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).
