I WAS IN THE GPO

GPO Rebel HQ 1916 - The Movie
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So I was.

It's hard to know where to start with this excellent and engaging exhibition. It is centered around the 1916 Rising but also puts it in the context of the time.

A good place to start might be the innovative presentation of a dramatised version of the Easter Week Diary (above). This is a sort of wide-screen Cinemascope version of the progress of the rebellion in various critical locations across the city.

Aerial view - Operations Room, Dublin Castle - The Movie

Continuity between the various locations is preserved by constant reference to an operations map of the city which is swooped into and out of after the fashion of the Google satellite map.

This may sound a bit scrappy but it works. We swoop in on the GPO, the Castle, the Shelbourne Hotel, Mount Street Bridge etc. to catch up with the ongoing action in each place. And the action moves at breakneck speed. You'd really want to watch the sequence a few times to make sure not to miss anything.

One of the first things to hit me on the way in was the on-screen commentaries from established scholars. These were very well edited, to the point, and presented a seamless introduction to what was to follow. I have referenced these below.

Fearghal McGarry

Fearghal has interrogated the Witness Statements comprehensively and in depth which has enabled him to evaluate the Rising from the perspective of the ordinary footsoldier.

Padraig Yeates

Padraig has researched and written extensively on the revolutionary period from a social history point of view.

Catríona Crowe

Catríona spent her career in the National Archives and her great legacy will be the 1901 and 1911 censuses online. She has also fought for women to be given their rightful place in the history of the time.

Joe Lee

Joe is the grand=daddy of living Irish historians.

Diarmaid Ferriter

Diarmuid is a relative newcomer on the block and has spread himself quite widely. He is a savvy media presence.

Kevin Myers

Kevin has long campaigned for recognition for Irishmen who fought in WWI and has tended to downplay the Rising.

Irish Volunteer uniform

There are many well curated glass case exhibits covering both combatants and non-combatants in the Rising and those affected by related events of that time.

Cumann na mBan uniform

British Auxiliary uniform

Housewife bearing the brunt of the 1913 lockout

This messenger bike really took my fancy and I went over for a closer look at its contents.

I was paying great attention to the labels on the tins when I noticed the black pencil-like things sticking out of the top of them. It was only then that I realised that this was a consignment of lethal weaponry.

Needless to say the walls are replete with explanatory panels like the one above. Replica brick walls are also plastered with posters for everything from theatre performances to monster meetings.

A 50th Anniversary Present
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Then there is a short on-wall exhibition upstairs bringing the story up to date.

The panel above gives me an opportunity to mention the one thing that jarred with me. The text panels are all bilingual and happily the Irish versions are fine as far as the content goes. But I found the combination of the earlier Gaelic font with the Roman spelling disorientating. I would have expected that font to include séimhiús or else have the Roman font with the "h"s.

It may well be that this disorientation applies only to those old enough to have used the Gaelic font extensively in their youth. And I can see that the organisers may want to have added an extra bit of "Irishness" to the Irish language text. Perhaps others may wish to comment on this.

All of the above is really only a teaser for the exhibition. I dropped in with just under an hour to kill while waiting for Felix Larkin's talk on Grace Gifford. But I'll need to go back myself and look at the vast array of interesting material in more detail. I'd be well advised to arrive early in the morning, take the tour and a short break for lunch in the onsite café, and then stay until closing time.

Anyway, I said at the outset that I was in the GPO. I hope I gave the impression that this had been in 1916 and that I was still drawing the military pension. This, of course, was just to mislead you in the interest of adding a bit of spice to my report.

I did think I had an uncle Michael in the Rising and, indeed, there was a Michael Dwyer in the GPO garrison but he wasn't my uncle. The uncle turned out to have been in Boland's Mills, but that wasn't in 1916. An interesting mini story which I will recount another time.

However I have been in the GPO and not just buying stamps or posting letters. I spent a lot of time there in my youth, on the third floor which then housed Radio Éireann.

I was reminded of this when being ushered out the side door after Felix's talk. That door used to be the way in to Radio Éireann.

MELTING PLASTIC HISTORY

Diarmuid Bolger
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Let me be clear from the outset. This is a marvellous series of lectures on Rebel Irish Women run by GPO Witness History, curated by James Curry and introduced by Diarmuid Bolger.

There has been a pile of work done on the place of women in the Irish revolutionary period in recent times - from the un-airbrushing of Elizabeth O'Farrell to a raft of biographies.

Hopefully it's not too late to redress the balance but the absence of these women from accepted history over the years is nothing short of a national scandal.

Felix Larkin

This month's talk was on Grace Gifford. And sure don't we all know who she was? Didn't she marry that Plunkett fellow in his cell the night before he was executed as a signatory of the 1916 proclamation? Pure romance. End of story.

Well, before I let Felix loose on the story, let me just say a word about the title of this blog post.

The history I was taught in school was plastic history, by which I mean embroidered myth. It was essentially propaganda rather than history and it conveniently skited over messy reality to embellish already over-polished glory.

Understandable, up to a point, maybe, given that I was educated by the Christian Brothers and was surrounded by a society imbued with a high level of tolerance for myth, particularly in its religious ethos.

I have drawn attention elsewhere to the "educational" compromise involved in the presentation of Brian Merriman's Midnight Court in the classroom.

Imagine any Christian Brother having to dwell on a pregnant Grace Gifford's marriage to Joe Plunkett in his cell in Kilmainham jail just prior to his execution.

And the same Brother having to deal with a barrage of questions from a potentially rowdy class of boys who had been taught that a girl's primary purpose in life was to ensnare a man, starting now.

So had our hero Joe succumbed to the temptress? Hard to see how either Grace or Joe would have come well out of that encounter.

So to the flesh of the matter.

Grace was essentially an artist. She had attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (incidentally around the same time as Gordon Brewster). She was a pupil of the artist William Orpen who thought highly of her and painted a number of portraits of her. She relied on her artwork for a living and, despite not being well off, she did much pro bono artwork for the revolutionary movement.

Later, she would quote this unpaid work when applying for a military pension, characterising it as income forgone in the cause.

Her family had thrown her out over her dalliance with, and subsequent marriage to, Joe. They did not approve of this unhealthy young man for their daughter, but there were, no doubt, other grounds, such as a mismatch between her parents' unionist convictions and her espousal of the nationalist cause, though she did not endorse violence in pursuit of that cause.

Her parents had a mixed marriage. The boys had been baptised Catholics and the girls Protestants after the fashion/requirements of the time, but all the children had been brought up Protestants. Grace had converted to Catholicism shortly before her marriage.

Anyway, there I was lapping all this up and taking photos like mad when I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Felix had broken into song, and a fine voice he has too:

Oh, Grace, just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They'll take me out at dawn and I will die
With all my love, I place this wedding ring upon your finger
There won't be time to share our love for we must say good-bye

An apparently well known ballad, immortalising Grace, written by Frank & Seán O'Meara in 1985.

Ruth Dudley Edwards in her book The Seven has a neat little piece of exegesis on this chorus, particularly on the last line.

The coy implication that their relationship was unconsummated is challenged by Gerry's testimony that she had uncontrovertable (sic) evidence that Grace had a miscarriage shortly after Easter while staying at Larkfield.

Gerry was Joe's sister.

Ruth, like Felix, is a myth buster and the online vituperation against her pouring out of hard core Sinn Féin/IRA has to be seen to be believed. So I just thought I'd give her an on-topic mention here to help her keep the faith.

If you're still with me, you can hear a moving version of the song recorded in Kilmainham Gaol for the 2016 centenary celebrations, or an earlier version by the inimitable, and sadly no longer with us, Jim McCann.

Mind you, this is as nothing compared to the impact of Felix's public secular singing debut on the GPO audience. Maith thú..

I can't quite remember, such was my state of shock, but I think the image above is of Felix softly hitting one of the high notes.

I've just realised that I have not so far included any of Grace's own work, so here goes.

This is her sketch of Joe done just a month after his execution.

And this is Douglas Hyde in her inimitable cartoon style.

Nearly finally, back to melting plastic history.

The decade of commemorations has seen a huge outpouring of "revisionist" research looking back on history through evidence-tinted spectacles.

This has exploded a host of plastic myths but it has also revealed the underlying humanity of many of the main players, the real environment in which they were operating and the real choices they faced.

In many cases, far from destroying the mythological character, it has made them more understandable and ordinary. That is not to deny them their extraordinary actions but it does make it easier to relate to them.

A quote from the French historian Pierre Nora, that Felix used in the talk, captures this well: “Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again”.

In the Q&A I asked Felix for his reaction to two recently available sources of evidence: the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements and the Military Pensions Applications.

The Witness Statements were taken many years after the events and clearly needed cross-corroboration to filter out the puff. The Pensions Applications on the other hand were more personal cries from the heart, admittedly with a purpose, but many of them are closer to the events to which they relate.

Felix felt he had got closer to Grace through her pension application.

You can check out Grace's Witness Statement, her Application for a Widow's Pension, and her Application for a Service Pension directly. She was awarded the former pension (£90pa in 1924 rising to £500pa in 1937) but was refused the latter pension.

Talks like this can run into unexpected moments of intimacy and emotion. On this occasion we had a contribution from the floor from a lady who turned out to be Grace's grand niece. She was the grand-daughter of Grace's sister Muriel who married another signatory, Thomas MacDonagh.

James Curry

I don't want to go without congratulating James Curry on his recent doctorate and on his curating of this excellent series of talks. A book in the future perhaps?

I'll leave you with this charming sketch of Grace by William Orpen. You'll have seen a version of it on the cover of Marie O'Neill's book on Grace in the second image in this post.