Unlikely Rebels

The saddest eyes in Irish history? Grace Gifford in the ensemble worn at her wedding to Joseph Plunkett hours before his execution

It ought to have been a joyful occasion; there should have been flowers and music, wine and the laughter of family and friends. But there were none of these things: no pretty bridesmaids, no wedding cake, no speeches. And what speeches they would have been, with the bride's father a magnanimous solicitor, used to good company, and with intimates such as John B. Yeats and his sons. The groom's father, too, fraternised where talk was seasoned with wit and wisdom, for he was a papal count, a barrister and a fine-art connoisseur. As for the groom, what golden, happy words he would have used, a mystic poet with, perhaps paradoxically, a great gift of laughter and, most of all, a young man whose tender letters to her showed how much he loved his young bride.

So why were these nuptial pleasantries absent when Joseph Mary Plunkett married Grace Vandeleur Gifford on 3 May 1916? The venue itself was the least likely place to engender celebration of even the most sober kind. The marriage took place within the confines of the Catholic chapel in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, whose cold, grey walls had absorbed the sighs of Irish political prisoners for over 100 years. Illumination comprised candlelight, and the witnesses were British soldiers carrying bayonets. The British authorities might have allowed her sister, Nellie, a prisoner in the jail, to stand by her side, but Grace Gifford was not allowed even that comfort.
[1]
The only resemblance to an ordinary marriage ceremony was the age-old promise of fidelity spoken to the priest, but even that was macabre. The words ‘till death us do part' held a hollow ring for that young couple, who knew not only that there would be no married life or honeymoon, but that death by firing squad awaited the groom within a matter of hours, because he had been one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic at the General Post Office, Dublin, ten days before.

After the stark ceremony they were allowed ten minutes together, in Plunkett's cell, surrounded by British army personnel. A simple meal might have been provided. Instead, a bowl of gruel lay on a small table on the cell's stone floor. Grace recorded later that there was no spoon and, not surprisingly, the bowl was untouched.
[2]
This for a man whose family table was furnished with fine napery and crystal glasses.

No description of Grace Gifford on her wedding day is extant, except that recorded by the jeweller who sold her the ring on her fateful dash to the prison. He said that her eyes were red with weeping.
[3]

There was a press notification of the wedding in Kilmainham Gaol in
The Irish Times
, and it read starkly: ‘Plunkett and Gifford – May 3rd, 1916, at Dublin, Joseph Plunkett to Grace Gifford.'
[4]

Thirteen words reflected aptly the paucity of the event. Yet, for all its starkness, even the Gothic horror of its setting, the ceremony at Kilmainham was, in fact, the wedding of
the year. Daniel Maclise, the artist, has recorded in oils another politically significant wedding – that of the twelfth-century nuptials of the conquering Norman, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow, to Eva McMurrough, daughter of the King of Leinster. Maclise saw the ceremony as symbolic of the death of Gaelic civilisation. The harpist's instrument is broken, and Strongbow's foot crushes some artefacts of early Irish art.
[5]
But if the artist's symbolism of the death of an old civilisation is valid, so too does the Plunkett–Gifford wedding symbolise, for all its wretchedness, the reawakening of Gaelic Ireland. In that sense, it was the wedding of the year in 1916 – a sort of wedding and wake combined.

When all the executed had been buried, when the consequent War of Independence had been fought and partly won, and when the Irish Free State emerged from the Treaty of 1921, though only after the trauma of Civil War, southern Ireland began to settle down. The Irish Republic was not declared until 1948, and the generation who were born and grew up between those years were very aware of historical happenings. There were many mixed households, such as my own. We knew that our beloved grandfather, Christopher Walshe, had been regimental sergeant major of the Connaught Rangers during the First World War and that when he ‘took the Saxon shilling' he was told by his brother Henry that he had disgraced his Fenian forebears: the brothers remained estranged for life.

When we hid under the stairs playing hide-and-seek, we knew that was where Great-Uncle James, who had been in the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), had hidden a gun in 1916. We approached the vegetable shop of Paddy Spain in Sandwith Street with a certain awe, aware that this mild-mannered man, selling pot herbs and potatoes, and
always
with a bandaged hand, was reputed to have been involved in the attack on Oriel House, at the corner of Westland Row. His sister, Maggie, had been jailed in Kilmainham and had ‘died of it' – the strange diagnosis of her neighbours.

There was mention of our maternal great-grandparents having met at the Foresters' Ball, he wearing their dashing uniform and she a green ball gown. There were uncles on the paternal side who had been in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and aunts who had been in Cumann na mBan. We heard references to ‘The Troubles', ‘The Struggle', ‘The Troubled Times' and ‘The Movement'. Men were referred to as having been ‘one of the boys', and this was an accolade. There was great talk of ‘the Big Fella' and ‘Mick', and my mother described how impressive Michael Collins was, walking in his IRA officer's uniform at the funeral of Thomas Ashe. We knew that our father, while still at school, had worked with Arthur Griffith on his paper
Sinn Féin
, and we absorbed all this when the hurts of Easter Week, the War of Independence and the Civil War were gradually fading in the huge effort to formulate a new nation.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to take history at university. There, however, a rude cultural shock awaited, because a professor stood before me and I was informed by him, vis-à-vis the Great Famine:

1. The extent of the suffering tended to be overstated.
2. The help given by England tended to be understated.
3. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith was not, we must remember, written by a professional historian.

It was a first taste of revisionism, and it led me to make a visit to Kilmainham Gaol. At that stage the Office of Public Works had handed over restoration of the disused jail to a group of voluntary workers, and guided tours were taking place. Perhaps that was the best place to learn Irish history, where much of it had happened.

It was a nostalgic visit. As a little girl, I had made visits to Aunt Kathleen (Power) who had a shop opposite the jail, and on these visits there had been playtime in the jail with the caretaker's daughter, Ita Stafford. The leaking roof over the main compound meant that small trees and shrubs had begun to seed themselves in the flagstone floor. We were warned about the dangers. The spiral staircase was
verboten.
We wondered at the Kilmainham Madonna painted by Grace Gifford, and an abiding childish memory was revulsion at the heavily encrusted cell doors, like a sort of wooden leprosy.

On my return as an adult, the encrustation was the least of many horrors. The whole place had fallen into advanced decay, but the voluntary workers were doing Trojan work in their spare time. It was the easiest thing in the world to set aside revisionists and happily associate with those who identified with the patriotic dead.

Women volunteers became guides, and men did physical work and acted as guides. There was a short training course, and then the new guide would take tours around the jail, pointing out such places as the cell where Charles Stewart Parnell had been detained, where Robert Emmet awaited his execution, the escape route of Ernie O'Malley, the execution yard, and the dungeon from which Anne Devlin emerged looking like an old woman at the age of twenty-five.

This was not book history: the records were there, the jail was there. Denial was impossible. This was history at source, not revised. It was, and is, at once an eerie and wonderful place. If I was the last guide there on a cold, winter's evening, I was glad to hear the great door close after me with its hollow, reverberating clang and to go back, unlike the unhappy political prisoners, to the comfort of a warm, welcoming home.

Of all the facts we gave the visitors, the story that most moved them was the wedding ceremony in May 1916. Everyone knew of the groom, Joseph Plunkett, but his bride, Grace Gifford, was, at best, a shadowy figure. She slipped quietly, tearfully, onto the stage of Irish history and just as quietly, having played her part, slipped back into the wings.

It was my good fortune to have met her niece, Maeve Donnelly, at the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' committee meetings and to have been given, with other material, a sort of diary kept by her mother, Nellie Gifford-Donnelly.

The original intention for this book was merely to tell the story of Grace herself – to put a face on this sad bride. However, the Gifford papers revealed a whole family well worth recording. After one death at birth, there were six boys and six girls born to Frederick and Isabella Gifford. All the boys remained staunch Protestant unionists despite their Catholic baptisms. All the girls declared for Irish republicanism; four of them became Catholic despite their Protestant baptisms, and two of them married signatories of the proclamation of Irish freedom. To trace their political significance, it is necessary to delve deeply into history and widely – to France, America, Canada and as far as Australia. Back in Dublin, where the Gifford parents settled and reared their family, two of the daughters afford us a very intimate account of a fairly typical Victorian ménage of the Protestant upper-class Ascendancy, as it then was in Ireland.

Essentially, this is the story of the Gifford daughters, who were, by virtue of their forebears and their training, most unlikely Irish rebels.

Notes