Intervals of Peace -the artistic journey of a Civil War Prisoner Alfred V. McGloughlin
The life and times of Artist, Playwright and Republican
Authors: Professor Tim McGloughlin(University of Limerick, Ireland) and Brian Crowley (Curator, OPW, Kilmainham Jail and Pearse Museum, St Enda’s, Dublin, Ireland) Max words 2200
On 21 October 1922, several months into the Irish Civil War, Alfred McGloughlin was arrested near his home by Free State forces and brought to Wellington Barracks on Dublin’s South Circular Road. Although he was never charged with a specific offence, he spent the following year in various prisons and camps in Dublin and Kildare. During this time he experienced periods of severe ill-treatment but, as mentioned in his obituary in 1932, he also found ‘intervals of peace in prison, sketching in watercolours, and filling a portfolio with pencildrawings of his comrades’. Over forty of these remarkable prison drawings survive and represent a unique record of the incarceration of political prisoners during the Irish Civil War.
Alfred Vincent McGloughlin was born in 1888, the youngest child of Alfred Ignatius McGloughlin and his wife Mary Emily. Mary Emily McGloughlin, née Pearse, was the halfsister of the 1916 leaders Patrick and William Pearse. She was their father James’s eldest child from his first marriage. In his unfinished autobiography, Patrick would later describe his early memories of serving as page boy at his sister’s wedding. Emily and Alfred Ignatius’s fathers were old friends and neighbours on Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. James Pearse lived and operated one of the biggest monumental sculpture businesses in the city at no. 27 Great Brunswick Street, while John McGloughlin’s art metal foundry was based in a premises at No.48. However unlike his brothers who followed their father into the family business, Alfred Ignatius became an architect/architectural draughtsman. He worked for many years in the office of George Coppinger Ashlin and worked on projects such as the O’Connell Memorial Church in Cahirsiveen, St Coleman’s Cathedral, Cobh and the Portrane Lunatic Asylum.
In addition to Alfred Vincent, the McGloughlins had two older daughters. Emily was born in 1885 while Margaret, known as Maggie, arrived two years later. They would have been quite comfortably off at that time, but that all changed in 1897 when the McGloughlin marriage broke up. It seems that Alfred Ignatius had a liaison with one of the family servants and in 1901 he emigrated permanently to the United States. With no other means to support herself, Mary Emily trained to be a midwife and moved to Fanad in Co. Donegal where she worked as a district nurse. At the time of the 1901 census, Margaret and Emily were living in St. Joseph’s Orphanage for Girls on Mountjoy Square, while 12-year-old Alfred Ignatius was resident in the Mount St. Joseph boarding school in Clondalkin. In November of that year Emily, the elder of the two girls, travelled to the United States to join the Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament, having been recruited by Mother Vincent Herlihy who had toured Ireland in search of girls to join the order. It is unclear when her sister Maggie moved from Dublin to live with her mother, but she seems to have been settled in Donegal by at least 1906
Alfred Vincent also found a new home around this time when he moved in with the Pearse family. In addition to Patrick and William, the household also included Alfred’s stepgrandmother, Mrs. Margaret Pearse, as well as his aunts Margaret and Mary Brigid. He was
quite close in age with the Pearse siblings, and they seem to have treated him like a younger brother rather than a nephew. As well as the stability it provided, Alfred would have found it a stimulating and lively household and he shared the family’s enthusiasm for art, literature, theatre and politics. In 1910 he is listed as attending Dublin Metropolitan School of Art parttime while simultaneously working for as a draughtsman for J & C McGloughlin, the company founded by his grandfather and subsequently run by his uncles John and Charles. Among other things, Alfred made beautifully detailed drawings of the decorative ironwork produced by the company for their catalogue. Surviving examples of the work of J & C McGloughlin include the decorative gates at the entrance of what is now the British ambassador’s residence at Glencairn, as well as the beautiful front gates of Leinster House.
In 1908 when Patrick Pearse founded his innovative Irish-speaking school, Scoil Éanna, the entire family became involved in one way or another. In the Midsummer 1909 edition of the school magazine, An Macaomh, Pearse gives special thanks to his brother William and nephew Alfred for their work on the costumes, groupings and general production of the elaborate theatrical pageant based on the boyhood of the ancient Irish hero Cuchuainn, which was mounted to mark the end of the school year. He wrote that
‘Mr. McGloughlin’s name does not figure among the School Staff, but he might be called a Member of Staff without portfolio. He is at our service whenever we want anything done which requires artistic insight and plastic dexterity, be it the making of plans for an Aula Maxima, the designing of a cover (we owe him, for instance the cover of An Macaomh), or the construction of a chariot for Cuchulainn.’
When Pearse moved the school to a new home in Rathfarnham in 1910, Alfred produced a series of delicate illustrations of the follies and other monuments which adorned the grounds for the Christmas 1910 edition of An Macaomh . He also accompanied Pearse on holidays to his cottage in Rosmuc in Connemara. Padraic Óg Ó Conaire, one of the local boys who later became a Scoil Éanna pupil, later described how it was Alfred who provided the technical expertise for the magic lantern shows which Pearse provided for the local community there between 1908 and 1912.
Alfred enthusiasm for the theatre led to his founding of a semi-professional theatre group, the Leinster Stage Society, with William Pearse and his sister Mary Brigid. Their hope was that the revenue raised by their productions would support their family and the school. Alfred wrote several of the plays they performed including The Skull, The Fugitive and The Countess of Strasbourg The Skull and The Fugitive (Figure 1) were both performed as part of a Leinster Stage Society at the Abbey Theatre in 1910.
A financially disastrous tour to Cork in 1912 resulted in Patrick having to send funds down to them to bail them out and spelt the end of the theatre group. However Alfred continued to be a prolific playwright and the manuscripts of several plays survive in his archives.
Alfred’s association with the Pearse family also seems to have influenced his growing interest in Irish nationalism and politics. He developed an interest in the Irish language and, along with the rest of the household, he was listed in the 1911 census under ‘Uilfrid Mac Lochlainn’, the Irish form of his name. A photograph of him in 1914 show him fully decked out in the traditional Irish kilt and brat favoured by many Gaelic revivalists at the time. He joined the Irish Volunteers on their foundation in November 1913 and was involved in the Howth gun running in July 1914. That was also the year he married Marcella Dowling whom he had met through her brothers Seán and Frank who had been pupils in Scoil Éanna. They were living on Belgrave Road in Rathmines when Marcella gave birth to their first child, James Alfred, on 31 March 1916. Alfred suffered a bout of severe ill-health around this time which meant he was unable to participate in the 1916 Rising. According to family tradition, he was devastated by the executions of his uncles Patrick and William Pearse and sought solace in Donegal where he stayed for a time with his mother and sister Margaret.
During the turbulent years which followed the Rising, Alfred’s main focus appears to have been politics and he became Sinn Féin’s director of elections in south Dublin for the 1918 and 1921 elections. He stood as a candidate himself twice in 1920. In January he unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the Pembroke Urban District Council, while in June he sought to represent Rathmines on Dublin County Council.
Alfred opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in December 1921 and it was his anti-Treaty stance led to his arrest in October 1922. A fellow republican, Desmond Murphy, staying with the McGloughlins at the time was also arrested. They were initially sent to Wellington
Figure 1 Program for “The Fugitive” by A.McGloughlinBarracks, now Griffith College, on Dublin’s South Circular Road. Large numbers of republican prisoners were being held there at the time, and on 7 November it became the location for some of the first military court martials in Dublin. Four young men - Peter Cassidy, John Gaffney, James Fisher and Richard Twohig - were sentenced to death and their executions later took place in Kilmainham Gaol on 17 November. On 8 November the Barracks came under attack from Republican forces who managed to shoot eighteen soldiers who were drilling in the exercise yards, killing one instantly, while another later died of his wounds.
It was against this violent background in Wellington Barracks that Alfred McGloughlin first began to draw pencil portraits of his fellow prisoners on scraps of paper. Among the prisoners he drew was the politician and activist Proinsias Ó Ceallaigh (Francis M. Kelly) (Figure 2) who assisted in De Valera’s escape from Lincoln Gaol in 1919. Other well-known sitters included the 1916 veteran Joseph Clarke (Figure 3), future Taoiseach (irish Prime Minister) Seán Lemass (Figure 4), and J.C. Forde, the officer commanding among the prisoners in Wellington Barracks.
further particularly striking portraits completed are
O’Toole been sentenced to death for the illegal possession of weapons, the same charge that had led to the execution of the four young men in Kilmainham Gaol on 17 November, but in
Figure 2 Proinsias Ó Ceallaigh Figure 3 Joseph Clarke Figure 4 Sean Lemass (Francis M. Kelly) Three of Joseph P. O’Toole (Figure 5), Sean Rainsford (Figure 6 ) and Comdt Joseph O’Connor (Figure 7) who also fought in 1916. Figure 5 Joseph O’Toole Figure 6 Sean Rainsford Figure 7 Joseph O’Connorhis cases the sentence was commuted to imprisonment instead. About thirty-five of these portraits, as well as other prison drawings, still survive in the possession of the McGloughlin family.
Alfred continued to make these sketches when he was transferred to Hare Park internment camp in the Curragh, Co. Kildare He also played a leading role in organising activities to relieve the boredom of prison life. On 4 March, the birth date of the revolutionary Robert Emmet, he arranged a special commemorative event to mark the 120th anniversary that year of Emmet’s 1803 rebellion. Alfred’s papers also contained a note in relation to a debate he organised in the camp on the proposition ‘That women should not hold public positions’!
Prison life in Hare Park and the other internment camps located in the Curragh took a brutal turn in late April 1923. Following the successful escape of one of the prisoners from Tintown No. 1 Camp, several other escape tunnels were discovered in Hare Park and Tintown No.2 Camp. In an effort to discover who was responsible, Alfred and the other camp leaders were removed to the notorious ‘Glasshouse’ military prison. Alfred detailed the ill-treatment he experienced there in a letter to the Irish Independent published on 7 November 1923 in response to a claim from the then Minister for Defence, General Richard Mulcahy, that republican prisoners had not been ill-treated in The Curragh:
I am one of the Hare Park prisoners referred to. In spite of what Gen. Mulcahy says, I slept on bare boards in the Curragh military prison for five nights – April 24-28. I did not get three blankets: I got one blanket … I was handcuffed night and day (day behind, night in front) from Tuesday 24 until Saturday morning. The handcuffs were not off for meals; they were off one wrist for alleged dinner, excluding Thursday, April 26, when they were both off for dinner, but on that day I was hanging handcuffed by the wrists to a kit-rack about six inches from the floor for four-and-a-half hours … I was threatened with a gun several times [that] I was to be shot.
Alfred was moved back up to Dublin to Mountjoy Prison in May. Interestingly, while he identified some of the portraits as having been done in Wellington Barracks or Hare Park, the only one he identified as being completed in Mountjoy is a self-portrait. He seems to have concentrated instead on documenting the prison buildings. His training as a draughtsman is evident in a very detailed watercolour sketch he did of “A” Wing which he later gave to a member of the Pearse family. Other watercolours include an image of his cell in which he showed how the prisoners adapted the gaslight jet to boil water for tea. A painting he did of the prison grave of Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McElvey and Dick Barrett who had been executed in Mountjoy in December 1922 later appeared on a memorial card for the four men. He also seems to have resumed his role of organising cultural activities for his fellow prisoners. On 5 August he gave a talk on the Futurist movement in art which included recommendations for modern paintings he felt his comrades should seek out in Dublin galleries and museums on their release. He may also have been involved in the production of a handwritten internal newspaper. The newspaper’s title, An Barr Buadh (‘The Trumpet of Victory’) was the same as that of an Irish-language newspaper published by Patrick Pearse in 1912. He continued to write plays as well, and his archive also contains the manuscript of an unfinished version of one of his plays entitled ‘The Widows’s Might’ which features a republican prisoner recently released from prison. There was also harsh treatment for the
prisoners in Mountjoy on occasion. A prisoner protest in August 1923 was brutally suppressed, resulting in prisoners being beaten and Alfred and his comrades spending two nights outdoors in an area known as ‘The Compound’ with neither shelter or blankets.
Alfred McGloughlin was finally released from prison on 13 October 1923. Political differences meant he did not return to work for his uncles in J&C McGloughlin. In 1924 he created an unsuccessful building company and following its liquidation, he was employed by the Board of Works as a draughtsman. He continued to engage with politics and wrote a column for the republican newspaper ‘An Phoblacht’ under the name ‘Your Candid Friend’. However it would seem that Alfred’s already delicate health never really recovered from his time in prison. He died of heart failure in 1932 aged just 44 years.
An exhibition of Alfred McGloughlin’s prison art took place in Kilmainham Gaol Museum, Dublin, Ireland from March -October 2022 and from Feb -May 2023 at the Pearse Museum, St Enda’s, Rathfarnam, Dublin, Ireland. Further exhibitions are planned.
