6

The Battle of Dublin I:
to the Barricades

It was on Easter Monday the boys got the call

To join their battalions in park, glen and hall.

In less than an hour they were out on parade;

They were true men tho’ few in the Dublin Brigade.

There was much work to do in getting things right,

But the old and the young were all anxious to fight.

Every man worked hard at his own barricade,

And rifles rang out from the Dublin Brigade.

Anon: ‘The Dublin Brigade’

One of the frustrated would-be rebels of Easter Sunday was Aine Heron, who assembled with a group of Cumann na mBan first-aid workers at Blackhall Street in the evening. (Earlier in the day she had been cooking extra food for the manoeuvres when her – non-Volunteer – husband looked up from his Sunday paper to tell her not to bother; when he explained about the countermanding order, she replied sharply, ‘Who would mind the Independent?’) She had packed twenty-four hours’ rations and a waterproof coat along with her first-aid kit. The women were confident that what was going on was more than an exercise. As they discussed the situation, they ‘all agreed that it would be impossible to put off the rising, as never again would the people be brought to the pitch of enthusiasm they were now at’.1 In Dublin, at least, this may have been true. Even a day’s delay had drastic consequences. How the mobilization would have worked out if it had gone to plan on Sunday can only be guessed at. What is beyond doubt is that when the process finally began on Monday morning, it produced near-chaos. Units assembled in fragments, individuals set off on random paths, capricious orders and counter-orders were issued by a baggy collection of commanders. Most had little idea what was happening, and even those who thought they knew what they were doing often found that they were doing the wrong thing. All this could hardly have been further from the precisely planned insurrection of Pearse’s imagination. Amazingly, out of it all, emerged the most potent military action ever mounted by Irish rebels.

The experience of Seumas Kavanagh, of the 3rd Battalion, was typical. He was a ‘mobilizer’ – each mobilizer being responsible for seven or eight men. (The 2nd Battalion idea of printed slips seems not to have been shared.) On Saturday he had bumped into his company lieutenant, Simon Donnelly, who had taken him to the Volunteer HQ at Dawson Street to help parcel up documents for removal. In case he did not grasp the significance of this, Donnelly also advised him to go to confession. He spent most of Sunday ‘walking the city’ in disappointment after the countermanding order; like many, he slept in on Monday morning. He was roused by a Volunteer named Doyle who told him that the company was to mobilize at Earlsfort Terrace at 10 o’clock. ‘I pointed out to him that it was by now 10.15. He was rather excited and said, “That is the order I got.”’ Kavanagh rushed out, mobilized his first man in Redmond Hill, then went on to Aungier Street to see the battalion quartermaster, James Byrne. To his dismay, Byrne informed him that he was going to the races at Fairyhouse. ‘What will the battalion do?’ Kavanagh asked. ‘They are depending on you.’ Byrne casually said they would have to shift for themselves. When they finally assembled at Earlsfort Terrace, it turned out that the company commander had also decided to absent himself, so Simon Donnelly had to take charge. They marched down to Mount Street Bridge, where Kavanagh was put under the command of Mick Malone. With a small group he began to fortify the Schools on Northumberland Road, just across the bridge. Only after they had spent much time and effort sandbagging the building did it dawn on them that it was totally unsuitable: set far back from the road, and surrounded by high hedges, it had ‘no military value’.2

Liam Tannam, captain of E company of the 3rd Battalion, had been summoned to see Pearse on Saturday, and told that his force was to mobilize in Beresford Place (outside the battalion area). No reason for this seems to have been given. He protested that the size of his company area – stretching from Leeson Street, just inside the Grand Canal, out as far as Goatstown – would make it more sensible for him to mobilize in his own area and march his company in to Beresford Place. Pearse saw the point of this, though he does not seem to have offered any explanation for the last-minute change in mobilization plans. On Sunday, as we have seen, Tannam’s company mobilized at Oakley Road at 3 p.m., but made no move towards the city before demobilizing. On Monday, like so many others, he slept in, and was only awoken by ‘a rapping on the door’ of his home in Wilton Terrace at 10.30. ‘A man named Stephenson was there with an order that “E” Company was to parade at 10 a.m. at Beresford Place. “Look here,” I said, “you are handing this to me at 10.35.” “It can’t be helped,” he said, “you are to do the best you can.”’3 Tannam had clearly had no idea that he might be remobilized that day, and never found out why the mobilization order was left so late. He launched into the laborious process of rounding up his men once again, and by midday had assembled about twenty-five of them. He sent them on under the command of Paddy Doyle while he went on looking for others. Doyle was on his way in to the city when he was met by ‘a couple of men of the 3rd battalion’ somewhere near Holles Street, who advised him to take the men to Boland’s bakery. Doyle asked for a direct order from the battalion commandant; Eamon de Valera, already worried about the weakness of his force, was only too relieved to issue it. So Pearse’s last-minute change of plan was itself casually changed.

The experiences of Kavanagh, Tannam and Doyle were repeated across the city. Frank Henderson, who had spent a disturbed night at 2nd Battalion’s arms depot in Father Mathew Park, ‘was just beginning to get to sleep between six and seven o’clock in the morning when a message came from Tom Hunter, Vice Commandant, asking me to provide him with a number of cyclists, I think he said at ten o’clock that morning’. Henderson refused – he only had a couple of cyclists in his company, and he ‘did not attach any importance to the message’. Thinking it was ‘merely routine’, he went back to sleep. This was just one of many unplanned, unexpected shifts in the Volunteers’ preparations. Two hours later, while Henderson was still in bed, Hunter turned up in person to instruct him to parade his company with all arms on St Stephen’s Green at ten o’clock. When Henderson protested that this would be impossible in the time available – an hour or less – Hunter merely said ‘Do your best, and get as many men as you can.’ Only at this point did Henderson grasp that things were serious, and ‘proceeded to set the mobilization scheme in motion’. His own account of what followed provides a vivid sense of the dislocation of earlier plans.4

Henderson headed back home ‘to get ready’, and on the way mobilized several of his men. (Traynor’s printed slip system seems to have been used up on Saturday.) This was quite time-consuming, as some of them lived as far away as Dominick Street, Goose Green and Dollymount. He next received a written order, signed by James Connolly, calling for a reliable man for a special job. After a display of deliberate pedantry, asking ‘who is James Connolly?’ – since MacDonagh had specifically told them only to follow orders from their immediate superiors – he found a message from MacDonagh on the back of Connolly’s order, telling him to comply with it. Connolly had, unknown to the Volunteers, been appointed ‘Commandant General’ with overall military command of the IV and ICA in either the Dublin area or the whole of Ireland (witnesses differ on this). Henderson detailed a Volunteer for the job, which turned out to be the attack on the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. Clearly this operation was not, as many have thought, part of a long-prepared plan intended to launch the rebellion, but a last-minute improvisation. The same seems to be true of a surprisingly large part of the eventual battle plan.

Henderson and Hunter decided to send half the company over to Stephen’s Green, keeping the rest to guard the stores. The Headquarters’ view, provided by Diarmuid Lynch, suggests that those of the 2nd Battalion ‘who responded earliest to the Monday morning mobilisation were sent to Commandant MacDonagh; those who reported later were ordered to convoy the military and medical supplies stored there to the GPO’.⁵ Why, for one thing, were these stores not sent to the 2nd Battalion’s own positions? Lynch’s characteristic suggestion of deliberate intent is rather different from Henderson’s picture of himself, his brother Leo, Oscar Traynor and Thomas Weafer debating what to do next after sending half their men on to Stephen’s Green (not itself a 2nd Battalion position). ‘There was a certain amount of indecision about what was to be done.’ Traynor was the only one in favour of ‘proceeding immediately into town’. Henderson, as a non-IRB man, ‘felt myself in a rather difficult position’. In the end he urged that Weafer, as the senior officer present, should decide what to do. Weafer then went off to find Connolly, while the rest of his command ‘were to demobilise in small groups and go to certain houses’, about six apiece, spread across Fairview and Summerhill. Henderson sat tight, though Traynor decided to go off, first to the Magazine Fort and then on to the GPO.

Only after another half an hour did Weafer’s order to re-mobilize arrive, and the force was collected once again – minus half a dozen or so who either made themselves scarce or could not be located. The lorry driver had also ‘got timid’, and a replacement had to be found. At last a column 80–100 strong, including men from three different 2nd Battalion companies, as well as some from 1st Battalion, formed up to take the lorry-load of stores into the city. A Fairview curate, Father Walter MacDonnell, blessed them before they finally moved off, about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. They crossed the Tolka Bridge and were moving down Ballybough Road towards Parnell Square and Sackville Street when they ran into a group of British troops at the Grand Canal bridge. A sharp encounter fight followed.6 Henderson, who was in charge of the rearguard, retreated to the Tolka Bridge and took over a Gilbey’s wine store. His men had already been dismayed to find themselves pushing past a flow of refugees coming from the city centre, and now they added their mite to the flood by ejecting an old lady and her daughter who lived above the shop (an experience which dented the romantic self-image of young Volunteers such as Harry Colley). Colley had just come across with Harry Boland from a Citizen Army outpost in the Wicklow Chemical Manure Company’s offices a couple of hundred yards away, where they had found themselves under the command of an irascible ICA officer, Vincent Poole. This post had apparently been set up on Connolly’s orders, rather than in accordance with the prepared plan; even the compact Citizen Army, which had not been directly affected by the countermanding order, seems to have been infected by the weekend’s confusion.

Henderson’s command spent the rest of the day on the lookout for Weafer’s force, but never made contact with it again. Several conferences were held, and the question of their line of retreat (probably one of Ginger O’Connell’s contributions to Volunteer thinking) was discussed at some length. ‘We had a general line of retreat made out, although it would be very difficult to say where we would eventually get to if we had to retreat from the position.’7 Fortunately the fleeting British military presence in the area vanished as fast as it had materialized. Weafer, without apparently contacting Henderson, marched on with the battalion stores to the GPO, where he arrived around 4.30 in the afternoon. Henderson had to wait another twenty-four hours before he received any orders.

All this welter of uncertainty contrasts sharply with what may be called the official IRB picture, as drawn by Diarmuid Lynch, of the ‘tense but serene’ scene at Liberty Hall, where the military committee and some of the Volunteers and Citizen Army men and women who would come to be known as the Headquarters Battalion ‘quietly attended to final details’. This serenity may seem surprising in light of the fact that, as Lynch noted, because the ‘muster was far short of normal, none of the prearranged positions could now be manned adequately to ensure a prolonged defence’. It might be expected that the leaders would be urgently trying to adapt their plans to make the best use of their reduced forces. If any such discussion did take place, Lynch kept quiet about it. His fatalistic comment, ‘No matter, the die was cast’, suggests rather that the planners assumed that nothing could be done. This would fit with Connolly’s oft-quoted remark to his ITGWU comrade William O’Brien, ‘Bill, we are going out to be slaughtered.’ This pessimism was uncharacteristic of him, and as we shall see he did, in his capacity as the newly appointed commander of the Dublin area, alter a number of dispositions. But he does not seem to have tried to exert control over the battle as a whole. His attention stayed focused on the situation at the end of his street.

The march of the headquarters group from its assembly point in Beresford Place, outside Liberty Hall, down Abbey Street and into Sackville Street, was short but significant. An eclectic mix of units, totalling some 150 on Lynch’s count, ‘some inadequately armed’, moved off at about 11.50. Onlookers assumed that this was a route march like dozens of others they had seen over the last couple of years. The police clearly thought the same. Even when they arrived in front of the Imperial Hotel, and Connolly issued the order to wheel left and charge the GPO the situation still appeared playful. Once inside, they had to deal with the bafflement of post office staff and bank holiday customers, one of many scenes of disbelief that played out across the city that morning. Only the threat of violence gradually persuaded people to obey orders to leave, and in some places the violence went beyond threats.

Once the GPO was occupied it began to act as a magnet to the many Volunteers who had missed their unit assemblies and who were criss-crossing the city, either as individuals or in groups, looking for someone in authority. The most celebrated individual to turn up was the O’Rahilly, immaculately uniformed, at the wheel of his prized De Dion automobile. (He had spent all of Saturday night and Sunday carrying MacNeill’s orders to stop the rising around the country, but was deeply wounded by the rebels’ decision not to tell him of the Monday mobilization.)8 The original garrison of 150 steadily expanded until it became by far the largest concentration of rebels in the city. As with all the other units, however, its exact size was never precisely known. Later jokes about the tens of thousands who claimed to have been in the GPO indicate the kind of difficulty involved, since no muster seems to have been held at any stage during the week. The most careful subsequent calculation, by Diarmuid Lynch (whose aim was to pare down the standard figure, while also demonstrating that Desmond Ryan had pared it down too far), put the total garrison of the GPO area at 408, at least 120 more than the next largest concentration in the 1st Battalion (Four Courts) area.⁹ They were not all in the GPO itself, of course; immediately after the occupation, groups were sent out to take over a string of premises on both sides of lower Sackville Street – the Imperial Hotel, Clery’s department store, the shops facing O’Connell Bridge (Kelly’s and Hopkins’). An elaborate attempt was made to set up a radio station in Reis’s store, using equipment taken from the Wireless School. Eventually the whole street from Henry Street to the river was occupied, and we should perhaps call the position ‘Sackville Street’ rather than ‘the GPO’. It was unquestionably a strong position in one sense; the British forces never even considered trying to assault it directly. Whether it was a well-chosen position in relation to the other garrisons is, as will be seen, more questionable.

But whatever its military value, the GPO was an impressive stage for the political drama that the military committee, now the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, had prepared. The sheer expanse of Sackville Street around the focal point of Nelson’s Pillar provided maximum exposure for key symbolic acts such as unfurling the flags which would make an indelible impression on everyone who saw them. Although there was to be plenty of dispute about exactly which flag hung on which corner of the GPO – and who hung them there – there was no mistaking their significance. One was the tricolour (designed on the French model, possibly by a Frenchman), introduced in 1848 by the would-be revolutionaries of the Irish Confederation, and by now the generally accepted symbol of the republican movement. Interestingly, though, its careful colour-symbolism, setting the white of peace between green and orange, was often read as the earlier green–white–gold made famous by Robert Emmet. (Pictures of him in ‘his cocked hat and feathers, his green and gold and white uniform as Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the Irish Republic’, were to be seen ‘in the humblest cabins of the land’ throughout the century after his death.)10 The new tricolour would take time to be understood; the fact that white and gold are the papal colours would be a fruitful further source of misreading. A Trinity student from Belfast described the tricolour hung from the College of Surgeons as ‘quite a pretty one, the colours being green, white and orange. I can’t understand why it was orange, but perhaps they call it yellow!’¹¹

The other flag raised on the GPO was a one-off creation – masterminded, inevitably, by Constance Markievicz – using the traditional golden Irish harp on a green ground, with the words ‘Irish Republic’ painted in gold. The material was, allegedly, an old coverlet (‘of a bed that Larry Ginnell used to sleep in’), dyed green; her gold paint had hardened and had to be thinned with mustard.¹² The harp itself was (it need hardly be said) of a variety specifically approved by Pearse. A third symbolic flag was raised a little later, but Connolly chose to fly the elaborate ‘starry plough’ banner woven for the ICA – a superb piece of (apparently anonymous) design – not on the GPO, but over the road on the Imperial Hotel. This was the most glittering asset not of the British state but of the ITGWU’s bitterest enemy, William Martin Murphy, and Connolly plainly derived intense satisfaction from seeing the socialist banner atop this palace of capitalism.

The other key symbol of the rebellion, and equally enduring, was Pearse’s proclamation of the republic. Even the production of this resonant document on Connolly’s run-down machine, against the clock and with inadequate stocks of type, was a minor epic of printing.13 (In fact, the job was not completed until Monday morning, so without the countermand the proclamation would not have been available to launch the new republic.) At its head, the Gaelic title ‘Poblacht na hEireann’ did take priority, though once again the text was rendered in English (presumably, like the choice of English for the legend of the ‘Irish Republic’ flag, to assist understanding). Not that this seems to have assisted the public reception of the document when Pearse stepped out into the street to read it to the modest crowd of onlookers shortly after noon. As Lynch gruffly noted, ‘the few cheers that greeted this epochal announcement furnished an index of the denationalised state of Ireland after the era of Parliamentarianism’. (Few even remembered where Pearse stood as he read it; the most common memory had him standing ‘on the steps of the GPO’, yet there were no steps; one or two writers speak of ‘the low step’ – presumably the doorstep; others again put him on a plinth set up in the middle of the street near Nelson’s Pillar.)

It has been suggested that ‘on this of all occasions his magnetism for once ebbed from him’.¹⁴ What is certain is that his audience was the worst he had faced since he had become a star public speaker; yet he treated it to one of his finest verbal evocations of the spirit of national struggle. Reproduced countless times, and still serving as the title deed of Irish republicanism (not least in the literary works of Gerry Adams), the terms of the proclamation were a kind of distillation of nationalist doctrine, a kind of national poem: lucid, terse, and strangely moving even to unbelievers. Addressing ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ in ‘the name of God and of the dead generations’ from which Ireland ‘receives her old tradition of nationhood’, the proclamation set out the mystical separatist belief that Ireland ‘through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom’. The female personification of the land, and the ethnic community as a kinship group, were the fundamental currency of romantic nationalism. The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic proclaimed that the republic was ‘a sovereign independent state’, and guaranteed ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens’. It would ‘cherish all children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government’.

Seven men signed the proclamation as the Provisional Government. Two of them were not in the GPO during Easter week; it is not clear whether the other five took any action in their governmental role, or whether any of them were given particular administrative roles. The general view (following the announcement in the single issue of Irish War News published on Tuesday) is that Pearse became ‘Commanding [sic] in Chief of the Army of the Republic and President of the Provisional Government’.15 Tom Clarke’s widow, however, always maintained that Clarke had become President, and this certainly would have followed standard IRB thinking. Some others agree with her contention, but the issue is a murky one, and the general lack of concern with it tells its own story. It is certainly significant that both civil and military supremacy was vested in Pearse – who became a kind of generalissimo – and that the military function was given primacy. Connolly and the other government members seem to have seen their function as exclusively military. Seán T. O’Kelly, who was in and out of the GPO all week (to the annoyance of some of its garrison), records that he was asked by Seán MacDermott – in what capacity he did not say – to act as ‘Civil Administrator of the Government of the Republic’ with a group of others, including William O’Brien, Alderman Tom Kelly, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. What lay behind this intriguing proposal is hard to tell. O’Kelly laconically notes that he ‘heard nothing more of the matter’, and that the project was evidently not proceeded with.¹⁶ There was no attempt even to adumbrate the political structure of the new Irish state. The contrast with the later Sinn Féin action when the republic was re-established in January 1919 is very striking, and it is this perhaps more than anything else that marks the 1916 rebellion out as a Fenian rather than a Sinn Féin manifestation.

A long shadow was to be cast by the title chosen for the congeries of forces mobilized on Easter Monday, the Army of the Republic. A new composite name clearly had to be found for them, and this was neutral enough. But colloquial usage soon rendered it as ‘Irish Republican Army’, a more loaded label – with obvious IRB echoes. (This formula would, of course, eventually be permanently adopted by the Irish Volunteers in 1920.) Here was another key title coined casually and lacking a Gaelic equivalent – the IRA’s Irish-language title remains ‘Oglaich’ (Volunteers). Most of the available energy of the army and its commanders, naturally, was expended in sandbagging the occupied buildings and enjoying the heady rush of action. Connolly, who brought with him his doughty secretary Winifred Carney, and her typewriter, set about dictating a stream of orders (nearly all of which, sadly, have been lost).17

When Connolly’s main body marched off to Sackville Street, a much smaller ICA detachment was already heading towards an area of far greater historic, and indeed strategic, significance. Its commander, Captain Seán Connolly (no relation), was one of the Citizen Army’s most glamorous figures, a leading man in theatre groups such as the Liberty Players and National Players. (He had just starred as Robert Emmet in a production of Mangan’s play, which also featured two of the ICA’s women stalwarts, Helena Molony and Marie Perolz.)¹⁸ At noon he arrived with about thirty men in front of the gates of Dublin Castle, the symbolic – and indeed actual – seat of British rule in Ireland. His actions from this point form one of the central, representative mysteries of the 1916 rebellion. As it happened, some of those British rulers had just gone into conclave; Major Price, the army’s chief intelligence officer, met Sir Matthew Nathan at 11.45, and they were joined soon afterwards by the head of the Post Office, Arthur Hamilton Norway, who had just walked across from the GPO, which he had left a few minutes before Pearse and Connolly arrived. Moments after midday, they heard a shot at the gate of Upper Castle Yard. Price had a moment of insight: ‘They have commenced!’

They had – but what? They had indeed shot the unarmed DMP constable who formed (as the later commission of inquiry was to repeat, with puzzlement, several times) the only guard on the Castle gate. Despite using a dud grenade – the first of many such failures of the home-made munitions laboriously manufactured over the previous months – they had overwhelmed the six soldiers quietly brewing up their lunch in the guardroom.19 When Major Price ran into the yard blazing away with his revolver, he was the Castle’s last line of defence. He prudently retreated; and so, more strangely, did Captain Connolly’s men. After what Diarmuid Lynch calls ‘an encounter with the enemy’ – an odd phrase for such a complete success – Connolly ordered the occupation of the Daily Express building across the road, and also of City Hall. He seems to have had no idea that the whole garrison of the Castle amounted to ‘a corporal’s guard’, and that even in Ship Street Barracks immediately behind the Castle there were no more than twenty-five troops. Two questions suggest themselves: why did he not know this, and, had he known, would he have acted differently? The first question raises one of the big puzzles of 1916. Although some of the buildings occupied may have been reconnoitred in the period before the rising, this was quite an unsystematic process, and no intelligence section had been set up by either the ICA or the Volunteers. The rebels had neglected to grasp the most elementary advantage available to insurgent forces, local knowledge; they were as much in the dark as their opponents.

The second question is usually answered by the assertion that it was in any case never the intention of either James or Seán Connolly to capture the Castle, however weak its garrison. If this was indeed the case, it is still difficult to explain. Not only was the Castle’s location vital, but the persistent and widespread belief that the core of the 1916 plan was to follow the example of Robert Emmet showed that its overwhelming symbolic importance was fully grasped by the planners. And, as has been remarked, the defensive strength of the government centre was not only physical: for the British it ‘would not have been as seemly to have shot or burnt the intruders out of the Castle as it was to shoot and burn them out of the GPO’.²⁰ The argument (made also about the equally vital location of Trinity College) that these extensive buildings would have needed large garrisons, might have held good on Monday, but seems strange in view of the forces available to the original planners, which were surely adequate. Even with the force available, Dr Kathleen Lynn, who arrived to give medical attention to Connolly and took over command when he died, wondered why the ICA men had allowed British troops to move into the Castle Yard. (Her guess was that they were demoralized by the early death of their leader.)21 If the original plan was hastily adjusted to exclude the Castle, why were so many of the available forces placed in buildings such as the GPO and Jacob’s factory rather than at the truly vital points?

Seizing the Castle would have been an ambitious undertaking, but the project of pinning its garrison down was not much easier. And the choice of City Hall for this purpose, whether on James Connolly’s instructions or Seán Connolly’s initiative, was not a good one. Its roof, in particular, with its elegant open balustrade, proved to be a death trap; Seán Connolly himself was killed up there within a few hours of taking over the building. In fact, the ICA garrison held City Hall for barely twenty-four hours before the British military reinforcements in the Castle launched a counter-attack. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday all the three rebel positions at the top of Parliament Street had been retaken. A member of the Trinity College Officers’ Training Corps (OTC), looking out up Dame Street, saw ‘men in successive waves rush across the street from the City Hall towards the Express offices’. There was an hour of intense gunfire, with ‘plaster and powdered brick flying in showers’ from the façade of the Express building. In Trinity they still thought that the rebels had captured the Castle, and that they were witnessing their expulsion.²² Then it all went quiet. The trained troops of the Curragh mobile column showed that big buildings were not, in themselves, enough.

At the same time as Seán Connolly’s company set off from Liberty Hall for the Castle, the main ICA force, commanded by Michael Mallin – who had been given the Volunteer rank of commandant on Saturday – also headed southwards across the river. Some 100 strong, and accompanied by a number of Cumann na mBan and Fianna, they passed several defensible, strategically located buildings (the Custom House, the Bank of Ireland, and Trinity College included) on their way. Frank Robbins noticed the clock on another of these, the Ballast Office on the corner of Westmoreland Street and Aston’s Quay, showing 11.55 as they went by. Lustily singing popular tunes such as ‘the Peeler and the Goat’ (apparently without intending to provoke the police), they swung on up Grafton Street to reach St Stephen’s Green soon after midday. Once there, Robbins’ section pushed on to take over Harcourt Street Station, while the rest set to building barricades.

But the process of constructing the barricades, mainly using commandeered cars and drays, led to the first clashes with ‘civilians’, some of whom resisted the seizure of their vehicles. A St John’s Ambulance volunteer, W. G. Smith, passing through the Green, witnessed the sudden change of atmosphere after the killing of an elderly man who had been warned several times to stop trying to remove his lorry from a barricade near the Shelbourne Hotel. Smith had been mystified by the appearance of the rebel force. ‘Many of them were mere boys, in fact only about one in ten was a man.’ He was struck by the fact that ‘they had a great many young girls, ranging [in age] from about 13 to 20, furnished with haversacks, evidently acting as vivandières to their Army’. The onlookers seemed to be ‘taking it as rather a joke’. But the effect of the shooting on the crowd at the corner of Merrion Row was ‘awful … Women began to shriek and cry and kneel down to pray in the street, and the vivandières with the rebels began crying and screaming and wringing their hands, to be told by the rebels to go home.’23 Lilly Stokes, who walked into the Green from Dawson Street, described the barricade as made up of ‘a big dray (its horse shot dead close by), a side car, two motors and a big laundry van, out of which the baskets had fallen, their contents lying about’. Like Smith, she thought that the trenches at the park gates ‘were chiefly manned by children – lads of 16 or 17’.²⁴

The writer James Stephens watched the building of this barricade outside the Shelbourne Hotel. He had just heard from a bystander in Merrion Row, near his office, that ‘the Sinn Feiners have seized the city’, and like many others his instinctive reaction was to run to the Green to see what was happening. As he came up to the barricade,

a loud cry came from the park. The gates opened and three men ran out. Two of them held rifles with fixed bayonets. The third gripped a heavy revolver in his fist. They ran towards the motor car which had just turned the corner, and halted it. The men with bayonets took position on either side of the car. The man with the revolver saluted, and I heard him begging the occupants to pardon him, and directing them to dismount. A man and woman got down.

Their chauffeur remained in the car, and was told

to drive to the barricade and lodge his car in a particular position. He did it awkwardly, and after three attempts he succeeded in pleasing them … He locked the car into the barricade, and then, being a man accustomed to be commanded, he awaited an order to descend. When the order came he walked directly to his master, still preserving all the solemnity of his features. These two men did not address a word to each other, but their drilled and expressionless eyes were loud with surprise and fear and rage. They went into the hotel.25

This was a revolt – or was it revolution? The curious Stephens spoke to the man with the revolver, who was ‘no more than a boy, no more certainly than twenty years of age, short in stature, with close curling red hair and blue eyes – a kindly-looking lad’. To Stephens,

this young man did not seem to be acting from his reason. He was doing his work from a determination implanted … on his imagination. His mind was – where? It was not with his body. And continually his eyes went searching widely, looking for spaces, scanning hastily the clouds, the vistas of the streets, looking for something that did not hinder him …

His answer to Stephens’ question, ‘What is the meaning of all this?’ suggested perhaps a less metaphysical reason for the ‘ramble and errancy’ in his eyes: ‘We have taken the city. We are expecting an attack from the military at any moment, and those people’ – he indicated knots of men, women and children clustered towards the end of the Green – ‘won’t go home for me. We have the Post Office, and the railways, and the Castle. We have all the city. We have everything.’²⁶

Stephen’s Green was a transport hub for the south-eastern approaches to the city centre, and the idea of closing it certainly made sense. But where Seán Connolly had followed too literally James Connolly’s promise to ‘fight from the rooftops’, Mallin ignored it altogether. Instead of establishing posts to cover the barricades from the tall buildings overlooking them – especially the Shelbourne Hotel – Mallin’s force set about digging rifle pits inside the railings of the park. The reasoning behind this has never been clear. Guests in the hotel, an epicentre of the Ascendancy lifestyle, now packed to the rafters for the Fairyhouse races, peered out in some bafflement at the strange goings-on. ‘Disappointingly little was to be seen. The thicket inside the railings screened the insurgent troops – green uniforms merged into the bosky shadows: here the glint of a rifle barrel, there the turn of a head in a bandolier hat were spotted from time to time.’ Finally, Countess Markievicz, resplendent in her Citizen Army uniform, began to march up and down, gun on shoulder, in full view of the hotel. This caused something of a sensation, as Elizabeth Bowen later wrote, ‘for lady colonels were rarer then than now’.27 As she went on parading for some time after British troops started to occupy the hotel, the head porter thought that ‘the Countess took unfair advantage of her sex’. Not, perhaps, for the last time.

‘Madame’ was widely believed by the spectators, and subsequently, to have been in command of the Stephen’s Green force – an impression her behaviour did nothing to contradict. Her role, however, was ambiguous. According to Dr Kathleen Lynn, the ICA’s medical officer (who had set out in her car with Markievicz to distribute medical supplies), she had been planning to drive around all the rebel positions – a function which may sound self-indulgent, though as will be seen it could have been vital – but she never got beyond Stephen’s Green.²⁸ Mallin, it seems, asked her to stay, first as a sniper and then as his second-in-command; perhaps another sign of his lack of confidence. She spent the day going ‘round and round the Green, reporting back if anything was wanted, or tackling any sniper who was particularly objectionable’ (with what weapon, she did not specify).²⁹ Who was responsible for the decision to occupy open ground – whether it was part of the original plan or an improvisation – is still a matter of argument. But here, as at City Hall, the penalty for miscalculation was heavy and rapid. Easter 1916 was to be remembered as a week of brilliant spring sunshine, but Monday was different: the weather did its best to give the Citizen Army a taste of Flanders trench life. During a rainswept night, British troops entered the Shelbourne by its Kildare Street door, unheard and unopposed by the garrison on the Green, and at daybreak opened fire with a machine-gun from the roof. Only the lush vegetation (though less prolific then than it is today) saved Mallin’s force from ghastly casualties. But it was immediately obvious that their position was untenable. By noon most of them had taken refuge in the College of Surgeons on the western side of the Green – a strong building, even if not much more than half the height of the Shelbourne, and, unlike the latter, absolutely empty of life-sustaining resources.

The College had been occupied on Monday afternoon, in a way that told its own story about the ineffectiveness of the Citizen Army’s more advanced positions. Two groups (nearly half of Mallin’s whole force) had pushed south from the Green; Captain Richard McCormick with twenty-five men (Frank Robbins among them) was supposed to control or destroy the railway line from Harcourt Street Station. Seven more men went all the way down to the Grand Canal and occupied Davy’s pub overlooking Portobello Bridge. This was a position well chosen to dispute the crossing into the city of the troops in Portobello Barracks just across the canal, particularly if it had been supported by a few other posts, however small. But it was abandoned after a very brief assault – in fact, before it was actually assaulted – and McCormick’s force also abandoned the attempt to control the railway within a couple of hours. By early afternoon they were back in Stephen’s Green. Frank Robbins with a scratch group of a dozen (four ICA and eight others, including Markievicz, Mary Hyland and Lily Kempson of Cumann na mBan) was sent to search the College. Mallin had information – a rare piece of reliable intelligence, as it turned out – that it housed a substantial arsenal belonging to Trinity College OTC.30 The idea seems to have been to bring the weapons out to the force on the Green, but by the time the fifty rifles were eventually found, the Green had been abandoned, and guns were needed less than food.

The same thing happened to the other outposts pushed towards the canal down Leeson Street. Liam O Briain, a 2nd Battalion man who had no idea where his company ‘would be positioned in case of active service’ decided to join the Stephen’s Green force on his way home to collect his rifle and ammunition. (‘If you want to fight, isn’t this place as good as any place for you?’) On Monday evening, standing in the three-foot-deep trench, the result of several hours’ digging, by the Leeson Street gate, he was ordered to ‘fall in’. After making a somewhat unmilitary joke he was sent off in a mixed group of twenty under the command of an ICA officer to garrison the houses covering the canal bridge at the end of the street, where they stayed overnight on the roof. Early next morning, the redoubtable Margaret Skinnider appeared in the street below with orders from Mallin for half the force to fall back to the Green, and some while later she returned to order the rest back too.31 The reason for this was not clear to O Briain. (Or to Laurence Nugent, a roving observer, who noted that ‘there was no threat of attack’ when this post was evacuated.)³² Was it lack of numbers? The advance of the Crown forces from the south had not begun, so there was no way of knowing which route they would take, and the outposts might have been vital. Twenty men there, or even ten, might have had a dramatic effect. The reason usually given for the failure to occupy the Shelbourne, lack of numbers, seems unconvincing there too. The ICA had not been affected by the countermanding order, and turned out pretty much in full strength at Liberty Hall. Unless a last-minute decision was taken to divert men to the GPO, it is hard to see how any original plan could have supposed that Mallin would have had a larger force than he eventually did. If such a decision was in fact made, it proved a costly one.

The positions taken up by the four city battalions of the Volunteers – or three of them at least – were more straightforward. The 1st Battalion went into action close to its mobilization area, in Blackhall Street. Piaras Béaslaí, its vice-commandant, later estimated the turnout at less than a third of its full strength; one of those who turned out counted 250 men.³³ Its zone of operations was large, extending from the Four Courts on the river Liffey, northwards to Cabra on the Royal Canal. The original intention seems to have been that these northern posts would link up with the 5th Battalion outside the city in county Dublin. (Béaslaí heard later from Thomas Ashe, in Lewes gaol in 1917, that his instructions were ‘to arrange some system of cooperation’. Ashe had sent a messenger to contact 1st Battalion at Cross Guns Bridge, but found nobody; clearly Béaslaí himself knew nothing of this plan.)³⁴ A key point in the centre of this area was Broadstone Station, where the line from Athlone – the army’s artillery depot – terminated. On Monday, however, the northerly deployment was seriously compromised. Although a strong company (B Company, with some sixty-five men according to Jerry Golden) was sent up to Cabra Road, Broadstone Station was bypassed. At noon, after formally announcing that the republic had been proclaimed, Daly marched his main force through North King Street into Church Street, where they occupied a series of premises and set up barricades. Jack Shouldice commanded a group of about twenty at the crossing of Church and King Streets, dominated by Reilly’s pub, which he fortified with sacks of flour and meal taken from the Blanchardstown Mills shop on the opposite corner of the junction.35 Although the North Dublin Union was occupied, no attempt was made to take control of Broadstone Station just beyond it. At this stage, though Daly had announced that they were going into action (and a handful of his men had decided against it), many still had no information about the battalion’s plans, or the reasons for building barricades. Daly set up his headquarters first in North Brunswick Street, and later in Father Mathew Hall near the northern end of Church Street. At the southern end, on the river, some of his men occupied the Four Courts.

It was on the Liffey quays that the first clash with British forces took place, but this was not the immediate counter-attack that most of the rebels – commanders as well as rank and file – seem to have expected at any moment on Monday. A convoy of five lorries bringing ammunition to the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park was moving along Ormond Quay, escorted by a squadron of lancers. (This proceeding smacks more of Birrell’s repeated requests for military displays in Dublin than of real protective action; although they were carrying rifles rather than lances, they had only been issued with five rounds of ammunition each.) After being allowed to pass along the quays from O’Connell Bridge, they were fired on by the Four Courts garrison. The ensuing panic and confusion must have been a gratifying sight to the apprehensive Volunteers; horses reared and plunged as the wagon drivers tried to steer their vehicles into a laager, and the cavalrymen hastily dismounted and ran in all directions looking for cover. Most of them ended up pinned down in Charles Street until Thursday, where their main problem was not direct fire but the starvation of their horses. (One of their lances became a flagstaff for a small republican tricolour, propped up in the middle of the King Street–Church Street crossing.) Lancers were also seen by B Company which had to run the gauntlet of a ‘fusillade of rotten cabbages, oranges, apples etc.’ from a crowd of ‘separation women’ – the wives of soldiers, dependent on the ‘separation allowance’ paid by the War Office, and thus fiercely loyal to the government (for the duration at least) – in Phibsboro Road on its way to take up positions around the railway bridge on the North Circular Road.36 But the Volunteers took cover in the garden of St Peter’s Church, and the cavalry passed by before turning south on their way to Sackville Street. This northern outpost of 1st Battalion was already dangerously isolated, however, and would come under serious attack the following day.

The battalion’s main positions remained undisturbed for the next couple of days. But there was a significant exception. D Company, commanded by Seán Heuston, did not mobilize with Daly’s main force. It was the northernmost unit, and mobilized near Mountjoy Square – not far, in fact, from the battalion’s intended northern front at the Cabra Road. But instead of taking up positions there, Heuston took his men due south, through Parnell Square and down Sackville Street towards Beresford Place. His first lieutenant, Seán McLoughlin, recalled that ‘we did not march or take up military formation; we just strolled across’. But ‘everybody was carrying arms’ – Lee-Enfields with 100 rounds of ammunition each – and he himself had ‘a small handbag containing .303 ammunition’. At Beresford Place they met up with some of the ‘Kimmage garrison’ (McLoughlin called them the ‘refugees’; the Company second lieutenant, Dick Balfe, recalled ‘the London Irish waiting under the loop line arches, with a queer assortment of arms of all sorts, including pikes’). After a conference with Connolly they were sent on across the river. They set off barely twenty-five strong, this time ‘in rather ragged military formation’, across Butt Bridge, and around midday caught a Kingsbridge tram. Only as they sat together in the back of the tram did Heuston tell his Lieutenant that they were going into action: ‘I am afraid we are on our own, at least for the beginning.’ Finally, when they got to Queen Street Bridge, Heuston announced to his company that they were going to seize the Mendicity Institute. Perhaps not surprisingly, ‘some of them were astonished’.³⁷

The Mendicity garrison is usually described as one of Daly’s ouposts.38 But it is clear that Daly did not put it there, and it had not figured in the original plan. Heuston seems to have come under Connolly’s direct orders, and to have communicated direct with HQ rather than with Daly as long as communications could be maintained. This was not to be for long, because the Mendicity was the only rebel post which could even indirectly dispute the free movement of British reinforcements from Kingsbridge Station into the centre of the city. It was in fact a key position; but why had it not been occupied by Daly’s force just across the river, rather than by a unit which had to come by a long detour from the northern side of the battalion area? Why, indeed, was it not occupied by the 4th Battalion, responsible for the area south of the river? Dick Balfe heard Connolly tell Heuston that a 1st Battalion company (D) had been detailed to occupy it, but its captain had decided to obey MacNeill. But if Connolly realized belatedly that there was a dangerous gap in the centre of the rebel positions, we may wonder why did he not do more to plug it by establishing a post which could directly close the route along James’s Street and Thomas Street to the Castle. Why not, indeed, occupy Guinness’s Brewery (as, curiously, Connolly’s own communiqué of 28 April was to claim)?

South of 1st Battalion, Eamonn Ceannt’s 4th Battalion also deployed on quite a narrow front, though it is not clear whether its original plan was more extensive. The battalion mobilized at Emerald Square, just north of Dolphin’s Barn, where a little over 100 had assembled by 11 a.m. About half an hour later they moved off down Cork Street to occupy two main posts, the South Dublin Union and the distillery in Marrowbone Lane. Ceannt’s group moved along the branch of the Grand Canal which extended to James’s Street Harbour by the Guinness Brewery, reaching the Rialto Bridge at noon. They entered the SDU by its southern gate. This rambling mass of buildings, covering fifty acres and extending north nearly – but not quite – as far as the junction of James’s Street and Stevens Lane, certainly formed a substantial obstacle to the movement of British forces. (Seumas Murphy, the battalion adjutant, remembered Ceannt earlier ‘describing with enthusiasm how from the South Dublin Union we could control or stop the troops entering the city from Richmond Barracks’.)39 But it could not, and did not, prevent the movement of reinforcements arriving at Kingsbridge Station. The sheer size, and the odd nature, of the SDU complex presented big problems to Ceannt’s force. This walled community was the country’s biggest poorhouse, with 3,000 destitute inmates, its own churches, stores, refectories, and two hospitals with full medical staff. Ceannt was taking a daunting responsibility in turning it into a battleground. His force was never large enough to attempt to hold the whole perimeter, and was soon fighting a shifting struggle against the troops who immediately began to advance from the barracks in the west. No effort seems to have been made to evacuate the inmates, who became embroiled in the increasingly intense mêlée. (Whether removal – even if feasible – would have been a nastier fate is open to question.)

Immediately behind the canal was a much more compact stronghold, Jameson’s Distillery on Marrowbone Lane. Bob Holland of F Company arrived there around 3 p.m. after a series of adventures of the kind replicated by many Volunteers across the city. Originally detailed by Con Colbert to watch the entrance to Wellington Barracks on the South Circular Road while the battalion mobilized, he went on at midday to Colbert’s post, Watkins’ brewery in Ardee Street. There he ran into a ‘very rowdy crowd of women of the poorer class’ who were assaulting the main gate in protest against the ‘Sinn Feiners’ who had gone in and beaten up the caretaker. After a fruitless attempt to get the occupiers to open the gate, he wandered off, and bumped into his fellow-Volunteer brother who was bringing a heavy cartload of guns, ammunition and tinned food to the post. He persuaded him not to try to get past the irate women, and the two of them took the cart back up Cork Street and parked it in a yard at Dolphin’s Barn, before making their way back ‘down Cork Street at top speed, running’, to the sound of gunfire from the canal area, to Marrowbone Lane. They found the force in the distillery ‘in good spirits’ (presumably not, being good Volunteers, John Jameson’s own), filling a large vat with fresh water in preparation for the siege. There seemed, Holland thought, ‘to be more women than men in the garrison’. They turned out to be from the Gaelic League branch where Holland had been at a ceilidh the evening before. Since he was proficient with all the main kinds of rifles used by the Volunteers, he was given two and posted in one of the huge grain storerooms with a commanding view out to the west.

I had grand observation of both north and south sides of the canal banks, along the back of the South Dublin Union as far as Dolphins Barn bridge … I could see over all the roofs of the houses in that area and in the distance a portion of the James’s Street section of the South Dublin Union.40

With one of the women, Josie McGowan, loading his assorted rifles (one Lee-Enfield and one Howth Mauser) in turn, he was to exploit this position for the next four days of fighting.

Not all the 4th Battalion garrisons were so effective. Just to the north of the Union, across Mount Brown, part of C Company had occupied Roe’s Distillery. This seems to have been intended as an outpost to strengthen the northern defences of the SDU, but it was a building with many problems. Only three storeys high, it did not command the Union grounds, and was itself overlooked by the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham – the location of the headquarters of the British army in Ireland – a mere couple of hundred yards away. The rear entrance of Roe’s was at Bow Bridge, which carried the road to the Royal Hospital across the Cammock stream. It was a bridge too far; even before the military response began, local people came out in force to oppose the garrison’s attempt to put up a barricade on it. ‘The women shouted jingo slogans, while the men started to pull down the barricade.’ The Volunteers of C Company, like others elsewhere in the city, had the unpleasant experience of starting their revolution by hand-to-hand fighting with ordinary Dubliners; they had to go at them with clubbed rifles, and laid out two before the rest dispersed. Once British troops began to fire on their building, its limitations became more apparent. Its windows were either too high to see out of, on the upper floor, or too low for safety. In the early evening, the second-in-command recalled, ‘Larry O’Brien rushed over from the side building and told us that the grain was ready to burst into flames.’⁴¹ Most of the garrison dashed in to move it, ending up exhausted; then an attempt to bolster the walls of the yard with grain-filled sacks was driven back by enemy fire. Much of this might have been predicted, perhaps. But, strangely, repeated efforts to get in touch with the garrison over the road in the Union failed. Mount Brown, open to British fire from the west, was a deadly barrier. Patrick Egan spent a long time gazing out at the depressing sight of what seemed to be three dead Volunteers in the field across the road; a fourth, mortally wounded, struggled vainly to raise his water bottle to his mouth.

Egan felt, nonetheless, that the garrison was quite secure in the building. British gunfire became more desultory on Tuesday, and no direct assault came. He was taken aback when Captain Tommy McCarthy announced in the afternoon that the position was untenable, and rejected Egan’s suggestion that, if so, they should try to cross the road into the SDU. In fact, several of the garrison had already decamped. This realization only dawned slowly on the men upstairs; Larry O’Brien felt ‘an uneasy quiet seemed to settle over the building’. He then found that ‘the section manning the top floor was the only one left. For some reason that has never been explained satisfactorily, the building had been evacuated without any notification to the section holding the top.’42 With no officer left, the men had ‘an informal conference’, and decided to try to get over to the Marrowbone Lane garrison.

Eamon de Valera’s 3rd Battalion was the south-east Dublin unit. Its headquarters, and central mobilization point, was in Brunswick Street, close to Westland Row Station. But its area was extensive, socially as well as physically. (‘No greater contrast could be imagined’, one observer wrote, ‘than between the squalid slums of Ringsend and the stately and fashionable houses in the Mount Street area.’)⁴³ Two of its companies mobilized as far west as Earlsfort Terrace, while E Company mobilized out at Oakley Road. Like the others, the battalion’s mobilization on Monday was disappointing. As we have seen, C Company ended up without its captain; so did A Company; and the whole battalion mustered fewer than 130 men. Uniquely among battalion commanders, de Valera specifically refused to allow women to join the muster. The Cumann na mBan group assembled in Merrion Square expecting to receive orders from him never did. He drew in his reduced forces closer to his operational headquarters, in Boland’s Bakery at the bridge on Grand Canal Street, which he occupied around 12.30. He told his men that this would be the main route into Dublin of any British reinforcements that might arrive via Kingstown. Still, he tried to cover some of the wider deployment originally envisaged for his battalion – especially northwards towards the Liffey at Ringsend (where Boland’s mills were), and westwards to Westland Row Station and railway works. Southwards, only one of the canal crossings, at Lower Mount Street Bridge, was covered, by a very small group detached by Simon Donnelly as he took his company in from Earlsfort Terrace to join de Valera’s main force. The Baggot Street crossing was left undefended.

De Valera’s positions were carefully chosen. Joe O’Connor, the first lieutenant of A Company, who had to replace his absent captain in charge of its feeble muster, records that de Valera had briefed them ‘in very great detail’ at a battalion council on Good Friday evening. He was ‘able to tell each Company Captain where he would enter on to his area, and what he would find to his advantage or disadvantage when he got there’. O’Connor was ‘amazed at the amount of information the Commandant had accumulated and how thoroughly he understood about the position each Company was to occupy’. His own company was to control all the level crossings on the railway line from Grand Canal Quay to Kingstown, and ‘dominate’ Beggars Bush Barracks. B Company was to take over Westland Row Station, and send a party up the line to Tara Street Station where they were to link up with the 2nd Battalion who would be in charge of the Amiens Street Station area. C Company would occupy Boland’s bakery and dispensary building, together with Roberts’ builders yard and Clanwilliam House; barricade the canal bridges at Grand Canal Street, Mount Street, Baggot Street and Leeson Street, where they should join up with the 4th Battalion and/or the Citizen Army. D Company was to be based at Boland’s mill, and control the section between the bakery and the quays. F Company was to occupy Kingstown harbour. (E Company, which came from St Enda’s school, was specially detailed to form part of Pearse’s HQ force.)44

Much of this ambitious plan was curtailed on Monday, notably the intended links to the north and west, and the occupation of Kingstown. As we shall see, though, the abandonment of this last objective continued to haunt the battalion commander. The impact of the botched mobilization soon became clear to O’Connor as he brought his reduced company into the Boland’s area. He halted his men at Great Clarence Street and told them they were going into action ‘for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland’; on hearing this news, one of his small band decamped, though fortunately at the same moment another turned up to take over his equipment. His group occupied a terrace of houses at the junction of South Lotts Road and Grand Canal Street, while others entered the railway workshops, climbing over the wall from a disused cart by the road (in the process, one shot himself in the leg). Now O’Connor was reluctantly appointed battalion vice-commandant, a worrying result of the shortage of officers. The battalion’s position was a cause for concern. Simon Donnelly noted that ‘the railway was a very vulnerable position to hold as it ran practically right through our headquarters, and had the enemy got possession of it our area would have been cut in two’. To prevent this, B Company after barricading and locking up Westland Row Station, moved 300 yards down the line and dug a ‘fairly deep trench, dominating the situation generally’.45

Part of 3rd Battalion’s task was to ‘dominate’ Beggars Bush Barracks, but evidently de Valera’s extended reconnaissance of his area had not revealed that the barracks were practically empty. (Its main occupants were from the army catering corps.) There was only a handful of troops there (with seventeen rifles), and the only force that appeared on the scene to fulfil the rebels’ expectation of an immediate military riposte was a unit of the Irish Association of Volunteer Training Corps, part-time reservists, many of them lawyers and other professional men, and many above military age. (The Irish Rugby Union, for instance, had its own contingent.) The ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’, as they were unofficially dubbed, wore civilian clothes with armbands emblazoned ‘GR’ – Georgius Rex; they had recently become a fairly familiar sight on the Dublin streets, where Nathan had been cautiously employing them on guard duties. On Easter Monday they had been on exercises in the Wicklow hills, where they had heard of the rebellion in the early afternoon, and were cautiously making their way back to their depot at Beggars Bush in two columns. The smaller of these came under fire from the Mount Street Bridge outposts in Northumberland Road. As Simon Donnelly tersely put it, they were ‘unfortunate enough to pass our posts and of course had to be dealt with’. They were either unarmed or carrying rifles with no ammunition; four were killed and several wounded before the rest managed to scramble into nearby houses. The larger column, nearly 100 strong, managed to get into the barracks, where they formed the only garrison, and eventually opened fire on the rebel outposts.

The mobilization of the 2nd Battalion presents the biggest puzzle. Its recruitment area, as we have seen, was north-western Dublin, with its depot at Father Mathew Park out beyond the Royal Canal. Strategically, this area was certainly as important as the other three battalion areas. Amiens Street Station was the terminal of the line from Belfast, and it was down this line that some of the first significant British reinforcements were to come. The area also had great symbolic significance as the site of the battle of Clontarf, something of which Thomas MacDonagh, the battalion’s commander, was as we know intensely conscious. It seems clear from de Valera’s instructions to his own battalion that the original plans anticipated the occupation of Amiens Street by the 2nd Battalion, and it is likely that they envisaged the main strength of the battalion operating like 1st Battalion as a shield for the republic’s headquarters. In the event, however, a very different deployment took place.

As we have seen, part of 2nd Battalion spent Monday and Tuesday of Easter week in somewhat uncoordinated (and, at least to one company commander, unexplained) movements along the road from Father Mathew Park to Parnell Square. One section stayed at Ballybough and Annesley Bridges on the Royal Canal, while another went on to join the headquarters force in Sackville Street. Henderson sent out cycle scouts as far north as Malahide to look out for advancing Crown forces, and these reported on Tuesday afternoon that troops were moving down the Malahide Road towards Fairview, and down the Swords Road towards Drumcondra. On Monday evening, or Tuesday, ‘acting on GHQ orders’, Henderson’s force sent men with explosives to demolish the Great Northern railway line as it crossed the ‘sloblands’ east of Fairview. Strangely, however, the chosen group, including Harry Boland and Harry Colley, was completely unprepared for the task: ‘none of us knew anything about gelignite’. Colley was already so tired that he tore his thigh badly in trying to climb over the barbed wire fence at the foot of the railway embankment.46 Thus another long-planned project fell victim to last-minute improvisation. At some point on Tuesday evening, Connolly seems to have ordered this northern outpost group to fall back to Sackville Street. Lynch’s explanation of this move is that ‘the Republican positions at Fairview and Annesley Bridge were becoming encircled by overwhelming forces of the enemy’, who were already in control of the Amiens Street–North Strand sector.⁴⁷

Certainly British moves here were significant, which underlines the fundamental importance of 2nd Battalion’s area.⁴⁸ Yet the main body of the battalion had left its area entirely and marched off south of the river. As the ICA force arrived at St Stephen’s Green at midday, they could see MacDonagh’s men parading on the west side of the Green in front of the College of Surgeons. Peadar Kearney of B Company (the composer of what was fast becoming the Volunteer national anthem, ‘A Soldier’s Song’) felt ‘orphaned’; he and one comrade were the sole representatives of a company which a week before had mustered close on 200 men. MacDonagh was joined by Major John MacBride, the legendary Boer War Irish Brigade leader newly appointed his vice-commandant. (Indeed MacBride, who had for years been marginal to the separatist elite, seems simply to have appeared on Monday because he heard that something was going on.) His sudden promotion was certainly due to his military reputation, rather than his intervening experience as a water bailiff for the Dublin Corporation, or his famous drink problem which set him apart from the puritanical new republicans. It came too late for him to acquire Volunteer uniform; he turned out in an immaculate suit (complete with white spats and malacca cane). He and MacDonagh led their force off westwards down Cuffe Street to Bishop Street, where they entered the imposing mass of the Jacob’s factory building. Again, they had to face some popular resist ance as they did so, the outposts they sent into the ‘Liberties’ provoked some public hostility. Kearney, set to building barricades in Blackpitts and New Street, thought that the aggression of the ‘separation women’ was ‘easily the worst part of Easter week’. In any case he doubted the value of barricades there – ‘a futile business, but apparently part of Sunday’s plan and based on our keeping communications open … had 4,000 men taken the field’.

Placing MacDonagh’s main force in Jacob’s factory suggests an intention to dispute the movement of troops from Portobello Barracks into the city. If this was the aim, however, the occupation of a single building, however strong, was not the most promising method. (Paradoxically, indeed, the very strength of the Jacob’s building would sharply limit its effectiveness for this purpose.) There were plenty of ways around it. A series of small outposts might have been much more effective. This was something the rebels were to learn by experience, but even in the original plans there was some provision for such tactics. The occupation by a ten-man ICA detachment of Davy’s pub overlooking Portobello Bridge had great potential. The seizure of the building, led by one of Davy’s disgruntled cellarmen (felicitously named James Joyce), now transformed into a proletarian fighter, is one of the emblematic revolutionary scenes of the rising.49 But the garrison gave away its position by firing on a lone officer, and soon came under heavy fire as, in what the press called ‘one of the most exciting of the events of Easter Monday … strong reinforcements, with machine guns, were rushed up’ from the nearby barracks, ‘to the accompaniment of hearty cheering of the crowds on the Rathmines road’ (no doubt including a few of Davy’s regulars).⁵⁰ When, after an hour or so, the troops rushed the bridge and broke in the plate-glass windows of the pub, they found that ‘the rebels had made good their escape’.

After the evacuation of Davy’s pub – which had not in any case been under MacDonagh’s command – there were no prepared rebel posts along the whole length of Camden and Richmond Streets. MacDonagh’s outposts in Blackpitts, New Street and Fumbally Lane were withdrawn on Monday evening before any contact with the enemy. (‘Late that night we were withdrawn to Jacob’s’, one member of F Company wrote, adding laconically, ‘after that I enjoyed a very quiet week’.)⁵¹ The barricades ‘were in a dangerous position and no useful purpose was being served’, one garrison member noted; ‘they were attacked on all sides by civilians’.⁵² Early on Tuesday, when the expected British attack on Jacob’s had failed to materialize, MacDonagh had second thoughts and sent out two small parties to occupy shops in Camden Street, but these once again withdrew after a sharp exchange of fire with advancing troops. The garrison of Jacob’s factory itself totalled no fewer than 185. Soon after they took over the vast building, some of them got the chance to open fire on a group of soldiers passing the end of Bishop Street as they went down Redmond’s Hill. Several were wounded; but this was almost the last the garrison saw of the enemy. Most of them stayed in the biscuit-filled mausoleum for the rest of the week, waiting for an attack that never came.

The rebels who went out to do battle on Easter Monday morning may have been marching into the unknown, but they shared one expectation: that the British military response would be rapid and hard. This may have influenced their choice of positions and procedures in ways that cannot be exactly clarified. The handful of encounter fights that happened at odd intervals on Monday sustained this apprehension. But it was a mistaken belief. Like a number of other assumptions, it was the product of a surprising ignorance of the strength and location of the Crown forces. At midday on Monday, there were just 400 troops in ‘immediate readiness’, out of a total of 120 officers and 2,265 soldiers. At the Castle there was a guard of just 6; in Ship Street Barracks beside it, some 20–25. An unknown number of officers had gone off to the big race meeting at Fairyhouse. The most notable absentee was the GOC Irish Command, Major-General Friend, who had gone to London for a long weekend. He had not returned for the urgent meeting on Sunday to discuss the arrest of leading republicans, and he only found out about the rebellion when he went in to the War Office on Monday. His deputy, Colonel H. V. Cowan, maintained nonetheless that the military response was unaffected. There was ‘no delay owing to officers being away’; the thirteen headquarters staff on duty were ‘ample’ to deal with the situation; the troops themselves had not been given Bank Holiday leave, and were all in barracks.53 Still, he admitted that they were taken by surprise. No special orders or dispositions had been made to deal with the Volunteer manoeuvres on Easter Sunday. The military authorities still assumed that the capital was safe; ‘the chief anxiety was outside Dublin’. The rebels had certainly seized the initiative. (Both Cowan himself, and the commanding officer of the Dublin garrison, Lt. Col. Kennard, were out of their offices when the news broke, leaving Kennard’s adjutant to take on the rebellion.) The army’s response would be instinctual.