Unlikely Rebels (11 page)

On his release from custody, Larkin had taken refuge in the Markievicz residence in Rathmines, a house which was habitually a refuge for the poor, for nationalists and for artistic friends. The Count lived there when he returned from looking after his estates in his native Poland, and, though among his wife's many friends James Larkin was not a favourite of his. Nevertheless he went along with a scheme to throw the watching authorities off the scent, which enabled Larkin to go to Sackville Street as promised. The Countess gave a big party, allegedly for her husband's friends to celebrate his return from Poland, and the place was full of lights, laughter and music – not at all a venue where one would expect to find a socialist hideaway. The bohemian revelry was not what the authorities associated with Larkin, so the DMP withdrew.

But there was another problem: how to get the six-foot-four Larkin to the main street of the city and past the watchful DMP. The plan required first that a young student from the College of Science, Gussie McGrath, go to the Imperial Hotel in Sackville Street (opposite the General Post Office and owned by William Martin Murphy), to book a balconied front room for a Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Donnelly, who would be brought there by his niece. The niece was necessary because the reverend clergyman had to be deaf – his Liverpudlian accent would give him away otherwise – and this obliged his ‘niece' to do all the talking. He would have to stoop to conceal his giveaway height.

Nellie Gifford was chosen to act as the niece because, owing to her absence in Meath, she was unknown to the DMP. The balcony outside the room would be Larkin's platform. A frock coat belonging to the Count, glasses to shorten his long nose, black hair powdered grey and a grey beard and whiskers completed the disguise. The stage was set. The uncle and his niece arrived in a cab and were admitted to the hotel, Nellie doing the talking.

When Larkin found the window of his room impeded by flowerpots, he flew out and into another room, tearing away at his false beard and whiskers to the astonishment of hotel guests. The arrangement had been that he was to signal to Nellie when he was ready to speak so that she could slip away. But in the charge to another room he forgot, and the police took her into custody.
[9]
As Larkin began to address the assembled crowd there was a triumphant roar from the packed street. He had kept his promise, even though he was not allowed to say very much before the DMP stormed his ‘platform' – but what he said did not matter. What mattered was his moral victory. For her courageous and very necessary part, Nellie Gifford is given little or no credit. At best she is referred to as ‘Miss Gifford, a schoolteacher'. A newspaper cutting among her papers credited ‘Miss Helena Molony' with her role, and even the excellent
Life of James Larkin
by Donal Nevin accords her sister, Sidney Gifford, the honour of being the Rev. Donnelly's ‘niece'.

Cameras recorded the devastation of the scene in Sackville Street. The frenzied police, over 300 of them, wielded their batons indiscriminately. The pictures are reminiscent of those we see of the Russian Revolution and the batoning of nationalists by the Royal Ulster Constabulary at Drumcree in Northern Ireland in 1996. To move was to invite a baton blow. Some lay on the streets, especially in Prince's Street, which had been blocked. Constance Markievicz was injured by a baton.
[10]
The hospitals were overcrowded with the injured, both policemen and strikers. That Sunday was international news, and Larkin's name became a byword worldwide.

William Martin Murphy's reaction was swift: the following Wednesday, 3 September, he chaired a meeting of some 400 employers who decided to lock out from employment any member of Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. Appalling misery followed. Despite food ships sent by the British Trades Union Congress, and in spite of the efforts of the food kitchen in Liberty Hall, the lock-out by Murphy and his Federated Union of Employers broke the strike. The agonised men had to watch the hunger of their families. Many intellectuals railed against the employers, including Joseph Plunkett, W. B. Yeats, the Sheehy Skeffingtons, Thomas MacDonagh, Pádraig Pearse and George Bernard Shaw. It was the Giffords' old friend from their teenage debut, George Russell (Æ), who gave voice most strongly in his criticism of the employers. In his famous open letter, he addressed them with cutting vituperation:

You determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the population of this city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives, and the hunger of their children.

We read in the dark ages of the rack and the thumb screw. But these iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men, in dungeons and torture chambers … It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly on starving one hundred thousand people and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride.
[11]

The workers, the intellectuals and Larkin lost that battle, but they were not to lose the war that lay ahead. The strike triggered off the formation of two bodies that brought enormous changes to Ireland. Larkin's sense of nationalism played second fiddle to his deep and abiding pity for the poor – but it surfaced now and then. In his presidential address to the Irish Trade Union conference at City Hall on 1 June 1914, he said, ‘I claim we have the opportunity given us of achieving much in the future of our beloved country, to work and live for, and if needs be die to win back, in the words of Erin's greatest living poet, for Cathleen Ní Houlihan, her four beautiful fields.'

Larkin left Ireland for America in 1914, but his ‘failed' general strike had a domino effect on the fate of Cathleen and her fields. To harness the bitter antagonism of the Dublin workers, the Irish Citizen Army was founded on 19 November 1913, initially to protect the workers from the DMP. Jack White, a former officer of the British army and son of Field Marshal Sir George White, trained and drilled this new Irish ‘army' of two companies, 500 men and inadequate weaponry, whose aims, defensive or otherwise, were both socialist and republican. Its membership dwindled gradually as want increased and the desperate men went back to work, but Larkin, with James Connolly's committed support, was determined that it should not be allowed to die. It acquired a constitution and a flag: ‘The Plough and The Stars'. A successful recruiting drive brought in new members, including Countess Markievicz.

As a result of her part in the Imperial Hotel drama, Nellie Gifford was dismissed from her post in County Meath. She had always intimated that a certain amount o
f
‘pull' (Protestant and unionist) had got her the job, and these two categories now quickly rejected her.
[12]
She came back to Dublin, and, not long afterwards, this daughter of the Ascendancy class in Ireland donned the uniform of the Citizen Army and stepped out with the dockers and labourers of Dublin. Nellie was the only one of the Temple Villas sisters to join what was an armed force of the Irish Ireland movement, though she was seen as a ‘field cook', rather than a soldier. Her mother's thoughts on the matter may well be imagined.

Notes

It is the way of things that as young people who share a common dream meet each other, many romances will result. Such was the case with the Irish Ireland movement. Moreover, there can have been no pre-revolutionary country where women played a greater part than Ireland in those years. So it was hardly surprising that two of the Gifford daughters found romance through the movement.

Pádraig Pearse had acquired for his boarding school a fine old building standing on its own grounds, Cullenswood House on Oakley Road, Ranelagh, and invited Nora Dryhurst to a celebratory open day in 1911. Poets and writers knew Mrs Dryhurst well and had often availed of her kindness and hospitality. She had taken Ernest Gifford's sisters under her wing and brought Muriel, Grace and ‘
John' along for the occasion. It was a lovely summer's afternoon, and Mrs Dryhurst and the three girls were greeted on the steps by Pádraig and Willie Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett. ‘Now I want you to fall in love with these girls and marry them' was her humorous introduction.
[1]
Two of the men obliged her: Thomas married Muriel, and Joseph married Grace – a good score for a matchmaker. It was typical of MacDonagh's ease of manner that he came down to the sisters, arms outstretched, and said it would be difficult to choose in such company.
[2]
Gracious it was, but tongue-in-cheek, because very soon he was a kilted visitor to Temple Villas, courting Muriel and scandalising the West British neighbourhood with his traditional Gaelic dress.

In fact, his choice was immediate and mutual, though Muriel was not his first love. The legendary MacDonagh charm had not been in cold storage up to then, and the young ladies he escorted were a great source of interest for his pupils at St Enda's. One such lady, fleetingly mentioned, was called Veronica. A name that stayed the course a good deal longer belonged to Mary Maguire. Mary had been at boarding school at the Sacred Heart Convent at Blumenthal in Holland, along with Rose Fitzgerald, who married Joseph Kennedy and gave birth to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Mary's career was less dramatic. She became headmistress of St Ita's (established as an equivalent girls' school when Pearse moved his boys to Rathfarnham) and married Padraic Colum the poet, a friend of MacDonagh and Pearse.

The pupils sensed more than a passing affair when this red-haired young lady appeared on the scene. Muriel Gifford, who had also had a previous, mild romantic attachment, was described poetically in an article of 1917 in
The Monitor
as fairly tall with a roseleaf complexion, dark eyes and masses of Titian hair, coiled in plaits and held in place by a bandeau. The Romeo of these tragic lovers was of average height, had dark, crisp hair, grey eyes and great personal charisma, which was eventually to charm Isabella, despite his Catholicism, his politics and even despite his kilt and matching brat (a traditional short cloak) and Tara brooch. But then this
was
an aspiring professor coming to court her daughter. Besides, it became obvious that the two families had much in common. Both
matresfamilias
came from Protestant backgrounds, though Thomas' mother, Mary Parker, had converted to Catholicism when she was still in her teens, before she met Joe MacDonagh. The children of both households ‘published' a family bulletin, and, like the Giffords, the MacDonagh offspring also staged plays. Another parallel was that two of Thomas' brothers joined the British army. Furthermore, Thomas had spent some time abroad studying art, and – an odd little likeness – he, like Bridget Hamill, was given to quoting St Columcille.

There was also, however, much that was utterly dissimilar in their upbringing. Mary MacDonagh, though a daughter of an immigrant compositor of Greek at the Trinity College Press, taught her Cloughjordan students Irish songs – with an eye out for the inspector, of course, whose appearance would cut short such un-English activity which was enough to merit a reprimand or even dismissal. When the MacDonagh parents moved to Cloughjordan in County Tipperary they were the first Catholics ever to teach there and, even more extraordinarily, young men (some of them moustached) from their previous posting followed the MacDonaghs to complete their national-school education during the winter months. They financed themselves with summer jobs and had their lunch, not in the school yard with the children, but across the way in Bowles, a pub where they could have a pint and a sandwich. Such was the need and greed for education among those who had been denied it for so long.
[3]
There is one thing certain – the anglicising jingle proposed by Britain for the schools it financed in Ireland would not have been given the breath of life in the school run by Joe and Mary MacDonagh. It ran:

I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth have smiled

and made me in these Christian days a happy English child.

Instead, they taught where they could, and especially to their sons, the stuff of Irish Ireland. Joe's ancestors in Roscommon were reputed to have faced Sir Richard Bingham's Tudor savagery at Ballymote Castle.
[4]
So we find their descendant, the young Thomas, home for the holidays from Rockwell College, singing that rousing Gaelic ballad ‘Aílilíu na Gamhna' at a concert in Moneygall. A happy child – but definitely not an English one.

MacDonagh's love affair with Muriel progressed against lessening opposition, and with much enthusiasm by the leading players. They saw each other almost daily during their courtship, and when he could not come, three, and even four, letters would arrive.
[5]
In those days, when you posted a letter in Dublin for a Dublin address it reached its destination in a matter of hours. When he was expected and the doorbell rang, Muriel would fly to the door to greet and embrace him.
[6]
She was still a Protestant when they married on 3 January 1912. Because it was a ‘mixed' marriage, it was a low-key affair in the little temporary chapel waiting to be replaced by the Church of the Holy Name which stands today on Beechwood Avenue. There was no best man or bridesmaid, but Pádraig Pearse was to be witness. Unfortunately, Pearse failed to appear, and a man cutting a hedge stood in for him. Informality was the order of the day.
[7]

By now MacDonagh was lecturing in English in University College, Dublin, and their marriage was a happy one.
[8]
Their first child, Donagh, was born later that year on 12 November at Temple Villas, like his aunts Grace and ‘John' and his uncle Edward Cecil. Barbara, Muriel and Thomas' daughter, was born three years after that. In one of life's strange vagaries, when Donagh was born he was christened at the Church of the Three Patrons in Rathgar, and who should drop in to pray before cycling into the city but Pearse, who knew nothing of the christening. The delighted father came up to him with the greeting, ‘Well, you got here in time for the christening anyhow.'
[9]

The romance between Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford was not as instant as that between her sister Muriel and Thomas MacDonagh, but they were meeting at the MacDonagh house on Orwell Road and at various Irish Ireland activities. He was, as usual, doing a balancing act between his enormous
grá
for life and indifferent health. To understand this extraordinary young man, who was to become the great, tragic love of Grace's life, it is essential to learn of his background.

His mother, Josephine Cranny, was the daughter of a very wealthy father who owned whole stretches of first-class residences, especially in the now elitist Dublin 4 area. Their home was a nucleus building of what is today Muckross Park Dominican College, the name deriving from the Cranny's Kerry origins. Though an heiress, the young Josephine had been a sort of personal assistant to her mother, answerable to her beck and call. Marriage to her first cousin, George Noble Plunkett, may have been a welcome release. There were many suitors from the time she was sixteen, though her father's reaction to these early ‘offers' was to place her as a boarder in a school run by the Sacred Heart Convent nuns at Roehampton, south-west of London, for a year. In fact she was twenty-seven, to George's thirty-three, when they married. It was an arranged union, an effort to conserve the property, to ‘keep it in the family'. There had always been a great affection between the two young cousins, and the papal title ‘Count' may well have swung the balance in George's favour. Josephine brought to the marriage a commendable skill as a singer, pianist, violinist and flautist, as well as property on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, and the prospect of much more. In turn, George brought to the union family property on Belgrave Road in Rathmines, a well-earned reputation as a fine-art connoisseur and a wide reading expressed in an enormous appetite for books, especially books about Ireland; in fact their housing requirements eventually spilled over from his library.
[10]
He brought something else to the marriage, less tangible but very important: a kindly disposition, although, uncharacteristically, he shared a deep dislike, with others, of W. B. Yeats. Recently a grandson, remembering his grandfather, described him as ‘a sweet and gentle dote'.
[11]
In Dublin parlance, this is the vocabulary of merit and love.

On the American leg of their worldwide honeymoon, the couple met legendary Irish patriots John Boyle O'Reilly, John Devoy and Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. On returning to Dublin, they set up home at 26 Upper Fitzwilliam Street which was to remain their town residence until their children were grown up.

In 1866, the Count was called to the bar, but he did not practise as a lawyer. Even before his appointment as Curator of the National Museum his interests were politics, journalism, learned societies, fine art and books; he himself wrote a highly regarded monograph on the work of Sandro Botticelli. When he eventually took up his duties as curator of the museum, he was classed as a higher civil servant and, as such, was required to attend the yearly state levee when the viceroy came, a duty that was an affront to the Count's nationalism. He had to wear the requisite black velvet embossed jacket with cut steel buttons, knee breeches of flannel-lined white satin, silk stockings with laced clocks, and buckled patent-leather shoes. At balls the wives were expected to wear a train. It was important to be seen on these occasions, but the Plunketts were wealthy enough to sometimes ignore such need, and the Count's post was not a sinecure but one gained on merit.
[12]

This is not to say that they did no entertaining. In fact, every year the residents of the very upper-class Merrion and Fitzwilliam enclaves gave ‘dances', and Josephine was not wanting as a hostess. An afternoon children's party would be followed by an adult dance and a cold supper, with professional musicians (violinist and pianist) who provided music until six the next morning. The repertoire included waltzes, lancers, gallops and the Boston. About 150 guests danced through the small hours, and ‘almost all' the young men in uniform disappeared, on active service, between one year and the next.
[13]
Josephine's parties were on a more lavish scale than those of Isabella Gifford, but then the Plunkett children's parties had no fake poached eggs and no hurdy-gurdy. You can't have everything in this life.

Joseph Plunkett was reared by a strict disciplinarian. To illustrate this point, and to furnish an odd little coincidence between the Plunkett and Gifford households, the story of Biddy, who nursed Joseph and his siblings, is apt. From their babyhood, Biddy washed, ironed, sang patriotic songs and took them to play in Fitzwilliam Square. Apart from the similarity of her name and occupation with those of Bridget Hamill, she also knitted socks (though not striped). On returning from a stay in Paris, Countess Plunkett considered that Biddy had become too familiar and dismissed her summarily, to the grief of her young charges.

In the matter of holidays, however, the Plunketts were in a class of their own. Greystones was enough to get the Gifford girls past the snobbery of their peers, but the Countess thought nothing of bringing the whole family to spend the summer in St-Malo in Brittany, or Knokke in Belgium. One year she hired a canal boat to transport them all, with furniture, to Tuam. Nearer home, a house in Firhouse was rented for three summers, from which they could come and go to Upper Fitzwilliam Street. That house was called ‘Charleville', and the whole family used to stand at the gate and vigorously boo a neighbouring driver of a two-ponied trap because she whipped the ponies unmercifully.
[14]
Finally, the Count bought Kilternan village (complete with abbey) in County Dublin, and again they moved freely between Fitzwilliam Street and Kilternan, where they had cows, dogs and horses and also huge greenhouses with grapes and peaches.
[15]

Like Isabella Gifford, the Countess was a study in contrasts. She had been reared by her mother never to look at servants when speaking to them – though it was suggested that this arose partly from fear, the teenage Josephine having been scared of giving orders to those much her senior. In any event, to her credit she eventually tried to take on management of her estate. A grandson remembered her climbing a roof to assess damage. ‘No shame in getting your hands dirty,' she would say, ‘never be ashamed of it.'
[16]

The eldest child of the marriage, Joseph Mary Patrick Plunkett, to give him his full name, was ill from infancy, a misfortune attributed to his parents being cousins. Early pleurisy and pneumonia developed into glandular tuberculosis, but his physique and eager mind were at war with his recurring illness. Paradoxically, his body was that of a vigorous young man, as testified by his sister Geraldine.

From 1900, when he was thirteen years of age, he was schooled, as his father had been, by the Jesuits in Belvedere College, but, on an apparent impulse, perhaps because she had been happy at her English boarding school, the Countess placed her three boys, Joseph, George and Jack, in Weybridge boarding school in England. Joseph and George were later sent to Stonyhurst College to take a two-year philosophy course. They joined the officer training corps there, went on manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain and said, if anything, that this experience increased their sense of nationalism.
[17]
England was training Ireland's future rebels!