Birthday cake amid open warfare. Commandeered cattle. Scores of sandwiches.
Have you ever wondered what the rebels ate during the Easter Rising? The thought never occurred to me until I read some of the volunteers’ personal stories in Michael Kenny’s new book Easter Week 1916: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories. He trawled through the witness statements held by the Bureau of Military History to see what it was like for the ordinary people who joined the Rising.
Volunteer Patrick Kelly told how he was fast asleep when a comrade burst into his house on Easter Monday morning to tell him the Rising was happening. He woke him up by pulling on his big toe. As he hurriedly got dressed, his father attended to his rifle while his mother sent him packing with sandwiches.
When apprentice butcher Robert Holland joined the Rising, he hardly expected to be deploying his butchering skills. Stationed at Marrowbone Lane garrison, he was the right man in the right place when three cattle were commandeered nearby. He was asked to slaughter one of them and prepare it for cooking.
The Tuesday of the Rising marked his 19th birthday. From Inchicore, he was one of four Holland brothers who fought in 1916. He probably thought no one would remember his birthday but his brother Dan popped in from another wing of the building to wish him well.
Better still, his 15-year-old brother Walter, who was acting as a messenger boy, slipped through the barricades and went home to Inchicore for a brief visit. He returned with a homemade birthday cake from their mother.
Robert must have dreamed of that cake many times when he sat in Knutsford prison near Manchester after the Rising. One of his witness statements in the Bureau of Military History recalled how hunger forced him to eat the lime from the wall. A small piece of bone in his soup would sustain him for hours, sometimes days. He remembered telling a fellow prisoner he would chance eating a picture of the Last Supper, he was that hungry.
Matters took a turn for the worse when he was sent to solitary confinement where the food ration was even smaller. “I spent hours thinking of cakes and parties I had attended. If only I had a little of what was left over from those now, how I would have appreciated it.”
Mary Anne Callender might also have had reason to look back ruefully at her life before the Rising. She ran the Lucan Restaurant on Sarsfield Quay and managed to keep it open during the Rising, famously providing Patrick Pearse with his last meal before his execution.
She was in the restaurant when she heard news of the executions and she exclaimed “May the Lord have mercy on their souls”.
This was overheard by a British army chauffeur who stormed out. According to her son, the volunteer Ignatius Callender, the restaurant generated 80 per cent of its business from the nearby Royal Barracks. The authorities put the restaurant out of military bounds and it was shuttered the following month.
But Mrs Callender was not a woman to scare easily. Early on the Wednesday morning of the Rising she saw Ignatius handling ammunition in his bedroom. He told her he was bringing the ammunition to the Church Street area. This would have placed her son a little too close to the action for her liking, so she declared she would do the job instead.
She secured the ammunition inside her blouse and brought a jug and money with her, so that she could pretend she was going to buy milk and food in Stoneybatter. Mission accomplished, she returned to run her restaurant and Ignatius got on with his work of scouting and delivering messages across the city.
Heavy gunfire brought him to a standstill at the corner of Parliament Street and Essex Street later that morning. He spotted an old woman, waiting to cross the street. She was bound for 11am Mass and refused to turn back. He took her umbrella, tied his handkerchief to it and waved it into the street to stop the gunfire. It took about five minutes for the firing to stop and he escorted her across the street safely.
She promised to pray for him, and perhaps her prayers worked. He was captured on Saturday evening and a British officer ordered a soldier to take him away. After they moved down the street, the soldier admitted that he didn’t know what to do with him and advised him to make a run for it.
He did so, bracing himself for a bullet that never came.
· Easter Week 1916: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories is published by the National Museum of Ireland and is on sale at the museum shop in Collins Barracks.
