‘We shall rise again’

Posted by Jim on May 16, 2016

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Nora Connolly O’Brien was born in 1893 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the
second daughter of James Connolly and his wife Lillie. From an early age
Nora was involved in labour and Irish republican activism, and in 1916
she acted as a messenger between the leadership of the Rising and the
volunteers in the North.

Nora died in 1981, having spent her life committed to the promotion of
socialist republican politics. In the excerpt below from her memoirs,
Nora talks about her father’s final days and the courage and inspiration
that James Connolly gave to her and continues to give to republicans
today.
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“During the rising, my father had not been content to sit in an office
and give orders. He used to go and see that the orders were being
carried out. That was how he got wounded. His ankles were shattered, and
he had been shot in the arm. After the surrender, he had been brought to
Dublin Castle. There he was placed in the officers’ ward, with a room to
himself. He was given the full credit of his rank, and the British
soldiers never forgot to call him the General, or the
Commandant-General. The ordinary soldiers called him the General, and
made it plain that the hope of the ordinary police and soldiers was that
he would not be executed. Many of the soldiers knew something about my
father. This was because Redmond has got a lot of Irishmen into the army
during the war.

By the time he was placed in this hospital ward, he had already lost so
much health. There had been no doctors in the GPO building. There was
one student who was in his last year at medical school, and he did the
best he could after my father had been wounded. There was also an
officer of the British Army Medical Corps in the GPO, whom we had
arrested. The medical student, whose name was Ryan, went to this
prisoner and asked him for help. At first the Medical Officer said he
could not do anything, but Ryan said, ‘Even if you can’t do anything,
just tell me what to do and I’ll do it all while you give me the
orders,’ and he reminded him of the oath of Hippocrates that doctors
take when they become doctors. So the officer went down and gave
instructions, but nothing he said did any good.

By the time my father reached Dublin Castle, he was a dying man.
Gangrene had set in, and he had little chance of living. He could not
even sit up, and was unable to lift more than his head from the pillow,
and his shoulders a little bit. The gangrene began affecting his whole
body.

The surgeon who was attending my father sent over to London for some
medicine he had heard of which he hoped would stop the spreading of the
gangrene. The surgeon took a strong liking to my father. It was the same
with everyone who met him – they all loved him. The surgeon and my
father discussed poetry, and different writers – one would say a poem,
and the other would quote a poem in opposition to it, and one would make
a joke and they would laugh. And they would discuss different writers,
and books they had read, and what their opinion of this writer was, and
their opinion of that. And all this time my father was dying every
minute, dying every minute.

There was a very young Royal Army Medical Corps officer whose job it was
to sit all day long in my father’s room. I often wondered what this
young RAMC officer must have been thinking. I can imagine that he must
have been saying to himself, ‘But this man is dying! And look how he is
going on – saying poems, making jokes, and laughing!’ It was mind over
body, and I have a feeling that the poor young soldier must have been in
a terrific tension – that he had never seen anything like it.

My mother and I and all our family had moved out of Belfast a few days
before the rising. We were planning to move to Dublin. We did not want
to attract attention, so we packed all our things in cases to pretend we
were just going on holiday. During the fighting, my mother and the
younger children stayed in a cottage belonging to Madame Markievicz just
outside Dublin. When it was all over she received a note from Dublin
Castle saying that she should come to visit James Connolly in the
hospital there. She went down and visited him on her own, taking only
Fiona, the youngest in our family.

When she reached Dublin Castle, my mother was searched to see that she
was not bringing a knife or any drug or anything else for my father to
commit suicide with.

‘That’s proof you don’t know James Connolly,’ said my mother. ‘Otherwise
you wouldn’t dream of suggesting that in order to avoid a little pain -‘

‘A lot of pain, Mrs Connolly,’ said the nurse who was searching her.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter how bad the pain is,’ said my mother. ‘He’d
never commit suicide. He bears all he has to bear. As long as there is
life in him, he’ll be fighting all the time’.

When the nurse had finished searching her, she said, ‘I’ll not do this
again next time you come’.

‘Oh, I can come again?’ asked my mother.

The nurse thought she would probably be allowed to.

On her way out from this visit, a photographer took a picture of her and
Fiona outside Dublin Castle, which was later printed in, I think, the
‘Daily Sketch’. They were both angry when they saw it, as they were
looking very unkempt, and the photographer had just called them out and
taken the photo without their permission.

Next my father was court-martialled. I later had the story of what
happened from the nurse. My father could not go and attend the court, so
the members of the court all went to his hospital room. The whole lot
just marched in.

The officer in charge of the court martial told my father, ‘Sit up! You
know what this is’.

My father did not say a word.

‘I told you to sit up!’ the man said.

The young RAMC said to them, ‘But the man is dying!’ The young man must
never before have dared to dream of standing up in front of all those
high officers. When they kept yelling at my father to sit up, the young
man had to tell them twice that he was dying.

‘Well, prop him up, then!’ the officer said.

In fact they knew of the gangrene and that my father had not many days
to live, but they were going to court-martial him anyway, as he was the
leader.

So then they called out for the nurse, who was standing outside the
room. And they ordered the soldiers to bring pillows and mattresses so
that my father could be propped up to hear his court martial there and
then. When they had finished, they asked him if he had any requests to
make, and he asked to see my mother and me.

By this time, I had come back to Dublin from the North. I was given two
visits, both times together with my mother. Our last visit was only an
hour or so before he was taken across from Dublin Castle to Kilmainham
to be shot.

Dublin Castle has a double staircase in the main entrance hall, with a
long landing between the two. On every step of the stairs when we went
in there was a soldier with a rifle and a bayonet. There were soldiers
on the landing also. Those on the landing had the little square cushions
that used to be used in the army as mattresses – they were called
‘biscuits’. They had had their night’s rest on these ‘biscuits’ on the
landing. My mother and I were taken to the top officer there – the
Intelligence Officer, who wanted to make sure we were not part of a plot
to steal James Connolly from them. All the soldiers were on duty as we
went in, to prevent an abduction attempt, with their bayonets fixed all
the time. The officer told us not to give my father any news. Apart from
Surgeon Tobin, the surgeon who was looking after my father, and Father
Aloysius, we were the only ones who were allowed to see him. In this way
they hoped to keep him in ignorance of what was happening, so that he
would not be able to have any influence outside.

The officers’ ward, where my father had been placed, consisted of a
corridor with little rooms along it for when an officer fell ill. They
would not let an officer go among the ‘common people’ at all! Each
officer who was ill used to have a separate room to himself.

My mother and I sat in this room, one each side of the bed. The only
other person in the room was the young RAMC officer, and he sat with his
back to us during our visits, just reading a book or looking out of the
window.

My father was lying in bed with a cage over his feet to keep the
bedclothes off his shattered ankles. He told us about the court martial,
and asked me for news from the North. I had to tell him that the men had
gone home, and that there had been no fighting, and I began to cry. But
he told me he was very proud of me.

‘But I’ve done nothing, nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve just carried messages’.

‘Never mind, Nora,’ he said. He told me that if I had not come down with
the message from the North that the Northerners were ready to fight, it
would not have been possible to persuade the Dublin leaders to go ahead
with the rising. ‘Only for you, Nora, we couldn’t have done anything,’
he told me.

Although we were not supposed to be giving him any news, I gave the news
of the executions to him anyway. He gave me the opening that gave me the
opportunity, by asking me to give a message to Skeffington.

I said, ‘Skeffington has been murdered by a drunken soldier’. And then I
went on, ‘There’s only you and MacDermott left. They’re all gone’.

And that was the greatest shock he ever got in his life. He had not
heard from anybody about the executions. He had heard the shooting, but
had not realised what it was.

I said that surely they would never shoot a wounded man.

He said he had never believed that. ‘I remember what they did to
Scheepers in South Africa,’ he said. He seemed to assume that I knew who
Scheepers was, but I did not, and I never found out, though I asked many
people. It was only this year that I was told that Scheepers was a hero
of the Boers in their fight against the British. His commando unit blew
up British railways and bridges, and his fearlessness made him the hero
of his men. Falling ill, he was left behind at his own request at a
farmhouse, where he was captured by the British. He was court-martialled
before he had recovered, and shot while he sat in a chair.

My mother was crying, and my father begged her to stop. He said she
would unman him if she continued to cry.

‘But your beautiful life, James,’ she said, ‘not your beautiful life!’

At one point my father patted my hand and drew it under the blanket. I
felt him put a stiff bit of paper into my hand.

‘Take this out of here,’ he whispered. ‘It’s what I said to the court
martial. I was asked what I had to say for myself, but I did not say it
for myself, I said it for Ireland. Get it out, Nora, get it out!’

I had no trouble getting it out, because I cupped it in my hands when
they searched us going out.

In the end we were told that our time was up to go, and we had to leave
him for the last time. Mama was on the side of the bed nearest the door.
She could not move. She was like a statue, and seemed rooted to the
floor. The nurse and the officer came and helped her out of the door. I
was on the other side from the door. I walked slowly round the bed,
looking at the face I would never see again.

As I reached the door, my father called me back and I went back to the
bed. He put his arm round me and pulled me down to him and hugged me,
and whispered in my ear, ‘Don’t be too disappointed, Nora. We shall rise
again’.

He did not want me to drop out of the fight. He knew it would go on
after he had gone.

And then I had to go out. Those were the very last word that he said to
me before I was taken away – ‘We shall rise again!”