Opera singer’s eyewitness account of Easter Rising made public

A dramatic eyewitness account of the Easter Rising as seen by a visiting opera singer has been made public for the first time.

Elsie McDermid, a popular opera singer of the period, was staying in Dublin during Easter Week. She was due to perform in Gilbert and Sullivan shows at the Gaiety Theatre with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

However, on the day that she was due to begin performing, the Rising broke out and Ms McDermid was stranded in Dublin.

She wrote a 26-page letter to her mother which chronicles each day of the Rising and gives vivid accounts of the fighting at St Stephen’s Green and Mount Street Bridge.

The letter to her mother beings: “We are living in stirring times. I am writing this to be posted if there is any post office left and will keep it till I know it will go.”

She arrived in Dublin on Easter Sunday and stayed in 32 Merrion Square. She first witnessed the Rising when she went to the Shelbourne Hotel for lunch on Easter Monday afternoon.

“There they were with fixed bayonets and digging trenches in the Green!” she wrote of the Irish Volunteers. “We said we were going to the Shelbourne. They told us not to go as a man had just been shot and killed on the Shelbourne steps.”

Her first show was sold out, but it did not go ahead. “I was the only principal who’d had the ‘liver’ to turn up,” she said.

Unequivocal terms

While out walking the following day, she heard locals condemn the Rising in unequivocal terms.

"It's funny to hear the curses on them – 'may the curse of God be on them', 'may they be cold meat by the morning'. They say there are 8,000 of them out and it will start in different parts of the country and Germany is at the bottom of of it. I think the head of them is a man called O'Niel [sic] [Eoin MacNeill] a professor at the university.

“There’s one thing the common people in the street are against – the ruffians. We were afraid they would riot when the military were called up.”

She graphically told of the chaos around Dublin as those caught up in the Rising were unable to find out what was going on.

From where she was staying she could see the Battle of Mount Street Bridge going on some distance away on Wednesday, April 26th.

She described it as a “terrible afternoon. All day long the soldiers bombarded a house or two in Clanwilliam Place within a hundred houses distance from us.

“It was simply awful as the soldiers crept up to the bridge over the canal. They spotted by the SFs [Sinn Féiners] and we could see them out of our top windows making rushes and fall. The VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment] women carrying them in on stretchers the slaughter was dreadful – 50 wounded, 20 killed and 17 officers killed.”

At 8pm she heard cheering which accompanied a volunteer jumping for his life out of a window.

“I was close to him as he took off his puttees. The crowd helped him to escape – a boy of 17 or so, white-faced, all black with grime and simply terrified.”

The letter has remained in the McDermid family since the Rising and is now owned by Elsie's nephew Colin McDermid from Lancaster in England.

Memorabilia

It first surfaced in the media last month on the BBC ‘Antiques Roadshow’ when it and other memorabilia associated with his aunt was valued at £5,000 (€7,074).

Mr McDermid has allowed the letter to be digitised by Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive which will run it next year from January to June. It will be available online at www.dublincitypubliclibraries.ie.

Mr McDermid said he knew very little about the Easter Rising other than what was in the letter and did not realise its import until contacted by Dublin City Council.

“I used to get it out from time to time and I thought, ‘what a situation to be in’, but it’s only since I’ve been here [in Dublin] and see the enthusiasm about this letter, that it hits you what an important document it is.”

He does not intend to sell the letter.

It was unveiled at the Mansion House on Wednesday. The Lord Mayor of Dublin Christy Burke praised Mr McDermid for his “generosity and time in bringing this letter to Dublin so that it can be read by the citizens of Dublin and add to our knowledge of what went on in the city during Easter Week 1916.”