Unlikely Rebels (10 page)

Susan Mitchell's aforementioned anti-conscription ballad, a great favourite at concerts and céilís, sums up the ironic rejection of Britain's recruitment posters for manning its armies with Irishmen. It is about a boy from Carrick who ‘took the Saxon shilling':

He didn't see much glory and he didn't get much good.
In most unrighteous places he freely shed his blood.
The best years of his manhood he spent across the foam.
But when they had no use for him they up and sent him home.
He has bullets in his right arm and bullets in his leg,
So he had no
grá
for working, nor had he leave to beg.
The peelers have their eye on him – twice he's been in gaol.
By now he's in the workhouse. Glory be to God!
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Audiences sang the last sentence with much gusto.

The Irish Ireland movement was in flood, veering towards a situation where it would, at last, burst its restraints. The daughters of Frederick and Isabella Gifford, in defiance of their upbringing, were very much part of the whole dramatic change.

Notes

Apart from the plays, concerts, céilís, Gaelic games and a feisty republican press, there was a very much darker side to the Dublin of the early twentieth century, and this increasingly became the concern of those involved in the Irish Ireland movement, including the Gifford sisters. James Connolly's daughter Nora described Dublin's housing conditions, which she observed while electioneering for the Labour Party in Townsend Street in December 1910: ‘I went up pitch black stairs, my feet slipping and squelching in the filth on them; some wide, some of them with steps missing. And the smell … the smell!'
[1]

The hopelessly inadequate sewage and limited water supply caused horrific conditions. The one water closet in a yard, clogged and stinking, was supposed to take away the waste. Instead, ordure (human and animal) built up in the small courtyards and was removed by a sanitary cart once a week – in theory at least. Winter found shivering children in inadequate clothes and with little in their stomachs. Their bodies and immune systems were deprived of proper nourishment, and their bare feet were blue with the cold and wet. Most of the ruling class had moved out to the salubrious suburbs such as Rathmines and Rathgar, ridding themselves of the stench and infectious danger of abject poverty. The Irish who lived in the little villages around the city, such as Coolock, Blanchardstown, Lucan and Tallaght, were the lucky ones. Their cottages were infinitely superior to the rat-infested city slums where death from fever and starvation was endemic.

A law was passed in Britain, in 1906, to feed those school-going children who were in want. No such law was passed for Ireland, where the situation was infinitely worse, despite several attempts made by the Irish MPs at Westminster. The only thing to be said in its favour, from the Irish Irelanders' point of view, was that this neglect recruited new supporters for their policy. A native government, the argument ran, could not possibly be so indifferent to its wretched poor.

The Giffords became involved when Maud Gonne MacBride (the beloved muse of W. B. Yeats, one of the founding members of Inghínidhe na hÉireann (
INE) and estranged wife of Major John MacBride), returned from France. Seeing the horror of the Dublin poor, she proposed to get school meals for the starving children through the munificence of the Dublin Corporation. ‘
John' Gifford, by then a member of Inghínidhe na hÉireann, described Maud Gonne MacBride's deep warm-heartedness, which had been greatly moved by the pitiful children on the Dublin streets. She saw them not only barefoot and hungry, but also wearing buttonless hand-me-down coats kept closed by their own cold hands or by a large safety pin. One virtue of the Ascendancy elite having moved out to new suburbs with their own town councils, was that Dublin Corporation's members were now more likely to be tradespeople and merchants. They agreed with Inghínidhe to strike a rate for school meals, but their legal advisers told them they could not do so without the determinedly withheld Westminster permission. Maud Gonne MacBride went ahead anyway, without official help, and with other members of Inghínidhe formed the Ladies School Dinner Committee (
LSDC). Canon Kavanagh, parish priest of one of the most deprived Dublin parishes, St Audeon's, asked her to supply meals to his school's children. She and the Canon had been friends since the time she had been part of the Ladies Committee for the Patriotic Children's Treat, which had organised a picnic for deprived Irish children in Drumcondra to counter that provided officially to honour Queen Victoria on her visit to Ireland in 1900.

Maud Gonne MacBride spent several weeks in Ireland in the autumn of 1910, and during this time 250 children were served hot stew with potato and beans by herself, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Countess Markievicz, Helena Molony, Kathleen Clarke (wife of Thomas Clarke), Helen Laird and Muriel, Nellie, Grace and ‘
John' Gifford.
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The Patriotic Children's Treat had been a one-off children's party timed to coincide with the Queen's visit; the LSDC's meals, vital for health, were sustained for as long as possible.

Most of the children had never tasted beans before, and they were a special favourite. School attendance improved, and Fr Thomas Keane, another nationalist priest, asked the LSDC's help for his school in John's Lane. The children's meals were served on great trestle tables in the school yard, and the volunteer caterers worked hard at cooking, washing up and raising funds to buy the ingredients.

Meanwhile, the Sisters of the Holy Faith, founded by Margaret Aylward, ran three ‘poor schools' – one in Temple Bar (one room in which they had all their fifty pupils), one in Little Strand Street and a third in the Coombe. At these schools, food, books and clothing were provided.
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Margaret Alyward's Catholic charity schools received help from some Protestant sympathisers, who were as aware as she was of the dire lives her pupils led. Their aim was not proselytism.

On Nellie's first visit to St Audeon's she noticed what she thought were little bundles of wet rags left to dry around the fire, but then discovered that the teacher allowed the very smallest toddlers to lie there, where they often fell asleep. Their mothers were using the school as a kind of crèche while they went out to work or to seek it.
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Many of the children had no underwear. This fact was brought to the attention of an appalled Canon Kavanagh when one of them inadvertently exposed her bare bottom. The very next day he arrived with what were described as red woollen garments, mostly too big. But, as Nellie Gifford wrote in her notes, the kind man had been generous in good faith. It is a cheerful, comforting thought with which to leave the wretchedness of it all – scrawny little tummies full of warm food and cold little bottoms clothed against the winter in voluminous red flannel.
[5]

Despite the moving description Nellie has left us of St Audeon's, she did not put as much work into the school meals as did her sisters, because of her absence on work in County Meath. She cut her political teeth, as it were, in ‘Meath of the Pastures', where she spent most of her years as a domestic economy instructress.

At Sandymount, Countess Plunkett was also feeding the hungry, and there were other such kindnesses around the city. The work of these women was a great help, but the enormity of the problem required state aid. Westminster had turned its back once again on the suffering in Ireland. Its callousness was not forgotten, a repeat of the Famine laissez-faire, and this time there was the added insult of the comparative care of the parliament for London's poor, enshrined in legislation.

The Irish MPs at Westminster were a motley lot. Some parlia-mentarians were mere lickspittles, dressed up in the required customary garb of the day – frock coats and tall silk hats; some were in politics with an eye to whatever was the equivalent of today's brown envelopes and Ansbacher accounts; but others were gutsy participants, opposing a parliamentary system where empirical needs were satiated at the expense of the colonies.

All the Giffords would have been aware in their childhood, from the talk amongst their father's friends at Temple Villas, of such parliamentary personalities as Parnell, Butt, Biggar and Davitt. But it was a contemporary MP, Laurence Ginnell, the Member for Meath, whom Nellie Gifford most admired, particularly for his very practical approach. His legal booklet,
The Brehon Laws
, recorded the fact that, while the land of the old Gaelic clan was communal, the
maighin digona
, or farmhouse and attached small garden, was a sanctuary for the family unit, protected by law – roughly the equivalent of an Englishman's home being his castle.

Ginnell, as well as being an MP, was also a barrister of the Middle Temple in London and took the unusual step, for a barrister, of also becoming a sort of highwayman and cattle rustler. His method was to watch carefully the movements of the RIC, his sworn enemies, and to enter a field as remote as possible, under cover of darkness, to drive the cattle onto the road. The field was then ploughed, leaving it unfit for grazing, and notices were pinned to the cow's horns, bearing such messages as:

The land is for the people
and the road is for us.

or

Blessed are the cattle drivers
for they shall inherit the land.

He acquired a committed following, none more keen than Nellie and ‘John', who became infected with Nellie's enthusiasm. Both Nellie and ‘John' also supported Ginnell's Dublin demonstrations in 1911, joined by their sister Grace, protesting against the visit of Edward VII. In time, after 1916, Ginnell became known at Westminster, with a mixture of toleration and affection, as ‘the member for Ireland'. The Meath designation was not big enough to encompass his activities. During the ensuing struggle between England and Ireland, the pockets in the tails of his regulation parliamentary frock coat became a sort of illicit mailbag, carrying messages to and from imprisoned rebels.
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The next Irish figure in the political limelight with whom Nellie and ‘John' associated, this time actively, was James Larkin, especially on one historic occasion which put Nellie in considerable danger but for which her personal courage is rarely credited. This giant of a man, six feet four inches in height, who had escaped from the Liverpool slums, had a leonine head to crown his stature and a heart that felt a deep, abiding compassion for the exploited manual workers of his day – often unfettered slaves of unscrupulous masters. With the fabled Larkin compassion went an iron will and a
modus operandi
in which courage and determination were the driving forces. His character was forged in an extremely harsh childhood, and his statue in O'Connell Street has perfectly caught the man. Hands outstretched, a mob orator, he could mould the mood and the actions of huge crowds, captured in the web of his impassioned words. None knew more than he the sour fruits of exploitation. When only seven years of age, he was already working in the slums of Liverpool, to which city his parents had emigrated from Newry. He was apprenticed two years later to a decorator, and at eleven became an engineer's apprentice. When Larkin was fourteen, his father died, and things got even worse: he had to fight to keep starvation at bay. Caught as a stowaway with ten others on a ship bound for Buenos Aires, they were badly treated by the ship's captain, who demanded excessive labour and gave them poor food. The young Larkin organised a strike. It was three ‘firsts' for him: his first strike, his first success (ultimately) and his first imprisonment for his stand. His confinement for one night, in irons, in the ship's hold, with just a drink of water and a swarm of rats for company, was a remembered nightmare.

Later, in Liverpool, Larkin founded the National Union of Dock Labourers and, back in Ireland in 1909, he tried to instil his courage into the poorest and least skilled of the workers, the dockers. They were already doing strenuous work for ten hours a day, barefoot and barebacked in a hold with dust-polluted air, dodging trolleys which were a danger to life and limb, especially to exhausted men. Their required output was approximately 100 tons of cargo a day, but that was not enough for their employers, and by an unfair system of bonuses their output was hiked to 200 tons a day. Even the strongest tottered at the end of three days, knowing all too well that there were dozens lining the quays to take their place. Added to this, their exploiters entered into an unholy franchise with publicans: the men were paid in the pubs only, where they were required, if they did not want to lose their pitiful jobs, to spend some of this sweated money. In return, the publicans paid a divvy to the bosses. After a day of curses, physical violence and the ever-present fear of losing their precious jobs, all too often the exhausted men spent money on drink which was needed to put bread on the family table.

James Larkin met this exploitation with his own brand of militant, fearless trade unionism. His method, facing the employers in unbending confrontation, using the strike weapon and involving other workers in any given strike, became known as Larkinism. He was a zealot and said himself that he was ‘fighting a holy war'.
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He was operating in a slumland which was physically rotting at its core. The putrid tenements actually collapsed in places, their decaying walls no longer able to sustain the structure of a roof, maiming, killing and entombing some of their wretched inhabitants.

On 26 August 1913, the tramway workers, whose employer was William Martin Murphy, had gone on strike and had abandoned their trams on the streets. Murphy was reassured by Dublin Castle that the RIC, the Dublin Metropolitan Police (
DMP) and even the British army of occupation would support him in a confrontation with the trade unionists. At a strike meeting in Beresford Place, the DMP arrested Larkin on a charge of ‘seditious conspiracy, of disturbing the peace and raising discontent and hatred among certain classes of His Majesty's subjects, of inciting hatred and contempt of the government, and of inciting murder'. Though he was released on bail, the magistrate, Swift (a shareholder in Murphy's Tramway Company), issued a proclamation as the DMP had asked him to, that banned a meeting arranged by Larkin for Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), Dublin, on 31 August. Typically defiant, Larkin burned the ban and swore that he would speak in Sackville Street as arranged.

During that weekend the Dublin streets saw bloody confrontations and even death. Seán O'Casey, the playwright and a member of the Irish Citizen Army, went to pay his respects to one of the victims, a fellow trade unionist, young James Nolan, as he lay in his coffin. In
Drums Under the Window
, O'Casey described the scene:

There he was asprawl under a snowy sheet, looking like a mask on a totem pole, one eye gone, the other askew, the nose cracked at the bridge and bent sideways: the forehead and cheek royal purple: from a distance it looked like a fading iris on a wide patch of snow. The mighty baton!
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