Unlikely Rebels (13 page)

There has been little enough mention so far of the young woman who called herself Grace Vandeleur Gifford. The ‘Vandeleur' was included as a sort of pride in her ancestor, John Vandeleur, who had started the Ralahine Commune experiment in County Clare to improve the lot of his tenants. Her Orpen portrait – as
The Spirit of Young Ireland
– shows a very attractive young woman. Nellie described Grace as pretty; certainly she makes a delightful child study in the studio photo with ‘
John', and Orpen's portrait in oils is arresting.
[1]
Her niece Maeve said that her face was striking rather than pretty. Of medium height, Grace had tawny red hair and brown eyes.
[2]
Both she and Muriel represented the quiet side of the Giffords, wedged as they were between the irrepressibles: Gabriel, Ada and Nellie on the one side and the feisty ‘
John', their junior, on the other. Grace had a quirky sense of humour and so marked a talent in art that her parents agreed to Orpen's advice that she continue her art studies in London.

Her first meeting with Joseph Plunkett did not develop romantically with anything like the immediacy of the courtship that led to the marriage of her sister to MacDonagh. In their case there were many reasons which would have intruded: for one thing, Plunkett's debilitating tuberculosis resulted in his being away for a year after they were introduced. Furthermore, he was entirely dependent on his mother's munificence, and, while she spared no money on his winter health trips abroad, and though he was dressed in the best of clothes (however carelessly worn) and had use of her car and the wherewithal to indulge his numerous interests, this young man in his late twenties, highly educated and highly intelligent, had no career as such.

After his return from Algiers, Joseph and Grace continued to meet frequently at the MacDonagh home and at the various theatrical and other social gatherings of the movement. It seems, however, that it was the publication of yet another nationalist paper that quickened their friendship. This one,
The Irish Review
, started off as a more intellectual approach to Irish problems. Professor Houston launched it in 1911, along with James Stephens, Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Colum. Colum took on the editorship for 1912/13 and Plunkett then became editor, when he had to save it from financial ruin. The contributors to this publication read like a roll-call of intellectuals: Joseph Campbell, Lord Dunsany, Darrell Figgis, Arthur Griffith, Professor Mary Hayden, Winifred Mabel Letts, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Pádraig Pearse, John B. Yeats, Standish O'Grady, Professor Eoin MacNeill and Sir Roger Casement.
[3]

Its stated (tongue-in-cheek) policy in the first issue was ‘non-party and non-political': ‘we will try to deal with them [current politics] with as little partiality and as little bias as is good for people in earnest to have.'

Soon, however, being very much in earnest about nationalism, they became as nationalist, though using different terminology, as the republican press. During the 1913 Dublin lock-out strike, Plunkett, born into wealth, vehemently took the side of the workers in his paper. In fact, this strike, with its attendant misery, was a great motivating force in his increased commitment to the movement and precipitated the IRB into helping to found the Irish Volunteers in 1913, in a reaction to the part played by Dublin Castle in breaking the strike.

An article in
The Irish Review
by Plunkett's friend, Sir Roger Casement, suggested the raising of a volunteer force to defend Ireland's neutrality in the event of war. There was also an article in Pádraig Pearse's Gaelic League journal on the same subject by Eoin MacNeill, a founder of the League and Professor of Irish in UCD. It was called ‘The North Began'. These articles prompted the IRB to arrange a meeting for 13 November 1913, at the Rotunda in Parnell Square. The numbers who turned up greatly exceeded expectations and required an overflow room, but, though this numerical success seemed impressive, it soon became clear that the members of this new force, the Irish Volunteers, did not speak with one voice. The one unifying factor was resentment that Westminster had deferred to the northern unionists, whose Ulster Volunteers had been allowed their arms importation without interference. Having conceded that unity of spirit, there was trilateral thinking in the ranks of these southern Volunteers from day one.

On the outbreak of the First World War, John Redmond was to recruit 27,000 of his followers to join the British army as a sort of bribe to force the implementation of Home Rule. He called his group ‘the National Volunteers'. A second grouping represented a sort of middle-of-the-road philosophy, questioning the deferral of Home Rule, deploring the unchallenged ease with which the Ulster Volunteers had established themselves and feeling, however vaguely, that it would not be a bad idea for them to arm. They retained the original title of the Irish Volunteers. Eoin MacNeill, one of the moderates, was appointed leader of the Irish Volunteers. They resented the official handling of the lock-out strike and indifference to the starvation and appalling misery of the Irish poor.
[4]
A third loosely structured entity, and the most extreme politically, was made up of members of the Irish Volunteers and guided, often behind the scenes, by the IRB. They were heirs to the armed separatism of the Fenians and included Thomas Clarke, who had survived the imprisonment meted out to captured Fenians, unlike others, with his sanity intact. This group also included The O'Rahilly, Bulmer Hobson, Pádraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.

Those who joined the British army from Ulster sought and received a specially named Ulster Regiment with appropriate regimental regalia and insignia. Redmond sought the same for his National Volunteers but was refused, despite the fact that a recruiting poster appeared with Redmond in the stance of the famous Lord Kitchener original, finger pointed at the viewer and bearing the words ‘Join an Irish regiment today'.

In all this hurly-burly, in the November 1914 issue of
The Irish Review
, Plunkett observed, ‘Our entire staff has for some time past been working full time and overtime (if such a thing is possible) in the Irish Volunteer organisation.
'
This issue also published a rejection of John Redmond's pledge to commit the Irish Volunteers to fight for Britain in the First World War. The rejection was formally couched in the form of a manifesto, signed by twenty men, whose names included five of the later signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. This edition also published ‘Twenty Plain Facts for Irishmen', the last two of which read:

19. The Union Jack is the symbol of the Act of Union of 1800, by which the Irish nation was deprived of her last rights and liberties.

20. The Irish Nation Lives.

No wonder the police confiscated as many copies as they could. This confiscation almost closed the paper, which staggered on a little while longer only through the pumping in of Plunkett money.
[5]
While it lasted, however, Grace Gifford had found her true métier. She helped with the newspaper's layout and also contributed some of her delicate, subtle cartoons. A clever one of actors Micheál Mac Liammóir and Maureen Delaney appeared, and the confiscated issue featured her caricature of the Irish writer, George Moore.

Working together on
The Irish Review
, its last young editor and the young caricaturist, both in their twenties, began to find each other very congenial company.

An example of one of Grace's cartoons

Notes

Some sympathy must be allowed Frederick and Isabella Gifford. It was bearable to have a republican professor as a son-in-law, particularly since he had been offered a post and a house in University College, Galway, at £1,000 per annum (an offer MacDonagh refused); it was allowable that another republican, son of a wealthy papal count, should come courting; even ‘John's' republican journalism might be borne – after all, she was hobnobbing with some of the Protestant intellectuals her parents knew, and, anyhow, it was unlikely that her parents ever read the journals in which her work appeared.

Nellie's involvement with James Larkin, however, was something else. They were unlikely, to say the least, to subscribe to Larkin's own assessment that he was fighting ‘a holy war' or others' assessment that he was a visionary seeking dignity for the poorest or that he would obtain a very special niche in the folklore of Dublin. They read, in fact, in the establishment press, that he was leader of ‘the rabble'. Nellie herself summed up the predicament: ‘Poor mother, she was like a hen who had hatched out ducklings.'
[1]
To put it another way, they were unlikely rebels, these Gifford girls.

Though Nellie lost her job as a result of her involvement with Larkin's Bloody Sunday, she was never a lady to sit around doing nothing and was soon immersed in a very different sphere of the movement. Her role in helping Larkin to keep his promise to address the workers in Sackville Street had been carried out fearlessly and effectively. Her next involvement with the movement, however, came from her own initiative and that of her friends Helena Molony (also a member of the Citizen Army) and Máire Perolz.

From 1914 on, both in England and in Ireland, conscription was the word of the day. Anti-conscriptionism, even in the earlier Boer War, had been very much a feature of Irish nationalism. The Boers had been making a determined fight, but British recruiting sergeants scoured Irish towns and villages to lure Irishmen into their army. Anti-recruitment propaganda declared that obstruction of this recruitment was for Ireland's honour and a help to the Boers struggling against their common enemy. Inghínidhe na hÉireann had been active anti-recruitment workers, and some lady enthusiasts even went into pubs (not socially acceptable at that time) and, under the watchful antagonism of the recruiting sergeant, handed out anti-recruitment literature.

The Great War, however, needed far more recruits than the war against the Boer farmers. Nellie Gifford, remembering all the lost Anglo-Irish friends and relatives of her tender years who had fought Britain's battles abroad, sometimes with fatal results, entered the anti-recruitment arena with fervour. To use her own words: ‘I, so to speak, “took fire” and made plans in my mind to avert this horror for Ireland.'
[2]
Nellie may have been attracted to James Connolly's ‘army' because of her admiration for Countess Markievicz and her experiences of the abjectness of Dublin's poor at St Audeon's, but there was also the moral divide between an army of aggression and one seeking freedom.

One Sunday she arranged to meet Helena Molony and Máire Perolz outside Liberty Hall. They had been invited to the Reddin house on the north side of Dublin, one of whose sons was a student at Pádraig Pearse's School, St Enda's. It was a house set in fields and boasted a small theatre for entertainment. A banquet would round off the evening. All the guests were going to be very much in favour of an Irish Ireland.

Before they started out, however, Nellie, who had been too busy on anti-recruitment work to see the daily papers, asked the others for news about the feared conscription for Ireland. ‘It's all right,' she was told, ‘we're not called.' She was pleased and bought a paper to read the good news, but the wording of the report worried her: Ireland was excluded – but what about Irishmen living in Britain? Helena Molony suggested that the only way to deal with that was to have an Irish MP ask a question in the House of Commons. The parliament, however, sat on Tuesday, in two days' time. The Irish MPs had already left for England – all but one, Alfie Byrne. Nellie insisted that they should contact him; his home was quite near Amiens Street Station (now Connolly Station), just around the corner from Liberty Hall.

They found Alfie had left to visit a friend before taking the boat for Holyhead. Undaunted, the three ladies set out for his friend's house. There they learned that he had gone on to another house, and they just missed him there too. They decided to go back to his home and wait. The MP himself answered the door. At first he thought they were on feminist business (to which he also gave his support), but when they put their plan to him he immediately agreed and on the Tuesday asked, in the House of Commons, if conscription applied to Irishmen living in Britain. Asking the question, recorded in Hansard, was enough. It was a signal for an influx of Irishmen from all over Britain back to Ireland.

Some of the men who returned found jobs through Nellie Gifford's employment agency, which was her next move in opposing recruitment for the British army, and among them was Michael Collins.
[3]
There were three faces to the ubiquitous recruiting drives in Ireland: the trams and several public places were plastered with posters of brave Irishmen wearing khaki and going off to fight for ‘poor little Catholic Belgium'; there was ‘the gallantry of the Irish' – propaganda which deceived few and irritated many; and there were also the wives of those serving in the British army who were not going to rock the boat that provided them with a welcome income. Added to all this there were the employers – the vast majority of them Anglo-Irish – who actually had leaflets printed after any unsuccessful recruiting drive. The wording was brief: ‘Your country needs you; we don't.'
[4]
The message was clear: if their employees did not enlist, they were to be made unemployed and their jobs could easily be filled by older men.

Nellie decided she would seek refuge for those who were dismissed and perhaps get them some work among her many friends in County Meath. She set off with Máire Perolz to visit the shops where the employers' leaflets had been given out and took the names and addresses of the victims from sympathetic colleagues. In return, she gave them her own address at Temple Villas as a point of contact. Her enterprise proved, understandably, to be too intrusive for her parents, apart altogether from the ideological gaps existing between them, with sons in the armed forces and daughters who were proving to be rather in the nature of loose cannons. When Nellie lost the Temple Villas facility, Countess Markievicz stepped into the breach and offered a room at the top floor of 6 Harcourt Terrace where the work could be carried out.

The whole undertaking, however, was becoming more complex than finding shelter and work for dismissed young men. Shelter certainly was required in cases where fired apprentices had been housed over shops as part of their remuneration and also where those who had been made unemployed could not afford to rent. Some of the men who had come back from England and who were occasionally, and apparently unjustifiably, being questioned and even arrested by hostile DMP, were obviously Volunteer material.

Finally, Nellie's brother-in-law, Thomas MacDonagh, put it to a meeting of the Volunteers that she be given a room at its headquarters at 2 Dawson Street, an upstairs back room which had a comforting fire, table and chairs and a blackboard. She contributed a lawyer's tin box for documents, a ledger and an exercise book (the last two are still extant). She provided her own packed lunch, and, though the work was purely voluntary, she kept strict office hours. Because a detective from Dublin Castle constantly stood guard at the street door, watching those who crossed its threshold, she legitimised her business by calling it the Employment Bureau, which indeed it was. Dubliners make their own of any language. Their nonchalant rendering of the French language knows such gems as
bone chewer
(
bonjour
) and
a Jew
(
adieu
)
.
So Nellie's
bureau
became the
burrow
and even the
burra.

She had to be careful, and some of the names and addresses were written deliberately in erasable pencil. She had a code for names and job descriptions, but it is not very obvious, unless those recommended had their sponsor's name inserted. These were well-known republican names such as Pearse, Plunkett, Mellows and J. J. Walsh. What is quite clear, however, is that the skills going a-begging were manifold and included housepainter, watchmaker, porter, van driver, grocer, draughtsman, cabinet-maker, law clerk, bookkeeper, chemistry student, gardener and coremaker (a brass foundry craftsman). The addresses, mostly in Dublin, range from Kilmore Cottages in Artane to inner-city areas such as Emerald Street, Sherrard Street and Charlemont Street. Advertisements for clients and jobs were put in the papers, but most of the men came through Volunteer referral because those answering advertisements might be spies.

In her ledger, Nellie recorded her first impression of Michael Collins, who had come back from London and was seeking a job at her agency: ‘A tall, loose-limbed young man, very much at home with himself. He gave me his reference and answered the routine questions.'
[5]
Joseph Plunkett, no longer with time enough to manage the family estate because of his involvement with the Volunteers, had turned to the good efforts of Nellie's ‘Burra', and she recommended Collins to be his assistant:

Joseph came in his motor car – one of the first in Dublin. He had a lot of gaiety and a tremendous amount of vitality, so he breezed in, quite confident that out of the young men who sat around every day waiting, I would find someone to do the secretarial work he required.

Collins, on the other hand, was dour. Nellie's comment was that a stranger looking on might well think that Joseph was seeking the job and that Collins had the giving of it. She introduced Joseph and Michael Collins, watched them have a hurried chat, and they left together. The vacancy was filled.
[6]

‘The Burra' handled hundreds of cases, and acted as a meeting place for new arrivals, satisfied employers and employees. It also served as a recruiting mechanism for membership of the Irish Volunteers. It was both the brainchild and success of Nellie Gifford, a member of the Irish Citizen Army who lived in Anglo-Irish unionist Rathmines, a fact that is rarely, if ever, mentioned in accounts of the period.

Notes