* This is a piece I wrote for the Irish Independent newspaper - a personal take on the events of 1916 - the Easter Rising or Rebellion that hit loyal, peaceful Dublin like a thunderclap on a sunny Easter Weekend. I learnt about it in school - at the hands (and sometimes fists) of the Christian Brothers. But in recent years, I have tried to approach the events from a different angle.......
Captain Jack White - Free Lovin' Irish Revolutionary |
* The Christian Brothers who taught me about Irish
history presented Easter, 1916 as a heroic epic, the founding myth of our
Republic.
They were muscular men, a generation or so on from the
Rising, the War of Independence and our brutal Civil War, the latter being a
subject that was still too raw to even mention in the classrooms of Cork in the
1980s.
They revered Pádraig Pearse, a teacher and strict
disciplinarian after their own hearts, and believed in his doctrine of blood
sacrifice, linking it to the men of 1798 and even further back to our original
muscular Christian, brave, martyred Brian Boru.
Brian Boru - the High King of Ireland and scourge of the Vikings! - was presented in the same way we learnt about the early Christian martyrs, the Roman Legionnaires put to death for refusing to chuck their fellow Christians to the lions.
Brian Boru - the High King of Ireland and scourge of the Vikings! - was presented in the same way we learnt about the early Christian martyrs, the Roman Legionnaires put to death for refusing to chuck their fellow Christians to the lions.
In many ways, in their admiration for Pearse and mania
for discipline, they were the paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church.
To my young, over-active imagination, Pearse was a
cross between the hot-tempered Brother who tried to “bate” Irish into us and
John Wayne at the Alamo, running his young volunteers through the tuiseal ginideach even
as he fired his rifle from the burning wreck of the GPO.
In our homes, Michael Collins was revered, his
portrait hanging alongside a picture of John F Kennedy and the Pope, Cork’s own
Blessed Holy Trinity. DeValera was mentioned only in dark whispers, a bogey-man.
The events of 1916 didn’t seem real to us, even though
they happened when our grandfathers were alive. And there was no connection made
to the Troubles, to the nightly news reports about the Hunger Strikers, names
such as Bobby Sands, heard as we sat around the table for our tea.
It is only in recent years, having gone back and
looked at the events of 1916 for myself, that I have been able to find a way
into the Easter Rising via some of the small, forgotten stories behind the
Great Myth.
As a history nut, and having written a book about long
forgotten Irish men who did everything from run the French slave trade to
invading Imperial China, I see the small stories of individual men and women as
a valuable way to approach Great Events from a different angle.
And 1916 has a wealth of small stories which can give
us a sense of what it must have been like to live through those times, the
sudden chaos, the trauma and the conflicting emotions and loyalties.
(The video below is only six minutes long and sets the scene well.)
(The video below is only six minutes long and sets the scene well.)
One episode, a tragic side-show to the doomed struggle
on O’Connell Street, gives us a striking picture of the confusion and tragedy
of Dublin, Easter 1916.
It is the story of The Gorgeous Wrecks, how, on Easter
Monday, April 24, a small party of volunteers occupying Clanwilliam House by
Mount Street Bridge fired on a detachment of Home Defence Force volunteers.
The Home Defence men were a sort of Dad’s Army, mostly
elderly Dubliners, loyalists, veterans of the British army and colonial wars.
They wore armbands with the inscription “Georgious Rex” (King George) and their
creaky, grey-haired ranks were known affectionately to Dubliners as “The
Gorgeous Wrecks”.
The Wrecks had been out on an Easter Monday parade in
full uniform and just stumbled into the volunteer strong-point. The 17
volunteers in Clanwilliam house opened fire, killing four of the Wrecks and
wounding others before they realised, to what some later said was their horror,
that these were not British Army regulars, but the Dad’s Army that Dubliners
were accustomed to seeing parading on high-days and holidays. The jolly old
Gorgeous Wrecks.
We could hardly find a better snapshot of a peaceful,
loyal city of the Empire suddenly overwhelmed by sudden, shocking violence and
confusion.
I am also drawn to the story of The Cricket Bat That Died
For Ireland.
The Bullet Still In the Cricket Bat That Died For Ireland |
This bat – now in the National History Museum –
was in the shop window of Elvery's Sports in Sackville Street when it stopped a
bullet from a British gun (the spent bullet still lodged in the bat is a
.303). To me, this strange, very Anglo-Irish memento vividly represents the destruction and
chaos of the Rising.
Contemporary accounts tell of street urchins looting
bats, balls, lacrosse sticks and polo mallets from Elvery's and parading them like
trophies around the edges of the fighting. One of the many surreal sights of a
battle being fought in the heart of a busy, mercantile city.
Recently, I also came across the story of Captain Jack
White, the son of an Ulster-born British Field Marshall and a decorated hero of
the British Army himself.
Jack followed a strange path from Winchester Public
School and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, fighting in the Boer War
and then throwing in his commission to embrace radical socialism, free-love and
the cause of Ireland.
It was White who brought his military experience to
organising The Citizen’s Army.
He did not fight in 1916 but when he heard his
great friend James Connolly would be shot, he tried to organise the Miners of
South Wales to come out on strike to put pressure on the British Government to
commute the sentence.
White, who later went on to fight for the Republicans
in Spain, battled sectarianism at home and tried to organise a socialist party
in Ulster, was (in his own words) a miss-fit, one of the many men and women who
saw the ideals of Connolly and brotherhood turn to dust in the years after 1916.
In the stories of Jack White, The Gorgeous Wrecks and
the Elvery’s Cricket Bat, we can see past the epic myth, the cold revisionism
and the strange, current need to treat
Easter 1916 as some sort of profound,
teachable lesson for modern Ireland.
Thanks to the internet and the great efforts of
historians (academic and amateur) to put a wealth of history online, we can all
now go back and look at the events of 1916, and look at the people and smaller
events that never made the history books or the heroic myth.
These are the stories that I would tell about The
Rising.
*** You can read more about the cricket bat Here - an excellent blog about its history and significance.
*** You can read more about the cricket bat Here - an excellent blog about its history and significance.
**** HEY THANKS FOR READING****
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