Men of a battalion of The Royal Dublin Fusiliers march through the rain somewhere in Ireland, probably before embarking for service in France during the First World War.
Together with three other southern Irish regiments - The Connaught Rangers, The Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment (Royal Canadians) and The Royal Munster Fusiliers - The Royal Dublin Fusiliers had a relatively short existence within the British Army, all having been formed in 1881 and disbanded in 1922 at the time of the creation of the Irish Free State. (The other Irish regiment to be disbanded at the same time was The Royal Irish Regiment, which had been formed in 1684.) Within those forty-one years, though, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers received the battle honours ‘South Africa 1899-1902’ and ‘Siege of Ladysmith’ for service in the Boer War, as well as forty-eight battle honours during the First World War when three of its men were awarded the Victoria Cross. Their sacrifice and that of 49,400 Irish soldiers in the First World War is commemorated in the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin, some three miles from the city centre close to Phoenix Park and Kilmainham Hill. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it comprises a sunken Garden of Remembrance whose centrepiece is a huge granite Stone of Remembrance and two pairs of pergolas also in granite, representing the four provinces of Ireland, and containing illuminated volumes recording the names of all the dead. The restored Gardens were rededicated on 10 September 1988.
Although the regiment’s history was only short-lived within the British Army, its antecedents went back to the seventeenth century when the Honourable East India Company formed the Madras European Regiment in 1648 and the Bombay Regiment 1661. Two centuries later these became the 102nd Royal Madras Fusiliers and the 103rd Royal Bombay Fusiliers before they were amalgamated in 1881 as The Royal Dublin Fusiliers, having been brought into the British military establishment following the mutiny of 1857. Because of the length of time they had served in India, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers were known as ‘The Old Toughs’, but they also answered to their local nickname ‘The Dubs’. As a fusilier regiment the men wore a uniform that included a cap made of black bear or racoon skin with a blue and green plume on the left side while the front of the cap carried the regimental badge of a grenade surmounted with a tiger above an elephant. The base for the regiment was a newly built depot and barracks at Naas in County Kildare, Ireland, and its official recruiting counties were designated as Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow and Carlow. After independence in 1922 and the disbandment of the regiment, the buildings remained in public use and served as the Army Apprentice School in the 1950s, but Devoy Barracks (as it had become) closed in 1998 when new county buildings were constructed on the site.
Little remains of the physical presence of the British Army in Naas and in the aftermath of Ireland’s independence it was considered almost shameful to acknowledge the role played by British regiments such as The Royal Dublin Fusiliers. However, all was not entirely lost: as if to demonstrate that regiments never really die but continue to live on in people’s hearts, a Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association (RDFA) was formed in Dublin in January 1997 following an exhibition mounted in the Dublin Civic Museum in South William Street to acknowledge the role played by the regiment during the First World War. With eighty founding members, by 2012 that membership had grown to 1,251, the chairman noting at the time that ‘much like the old regiment itself, the bulk of the membership of the RDFA came from a cross-section of Irish society’.
Men of a battalion of The Royal Dublin Fusiliers march through the rain somewhere in Ireland, probably before embarking for service in France during the First World War.
It was fitting that the wartime service of so many Irishmen should have been commemorated for, in common with all British infantry regiments, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers expanded substantially to meet the challenge of raising recruits for service during the First World War. As Irish infantry regiments did not include Territorial battalions in their Orders of Battle, The Royal Dublin Fusiliers relied on raising volunteers from all over Ireland, creating seven Service battalions for service in Gallipoli and on the Western Front and three Garrison battalions of older soldiers, which served in India and on the Salonika front. Among the volunteers were 350 Dublin rugby union players who paraded at the Lansdowne Road ground and then marched to the huge military camp at The Curragh where they formed D Company of 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. They were promptly christened ‘The Toffs in the Old Toughs’. Among them was Ernest Julian, a barrister and Reid Professor of Law at Trinity College, Dublin, who was killed in action at Gallipoli in August 1915. Another rifle company in the same battalion was composed of ‘Larkinites’, Dublin dockers who had supported their radical union leader, James Larkin, in the famous ‘lock-out’ and strike of the previous year.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the many volunteers was Father William Doyle, a Jesuit padre who served with 8th Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front. Born in the suburb of Dalkey, the youngest of seven children, Doyle entered the Jesuit Novitiate at the age of eighteen and on the outbreak of war immediately joined the army as a padre. While serving on the Western Front he gained a well-deserved reputation both for his bravery under fire and for his refusal to make any distinction between soldiers of different faiths. One Ulster Protestant officer later said that Father Doyle ‘didn’t know the meaning of fear and he didn’t know what bigotry was’. In 1916 he was awarded a Military Cross – an unusual distinction for a padre – but he was killed during the Third Battle of Ypres on 16 August 1917, having run ‘all day hither and thither over the battlefield like an angel of mercy’. During the conflict the Dubs lost 4,700 men killed and thousands more were wounded.
Perhaps the most painful incident involving the regiment came during the Easter Rising in 1916. When the nationalist rebellion began in Dublin on 24 April, 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers was in residence at the Royal Barracks, later to become Collins Barracks (named after Michael Collins, the first commander-in-chief of the Irish Free State) and now part of the National Museum of Ireland. At the time the battalion was preparing to deploy to the Western Front and was immediately involved in the operations to relieve Dublin Castle. The following day the 5th Battalion arrived in the city from the Curragh, travelling by train, and they engaged the rebels at the City Hall. Also in action in that period was the 4th Battalion, which travelled to the city from Richmond Barracks at Templemore in County Tipperary and took part in the fighting along the railway line from the Broadstone railway station held by the rebels, up to the Cabra Bridge. Once an important transport hub serving the west of Ireland, the station closed in 1961 and only its façade remains.
The tug-of-war team of The Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1914. The British Army favoured the tug-of-war as an ideal way of building up physical strength while simultaneously fostering co-operation and teamwork.
All told, the regiment lost two officers and ten other ranks during the fighting in Dublin but despite the provocation and the risk of conflicting loyalties, the three battalions remained loyal. Later John Dillon MP, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, informed the House of Commons that he had asked Ireland’s commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Sir John Maxwell, ‘Have you any cause of complaint of the Dublins [The Royal Dublin Fusiliers] who had to go down and fight their own people in the streets of Dublin? Did a single man turn back and betray the uniform he wears?’ To which Maxwell replied, ‘Not a man.’
Carried on the Regimental Colour
Arcot, Plassey, Condore, Wandiwash, Pondicherry, Buxar, Guzerat, Carnatic, Mysore, Seringapatam, Nundy Droog, Amboyna, Ternate, Banda, Maheidpoor, Kirkee, Beni Boo Ali, Aden, Mooltan, Goojerat, Punjaub, Ava, Pegu, Lucknow, Siege of Ladysmith, South Africa 1899–1902
Le Cateau, Retreat from Mons, Marne 1914, Aisne 1914, Armentiéres 1914, Ypres 1915, 17, 18, St Julien, Frezenberg, Bellewaarde, Somme 1916, 18, Albert 1916, Guillemont, Ginchy, Le Transloy, Ancre 1916, Arras 1917, Scarpe 1917, Arleux, Messines 1917, Langemarck 1917, Polygon Wood, Cambrai 1917, 18, St Quentin, Bapaume 1918, Rosières, Avre, Hindenburg Line, St Quentin Canal, Beaurevoir, Courtrai, Selle, Sambre, France and Flanders 1914–18, Kosturino, Struma, Macedonia 1915–17, Helles, Landing at Helles, Krithia, Suvla, Sari Bair, Landing at Suvla, Scimitar Hill, Gallipoli 1915–16, Egypt 1916, Gaza, Jerusalem, Tell ‘Asur, Palestine 1917–18
Sergeant Robert Downie, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1916
Sergeant James Ockendon, 1st Battalion, First World War, 1916
Private (later Sergeant) Sergeant Horace Augustus Curtis, 2nd Battalion, First World War, 1918
