To anyone interested in history, surely one of the best things about this decade of centenaries is the degree to which lost stories have been resurrected?
Shoe boxes in attics, long undisturbed having been put away for a variety of reasons, have been re-opened, their contents dusted down and examined by a new generation, hungry to know and eager to learn, without necessarily passing judgment. It seems as though we have shed much of the baggage of our history but not our lust to know and to understand.
Much of all that applies, of course, to the first World War and the heartbreaking stories that came back from the trenches. But it applies also to history closer to home, to the Irish revolution that began, arguably, with the labour unrest of 1913 and grew into the Rising of 1916, the War of Independence and all that followed.
Some of the best commemorations of 1916 have been local, involving communities rediscovering, often through re-enactment and story-telling, what are, in essence, their own stories. I experienced several myself, notably in north Co Dublin and also in north Wicklow where I live.
One of the quiet heroes of all this is Jimmy Wren, a former Dublin Corporation housing officer who has devoted much of his later life to rescuing the names of the ordinary, rank and file Irish Volunteer and Citizen Army rebels, and the roles that they played in the revolution.
An author of several books, last year he produced the GPO Garrison Easter 1916 – a biographical dictionary. The book contains the names and details of 572 people whose identities and roles he managed to unearth with the help of the Military History Bureau and other archival sources, together with his own endeavours.
Out now is a companion volume: The Four Courts Garrison and Mendicity Institution Easter Week 1916 – a biographical dictionary. It contains the details – the names and rank, role in the Rising, life after it where known (for those who survived) and places of burial – of 428 men and women who served in both locations. Many are also accompanied by black and white linocut-style images of their faces.
A series of excellent appendices contain a trove of information. An analysis of the home addresses of the Four Courts Garrison confirms – once again – the role of Dublin inner-city working-class people in the Rising.
There are concentrations of volunteers from, for instance, Arbour Hill and Stoneybatter; from the areas of Christchurch, the Coombe, Dominick Street, Mountjoy Square, the North Circular Road, North Strand, Phibsboro, Broadstone and Cabra. Few enough came from Dún Laoghaire (then Kingstown), Donnybrook and Rathgar (one each).
The list of occupations is similarly revealing. There are clusters of barmen and grocer’s assistants, carpenters and cabinet makers, clerks, draper’s assistants and porters, electricians and vehicle drivers, not to mention painters, printers and railway workers.
Oddly enough it being the Four Courts, there is no barrister identified in the list of occupations. There is one solicitor – but there are four solicitor’s clerks.
The number of relatives, fathers and sons, and siblings, is also revealing. Just as many fathers and sons marched along the quays to sail off to England and later Gallipoli and the Western Front never to return, so too all did the males of fighting age in other families enlisted en masse in the Volunteers.
Thus we have, for instance, Joseph Bevan of 58 Lower Dominick Street and his three sons, Thomas, James and Charles, all enlisting – Joseph, Thomas and Charles in the 1st Battalion of the Dublin Brigade, James in Fianna Eireann.
James, aged 16, ran dispatches for a time from the Four Courts but was eventually sent home because of his age. Charles was a section commander there and, with three other volunteers, he occupied the Chancellor’s Chambers until the surrender. In later life, he was a printer in The Irish Press.
Thomas was also a section commander in the Four Courts and was sentenced to death afterwards, commuted to 10 years’ penal servitude. A man of fine voice, in later years he joined the O’Meara Opera Company and, with 2RN, the forerunner of RTÉ Radio, he was a frequent broadcaster. As a proof reader, he also worked for many years in the Irish Press, the Irish Independent and also this newspaper.
Their father Joseph was deported after the Rising to Frongoch internment camp in Wales where his health failed him and he contracted tuberculosis. He died, on December 13th, 1919, in the Pigeon House Sanitorium.
In a foreword, historian Brian Hanley rightly praises Jimmy Wren for the service he has done to Dublin’s history, to commemorating those who fought and died in 1916 and for enhancing contemporary understanding of that traumatic time.
He notes how many of the volunteers prospered in independent Ireland but many did not. Some emigrated, some remained and fought in the Civil War, participating in its “grim atrocities”, as Hanley puts it.
“When we discuss these stories, as we surely will in a few years,” writes Hanley, it may be uncomfortable but it is necessary to confront and understand how comrades, who battled the might of the Empire in 1916, could just a few years later kill one another.”
The Four Courts Garrison and Mendicity Institution Easter Week 1916 by Jimmy Wren is available from the author, who may be contacted via email at 1916book@gmail.com
