The wholesale arrests and the fifteen executions that followed in the next two weeks were a terrible blunder on Britain’s part because they generated enormous compassion which turned to sympathy for the rebels. In death Pearse became a national hero and his mystical rhetoric coloured the perception of what he had tried to do.
Henceforth the rebellion would be seen in terms of a kind of religious experience. The executed were referred to as ‘martyrs’ and it was said that the executions ‘helped to convert’ the Irish people to the separatist cause. The rebellion itself would become known as the Easter Rising, and in the process Pearse’s accomplishment would be symbolically equated with the greatest of all of Christ’s miracles.
Upon arrival in Holyhead, Collins and the other prisoners found two trains waiting for them on either side of a railway platform. One went to Knutsford, and the other, which Collins boarded, to Stafford, where he and 288 other rebels were marched from the railway station to Stafford Military Detention Barracks. At one point on the way a couple of bystanders tried to attack one of the prisoners, but was driven off by a burly English sergeant. ‘Get back you bastards,’ he shouted at the assailants. ‘These men fought for their country, you won’t.’
For three weeks the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only allowed out for short periods to walk in single file around a courtyard in total silence. They had no news of the outside world. In the monotony of this daily routine, each man got to know his cell intimately: the stone floor, the thirty-five panes of glass and the black, iron door. They had a slate to write on, a pencil, a bedboard, a stool, a table, a can, a bowl, a glass, and endless time to think. They could hear the noise of the town in the distance.
‘It was for the most part an unpremeditated solitary confinement,’ Desmond Ryan recalled. ‘Our khaki guardians came round to give us mugs and mattresses and to examine the cells; it took them the best part of a week to adjust themselves completely to the invasion.’
‘What caused the riots?’ the British soldiers kept asking.
‘We heard early that we must shine tins, until we could see our faces therein, must fold our blankets along certain lines, keep our cells as clean as pins, listen to what the staff had to say to us, preserve the strictest military discipline with silence, not whistle or sing, not attempt to communicate with other prisoners, not to look out the windows under penalties of bread and water and an appearance before the commandant,’ Ryan explained.
After two weeks they were allowed to write home, and Collins wrote to Hannie in London. ‘Positively you have no idea of what it’s like — the dreadful monotony — the heart-scalding eternal brooding on all sorts of things, thoughts of friends dead and living — especially those recently dead — but above all the time — the horror of the way in which it refuses to pass.’ He asked her to send him some novels and a French grammar that had been at the flat before he left London. He found it very hard to concentrate and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ kept running through his mind.
He also had plenty of time to think about ‘our little “shemozzle”’, as he called the rebellion in a letter to his friend Susan Killeen on 25 May. ‘If our performance will only teach the housekeepers of Dublin to have more grub in reserve for the future it will surely not have been in vain.’ This was his idea of being funny. ‘But seriously,’ he added, ‘I’m afraid there must have been a lot of hardship and misery which must continue for many a day and which all our sympathy cannot soften.’
‘Life here has not been so ghastly since communications from the outer world have been allowed, and since we’ve been allowed reading matter and write letters,’ he continued. ‘I saw poor Pearse’s last letter in the Daily Mail this day and it didn’t make me exactly prayerful.’
As the restrictions were relaxed, the authorities became very benign. ‘Conditions have improved wonderfully during the last week,’ Collins explained in another letter to Susan Killeen four days later.
‘We had the life of Riley,’ Joe Sweeney wrote afterwards. They revived their spirits with impromptu football games in the courtyard, using a makeshift ball of brown paper and rags wrapped with twine.
‘A frenzied mass of swearing, struggling, perspiring men rolled and fought over the ball in the middle of the yard,’ Desmond Ryan recalled. ‘From the din a tall, wiry, dark haired man emerged and his Cork accent dominated the battle for a moment. He went under and rose and whooped and swore with tremendous vibrations of his accent and then disappeared again.’
‘That’s Mick Collins,’ someone said.
On 28 June 1916 Collins and more than a hundred others were transferred from Stafford to an internment camp at Frongoch, near Bala in north Wales. He seemed as if he might even have had some regrets about leaving Stafford, because henceforth he would be limited to one letter a week. He was certainly in a reflective mood on the eve of his transfer.
‘One gets plenty of time to think here and my thoughts are often self-accusing goodness knows. I can’t tell how small I feel sometimes. ’Tis all very fine for the writers to talk about the sublime thought which enters into people when they are faced by death — once, when I was in a pretty tight corner, what struck me was, how much nicer I might have been to the people who had a regard for me.’
Collins enjoyed the train journey through what he described as ‘a most engaging country’. At Frongoch they joined internees from Knutsford and other detention centres, and numbers swelled to more than 1,800 men. The camp, which had until recently housed German prisoners of war, was divided into two barbed wire compounds, separated by a road. Collins, internee No. 1320, was put in the north camp; this consisted of a series of thirty-five wooden huts, which were sixty foot long and sixteen foot wide and only ten foot high in the centre. Each hut housed thirty internees, so conditions were very cramped.
‘It’s situated most picturesquely on rising ground amid pretty Welsh hills,’ Collins wrote shortly after his arrival in the camp. ‘Up to the present it hasn’t presented any good points to me, for it rained all the time.’ As a result the grass pathways between the huts quickly turned into ‘a mass of slippery shifting mud’. The huts were cold and drafty even during the summer, which gave rise to anxiety among the men as to what conditions would be like later in the year. ‘I cheer them all up by asking them — what’ll they do when the winter comes?’ By then he would actually welcome the conditions in the north camp, but that is getting ahead of the story.
The internees were given the control and management of the camp within the barbed wire. Collins readily adapted himself to the conditions and made the most of his internment. ‘He was full of fun and mischief,’ remembered Batt O’Connor. ‘Wherever he was, there were always ruc-tions and sham fights going on. Mock battles took place between the men of his hut and the adjoining one. We had a football field and whenever there was a game he was sure to be in it. He was all energy and gaiety.’ Each night the men were locked up at 7.30. Between then and lights out at 9.45 they were free to read or play cards. ‘They were listening all the time to talk and plans about the continuance of the war as soon as we got home,’ according to Batt O’Connor. Many of the men had their own musical instruments, and they frequently staged their own concerts and singsongs.
Each day finished with rebel songs and recitations. Collins had a poor singing voice; so his party-piece was a forceful rendition of the poem, ‘The Fighting Race’, by J. I. C. Clarke. It was about three Irishmen — Kelly, Burke, and Shea — who died on the battleship Maine at the start of the Spanish-American war. Collins would deliver the lines of all five verses with an infectious enthusiasm that made up for his inability to recite properly.
There was plenty of time to think about what had gone wrong during Easter Week. Collins realised the strategy was faulty; it had been foolish to confront the might of Britain head on by concentrating their forces in one area. Henceforth he would learn from the mistake, but he did not believe in dwelling in the past. His attitude was best summarised in an autograph book entry he made in Frongoch. ‘Let us be judged by what we attempted rather than what we achieved,’ he wrote.
Each morning the men rose at 6.15. After breakfast, about a quarter of them were assigned to various fatigue groups to clear out fireplaces, sweep buildings, empty garbage, prepare meals, tend a vegetable garden, etc. Those not on fatigue duty would normally go to a playing field until eleven o’clock, when all the internees gathered for inspection. The commandant inspected everything in company with internee officers. The blankets on the bunks had to be folded precisely and placed on the bedboards so that they were in a straight line from one end of the room to the other, and the commandant at times used his stick to determine whether the line between any two beds was exactly straight.
The camp commandant, Colonel F. A. Heygate-Lambert, whom the internees nicknamed ‘Buckshot’, was a cranky, fussy individual with a lisp, always looking for something or other to complain about. ‘It’s hard to imagine anything in the shape of a man being more like a tyrannical old woman than the commandant in charge of this place,’ Collins complained. ‘The practice of confining to cells for trivial things is a thing which the commandant glories in.’
Following inspection the men were free to do much as they pleased within the camp. They played football, engaged in athletic contests, and set up classes to teach Irish, French, German, Spanish, shorthand, telegraphy, and various military skills. They drilled regularly and conducted military lectures, using manuals smuggled into the camp.
‘We set up our own university there, both educational and revolutionary,’ Sweeney recalled, ‘and from that camp came the hard core of the subsequent guerrilla war in Ireland.’ Frongoch was indeed a veritable training camp for the rebels, who acquired skills and made contacts that would prove invaluable afterwards.
‘They could not have come to a better school,’ O’Connor wrote. ‘They were thrown entirely in the company of men to whom national freedom and the old Irish traditions were the highest things in life.’
Collins and the solicitor Henry Dixon, then in his seventies, were prime movers in organising an IRB cell within the camp, and one of their recruits was Richard Mulcahy. Others in the camp who would work closely with Collins in future years included Joe O’Reilly, Seán Hales, Gearóid O’Sullivan, J. J. ‘Ginger’ O’Connell, Seán Ó Muirthile, Michael Brennan, Michael Staines, Terence MacSwiney, Tomás MacCurtain, and Thomas Gay. Those were only a few of the very valuable contacts he cemented at Frongoch.
People from the camp were to be found in the forefront of Irish life throughout much of the next half-century, especially in the army and police, as well as in the political arena, among them a future Governor-General of the Irish Free State in Domhnall Ó Buachalla, and a future President of the Republic of Ireland in Seán T. O’Kelly, as well as future cabinet ministers in Mulcahy, O’Kelly, Oscar Traynor, Tom Derrig, Jim Ryan, and Gerry Boland.
Of course, not all of them liked Collins personally. Many found him childish and overbearing. It was here that he earned the nickname, ‘the Big Fellow’. He was not quite six foot tall and had a rather wiry, athletic build together with a youthful appearance that belied his twenty-six years, so the nickname had nothing to do with his physical characteristics. It would later become a term of affection, but it did not have its origins in affection; rather, it was a sarcastic reflection of Collins’s exaggerated sense of his own importance.
Many colleagues were repulsed by his bullying tactics and his inability to concede gracefully. Being highly competitive, he hated to lose at anything. ‘In the camp, if he didn’t win all the jumps, he’d break up the match,’ Gerry Boland recalled. When Collins had a good hand playing cards, he would concentrate intensely and would resent interruptions, but when the cards were running against him, he would renege, look into the hands of the men beside him, upset the deck and even jump on the likely winner and wrestle him to the floor. He was fond of wrestling, or looking for ‘a piece of ear’, but these wrestling bouts often ended up in real fights. He was not only a bad loser but also a bad winner. Having forced someone into submission, he would crow with delight in a high-spirited show of exuberance that more than a few found irritating.
Morale was comparatively good considering the circumstances under which many of the men were interned. All of those with whom Collins had been sent to Stafford had taken part in the rebellion, but he was surprised to learn that many of the men in Frongoch played no part in the fighting. ‘By my own count,’ he wrote, ‘at least a quarter of the men in the north camp know very little about the Rising. One man, a former labourer of my acquaintance, said that he was just forced off the street in the roundup. His only crime appears to be that he was walking the street.’
When Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith visited Dublin in May following the executions, he talked to some of the people being held at Richmond Barracks. ‘They were mostly from remote areas of the country and none had taken any part in the Dublin Rising,’ he wrote to his wife. He therefore instructed the military to comb out the prisoners properly and ‘only send to England those against whom there was a real case’. By then, however, more than 1,900 prisoners had already been deported, so the British government set up a committee to examine the case against each of those being held. All of the internees were brought, in turn, before the committee in London, and a considerable number were freed.
Collins went before the committee in early July. He spent overnight in a prison waiting for the interview. ‘This morning I was able to see through the open pane of my window the convicts at exercise,’ he wrote. ‘It was the most revolting thing I have ever seen. Each convict seems to have cultivated a ghastly expression to match the colour of his turf-ash-grey garb. Broad arrows everywhere. As the men walked round and round the ring, those wretched arrows simply danced before the eyes. That awful convict dress is one horror we’re saved at any rate.’
Jim Ryan, who had been in the GPO during the rebellion, was released, but Collins was returned to Frongoch, where the internees held a sports meeting on 8 August. Collins won the 100 yards dash. As he breezed past the leader, he grinned gleefully. ‘Ah, you whore,’ he said, ‘you can’t run!’ Collins described it as ‘a great day’. There was high tea afterwards for the prize winners. ‘It consisted of such stuff as tinned pears, jam and pudding,’ he wrote to the recently released Ryan. ‘We gorged ourselves and ended up with a concert.’
His victory was mentioned in the House of Commons, much to his own annoyance, because the person who raised it cited his winning time as evidence that the men were being properly fed at the camp, but this had nothing to do with camp food, as far as Collins was concerned.
‘Actually there isn’t a solitary man here of no matter how slender an appetite who could live on the official rations,’ Collins wrote. ‘There are two or three committees supplying us with additional vegetables and sometimes apples and cocoa.’ It was also possible to buy extra food, but most of the men had little money. They could avail of parole to work at a nearby quarry for five and a half pence an hour, but on 1 September the camp commandant announced he was deducting three pence an hour for their upkeep, and they promptly downed tools and refused to do further work. Hence the meals at the camp were important.
There were three meals each day. Both breakfast and the evening meal consisted of eight ounces of bread and almost a pint of tea, and the midday dinner did not show much more imagination. ‘With the exception of Friday when we get uneatable herrings, the food never varies,’ Collins wrote. ‘Frozen meat, quite frequently bad, and dried beans, are the staple diets. The potato ration is so small that one hardly notices it.’
In mid-August, after some 600 men had been released, those remaining in the north camp were transferred to the south camp, and the north camp was retained as a punishment centre. Collins’s own reaction to the move was rather mixed. ‘Most of us do not appreciate the change as much as we ought to,’ he wrote. ‘But there are many consolations all the same.’
The south camp contained a disused distillery in which an abandoned granary building was converted into five large dormitories, with between 150 and 250 beds in each. The beds consisted of three boards on a frame, four inches off the floor, and each man had two blankets. The low, nine-foot-high ceiling contributed to the claustrophobic atmosphere in the large rooms with so many men crammed together and confined from 7.30 at night until 6.15 the following morning. Long before morning the air would become quite foul, no doubt aggravated by the renowned flatulent qualities of the men’s daily diet of beans.
‘In some unfavoured spots, breathing is almost difficult in the mornings,’ Collins wrote. Luckily his bunk was beside a window and he did not suffer so much in that respect, but when it rained he could get wet as he could not close the window. To make matters worse, the place was infested with rats ever since it was a granary. ‘Had a most exciting experience myself the other night,’ he explained in one letter. ‘Woke up to find a rat between my blankets — didn’t catch the blighter either.’
Although he detested rats, he had an easier time adapting himself to the conditions than many of the men, especially those married with families. He did not have to worry about a wife or children and, in any case, most of his friends were interned with him, with the result that he was never really lonely, as were many others. ‘It is pitiable to see those who have given way to imprisonment now enforcing on themselves the extra burden of loneliness,’ he wrote. It was easier for him, a bachelor, to take a more philosophical outlook.
‘I’m here and that’s the thing that matters,’ he wrote. ‘Prating about home, friends and so on doesn’t alter the fact that this is Frongoch, an internment camp, and that I’m a member of the camp. There’s only one thing to do while the situation is as it is — make what I can of it.’
There was, of course, strict censorship at the camp, but Collins set the groundwork for his future intelligence work by establishing secret channels of communication with the outside. Letters were smuggled out in various ways. Sometimes guards were bribed to post them outside the camp. Another favourite method was to have someone being released take letters out in old envelopes as if they were letters that had already been censored on entering the camp. The camp staff never bothered to inspect the contents. The freed man would then simply transfer the contents to another envelope and post it. Another method was to place letters in the wrapping of sandwiches being prepared for men being released. Messages and letters were smuggled into the camp, on the other hand, by visitors. In addition, a man who worked in the censor’s office used to remove mail for Collins before the censor could read it. In this way a two-way system of communication was established with the outside.
Collins initially viewed the smuggling as just a contest between the guards and internees. ‘The game of smuggling and communication is one for which there is no definite end,’ he wrote. ‘It gives some spice to the usual monotony. In its present form it could go on for ever. Daily the British grow more weary of attempting counteractions to it. As one of them remarked, “If you were bloody Jerries we’d know what to do. But you’re not.”’
Although the smuggling may have started as a kind of game, it soon proved invaluable for propaganda purposes as the camp was gradually whittled down to the hard core of activists. Collins found a new spice to life with the need to avoid detection, as he was eligible for conscription because he had been living in Britain when the Great War began.
On 3 September Hugh Thornton, one of the internees, was informed that, because he had been living in Britain at the outbreak of the war, he was being drafted into the British army. All told, some sixty internees were in the same category. Before the rebellion they had been known as ‘refugees’ in Dublin and the name stuck.
When the authorities came looking for Thornton two days later, he refused to identify himself. All the internees were forced to turn out in the yard and line up in two straight rows, but the guards were unable to recognise Thornton. The camp adjutant ordered the roll be called. As each man’s name was read out he was to answer, ‘Here, Sir’, and then march in front of the adjutant to the end of the yard and re-form in numerical order. These instructions were cheerfully obeyed by the prisoners. By the time Thornton answered to No. 1454, the camp authorities were irate.
‘You have hitherto conducted the camp in an excellent manner, but this incident this morning was the worst exhibition of insubordination which I have met so far, and I cannot overlook it,’ the commandant told the assembled men. As a punishment, he suspended all letters, newspapers, and visits for a week.
This ‘harsh and unjust punishment’ was resented by the internees, according to Collins. Many of them did not know Thornton. Michael Staines, their leader, could not have identified him ‘even if he had wished to’, the prisoners contended.
‘Obviously everybody could not have known the particular man,’ Collins wrote to Hannie. ‘It is not very just to attempt to make prisoners identify a fellow prisoner,’ he added. ‘On the same day another man was sentenced to cell with bread and water for forgetting to say “sir” to an officer.’
Another dispute came to a head on 9 September when internees refused to clear rubbish from the huts of guards. Until the start of the month this work had been contracted to an outside company, but the camp commandant decided to save money by using internees. When they balked, he ordered that those who refused to carry out the assigned duties be sent to the north camp and deprived of letters, newspapers, smoking material, and visits as a punishment. Each day thereafter eight more men were transferred after they refused to do the work.
Although the men had difficulty communicating with the outside, Collins was still very much on top of things, as was evident from a letter that he wrote to Jim Ryan on 2 October 1916. ‘Most of my letters have been meeting with accidents,’ he wrote. ‘Things go on in much the same way here, but there have been some interesting happenings lately, which the Censor’s Department forbids us to speak about. Even so the Dublin Corporation meeting tomorrow will give you some idea.’
This was obviously a reference to the refuse strike. Notwithstanding the many ‘accidents’, the men had managed to smuggle out detailed reports of the refuse strike to Alfie Byrne of Dublin Corporation, who proceeded to publicise the whole affair at a meeting on 4 October. They also smuggled details to Tim Healy, nationalist member of parliament, who raised the matter in the House of Commons. As a result the refuse strike received extensive coverage, especially in the Irish-American press.
The camp authorities relented on 21 October and reinstated the men’s privileges. They then moved all the internees to the north camp, where the pathways again quickly turned to mud as a result of some heavy autumn rains. In spite of the mud, however, Collins welcomed the move back. ‘Nothing could be as bad as the horrible stuffiness of the other place,’ he wrote to Hannie. ‘On the whole, I think the huts are better . . . In any case they’re more desirable and there’s a fire. There are only 29 in each now and we have a nice crowd in ours.’ Some of them enjoyed reading like Collins, and they shared their books and magazines. ‘Between us we haven’t a bad library,’ he explained.
Hugh Thornton, the ‘refugee’ discovered in September, had been sentenced to two years at hard labour for evading conscription, with the result that while Collins was very active in the camp, he had to remain inconspicuous and, in order to avoid detection, he never acted as a formal spokesman.
They were slow about identifying themselves, much to the annoyance of guards. ‘Why the fuck don’t ye holler out when I call yer fucking names!’ exclaimed the Welsh sergeant major.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ another exasperated guard pleaded, ‘answer to the name you go by, if you don’t know your real name.’
The men naturally took delight in upsetting the guards. One morning while a count was being conducted, an internee started coughing, and the officer of the guard shouted at him to stop, whereupon all the internees began coughing.
In early November the camp authorities tricked one of the refugees, Fintan Murphy, into identifying himself by announcing that he should pick up a package, and they tried to single out Michael Murphy by saying he was to be released as his wife was ill, but that ruse failed because Michael Murphy was not married. The commandant then tried to find him by using the same tactic used to uncover Thornton, but this time 342 men refused to answer to their names. As a punishment they were moved back to the south camp, and their privileges were withdrawn. Most of the 204 men who answered the roll-call on that occasion did so by agreement in order to keep the two camps open and thereby maintain their contact with the outside world. Fifteen of the hut leaders were court-martialled.
‘The court may understand this better if I put it this way,’ Richard Mulcahy explained in his defence. ‘If a German interned among English soldiers by the Germans were wanted for the German Army what would be thought of those English soldiers if they gave the man up and informed on him to the German authorities? There are men here who fought in the insurrection; many are here who did not; but most of them now are very sympathetic with those who did.’
A number of the refugees felt badly about others suffering to protect them. They considered giving themselves up, but Collins — who was generally recognised as the leader of the refugees — would not hear of it. ‘Mick burst into the meeting and sat down,’ Joe O’Reilly recalled. ‘When he heard their proposition he told them to do nothing of the kind but sit tight, and not to mind the cowards.’
The Easter Rebellion had taught him that Ireland was not capable of beating the British militarily, but in Frongoch he learned it was possible to beat them by wearing down their patience. ‘Sit down — refuse to budge — you have the British beaten,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘For a time they’ll raise war — in the end they’ll despair.’
He was right. The authorities soon tired of trying to uncover the refugees. But that was not all. With the war on the continent grinding to a virtual stalemate, and the British feeling heavily dependent on American goodwill, the whole internee problem was becoming an embarrassment not only in Ireland but also in the United States.
As a result of Alfie Byrne’s agitation on the men’s behalf, Sir Charles Cameron, a retired medical officer of Dublin Corporation, visited Frongoch on 7 December along with a doctor nominated by the Home Office. The internees tried to project an image of deprivation by dressing in their worst clothes. They also complained bitterly about their food, which was actually upgraded for the occasion. ‘Is there anything which you get enough of?’ Cameron asked.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Collins, ‘we get enough salt.’
Collins was clearly encouraged by the visit. ‘This state of affairs can’t last much longer,’ he wrote next day. ‘While many of the men are looking forward dismally to the prospect of spending Christmas here, I would not be surprised to find myself at home for that event.’
On 21 December the men were summoned to the dining hall and told they were being released. The officer on duty said, however, that he needed their names and addresses.
‘It’s no use,’ cried Collins. ‘You’ll get no names and no addresses from us.’
The officer explained that he had no further interest in Michael Murphy, and did not ‘give a damn’ who was who, but they would have to help him if they wanted to get home by Christmas. ‘I will have to telegraph the name and address of every prisoner to the Home Office and Dublin Castle before he leaves the camp,’ he said. ‘It will be an all-night job for me unless you help. I will not be able to get through on time.’
Collins and Brennan-Whitmore talked to the officer and agreed to draw up the list themselves, which solved the officer’s problem. The men were then taken to Holyhead, where Collins got a boat to Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), arriving back in time for Christmas, a free and wiser man.
After his release Collins went home to Clonakilty for a brief holiday, but it was not the best of homecomings. His maternal grandmother had just died. ‘Poor old grandmother was dead when I came home, and then that brother of mine and his wife were both very unwell.’ The political scene, too, disturbed him. ‘From the national point of view,’ he wrote to Hannie, ‘I’m not too impressed with the people here. Too damn careful and cautious. A few old men aren’t too bad but most of the young ones are the limit. The little bit of material prosperity has ruined them.’
After a brief stay he returned to Dublin and applied for a job as secretary of the Irish National Aid and Volunteers’ Dependants’ Fund, an amalgamation of two charitable organisations established following the Easter Rebellion to help rebel prisoners and their families. One had been set up by Dublin Corporation and the other by Tom Clarke’s widow, Kathleen, who used gold left over from what Clan na Gael had provided to finance the rebellion. Collins did not realise that some friends from Frongoch pulled strings to get him the job. ‘We worked like hell, though we were careful to keep any knowledge from him of what we were doing,’ one of them recalled. ‘Mick would have taken a very sour view of our part in the affair.’
Collins realised that there was resistance to his appointment. ‘I was regarded with a certain amount of suspicion,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘I was young and would therefore be almost certain to be irresponsible to the importance of the position.’ He thought his involvement in the rebellion was frowned upon by the committee, especially the ladies. ‘In the end,’ he wrote, ‘chiefly by good fortune the job became mine.’
In his new position he was in contact with a wide spectrum of people sympathetic to the separatist movement. Kathleen Clarke provided him with the names of IRB contacts throughout the country. As his work was of a charitable nature, he was able to travel widely without rousing the slightest suspicion. With the recognised leaders still in jail, he became particularly influential in rebuilding the IRB. He took an active part and, in his own words, ‘had a great time’ supporting Count Plunkett’s campaign for a vacant parliamentary seat in Roscommon in the February 1917 by-election.
From the outset Collins was optimistic. ‘Consider the situation,’ he wrote on 19 January. ‘It is ripe for whatever one may wish.’ He believed the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Crown authorities were now ‘in a corner, driven there by what they have done and by the will of the people’.
‘The crowds were splendid,’ he wrote to Hannie. ‘It was really pleasing to see so many old lads coming out in the snow and voting for Plunkett with the greatest enthusiasm. Practically all the very old people were solid for us and on the other end the young ones.’ Plunkett won the seat, and in the process provided a tremendous boost for the separatist movement.
The work of reorganising the IRB took up a lot of Collins’s time because there was so much to be done. ‘It is only since being released that I’m feeling to the full all that we have lost in the way of men and workers,’ he noted. As a result he was ‘kept going from morning till night and usually into the next morning’. He was suspicious of some of the people who were offering help. ‘I haven’t the prevailing belief in the many conversions to our cause,’ he wrote. Indeed, he found that he ‘incurred a good deal of unpopularity through telling people so’.
The separatist movement at this time consisted of a number of different organisations, each with its own leader. Arthur Griffith was the head of Sinn Féin, Count Plunkett of the Liberty League, Eoin MacNeill was still nominally the head of the Irish Volunteers, and Thomas Ashe had been elected head of the IRB. In addition, there was Eamon de Valera, the elected spokesman of the prisoners in Lewes Jail. He had nominally been a member of the IRB, but had never been really active in the organisation.
De Valera owed his prominence to two facts: first, the men fighting under his command had inflicted the heaviest casualties on the British during the Easter Rising, and second, he was not closely identified with any of the various organisations. It was also later suggested that he was the only commandant to survive the executions and was the last commandant to surrender, but neither of those statements was true. Thomas Ashe and Thomas Hunter also survived the executions, while Ashe was the last to surrender and had been arguably the most effective commandant of the rising, seeing that the men under his command actually had victories over the Crown forces, whereas de Valera’s men had been defeated at Mount Street Bridge after putting up a stout resistance.
De Valera was in Dartmoor Jail one morning when, noticing MacNeill coming down a stairs, he called the other rebel prisoners to attention to salute their chief of staff. Even though MacNeill had nothing to do with the planning of the rebellion, indeed had tried to call it off and took no part in it, he was still sentenced to life in prison by the British. Many of the men despised MacNeill but in the circumstances they complied with the order, which cast de Valera in the role of a healing force among the prisoners. This was probably more responsible than anything else for de Valera’s subsequent election as spokesman for the prisoners.
The prisoners in the jail were held under much more stringent conditions than the internees at Frongoch. De Valera had to wear prison clothes and he was given the number ‘q95’ at Dartmoor. Silence was rigorously imposed and they were only allowed one letter a month. The tougher conditions, coupled with the fact that the Irish prisoners had little chance of associating with each other, meant that life in Dartmoor was vastly different from that which some of the men later said they ‘enjoyed’ at Frongoch.
‘Labour, as labour, we rather welcome for its own sake and as an employment, be it digging, carting manure, carrying sacks of coke on our back, or scrubbing our halls,’ de Valera wrote.
On one occasion he was caught throwing food to a colleague in another cell and the two of them were punished for breaking prison discipline. He went on hunger strike to protest and was transferred to the infirmary and then to Maidstone Prison, where he remained only a short time before being sent to Lewes, where the bulk of the Irish prisoners were brought together. The conditions there were much more relaxed and they were allowed to talk freely during the exercise period. De Valera was elected spokesman by the Irish prisoners over Ashe, who was seen as one of the IRB manipulators. De Valera, on the other hand, was regarded as a moderate who was more likely to unify the prisoners.
Robert Brennan, who was a fellow prisoner at the time and a lifelong supporter afterwards, noted later that de Valera was a very good listener. He actually encouraged debate; yet in the end he would insist on having his own way. ‘You can talk about this as much as you like, the more the better and from every angle,’ he would say. ‘In the last analysis, if you don’t agree with me, then I quit. You must get someone else to do it.’
His own abortive hunger strike had turned him against the tactic. ‘You may be tempted to Hunger Strike,’ he argued. ‘As a body do not attempt it whilst the war lasts unless you were assured from outside that the death of two or three of you would help the cause.’ Even at this early stage he obviously understood the value of propaganda, and it was mainly as a propagandist rather than as a soldier that he would distinguish himself as a leader.
From the outside the prisoners heard word of Count Plunkett’s election to Westminster and his refusal to take his seat. De Valera had shared a cell with him in Richmond Barracks only months earlier while awaiting trial, but he was sceptical about people associated with the rebellion entering politics. ‘It is a question whether it is good tactics (or strategy if you will) to provoke a contest in which defeat may well mean ruin,’ he wrote. ‘We should abstain officially from taking sides in these contests and no candidates should in future be officially recognised as standing in our interests or as representing our ideals.’
Collins managed to set up secret communications with Ashe through visitors smuggling messages into the jail. In April Collins came up with a plan to nominate one of the Lewes prisoners, Joe McGuinness from the Longford area, for a forthcoming by-election in the county. His aim was to dramatise the issue of the prisoners by asking the people to elect McGuinness as a means of demonstrating public support for the release of all the prisoners who took part in the rebellion. Although the response from de Valera and some IRB prisoners had been pretty critical, Collins was not about to be deterred.
‘If you only knew of the long fights I’ve had with A. G[riffith] and some of his pals before I could gain the present point,’ Collins wrote to Ashe. He had only with difficulty persuaded Sinn Féin not to put up a candidate in order not to split the separatist vote. Although Griffith had played no part in the Easter Rising, it was nevertheless widely identified with his party in the public mind, because Sinn Féin had been in the vanguard of the separatist movement for more than a decade.
‘This Sinn Féin stunt is bloody balderdash!’ Collins declared. ‘We want a Republic.’
Griffith stared at him and Collins became uneasy. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I don’t know much about Sinn Féin.’
‘Evidently not, Mr Collins, or you wouldn’t talk like you do,’ Griffith replied.
Collins knew well what Sinn Féin stood for. As a boy he had admired Griffith and had been active in the party during his early years in London. While he no longer shared Griffith’s more moderate views, he still thought enough of him to try to excuse his rash remark.
A stubborn, opinionated politician with a resolute determination, Griffith was a fanatic in his own right, but he was unselfish in his dedication to the separatist cause. He wanted full independence for Ireland, but he was not a republican. Instead, he advocated an Anglo-Irish dual monarchy on Austro-Hungarian lines, as he believed it could be achieved by non-violent means. Hence he agreed not to put up a Sinn Féin candidate against McGuinness so that the release of all the remaining prisoners who had taken part in the rebellion could be made an election issue.
While Collins probably still had a sneaking admiration for the Sinn Féin leader, he possibly felt that he had to play this down because of Griffith’s failure to support the rebellion. ‘Some of us have been having fierce rows with him,’ Collins wrote to Ashe. ‘In view of this it is rather disgusting to be “chalked up” as a follower of his.’ The Big Fellow did not want Ashe to think he was going soft because of his willingness to deal with Griffith, or even Eoin MacNeill who was in Lewes with Ashe. ‘For God’s sake,’ Collins wrote, ‘don’t think that Master A. G. is going to turn us into eighty-two’ites. Another thing, you ask about Eoin — well we did not approach him and by the Lord neither shall we.’
The remark about ‘eighty-two’ites’ was clearly a reference to the so-called Kilmainham Treaty that Parnell made with the authorities while in jail in 1882. It is not clear why he was referring to MacNeill — possibly Ashe had asked if they had considered running him as a candidate for Westminster — but Collins’s response ruled out having any truck with the man who had tried to call off the rebellion. The Big Fellow tended to express his views with a harshness that was often unattractive. He was described later as ‘the very incarnation of out-and-out physical force republicanism’ by Desmond Ryan.
Although Ashe liked the idea of running McGuinness, de Valera objected because a by-election was likely to be closely contested. De Valera argued that the movement’s morale would be irreparably damaged by defeat at the polls. While in prison he drew up guidelines that provide an insight into his cautious approach. ‘Never allow yourselves to be beaten,’ he wrote. ‘Having started a fight see that you win. Act then with caution. Carefully size up the consequences of a projected action. If you feel that in the long run you can be beaten then don’t begin.’ He persuaded McGuinness to decline the invitation to stand in the by-election.
But Collins was not about to stand for such timidity. Ignoring the instructions from Lewes Jail, he had McGuinness’s name put forward anyway, much to the annoyance of IRB prisoners like Seán McGarry and Con Collins, who had sided with de Valera against Ashe on the issue.
‘You can tell Con Collins, Seán McGarry and any other highbrows that I have been getting all their scathing messages, and am not a little annoyed, or at least was, but one gets so used to being called bad names and being misunderstood,’ Collins wrote to Ashe. The Big Fellow’s judgment was vindicated when McGuinness was elected in early May on the slogan: ‘Put him in to get him out.’
The victory helped to increase pressure on the Lloyd George government to release the remaining prisoners. Although de Valera had been slow to appreciate the changes in Ireland during his absence, he was a better judge of the international political scene. After the United States entered the war in April 1917 with the avowed aim of making the world ‘safe for democracy’, American pressure on the British was increased to force them to do something about the Irish question. Lloyd George announced plans for a convention in which people representing all shades of Irish opinion would be charged with drawing up a constitution for Ireland. Astutely perceiving that the British government might try to curry favour with public opinion by making the magnanimous gesture of releasing the remaining Irish prisoners, de Valera advocated a prison strike in order to deprive Britain ‘of any credit she may hope to gain from the release’.
The prisoners began their campaign on 28 May by demanding prisoner-of-war status and refusing to do prison work. When they were confined to their cells as punishment, they set about destroying the furnishings. De Valera and some other Irish prisoners were transferred to Maidstone, where he treated the prison governor with insolence and proceeded to wreck his cell.
Exaggerated accounts of what was happening in the prison were published in the press, and a public meeting was called in Dublin for 10 June to ‘protest against the treatment of the men in Lewes Jail’. Although the meeting was banned by the military authorities, a crowd of some two to three thousand gathered in Beresford Place in the early evening. They were addressed by Cathal Brugha, a veteran of the rebellion. He was arrested by Inspector John Mills of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and a riot ensued. As the inspector was leading Brugha to a nearby police station, he was hit over the head with a hurley and died of his injuries some hours later in Jervis Street Hospital. The father of three teenage children, he was a native of County Westmeath.
Against such a backdrop the British received little credit for their magnanimity when they released the prisoners a week later. It seemed Lloyd George was simply trying to make a virtue out of necessity. All were freed on 18 June. On the mail-boat home that night it was significant that de Valera’s first act was to turn to the United States by drawing up an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson and the American Congress. After signing it himself, the first person he asked to sign was Eoin MacNeill. It was also signed by twenty-four others, including Austin Stack, Desmond FitzGerald, Sean MacEntee, and Fionan Lynch.
Noting that Wilson had written that the United States was fighting ‘for the liberty, self-government and undictated development of all peoples’, they called for the Americans to act in Ireland’s case. ‘We ask of the Government of the United States of America, and the Governments of the free peoples of the world, to take immediate measures to inform themselves accurately and on the spot about the extent of liberty or attempted repression which we may encounter.’ The document was inserted into the US Congressional record and a facsimile of the original was published in the Gaelic American newspaper.
It was little over a year since the prisoners had been deported in disgrace, despised and dispirited, but they arrived back in Dublin to a tumultuous welcome next day. At around 4 a.m. there were some three thousand people waiting at the North Wall for the boat, but it docked at Kingstown. The men lined up and de Valera gave the order to march off to an awaiting train. By the time the train reached Dublin the crowd had moved from the North Wall to Westland Row railway station and the entire length of the platform was thronged with young men and women carrying and waving tricolours. De Valera and the other leaders refused to make any comment about their prison treatment. Some of the men also refused, saying they were under orders that all statements should come through de Valera.
Collins, who helped organise the welcoming reception, was a model of efficiency in his capacity as secretary of the Irish National Aid and Volunteers’ Dependants’ Fund. He had worked out the travel costs of all the released prisoners from Dublin to their homes, but his rather abrupt, businesslike manner was a little too officious for some.
Robert Brennan, one of those released from Lewes, had already noticed the pale, fast-moving, energetic young man darting here and there. He was all business. He frequently dispensed with formalities like shaking hands or even saying good morning. He came over and, without bothering to introduce himself, told Brennan to look after those returning to Wexford.
‘He had a roll of notes in one hand and silver in the other,’ Brennan recalled. ‘He said that the fares to Enniscorthy amounted to so much, and I found out later the sum was correct to a penny. He added that he was giving me five shillings, in addition, for each man, to cover incidental expenses. As he handed me the money, he looked into my eyes as if appraising me. With a quick smile, he shook my hand and turned to someone else.’
‘Who is he?’ Brennan asked.
‘Michael Collins,’ a friend replied.
‘I don’t like him,’ said Brennan.