The reissue of William Brennan-Whitmore’s memoir, written in 1961 and first published in this form in 1996, will ensure that this unique account of Easter Week in Dublin remains accessible. Since it was written, much more of his fellow Volunteers’ testimony has become publicly available, but his remains the only full-scale account written by the commander of a post – in his case the Imperial Hotel on Sackville (O’Connell) Street. Brennan-Whitmore had the dual advantage of being a professional journalist and a former regular soldier, and his lucid and level-headed narrative mixes vivid detail with a broad strategic grasp.
Though his post was very small, it tells us quite a lot about the planning and conduct of the rising. It was a last-minute improvisation by Connolly, and Brennan-Whitmore was given command of it even though he was a stranger to the area. (It is not entirely clear from his account why he stayed in Dublin over Easter weekend – where he was “in the unhappy position of a mariner at sea without a compass”, looking for leaders who could tell him what was going on – rather than returning to his unit in Wexford.) His garrison was also a mixed group of men nearly all unknown to him or to each other. Its task, of fortifying the Imperial Hotel together with a block of stores at the top of North Earl Street, involved heavy and frustrating labour, but apart from odd exhanges of fire with a sniper, it never saw the fighting it expected.
Ironically, Brennan-Whitmore was not only one of the few rebels with military experience, but one of the even smaller group who, with “Ginger” O’Connell, had argued for guerrilla fighting and regarded the defensive plan adopted by the military council as a wasted opportunity. The Volunteers might have “put up a prolonged resistance that would appeal to the fighting instincts of our race and rouse our people out of the apathy they had sunk into”, but the defensive strategy consigned them to “another chapter of failure”.
He believed that a move out to the countryside could have been organised – creating “a very awkward situation” for the British – even at a late stage, and was mystified that the leaders had given no thought at all to how this might be done. Indeed, when they were forced to abandon the blazing GPO as its roof collapsed, they had no idea where to go. Brennan-Whitmore was at least spared the grim coda of the directionless retreat to Moore Street, though he himself had to lead a retreat towards Fairview, a place he did not know at all.
He argued that even the defensive strategy could have been much more effective if, instead of holing up in a few buildings and waiting to be attacked, the rebels had garrisoned the buildings lightly, freeing most of their manpower to “push out strong patrols along the obvious routes of the enemy’s advance lines”. By operating in this more flexible way they could have held the city “into the second week at least”, possibly without triggering the bombardments and horrendous fires that gave this book its main title. But instead of the onrush of British troops they hoped for, offering the chance of death in open combat, they faced “a creeping insidious thing, like some foul disease ever-inexorably gnawing its way to the vital core”.
The book’s subtitle is slightly misleading – most of the barricades the rebels so laboriously and (in Brennan-Whitmore’s case) ingeniously constructed were never defended, because they were never assaulted. Brennan-Whitmore simply looked down from his fortified Earl Street post on the obstruction which, apart from its symbolic value, was no more than a public nuisance. He tells with some relish a story of a woman “of the bull-headed, bossy type”, determined to walk home by her habitual route, who tried several times to climb the barricade, warning Brennan-Whitmore “with true feminine logic” that if she broke her neck it would be his fault, falling down several times (“her legs waving grotesquely in the air”) before giving up. As he pointed out to her, it was only a short diversion to walk round the barricade, as no doubt attacking troops might also have discovered.
The casual mysogyny of the bossy-woman story pervades the whole account. Brennan-Whitmore had an impressive memory for names but it failed him when he recalled the Cumann na mBan women in his post, even their leader, “a very brave lady”, whom he watched crossed the yawning width of O’Connell street to the GPO and back under “streams of bullets” to get medical supplies. She and the others, also nameless, who were determined to accompany the men on the breakout after the position was evacuated, were manhandled into a presbytery and locked up. “Our respect for their courage and devotion would not permit us to drag them into some horrible situation” (though the women unquestionably wanted to go into that situation and had to be dragged away). Far better to humiliate them.
Brennan-Whitmore, who was a regular contributor to the Catholic Bulletin before 1916, was a convinced believer in the story that Count Plunkett told the pope the date of the rising and secured a papal blessing of the rebels. Though he recognised that "it seemed unusual" – something of an understatement – he not only found it possible that the pope could have done such a thing, but saw no political downside to it. As he said, "what Irish Catholic would not be pleased with it?"What Irish Protestants would have thought probably did not matter. For him, the "vigorous and unanswerable" case for believing this story was Brian O'Higgins's argument that "God told Joan of Arc to make war on" the English.
In this edition, Brennan-Whitmore’s text is supplemented by a short selection of documents relating to 1916, a helpful editorial introduction, and footnotes which (as reviewers of the first edition noted) demonstrate the editor’s extensive knowledge of the Easter Week events. These last, though, have been only sporadically updated for this reissue; the information that the Bureau of Military History’s witness statements “are still closed to researchers”, for instance, reads oddly, since they were opened to researchers 10 years ago, and recently made searchable online. (And a comprehensive set of extracts, skilfully chosen by Fearghal McGarry, was published two years ago.) A more serious failing, perhaps, is the failure to provide any maps. Without one it will be hard for anyone who (like Brennan-Whitmore himself) does not know the area to follow his sharp critique of Connolly’s military logic in selecting the Earl Street position, or the final attempt to escape through the surrounding British forces after that position was consumed by fire.
Charles Townshend's latest book is The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923.
