The good old days of the Emergency are mostly wrapped up now in the warmth of nostalgia. They were the days when our grandfathers played part-time soldiers in the Local Defence Force, the glimmer men prowled urban streets, and the road through the Phoenix Park was renamed by Dublin wits the New Bog Road because of the huge clamps of turf lining it.
The glimmer men were gas company inspectors who tried to make sure that people weren’t using their cookers during prohibited hours. For technical reasons the gas could not be turned off completely: a thin supply continued at all times producing a glimmer of flame capable of boiling a kettle, if it was left long enough, and making a pot of tea.
The glimmer men had the authority to walk into people’s houses and check the cooker to see if it was still warm. Wet cloths were kept handy, to cool down the cooker, as soon as a glimmer man was spotted in the locality. It was a constant battle between the tea-makers and the inspectors but it did require, of course, that you had tea. Like many other commodities, notably petrol, tea leaves became increasingly scarce as the war went on. Rationing provided an ever dwindling amount so tea leaves were used over and over again until the exercise became pointless.
Which left tea drinkers at the mercy of Dublin’s extensive black marketeers who were not above mixing a little turf mould from the abundant supply in the Phoenix Park into their quarter pounds of highly-priced tea. Everybody, of course, condemned the black market while most people who could pay the prices did so. Among the operators of the black market were some detectives based in Dublin Castle: a superintendent sent in to clean it up was shot dead in somewhat murky circumstances some years after the war. Shopkeepers were occasionally convicted of overcharging but not many real black marketeers were sent to jail. They provided a useful safety valve: clamping down too hard would have prompted a backlash, especially from the middle classes.
Fuel shortages increased over time, stopping all buses after nine at night and turning the city into a mass of cyclists and walkers. Petrol became all but impossible to get legally and it was restricted eventually to doctors and clergymen. But the rationing clearly didn’t inhibit everybody’s ingenuity: a commentator once noted sourly that the punters at Leopardstown races the previous Saturday must have been mostly doctors and priests on emergency calls if one was to judge by the car park.
Behind the nostalgic glow, however, there was a harsh reality, exemplified at its worst by the bombing of the North Strand by German aircraft which killed 28 people in May 1941. Two German raids on Belfast the previous month had killed an estimated 1,100 people. The North Strand victims were not the only ones killed by German bombs in neutral Ireland: three young women were killed in a lunchtime attack on a creamery at Campile, Co Wexford in August 1940 and the Shannon sisters, Mary Ellen and Brigid, and their 16-year-old niece Kathleen died when a bomb fell on their farmhouse in Co Carlow in the middle of a January night in 1941.
The latter, almost forgotten now, brought home to people the utter randomness of war. The farmhouse was in open countryside, remote from any possible strategic target. The other end of the farmhouse was largely undamaged: five male family members asleep there were uninjured. The pilot was probably jettisoning his bombs to fly back to France, possibly thinking he was over western England or Wales or even the sea.
The first few days of 1941 (which form the background of Echobeat, the second book in the Echoland series) saw up to a dozen bombing incidents by German aircraft over the east coast from Enniscorthy up to Dundalk, inland to the Curragh, and including bombs on South Circular Road and Terenure in Dublin. Other than the Shannon family, nobody was killed but that was a matter of luck.
The Fianna Fáil government of the day tried, with considerable success, to smother the country with a comforting blanket of censorship, aimed as much at dampening down internal divisions as demonstrating neutrality. Preventing acrimonious debate at home between the pro-German and the pro-British camps was its main preoccupation, leading to the banning, for instance, of newsreels about the RAF which had raised conflicting cheers and jeers in a cinema.
Frank Aiken, the minister in charge of censorship, was not above fighting traditional battles with older enemies that had nothing to do with the country’s neutral status. He jousted with The Irish Times over whether it could mention the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI): no, he ruled, an organisation could not be “royal” and “national” at the same time. He lost that one but he won another over a photograph of a public meeting in College Green which showed the Bank of Ireland building in the background. The tympanum over the entrance had (and still has) the British royal coat of arms on it and the photo would be a breach of neutrality, he decided. The picture appeared in the newspaper with the coat of arms scratched out and what looked like a crude hole in the tympanum.
In relation to the war itself, censorship required a balance of, essentially, propaganda. Allied and Axis war bulletins were reported, often side by side. What is surprising, from a casual glance at them, is how accurately they traced the progress of the war, leaving aside that every belligerent exaggerated its successes and minimised its setbacks. Apart from the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when Soviet claims were wildly at odds with the reality of German advances, it was possible to follow the broad progress of the conflict fairly well through the censored press.
The uncertainty of the outcome during the first three years of the war plus the shortages of basic commodities, the near impossibility of travel, the curbs on industry and farming due to shortages of raw materials and fertilisers all added up to a very tough period. Which followed, it must be remembered, the difficult decade of the 1930s when many people went hungry much of the time.
Writing historical fiction is a great antidote to nostalgia. Putting yourself back into a period like the Emergency quickly dispels any sepia-toned images and rids you of the fallacious assumption that the past was always a simpler time than the present.
Joe Joyce's Echoland spy novel, set during the second World War in Dublin, is this year's Dublin's One City One Book. It is the first in a series of which Echobeat and Echowave are the subsequent volumes.
2017 Dublin: One City One Book
Lord Mayor of Dublin, Brendan Carr, launching the 2017 Dublin: One City One Book programme of events today in Pearse Street Library, said: “Echoland brings the reader back to the Dublin of the 1940s and I know it will prove to be a popular choice with bookclubs and the city’s many readers. I hope people will engage with the many interesting events that take place during the month of April as part of this wonderful festival.”
Echoland, published by New Island Books, is the twelfth book to be featured as Dublin: One City One Book. Readers are brought back to experience life in Dublin during the Emergency of the 1940s. This year's festival, which runs during April, offers an opportunity for readers to engage with the book, and the city, through music, readings, walks and interviews. All events are free and details are available on: dublinonecityonebook.ie/programme
Joyce said: “I’m delighted and honoured that Echoland will be Dublin’s One City One Book for 2017. The city is an integral part of the book, not just the backdrop to a spy story. As I was writing it, I was very conscious of the hardships and great dangers of the Emergency period, faced – as always by Dubliners – with resilience and wit.”
Festival highlights include:
Airman Michael J Whelan will give tours of the Air Corps museum at Baldonnel, with a focus on aviation during the World War II period on Thursdays in April at 11am
Eunan O'Halpin, Professor of Contemporary Irish History at Trinity College Dublin, will talk about Spies in 1940s Ireland at Dublin Castle's Chapel Royal on April 10th at 6.30pm.
Author and journalist Mary Kenny will appear at the Mansion House to discuss her book Germany Calling: A Personal Biography Of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw on April 12th at 6.30pm
Authors Sinéad Crowley, Andrew Hughes and Joe Joyce will talk about the challenges of writing fiction set in different time periods in a panel discussion entitled Writing Crime Fiction in Dublin City Library & Archive on April 25th at 6.30pm
