The honeymoon with the British war effort was doomed to be short-lived. For one thing, Dublin, unlike Belfast and many British cities, possessed no war industries. Those products it did manufacture, such as biscuits, beer, whiskey, and confectionery, would not budge the front line ‘by even an inch.’1 However, they could help pay for munitions that would.
The first war budget, in November 1914, showed the shape of things to come. Income tax was doubled, from 3¾ to 7½ per cent, but the threshold for liability remained at £160 a year, well above the annual income of skilled workers and most of Dublin’s lower middle classes. Far more serious was the decision to increase duties on consumer items such as tea, from 5d to 8d in the pound, and to increase taxes on porter, stout and strong ales by between 17s and 19s a barrel.
The thinking behind such measures was to reduce spending on luxury items, improve public health and provide badly needed funds for war industries.2 Whatever the impact in Britain, the implications for Ireland’s drinks industry were disastrous. With the prospect of a protracted conflict, a second war budget was introduced in May 1915, which was even worse. Not only was duty on beer almost doubled for the second time in six months but the duty on whiskey, which had escaped an increase in November, was doubled from the pre-war rates. As if to add insult to injury, the light ales brewed in Britain were spared.3
Irish public opinion took offence at British Liberal politicians who felt that more abstemious habits were a small price to pay for victory. The Irish Independent proclaimed:
In Ireland the public have something more serious to consider than mere interference with their daily habits. Here we have at stake the existence of industries which are the most important in some of our largest centres, and which are the actual main stay of smaller towns.
It predicted that thousands of investors would suffer and that state intervention would be required to deal with the resultant unemployment. The new taxes represented ‘prohibition without compensation.’ Not only did the rest of the nationalist press agree but so did the Irish Times, voice of southern Unionism.4
On Sunday 2 May a mass meeting was held at the Nine Acres in the Phoenix Park. It was the last great demonstration of constitutional nationalism in the city, and already its patriotic credentials were being called into question. William Field, one of the longest-serving and most radical Parnellite MPs in the city, was heckled for not voting against the new legislation. He told the crowd:
It was arranged by the head of the Party [Redmond] that we were not to vote, and I am a member of that Party and under the discipline of it. I am obliged to obey orders.5
What infuriated many nationalists was that previous big increases in the duty on whiskey had been introduced by the same Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in 1909, when the Irish Party had tamely accepted it as part of the price for keeping the Liberals in power and securing home rule. The Cork Free Press wrote that no-one knew better than John Redmond
the terrible effects Mr. Lloyd George’s frightful … taxes will have on Irish trade. His own speech is clear and irrevocable evidence that he regarded Mr. Lloyd George’s proposals as fatal to Ireland … Yet when he got the opportunity to back his words with votes he collapsed.
Such was the rancour in nationalist ranks that the Irish Independent reprinted this comment, despite its traditional antipathy towards the rival publication.6
In fact there was little that nationalist Ireland could do. The Liberal government had the support of the Tory opposition, and the military. The war had fundamentally changed the political equation in the House of Commons, something Redmond understood but the Irish nationalist voter did not.
Things would become a lot worse in August 1916, when the Output of Beer (Restriction) Act limited production to 85 per cent of the previous year’s output. Distillers had production cut even more drastically, to 30 per cent of the average yearly output. The Immature Spirits (Restriction) Act (1915) had already banned the sale of any stock produced in the previous three years, and in December the Irish distilleries were taken over by the Ministry of Munitions and converted to the production of industrial alcohol.
By then about half the work force in the brewing and distilling industries had been laid off, many of them constituents of William Field, who had been heckled in the Phoenix Park. Not surprisingly, brewers and distillers with surplus employees were among the most enthusiastic in co-operating with the Department of Recruiting in supplying men to meet the butcher’s bill in Flanders.7
One of Field’s old colleagues in the Irish Party had died only days before the Phoenix Park rally, opening the way for Dublin’s first by-election of the war. John Nannetti, the long-serving Nationalist MP for College Green, was already incapacitated by the series of strokes he had suffered. A printer by trade and the founding father of the Dublin Trades Council, he had been Redmond’s chief link with the trade unions and his adviser on labour matters. He represented the dominance of the craft unions in the labour world of the previous century and had long been out of favour with the younger generation of more militant leaders. When he died there were few of the usual tributes, and one old comrade on the trades council, Peadar Macken, described him as ‘an example of what a labour man ought not to be … tied up with a party inimical to Labour.’8
In fact the timing of his death could not have been better from the trades council’s point of view. Its new leadership had just taken over the Labour Party organisation in the city, and it quickly nominated Thomas Farren of the Stonecutters’ Union to fight the election. His opponent was the secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, John Dillon Nugent. A native of Keady, Co. Armagh, Nugent was a close ally of the northern nationalist leader Joe Devlin and had been associated with the strong-arm tactics used by the AOH against opponents within the nationalist movement—and outside it, such as suffragists and socialists. He had become one of the city’s leading insurance brokers through the AOH’s own company, the Hibernian Insurance Fund.
Devlin, who had a strong working-class base in west Belfast, liked to portray himself as a champion of labour and to remind audiences that ‘whatever rights labour enjoys in Ireland, it owes them to the [British] Labour Party.’9 He invited the Dublin Trades Council to send delegates to the convention at which Nugent was selected, but the union leaders had not forgotten Nugent’s role in the 1913 lock-out, when, besides using the AOH organisation in the city to undermine them, he had joined with the Catholic clergy in inciting mobs against Dora Montefiore and her helpers when they tried to bring strikers’ children to temporary homes in England.10
Farren had been one of the 1913 leaders, though he was not as well known as Jim Larkin or James Connolly. It was Connolly who wrote Farren’s election address. He described the selection of Nugent as ‘a studied insult to the Dublin working class’11 and Nugent himself as ‘the malevolent enemy of trade unionism on every occasion, great and small, where he could exercise his influence.’12 Farren’s brief electoral address attacked the Irish Party for blocking the extension to Ireland of ‘the best provisions of every social reform’ passed by the House of Commons.
The Labour candidate also declared his opposition to partition, and called for votes for women.13 The Irish Citizen, weekly paper of the women’s suffrage movement, reciprocated by supporting Farren’s campaign. On election day, 11 June, Farren obtained 1,816 votes, against 2,445 for Nugent. Most worrying from the nationalist viewpoint was the fact that only 4,261 voters out of more than 8,000 bothered to turn out.
It was a very creditable performance, considering that Farren entered the contest only seven days beforehand and that there had been no systematic canvass or organised campaign to combat the AOH and UIL machines. Nor, apart from the Citizen, did Farren receive a sympathetic press. Nugent’s campaign accused Farren of ‘Larkinism and Syndicalism combined with pro-Germanism,’ as well as being opposed to the war effort and to the Catholic Church. Socialist though he might be, Farren took the opportunity of the vote of thanks to the returning officer to tell the crowd he was secretary of the largest men’s confraternity in Dublin and had been a member for twenty-two years.
Nugent had a tough time from hecklers at the count, who accused him of being a bailiff and an employer of scab labour. Farren had to appeal for quiet to allow his successful opponent to conclude his election speech.14
While some of the Labour activists, such as William O’Brien, had worried that their anti-war stance had told against them, the attractions of the Redmondite position were fast fading. On 25 May the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, announced a grand wartime coalition. Among the new Tory ministers was Carson; but Redmond opted to remain outside the Cabinet. Nationalist Ireland saw it as yet another blow to the cause of home rule. The comment of the Dundalk Examiner was typical of a mood of deepening disillusion in nationalist ranks.
The Irish Party has been playing a certain game for ten years. The denouement has now come, and it is only too manifest that they cut a sorry figure.
Nor was the news from the front good. Dubliners had been treated to lavish if inaccurate war news from the outbreak of hostilities, including the doings of local units, such as a report of how thirteen members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers made it back to their lines with the help of Belgian farmers. Their graphic description of the German ambush of their unit near Courtois—‘they shot us down by scores’15—was hardly reassuring to would-be recruits or their families. But these were men of the tiny regular army, who often had few ties outside their units. It would be 1915 before the impact of the conflict hit the home front, as Kitchener’s ‘first 100,000’ completed their training and entered the fray.
The last act of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ came in the spring. On 22 April 1915 the Germans launched the Second Battle of Ypres to try to capture the town. On 25 April the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers took part in the counter-attack at Saint-Julien. Observers noted that they advanced in ‘faultless order’ into the morning mist, to be swept away by machine-gun fire. One detachment managed to reach the town under Captain Tobin Maunsell but was forced to withdraw for lack of support. The battalion had lost 510 members in the attack. Incredibly, the remnants of the unit raised ‘three cheers for Jim Larkin’ when they returned to the trenches, as if they had just attended a rally outside Liberty Hall. Undoubtedly the unit contained elements of the ITGWU, probably reservists forced to rejoin the regiment when hostilities began.
The battalion, reconstituted with reinforcements, was back in action a month later at Château du Nord, renamed by British soldiers Mouse Trap Farm. It was supposed to be recuperating when it was the target of a strong German attack on 24 May. By the time relief forces arrived it had suffered 583 casualties. The farm remained in allied hands, a heap of ‘mud and rubbish,’ but the battalion had practically ceased to exist, as had its sister unit, the 1st Battalion, which had lost 569 dead in the Gallipoli landings at Seddülbahir (called Sedd el-Bahr by the British army), which had taken place on 25 April.
What made the sacrifice of the Dubliners there all the more futile was that the naval crews bringing them ashore were all killed by Turkish fire from the shore, and the onslaught continued remorselessly as the boats drifted in a reddening sea. Some men drowned, weighed down by their equipment, as they leapt overboard and tried to reach the shore. Those who succeeded were caught on the underwater barbed wire the Turks had laid and were shot as they tried to struggle free.16
Little of the horror of war, especially as it affected Dublin units, seeped past the military censors. Of more immediate import was news that Brigadier-General Hill had put all licensed premises in Dublin off limits to soldiers—in the interests of discipline. The order included sailors and policemen, and applied also to restaurants and theatres where drink was sold. The Licensed Vintners’ Association ‘thoroughly agreed’ with the decision, and so did most civilians.17
By the summer of 1915 the war was visibly affecting mainstream politics in the city. At the corporation’s meeting on 14 July a maverick nationalist councillor, John Ryan, proposed a motion demanding that the Government of Ireland Act (1914)—which granted a measure of home rule but had been suspended for a year—be implemented ‘for all Ireland on September 17th next’ at the latest. Two UIL stalwarts, Councillors William Delaney and Thomas Murty O’Beirne, quickly proposed an amendment that the corporation ‘look with confidence to Mr. Redmond and the Irish Party, to select the best and speediest means and the proper moment for bringing the Home Rule settlement into operation by the summoning of the Irish Parliament.’ Although the amendment was adopted, it was only by 30 votes to 22, with several nationalist councillors voting for the original motion, alongside Labour and Sinn Féin members.18
Even the watered-down version was too much for Redmond, who wrote back from Aghavannagh, Co. Wicklow, on 20 July expressing concern at the damage the motion could do in ‘extremely critical times,’ when ‘a single false step might ruin the work of 35 years.’ He assured Dublin Corporation that
nothing can undo the enactment of Home Rule by the Imperial Parliament. But let us recognise the great and overshadowing fact that the war … dominates all other issues … [The] highest duty and most vital interest of Ireland … is to do everything in her power to support the cause of the Allies.
Ironically, he also warned of the need to maintain ‘the Volunteer Movement, and to stand ready for any emergency that might arise.’ No-one could tell
when the war may take a turn which may bring Ireland’s hour; and I appeal … to my countrymen to organise and prepare, so that, when that hour does come, they may be ready.
At the meeting of 6 September the letter was incorporated in the minutes on the proposal of the High Sheriff, Councillor Patrick Shortall, a builder who had locked his employees out in 1913, and seconded by Councillor William O’Hara, who owed his narrow victory over Labour in the 1914 municipal elections to strong clerical support.19 Redmond would become increasingly dependent on the most conservative and unpopular elements in the UIL and AOH in the city.
Although his letter was adopted by the councillors, at the same meeting they also passed a motion ‘that we declare we will not have Conscription.’ It was proposed by Alderman Tom Kelly of Sinn Féin and passed by 31 votes to 7. This arose out of a conference hosted in the council chamber on Tuesday 20 July, chaired by another radical nationalist councillor, Laurence O’Neill. The conference attracted a wide audience, and even some of the establishment figures on the platform made speeches that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. A former Lord Mayor, Alderman J. J. Farrell, said:
In Dublin young men have been advised to go to war by the effective means of depriving them of work. In England there are millions of men fit to fight if they were only willing. The Government do not want anything from Dublin or the South but blood and money. If the two Volunteer forces in Ireland made up their minds that there should be no conscription there would be none.
Other nationalist councillors and the maverick Irish Party MP Laurence Ginnell shared the platform with Farrell, along with James Connolly, Councillor William T. Cosgrave of Sinn Féin and members of the Catholic clergy. In fact no fewer than six Catholic clergymen, including four parish priests, wrote public letters of support for the meeting, while apologising for not being able to attend.20 Incipient respectability was descending on a cause that had been the solitary haven of Connolly’s Irish Neutrality League when war broke out. The seven members of the corporation who voted against the anti-conscription motion included the few remaining unionists and a former unionist councillor, Andrew Beattie, who now sat as an independent ratepayers’ representative for the South City ward, as well as some moderate or independent nationalists who represented areas such as Drumcondra and Glasnevin, which had significant Protestant-unionist electorates. The eccentric, deeply corrupt and contrary-minded ‘Labour’ councillor John Saturninus Kelly also opposed the motion, fuelling rumours that he was ‘on the take’ from Dublin Castle.21
In August there was more bad news from Gallipoli. As a concession to the Irish Party, Field-Marshal Kitchener had reluctantly agreed that the 10th Division, recruited almost entirely in Ireland, would be dubbed an Irish division. Its volunteers landed at Suvla Bay on 7 August, on the opposite side of the Gallipoli peninsula to the embattled forces at Seddülbahir. The objective was to take the Turks in the rear and clear the way to Istanbul.
It was another debacle. A third of the division’s strength was diverted to the Seddülbahir beach-head, and command of the rest constantly changed until its commander, Lieutenant-General Bryan Mahon, resigned in protest.22
In less than a week the Dublin Fusiliers ‘Pals’ were reduced from 239 to 106. One of the field ambulance brigades working with them lost 23 out of 33 men, killed, wounded or captured in three days of intense fighting to capture the heights of Kiretch Tepe above the bay. German officers with the Turkish troops would later report that the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and Royal Munster Fusiliers who took part in the operation came close to capturing the ridge. When they failed, the defeated troops were trapped in a beach-head rarely free from enemy fire and so congested that the stretchers of the wounded were set side by side on the sand. The lack of hospital tents meant they had to lie in the sun, amid human faeces and clouds of flies. Lack of adequate supplies of fresh water was a constant problem, and the men subsisted on tinned meat that was sometimes rotten, because the cans had been punctured in transit. Meanwhile rows of British bayonets glinted on the slopes above them, marking the spot where their dead owners lay.
Altogether the 10th Division suffered more than two thousand fatalities at Gallipoli in August, 569 of them from the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. When the wounded are taken into account, the division lost half its fighting strength. An officer of the 7th Battalion wrote with unconscious irony: ‘Ireland may mourn, but the Irish may hold up their heads and be proud of their Tommies.’23
The truth emerged slowly. Reports controlled by the War Office had given all credit for the repulse of the German attack at Saint-Julien on the western front in April to the Canadian units involved, while the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps received what little credit there was to be gleaned from the Seddülbahir landings in the same month. In August despatches also concentrated initially on the efforts of the ANZAC forces to push northwards up the peninsula to link up with the 10th Division at Suvla. Even then the coverage was significantly less than that given to the western and eastern fronts, or indeed to the crash of the Holyhead mail train near Rugby on Saturday 14 August, in which ten people died—four of them Irish women and one a Dublin Fusilier.
The torpedoing of the troopship Royal Edward in the Mediterranean with the loss of a thousand men shortly afterwards, and the sinking of the transatlantic liner Arabica off Cork in the same week, further distracted attention from the costly failures at Gallipoli. A writer to the Irish Independent expressed his frustration at the lack of coverage in a brief but sharp letter.
One is … struck by the entire absence of mention of the two Irish regiments who, at terrible losses in officers and men, made this landing good. Viz.—1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the 1st Royal Munster Fusiliers: The 6th and 7th Battalions of both these famous regiments are now ‘somewhere’ in or near the Gallipoli Peninsula, and, given an opportunity, they will no doubt emulate the deeds of their line battalions. It is to be hoped … that they will not be officially passed over.24
The letter was signed ‘Dubster.’25
On 24 August the immensity of the losses began to emerge in the Irish press, coinciding with news that the Government of Ireland Act was now likely to be suspended until after the war, or even longer. John Redmond called on nationalist Ireland to rally behind him so that the country could speak with ‘one voice’ and ensure that this threat was defeated. He received short shrift from the Irish Independent, which pointed out that ‘the time to have exhibited strength was five years ago.’ It put his present problems down to a ‘lamentable initial weakness’ in tackling opposition to home rule.
The next day’s edition published a group photograph of officers taken at Portobello Barracks (now Cathal Brugha Barracks) before their departure for the Dardanelles. Of the 25 men in the picture, 18 were listed as killed or wounded.26 But it was only on 27 August that Dubliners began to learn of the full scale of the disaster at Gallipoli. On the same day, sections of a despatch on the landings written by the commanding officer in the military theatre of operations, General Sir Ian Hamilton, also appeared in the press. ‘The young troops of the new divisions did not get on fast enough, and the first advantage of surprise was lost,’ he wrote. As a result, gains made by veteran New Zealanders had to be given up.
Details of the despatch, widely circulated in British newspapers, added insult and hurt to bereaved families in Ireland. The Irish Independent counselled that it
would be better for the public to suspend judgement until the facts are fully ascertained. The casualty lists, at any rate, show that the Irish troops fought bravely and suffered heavily.’27
It was another nail in John Redmond’s political coffin. Even his request that the 10th Division be allowed to undergo its baptism of fire under the command of its own Irish commander had been ignored.
Over the coming days Irish papers published horrific stories of the carnage. Father J. Fahey, a recently ordained Catholic priest and chaplain, described the scene at Suvla.
An inferno broke loose. It was appalling. The men were packed so closely that one bullet would wound or kill three men. There was dreadful slaughter in the boats.
I could see only what was happening in my own. First the ‘cox’ was shot; then an oarsman fell dead across my feet; then a bullet came through the boat and grazed the puttees on my leg; then another of the men collapsed without a sound … I never expected to reach the shore alive.
There was only one anxiety amongst the men—to reach the shore and rush the Turks with the bayonet.
However, the boat struck the bottom about twenty yards from the shore, and the men had to wade the rest of the way. As Father Fahey jumped into the water a bullet went through the sleeve of his jacket ‘and caught a lad behind me. A [piece of] shrapnel splashed a man’s brains over me,’ while a shot that hit the gunwale
almost blinded me with splinters. I got on the beach exhausted and had to lie down amongst the falling bullets to get my breath.
A soldier trying to dig a foxhole in the sand beside him was shot through the heart. Looking back, Father Fahey saw that
the beach was strewn with dead and wounded. Two boats landed about 50 yards from where I was. They held 50 soldiers each but only 20 came ashore altogether. They came under fire from a maxim gun. But these 20 had their revenge; they captured the gun and bayoneted every member of the crew.28
The pages of the newspapers began to fill with photographs of dead and wounded Fusiliers officers. Two brothers reported wounded were Captain J. A. D. Dempsey and Lieutenant P. H. D. Dempsey. Captain Dempsey was ‘very popular in musical and dramatic circles in Dublin’ and had served on the entertainments committee of the battalion.
Personal details of private soldiers who were casualties were rare, but an exception was Corporal F. J. Murphy. While thousands of his comrades were being buried at Suvla, he was awarded the honour of a funeral with military honours through the streets of Dublin because he had been one of the fatalities on the Holyhead mail train the previous Saturday. Dubliners were also able to examine replicas of a dug-out and a shooting trench in the grounds of Iveagh House as part of the Royal Horticultural Society show, transferred from the RDS grounds, now under military occupation. These were reportedly the most popular attractions.29
The next day’s Irish Independent published a group photograph of twenty-eight officers of the ‘Pals Battalion’, of whom nine had been killed and a further six wounded. The wounded included the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Downing, and Lieutenant Ernest Julian, Reid professor of law at TCD. Julian had died in fact on 8 August, three weeks before the photograph was published. Errors in news reports were compounded by censorship and slow communications. Page Dickinson described Julian as ‘brilliant in his career and … making his name as fast as man can at his own calling.’30 It is a measure of the impact that the Dardanelles fiasco was having that Dickinson—an architect from a staunch unionist background who left Ireland in the 1920s rather than live under the Free State—felt ‘unable to speak of Gallipoli: of all the horrible, ill-thought-out phases of the war that reflect discredit on those in authority, it was the worst.’31
Lieutenant Ewen Cameron, an officer in the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, died without even reaching the front. The Irish Independent reported with brutal clarity:
He was found shot dead in a lavatory of the 10.15 a.m. train from Dublin, between Greystones and Newcastle. The door was bolted from the inside. The bullet, which had been discharged from an automatic pistol, pierced the brain.32
Cameron’s brother Charles had served as a captain in the same regiment before perishing in a drowning accident shortly before the war broke out. Ewen had been
vigorously assisting in the recruiting campaign, with the result that for the past few days he had shown serious signs of complete nervous breakdown. The news of the numerous fatalities and casualties among his fellow officers, it is said, also depressed him deeply.
Their father, Sir Charles Cameron, was deputy grand master of Ireland’s Freemasons, though he was better known for the previous half-century as Dublin’s chief medical officer. ‘This terrible blow will [make] the little of life left to me meaningless,’ he recorded in his diary that night.33
Another family deeply affected by events at Gallipoli was that of Edward Lee. A Methodist of modest origins from Cornahir, near Tyrrellspass, Co. Westmeath, he was known as the local man who went to Dublin and became a millionaire. He owned a string of drapery shops in Dublin and its suburbs. He had married Annie Shackleton, a member of the well-known Quaker business family, and had earlier worked for another well-known Quaker family, the Pims, at their drapery shop in South Great George’s Street. In 1885 he established his own shop in Bray and the same year a second one in Kingstown. Other branches followed in Rathmines and the city centre.
Lee was renowned for two things. In 1889 he initiated a half-day holiday on Thursdays for his staff, which was later adopted by most shops in the city, and in 1913 he was almost alone among employers in Dublin in opposing the lock-out. He was certainly the most consistent and vociferous opponent of William Martin Murphy’s strategy of starving the workers into submission. He joined the Industrial Peace Committee established by Tom Kettle,34 which tried unsuccessfully to arrange a settlement to the dispute.
Lee had served as chairman of Bray Urban District Council in 1908, sponsored by Lord Powerscourt, in the Unionist interest. The first toast at the dinner held to celebrate his election was ‘The King.’ Two years later there was a luncheon in the Royal Marine Hotel in Kingstown to mark his handing over of the Dungar Terrace housing development, which he had built at his own expense for employees, to the urban district council. When the war came he would make his premises available for collecting fruit, fresh vegetables and game for wounded soldiers convalescing in the city’s hospitals.
Life must have seemed idyllic in the summer of 1914, although Edward and Annie Lee had already known tragedy in their lives, with the deaths of five of their nine children in infancy. The surviving children lived with their parents in a big house, Bellevue, in Cross Avenue, with large grounds and tennis courts. Two of the sons, Edward and Tennyson, would follow their father into the family firm, while Robert became a doctor and Joe a barrister. A dinner was held in the Dolphin Hotel in East Essex Street, Dublin, to celebrate the calling of Joseph Bagnall Lee to the bar. Again the first toast was ‘The King,’ followed by ‘Mr. Joseph Bagnall Lee,’ ‘The Irish Bar,’ and ‘Prosperity to Ireland.’
Joe Lee was a brilliant student at Trinity. He was senior moderator (in first place among honours graduates) in legal and political science, joint author of a book on criminal injuries and auditor of the Law Students’ Debating Society. The Lord Chancellor, Sir Samuel Walker, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, were in the audience at King’s Inns for his inaugural address on the subject of ‘The Law and the Problems of Poverty.’
It was an unremarkable performance, however. Lee sought reforms in the old workhouse system and the new labour exchanges to ensure greater discrimination between the ‘deserving poor,’ who should be helped, and ‘the loafer and semicriminal with whom they have no option but to associate.’ The greatest excitement came when suffragists in the audience heckled Birrell.
With the outbreak of war, three of the Lee sons volunteered. Joe and Tennyson were sponsored by a family friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Verschoyle T. Worship, and received commissions as officers in the 6th Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, his own unit. Robert, the doctor in the family, was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Joe Lee was killed within hours of landing at Suvla Bay, leading his men in the assault on the hotly disputed Kiretch Tepe ridge. Tennyson, who saw his brother’s dead body being brought back into the lines, was severely wounded in the left arm. A month later and a thousand miles away their brother Robert was promoted captain for his work under fire at a field hospital in the battle for ‘Hill 60’ at Ypres. His companion, O. S. Watkins, a Methodist chaplain, wrote of their experiences:
All through the night the ghastly stream poured in. I will not attempt to picture that dressing station—blood, horror, shrieks and groans. I wish I could forget it myself, and do not desire that anybody else should have to carry the burden of that memory.35
But the horrors of war, or at least its consequences, were beginning to make themselves visible in Dublin. On 7 September, just as the battle of Hill 60 was opening, no less than 611 war wounded arrived at the North Wall on the hospital ship Oxfordshire from Le Havre. Half of them were despatched, ‘in a dismal downpour of rain,’ to various hospitals in Dublin and the rest to Belfast, Cork and the Curragh. Members of the Automobile Association organised private transport to bring many of the wounded to local hospitals.
The death of yet another of Dublin’s ageing nationalist MPs passed almost unnoticed in the clamour of war. William Abraham had few connections with the capital. Like Nannetti, he had been a craft union stalwart in his day, representing the Carpenters and Joiners at the British Trades Union Congress in Dublin in 1880. Like Nannetti, he was out of tune and out of touch with the younger generation of radical labour leaders. Unlike Nannetti, he had first come to prominence through his work for the Land League and had been imposed on the electorate of the Harbour division by the Irish Party machine in 1910 when local UIL branches could not agree on a candidate. Since his election he had hardly visited the city, and he even deprived the party of the bonus of a political funeral in Dublin by being buried in the Nonconformist section of St Pancras Cemetery in London.36
‘It’s the best Labour seat in Dublin, and win it we must,’37 was William O’Brien’s assessment of the Harbour division; yet Labour never contested the election. Connolly was pressed to run but refused: he was already embarked upon a course of revolutionary violence that would lead to a firing squad eight months later. He believed that the war had made elections a distraction for the working class. As early as August 1914 he had expressed the hope that ‘Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.’38
The president of the Dublin branch of the Railway Clerks’ Association, W. B. McMahon, was prevailed upon to run instead but withdrew within twenty-four hours, pleading ill-health.39
In the event, the writ was not moved until 24 September, nominations closed on 28 September, and the election took place on 1 October, making it one of the shortest election campaigns on record. It was also one of the dirtiest—a three-cornered dogfight between three nationalists, Alderman J. J. Farrell, Pierce O’Mahony (better known as ‘the O’Mahony’) and a local publican called Alfie Byrne. Byrne cheerfully admitted that he wanted an MP’s salary because he could not make a living from ‘my little pub’ (the Vernon Bar in Talbot Street).40
O’Mahony was expected to win. He was a former Parnellite MP and had been sympathetic to the workers during the 1913 Lock-out, speaking at meetings and making a substantial donation to the strike fund, whereas Byrne had been excoriated by Larkin, who famously denounced the Vernon Bar as the resort of ‘slum landlords, scabs, prostitutes’ bullies … Hibs, Orangemen, Temperance humbugs … the brothel keeper, the white slaver,’ and other unpleasant characters.41 But Byrne won comfortably, with 2,200 votes to O’Mahony’s 917. The reason, besides the assiduous canvassing and constituency work for which he would become legendary, was that Byrne opposed conscription, the penal war taxes on Irish industry and the British war effort in general.
In contrast, O’Mahony was a strenuous recruiter for the British army. While Byrne shared anti-conscription platforms with Connolly, O’Mahony was addressing ever more disorderly election meetings. He vainly invoked the memory of Parnell and promised workers that a grateful British government would provide school meals for children, slum clearance and even munitions factories; but hecklers reminded him that the ‘Liberals killed Parnell.’ When a platform colleague of O’Mahony told them that the ‘Home Rule Bill’ was now an act, a wit cried back, ‘But not a fact,’ to loud laughter.
Farrell was never in the running. Despite his own anti-conscription stance at corporation meetings,42 he held to the party line on the war, and was considered a somewhat risqué figure, as he had opened one of Ireland’s first cinemas, the Pillar Picture House in Sackville Street, a few months earlier. A completely spurious rumour that he wanted to abolish Catholic schools was readily believed, and his two clerical sponsors were scared into disowning him on the eve of the election. They subsequently apologised sheepishly for their behaviour, but the damage had been done.43
Gallipoli had discredited the war effort in Dublin. The criticism of the young Irish troops by Sir Ian Hamilton, especially when it was contrasted with the favourable references by the War Office to the ANZAC forces and increasing evidence of poor logistical and operational planning, not only provided ammunition for militant nationalists but even shook the faith of Castle Catholics, such as Katherine Tynan, a confidante of the former Lord Lieutenant’s wife, Lady Aberdeen.
So many of our friends had gone out in the 10th Division to perish at Suvla. For the first time came bitterness, for we felt that their lives had been thrown away and their heroism had gone unrecognised. Suvla—the burning beach … and the blazing scrub, does not bear thinking on. Dublin was full of mourning.
On a visit to the Aberdeens she met two new war widows and a girl whose brother had died.
One got to know the look of new widows—hard bright eyes, burning for the relief of tears, a high, feverish flush in the cheeks, hands that trembled, and occasionally an uncertain movement of the young head.44
The Irish Times voiced the pious hope that
the Unionists and Nationalists who stormed the hill at Suvla have sealed a new bond of patriotism and the spirits of dead soldiers will cry trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of internecine strife in Ireland.45
But the northern unionist press was having none of it. The Northern Whig of Belfast used figures from a Protestant chaplain to claim that the majority of the 10th Division were neither Catholic nor Irish, which was probably true after British drafts made up for casualties. However, the records show that two-thirds of those who died or were wounded during the fighting had been domiciled in Ireland.46
The Northern Whig had a more legitimate argument when it pointed out that nationalists would not be able to claim political ownership of the 10th Division much longer, because recruitment had dried up at home. Major Bryan Cooper, a former Unionist MP for South Dublin who commanded a battalion of the Connaught Rangers at Suvla Bay, described the division as ‘shattered’ and felt increasingly demoralised by the fact that most of the replacements were British.
By the beginning of 1916 recruitment in Dublin had fallen below four hundred, the lowest figure for the entire war. But almost seventeen thousand had already signed up, and an additional eight thousand would do so before the war ended. In total, the Dublin metropolitan area provided more than 20 per cent of Ireland’s manpower to the war effort. This was by far the largest contribution outside the Belfast recruitment area, which contributed 36 per cent of recruits.47 Dublin was always a strong traditional recruitment area for the British army, with figures almost always exceeding those for Belfast. However, this pattern was strongly reversed during the First World War. (See tables 3 and 4.)
Recruitment to the regular army, 1899–1913
Recruitment, 1914–18
The flow of casualties from the front was an immediate reminder of the human cost of the war for everyone. By the end of 1915 there were five hundred war wounded in Dublin hospitals, often being treated side by side with other patients, such as Seán O’Casey, the future playwright, who was being cared for in St Vincent’s Hospital for TB. Years later O’Casey would remember Richard Francis Tobin, a former army surgeon whose bad hearing made him wield his ear trumpet ‘like a Field Marshal’s baton.’ Tobin’s only son, Paddy, had been a captain in the ‘Pals Battalion’ of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, killed on 15 August 1915. He often asked patients for news from the front, especially if they had been at Gallipoli. ‘He seemed to think when he was close to them, he was closer to his son.’48
Of course the cost of the conflict was also being felt by the wider community. Inflation continued to erode incomes. The activities of German submarines and the insatiable demands of the British war machine affected the price of everything. A good example was coal, which increased from 22s a ton to 40s between the start of the war and February 1915. The risk to transport in crossing the Irish Sea and the demand from war industries in Britain meant that even hospitals treating war casualties, such as St Vincent’s, were asked to reduce consumption.
Most widely affected were the ratepayers and electricity consumers. Both were mainly businesses and middle-class householders, as the poor still relied on paraffin lamps for light. The corporation’s coal bill would soar from £22,000 in the year ending 31 March 1915 to a projected £53,700 in the following twelve months.49 The Electricity Supply Committee reported that, although the city had acquired another 830 customers since the war began, mainly domestic subscribers, consumption had declined by 26,000 units, because of shortages and price rises. Some 21,000 units were accounted for by the hard-pressed middle classes, while theatres, cinemas and licensed premises consumed the rest, despite restricted opening hours and the ban on police and military personnel in public houses.50
The one bright spot on the horizon was the fact that the committee had stocked up on carbon electrodes for street lighting just before the war broke out. Unfortunately, replacements from the German supplier were no longer available, and Dublin would have to pay up to three times as much for poorer-quality British substitutes.51
The financial situation had become critical by mid-1915. If desperate measures were not adopted the respectable £9,600 profit for 1914/15 would be transformed into a loss of £23,000 by March 1916. The Electricity Supply Committee came up with two possible solutions: to meet the entire cost by putting an extra 1d on lighting and ½d on power, or to use up cash reserves and increase the rate for lighting by only ½d and for energy by a farthing (¼d). However, it noted that prices would have to remain at the new level—even if the war ended—until cash reserves were restored.
Not surprisingly, the councillors opted for the latter course, but only after deferring a decision for three months in the hope of better news from the front.52 The corporation was also paying 50 per cent more for cement, tar, wood and asphalt than before the war, and paying up to 10 per cent more in wages, including allowances for employees at the front.53
At least food prices had stabilised, and bakeries in particular showed considerable restraint in passing on costs. But demand from Britain, coupled with tax on luxuries such as tea and sugar, still exerted upward pressure on prices, even for such basic items as wheat and potatoes, by the autumn of 1915.54
Eating out was becoming significantly dearer, as restaurants had been another luxury area to be taxed. In September the Vegetarian Café in College Street raised the price of shilling teas by a penny ‘to cover the cost of everything, including the tea tax.’ The Red Bank Restaurant in D’Olier Street had already increased the price of shilling lunches by the same amount, but another penny was to be charged on a 4d pot of tea and 2d on an 8d pot. However, Bewley’s Cafés and Lemon and Company, the sweet manufacturers, said they would not increase prices while existing stocks lasted.55
There was uproar in the business community over the introduction of an excessive profits tax in the budget of September 1915. It was levied initially at 50 per cent and was to curb profiteering, particularly in armaments and clothing as well as cinemas and breweries near military bases.
The method of calculating excessive profit was to take the average return of businesses for the three years preceding the war as a base line. Unfortunately for Dublin, 1913 and 1914 had been particularly bad years, because of the lock-out and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the Citizens’ Association protested to the government and to John Redmond. As Sir Maurice Dockrell pointed out, ‘very few firms were making a profit in Dublin in 1913.’ Even companies not directly involved in the lock-out were affected, because, as Arthur Legg, whose firm made packing-cases, said, ‘we had no dispute with the men but they refused to handle “tainted goods”.’ He put his profits for 1913 at half the usual rate.
Such considerations cut little ice with the government. Its focus was firmly on the problems of wartime Britain, including the need to assuage public anger at profiteering.
By now it was relatively easy to direct public anger in Dublin at the British authorities, as the controversy over fodder and milk supplies demonstrated. In the autumn of 1915 rumours began to circulate that Major-General Friend, who commanded the British forces in Ireland, intended to commandeer the first cut of hay from farms within a ten-mile radius of the city. There was widespread fear that this would lead to shortages of fodder for Dublin’s five hundred dairies, on which the city depended for its milk. Any shortage of fodder would soon translate into falling milk supplies and rising prices for this vital commodity.
In fact the army was not commandeering the fodder but was paying market rates for the crop, and taking no more than it did in 1913. Most importantly, the first cut of hay was not normally fed to cattle anyway but used for horses. The army’s fodder-purchasing activities did not lead to milk shortages, or price increases, but it did give ammunition to increasingly vociferous critics of the war, as did the new import duty of 33 per cent on luxury goods, such as motor cars, bicycles, films, watches, clocks and musical instruments.
Another luxury item taxed was newspapers, a burden that the press was not slow to point out fell disproportionately on Ireland, whose papers lacked the mass circulation, large advertising market and better transport infrastructure of their Fleet Street rivals that could absorb the extra costs.56 The Freeman’s Journal made the telling point that people in rural Ireland were far more reliant on newspapers for information than were town-dwellers. It concluded that ‘no enterprise has been so hardly hit by the war … paper, metal etc. have gone up in price, and freight and insurance rates have almost doubled.’ Nor could costs be recouped through price increases, while ‘advertisements too have diminished.’57 Instead the size of newspapers shrank, and with them the amount of space given to parliamentary debates, ‘especially the speeches of the smaller fry among politicians.’58 This would have implications for the Irish Party at the national and the local level. In Dublin, the coverage of council meetings shrank to a fragment of the pre-war days.
Ratepayers were caught between the nether stone of rising pay demands from corporation employees and a reduced capacity to raise revenue. A debate on increases for 1,200 civic labourers in August to compensate them for wartime inflation revolved around the fact that it would break the ceiling of £2,000 on extra expenditure provided for by the agreed ½d increase in the rates. Eventually councillors voted for increases costing £7,000, with a proviso that, as with railway workers, the pay increases would be cancelled once the war ended.59
In October, resigned to having to break their own guidelines on expenditure again, the councillors adopted a report recommending that £8,000 be included in the 1916 estimates for a small working-class housing estate on the Ormond Market site. However, they failed to agree a means of raising the money.60 To clear all 14,000 slums in the city would cost £3 million, or three times the annual rateable valuation of the city. Yet Pembroke Urban District Council managed to raise £175,000 to complete 759 houses in Stella Gardens in Ringsend by September 1916. One factor behind the impressive housing record of this suburban township was undoubtedly the lower wage rates of its local authority employees; another was the relative prosperity of its ratepayers. But it also showed that progress was possible on the housing front, even in wartime, if there was the political will.61
Censorship added to the sense of powerlessness Dubliners felt in the crisis. Home news was restricted, and the mainstream press served up copy inspired by the War Office and obtained from the news agencies. These were sprinkled with letters and reports from individuals at the front, usually chaplains, who appeared less inhibited by the censors than other serving personnel. The poor quality of war coverage made it almost impossible to distinguish real victories from illusory ones. By the end of 1915 the only conclusions readers could safely draw were that the war was going to last a long time, that no reductions could be expected in the casualty rates and that more hardship was a certainty on the home front.