Dublin Burning: The Easter Rising from Behind the Barricades - Hardcover

W.J. Brennan-Whitmore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0717159302 ISBN 13: 9780717159307

Publisher: Gill & Macmillan, 2013

Synopsis

Dublin Burning is a vivid, clear-eyed account of the 1916 Rising and is the most complete account we have from a senior participant. No other senior Volunteer figure has left a similar memoir of Easter Week. Commandant W.J. Brennan-Whitmore was officer commanding the Volunteer position at the head of North Earl Street, an outworking of the GPO garrison. Its purpose was to delay and frustrate any attempt by the British to deploy reinforcements coming from Amiens Street railway station (now Connolly). Commandant Brennan-Whitmore and his men held this position for over seventy-two hours until forced out by British artillery. He and his troops attempted to retreat northwards through the slums, hoping to reach the safety of the suburbs. But he and his men were not Dubliners and were unfamiliar with the city. They were captured in a tenement where they had taken refuge and were interned in Frongoch in Wales until 1917. Brennan-Whitmore s book is a unique document, one of the most valuable accounts of the Rising available to us.

About this title

About the Author

Commandant W.J. Brennan-Whitmore, a native of Co. Wexford, was a journalist by profession and a senior member of the Irish Volunteers. In addition to Dublin Burning, he also wrote With the Irish in Frongoch, an account of his time as an internee. He was the last surviving Commandant of the Easter Rising when he died in December 1977.

From the Back Cover

'I stood on the rooftops in the gathering gloom. Dublin burning! What a sight! Gruesome, awe-inspiring. Man's inhumanity to man--there is nothing so brutal and callous in all creation. Columns of deep black, evil-looking smoke spiralled up into the darkening sky. Flames leaped, twisted, curled and danced fantastically and the glow of this inferno tinted every object with a lurid redness. The face of a Volunteer, as he looked towards me, took on this horrid tinge. It was as if all the evils that had tormented our people through the ages were now gathered in our metropolis and were having a witches' frenzy of ritual and grim stalking death. The scene etched itself deep on my memory never to be effaced except by death. It was a scene symbolic in its gruesomeness of the agony of the dear motherland and through the long and tedious centuries of oppressive thraldom. Would it ever end?'

Commandant W.J. Brennan-Whitmore

Edition details

• Publisher: Gill & Macmillan
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0717159302
• ISBN 13: 9780717159307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224