What’s the news the newsboy yells?
What’s the news the paper tells?
A British retreat from the Dardanelles?
Says the Grand old Dame Britannia.-From the contemporary song The Grand Old Dame Britannia.
In popular memory, the War of Independence is more synonymous with the hilly terrain of rural Ireland than Dublin’s urban landscape, despite a number of key events occurring in the capital, such as the burning of the Custom House and the drama of Bloody Sunday. In reality, ambushes were a feature of life in the capital too.
Nowhere was this truer than in the area of Aungier Street, Camden Street and Wexford Street. Essentially one long continuation linking the city centre at Dame Street to Portobello Barracks, it was a route frequently taken by British soldiers into the city. Particularly dangerous was the area where Wexford Street once narrowed into Aungier Street, creating a bottleneck ideal for ambushing parties. It was British forces who christened the district ‘the Dardanelles’, drawing parallels to the First World War Gallipoli campaign.
The name remained in colloquial use in Dublin post-independence, and even survived road widening which transformed the appearance of Redmond’s Hill, removing the historic bottleneck. A writer in the Evening Herald in 1940 noted that some bus conductors did not believe in “scrapping the colloquial expression”, still intoning “we are at the Dardanelles.”
Bartholomew’s 1909 Plan of Dublin showing the area that became known as the Dardamelles.
In recounting the historic layout of the area, Volunteer Sean Prendergast recalled that:
Certain thoroughfares in Dublin had become prominent in the military sense due to the number and intensity of street bombings. One of these was Redmond’s Hill and Wexford Street in the 3rd Battalion Area….a short narrow street that divided Aungier Street and Camden Street. Those streets were habitually used by British forces flying from the city to Portobello Barracks and vice versa. Several streets jutted from the north entrance of Redmond’s Hill, Digges Street, Bishop’s Street and Peter’s Row….The strange feature about Redmond’s Hill was that it was a bottleneck. Ambushing at this point was carried out with such recurring frequency as to cause it to be regarded and called the Dardanelles.
There were many living in the district for whom the Dardanelles meant only one thing, the far off battlefields of World War One. The high loss of life among the Irish in the Dardanelles campaign would make its presence felt at home in the aftermath of the Rising, with the Freeman’s Journal proclaiming the Dardanelles to be “where Irish troops were sacrificed by blunders.”
A number of major employers in the area had proactively contributed to the British war effort, in particular Guinness and Jacob’s. At the time the First World War broke out, the workforce of Guinness stood at 3,650 people, of whom more than 800 would serve in the war effort. The brewery paid half wages to the dependents of these men, while also committing to reemployment upon return from the war. From Jacob’s, almost 400 employees had enlisted in the British Army. The presence of many so-called ‘Separation Women’ in the vicinity was a source of annoyance to the Irish Volunteers during Easter Week, and Bill Stapleton recounted of the first day of the Rising:
This was a very hostile area. We were booed and frequently pelted with various articles throughout the day. We were openly insulted, particularly by the wives of British soldiers who were drawing separation allowance and who referred to their sons and husbands fighting for freedom in France. As dusk as falling, about 8 or 8 o’clock, we retreated from the barricades to our headquarters at Jacob’s factory, at the Bishop Street entrance, and while waiting to be admitted we were submitted to all sorts of indignities by some of the local people. It was difficult to preserve control due to the treatment we suffered from these people.
As Prendergast rightly recounted, Dublin was an unfavourable field for military action; the “mobility, speed and characteristics of the armoured cars…afforded a certain amount of protection for the British forces… Add to that the feature that they generally operated in populous areas on the main thoroughfares and you get a fair picture of the difficulties facing the IRA in pursuing action against them.”
British forces leaving Portobello Barracks following its handing over in 1922 (Image Credit; Nationa lLibrary of Ireland)
As much as rifles and handguns, the IRA’s Third Battalion (for whom this area was pivotal) were dependent on a supply of grenades to lob into passing army vehicles. Throughout the guerilla war the IRA maintained a proactive GHQ, which included a Director of Chemicals, Director of Munitions and Director of Purchases, all tasked with different but important missions in arming the IRA. Clandestine grenade factories operated across the city, including one we previously looked at in Temple Bar. Michael Carroll, a Section Commander with the Third Battalion, recounted that the grenades were not always reliable, remembering an evening in Wexford Street when “an armoured turret car was passing along at medium speed, and James Harcourt lobbed a grenade into the open turret. A few seconds later the same grenade was thrown back on the roadway. It was a dud.”
In Carroll’s account of the district during the War of Independence, it was at a meeting on Stephen’s Day 1920 in a flat on Aungier Street that plans were discussed to carry out frequent ambushes in the locale, and “section leaders were told to inspect the area and to show the men quick exits after attack. All previous training in bomb throwing and rifle practice was of very little use at this period,as the whole method of street fighting now adopted changed completely.” The mission was simple: “It would not be possible for me to describe all the actions, as they were carried out in a hit and run manner. The main idea was to throw the grenade at the armed vehicle and get away as soon as possible.”
In a densely populated civilian area, there was always a risk to civilian life. Carroll recalled a gang of men outside a pub who were politely advised to move on before an attack near Wexford Street, but who refused to budge, only later to run away when the action began:
One Saturday evening we were tipped off that a lorry with British soldiers was moving along from Portobello Barracks direction, and some of the section were directed into Montague Street, also on the opposite side to Camden Row. Jimmy Keogh and I saw some young men loitering outside Sinnott’s public house and we quietly advised them to move away, explaining the reason.They refused to do so and gave out abuse, so we told them to stay where they were. Jim and I went across the street and stood at the corner of Montague Street. The vehicle was now approaching and Jim ordered me to cover him, while proceeding to throw the grenade….A couple of seconds later, a second grenade, thrown by Christy Murray, followed in, and both exploded inside, shaking the lorry from side to side as it sped down Wexford Street. Jim and I hurried to join the remainder o f the patrol in Montague Street. As we did so, the men who were loitering at the publichouse could be seen sprinting like hares along Camden Row. This was their last appearance at Sinnott’s exterior.
The British responded to the grenade attacks on armoured cars and other patrolling vehicles in a number of ways. Some British patrols began carrying republican prisoners, something that was done with notice in the hope of preventing attacks, though this was widely reported in the press and condemned across the political spectrum. Joseph McKenna notes in his history of guerilla warfare tactics in Ireland that when grenade attacks continued, “to prevent them from entering the vehicles, the British army trucks were covered in mesh. The IRA responded by attaching fishing hooks to the grenades, which would catch in the mesh and explode.”
Into the Civil War, both sides were conscious of the dangers posed by the district. Many in the Free State armed forces were former republicans, who had themselves partaken in ambushes on British forces in the War of Independence. In his history of the Civil War in Dublin, John Dorney notes that the new National Army found the Dardanelles a dilemma, one officer pondering: “Would it be worthwhile to put a small post on the Dardanelles. You remember how we often used it for ambushing cars in former times?” A republican ambush on Free State forces in January 1923 went disastrously wrong, wounding a number of innocent civilians. It was the sad end of ambushing days in the Dardanelles.
Newspaper report of 6 January 1923.