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Contents Introduction by Robert Ballagh
9
Preface 13 London Years 17 Dublin 35 The Easter Rising, 1916
49
Return to the GPO
81
Withdrawal from the GPO
97
The Surrender 115 Internment 135 Home for Christmas
165
Sinn FĂŠin 175 London Revisited 209 With Michael Collins Again
231
1920 249 Until the Truce 281 Epilogue 293
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8
Introduction
The key significance of this stirring account of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence is that it is told not by a professional writer or historian, but by someone who was there; someone who actually experienced, at first hand, those seminal events in Irish history. This is what invests the narrative with such freshness and integrity. The book’s author, Joe Good, was born in Soho, London, in 1895. He quickly developed an interest in his Irish background. As a young man, he enrolled in the Irish Volunteers – the same night as Michael Collins. In 1916 they, together with many English-born men, travelled to Dublin to participate in the Easter Rising. Until I read Joe Good’s account, I was unaware of just how many Londoners were in the GPO during Easter week. In our chequered history, it’s amazing to record how often our exiles have answered Ireland’s call! 9
INSIDE THE GPO Joe Good was a modest man. His version of those tumultuous years is not a vainglorious one, simply a setting-out of the facts as he saw them. In the course of the narrative, he provides us with a personal and honest portrayal of the leaders; this in turn gives us a unique insight into the motivations behind the Rising. As the centenary of the Easter Rising approaches, Joe Good’s vivid account is a timely reminder of our responsibility to ensure that the bravery and sacrifice of an exceptional generation of Irish men and women are adequately commemorated.Yet, as we prepare to salute their unprecedented courage in taking on the might of the British Empire, we must not lose sight of the reasons why they embarked on such a daring challenge in the first place. In my opinion, the men and women of 1916 were not merely rebels, but people of vision. What they desired was not simply a government in Dublin, a green flag over Dublin Castle and a harp on the coinage – they were calling for a cultural revolution, for a transformation of both public and personal reality. The outline of that transformation is contained in a truly remarkable document, the Proclamation of the Republic. It pledged the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies; the right to national freedom and sovereignty; the right to religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all Irish citizens; and the right to the pursuit 10
Introduction of the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally. Those inspiring ideals were ratified when the first Dáil met in 1919, and later defended in the War of Independence. I believe we should take advantage of the focus created by the anniversaries to examine the Ireland of today, and to question whether the dreams and aspirations of a truly heroic generation have been fulfilled. For instance: who owns Ireland today, its natural resources, its mineral wealth? Do we, as Irish citizens, have unfettered control of our destinies? Can we say we are a fully free and sovereign nation today? Tragically, the honest answer to all those fundamental questions is a resounding ‘No’! However, instead of dwelling on the failures of today’s generation, I believe we would be far better served by looking ahead. We should draw inspiration from the courage and vision of Joe Good and his comrades, and initiate a nationwide dialogue on the shape of a new Ireland that would serve the interests of all its citizens. Such a democratic and visionary project would represent a far more fitting tribute to a heroic generation than the erection of a ceremonial viewing stand, packed with so-called dignitaries, outside the GPO on Easter Sunday, 2016.
Robert Ballagh, Dublin, 2015 11
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Preface
THIS IS MY father’s journal, his account of the events he witnessed when he fought in the 1916 Easter Rising and the War of Independence that followed. It is a personal testimony, a story of rebellion written by a man of fifty-one about his actions as a young revolutionary. In 1946, thirty years after the events of Easter Week, he finally yielded to my demands to write of his experience. The journal that resulted was written on 2s 6d copybooks, in my father’s clear and even hand. At this time, too, Joe gave evidence to an official commission that interviewed veterans of the Rising, and he later received a transcript of his testimony. This journal became a composite blend of both sources. I have edited the text, occasionally expanding a familial ‘shorthand’ that would confuse the general reader, though the rest of Joe’s writing remains unaltered. 13
INSIDE THE GPO My father never imagined that his words would be published. He was a modest man, who loved talk when it was other people’s, but was himself happy to watch and listen. He never spoke of his own glory, nor of his small place in Irish history, any more than my mother, Mary Ellen Donovan, would speak of her family connections with renowned Fenians – of O’Donovan Rossa, or of Richard O’Sullivan Burke, her great-uncle who fought in the uprising of 1867 and with Garibaldi’s Italian Risorgimento. My father shared her reticence and extreme distaste for ‘heroics’, and made no show of his worth, though others did. Joe Good was born in Soho in 1895. Despite his English patronymic and the fact that his mother’s surname was Spencer, he believed he came from Irish stock. He was christened Alfred Joseph, but shortened that name to Joe, de-Anglicising it as part of his changing identity when he became involved in the nascent Irish revolutionary movement in Edwardian London. He enrolled in the Irish Volunteers, in the same group as Michael Collins, and from the outbreak of the First World War campaigned against Kitchener and Redmond’s recruitment of Irishmen for the Flemish abattoirs. He left for Dublin in 1916, one of many English-born men who would rather serve the Republic. This he did in Easter Week and through the War of Independence, when he worked closely with Michael Collins, for whom he had a special respect and affection. After the Treaty and Britain’s 14
Preface withdrawal from the Twenty-six Counties, he resigned his commission in the Free State army rather than participate in the fratricidal Civil War that broke out in 1922. But the death of Michael Collins early in that conflict was for Joe a personal trauma, an event from which he could not walk away. He rejoined the army immediately after Collins’ funeral, and served until the end of the Civil War; then, having completed this duty, he returned to civilian life. For much of that life, my father worked as the maintenance-electrician in the College of Science, Dublin (now restored in much magnificence as Government House), and raised four children with his wife Mary Ellen. He loved his family, his friends and his books. He was an avid reader, and later in his life he wrote a number of prose pieces – studies rather than stories, as he had little time or taste for fiction. This journal, however, is his earliest work. It reflects well the man who wrote it: it is clear-headed, wry and always honest. Joe remained throughout a detached and ironic observer of the doomed rebellion. He witnessed with a distinctly English incredulity the absurdity of the rebels’ heroism; he never forgot the sight of his aristocratic commanding officer, the poet Joseph Mary Plunkett, reading Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly as shells exploded around them in the GPO and Joyce’s Seventh City of Christendom went up in flames.This memoir was written by a streetwise Cockney youth who distrusted heroics, though he could 15
INSIDE THE GPO respond to the valour of his leaders and comrades. Late in his life, when I asked him to send me this manuscript so that I might consult it for a play I was writing, he added a comment at the top of the first page: ‘I don’t think it’s of any great value – I’ve grown up a little in my acquaintance with good writing since I wrote this.’ I’ve grown up more than a little myself while editing these extraordinary pages. It’s not often that one can resume a relationship with one’s father in such a way. Here he is then, equipped with his phenomenal memory, his exceptional eye, and his ear cocked so closely to history. Hamlet: Horatio: Hamlet:
My father. Methinks I see my father. O! Where, my lord? In my mind’s eye, Horatio. Maurice Good, Dublin, 1996
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London Years
PERHAPS THIS NARRATIVE is hardly worth the two and sixpence spent on the paper; and even then may not be completed. I am dilatory, and have had thirty years during which I might have written it, when the personalities and incidents were fresher in my mind. As to precise dates, I have no intention of checking; any historical references can be confirmed from competent writers on the period. As to the facts, they are as I honestly believe them to be, and in speaking of any personalities I have tried to be without bias. You have asked for it1 – this narrative – and I consented to write it mainly so that I might see the why and the wherefore of all the effervescence that contributed so largely to the success of the 1916 Rising. Incidentally, the bubbling has not yet subsided. 1 There is an inscription ‘To Maurice, Aged 13, 1946’ before the opening paragraph in the first book of manuscript. 17
INSIDE THE GPO Make no mistake about it, the emotional depths to which the people of Ireland were stirred were the main cause of the revolution’s success.Yet for the life of me I cannot understand how a logical people – who often shot the landlords as a remedy for Irish national grievances, as well as to get possession of the peasant holdings – thought that they could, and did, end British rule in four-fifths of Ireland mainly by flags, banners, meetings and hysteria. For at no time during the period from 1916 to the truce in 1921 were there more than 2,000 rifles in the hands of the Irish Volunteers or what was, later, called the IRA. Indeed, as late as August 1920, there were not more than ten rifles in the Mid-Limerick Brigade, Limerick being one of the most active areas of confrontation with the British. It would be interesting to assess how many rifles there were in Ireland after the Rising of 1916. They were terribly few. Most of the weapons were captured after the Rising and could never be replaced. The 2,000 I mention I believe to be an exaggeration. But whilst the Irish could not have put two battalions in the field, they fought and defeated the British armed and unarmed forces: for certainly the British did not withdraw because they wanted to. On the face of it, the Irish achieved what appeared to be quite impossible: such a small body defeated an army of 20,000 troops, about 5,000 armed police and a favoured and 18
London Years powerful section of the community who had most of the privileges and possessions from the time of Cromwell. Then how was it done? In the last resort, when all the heroic posturings were of no avail, there grew out of our movement a very small branch called the ASU – the Active Service Unit. This unit was made up of men drawn mainly from Dublin and London. The question was seriously debated at Volunteer HQ – why previous risings had failed? It was agreed that there were three main factors: intemperance, talking and informers. The hardcore Irish Republican Brotherhood (a secret society condemned by the Catholic Church) – the activists who fuelled the rebellion in 1916 and the resistance movement that followed – unofficially appointed their own officers. The IRB was a watertight elite, and the Volunteers (long before 1916) were either abnormally sober, or never drank. So informers could be identified and liquidated by an efficient intelligence system. Better still, those who sought and paid for information – the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) and other British civil servants – could be killed or terrified. They were the eyes and ears of the British administration. Our ASU were armed mostly with revolvers. Their job was mainly to execute on orders British agents or those who supplied them with information at any time and place, to put out the eyes of the British 19
INSIDE THE GPO administration in Ireland. By August 19202, the eyes of the enemy were put out. Most of the actions in the country against the British after 1916 were spontaneous, without direction from our GHQ. When winter was coming in 1920 and I knew the British would hit back, I asked a member of our GHQ what were their plans, if any, for our campaign. His reply was, ‘Ah – we are still only discussing the next stunt!’ ‘This happy few, this band of killers’ – that was the name it went by in Dublin – put the fear of God into the British administration in Ireland, and no doubt into quite a few Irish politicians. It dawned on the British, I imagine, that whilst assassination could be met with assassination, that for every assassin they made, we in Ireland could produce two; that the game was up, and that suppressing the national revolution would mean a reconquest of Ireland, and God knew how many hangings that might involve. When would reconquest pay a dividend? The British did not know the strength of the force they were fighting, and the Irish leaders had not the faintest idea how or when or if the end would come. They lived from day to day, and sufficient to the day was the ambush thereof. Historians no doubt will try to show the period of 1916 to 1921 as a period when there was a definite insurgent army and nation with campaigns and battles. It will be a damned lie. 2 The ASU of the Dublin Brigade and the ‘Squad’ of the intelligence section wiped out much of British intelligence in Dublin on 21 November 1920, ‘Bloody Sunday’. 20
London Years The insurrection of 1916 was a blossoming of seeds sown in the past by unimaginative rulers. The aftermath of 1916 and the reaction to the execution of the leaders was the natural reaction of a people who have strong personal ties with each other, and react as members of a family when an injury is done to one of them – without regard to the original cause. Had any member of our movement been asked this question: ‘Do you expect to drive British administration bag and baggage out of the greater part of Ireland?’ – he could not truthfully have said ‘yes’. One of the main reasons for the activities after 1916 was the clannish temperament of Irishmen. Dublin had, so to speak, justified its existence. Corkmen and southern Irishmen had not had the opportunity to put up so good a show, because their mobilisation was countermanded. They were resentful and angry, and were longing for an opportunity to have a crack at the British. The first action occurred in Cork and Tipperary. The Volunteer headquarters in Dublin again and again tried to restrain this. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog; most likely the fact that Collins was a County Cork man made it possible for him to guide, restrain, and give them final absolution. What happened in early 1920 in southern Ireland, including the audacious attacks on the RIC and their barracks, was received with amazement in Dublin. ‘Little Apples’ had grown again, but they were not the fruit expected by those 21
INSIDE THE GPO who had made that epic stand in 1916. The Dublin Volunteers, on the whole, were content with their past laurels. Perhaps understandably so. Much ink and some blood has been spilt for and against the Treaty which was signed in London by Arthur Griffith and Collins. It was said and believed by many, in all sincerity, that another round should be fought. But for those of us who had brought into being the Terrible Beauty – to use Yeats’ words – there was but one obvious end to the revolution: to be hanged by the neck, because by 1921 our Active Service Unit, and a few daring spirits, had all but reached the end of their tether. So far as I know, no biographer or historian has asked this question: what had Collins left of real fighting material? And what responsibility had he for those he had brought to the shadow of the scaffold? If he was a soldier – and he was always that – his first duty was to his subordinates and comrades. In conclusion, then: in five years, from 1916 to 1921, the freedom of the greater part of Ireland was achieved. It is now 1946, and so far as I see, there has not been in all these years any realistic effort to secure complete autonomy. Nor, as far as I am aware, has there been any plan for doing so.Will ‘little apples’ grow again, and a few romantic realists sweep all those who sleep on their laurels into oblivion? The apparent contradiction of ‘romantic realists’ is an appropriate one for such paradoxical zealots. 22
EARLY YEARS – ‘THE GAEL IS GONE’
When I was a small boy in London, it was said during a speech in the British House of Commons: ‘The Gael is gone, gone with a vengeance.’ And this was said long after those terrible famines of 1847 to 1867. That remark stuck and still sticks in my mind – ’great is the potency of the spoken word’. The description of the insurrection of 1798 made quite an impression on me as a boy in a London-Irish family, where I heard many speak of those poor pitiable peasant pikemen, and how their distended stomachs, filled with raw grain, had in death burst so that their entrails entangled the wheels of the wagons on which they were taken for burial. Poor ‘Croppies’. I felt something should be done about it someday. I was not then familiar with Pope’s Iliad, in which Hector’s ‘entrails streamed along the ground’! But in due course I was to see the bright pink lungs of one Irishman, exposed by a fellow Irishman, strewn on a newly tarred road, and reflect on Pope’s cheerful lines.Truly, no one should have anything to do with revolution unless he possesses a strong stomach. I was about fifteen when I first read a little of Irish history. I was rather a solitary and very imaginative young fellow, and kept my real musing to myself. I had read a good many of Walter Scott’s novels, and was impressed by Ivanhoe. I had 23
INSIDE THE GPO plenty of time to daydream. From the age of fourteen to sixteen-and-a-half, I worked in a weaving and spinning factory. My job was to keep the wheel turning for the spinner – not a very arduous task. I turned the spinning wheel for the foreman; this I could do with one hand and, by putting my book on a shelf, could read at the same time. I read anything I could get, even girls’ ‘yellow-back’ novels, to avoid the monotony of turning a wheel from half-eight each morning to seven-thirty at night. I was going soft in the brain from monotony and reading tripe – and knew it. ‘Let me write the ballads of a people – I care not who makes their laws ...’3 A rare and refreshing element suddenly arrived. My sister Agnes had joined an Irish political society and also attended the branch of the newly founded Gaelic League in London. She brought home old Irish songs and ballads – those of James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Davis – and Thomas Moore’s poems and melodies were heard by me for the first time: ‘The Erne shall run red with redundance of blood’; ‘When boyhood’s fire was in my veins’; ‘To strike a blow for you, dear land’; ‘When he who adores thee’; ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps.’ 3 Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1704): ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ I prefer Joe’s version. 24
London Years These were thoughts that had run in my head since childhood, and that I had never heard expressed – till now. I lapped them up without effort, and memorised hundreds of songs and ballads. I once bet Mick4 Collins that I knew more Irish songs, ballads and poems than he – during the time we were in Frongoch Prison Camp together after the 1916 Rising. I remembered about two hundred and fifty, he about one hundred more than I. But then he always had a phenomenal memory. Perhaps the desire for action among those of Irish blood in London and elsewhere in England was caused by the old Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons. God how those Irish MPs talked! Their speeches were reported verbatim in the Sunday papers, and were read out in their entirety in most working-class Irish households. How I hated to hear the phrases that in the reports interrupted long meandering speeches: ‘Loud Cheers’; ‘Laughter’; ‘Loud Laughter!’ Many a Sunday at home, I listened to those speeches being read aloud and longed to hear that one of the ‘Right Honourable Gentlemen’ had thrown something or spat in someone’s eye, but it never happened.The speeches went on and on and on, and our parents looked forward to more of it. There was a colony of Irish Catholics in every English city, the sons and daughters of those who were driven out 4 Throughout the journal, my father usually writes ‘Mick’ Collins, as he also always did in speaking of him at home and amongst old comrades or friends. 25
INSIDE THE GPO of Ireland by the famine and Irish landlordism. They had remained Catholics in the main, and had a sentimental regard for Robert Emmett and – of all people – Gladstone, that one-time champion of Home Rule for Ireland. They were to beget sons who would take the Post Office in Dublin, garrison it for a week’s stand, and be commemorated there later in a bronze statue of that legendary warrior-hero of Irish epic – Cú Chulainn. THE GAELIC LEAGUE IN LONDON
‘He who cannot with his tongue win a “Nation” is no man ...’ to misquote Byron, I think, who won many a woman.When my sister, Agnes, joined the Gaelic League, it was with some misgivings, I imagine, that she took me to my first Gaelic class. My appearance was nothing to speak of; one could not do a lot sartorially on two and nine pence per week pocket money and clothing allowance. So I took no part in the Irish class, and sat on a school-desk and waited beside a somewhat delicate and intelligent looking boy to witness the Irish ‘folk-dancing’. I never knew his name, but he gave me one of the shocks of my life. He was reading a small two-paged paper, about ten inches square, and in due course passed it to me. Herein, frankly stated, was the argument of ‘direct action’ and ‘physical force’; the printed words were, as I have said, in my mind for many 26
London Years years, and now someone had published them. This Gaelic League journal was named An Claidheamh Soluis. I was told much later that ‘Solus’ meant light, and ‘Claidheamh’ was the word for sword in Gaelic; but on that instant that paper was a sword of light to me! The Gaelic Leaguers were quite a new experience for me; they were mainly civil servants and schoolteachers, a step up the social ladder from my usual associates. Still, if you would try to learn Irish, they would accept you like a brother. Gaelic was not my dish – I was no student – but I thought then as I watched them that their gospel would endure, and was beyond corruption, and would outlive physical violence. Strange as it may seem, the Gaelic League held many of its classes in British Protestant schools. Even then, John Bull was very tolerant in his own house. And that was all I got out of the Gaelic League – that small paper every now and again from my new friend. It was plenty to satisfy. I used to carry it in my pocket, feeling somewhat like a small Guy Fawkes. THE GAELIC ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION
The Gaelic Athletic Association occasionally held their sports at Herne Hill in London, and it was there I had my first sight of Mick Collins. Mick was running a race and was finishing neck and neck with Joe Reilly; at one moment Joe would be in front, and 27
INSIDE THE GPO then Mick. Suddenly Mick put on a spurt and, as he passed Joe, deliberately dug his elbow into the soft part of Joe’s bent arm. The race finished; Joe was second, but there was no doubt who had fairly won the race. It struck me that day that Mick was the epitome of the individual who must win – at that period a more English than an Irish characteristic, which he’d acquired, maybe, working in the British civil service. This basic competitiveness was to fuel his talents later in beating the English at their own game. What Mick had done in that race was unpremeditated, but still as plain as a pikestaff – so much so that many people were laughing. Meanwhile, Joe and Mick were face to face, shouting at each other with that Clonakilty mellowness, that County Cork accent which is so mellifluous, even when belligerent. I had gone to the sports that day in uniform. I was a member of a kind of military cadet organisation, the ‘Catholic Boys’ Brigade’: the English Catholics must have had plenty of money, for it was a uniform similar to that worn by the Irish Guards. It must have been quite shocking to some of the Gaelic Leaguers and Gaelic Athletic Associates. Nothing was said to me, however, and I was unconscious of how out of place a British uniform was.Though I would not have left if asked to go, and would have explained why I was so dressed, by saying that ‘If one would carry arms, one should learn the use of arms!’ This, incidentally, was before the Irish Volunteers were formed in London. But, meanwhile, we 28