Unlikely Rebels (18 page)

James Connolly had prophesied, before the insurgents had manned their posts, ‘We are all going out to be slaughtered.'
[1]
Certainly, whatever the kindness shown to the rebels by some of the British forces, the official reaction was otherwise. Retribution was swift. The man appointed to effect it was General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the forces in Ireland.

Maxwell approved Lowe's handling of the military situation and confined his ire to the Castle politicians who had allowed the Irish to arm and carry out their manoeuvres all over the country. He first made public his intention of burning to the ground all buildings harbouring rebels and then decided that the execution of 100 rebels would put manners on the unruly Irish: ‘I am going to ensure that there will be no treason whispered for 100 years.' That he was to ensure the very opposite was not due to carelessness on his part; the arrangements for the executions and burials were meticulous:

After each prisoner has been shot, a medical officer will certify that he is dead and his body will immediately be removed to an ambulance, with a label pinned on his breast giving his name. When the ambulance is full, it will be sent to Arbour Hill Detention Barracks, entering by the gate at the garrison chapel. A party there will put the bodies close alongside one another in the grave (now being dug), cover them thickly with quicklime (ordered) and commence filling in the grave. One of the officers with this party is to keep a note of the position of each body in the grave, taking the name from the label.
[2]

Both the size of the grave, more of a pit in that it measured twenty-nine by nine feet, and the disintegrating nature of the quicklime, suggest reasons for affixing labels, though that directive was not carried out.
[3]

No time was lost. The executions started five days after the sur-render, on 3 May 1916, in the execution yard attached to Kilmainham Gaol. Within hours of the ‘trials' (with no defence), the shootings began. The first of the ‘funerals' – though the unceremonious disposal of the bodies could hardly be so-called – were those of Pádraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Clarke. No one was in the yard excepting the firing party and the attendant priest who stayed with them to the end. A lorry awaited at the side gate of the yard, and the remains of the three men were driven to the pit at Arbour Hill.

Thomas MacDonagh had kept photographs of his two children with him in prison. He sent them to Muriel, whose attempt to visit him in Kilmainham had been frustrated and to whom he sent also his last, loving tributes. His son, Donagh MacDonagh, has left this recollection of news of his father's death being brought to Oakley Road, when he was a very small boy:

One of my earliest and most vivid memories is of Fr Aloysius coming to our house in Oakley Road with the news of the executions. I was playing in a rockery and fled in terror from the bogeyman who came riding on a bread van with news which terrified; and later I remember the British soldiers lying on the ground with their guns sighted on our house as we walked away.

In 1908, Thomas MacDonagh had written a play, produced by the Abbey, called
When the Dawn Is Come
. It had foreseen a future Ireland in which, oddly prophetically, seven captains would lay down their lives for their country. He was the third of the seven signatories of the Proclamation to be executed. A British officer said of him: ‘They all died well but MacDonagh died like a prince.'
[4]

Fr Augustine, OFM, Cap., saw Joseph Plunkett at Richmond Barracks, resting with a group of other tired Volunteers on a stretch of grass, his body thrown back slightly, and his position supported by his two hands pressed against the grass. Plunkett had been in a fainting condition after the march from the Rotunda, and Seán Mac Diarmada, who had also found it a huge strain, suggested that Plunkett be given an old quilt from the Royal College of Surgeons, which was rolled up to form a pillow. Easter Week in the GPO, a night in the chill air outside the Rotunda with nothing to eat or drink and a forced march on an empty stomach: these were hardly the doctor's orders for a tubercular surgery convalescent. Fr Augustine may not have known all this, but he was told the young commandant was awaiting court martial, and he recorded that his heart went out to him, resting there on the grass.

The banns for the marriage of Joseph Mary Plunkett and Grace Evelyn Vandeleur Gifford had been read out, in Rathmines church, weeks before the proposed wedding to be held there on Easter Sunday. The wedding, in fact, took place in Kilmainham Gaol. No bride can have had more distressing eve-of-wedding preparations, all to be accomplished in a few short hours.

Ironically, while Joseph Plunkett's letter dated 29 April (the sixth day of the Republic as he so dated it) was not received until Winnie Carney's release, his last letter to Grace, dated 2 May, was delivered to her without delay by the British soldier to whom it was entrusted. More ironically still, this final letter was written on the back of Plunkett's Last Will and Testament which had lain in his pocket for nine days and which had been the subject of Captain Wilson's ribald comment. It reads as follows:

The Will of Joseph Mary Plunkett, 23rd April, 1916.

I give and bequeath everything of which I am possessed or may become possessed to Grace Evelyn (Mary Vandeleur) Gifford.

Signed: Joseph Mary Plunkett
Witnessed: George Oliver Plunkett.
[5]

The letter on the back of the document appears to have been written after Plunkett's court martial but before sentencing.

Richmond Barracks,

Tuesday May 2nd, 1916.

My darling child,
This is my first chance of sending you a line since we were taken. I have no notion what they intend to do with me but I have heard a rumour that I am to be sent to England.

The only thing I care about is that I am not with you – everything else is cheerful. I am told that Thomas was brought in yesterday. George and Jack (Plun) [
sic
] are both here and well. We have not had one word of news from outside since Monday 24th April except wild rumours. Listen – if I live it might be possible to get the Church to marry us by proxy – there is such a thing but it is very difficult I am told. Father Sherwin might be able to do it. You know how I love you. That is all I have time to say. I know you love me and so I am very happy.

Your own,
Joe

The Fr Sherwin mentioned was the priest who had received Grace into the Catholic Church in the University Church on St Stephen's Green. Whether she consulted him or her parish priest at Rathmines – perhaps both – she was obviously advised that the clergy at James' Street looked after the Kilmainham area and if permission for the wedding was granted by the prison authorities a priest from that parish would attend. Permission was granted, but although the couple had discussed various possibilities when the Rising cancelled their Easter Sunday wedding, Grace was now faced with implementing them. She knew that her mother, occupied in caring for her sick father, disapproved of the marriage. Nellie was in jail, and the family was also trying to cope with Muriel, who was stunned at the sentencing to death of her beloved husband. It was no wonder that the jeweller from whom Grace bought the plain gold band, Dermot Stoker of Grafton Street, was taken aback when a young woman emerged from a taxi which stopped outside at closing time, entered his shop and asked to buy a wedding ring. She cried a little as the purchase was completed, and he, now upset himself, asked the reason for her tears. She told him simply that she was to marry Joseph Plunkett that evening, a little while before his execution.

On her wedding day, Grace Gifford wore a gingham dress with white collar and cuffs and a brimmed straw hat with a veil. This is the ensemble shown in her passport picture of 1928. It was questioned if a twelve-year-old picture would have been acceptable for passport purposes. The
Catholic Bulletin
of February 1917 comes to the rescue and shows the identical picture of Grace, with the great sad eyes of a woman, still in her twenties, who has lost a young brother, a brother-in-law and her husband.
[6]
It is one of the most sorrowful faces in the pages of Irish photography. There is another picture, taken at Larkfield, where she went after the Rising, wearing a pretty, flounced dress and cuddling a kitten. Such a dress might have been out of place at the wretched ceremony in Kilmainham.

It is best to allow Grace herself to tell the details of that sombre wedding:

I entered Kilmainham Jail on Wednesday, May 2nd, at 6 p.m., when I saw him for the first time in the prison chapel, where the marriage was gone through and no speech allowed. He was taken back to his cell, and I left the prison with Fr Eugene MacCarthy [
sic
], of James' Street. We tried to get shelter for the night, and I was finally lodged at the house of Mr Byrne – bell founder – in James' Street. I went to bed at 1.30, and was wakened at 2 o'clock by a policeman, with a letter from the prison commandant – Major Lennon – asking me to visit Joseph Plunkett. I was brought there in a motor, and saw my husband in his cell, the interview occupying ten minutes. During the interview the cell was packed with officers, and a sergeant, who kept a watch in his hand and closed the interview by saying: ‘Your time is now up.'
[7]

Other facts emerged: that her groom had come to her handcuffed; that the ‘cuffs' were removed for the ceremony and the signing of the register and were then replaced immediately before he was marched away; that because of a gas failure the prison was in darkness, light provided by a soldier holding a candle, with another soldier acting as witness to the wedding. Grace said, even years afterwards, that she could still see that soldier's face.

Before being brought to her husband's cell, when she was recalled to the prison at 2 a.m., she had an astonishing conversation in the damp, dark building with one of the officials, which she recorded, as well as further details of the time allowed with her husband:

I was gratuitously informed in May, 1916, by the officer in charge of prisoner's effects, that my husband, being in bad health when taken prisoner (he had entered the fight only a few days subsequent to an operation) was specially given hospital treatment, and lodged in the infirmary. The hospital treatment consisted of an extremely small cell with an extremely small window, a table on which (I presume) lay his ‘hospital diet' – i.e. a tin bowl of some unspeakable, semi-liquid concoction, with no implement with which to eat it, and a stool so small that he had to kneel beside me during our ten minutes conversation (regulated to exactitude by a soldier with an open watch).

His bed consisted of a plank, with one blanket, although the coldness of the disused prison had made it necessary for a roaring fire in the commandant's room and in the guard room. He was also left without a light. Also, his last moments with his wife were not rendered more bearable by the presence of as many soldiers and inane officers as could be crammed into his cell – we who had never had enough time to say what we wanted to each other found that in the last ten minutes we couldn't talk at all.
[8]

This was the ‘hospital treatment' accorded to a man used to dining with cut glass and fine linen. The conditions for the other prisoners would have been much the same, but they were squeezed three and four to a cell. How constrained and awkward the newly-weds must have felt in that cell of alert ears. Perhaps it was for their benefit that Joseph Plunkett spoke glowingly, as he did, of Pearse, MacDonagh and Clarke, executed only that morning, and of The O'Rahilly, who had deprived Maxwell of another execution when he was shot by a sniper in the retreat from the GPO.

On the certificate of marriage, the address of Grace's husband was given as Kilmainham Prison. She gave, as her own, Muriel's address, 29 Oakley Road, though she appears to have been brought temporarily to Kate's home in Marino before going to the Plunkett residence, Larkfield House in Kimmage, where Nellie also went.

There was certainly no going back to Temple Villas. At that stage Isabella must have had her fill of republicanism. Already coping with the strain of a husband still invalided after his stroke, she now had a daughter, Nellie, in jail (a circumstance Isabella attributed to association with Countess Markievicz); her well-liked son-in-law, Thomas, was dead, leaving her daughter, Muriel, a widow and her two grandchildren fatherless; and now Grace had contracted a marriage with a man about to die. In fact, Isabella, probably tired and a bit distraught, told a journalist that Grace ‘was always a very headstrong and self-willed girl': if she was, one may wonder from whom these characteristics might have been inherited.

Fr Augustine described 4 May 1916 as ‘a hurried morning'. Before 3 a.m. soldiers arrived at the Church Street Capuchin mona-stery and said that he and his fellow priests should come urgently to Kilmainham Gaol. Four were to be shot that morning, and the Governor had got a slight postponement to enable the priests to attend.
Hurry
was the word. Fr Augustine roused three of his fellow monks, Albert, Columbas and Sebastian, so that each of them could attend spiritually to the condemned men. There was no delay when their ministrations were completed, and the order of dying was Edward Daly, Willie Pearse, Michael O'Hanrahan and Joseph Plunkett.

Plunkett's niece, the late Eilís Dillon, made an extraordinary revelation regarding her uncle's execution. She was writing of Kilternan Abbey, where the Plunketts lived during their childhood, and of the nearest big house on the Dublin side, which was the home of the Protestant rector. His children and the Plunkett children played and grew up together in what Eilís Dillon called ‘a warm friendship'. She went on to say: