An Irishwoman’s Diary on Joe Tallon and an offbeat record of the 1916 Rising

Pulling James Connolly by the heels, praying for a German submarine’s torpedo to cure sickness at sea, learning how to transmit a prison message with a pin ... Dubliner Joe Tallon had an ear and eye for the offbeat in his record of a bloody insurrection.

“Spring of the year 1916 – Holy Week, and I will be on holidays from Wednesday,” the maths teacher wrote in a foolscap account handwritten in Irish, and discovered in his family effects.

“The weather beautiful and my looking forward to a great weekend I would have, riding my bike through the Wicklow hills and, maybe, a swim ... at one of the many great beaches in that county. Alas ! It was not to be...”

That same Wednesday night, orders were given to “stay close to homes” as there might be “work” for the Irish Volunteers, he wrote. “Right enough”, he said, he was directed to head out on his bicycle on Good Friday, and keep an eye on the English soldiers’ camp based at the Bull Wall.

‘Wonderful day’

“I spent a wonderful day there in the sun smoking my pipe, reading the papers and book, with nothing to do but send word back to the city if the soldiers were making a move ... but they did not...there were no spies in our midst ...”

Tallon, or Ó Tallamhain as he signed his account, was a bit disappointed at no action on Easter Sunday. Using a revolver to face down a phalanx of police near the GPO on Monday , he says that James Connolly was first person he met after the republic had been proclaimed. While busy placing home-made explosives up on windows, he had a narrow escape when he accidentally knocked one to the floor.

That evening, he was sent with a small contingent of Volunteers to Ballybough to stop the army if it left its Bull Wall camp. “But what we had to prevent them, but toy guns!”, he wrote, and so it was “a good job they didn’t come”. Having returned to the Metropole Hotel in O’Connell Street, he was told to make holes in the walls, but Connolly, who had come to inspect, was not impressed. “He attempted to get through one of the holes and I had to pull him out by his heels and he told me in no uncertain terms that everyone was not as skinny as I was ...”

Furious shelling

Tallon alluded only briefly to the mayhem of burning buildings, furious shelling, suffering, and surrender. He was one of the group that carried an injured Connolly to the Rotunda hospital, and one of the last to speak to him before execution. Shortly afterwards, he and his brother Séamus were arrested and sent abroad, and taken initially to Yorkshire’s Wakefield prison.

Herded tightly into an unwashed cattle boat, he described it as their one of their worst experiences of all. While one elderly man with sea legs tried to ease their pain, they were “all praying that a German submarine would come and sink us to the bottom”.

Stuck in small cells for 23 hours a day, Tallon recalled how singing, praying and reciting poetry became methods of keeping sane, while proficiency in what was then school Irish rapidly improved. They were not permitted to communicate during the daily half-hour walk in the yard, but “many an Irish conversation was held through the windows of an English prison”.

At one point, he asked his brother for the words of Salve Regina, the Marian hymn. Never failing to think up "some trick", Seamus managed to acquire a tiny piece of thin paper and a pin. "He pricked out that prayer for me," Joe wrote, "and it was from that paper that I learned it ..."

When they were eventually transferred to Frongoch camp in Wales, life was “ten times better”.

Tuition

They were allowed to play football, read books and newspapers, and it became a “university” for Irish, Spanish and French. Tallon gave maths tuition, and they all learned “how to launder our clothes ... how to clean a table and floors, and a thousand other jobs we didn’t know about before...”

Translated into English by his daughter, the late Eithne Shiel, Tallon’s account and other effects have been kept by his grand-daughter Deirdre Eccles. Her first cousin, Conor Tallon, was researching a project with 1916 walking tour founder Lorcan Collins when he learned of his “sean-dad’s” story. And so Joe Tallon’s words are woven into the GPO section of the new InHand Guides audio tour, on sale in Trinity College Dublin, Glasnevin Cemetery and other good outlets for just €13.95.

www.inhandguides.com