Tom Clarke

The True Leader of the Easter Rising

Michael T Foy, Michael T. Foy

• Publisher: THP Ireland
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781845887766
• eBook ISBN: 9780752499352
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Long overshadowed by fellow republicans Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, Tom Clarke was the man who made the Easter Rising possible. During an extraordinary life dedicated to Irish freedom he rose from humble origins and endured thirty years of struggle, imprisonment and exile before becoming a master conspirator in the Easter Rising. Endowed with a charisma and moral ascendancy, he held together a disparate group of followers and they, in turn, recognised his indispensable leadership by insisting that his name alone should have pride of place on the Proclamation. It was a gesture that, in a sense, guaranteed Clarke immortality; it also proved to be also his death warrant. But death held no terrors for Clarke who was to die satisfied in the belief that, with the sight of a tricolour flying over the GPO, he had changed the course of Irish history.

1

Beginnings: Tom Clarke, 1857–1883

In the year 1847 when much of rural Ireland was in the throes of the Famine, a 17-year-old farmer’s son from Co. Leitrim joined the British Army. For James Clarke that was not an unusual choice as a member of the small, scattered Protestant minority near the western fringe of Ulster and loyal to the British connection. Seven years later as a soldier in the Royal Artillery he was fighting in the Crimean War at the battles of Alma and Inkerman and taking part in the siege of Sevastopol. After the conflict ended in February 1856, his regiment transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary where James was promoted to bombardier.

In Clonmel James met Mary Palmer, a Roman Catholic servant girl. On 21 May 1857 they married in Clogheen at Shanrahan Anglican parish church. Like many of her social class at the time, Mary could not read or write and made her mark in the register. Since in that period the Church of Ireland – to which James belonged – alone issued marriage licences, Roman Catholics like Mary often married under its auspices, though she insisted that any children the couple had would be raised in her religion.

Thomas James Clarke, the subject of this book, was their firstborn. Hitherto it has been accepted that Thomas was born in 1858 at Hurst Park Barracks on the Isle of Wight where James’s Royal Artillery regiment was stationed at the time. One historian, though, has asserted that Thomas was born at Hurst Castle – an abandoned fort on the Hampshire coast that had not had a military garrison for over 150 years and which during the eighteenth century had become a favourite haunt of smugglers. But the records show no Thomas James Clarke born on the Isle of Wight or in the nearby county of Hampshire during the entire 1850s, nor is anyone of that name listed in the British Army’s births and baptisms for England and Ireland during 1857 and 1858. Furthermore, Clarke’s widow Kathleen asserted that her husband had been born on 11 March 1857 and celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday just before the Easter Rising in 1916. The inference is that Thomas James Clarke must have been born out of wedlock in Co. Tipperary.1 Over the next twelve years, James and Mary had three more children – two girls, Maria and Hannah, and a younger son, Alfred. In April 1859, James, Mary and their then only child Thomas accompanied the regiment to South Africa, almost drowning on the way when their ship was involved in a serious collision.

After five and a half years the Clarke family returned to Ireland and, after being honourably discharged from the Royal Artillery in January 1869, James joined the staff of the Ulster Militia Artillery. With no married quarters available in the militia barracks, James and his family lived in Dungannon, a rather drab provincial town in Co. Tyrone whose arid social life came to a dead stop on Sundays. Evenly balanced between Protestants and Catholics, the town was dominated by its centuries-old sectarian struggle between Unionism and Nationalism. Tyrone had been a cockpit of religious and political antagonism since the Ulster Plantation and the county was also a heartland of the great O’Neill clan that in Tudor and Stuart times had provided two notable rebels against English power – Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and his nephew, Owen Roe. This bitter county was the centre of Thomas Clarke’s small world. Only the newspapers connected him to outside events and he travelled little, apparently never even visiting Belfast, 50 miles away.

Now known universally as Tom, Clarke attended St Patrick’s National School in Dungannon. Under the monitor system he became an assistant teacher but was eventually let go because of falling rolls. Clearly intelligent and well read, Tom became an enthusiastic amateur actor in Dungannon’s Dramatic Club. But politics was his all-consuming passion and he came to espouse the cause of Irish independence. This commitment divided the Clarke family because his father had for decades served proudly as a British soldier and his brother Alfred had also enlisted in the Royal Artillery. Any early influence that his mother, who came from a very different background, might have had on Tom’s ultimate political beliefs remains a matter for conjecture. When James Clarke warned his son that defying the British Empire meant banging his head against a wall, Tom retorted that he would just keep going until the wall fell down. His rebelliousness was certainly not rooted in a miserable childhood. The Clarkes were a happy family and Tom respected and admired his father, rejecting only his army uniform; the bonds with his mother and siblings stayed strong and harmonious. Much more influential in shaping his political consciousness was Tom’s time in South Africa. Increasingly hostile to the British Army, he came to regard it as an imperial garrison that oppressed not the black population – then politically invisible – but the Boers, Dutch settlers for whom Tom developed a lifelong sympathy. But it was on his return to Ireland that Tom’s political ideas really crystallised. Only a few years after the Fenian Rising of 1867 the British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary were still highly vigilant – and visible – in Co. Tyrone. And in bitterly divided Dungannon memories of the Irish Famine remained vivid, while an agricultural depression during the late 1870s exacerbated a traditionally turbulent relationship between landlords and tenants. The town also experienced frequent sectarian rioting between Protestants and Catholics.

In 1878 Tom attended an open-air meeting outside Dungannon addressed by John Daly, a national organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). A superb public speaker with a powerful physique, imposing presence and magnetic personality, the 33-year-old Daly’s oratory mesmerised audiences and his vision of an independent Ireland left Clarke deeply impressed. Suddenly Tom realised that his mission in life was to destroy every vestige of British authority in Ireland – Crown, Viceroy, Army and the Dublin Castle administration, the entire colonial system. He espoused the same goal as Wolfe Tone, his greatest historical inspiration. Almost a century earlier, Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish republicanism and instigator of the 1798 Rebellion, had set out ‘to subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country’. And from this goal Tom himself was never to deviate. Later in 1878, after the Dungannon meeting, Clarke and his best friend Billy Kelly joined a Dramatic Club excursion to Dublin where Daly swore them into the IRB.2 But after becoming the organisation’s Dungannon secretary, a disillusioned Clarke discovered that his idealised vision of the IRB as a sword for smiting England was very different to the drab reality of a society that had seriously lost its way. He was to spend the rest of his life remedying that situation.

Founded in both Ireland and America in 1858, the IRB was a secular, secret, oath-bound revolutionary movement dedicated to achieving Irish independence. Organised in circles, IRB members underwent clandestine military training, preparing to rise in Ireland when England became involved in a major war. Through conventional battle the IRB hoped to defeat British forces, establish a revolutionary government and win international recognition for an independent, democratic Irish republic. The IRB’s American counterpart – which became known as the Fenian Brotherhood – channelled men, weapons and funds to Ireland and after the American Civil War ended in April 1865, thousands of former Union and Confederate soldiers crossed the Atlantic hoping to fight in an Irish rebellion. But the British government struck first in September 1865 by arresting and imprisoning most IRB leaders and detaining hundreds more. This pre-emptive strike ensured that when the insurrection finally occurred in 1867, it was a complete anticlimax. The only significant action was at Tallaght outside Dublin, where police fired on and routed columns of rebels. After the abortive rising everything fell apart. With most IRB leaders in prison and the organisation itself bereft of energy and purpose, the Fenian Brotherhood collapsed into squabbling factions. By 1871 Prime Minister Gladstone believed it was safe enough to give an amnesty to the imprisoned IRB leaders, especially as constitutional nationalism was gathering strength in Ireland where a Protestant lawyer, Isaac Butt, had established a Home Rule movement.

One IRB leader, John Devoy, believed ‘it was a wonder that the men of the organisation, after such a series of defeats, had the recuperative power to reorganise the movement’.3 But somehow it did survive. However, to prevent another hopeless rebellion, the Supreme Council changed its constitution and stipulated that henceforth the support of a majority of the Irish people was required for the IRB to inaugurate war with England. In the 1874 Westminster general election, the Supreme Council even supported Home Rule candidates. But within three years this co-operation ceased as most IRB members became disillusioned with constitutional politics, though even then four Supreme Council members dissented and were forced out. So by the time Clarke joined the IRB in 1878, it was more like a talking shop than a revolutionary conspiracy. And when he finally got some action it proved sterile and self-defeating. In August 1880 a nationalist Lady Day parade through Dungannon led to clashes between Catholic and Protestant mobs in the so-called ‘Buckshot Riots’. A newspaper reported that after police in Irish Street fired buckshot into crowds, ‘the firing was returned with interest from revolvers and by repeated showers of stones from the crowds of desperate men, many of them inflamed by drink, almost rushing on the points of the bayonet in the eagerness of their attack’.4 Clarke and Kelly were among the shooters and despite eluding a subsequent round-up, the heat was on. Since Tom was already unemployed, they decided to leave for America, departing from Dungannon on 29 August 1880 and sailing a fortnight later from Londonderry. For Clarke this was a leap in the dark. But though it meant abandoning everything and everyone he knew, Tom was always a fearless gambler and no doubt hoped that in America his revolutionary career might finally take off.

After a fortnight’s voyage Clarke’s steamer arrived at Castle Garden on the island of Manhattan, then New York’s reception centre for European immigrants. Later many of them recalled the excitement of sailing up one of the largest natural harbours on earth and realising – even before its first skyscraper was built – that New York’s high-rise buildings promised them a new life in which the sky was indeed the limit. Pressing through a huge hall thronged with people conversing in many languages, Clarke was now a world away from Dungannon. Finally, immigration officials processed him and Kelly into a vibrant and astonishingly diverse metropolis of industry, finance, commerce and entertainment. This was the city that never slept. Here social life was exciting and liberating and iconic landmarks were everywhere from the Statue of Liberty and Broadway to Times Square and the world’s longest suspension bridge in Brooklyn.

By 1880 over a third of New York’s 1.5 million inhabitants were Irish or of Irish descent, concentrated mainly in the cheap housing of Brooklyn and Manhattan’s ‘Little Dublin’.5 Urban Protestant America regarded the Catholicism of the Irish as alien and subversive and many Irish slid into lives of crime, alcoholism and violence. Even though by the 1880s Irish immigrants like Clarke were much better educated than previous generations of illiterate peasants, many still worked at dirty, dangerous semi-skilled and manual jobs. With no waiting relatives or friends and lacking a house and job, Clarke and Kelly faced an uncertain future. But the New York Irish had stuck together, building a vast support network of social, military and athletic clubs, and it was through these that the pair came to board with another Dungannon man, Pat O’Connor. He also gave them jobs in his shoe shop, although after a couple of months they shifted to Brooklyn’s Mansion House hotel where Clarke worked as a storeman and Kelly as a boilerman.

However, politics was never far away and Tom and Kelly joined the Napper Tandy Club, a branch of Clan na Gael, then the leading republican organisation in Irish America. Founded in June 1867, the Clan was a revolutionary society committed to Ireland’s liberation by force of arms. It had only really taken off after January 1871 when Gladstone released IRB leaders like John Devoy, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and Thomas Clarke Luby and immediately exiled them to America. Joining the Clan, Devoy and O’Donovan Rossa quickly emerged as the dominant figures in Irish-American nationalism and in time both men would also dramatically change Tom Clarke’s life. Devoy’s forceful, single-minded personality and organising talent quickly attracted 15,000 members to the Clan from across America and in 1875 his fund-raising ability had persuaded the cash-strapped IRB to reunite with the American wing. A year later Devoy pulled off a sensational coup by dispatching a sailing vessel, the Catalpa, to rescue a group of transported Irish soldiers from a prison in western Australia. He then established a joint Revolutionary Directorate linking Clan na Gael and the IRB (with America the dominant partner). Devoy now stood at the zenith of his political power but ironically by the time Tom reached America in late 1880, Devoy had split the Clan and precipitated his own downfall. This was because Devoy’s triumphant Australian rescue had raised his followers’ expectations to completely unrealistic levels. Many outlandish ideas for attacking England now circulated, including a Clan submarine fleet that would destroy the Royal Navy and starve the enemy into submission. Devoy rejected all such schemes and dismissed as fantasy predictions of an imminent Irish revolution. Instead he favoured joining with Ireland’s landless peasantry and Isaac Butt’s Home Rule party in a broad national front that would campaign for gradual political and economic progress in Ireland. By 1880 this so-called New Departure policy had established an alliance between the Clan, Home Rulers now led by Charles Stewart Parnell, and Michael Davitt’s Land League.

However, this semi-constitutionalism went against Irish republicanism’s entire raison d’être of violent struggle against British rule. An authoritarian, Devoy had suddenly sprung his gradualist policy on a bemused membership, many of whom regarded it as heresy. Devoy’s leading critic and the champion of militarism was Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, a charismatic former IRB leader from Co. Cork. Once he and Devoy had been best friends until incompatible personalities and policies drove them apart. Studious, reserved and teetotal, Devoy was very different from the gregarious, chaotic O’Donovan Rossa, an alcoholic famous for his spectacular benders in Broadway bars. When O’Donovan Rossa’s atavistic hatred of England led him in early 1880 to advocate assassinating Queen Victoria and wiping out the entire House of Commons with chemical poison, Devoy expelled him from the Clan. But O’Donovan Rossa regarded Devoy’s policy as treasonous to the Clan and he didn’t go quietly, taking a minority of radicals with him. Even many members who stayed in the Clan harboured serious doubts about Devoy’s leadership. While his New Departure appealed to the head, O’Donovan Rossa’s demand for immedia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Map
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Beginnings: Tom Clarke, 1857–1883
• 2. ‘An Earthly Hell’: Prison 1883–1898
• 3. Exile: America 1900–1907
• 4. Climbing to Power: 1908–1914
• 5. On the Road to Revolution, Part One: August 1914–September 1915
• 6. On the Road to Revolution, Part Two: September 1915–April 1916
• 7. Prelude: Holy Week 1916
• 8. The Easter Rising
• Bibliography
• Copyright