It has been a long 2016. The centenaries of the 1916 Rising, the executions at Kilmainham, Cork and Pentonville prisons, and internment at Frongoch, have spanned a breathless series of commemorative events across Ireland and the Irish world. This week marks the centenary of the release of the remaining 500 or so internees from Frongoch internment camp. History has, to a large extent, compacted the internment experience after the Rising into republican preface (the “university of revolution”), removing it from critical enquiry and counter-narrative. The material culture of the period restores this history to tangible, contemporary experience.
Between May 1st and June 16th, 2,519 internees were deported from Richmond barracks to one of eight British prison centres: Perth, Barlinnie, Lewes, Knutsford, Stafford, Wakefield, Wandsworth or Woking. (Five female internees were transferred separately to British prisons, three remaining interned at Aylesbury prison.) Solitary confinement was the predominant experience. At both Knutsford and Wakefield the internees were kept in their individual cells for up to 23.5 hours a day. The cells at Knutsford were particularly bad. Here the detainees were issued with a single blanket and slept on bare boards. A single 30-minute period of exercise offered reprieve from the desolation of daily life in one’s cell. This too, however, was to be conducted in silence: “in single file around the ring we trod the fool’s parade”. The monotony of prison life, confined space and boredom could trigger the slide into “barbed wire disease”, a neurosis symptomised by irritability, depression and, ultimately, insanity. “A man could keep sane, under these conditions,” one internee noted, “only as long as he was able to keep his mind revolving on something or other. If the mind got blank, or if you started worrying about your loved ones at home, madness was staring you in the face.”
Internees used any available materials as coping strategies. Michael Lynch attempted to stave off depression by counting bricks on the wall, James Kavanagh fashioned a deck of cards out of toilet paper, while Frank Robbins instituted a system of Morse code using a hand brush.
Towards the end of May, however, the internees began to be treated as de facto prisoners of war. Freedom of association was instituted including the right to converse, (censored) letters could now be written and received, rations were increased and foodstuffs could be purchased. The sense of liberation experienced by the internees was vividly recalled in later memoir, often in the form of objects. Writing of his time in Stafford jail Darrell Figgis itemised his definition of prisoner of war status: “I wanted tobacco and pipe, I wished any books that I might order or that might be sent in to me, daily papers, free communication with my fellow-prisoners and the opening of cell doors by night and by day.”
Daniel Tuite, similarly, captured the catharsis at Wakefield: “visitors came in, tobacco, cigarettes, newspapers, cakes and eatables of all kinds whilst Nuns came in with beads, medals, prayer books, religious magazines, pens, pencils and writing paper.”
Material artefacts had a palliative effect on the individual’s internment experience. These products were often provided by sympathetic members of the Irish community in Great Britain. As early as Easter Week itself the Irish National Relief Fund had been formed by Art O’Brien and other London-Irish nationalists. Further relief committees would be formed in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. Future president of Ireland Seán T O’Kelly would later praise the “herculean work” carried out by the INRF, and Art O’Brien in particular, during his internment: “I personally am most deeply thankful to you for standing so gallantly in the bearna baoghail at a time when so few men were prepared to recognise us, much less to hold out a hand of friendship.”
By early June the internees were on the move. As many as 650 were released and returned to Ireland while the remaining 1,863 detainees were relocated under the Defence of the Realm Act to Frongoch internment camp in north Wales. The authorities expected the Irish internees to regulate the day to day running of its adjacent north and south sites. Interned indefinitely, the detainees set about creating and maintaining what has been termed “a prison camp society”.
Rooms in the inner yard of the South Camp were reopened as a mall of shops: barber, tailor and shoe maker. Social clubs were formed: Henry Dixon established a library, Jeremiah Purcell introduced a course in shorthand and Michael Lynch formed a choir. Afternoons could be spent at “Croke Park” (the internees’ recreation field) while evening classes were offered in French, German, Spanish and Irish.
Gender roles too were blurred within this illusory civilian life. A number of the men did their own washing, cleaning and cooking, evidencing a male domesticity at variance with the expected gender roles of the period. One veteran, Joseph McCarthy, would later comment: “Some of the prisoners became expert at housekeeping and were the envy of the others. Their laundry was spotless and their work with the needle was tailor-like in workmanship, and the meals they were able to provide at night-time on top of the hut stoves with meagre resources were appetising fare.” Frongoch indeed functioned for many as an internment camp society.
However, the Frongoch experience was not entirely functional for all internees. The onset of “barbed-wire disease” was always a possibility and two men were declared insane during their time at the camp. The early months were a particularly claustrophobic experience with the internees bound to their quarters between 8pm and 6am. The South Camp dormitories contained between 150 and 250 beds on each floor, which measured 150 ft long and 50 ft wide. The ceiling of the ground floor dormitory, meanwhile, reached only nine feet high. Ventilation was very poor in the rooms and internees were known to faint on getting up in the morning on account of the deadened smell from the toilets.
Studies of First World War internment have noted the psychological impact of confined space on detainees, particularly those from middle-class backgrounds. The poet Brian O’Higgins was particularly affected by his surroundings: “There is absolutely no privacy. A man cannot say to himself that he will go off and be alone for five minutes. Nerves become frayed, tempers out of control, and all the little meanness of man comes to the surface…After Frongoch when I was arrested I hoped and prayed that I might be kept under lock and key in a cell rather than be given the ‘freedom’ and intercourse of my fellows in some hut or dormitory of a prison camp.”
It was within the spatial and psychological confines of the dormitories and huts that internees turned to the creation of internment craftwork. For some the creation of sculptures, jewellery and macramé was an existential practice directly related to the restraints of internment: “to overcome such heartaching [the confinement] those who could not give their entire energies to sports and games turned to arts and crafts”; “when locked in the dormitory each night the men used the time in many ways. A number of them started the hobby of doing macramé work with coloured cord and, in a short time, several of them got very expert with it”; “when the main body of our men in the camp were denied access to playing fields, many turned to carving bones and making rings out of coins. Some larger meat-bones became astonishing sculptures.”
For others the production of craftwork may have been intended to preserve their memories of Frongoch, a tool used by veterans to remain “in the landscape” years later. “Many prisoners in Frongoch,” Seamus Fitzgerald would later observe, “cherish mementoes of these places, such as little hand craft models, hand-made brooches, rings”. One hundred years after the Frongoch releases, material culture continues to serve as historical metonym to the physical and psychological realities of that period: it was a long 1916.
Darragh Gannon is the author of Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916 and the National Collection, published in paperback by Irish Academic Press in association with the National Museum of Ireland at €24.99 to accompany the museum’s exhibition Proclaiming a Republic: the 1916 Rising currently on view at Collins Barracks, Dublin
