Feeding the Rising: Military and Civilian Food Supplies during the Easter Rising, 1916

IRISH GARRISON TOWNSSTORIES OF SOLDIERS IN IRISH STREETS

Feeding the Rising: military and civilian foodsupplies during the Easter Rising, 1916

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On Easter Monday, 24th April, the staff of the Hotel Metropole on O’Connell Street weresurprised to see a party of armed uniformed men enter the premises. Brandishing their guns atthe manager, the men demanded all the cooked meats and bread from the kitchens. As theprovisions were carried to the neighbouring building, the rebel headquarters in the General PostOffice, the leader paid for the supplies with paper notes, later assumed to have been ‘liberated’from the post office. Over the next few days, the rebels stopped food delivery vans andconfiscated their contents at gunpoint. Some unlucky deliverymen were given receipts from the‘Irish Republic’, stating how much they were owed but most of the 2,000 rebels did not havetime for bureaucratic niceties.

FROM THE CORK EXAMINER, 5 MAY 1916

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While the rebels found food by any means possible, the British military faced the challenge offeeding large numbers of troops, as thousands of reinforcements joined the 2,312 men already inDublin barracks. The declaration of martial law on Tuesday 25th April helped the armyprovision itself because it gave the military complete control over economy and civil society.Soldiers were the first to be fed, and the army commandeered what it needed from wholesalersand distributors who willingly acceded to their demands. As reinforcements poured intoDublin from the Curragh, Belfast and England throughout the week, the army’s need for foodgrew exponentially. The increased military demand, the cordon that was placed around the citycentre, and rebels taking food at gunpoint, halted ordinary food distribution. With both stateand rebel armies absorbed in the battle for streets and food, the civilian population weretemporarily ignored.

Since every household bought fresh bread daily, a bread shortage was almost immediate. A largecity centre bakery, Boland’s, had been occupied by the rebels, making the scarcity more acute.Desperate civilians, even in the embattled city centre, had no choice but to venture out to findbread. Queues formed outside bakeries from as early as 6am. The remarkable sight of staid,throughly respectable professional men carrying cauliflowers or bread loaves amused passers-byduring a difficult week. Suburban residents may have been safe from bullets but the people ofHowth, who received all their bread from the city centre, were forced to send to Drogheda forsupplies. The suburb of Ballsbridge was fortunate to have a bakery – Johnston, Mooney andO’Brien’s – in the area, which continued to bake throughout the insurrection. In a remarkablegesture, the bakery did not raise their prices, selling at normal, pre-Rising rates. In general,scarcity drove prices up: butter prices more than trebled until supplies ran out and margarinewas substituted.

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IMAGE © IWM (ART.IWM PST 5160)

Of course, food prices were irrelevant to the those who had no money whatsoever. When therebels captured the GPO, they commandeered the money intended for the families of servingBritish soldiers. The separation allowances were a lifeline for the Dublin poor, who enduredwartime price rises with little corresponding increase in wages or job opportunities. During theEaster Rising, service families who lost their income became desperate. By Friday 28th April,privation had become starvation: ‘At almost every shop … women could be heard begging invain for a single loaf or a drop of milk for their starving children.’ Outside the besieged citycentre, the poor raided market gardens for vegetables.

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IMAGE FROM HTTP://WWW.RTE.IE/CENTURYIRELAND/INDEX.PHP/ARTICLES/THE-CIVILIAN-DEAD

At the start of Easter Week, the army was too busy to bother with civilian needs, apart from anemergency distribution of Bovril to hungry Dubliners. Once military success was assured, thearmy began supplying the civilian population with food. By Saturday 29th, the day of thesurrender, the military were delivering supplies to local committees in the food-deprivedsuburbs of Rathmines and Terenure. Bureaucratic attention turned on the poor on Friday28th, when the army agreed to deliver food to depots run by the St Vincent de Paul, who woulddistribute the aid to the needy. In Fairview, the Army Service Corps handed out food to thehungry. As well as supplying free food to the poor, the army continued to control fooddistribution in Dublin in the week after the Rising. Military transports delivered provisions to‘responsible traders’, attempting to control prices by supplying only those shopkeepers whowould not ‘mulct’ their customers.

But the army faced a food problem that was more politically pressing than organising acity-wide distribution system and feeding over 16,000 soldiers. After the rebel surrender,about 1,000 insurgents who were detained by the army in Dublin had to be fed 3 times a day.There were regulations to interpret, accounts to be kept and all with an eye to the highly chargedcontext surrounding feeding and politics. Suffragettes had begun hunger strikes in 1909, manyof which were ended by brutal, life-threatening force feeding by prison authorities. JamesConnolly, a captured rebel leader, had gone on hunger strike three years previously during theDublin Lockout. Furthermore, the treatment of Irish dissidents in British detention had longbeen a sensitive political issue. Five years after his conviction, the prisons conditions of theFenian, O’Donovan Rossa, were still scrutinised in Ireland: rumours in February 1870 that hehad been flogged shocked the nationalist press. In the case of the Easter Rising, with the Great

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War raging in Europe and martial law in force in Ireland, the civil government had allowed thearmy to assume complete control of the response to the insurrection. Fatally for the 16 executedrebel leaders, the government did not regain control immediately after the rebel surrender. Likethe soldiers on the Front, the rebel leaders were subject to the swift and brutal punishmentsdispensed by the British army at war. It was 20 May before General Maxwell agreed to seekthe Prime Minister’s permission before executing prisoners. Once the executions ended, thearmy’s attitude to rebel prisoners in its custody became conciliatory, as proved by the rationplan drawn up in Richmond Barracks.

REBEL PRISONERS IN RICHMOND BARRACKS

Per day, each prisoner received:

1 lb. of Fresh Meat1 lb. of Bread1 lb. of potatoes or other fresh vegetables4 ozs of Bacon4 ozs Jam4 ozs Margarine3 ozs Sugar3 ozs Cheese1 oz. Tea1/2 oz. salt1/50 oz. of pepper1/4 pint of Milk

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Based on the standard ration issued to British soldiers, this allocation included margarine andfresh vegetables that were not usually given to men in uniform. But this ration could be furtherimproved if the officer in charge decided that more ‘comforts’ were necessary. The letterdescribing the rations concludes with an incredible phrase ‘to be supplied regardless ofexpense’, proving how extraordinary the political circumstances were after the Easter Rising. The British army, ever conscious of the Treasury, never spent money with abandon.

Prisoners did benefit from this permissive rationing. Between May and June 1916, the officer incharge of prisoners’ supplies in Richmond Barracks authorized extra bread and potatoes, thestaple foods of prisoners who were, in his opinion, ‘largely from the peasantry’. They alsoreceived extra milk, sugar and cheese. On fast days, the prisoners were fed fish and tinnedsalmon ‘in deference to [their] religious convictions’. The considerate and generous feeding ofthe rebel prisoners was ‘to be done regardless of expense, to avoid complaints on the part ofprisoners.’ Without doubt, the army was aware of the political sensitivities around Irish rebelprisoners in British custody. These comfortable conditions were intended to preempt anypublicity that rebels sympathisers could exploit if the prisoners were mistreated.

MURIEL BRANDT, THE BREADLINE, 1916 (C.1950)

Unlike civilians outside the barrack walls, the rebels were assured of a daily breakfast, dinnerand supper. They were undoubtedly luckier than inner-city Dubliners who struggled to feedtheir families in the aftermath of the Rising. Such was the distress caused during Easter weekthat the Poor Law system offered relief from 8th May to the poor ‘without involving them in anydisability’. Here too, fiscal prudence was set aside, and cash payments were made without theusual parsimony. Was this a humane response to deprivation or part of the civil government’sconciliatory policy towards Ireland? Although the army continued to manage the logistics ofDublin’s food supply, the power to feed the people was firmly back in civilian hands.

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Feeding the Rebels, Cork Examiner 3 May 1916. ↩1. On acquiring supplies see Ann Matthews, The Irish Citizen Army (2014), pp 97-8.Figures for rebel forces, Matthews, p 104. ↩

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Matthews, The Irish Citizen Army, p 105 and 106. ↩3. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916 ↩4. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916. ↩5. This was sufficiently humourous to be reported twice: The Food Supply, CorkExaminer, 3 May 1916; Supply of Bread, Cork Examiner 4 May 1916. ↩

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Report by Special Correspondent Valentine Heywood, Cork Examiner 3 May 1916. ↩7. Supply of Bread, Cork Examiner 4 May 1916. ↩8. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner 3 May 1916. ↩9. Report by Special Correspondent Valentine Heywood, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916. ↩10. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916. ↩11. Incidents of the Rebellion, Cork Examiner, 4 May 1916. ↩12. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916. ↩13. The Food Supply, Cork Examiner, 3 May 1916. ↩14. Troop figures here: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/patrick-bury-how-the-rebels-could-have-won-in-1916-1.257601 ↩

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http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/blog/union-leader-james-connolly-on-hunger-strike-in-mounjoy-prison ↩

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Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1848-22: Theatre of War (2003). ↩17. Cork Examiner, 15 February 1870. ↩18. For more on the legal basis for the rebel’s execution see http://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/the-state-the-law-and-political-imprisonment-1914-1918 ↩

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McConville, p 431. ↩20. http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/British_%26_German_rations. ↩21. H. Fraser Lt. Colonel, Provost Marshall, Richmond Barracks to The A.D.S.T., IrishCommand, undated, WO 35/69/4. ↩

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Lieut. G. Wynn Rushton to A.D. of S.&T., Irish Command, Supply Account of Sinn FeinPrisoners for the period 14/05/15 to 15/06/16, WO 35/69/4. ↩

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Dublin’s Food, Cork Examiner, 4 May 1916. ↩24.

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Feeding the Rising: Military and Civilian Food Supplies during the Easter Rising, 1916