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The Irish in Gallipoli

Francis Ledwidge, 1917

Where Aegean cliffs with bristling menace front

The Threatening splendor of that isley sea

Lighted by Troy’s last shadow, where the first

Hero kept watch and the last Mystery

Shook with dark thunder, hark the battle brunt!

A nation speaks, old Silences are burst.

Neither for lust of glory nor new throne

This thunder and this lightning of our wrath

Waken these frantic echoes, not for these

Our cross with England’s mingle, to be blown

On Mammon’s threshold; we but war when war

Serves Liberty and Justice, Love and Peace.

Who said that such an emprise could be vain?

Were they not one with Christ Who strove and died?

Let Ireland weep but not for sorrow. Weep

That by her sons a land is sanctified

For Christ Arisen, and angels once again

Come back like exile birds to guard their sleep.

I

Things Fall Apart: Art Emerges from Conflict

1919. In Dublin, the artist Harry Clarke is struggling with a commission to illustrate an anthology of poetry edited by Lettice d’Oyly Walters, titled The Year’s at the Spring. Harrap’s in London has just published Clarke’s macabre illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. William Butler Yeats writes ‘The Second Coming’, reflections on the aftermath of the First World War. Dáil Éireann assembles in January, but by September is ruled illegal. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary are killed in Tipperary. The aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown cross the Atlantic in their First World War era Vickers Vimy bomber, landing in Clifden, Connemara. The complete poems of Francis Ledwidge, who was killed in the Battle of Passchendaele, are published posthumously.

The Treaty of Versailles is signed on 28 June 1919, marking five years to the day after the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Anarchy and revolution spread throughout Germany. In Berlin, Max Beckmann completes his painting, Die Nacht. On Bastille Day in Paris, a two-hour victory parade marches under the Arc de Triomphe, passing a towering pyramid of cannons along the Champs Élysées. In London, Edwin Lutyens designs a cenotaph to the dead and wounded that will be the centerpiece of Allied Peace Day celebrations. In Dublin, the Viceroy, Sir John French, decides that in Ireland, too, there will be a parade and a permanent memorial to the missing and wounded. Harry Clarke receives the commission to illustrate the eight volumes of Ireland’s Memorial Records.

Ireland’s Memorial Records are Commissioned

Ireland’s Memorial Records were commissioned in 1919 and published in 1923 by the Dublin firm Maunsel and Roberts.1 These volumes contain the names of 49,435 individuals of Irish birth, ancestry, or regimental association who were killed in action or died of wounds in the First World War. There are eight volumes and 100 sets of Ireland’s Memorial Records. They are distinctive as honour rolls because of the richly illustrated borders by Harry Clarke, who is recognized in Ireland as one of the foremost artists of the early twentieth century. Clarke contributed an evocative Celtic-themed title page and eight illustrated borders. When Harry Clarke was awarded the commission to create decorative margins for Ireland’s Memorial Records, the only trace he left of any conversations was a line in his pocket diary for 29 September 1919, which reads simply, ‘Irish Nat Memorials’.2

FIGURE 1.1

Harry Clarke Diary 1919. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, MS 39, 202 (B)(2).

One hundred years later, computer programs and web-based interfaces allow Ireland’s Memorial Records to be searched online for names, regiments, and dates of death. The ease of international access to the data has meant that the artistic achievement of Ireland’s Memorial Records has been lost. The artwork has been removed from the online search capability; the illustrations are considered secondary to the text, mere decoration. What if we were to set aside the text for a time and consider only the borders? What if Ireland’s Memorial Records were considered not a flawed collection of names, but a superior realization of memorial art?

Maunsel and Roberts were known for printing nationalist literature including J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1907) and the Collected Works of Padraic [Padraig] H. Pearse (1917). Thus, they were a suitable publisher for printing the roll of the Irish dead. Given the choice of publisher and artist it appears as though Clarke’s illustrations and George Roberts’s visual design were symbolic acts of repatriation of the Irish soldiers, removing them from Britain’s army into a realm of purely Irish aesthetics. Each volume of Ireland’s Memorial Records measures twelve inches by ten inches. Following the decorative title page, eight images are repeated throughout the volumes, in recto and verso (reversed) – including soldiers in silhouette, ruined houses, graves, trenches, the Gallipoli Peninsula, cavalry, airplanes, tanks, bursting shells and searchlights. Sets were delivered to libraries and cathedrals in Ireland, England, Canada, Australia, and the United States. A very fine set was presented to King George V on 23 July 1924 and, also at that time, a set was conveyed to the Vatican.3

Who was Harry Clarke? He is known as a talented and visionary stained-glass artist. He was born in Dublin, educated at Belvedere College, and left school at age 14 to enter into a series of apprenticeships. While he began to refine and perfect his stained-glass technique through plating and aciding the glass, he also was working on pen and ink illustration. In 1913, Clarke received the commission to illustrate the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen for George Harrap & Co., London and he was occupied with his illustrations and travels on the continent throughout 1914. When England declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Clarke did not enlist. From 1914 onward, he was dedicated to a commission to complete eleven stained-glass windows at the Honan Chapel in Cork, which are now considered among his masterpieces.4

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Sir John French, instigated the idea for a national war memorial on 17 July 1919, the day prior to the Peace Day celebrations.5 The year marks the beginning of a great age of war memorials in Britain and the Commonwealth, with public and private monuments raised to commemorate over one million British troops dead or missing in the war. The pressing desire for post-war remembrance fostered two exhibitions held in London in 1919 by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy War Memorials Committee. Clarke’s domestic stained-glass panel ‘Gideon’ was among the new works exhibited at the V&A exhibit that opened in July 1919.6 In Ireland, a core group that would become the sustaining subcommittee for Irish memorials came together at the 1919 meeting, including in particular, Andrew Jameson (director of the whiskey distillery) and Clarke’s patron, the former MP Laurence Waldron.7

This meeting in July 1919 resulted in two resolutions that were ‘unanimously passed’: first, ‘to erect in Dublin a permanent Memorial to the Irish Officers and men of His Majesty’s Forces who fell in the Great War’; and to prepare ‘parchment rolls’ upon which ‘should be recorded the names of Irish Officers and men of all services who had fallen in the war’.8 At this point in 1919, from the first meeting of a group of interested and, it appears, mostly loyalist parties, Ireland’s Memorial Records were joined with a permanent memorial structure to house them, which we know today as the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. Although Ireland’s Memorial Records were completed in 1923, the memorial would not be complete until 1938, the eve of Britain’s entry into the Second World War. Consequently, the memorial was not officially opened until 1988.9

Given an absence of historical records, it is difficult to answer with any certainty why Harry Clarke was chosen as the illustrator or Maunsel as the publisher. Extant historical documents are silent on the official decisions and parlour conversations that might shed light on the making of the books. It is likely that his friendship with Waldron led to the commission, for Waldron was present at the initial meeting at the Viceregal Lodge. Descriptive, illustrative announcements of their publication appeared in key publications in the early 1920s, the books were exhibited to the public, and copies were distributed to libraries. However, due to the political climate in Ireland that challenged any affiliation with the crown and the absence of a suitable memorial space for display, Ireland’s Memorial Records slipped into a long period of obscurity.

War Memorials in Ireland

On 4 August 1914, the date that England declared war on Germany, the Irish people were governed by Great Britain. Four years later, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, Ireland was on the brink of a war to secure independence from England. The intervening four years were momentous, including the granting and subsequent suspension of the Government of Ireland Act in 1914, the 1915 military disaster at Suvla Bay, the 1916 rebellion in Dublin raised by the Irish Volunteers, and the 1916 devastation of the Battle of the Somme. By the conclusion of the First World War, Irish soldiers returned to a country divided, their status as British military veterans complicating their relationship with the emerging Irish Free State.

The historian Fergus D’Arcy opens his survey of war memorials in Ireland by noting that the service of Irish soldiers to the First World War was for many years ‘a story woefully neglected and willfully forgotten’.10 This sentiment has been echoed by the historian John Horne, who has argued that ‘from the Second World War the memory of the Great War was increasingly denied in the public life and self-understanding of independent Ireland’.11 While many recent histories have rectified the denial and neglect, the question of remembering and commemorating the Irish dead of the First World War continues to provoke controversy.

What role do Ireland’s Memorial Records play in remembrance? The intent of books of remembrance is to offer a tangible object for reflection. Not only do they provide evidence of the service record of the dead, but also they elevate the names to a semi-sacred status of sacrifice for the nation. Paired with a memorial space, such as a chapel within a cathedral or a dedicated war memorial, rolls of remembrance offer powerful connections between the individual and the nation. In several major Anglican cathedrals in England, such as Canterbury, St Paul’s, and Manchester, services of remembrance surrounding the regimental rolls of the dead continue to take place daily, weekly, or monthly. These rituals of ‘turning of the pages’, connect the living, the dead, the church, and the state. Ireland’s Memorial Records are displayed within Church of Ireland cathedrals, and similar page-turning rituals were intended initially to take place in Ireland.

Abstracted from memory rituals, as richly illustrated, finely-produced books, the Records tell us about the relationship of art and culture to Irish politics during the pivotal decade that encompassed the First World War and Irish independence. To build a modern and identifiable Irish cultural identity, Irish arts were inspired by history. In 1916, Padraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, published four pamphlets outlining the political philosophy of past leaders Wolfe Tone, John Mitchel, Thomas Davis, and James Fintan Lalor, thereby connecting their ideals and sacrifices to the contemporary Irish cause. Exploring similar paths in literature and the arts, William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge were instrumental in creating a national Irish voice in literature and drama. An Irish Arts and Crafts movement, led in part by the Yeats sisters, Susan (known as Lily) and Elizabeth (known as Lolly), investigated the means for incorporating Irish themes with Irish materials.12 Also working to establish a Celtic Revival were George Russell (known by the pseudonym AE, short for Aeon, or ‘life’) and his group of mystical visionary poets. Harry Clarke was part of this immense creative moment in Ireland. However, Clarke, like his contemporary James Joyce, not only looked to the symbols and stories of Irish history, but also was influenced by European modernism. Clarke’s social connection with advanced nationalists from Ireland enabled him to synthesize continental elements of the avant-garde with the artistic language of the Celtic Revival. The power of the illustrations for Ireland’s Memorial Records is evident in their complicated design, which demonstrates influences of modernist art while incorporating Celtic themes. Just as the First World War was an event in which modern technology was introduced into nineteenth-century battle tactics, so also Harry Clarke’s illustrations blended international modernism with the nineteenth-century aesthetics of the Celtic Revival and Arts and Crafts movements.

As later chapters will detail, there are many influences on the design of the borders in Ireland’s Memorial Records, including the Book of Kells. For one, Nicola Gordon Bowe records that Clarke consulted photographs in The Irish Soldier, a six-issue magazine about the war published by Eason’s, and part of a British ministry of information recruiting initiative.13 Secondly, Clarke’s striking use of silhouetted figures in the Records, were suggested by a widely used recruiting-poster technique. Clarke would have seen these posters in Dublin and during his trips to England. Captain H. Lawrence Oakley was to become particularly well-known for his posters and his series of trench-life silhouettes in the Illustrated London News, titled ‘Oakley of the Bystander’.14 Third, several drawings of soldiers in motion suggest that Clarke had army training manuals at his disposal; these manuals offered photographs and diagrams of the proper way that grenades should be handled. I argue in a later chapter that Clarke also drew on the innovations of cinema, a popular new visual technology that promised narrative possibilities for arranging images in sequence.

Therefore, rather than an isolated creative work, Ireland’s Memorial Records are part of an outpouring of commemorative art and architecture that extended around the globe. With over one million dead in Great Britain, individual artists and religious and cultural institutions sought ways to respectfully commemorate the dead. As already mentioned, this need was so great that the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts held exhibitions to inspire and provide guidelines for memorials. Issues of The Studio from 1919 and 1920, which Clarke read, are filled with articles about new memorial work.15 Therefore, not only were artists busy with commissions, they were interested in uniting traditional memorial styles with their own artistic vision.

FIGURE 1.2

‘Think!’ (1914) by Harry Lawrence Oakley. Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Great Britain. © Imperial War Museum Q33144.

The general historical trend of the past few decades has been to see Ireland’s Memorial Records as a static list of military information, focusing particularly on the 49,435 names printed in the eight volumes. They have been compared to the official publications by His Majesty’s Stationary Office, Soldiers Died in the Great War (1921) and Officers Died in the Great War (1919) – and they have been found wanting in their level of comprehensiveness and detail. Clarke’s illustrations are almost incidental in the case of debates over the textual content.

If we step back, however, we can see that even the list of names is mobile: it has been challenged, authenticated, studied, and changed. Historians, journalists, and citizens have uncovered hundreds of names of Irish servicemen in the war.16 The centennial’s focus on ordinary citizens, the contributions by the Irish citizenry to the war effort, the peace movement, and the discourse surrounding the war demonstrate that a bound list of 49,435 names represents only a fraction of those whose lives were lost as a result of the war. The list might include munitions workers, veterinarians, and those who died of physical wounds long after the Armistice. In other words, it’s important to recognize that Ireland’s Memorial Records have informed and developed dialogue for decades. Any Irish historian working with the First World War has had some engagement at some level with Ireland’s Memorial Records.

This book is designed to tell the story of how and why Ireland’s Memorial Records were published, how they were conceived from the beginning as part of a physical national memorial, and how Harry Clarke infused the decorative borders with his own distinctive vision. While Ireland’s Memorial Records have been listed as part of Clarke’s oeuvre, they have not been extensively studied in terms of their art and their history. The history of Ireland’s Memorial Records offers a glimpse into the life of Dublin during the wars. The cast of characters is sweeping, including, in addition to Clarke himself, Andrew Jameson, William Orpen, Edwin Lutyens, Seán Keating, Joseph Maunsell Hone, George Roberts, and Sir John French, all of whom, in one way or another, affected the outcome of the books or the disposition of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. What emerges is a fascinating story of how Dublin’s unionist and nationalist leaders worked together to create a unique memorial record of the Irish dead from the First World War, the same unionism and nationalism that ultimately divided Ireland and fostered competing narratives about the First World War.

The centenary of the First World War has provided the opportunity to tell new stories, stories other than military engagements or lines of command. War affects civilians and soldiers alike, noncombatants as well as combatants. Continued newspaper coverage of those serving on front lines, houses draped in black crepe, soldiers in uniform in the city, the activity at training camps, recruiting posters, the requisition of horses and mules, food and paper shortages, and the changing face of labour influenced the perceptions of old and young, women and men. The outpouring of art from the war is one consequence of the heightened awareness of wartime conditions.

Much has been written about British art of the First World War, particularly about the official war artists who where employed through the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House in London to record their impressions of the front lines.17 These artists included well-known names, such as William Orpen, Christopher Wynne Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and Muirhead Bone. Their works were featured in exhibitions in London and published in a full-colour series titled British Artists at the Front. The paintings of Nevinson, Nash, Kennington, and Orpen eventually came to record their profound disillusion with the horrors of the war, in keeping with the works of the poets published after 1916. Among their public statements and private sentiments, Nash’s comment stands out: ‘I am no longer an artist. I am an artist who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.’18

Orpen, born in Dublin, an instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and Harry Clarke’s teacher, became an official war artist for the War Propaganda Bureau in 1917. The Irish painter John Lavery was recruited by the War Office to paint the home front. While recent reappraisals of what constitutes war art have broadened the canon to include the Belfast painter William Conor19 and Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler,20 Harry Clarke’s illustrations are notably absent from scholarship on art and war. This may be because Clarke’s border art for Ireland’s Memorial Records was neither heroic nor horrific. Clarke’s art reveals a distinctive vision, a purposiveness mingled with the macabre. Illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period were often irreverent, demonstrating the artist’s wit and point of view.21 Clarke borrows from this tradition, encoding the border designs for Ireland’s Memorial Records with visual puns, commentary on the text, parodies, and riddles. They enter a realm of the fantastic in which imagination merges with documentary evidence and symbolism to produce something so unique that it defies easy classification.

FIGURE 1.3

‘We are Making a New World’ (1918) by Paul Nash. ©Imperial War Museum Art.IWM ART 001146.

Recruiting in Ireland

The complex status and Irish identity of the Irish soldiers memorialized in Ireland’s Memorial Records is related to questions of why the men enlisted. The horrible conditions of the Dublin slums in the early twentieth century give credence to suggestions that Irish soldiers who served with British regiments in the First World War were essentially conscripted by poverty, having no other choice than to enlist and take ‘the King’s shilling’. At the time, it was the Labour Party leader James Connolly who advanced the idea that the working class had been sacrificed by the war,22 and this attitude was promoted by his contemporary, Dublin resident and pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who believed the enemy was not Germany, but ‘English militarism – Kitchenerism’.23 More recently, Terence Denman has asserted that ‘the urban poor, labourers and the unemployed, disproportionately formed the mass of Irish recruits in the south’.24

In 1914, unemployment was close to 20 per cent in Dublin, and a lack of manufacturing meant that most of the workforce was unskilled. Close to one quarter of the Dublin-city population occupied tenements that were ripe with overcrowding, disease, and poor sanitation. The transport workers’ strike from 26 August 1913 to January 1914 resulted in 20,000 employees losing their wages and the declaration of war in August 1914 led to a rise in prices for coal, meat, milk, and bread.25 Thomas Dooley points to these basic needs as a factor in enlistment, but adds that military service also ‘meant a job which offered escape from drudgery. It promised excitement, the potential for advancement and a future’.26

Catriona Pennell’s important study of enlistment in Ireland demonstrates that enlistment figures were consistent with those of England. In addition to the regular armies, Patrick Callan cites a figure of 140,460 men enlisting during the war’s duration.27 Over 20,000 Irishmen enlisted by 15 September 1914, predominantly from industrial areas of the island. Yet, as Terence Denman notes, the ‘class known in Ireland as “farmer’s sons” were largely disinclined to join up’ because they were needed at home.28

FIGURE 1.4

‘Your first duty is to take your part in ending the war’, Mr J. E. Redmond, M. P., at Waterford, 23 August 1915. Central Council for the Organization of Recruiting in Ireland. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, WAR/1914–1918.

Pennell is careful to avoid any overwhelming motivation assigned to those soldiers who enlisted, yet she does point out that genuine belief in the rightness of the war was a motivating factor for many young men to enlist in the British forces.29 This sense that the war was a just war, ‘in defense of right, of freedom, and religion’, was encouraged by Sir John Redmond, the nationalist MP for County Waterford.30 On 27 August 1914 Redmond announced to Parliament that the Irish would fully support the war: ‘I am glad and proud to be able to think that at this moment there are many gallant Irishmen willing to take their share of the risks and to shed their blood and to face death in the assistance of the Belgian people in the defense of their liberty and their independence.’31 A month later, on 20 September 1914, upon passing through Woodenbridge, County Wicklow and seeing a parade of the Irish Volunteers, Redmond reiterated his support for the war, drawing on the stereotype of the fighting Irish to encourage enlistment:

it would be a disgrace for ever to our country and a reproach to her manhood and a denial of the lessons of her history if young Ireland confined their efforts to remaining at home to defend the shores of Ireland from an unlikely invasion, and to shrinking from the duty of proving on the field of battle that gallantry and courage which has distinguished our race all through its history.32

While the majority of the Irish people hoped that war would be avoided, once war was declared, many believed it was necessary and relief organizations mobilized to support the war by fund-raising, sending food, and making clothes and bandages.33 Pennell writes,

As in Britain, Irish individuals, regardless of political affiliation, volunteered for a variety of reasons. For some it was a combination of an opportunity for adventure and/or a sense of duty. Many identified with Ireland’s ideological support of the war. … Support for Belgium was a significant motivating factor. … As has been explored elsewhere, a strong tradition existed of Irishmen enlisting in the British army, both before and after the First World War. Some men were simply following a family tradition of soldiering, entering into a respectable career. … The readiness of individuals to join the colours was largely determined by the attitudes and behavior of comrades – kinsmen, neighbours, and fellow-members of organisations and fraternities.34

Tom Johnstone lists old soldiers, young men ‘from all classes’, rugby football players, and ‘a company of tough Dublin dockers’ among the recruits.35 Philip Orr, chronicling the history of the 10th (Irish) Division under the command of General Bryan Mahon, records that ‘Frank Browning, President of the Irish Rugby Football Union, sent a circular to his players, just a few days after war was declared. Within a short space of time, he had established a 300-strong “Volunteer Corps”, which drilled at the Lansdowne Road rugby ground for several evenings each week. During these sessions Browning would encourage his men to enlist.’36 Browning’s volunteers were members of the loyalist Protestant professional class who lived in Dublin while training for careers elsewhere. The players would form the core of the famous D Company of the 7th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, who would be almost completely wiped out at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli on 6 August 1915.

Regular and New Armies

In 1914, Ireland was home to nine regular regiments of infantry, which were subsequently attached to the British Expeditionary Force. These included the Irish Guards, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. In addition, Ireland’s military included four regular regiments of cavalry. These included the Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, the Inniskilling Dragoons, the Royal Irish Lancers, and the King’s Royal Irish Hussars.37

On 11 August 1914, the War Office in London established thirty New Army divisions, which came to be known as Kitchener’s Army or the Pals. Pals divisions were designed to aid recruiting by promising ordinary working men the opportunity to train, travel, and fight side by side with family, friends, and co-workers.38 By November 1914, three new divisions were established in Ireland: the 10th (Irish) Division, the 16th (Irish) Division, and the 36th (Ulster) Division. The 10th (Irish) was the first division that could be called ‘Irish’, a term that John Redmond argued would instil pride and aid recruiting. As Captain Stephen Gwynn later claimed to potential recruits, ‘Each battalion in each Irish Brigade bears the name of an Irish regiment long established in the British service, and this high inheritance must be upheld.’39 Thus, the nine regular regiments became reorganized as battalions within the 10th (Irish) Division and 16th (Irish) Division.

Recruitment and enlistment were heaviest in the industrial areas of Dublin and Belfast. Agricultural labourers were needed at home, resulting in lower enlistment from rural areas. Given the specific geographical character of the new Irish divisions, their outlook on the question of Home Rule carried into the predisposition of the membership. The 36th (Ulster) Division was made up of 90,000 members of the Ulster Volunteers, with the addition of recruits from Scotland and northern cities in England.40 The nationalist Irish Volunteers were divided in their support of the war effort. Over 170,000 supported Redmond and enlisted in the new divisions, changing their name to the National Volunteers. A cadre of 11,000 members of the Irish Volunteers did not enlist; a core group of these Volunteers would form the rebel force that led the Easter Rising in April 1916.41

Drafts were not always placed with Irish regiments. If battalions at the front were in need of replacements, Irishmen might be sent to units that required them. Johnstone lists Irish recruits being sent to the Black Watch, the 13th Middlesex, and the Scots Guards.42 Furthermore, ‘since Napoleonic times, English Roman Catholics were usually sent to Irish regiments’.43 As a result, between the regular and new armies of the British Expeditionary Force, Irish-born Irishmen could be found in almost all regiments, whether these were designated Irish or non-Irish.44

While this book addresses the artistic achievement of Ireland’s Memorial Records, some attention has to be given to the ongoing question of the 49,435 names in the eight volumes, including a discussion of the number of enlisted men and the numbers of dead. Historians and military enthusiasts alike acknowledge that the names listed were neither complete nor accurate. In fact, the 1923 preface to Ireland’s Memorial Records duly notes their incompleteness:

The sub-committee regret profoundly that they have not been able to obtain a complete list of the names of the fallen Irishmen in the Navy, Air Force, and Colonial Regiments, but these volumes contain names of such Irishmen in these Services as have been available from private sources and through the Press. The compiling of these records was given great publicity, and every effort was made to procure complete and accurate information, and accordingly if any names have been omitted, or any particulars are incorrect, the Committee cannot accept whole responsibility.

Eva Barnard, secretary to the Dublin-based Irish National War Memorial Committee, undertook the work of collecting the names that would be printed in the eight volumes. To do so, she sent letters asking for information and looked at the lists of dead in the newspapers. Her work was completed independently of Harry Clarke. Clarke was responsible only for the artistic vision and production of the decorative borders surrounding the names. The borders and the roll of names were even printed independently of one another.

As definitive military records of Irishmen who died in the First World War, Ireland’s Memorial Records contain many inconsistencies and discrepancies. To begin, they purport to contain the names of 49,435 Irish casualties of the war, dating from 1914 to 1918. Yet Casey asserts that a significant number of these names, about 19,000 in fact, ‘were not Irish’.45 Cross-referencing the names in Ireland’s Memorial Records with the soldiers listed in the 1921 publication Soldiers Died in the Great War, 1914–1919, Casey identified only 30,216 known casualties of Irish birth.

Furthermore, as Fergus D’Arcy has demonstrated, hundreds of soldiers who fought in the First World War died of wounds or illness in Ireland and were buried on Irish soil. While Ireland’s Memorial Records include soldiers who died between 1914 and 1918, due to official Imperial War Graves Commission policy, the soldiers could be considered ‘war dead’ until 31 August 1921, regardless of their cause of death. For example, in Dublin, the private burial ground at Glasnevin Cemetery contains the graves of 168 soldiers who were entitled to receive a headstone from the Imperial War Graves Commission; these same names are listed on the two monument stones now located near the chapel. Grangegorman Military Cemetery, adjacent to the northeast corner of Phoenix Park, contains 613 war dead from the First World War.46 The last grave to receive an IWGC headstone is that of Private M. Scully of Dublin, who died on 30 August 1921, leaving an 18 year-old widow.

It is worth pointing out that further inconsistencies related to the criteria for inclusion in the volumes arise from regimental insignia designs. Clarke wove badges of seventeen regiments within his engravings, which the index to the volumes list as:

1.Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards

2.Royal Irish Rifles

3.Royal Field Artillery

4.Tank Corps

5.8th (Royal Irish) Hussars

6.Royal Dublin Fusiliers

7.Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers

8.Royal Irish Dragoon Guards

9.5th (Royal Irish) Lancers

10.Royal Munster Fusiliers

11.Royal Irish Regiment

12.15th Hussars

13.Irish Guards

14.Connaught Rangers

15.Royal Berkshire Regiment

16.Leinster Regiment

17.Royal Irish Fusiliers

In addition, Clarke included a kangaroo to honour the contributions of the Australian and New Zealand Allies, and a maple leaf for the Canadians. However, badges of the North Irish Horse and South Irish Horse are not included, nor are the colours of the Royal Engineers, the Royal Army Medical Corps, or the Labour Corps, all of which contributed several hundred Irish casualties to the war effort. There is no record of why certain regiments were included in the Records or why others are absent. Two regiments are decidedly non-Irish: the 15th (King’s) Hussars and Royal Berkshire Regiment. Inclusion of the 15th (King’s) Hussars can be explained because they served at Suvla Bay with the Royal Irish Fusiliers and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

However, the inclusion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment is a minor mystery. According to Casey, the Royal Berkshire Regiment contributed twenty-eight casualties to the total of Irish-born Irish dead in the war, while the 15th Hussars contributed four.47 The 3rd (Special) Battalion of the Berkshires trained recruits at Portobello Barracks in Dublin from 1917 to 1918, which may have resulted in a connection with Irish families; however, ironically, the 2nd Battalion was sent to Dublin in 1919 to fight against the IRA.48

This brief survey does not do justice to the complications that arise from trying to identify a definitive set of names that could or could not be included in Ireland’s Memorial Records; however, we can make some conclusions. For one, while the method of gathering names of the committee was perhaps not ‘haphazard’ as Casey purports, it was definitely imperfect. Second, the regimental badges represented in Clarke’s borders are incomplete; many Irishmen were killed while serving with non-Irish regiments. For example, the 11th Hampshires trained with the 10th (Irish) Division at the Curragh and ultimately lost sixty-three Irishmen enlisted with their regiment.49 In addition, there were hundreds of Irish born who served with Scottish and Northern English regiments, such as the Northumberland Fusiliers famous 103rd (Tyneside Irish) Brigade, which suffered heavily at the Battle of the Somme. While these regiments are not artistically rendered in the decorative borders, the names of the soldiers themselves are listed in Ireland’s Memorial Records.

Ultimately, these are questions for the military historians to winnow and sift. I have chosen to consider the eight volumes of Ireland’s Memorial Records as a complete artefact of their time and place. While the numbers and names can be contested, and their value as military records falters today, the history of their publication and the neglected history of Harry Clarke’s accomplishment are important to the legacy of Ireland’s artistic achievements in the twentieth century.

Significant Conflicts in 1915 and 1916

Irish people were involved in all aspects of the military campaigns from 1914–18, filling medical, combat, and labour roles. In each major battle, Irish soldiers served and died, whether fighting with Irish divisions or English. In addition, 11,000 military-trained Irish Volunteers remained at home, taking decisive steps toward Irish independence. A brief history of the Irish involvement in the First World War must take into account three events of military importance involving dedicated Irish divisions: Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, and the Battle of the Somme.

Gallipoli, 1915

One of the most popular songs to emerge after the 1916 Easter Rising was ‘The Foggy Dew’, an old melody with new rebel lyrics penned in 1919. The song pits the gallant efforts of the martyred Irish rebels fighting for freedom in Dublin city in April 1916 against the disastrous events of the British military campaign against the Turks in the Dardanelles, concluding ‘’Twas better to die ’neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud el Bar.’ Still popular today, the song embodies the continuing tensions between the memory of the Easter Rising and the memory of the First World War. Geographically, Suvla Bay and Sud el Bar are in the Aegean, indeed a long way from Tipperary. Suvla Bay is on the western side of the Cape Helles peninsula; it was the site of V Beach, a landing zone for two Irish battalions. ‘Sud el Bar’ is a corruption of Sedd el Bahr, a village south of Suvla Bay, at the approach to the Narrows, along the Dardanelles Straits.

FIGURE 1.5

Construction work in progress on a beach in Suvla Bay (1915), photographed by Ernest Brooks. ©Imperial War Museum Q13552.

When naval bombardment of forts at the Dardanelles began on 19 February 1915, the 10th (Irish) Division was still spread across Ireland in training camps at Fermoy, the Curragh, and Dublin. They were sent to England in April. The official orders for the 10th to depart for the Dardanelles arrived on 1 July 1915, while they were stationed in Basingstoke, Hampshire. On 5 August, the division was divided in order to assist other divisions; the 29th sent to Anzac Cove and the 30th and 31st were sent to support the 11th Division at Suvla.50 Limited to one pint of water per day on a rocky peninsula surrounded by salt water in the middle of summer, the soldiers were desperately thirsty. Although the objectives of seizing Chocolate Hill and Green Hill were met on 7 August, the fighting continued for several weeks. While it may have established the Anzac legend, the Gallipoli campaign is remembered for its ‘disorganised chaos’.51 With no central or unified command, the plans of attack were delayed and often contradictory. ‘All semblance of command and control had disappeared. No one had any idea of what was happening, or indeed any apparent grasp of their objectives.’52 The men suffered from lack of water to drink or to tend to wounds with, an absence of shade, high temperatures, rocky terrain, spoiled food, and dysentery.53

Eventually, two devastating attacks were launched at the end of August, the advance on Scimitar Hill by the 29th Division and the Anzac attack on Hill 60. Peter Hart contends that neither attack was ‘likely to result in significant gains’54: ‘If there was ever a futile battle it was the assault at Suvla by IX Corps on 21 August.’55 Compounding the heat, lack of water, exhaustion, and disease, bombing and machine gun fire set the brush alight, burning the dead and wounded.56 Corporal Colin Millis recalls,

An awful death trap this was and it claimed many victims, the poor devils simply dropped in dozens and were speedily burnt with the flames – a sight that I shan’t forget.57

Unfortunately for the Irish, in the legends that would ensue of the peninsular campaign, they were portrayed as cowardly and disorganized.58 While it is not the place of this book to point out the inaccuracies of nationalistic war rhetoric, it is significant that the contributions of the 10th (Irish) Division were lost to the greater lines of this story after 1916. After continuing their service in Palestine and Salonika (where they may have come into contact with some of the Berkshires), what was left of this New Army division returned to a much-changed Ireland, one that would come to be ambivalent about their contributions and sacrifices. As one commentator put it, when the 7th marched out of Dublin, they marched out of history. By contrast, Australia and New Zealand commemorate the first day of fighting at Gallipoli annually on April 25. The Anzacs – Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – lost over 8,000 men during the eight-month period on the peninsula.59

From April to August, the war correspondent E. Ashmead-Bartlett worried that the public was completely unaware of the horrible conditions and high losses in the Dardanelles. With the help of Keith Murdoch (father of newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch), Ashmead-Bartlett was able to smuggle news of the fighting past the censors to the British Press.60 Historian Philip Orr recounts that, by September 1915, The Irish Times carried an eyewitness account of the battle and the Irish Independent was ‘filled every day with photographs of dead, wounded and missing officers, usually with a pen portrait that included information about their family, their peacetime career and – in guarded detail – the manner of their demise’.61 Some of these illustrated accounts may have influenced Harry Clarke’s choice of content for his borders. We can be certain that the reports influenced public opinion about the war. The last British troops left the Dardanelles in January 1916, marking the end of the failed campaign to open the Black Sea. In Ireland, January 1916 marked the beginning of a significant decline in enlistment.

Easter Rising 1916

In 1926, during the protracted and contested conflict over the location of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens, it was the Easter Rising of April 1916 that was invoked as the founding conflict for the Irish Free State, not the First World War. The Rising marks the point when those whom Padraig Pearse called the ‘risen people’ claimed the moment for independence.62

An estimated 11,000 members of the Irish Volunteers resisted enlisting in the British Army at the outbreak of war with Germany. Seeing a tactical opportunity while Britain’s armies were fighting in Europe and Asia, members of the Volunteers joined with the Irish Citizen’s Army to occupy locations around Dublin and proclaim the city as the centre of a Provisional Irish Government. On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, a force of revolutionary nationalists occupied prominent buildings in central Dublin, making its headquarters at the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville (now O’Connell) Street. Padraig Pearse, schoolteacher and visionary, read aloud a proclamation announcing a Provisional Government, and called for ‘the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves’. Pearse’s younger brother William (Willie), an artist who trained at the Metropolitan School of Art, was also involved in the Rising, headquartered with his brother at the GPO. Working to supply the revolutionaries with guns and material support was Roger Casement, a champion of human rights, who sought aid from Germany to purchase guns and reinforcements.63

FIGURE 1.6

Abbey Street Corner (1916). Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland Ke 105.

During the week of occupation, central Dublin was heavily shelled by British forces recruited from training camps in Ireland and England. Houses and businesses closest to the quays were completely destroyed; Eden Quay, Henry Street, Lower Abbey Street, Middle Abbey Street, North Earl Street and Sackville Street were reduced to rubble. Fires from the city centre could be seen for miles. Communications from the city centre were poor and relatives waited and watched for news. Rumours abounded. Describing the evening of Friday, April 28, Kathleen Clarke, captures the way that lack of knowledge and fear mixed in the minds of combatants and non-combatants alike. Her husband Tom Clarke was in the GPO.

That night I watched, from the upper windows of the house, the smoke and flames of what seemed to be the whole city in flames. I watched all night; it seemed to me no-one could escape from that inferno. The picture of my husband and brother caught in it was vividly before me, and their helplessness against that raging fire appalled me. 64

Although he was not a participant in the revolutionary measures, Clarke and some among his circle were directly affected by the fighting. As Nicola Gordon Bowe relates, because the studios at 33 North Frederick Street were within the combat zone, ‘The military refused permission for the men to leave the building, so they were held there for four days, and work was at a standstill until 8 May.’65 Joshua Clarke related that he was anxious, not knowing ‘whether my house was blown down or my sons killed in Dublin’.66 Sheltering against bullets, shells, and fires, Clarke experienced first-hand the conditions of combat, personal experience which he most certainly drew upon when designing the borders for the Records. The publishing house of Maunsel was located along Abbey Street, which was destroyed by fires that consumed many of the buildings along the North Dublin quayside. Inside were plates of Clarke’s illustrations for ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

By Saturday, April 29, Pearse surrendered the forces from the GPO and those who occupied other sites soon followed. The Irish rebels from the central city were gathered in the Parnell Square at the north end of Sackville Street, where they spent a night outdoors and in the rain, huddled together in stillness and discomfort under the rifles and eyes of British guards.

Though the Rising was not immediately or generally popular with the Dublin citizens, the summary execution of the leaders of the military coup turned public opinion in support of the revolutionary heroes. Fourteen were swiftly shot after secret tribunals at Kilmainham Gaol in west Dublin. On May 3, only four days after the surrender, Padraig Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Thomas Clarke were executed by firing squad. Five more leaders were shot in the next two days. Within the week, six more men were executed. Thousands more were deported to prison camps in Ireland, England, and Wales. In total, there may have been as many as 500 dead by the end of the week,67 among them Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, war protestor, pacifist, and friend to artist Seán Keating, who left his home to stop looting in the city.

The dead of the Easter Rising, including the leaders and the civilian casualties, are memorialized in the Garden of Remembrance in central Dublin’s Parnell Square, the site where rebels huddled in discomfort after the surrender. A written and illuminated record of the rebellion was begun by the artist Art O’Murnaghan in 1924 as Leabhar na hAiséirghe, Book of the Resurrection, a twenty six-page book of remembrance that may be compared to Ireland’s Memorial Records. These beautiful illuminated pages are displayed at the National Museum, Collins Barracks.

The Somme, 1916

During the revolution in Ireland, British forces were engaged in battles in Mesopotamia and massive troops and equipment were moving into the Picardy region around the Somme River. What ensued was a series of battles that extended from late June 1916 to November 1916. These battles would be the proving ground for the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division. The area had been occupied by the German army since the opening months of the war in 1914, which gave them sufficient time to deeply entrench themselves and heavily fortify the towns, including Beaumont, Bapaume, Thiepval, Guillemont, and Ginchy. By July 1916, German machine gun posts covered approaches to the area from the west, north, and south, effectively blanketing the thirty-kilometer line of the front with heavy fire. Working with the French troops under the command of Colonel Joffre, British General Douglas Haig planned to advance on 1 July 1916, following a weeklong bombardment of German lines that they anticipated would cut the wire and destroy the artillery. Beginning on June 23, the British launched a barrage of three million shells on German lines. Early in the morning of July 1, the BEF detonated seventeen mines under German positions. At 7:30 a.m., whistles blew along the miles of trenches to send the advance waves of troops over the top.68

Among those in the first wave of July 1 were the 36th (Ulster) Division under the direction of Major-General Sir Oliver Nugent, who were in trenches dug within Thiepval Wood. Although they would achieve the objective of reaching the German lines, they were unable to hold the position. The division would face heavy losses. Casualties from the first day of fighting numbered over 19,000 British soldiers. Martin Middlebrook estimates that 2,000 Ulstermen were killed on the first day of battle and 3,000 were dead by the third day.69

FIGURE 1.7

Two British soldiers standing in a wrecked German trench at Ginchy (September 1916), photograph by John Warwick Brooke. © Imperial War Museum Q 4338.

The Tyneside Irish (Northumberland Fusiliers) were situated to the east of the 36th (Ulster) Division; their objectives were La Boiselle and Contalmaison. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers were positioned to the northwest of the 36th (Ulster) Division, facing Beaumont-Hamel. By noon on July 1, over 60 per cent of the officers and men of the 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers were casualties of the advance. On July 3, roll call of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, 36th (Ulster) Division, revealed only one of four officers was alive and thirty-four of the battalion’s 115 men were dead, wounded, or missing.70

Although it was not their first action of the war, the 16th (Irish) Division is particularly associated with the attacks on the German-controlled towns of Guillemont and Ginchy on the eastern end of the line. Gerald Gliddon refers to the village of Guillemont as ‘a fortress with a chain of dugouts and tunnels that defied the heaviest artillery barrages’.71 The first attempts to take the village of Guillemont occurred on 23 July 1916. By August 27, with the rain now muddying the roads and the bodies of the dead filling the trenches, the 6th Connaughts, 7th Leinsters, 8th Munsters, and 6th Royal Irish were called in from the 16th Division for a new plan of attack from the north. This attack was successful, and in his official report, John Buchan wrote, ‘The men of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught broke through the intricate defenses of the enemy as a torrent sweeps down rubble.’72

However, two other objectives beyond Guillemont remained: a heavily fortified area known as the Quadrilateral and the town of Ginchy. Until the advance on Ginchy, ‘the brigades of the 16th Division were thrust piecemeal into a continuing battle under the command of other divisional commanders’.73 On September 5, Major-General Sir William Hickie leading the assembled Irish Division was successful in taking the town. On September 9, Ginchy was secured. One of the casualties was Lt Tom Kettle of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, poet and barrister, who was shot while leading his men into the ruins of the town. (Ironically, five months earlier, his brother-in-law Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was executed during the Easter Rising.) With Kettle was James Emmet Dalton, who, having survived the war, would go on to join the IRA. Dalton was with Michael Collins during the 1923 ambush and assassination at Béal na Bláth, Cork. The total number of casualties from Irish regiments at the battles at Guillemont and Ginchy are 11,500.

Harry Clarke and the Arts in Dublin

When Harry Clarke was awarded the commission to prepare borders for Ireland’s Memorial Records, he was 30 years old, a father, and just beginning the decade that would be the most fruitful of his short career. That year, his friend Thomas Bodkin, a Governor of Ireland’s National Gallery of Art and Clarke’s lifelong friend, wrote an article titled ‘The Art of Mr Harry Clarke’ for the important artists’ monthly, The Studio, which praised Clarke’s artwork, citing over 250 of his completed works.74 That same issue contained several articles relating to war memorial commissions. Ultimately, the Studio article gave Clarke exposure in England and America that would lead to many commissions and extend his work beyond Ireland.

Harry Clarke was born in Dublin on 17 March 1889, the son of Joshua, a stained-glass manufacturer and church decorator hailing from Leeds, and the former Brigid MacGonigal from County Sligo. Like James Joyce, he received a Jesuit education at Belvedere College on Dublin’s north side. Clarke studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and the South Kensington School of Design in London. Returning to Dublin to work in the stained-glass studio of his father, he became involved with the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland and the Guild of Irish Art Workers, and he resumed studies at the Metropolitan School of Art with William Orpen. In his memoir Some Memories, 1901–1935, George Harrap recalls Clarke as ‘an indefatigable worker,’ citing the ‘over two hundred finished works’ that Clarke completed between 1915 and 1919.76

FIGURE 1.8

Harry Clarke, circa 1924. Image courtesy of Fianna Griffin.

The illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination represent a transitional moment in Clarke’s illustrations, in which they move from a spare and gracious design to a darker and more complex pallet of line and ornamentation. Within the Poe drawings, viewers begin to detect the subversive elements that would dominate the drawings of the 1920s. It is as if Poe’s literary explorations of heaven and hell, beauty, madness, sin, and horror awakened in Clarke a need to express his own experiences, the dichotomy of earthly physical existence with the teachings of the Catholic Church. For example, the plate that accompanies Poe’s tale of Ligeia presents the lady elaborately bound in a black ribbon that straps her stomach, falls loose at the breast, and delicately balances a cloak at her back. Her bare breast draws attention to the way that she is sensually alive while physically dead. Beyond this image, Clarke carries the motif of binding and unwinding through other illustrations in the Poe volume. The most prevalent of these are the tattered winding cloths that trail from the corpses in the illustrations. Even some of the living characters are swathed in burial cloths that untwist elaborately; Clarke’s visual puns twist the ribbons and shrouds into decorative scroll patterns on the pages, motifs that would recur in Ireland’s Memorial Records.

Among his noted works in stained glass are the eleven Honan Chapel windows (1915–17) in Cork. Clarke used vivid azure, scarlet, royal purple and emerald green glass to represent Mary, our lady of sorrows, and the saints Patrick, Colmcille, Brigid, Finbarr, Ita, Albert, Gobnait, Brendan, and Declan. In 1924 Clarke completed an exquisite small decorative window based on John Keats’s sensual poem of illicit love, ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’. His final work was the Geneva Window (1925–29), a spectacular series of panels inspired by fifteen Irish writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Padraig Pearse. The window was initially destined for the Hague, but was censored by the Irish government and is now at the Wolfsonian Museum, Florida. Suffering continually from chest ailments, Clarke traveled to a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. He was returning to Dublin in January 1931 when he died in Coire, Switzerland.77 Sadly, his body was not returned to Ireland and his gravesite is not known. Harrap concluded that Clarke ‘will be remembered among the artists of his time for his imaginative power and originality, and it will be written that his early death, in 1930, at the age of 41, extinguished a genius’.78

Like fellow artists Austin Molloy, Seán Keating, and Jack Yeats, Clarke did not enlist in war service. As there was no conscription in Ireland, the artists were free to follow their own conscience. Given an absence of records, it is not possible to record what Clarke’s attitude was toward the war itself, but if we consider the circle in which he traveled, we can perhaps find some answers. Clarke’s friends included a group of outspoken and unmistakable nationalists: Seán Keating, Mary Keating, and George Russell (AE). Clarke’s close friend at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and in later life was the artist Austin Molloy. Together with Seán Keating, Molloy and Clarke visited the Aran Islands, where so many artists and writers were seeking inspiration from the Irish landscape. John Millington Synge’s literary reputation was founded on the plays and tales that emerged from his researches in the West. The Aran Islands and the Gaeltacht became the face of art for the new Irish State. Molloy later became a teacher at the Metropolitan School of Art, and he also contributed a weekly political cartoon to the Irish nationalist news weekly, Sinn Féin, edited by Arthur Griffith, signing his name variously in Irish as Maolmhuidhe, AóM, and Austin Ó Maolaoid. Molloy also created several book covers for an Irish government scheme to publish books in the Irish language, including translations of popular literature.79

One of Clarke’s early biographers, William J. Dowling, commented, ‘I do not think that Harry Clarke gave much thought to politics, but due to his associations with the cultural resurgence, of which he was part, it is inevitable that he would have absorbed its national atmosphere.’80 Seán Keating offers an intriguing comparative point for Clarke’s own life. Keating and Clarke both studied under Orpen at the Metropolitan School. Orpen himself was Dublin-born, but unlike his two students, he enlisted as a war artist and would be distinguished as one of the most significant British war artists of the conflict. Keith Jeffery draws attention to an important dialogue between the teacher Orpen and the student Keating:

In the early spring of 1916 Orpen’s pupil and studio assistant Seán Keating, a noted artist in his own right, had to leave London and return to Ireland in order to avoid conscription (Michael Collins left England at the same time for the same reason). Keating tried to persuade Orpen to accompany him: ‘Come back with me to Ireland. This war may never end. All that we know of civilization is done for … I am going to Aran … Leave all this. You don’t believe in it.’ But Orpen remained in London, claiming that everything he had he owed to England. ‘This is their war’, he said, ‘and I have enlisted. I won’t fight, but I’ll do what I can.’81

In the comprehensive recent biography of Seán Keating’s life and art, Éimear O’Connor identifies Keating as ‘the painter of Ireland’s fight for independence’,82 a ‘hard-working artist with nationalist ideals and socialist tendencies’.83 In the revolutionary year of 1916 he was a member of ‘the most politically radical’ branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893 to promote the study of Irish language and culture.84 Fighters in the 1916 rebellion and later influential members of the government, Cathal Brugha and Michael Collins, were also members of this branch. Keating’s brother Joe was a member of the Irish Volunteers and ‘active in the republican movement for a number of years’, perhaps also as ‘a member of the IRB’.85 Seán Keating met his wife at the Craobh branch; she worked for Robert Barton, the nationalist cousin of Erskine Childers, and also the political activist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, who was married to the pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was a well-known opponent of recruitment by the British Army in Ireland, which led to his imprisonment in 1915 and execution during the week of the Easter Rising in 1916.

Before and during the war years, the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art was highly political.86 Louise Ryan writes that ‘many hopeful young artists flocked to Dublin’ at the turn of the century, and ‘[s]ome of the best known and most active suffragists of this period were highly involved in the arts, literature and theatre’.87 These feminists included the Sheehy-Skeffingtons, Margaret Cousins, Sir John French’s sister Charlotte Despard, and Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, of the writing duo known as Somerville and Ross. A number of staff and students ‘joined the British Army to fight in World War One’,88 while the nationalist students, most of whom predated Harry’s time at the college, included Willie Pearse, Constance Markievicz, and Grace Gifford. Grace Gifford was a talented political cartoonist who, like Austin Molloy, promoted Sinn Féin, and was eventually elected to the executive board of the political organization. On 3 May 1916 she married Joseph Plunkett, only hours before his May 4 execution at Kilmainham Gaol for his role in the Easter Rising.

Postwar Displacement

In the 1920 poem ‘Lament of the Demobilised’, the English writer and Voluntary Aid Detachment worker Vera Brittain, who lost her brother and three friends to the war, expressed the sentiments of many: ‘And we came home and found [. . .] no one talked heroics now.’89

This sense of displacement, coupled with the needs of many for mental and physical recovery, would define international postwar sentiment. In Ireland, while on leave and following the Armistice of 1918, returning soldiers could only go out in groups, for on their own they were stoned.90 Denman points out that ‘The growing indifference of the mass of Irish Catholics to the war after the Rising, as Stephen Gwynn admitted, left Irish soldiers “in great measure cut off from that moral support which a country gives its citizens in arms”.’91

While parades and commemorative ceremonies marking the Armistice took place in Ireland from 1919 forward, the public commemorative events were never without controversy. Eventually, the controversy would affect the siting and opening of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. Yet, whether their noble sentiments or the art saved them at the time, Ireland’s Memorial Records avoided censure by the critics of the war.

The eight volumes of Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918 are exceptional among the Allied countries of the First World War because of the particular attention given to design and printing. Following the Armistice, English and Irish universities, businesses, and villages began to honour their dead with a variety of memorial works, including parchment scrolls, metalwork tablets, and stone carvings. For example, the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh contains leather-bound rolls of honour lining walls and alcoves devoted to difference branches of the military. Handwritten rolls of remembrance have been placed in a silver casket within a shrine that honours close to 150,000 Scottish soldiers lost in the First World War. Similar rolls of honour may be found in cathedrals throughout England; as I note later, a particularly dramatic example is in York.

The illustrations by Harry Clarke make Ireland’s Memorial Records distinctive among other rolls of honour. Harry Clarke’s vision fused the ancient arts of Ireland with the modern dispositions toward abstraction, thus creating an internationally significant work of art.

NOTES

1.Maunsel and Company changed its name to Maunsel and Roberts in December 1920. C. Hutton and P. Walsh describe the history of the company in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), p.561.

2.MS 39,202/ B, in Harry Clarke Papers, National Library of Ireland. Pocket diary, 1919.

3.C.121.f.1, British Library.

4.N. G. Bowe, Harry Clarke: The Life and Work (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2012) passim.

5.N. C. Johnson, ‘The Spectacle of Memory: Ireland’s Remembrance of the Great War, 1919’, Journal of Historical Geography 25, 1 (January 1999), pp.44; N. G. Bowe, ‘Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918’, Ireland of the Welcomes, November / December 2006, pp.18-23.

6.Royal Academy of Arts, War Memorials Exhibition 1919 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1919); C. Smith, Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of the War Memorials Exhibition, 1919 (London: HMSO, 1919).

7.Jameson, et al. v. Attorney-General, Affidavit, RDFA 020/001, Folder No.1: 1926, (3 March 1926): p.1.

8.Jameson, et al. v. Attorney-General, Affidavit, RDFA 020/001, Folder No.1: 1926, (3 March 1926): p.2.

9.Bowe lists an opening date of 1940 in Harry Clarke, p.203.

10.F. D’Arcy, Remembering the War Dead: British Commonwealth and International War Graves in Ireland Since 1914 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, 2007), p.1.

11.J. Horne, Our War: Ireland and the Great War (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy 2008), p.14.

12.K. Brown, The Yeats Circle, Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880–1939, (London: Ashgate, 2011), pp.34–35.

13.N. G. Bowe, ‘Ireland’s Memorial Records, 1914–1918’, Ireland of the Welcomes, November/December 2006, pp.18–23.

14.J. Rendell, Profiles of the First World War: The Silhouettes of Captain H.L. Oakley (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Spellmount, 2013); L. Gosling, Brushes and Bayonets: Cartoons, Sketches and Paintings of World War I (Oxford: Osprey, 2008).

15.For example, ‘The Great War, Depicted by Distinguished British Artists,’ The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, (1919).

16.T. Burnell, The Tipperary War Dead: History of the Casualties of the First World War (Dublin: Nonsuch, 2008); G. White and B. O’Shea, A Great Sacrifice: Cork Servicemen Who Died in the Great War, (Cork: Echo, 2010).

17.British Artists at the Front, (London: Published from the offices of Country Life, 1918); A. E. Gallatin, Art and the Great War (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1919); R. Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven: Yale, 1994).

18.P. Nash, Outline: An Autobiography (London: Faber & Faber, 1949), p.211. This letter from Nash to his wife dated 16 November 1917, is also cited in S. Malvern, ‘“War As It Is”: The Art Of Muirhead Bone, C. R. W. Nevinson and Paul Nash, 1916–17’, Art History, 9, 4 (December 1986), p.499.

19.K. Jeffery, ‘Artists and the First World War’, History Ireland, 1, 2 (Summer 1993), pp.42–45.

20.C. Bowen, ‘Lady Butler: The Reinvention of Military History’, Revue LISA / LISA e-journal, 1, 1 (2003), pp.127–137.

21.M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992). p.43.

22.C. Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), p.184.

23.Pennell, A Kingdom United, p.184.

24.T. Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: The 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992), p.134.

25.Pennell, A Kingdom United, p.167.