"What's it to be?" asked Tommy Bevan, producing a tuning fork. "Let them have it," said his brother Charlie. Soldiers in khaki glared malevolently as five Irish prisoners chained together sang The West's Awake.
The setting was the crowded bar-room of a steamer ferrying internees to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, in the third year of the cataclysmic Great War. A British NCO came forward: "I'd like to kick your heads off, you dirty swine." Robert Brennan, who recorded this extraordinary scene in his book Allegiance, replied that the officer wouldn't speak like that if he wasn't on a chain. A red-headed soldier stepped out and said in a Dublin accent: "Why not take me on?" He felled the NCO with one blow.
The Bevans were not only musical but brave as well. The Sinn Féin Rebellion Handbook, published by The Irish Times, listed three members of the family interned in 1916: Joseph Bevan and his sons, Thomas and Charles. A younger son, Séamas, carried dispatches.
When the memorabilia of Charles Bevan were entrusted to the Military Archives recently, Comdt Victor Laing, Officer in Charge, remarked on the generosity of donors, who desire nothing more than that the patriotism of their forebears be remembered.
Charles Stewart Bevan - he was named after Parnell - joined the Irish Volunteers at the Rotunda Rink in December 1913. He took part in the Howth gun-running.
The highlight of Bevan's historical bequest is a memoir, Through the Valley, which he wrote nearly 40 years after the Rising had been "crushed in blood and fire". He recalled the parade on Easter Monday 1916 when Comdt Ned Daly told volunteers the Republic would be declared at noon. He gave each the option of withdrawing, but no one availed of the offer. "There was nothing heroic about it, for who but a veritable poltroon would turn tail in the face of danger? Hadn't we prepared for this day?"
At noon Squad Commander Bevan led a group of volunteers into the Four Courts and formed part of the garrison there until the surrender on Saturday. Next day, his battalion was detained in Richmond Barracks. "For some unaccountable reason," Bevan records modestly, he was considered an important prisoner.
Of the approximately 3,500 men and women arrested after the insurrection, 170 men and Countess Markievicz were selected for courts-martial. Bevan was charged with waging war against the king, "such act being of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the Defence of the Realm, and being done with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy". The insurgents were perceived as stabbing England in the back. The prosecuting counsel, William Wylie, had helped to suppress the Rising as a member of Trinity College's OTC.
Transferred to Kilmainham Prison, Bevan awaited the verdict of the court. In the loneliness of his bare cell - "not even a blanket though the nights were cold" - he prayed for courage. "My years with the Palestrina Choir passed before me. The consecration of St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh; the wedding of the Marquis of Bute at Castlebellingham, Co Louth; the consecration of the Bishop of Galway, at all of which the choir had been privileged to assist. In my 23 years, I had seen and done things not given to every lad."
Dawn would come with "the same dread expectancy. The least sound might bring preparation for execution. Who will it be this morning?" At Sunday Mass in the prison chapel, his boyhood friend Seán Heuston told him: "I have no hope, though I think you will be safe."
In the afternoon there was a great bustle. An officer, accompanied by an orderly, entered Bevan's cell. "You have been found guilty and sentenced to death," he said. "I returned his stare unblinking. If he wished the satisfaction of seeing me flinch he was disappointed."
Like many of his comrades, Bevan was sustained by a deep faith.
His memoir continues: "Some time elapsed - how long I had no means of knowing, one, two or three hours - when my door opened and the same officer entered. He went through the same performance, word for word. Again he stared me in the face and again I returned his stare. Then: 'The sentence is commuted to three years' penal servitude, and consider yourself [ damn] lucky' . . . That night I slept, only to be rudely awakened by the sound of rifle-fire. One of my comrades less fortunate than I had been executed." He learned later it was Heuston.
That evening he was transferred to Mountjoy Prison en route to Portland.
Of the 1,836 men sent to be interned in Britain, 1,272 were soon released and most of the rest were freed by Christmas 1916. The Bevan brothers were held until a general amnesty in June 1917.
The Rising was the dramatic climax of Charles Bevan's life. He served in the War of Independence, 1919-21, but admitted: "I never really got into the centre of activities." He resigned in June 1922, "being unable and unwilling to take part in a Civil War".
Subsequently, he worked as a printer in the Irish Press, where his brother Thomas was employed as a reader. Charles married a member of Cumann na mBan and they had five children. He died in 1969.
In 1916, 15 death sentences were confirmed and a 16th leader, Roger Casement, was executed in London. Seán Heuston wrote to his sister, a Dominican nun, from Kilmainham: "The agony of the past few days has been intense, but I now feel resigned to God's holy will. . .Let there be no talk of foolish enterprise. Think of the thousands of Irishmen who fell fighting under another flag at the Dardanelles, attempting to do what England's experts now admit was an absolute impossibility. . .If you really love me, teach the children in your class the history of their own land . . . "
One of those children was this diarist's mother. She used to recall that Heuston's sister encountered hostility from some staff and pupils at Taylor's Hill School, Galway, in the aftermath of the Rising.