The Knutsford Hotel

Abstract

The events following the Easter Rising in 1916, the executions in Dublin and incarceration of the volunteers in Frongoch have been examined and published on multiple occasions. What remains missing are studies of the experience of prisoners in British gaols as they waited for the British Government to decide what to do with them. The most important studies of their prison experience have been completed by William Murphy and Seán McConville. Knutsford was a military prison and unlike the more relaxed regimes of civilian prisons where photographs of notable prisoners including Michael Collins were taken no such records for Knutsford exist. The words and memories of the remaining volunteers remain largely unpublished other than in one or two fleeting sentences. Although the cohort sent to Knutsford did not contain any of the leaders of the Easter Rising significant figures were incarcerated there, including William X. O’Brien, Richard Mulcahy, Oscar Traynor and W.J Brennan-Whitmore. The Witness Statements, letters and poems of those who endured their imprisonment at Knutsford reveal an intimate story of abuse, stress and support of the Irish in Britain, in what, with gallows humour, they called the Knutsford Hotel.