‘Almost impossible’ he said but to the
two determined journalist’s eager to get their story nothing was impossible.
They had already negotiated a tricky journey and survived a bombing raid so
crossing the Irish Sea would just be another
surmountable objective. They dragged themselves and their luggage back up the
pier towards the railway station and went into the telegraph office. They both sent
messages to their respective London
offices imploring them to intercede on their behalf. As they did so they
spotted the smoke from the funnels of the destroyer leaving the harbour into
the Irish Sea .
They also telegrammed Captain
Reginald Hall the head of Naval Military Intelligence with who both were well
acquainted with. Forrest and Berry
then set about the task of booking into a hotel, informing the telegraph
operator where they could be contacted when a reply arrived. For Forrest his
first problem in Holyhead was the fact as an American born in Illinois
he was an alien in a wartime British naval port and his editor had to convince
the Foreign Office to allow him to stay in Holyhead pending a decision from the
War Office whether or not to allow him to travel to Dublin . The Foreign Office coordinated with
the Home Office and he was allowed to wait on the War Office decision.
A telegram was delivered that put
the two men out of their misery in that Wednesday evening.
‘Train leaving
Euston tonight carries Foreign Office credentials enabling you to take boat
leaving Holyhead Thursday’
The two men were told to meet the
train personally to collect their documents. They discovered that the train
would arrive just after two in the morning. They also ascertained that a light
Naval craft was leaving for Dublin soon after and not only would it get them
across the Irish Sea but rather than landing them in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire) on
the outskirts of the city this Naval vessel would take them up the River Liffey
into the heart of the action. Berry
remarked that they would be heading towards
‘A
beautiful and exclusive word picture of a genuine revolution’
As the first and only reporters
heading to Dublin
it would be ‘their’ war. They were very pleased with themselves and their
efforts thus far.
In their hotel they headed into the
dining room to dine in celebration on the most expensive food available,
washing it down with expensive red burgundy wine and a couple of Napoleon
cognac’s to toast their success and all on their expense accounts.
They left the hotel to take a
leisurely walk around the small Welsh harbour town killing time until the clock
struck two. Occasionally they checked the harbour to make sure their gray
hulled sea transport was still tied up. They discussed what they knew about the
Irish situation, how best to file their stories and how to by pass the British
censors. They were also happy in the knowledge that no civilian or military
ships were departing anytime soon except the one they would be on confirming to
them that they would have no competition in their well engineered plan to reach
the Irish battlefield. They were extremely satisfied with their good fortune
and their fine meal.
The clock struck two, Forrest and Berry made their way to the station platform to await the
London train.
As the train halted at the buffers they spotted a familiar face of Captain
Ralph Butler from the Foreign Office alighting from one of the carriages. Butler had been born in Harrow in 1883 and educated at
Rugby before graduating from Corpus Christi
College at Cambridge . He had been a journalist covering
the war in the Balkans before being attached to the Foreign Office with the
task of looking after front line journalists. He would be travelling with the men
to Dublin .
As the reached the officer, who
greeted them warmly, a blow was about to be delivered that would rock the two
men.
IV
Within seconds a large group of
fellow American and British journalists gathered around the trio on the
platform. It was an absolute disaster from a journalistic exclusive point of
view and a real blow to Forrest and Berry .
Their enquiries to the Admiralty for permission to board the Naval vessel to
Dublin had given the Admiralty and the War Office press office a golden opportunity
to have their spin put on events in Dublin for the American public and if two
American reporters were able to go why not more with a number of British
journalists who would not be sympathetic to these ‘Sinn Feiners’ who dared rise
up against the King as so many men (including thousands of Irishmen) were
sacrificing their lives on the Western Front.
The British Government naturally
hoped to convince America
and their populace of the justice of its handling of the rebellion. The Foreign
Office initially opposed the introduction of American opinion into discussion
of Irish affairs. The head of the Foreign Office news department Lord Newton
wanted to counteract ‘a network of German lies’.
They also realised that not only
would the members of the Fourth Estate be transported to Dublin but also on board was an ashen faced
Chief Secretary to Ireland Augustine Birrell MP. He had been severely criticised
in the Houses of Parliament by the opposition for not being in Dublin when the Rising broke out on Easter
Monday.
In the House of Commons on
Wednesday Wilfred Ashley MP asked Prime Minister Herbert Asquith if English
journalists would be accompanying American journalists who were going over that
day.
‘I
think so’ replied the Birrell who added that he was
‘anxious that
news should not reach neutral countries which would be calculated to give a
false impression of the importance of what had taken place, important as they
were.’
HMS Dove
Birrell and his party of seven had travelled
first class from Euston to Holyhead picking up another reporter at Chester for the final leg of the journey to the Welsh Port. Berry took possession of
their permissions. He announced that his ship would be underway as soon as the
party of a dozen men were aboard HMS Dove. Within forty five minutes the grey
naval vessel was heading out into the choppy and dangerous waters of the Irish Sea heading westwards.
Along with Forrest ,
Berry and Birrell was forty seven year old
James Tuohy, the London
correspondent of the New York World. Cork born
Tuohy was well known in Ireland
as over the years had garnered the confidence of Charles Stewart Parnell, John
Dillon and John Redmond. He was also at the time the Freeman’s Journal
correspondent in London .
Arthur Stimson Draper was the London Correspondent of the New York Tribune
whose articles also appeared in the Daily Chronicle. Percival Gibbons from the
Daily Express who was Welsh born and German educated and his colleague Percival
Phillips who had left the British GHQ in France on the Western Front to make
his way to Dublin, a reporter from the Manchester Guardian and their official
photographer Walter Doughty. Also on board was Henry Whigham a forty seven year
old reporter who had finished sixth at the US
golf open on 1896 before turning to writing for a living and Sidney Cave Sidney B.
Cave was born in Northampton on 4th September 1879, son of Edwin & Ruth Cave ,
who named him Sydney
Brambley Cave Northampton . By 1909, he had moved to
Dulwich, living just a few doors away from his elder brother, Albert. He became
staff correspondent with the International News Service in 1915.
Manchester Guardian reporter George
Leach arrived in Kingstown with another
journalist J C Radcliffe travelling across the Irish Sea
with British reinforcements. Leach grabbed a taxi from the port to the Northside
of the city and the suburb of Drumcondra and from there he made it on foot into
O’Connell Street ,
the heart of the new Irish
Republic
The journalists were now all on
board HMS Dove under the captaincy of Cyril Edwards. HMS Dove was a fast light
patrol boat. At just under two hundred and fifteen feet long, it had a top
speed on twenty nine knots. Its four boilers fed steam to its two four cylinder
steam engines. It was armed with a machine gun mounted on the ships bridge,
five six pounder guns and two torpedo tubes. HMS Dove was launched from Hull
Shipyards in March 1898 and went into British Naval service in July 1901. It
was the ideal vessel to cross the Irish Sea in
April 1916 with such a valuable cargo. It was fast and armed against the threat
of German submarine activity in the Irish Sea .
This was the same U Boats activity that the rebels had hoped would stop British
reinforcements arrive. The ship had a compliment of sixty three officers and
men and adding a dozen more souls made conditions cramped in the extreme.
Forrest found himself in the
Captain’s quarters. At the Captain’s suggestion the steward mixed a ‘concoction
of thick British navy cocoa’. The serving was very tasty but after such a
sumptuous meal and a fair drop of wine in Holyhead, the addition of this
concoction to the bucking and rolling of the ship was not sitting well with the
reporter. Forrest left the cabin and climbed up a metal ladder towards the
outside deck and was unceremoniously dragged through a manhole cover onto the
gun deck by one of the seamen topside. Forrest slumped against the hull in
almost total darkness as the ship ran dark trying to avoid the attention of
patrolling u-boats.
The seaman attached a length of
rope to Forrest’s waist which was tethered to the ship to prevent him falling
overboard. There was sufficient slack in the rope to allow him to bounce off
heavy metal objects that were secured to the deck as it sped through the waves.
For the three long hours of the
seventy mile crossing, Forrest struggled with the fog, the mist, the waves and
the constant dull pain in his stomach. The dawn of Thursday morning began to protrude
from the darkness. As the light grew stronger he looked at the metal objects,
shiny metal balls about a foot in diameter with handles attached. He asked the
young sailor, who had kept him company all night what the objects were,
‘Six
depth charges’ he nonchalantly replied adding
‘The
safety catches are all secure sir, there’s not the slightest danger’.
As Forrest digested the shock of
bouncing off high explosives for the previous number of hours, the coastline of
Ireland
began to appear from the horizon. The destroyer slowed speed which was a
welcome relief. They passed a two master yacht just after six a.m. and the
captain brought his ship to a stop as his crew ensured the vessel and its crew
were not in league with the rebellion. The all clear was given and HMS Dove was
underway again. An hour later they passed the lighthouse at the Great South
Wall at the mouth of the River Liffey. As the ship entered the bay the officers
were handed side arms and ammunition to repel any attack on the vessel as it
made its way to its mooring point.
The rebels of the 3rd Battalion
of the Irish Volunteers commanded by American born Eamon DeValera had seized
Boland’s Mills near Ringsend on the southside of the Liffey and a nearby
disused distillery which gave the rebels an excellent vantage point over the
river. The rebels opened fire on HMS Dove as it moved slowly up the river.
Forrest hurriedly untether himself and went below deck for safety. The vessels
machine gun retuned fire directed at the rebel position, after ten minutes the
firing stopped.
The ship tied up just short of the
Custom House from where the correspondents could see the work of another
British vessel The Helga which had first targeted Boland’s Mills and then James
Connolly’s Irish Citizens Army headquarters in the now deserted Liberty Hall
just on the far side of the railway line bridge.
Despite the fact that many of the
journalists had spent many years reporting from battlefields across Europe , the tension on board the vessel as it docked was
almost unbearable in such a cramped space. The party of twelve left one by one
up the narrow gang plank. Once the ships engines had stopped all Sidney Cave could hear
was the sound of machine gun fire. Birrell also stepped ashore and briefly
addressed the pressman in front of a large party of British soldiers.
‘I wish you luck
gentlemen, I don’t know what will happen to you now that you are here.’
Birrell was ushered into a motor
car and whisked away with a military escort bound for the Vice Regal lodge in
the Phoenix Park
Cave reported that
‘Dublin seemed to be a
dead city except for some weird evidence of hidden life. It seemed unreal, the
streets, the quays and docks were all deserted”
.
‘Bullets swish overhead’. The
reporters were left in little doubt that they were in a war zone.
The pressmen as a group with their
chaperon Captain Butler zig zagged away from the direction of the ship back
down along the North Wall Quay. They quickly passed the North Wall railway
terminus and entered the lobby of the London
and North Western Railway (LNWR) Hotel managed by Edwin Solomons at 58/59 North
Wall Quay. The hotel was almost on the front line of the battle, windows were
shattered, and bullet holes littered the front of the red brick building that
faced both onto the River Liffey and Boland’s Mills across the waterway.
The hotel, originally the Prince of
Wales Hotel had been purchased by LNWR Company, who operated a sailing service
across the Irish Sea, when they moved their Irish terminus from Kingstown to the North
Wall Quay in 1861.
The journalists found themselves
unwelcome in the beleaguered hotel. By Thursday food rations were running low
and more mouths to feed would put an extra strain on those rations. They found
that the Irish born Colonel in charge of the British forces around the hotel
was also staying there as were many of the men in his command including kilted
Scots Guards who were protecting the railway terminus next door. The only
positive was that from the time of their arrival at the hotel, the bill for
their stay including meals was paid for by the British Foreign Office through
their representative Captain Butler.
The Colonel took the journalists
out onto the roof of the hotel to point out many of the city’s landmarks and
areas he believed were under rebel control. Smoke rising that Thursday morning
was from the many fires now engulfing Dublin ’s
main thoroughfare O’Connell Street
and around the rebel headquarters in the GPO. Draper surveyed the city
landscape and wrote that
‘A
lurid canopy of flame hung over the city’
They were unable to leave the hotel
due to the heavy fighting and they awaited the arrival of military passes. The
interviewed as many as they could in the hotel or simply those passing by the
front door occasionally during a lull in the firing but this was the easy part.
They typed their stories on hotel headed paper on their portable typewriters
but they had no means of communications with their London offices.
They spent their first day in the
new Irish Republic
No comments:
Post a Comment