Handwritten Rebellion: Autograph Albums of Irish Republican Prisoners in Frognach

Abstract

Handwritten Rebellion:Autograph Albums of Irish Republican Prisoners in Frongoch Marguerite Helmers Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. "This book was lifted for a joke out of Cook House. Return to Paul Cusack." Internment Camp Autograph Book Belonging to Paul Cusack. Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, MS K18. [End Page 20] On Easter Monday, 1916, three members of the Irish separatist militia from Granard, County Longford, motored to Dublin in a Model T Ford.1 An armed rebellion for Irish freedom had begun at noon that day and, intending to join the fighting, the men traveled sixty-five miles before being turned back by the British army at the city limits.2 In the car were Paul Dawson Cusack, John Cawley, and Cusack's cousin Larry Kiernan.3 Cusack was recognized as a "prominent separatist" and was particularly well-connected to the rebel mainstream.4 His older brother, Dr. Brian Cusack (later a TD for North Galway) was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and, with John Cawley, established the Irish Volunteer Army in Granard in 1913.5 Brian called Paul "a prime mover" in the Granard Irish Volunteers.6 Undoubtedly known to British authorities, Cusack and Cawley were arrested in the general sweep of suspects after the Easter Rising and imprisoned in Richmond Barracks, Dublin.7 After a month or more in Dublin, Cusack was deported to England and from there, to Frongoch detention camp in Bala, North Wales. He was assigned [End Page 21] to work in the kitchen. There he appears to have found an autograph book, which he and began to pass around to his fellow prisoners for signatures. A page in the center of the album is marked, "This book was lifted for a joke out of Cook House. Return to Paul Cusack"8 (figure 1). Cusack's book is a typical album, a small and inexpensive bound volume filled with cheap wood-pulp paper in pastel colors of orange, yellow, grey, and blue. The book opens in a horizontal orientation, what we would today call "landscape format." Irish republican autograph albums such as Paul Cusack's provide material evidence of a situation occasioned by World War I and the ongoing political conflict in Ireland. They emerged from the conditions of imprisonment under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914: boredom, camaraderie, and reified Irish identity. Yet the label "autograph album" is misleading. Although it defines the format of the bound book, it suggests ephemera and "the assumption that their contents were essentially meaningless."9 These small books are more than a list of mates; Irish republican autograph albums are complex collections of original writing and artwork, remembered refrains from political speeches and ballads, and sentiments about the war and the Irish rebellion. Furthermore, they provide a link between Irish prison memoirs of the nineteenth century (such as works by John Mitchel, Thomas Clarke, and Oscar Wilde) and those of the late twentieth century in Northern Ireland (such as the writing of Bobby Sands). Autograph albums kept by Irish republican prisoners can be found in the collections of the National Library Ireland, the National Museum at Collins Barracks, and at Kilmainham Gaol. It is likely that even more remain in the private hands of families. These objects should thus be viewed as significant repositories of cultural communication; autograph albums reveal the consciousness of a people during a momentous time of change. Paul Cusack's album, one of several hundred housed in archives in Ireland and the United States, clearly illustrates the continued use of an autograph album. Now in the special collections at the University of Kansas, Cusack's book was part of a large collection of Irish writing and ephemera belonging to P. S. O'Hegarty, a writer, civil servant, and supreme commander of the IRB. [End Page 22] O'Hegarty knew Dr. Brian Cusack, Paul's brother, and also Terence MacSwiney, who was imprisoned with Paul in Frongoch. Cusack himself could not be called a major figure in the story of Irish independence; his significance lies in the fact that we can trace the autograph album to him and that his autograph album is typical...