireland, reading Irish history and learning about its culture, but I had never been there. In July 1970 the International Marxist Group (IMG) sent me to visit Dublin and Belfast and I left Euston Station with keen anticipation. It was a long journey – train to Holyhead, ferry to Dun Laoghaire and train to Dublin, so I took a book to read on the way. It was Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s great novel about rural life in North East Scotland, Sunset Song. I opened it as the train left London and immediately fell in. I emerged only as the Irish coast came into view and I was abruptly tipped from one world into another. What I was seeing was familiar and that puzzled me. Then I remembered Brendan Behan’s description, at the end of Borstal Boy, of sailing into Dublin Bay. It had lodged in my mind so vividly that it now it was replaying itself in my memory.

Dublin in 1970 was very reminiscent of 1950s Edinburgh. I ate in a restaurant which had waitresses wearing frilly caps and aprons, with cakes on tiered plates, just like the tea rooms of my boyhood. The Georgian squares and crescents were familiar from Edinburgh’s New Town. But it was very evidently a Catholic city. There seemed to hundreds of priests and nuns in clerical garb on the streets and, outside the cinemas, posters showing girls in bikinis were blacked out from neck to mid thigh.

It was four years after the centenary [Golden Jubilee] of the 1916 Rising and my train tickets still said “Westland Row” and “Amiens Street”, but the signs in the stations read “Pearse” and “Connolly”. I gazed at the bullet marks on the GPO and wandered round inside, trying to imagine it occupied by the Volunteers and the Citizen Army. I wandered round the National Museum looking at the relics of the Rising and, in a shop on O’Connell Street, I bought a reproduction of the Proclamation of the Republic. I also bought the political writings of Padraig Pearse and some history books. In a second hand book shop on the quays, run by Joe Clarke a veteran of the Rising, I bought a slim volume of the writings of James Fintan Lalor. That was the beginning of my collection on Ireland, which now runs to well over a thousand books, plus a couple of hundred pamphlets.

I stayed the first night in a cheap B&B in Pearse Street, it cost me a pound and I paid with an Irish note which displayed Lavery’s portrait of his wife, as Kathleen ní Houlihan. I shared the room and next morning the water in the cracked washbasin gave off a strange smell. But the Irish fried breakfast was very acceptable.

I spent three days in Dublin and on the remaining two nights stayed with Paddy Healy of the League for a Workers Republic, a small Trotskyist group which was not affiliated to the Fourth International. In his flat at the back of an Busaras (the bus station) I found the ms. of a short story by Géry Lawless which was seemed to be autobiographical. It told the story of an internee in the Curragh Camp who was allowed, as a special concession, to see Sputnik cross the sky. Surrounded by walls and barbed wire, he watched it with his armed guard who said, “them Russians have got the Free World guessing.” I thought it was well written and Géry later confirmed that it was by him, but he didn’t have a copy and was not interested in getting it published. It is, almost certainly, now lost.

I called in at the HQ of the Official Republican Movement in Lower Gardiner Street. I had a very friendly conversation with Seán Ó Cionnaith, while helping him to stuff envelopes with their newsletter. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and looked more like a 1950s schoolteacher than the long haired revolutionaries I had left behind in London. I also met Mairín de Burca, to whom I had a letter of introduction from Géry. She was friendly and reassuringly militant; very like the feminists I knew in London. At Trinity College I met Dalton Kelly (known nowadays as Daltún Ó Ceallaigh), a rising star amongst the younger Officials. He told me he expected that the movement would become completely political and the IRA would be disbanded.

I also met some Trotskyists who were more in tune with the IMG, Rayner Lysaght (still a good friend), Brendan Kelly and a couple of others. On my last day in Dublin I was sitting in a pub with them, when I was told that two CS Gas canisters had been thrown onto the floor of the House of Commons. I travelled to Belfast the next day and that fixes the date of my visit as 24th July 1970. On the Enterprise Express, going northwards, I gazed out of the window, trying to see as much of Ireland as I could. Then I arrived in the city that was going to engage my mind and heart, as no other place has ever done.

Bob Purdie speaking, n.d.

Purdie picks up the story ten years later and recollects his experience of traveling down to Dublin monthly in 1980 for meetings of the Irish Labour History Society.

“I remember …  Dublin and the Irish Labour History Society.”

In the Autumn of 1980 I helped to set up the Belfast Branch of the ILHS. I had been interested in the history of the Irish working class for many years, the walls of the cellar in which the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists met in 1961-2 were decorated with pictures of the Irish Citizen Army, their Starry Plough banner and Liberty Hall, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ HQ.

As an Edinburgh socialist I was drawn to James Connolly, who seemed to be the antithesis of that grim, grey, dreich, Presbyterian city. I had joined the ILHS soon after it was set up in 1973 and I had been receiving its journal “Saothar” since 1975. Now I was living in Ireland so I joined with a few other enthusiasts to found a branch and was elected Secretary. We then sought official recognition from the Committee of the Society in Dublin, expecting a warm welcome. We didn’t get it.

The Secretary of the Society informed us that we could not set up a branch without the prior permission of the Committee and this could only be done after it was formally placed on their agenda, which would take a couple of months. And before they could decide to recognise a Belfast Branch they would have to decide whether or not to have branches in the first place. It was all very complicated and we should wait patiently until it could be sorted out. In the meantime we could not call ourselves a branch of the ILHS. To which we responded in the spirit of Larkin and Connolly, we refused to accept this ridiculous bureaucratic nonsense. I was delegated to go down to Dublin to tell the Committee that we were a branch and we were demanding recognition. I was received with great warmth and we were enthusiastically welcomed into the fold. The Secretary had been speaking only for herself.

I became the official representative of the Belfast Branch, travelling down to Dublin for the monthly Committee meetings. It was advantageous for the ILHS to have an address in the North and the Workers Educational Association let us use their premises in Fitzroy Avenue. These regular trips to Dublin became part of the pattern of my life and I worked out a route from Connolly Station to the meeting which incorporated the maximum number of bookshops. In this way I began to build my Irish library.

Dublin had changed little since my first visit in 1970, walking along Talbot Street I passed an electrical supply shop called “McHugh Himself” and a theatre which permanently advertised a show by the Irish tenor Josef Locke. I thought it was derelict but in fact it was still packing in audiences to hear his operetta songs. This was not long after the link with Sterling had been broken and the Irish pound was worth about 0.75p of the British one. Purchase tax on clothes and food was much lower than in the UK and I could buy things for about half the cost in Belfast, except that I was too poor to take very much advantage, (I always had money for books, but that’s different). My lunch was a soda farl with cheese and another with jam, washed down by a small flask of black coffee. I picnicked in St Stephen’s Green whatever the weather, I couldn’t afford a cafe.

Dublin was starkly divided. South of the Liffey there were plush shops and prosperous crowds, from Connolly Station to the end of O’Connell Bridge it was rough. Pasty faced Traveller children sat on the steps of the O’Connell Monument inhaling glue from paper bags and once I was robbed. I carried cash and my keys in a small leather bag and someone said, “did you know these two boys have just picked your pocket?” I chased after them and a couple of well dressed young guys grabbed them. I got the bag back and they asked if I wanted to take them to the Garda Station to charge them. I looked at their scrawny bodies and the abject misery on their faces and my heart melted and I said “no”. One of the young men, with disgust, said “well, ye’re an eejit!” I would do the same again, what’s the use of being on the side of the poor and the oppressed if you join with the arrogant middle class against them?

Crossing the Bridge and walking down Grafton Street on Saturday mornings I was passing shops and restaurants I couldn’t afford to enter. But there was free entertainment from the buskers. One of them was the “Dice Man”, who became a well loved Dublin character. Actually he was a fellow Scot, Thom McGinty from Glasgow. He dressed in a long black gown and hood and his face was white, so that he looked like the angel of death. His act was to move incredibly slowly, this was before living statues appeared in every city but he was much more than that. He seemed to be moving through another dimension of time and space and he projected a charisma that drew fascinated crowds. Except that every so often he would catch a child’s eye and drop a large, conspiratorial wink.

Going back to Connolly Station at night I would pass “Holy Island” a traffic island in the middle of O’Connell Street on which a middle aged woman had set up religious images and a loudspeaker, she would appeal to the cinema and restaurant crowds to return to their Catholic duties and loudly gave out the Rosary, with which they didn’t join in. She was another Scot, and the world believes that it is the Irish who are eccentric.

Note : Thanks to Brian Hanley making us aware of these recollections.

Arthur Horner (1894 – 1968) was a miner, a communist, a conscientious objector of the First World War and a trade unionist. Born in Merthr Tydfil, South Wales, he was politicised in the early twentieth century by the rise of the Scottish socialist leader Keir Hardie, the first Labour member of the House of Commons in Westminster, and by the rise of militant trade unionism in Wales.

What makes Horner a suitable candidate for a blog post on Come Here To Me?  He offers one of the most unusual stories of the Irish revolutionary period; inspired by events in Ireland (the Dublin Lockout and Easter Rising in particular), and ignoring his call-up papers for military service during the First World War, Horner arrived in Dublin in 1917, aligning himself with the recently reformed Irish Citizen Army. To Horner, it was an important act of solidarity. He remembered (in his memoir Incorrigible Rebel) that “the Citizen Army, which Connolly created, represented to me the only possible struggle –a movement of the working class aimed at economic as well as political freedom.”

An illustration of Horner (Image credit:www.grahamstevenson.me.uk – Graham’s website includes a biography of Horner and other British communist leaders)

Wales and the Easter Rising:

In the popular history of the Easter Rising, the small Welsh village of Frongoch holds a special place. Located in  Gwynedd, North Wales, it became home for many of the rebel participants in the Easter Rising, and indeed for those who were swept up in the policy of internment that followed the insurrection. Frongoch offered the republican movement a change to regroup and to discuss strategy in light of the military failure of the Easter Rising;  while the men also immersed themselves in language and political discussion groups. Michael O’Flanagan, a young member of the Irish Volunteers, recalled that the reception that greeted the rebels in Wales was somewhat different to that back in Dublin, as “When we arrived at Balla station which was the point at which we left the train for Frongoch we got a very friendly reception from the Welsh people who had assembled in large numbers on the platform.”  He remembered that it didn’t take the camp internees long to get “settled down to the usual camp routine in Frongoch, attending lectures, route marches, Irish classes and so forth.”

The mines of South Wales were far removed from the sleepy village of Frongoch however. In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, an unusual figure arrived in the valleys of Rhondda and Aberdare, seeking to win support for James Connolly, the Scottish rebel leader who found himself a prisoner in Dublin Castle. Captain Jack White DSO was the son of the famed British Field Marshall George White, and like his father he was a veteran of the Second Boer War, fought in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. In many ways however, his life had taken many unusual turns since South Africa. A committed revolutionary, he had helped establish the Irish Citizen Army in 1913, which emerged from the violence of the Dublin Lockout. Though no longer a member of the workers’ militia, he hoped to rally support among the miners of South Wales for strike action, which he hoped could save the life of Connolly.  In his colourful (and, at times, totally bonkers) memoir, White noted that:

 In short, I am arrested in the South Wales coalfield for trying to get the Welsh miners out on strike. Why? To save Jim Connolly being shot for his share in the Easter Rising in command of the Citizen Army. Had I succeeded I would have crippled the coal supply for the British Fleet.

White was handed down two sentences of three months each in Aderdare on 25 May, for trying “to sow the seeds of sedition in an area which had nothing to do with the grievances of Ireland either real or imaginary”, and at a time when “a peaceful settlement was being arrived at.” It was to the loss of the Irish trade union movement that the so-called “peaceful settlement” in Dublin involved the execution of James Connolly, blindfolded and tied to a chair. While White had failed in preventing the murder of Connolly, his death and the other shootings did impact public opinion. In Manchester, The Guardian proclaimed that “the executions are becoming an atrocity.”

Captain Jack White, founding member of the Irish Citizen Army.

While White had failed in his ambition of bringing Welsh miners out in strike, there did exist some sympathy with Irish trade unionism in the mines of Wales; as the historian Paul O’Leary has noted, this sympathy rested not with the nationalist tradition, but rather “”largely out of common cause with Jim Larkin and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and sympathy with the suffering endured in the 1913 Dublin strike.” James Connolly had expressed support for the miners of South Wales in 1915 following a successful strike, writing in The Workers’ Republic that:

We wish this week to congratulate our Welsh Comrades upon the successful outcome of their resistance to the attempt of the Government to dragoon them into submission. We congratulate them all the more heartily because we realise that had the Government succeeded in terrorising them we might all have bidden a long farewell to our industrial liberties. Successful in Wales, the capitalist class that runs these islands would have been ruthless in Ireland. We are aware, of course, that the people of this country do not possess the same public rights as are freely exercised in Great Britain. But we also know that the measure of liberty enjoyed in Great Britain has a direct bearing upon the measure of liberty permitted in Ireland.

It was the political sympathies of some Welsh miners that would allow a young Arthur Horner to join the republican movement in Dublin.

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‘Public Notice’ from 13 May 1922, concerning Belfast refugees.

It is hardly surprising that the revolutionary period witnessed a heightening of sectarian tensions in the north east of Ireland. Sectarianism had become a sad part of life in Ulster, not least in its industrial centres, long before the partition of Ireland. Writing in 1922, G.B Kenna lamented the fact that at one point there had been signs of working class unity in Belfast, but by 1922 it seemed distant history:

Relations between the workers of various creeds had become quite friendly. The shipyard strike of 1919 revealed a wonderful thing in the political history of the city. There had been growing up steadily and unobtrusively a feeling of the solidarity of Labour and a tendency to forget the differences of Orange and Green in attempts to achieve objects of common interest to the workers in Belfast irrespective of creed or politics.

Pearse Lawlor, writing in the pages of History Ireland, has detailed the spiral of sectarian violence in Belfast from July 1920, noting that “From the expulsion of Catholic workers from the Belfast shipyards and engineering works in July 1920, when men had their shirts ripped open to see whether they were wearing scapulars, so identifying them as Catholics, there was a litany of attacks on the Catholic population in Belfast.” Places of work and worship were attacked,  and there were outbreaks of arson against the homes and businesses of Catholics. The situation escalated, with republican units in Belfast attacking tramcars loaded with shipyard workers, who tended to be drawn from the Protestant working class.  While the vast majority of sectarian outrages committed in the city were against its Catholic populace, innocent Protestants endured suffering too, with rogue ‘Hibernian’ elements as willing to engage in squalid retaliation.  By 1922, Belfast was a tinderbox.

The mistreatment of the Catholic minority  in Belfast was enough to lead the Daily Herald newspaper to state in the summer of 1921 that what was being witnessed amounted to the “the bloody harvest of Carsonism”, highlighting the great irony that “the gangs who have organised the reign of terror are the very people who protest they are afraid that they would, under even partial Home Rule, be persecuted and denied religious liberty.” By February 1922,the Freeman’s Journal proclaimed Belfast “a city of death”,  and it was reported that in the previous three weeks forty people had been killed and at least 100 wounded. Kieran Glennon, in his study From Pogrom to Civil: Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA, does a great job of chronicling the rising tensions of the northern city. One key event was the murder of the McMahon family. Owen McMahon was a publican who lived at Kinnaird Terrace in north Belfast; with McMahon recognised as a prominent Catholic businessman, the eight men living in his home were lined up and shot on 23 March 1922. As Glennon has noted “the viciousness with which the attack was carried out caused widespread shock in both Ireland and Britain. That it was an act of naked sectarian frenzy was demonstrated by the fact  that religious pictures in the house were torn and shot at.” Those who murdered members of the McMahon family were not part of a disorganised mob – they wore the uniforms of policemen.

Fleeing sectarianism, Belfast refugees at the Kildare Street Club, 1922. (Image: NLI)

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Image by Pól Ó Duibhir.

Against the backdrop of the centenary of the Easter Rising in March, it would be easy to forget that the 8th of March will mark the Golden Jubilee of the bombing of the Doric column to the memory of Horatio Nelson. That the anniversary hasn’t received much attention is a little ironic; for many people, the defining memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising in 1966 is the bombing of the Pillar.

Every five years Dublin City Library and Archive on Pearse Street host a lecture on the theme of the Nelson Pillar. This is more than fitting, as Horatio Nelson’s head is on display today in the Reading Room of Pearse Street (looking a little jaded, and  perhaps still in shock). I am delighted to have been asked to give the lecture for 2016.

It will take place in the DCLA at 11am on the 8th March and is free to attend. The library is currently hosting an excellent exhibition, Citizens in Conflict: Dublin 1916, so this offers a chance to check that out too if you haven’t. My book, The Pillar: The Life and Afterlife of the Nelson Pillar, is available from here at a special price including free P+P. It includes many excellent photographs by Pól Ó Duibhir, who had the good sense to get down to O’Connell Street and capture an important piece of social history.

An tArdmhéara Críona Ní Dhálaigh and the banner of Na Fianna Éireann, Imperial War Museum. (Image Credit: An Phoblacht, http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/25620)

The Imperial War Museum in London is one of my favourite museums to visit anywhere in the world, and I’ve been fortunate enough to pass through its doors on several occasions. Rather than being a jingoistic celebration of war and conflict – which such a museum could easily be – I’ve always found it does a great job in bringing the horrible realities of conflict home. There is an entire section of the museum given over to telling the story of the Holocaust through personal stories of those who suffered at the hands of fascist terror. It is the most moving exhibition of its kind I have ever encountered, and I’ve seen it reduce people to tears.

From India to the Boer War, and from the trenches of the Somme and to the Battle of Berlin, if an Englishman was there with a rifle you will find any conflict you care to learn more about represented in the museum through contemporary artefacts. On my first visit then, I wondered what mention events on the streets of Dublin at April 1916 would warrant.

In a small display cabinet, I stumbled upon republican propaganda from the revolutionary period, along with weaponry and a curious banner. Reading ‘Na Fianna Eireann’, and showing a sunburst background on green, this flag belonged to the republican boy scout organisation established in 1909 by Countess Markievicz, Bulmer Hobson and others. The flag will soon be on display in Dublin’s City Hall, on loan from London, but the question remains – how did it end up there in the first place?

In war, flags are captured. One of the most iconic images of the Easter Rising shows the ‘Irish Republic’ flag that flew over the GPO hanging upside down from the end of a rifle, as British forces pose under the statue of Charles Stewart Parnell. There is huge symbolic power in capturing the flags or other important symbols of your opponent – walk into any war museum from Hanoi to Edinburgh and this quickly becomes apparent. The ‘Irish Republic’ flag was returned to Dublin in the 1960s in a gesture of goodwill, and it is today in the possession of the National Museum of Ireland, displayed at Collins Barracks.

The Irish Ambassador in London receiving the ‘Irish Republic’ flag in 1966. (Irish Press)

Flags may be destroyed in the flames of war, or seized by an opponent during combat or after surrender. Yet, the flag that reads ‘Na Fianna Eireann’ was not captured on the streets of Dublin in 1916. Rather, it was taken after the insurrection from the home of Markievicz as a war trophy. Surrey House at Leinster Road in Rathmines was a well-known meeting places for Na Fianna. As Eamon Murphy (who maintains the excellent blog ‘Fianna Eireann History’) has noted:

It was at ‘Surrey House’ that the Countess built up a small ‘clique’ around her that consisted of her most loyal boys in the Fianna. Some of these had even taken to ‘moving in’. They took over part of the house and used it as a regular meeting place. Some of the older Fianna officers, particularly the IRB members, advised her not to encourage this new elite group and said it would bring unwanted attention to the organisation. However this did not deter the Countess and she used ‘Surrey House’ as a 2nd home for her close Fianna circle.

Surrey House, from which the flag was taken as a war trophy. (Image Credit: http://www.fiannaeireannhistory.wordpress.com )

A brief history of Na Fianna:

 Undoubtedly, the central figure behind the birth of the republican boyscouts was Bulmer Hobson. A northern Quaker, and later a founding member of the Irish Volunteers and a member of the Supreme Council of the secret oath-bound Irish Republican Brotherhood, he had operating a sporting and cultural club for young boys for a number of years previously under the title Na Fianna Eireann, but in 1909 he merged his efforts with Markievicz and others in Dublin. Bulmer Hobson was once regarded by British intelligence as “the most dangerous man in Ireland”, but his role in the revolutionary period has been largely overlooked until recent times.

The organisation listed its purpose at the time of its foundation as being “the training of the youth of Ireland, mentally and physically, to achieve this object by teaching scouting and military exercises, Irish history, and the Irish language.” It was implied from the beginning that while young, those within the organisation could have an important role to play, as “though one may be too young to be the possessor of that powerful weapon called a vote, nobody is too young to serve his country, and, if necessary, fight for his country.”

Baden Powell and his boyscouts. Republicans regarded the Baden Powell scouts as being sympathetic to British imperialism (image credit: http://www.scout.org)

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Click to expand. (Image Credit: NYPL)

Thanks to Liam Hogan for bringing this excellent map to my attention, from the collections of the New York Public Library. This is Dublin 1915, with the red lines showing the extent of the city tram system. With Dublin currently a construction site for the Luas Cross City project, it seems worth posting.

The Dublin United Tramways Company closed their last tram route, the No. 8 to Dalkey, in July 1949. Huge crowds of people came out to catch a glimpse of it on its journey. In the Sunday Independent, one writer made it clear that:

I am sorry for the demise of the trams, but as a motorist I just cannot weep for them. They had become an incorrigible block to modern traffic, holding always, as they did, the middle of the road…Yet, the trams are dead, and it is time for them to lie down.

The departure of the last tram was supposed to be marked with a little pomp and ceremony, but with the huge numbers that came onto the streets, the crowds proved quite uncontrollable. One journalist wrote the following day that:

All plans to give the trams a suitable send-off had to be abandoned. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union band was to have played them part of their way. It had to disperse when the crowds got out of hand. Radio Eireann had made arrangements to record the passing, but the scenes were so wild that the project was abandoned.

Anything that wasn’t nailed down was made off with by souvenir hunters. It was said that one conductor had his “driving lights removed (…) he lost his hand-brake as well.  This meant driving the tram backwards, with the conductor up in front giving directions. He was an hour and a half late delivering up the shattered remains of the charge.”

Irish Press, 11July 1949.

Image Credit:Save More Street 2016 Facebook.

I passed this earlier on today on Moore Street and was unable to get a decent image of it with the lighting, but this comes from the Save Moore Street 2016 social media account. The stencil is a clever take on one of the most iconic images of the 1916 Rising, showing the surrender of P.H Pearse to General Lowe:

Pearse surrenders to General Lowe, Easter 1916.

At the time of surrender, Pearse was joined by Elizabeth O’Farrell, whose feet can just about be made out in the image above. In time, she would quite literally be airbrushed from history, and the image has been widely reproduced without any trace of her. O’Farrell bravely delivered news of the rebel surrender to General Lowe, Commander of the British Forces in Dublin during the insurrection. She recalled years later that:

I waved the small white flag which I carried and the military ceased firing and called me up to the barrier, which was across the top of Moore Street into Great Britain Street. As I passed up Moore Street I saw, at the corner of Sackville Lane, the O’Rahilly’s hat and a revolver lying on the ground – I   thought he had got into some house.  I gave my message to the officer in charge, and he asked me how many girls were down there. I said three.  He said: “Take my advice and go down again and bring the other two girls out of it.”

There is a demonstration this Saturday at 1pm marching from Liberty Hall to Moore Street, more information is available from here.

Image credit: RTE Player.

RTE’s Rebellion has come in for a bit of a kicking in recent weeks.

There are a few things about it that are worthy of praise, not least the performances of some of the cast. Brian Gleeson has delivered a striking performance as a Citizen Army Volunteer in my view, proving that the Gleeson family can do no wrong.

Yet actors can only work with what they’re given. The dialogue is truly appalling, and while the first cringe of the series came with the line “I’d rather be fucked by an Englishman than brainwashed by an Irishman”, there’s been plenty since. The differences between the Citizen Army and the Volunteers are grossly exaggerated. We’re given one Bolshie militia and another more akin to the Legion of Mary. The depiction of P.H Pearse is truly shameful, reducing a complex character to a revisionist cliche. I understand that Rebellion is a drama and not a documentary, but even allowing for that, there is a little too much reshaping of the past here for my liking. Perhaps there is too much Praying Pearse and not enough North King Street Massacre.

Some have attacked the drama over minute details, and the small pieces of modern Dublin that have found their way in front of the camera from time to time. This is totally unavoidable in any large scale drama filmed in the midst of a modern capital city, and while yellow lines creeping into shot or streetsigns have caught the eye of many, one thing I noticed has largely gone unnoticed.  They did a fine job in creating a CGI model of the Nelson Pillar for O’Connell Street, right down to the gates and the entrance doorway of the monument. How then did they manage to put the wrong statue on top?

The Nelson in Rebellion may be more familiar to Londoners than Dubliners. Sporting a fine hat and striking the same pose, it’s the Trafalgar Square statue outside the GPO:

Nelson in Trafalgar Square.

Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square was constructed between 1840 and 1843, meaning there were more than three decades between the construction of the Dublin monument and it. The Nelson Pillar in Dublin was erected between 1808 and 1809, the work of Francis Johnston, the celebrated Dublin-based architect. Johnston was also responsible for the General Post Office, constructed between 1814 and 1818. Little could he know at the time that he would ultimately be responsible for giving Dublin not only a symbol of political loyalism, but a building that would become synonymous with political separatism. The statue of Nelson was the work of Cork-born sculptor Thomas Kirk. When it was placed on top of the Doric column, one Irish magazine lamented the fact that “the statue of Nelson records the glory of a mistress and the transformation of our senate into a discount office.”

London’s Nelson could perhaps boast of being the better looking of the two Admirals! While the Nelson Pillar was destroyed on 8 March 1966, there were exciting times ahead for the head of the celebrated Admiral. Liberated from a Dublin Corporation lockup by students of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), it spent a number of months traveling both Ireland and the UK before it was returned to Dublin. Today it is on display in the Reading Room of the Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street.

NCAD students with the head of Horatio Nelson.

Donal Fallon’s The Pillar: The Life and Afterlife of Nelson Pillar, was published in 2014 and is available here.

CHTM is now on Instagram, at @chtmdublin.  Instagram is an app and social media website for sharing images and short videos, in other words: It’s perfect for posting little tidbits that might not make it on here.

CHTM Instagram.