Clarke · 1916
Tom Clarke's signature
In the late evening of Sunday the twenty-third of April 1916, in the Liberty Hall printing-room on Beresford Place at the Custom House Quay in central Dublin, the Irish Citizen Army printer Christopher Brady produced the thousand-sheet first impression of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. The Proclamation, which would be read aloud by Patrick Pearse from the General Post Office steps the following day at noon, was signed by seven members of the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The first signature, in the traditional left-most position of the most-senior signatory, was that of Thomas James Clarke, fifty-seven years old, the Hyde Park Tipperary-Limerick-emigrant-born Fenian who had served fifteen years (1883–1898) in Pentonville and Portland prisons for the Fenian dynamite-campaign of the 1880s, who had returned to Ireland in 1907, who had been the Treasurer of the IRB Supreme Council since 1910, and who was, by every careful judgment of Easter Rising historiography (Charles Townshend, Ruth Dudley Edwards), the political-organisational architect of the 1916 Rising in personal terms more than any other single figure. The Clarke-first signature on the Proclamation was the explicit IRB recognition of his senior political-organisational role. Clarke was the first of the seven Proclamation signatories to be executed at Kilmainham Gaol, on the morning of the third of May 1916.
It is twenty past nine on the evening of Easter Sunday the twenty-third of April 1916, in the printing-room on the third floor of Liberty Hall at the Custom House Quay on the north bank of the Liffey in central Dublin, in the yellow gas-light of the Liberty Hall workshop. He is fifty-seven years old. He is Thomas James Clarke, born to Irish-emigrant parents in the Royal Magazine Fort in Hyde Park, London, on the eleventh of March 1858, brought up in Dungannon in County Tyrone (his father being a British Army sergeant of the Royal Sappers and Miners, the family had moved between British Army postings in South Africa, England and Ireland through his childhood), schooled at Saint Patrick's National School in Dungannon, joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1880, served fifteen years of a life sentence at Pentonville-and-Portland prisons (1883–1898) for the Fenian dynamite-campaign of the 1880s, in his eleventh year back in Ireland since the 1907 return.
On the printing-room desk in front of him is the finished proof-sheet of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, six paragraphs in Garamond type on a foolscap sheet, in the final-text Christopher Brady the Liberty Hall printer had set after the day-long Provisional Government meeting at the Liberty Hall second-floor council room. The seven signatories of the Proclamation are listed in the formal Irish-Republican-tradition of the most-senior-organisational signatory at the top-left. The list order is: Thomas J. Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, P. H. Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett.
He thinks: the Order-of-Signatories on the Proclamation is the IRB Supreme Council's recognition of the senior-political-architect of the Rising. The Order has been agreed by the Supreme Council in the private vote of the twenty-second of April. The Order puts me at the top, before Pearse, before MacDonagh, before Connolly.
He thinks: the IRB-Supreme-Council vote of the twenty-second is, in plain reading, the private-organisational acknowledgement that the Rising would not have happened without my fifteen-year political-organisational work since the 1907 return. The Pearse public-face will, by the eleven-o'clock-tomorrow GPO reading, take the public credit. The Order-of-Signatories is for the historical-record only.
He thinks: the British-army garrison at Dublin Castle and the Royal Barracks has, by the IRB intelligence of the past fortnight, between six and seven thousand men. The Irish-Volunteer-and-Citizen-Army force the Provisional Government can put in the field tomorrow is, on the Eoin MacNeill countermanding order of this morning, about twelve hundred. The numerical-balance is six to one against us.
He thinks: the Rising will, on the numerical-balance, be put down inside seven days. The Proclamation we are about to print and read will, in plain reading, be the political document of the defeated rising.
He thinks: the defeated rising is the Irish-Republican political-event. The defeated rising establishes the Irish Republic as a political fact in international diplomatic recognition by the Continental nationalist movements. The execution of the seven of us at Kilmainham in the following ten days will, on the political-emotional reaction of the Irish public, turn the British-Ireland political-equation in the five years that follow.
He thinks: I will sign first because the IRB Supreme Council has voted that I will sign first. The first signature is the first signature.
He picks up the pen from the printer's desk and signs his name in the flowing copperplate hand at the top-left of the proof-sheet: Thomas J. Clarke. The other six signatories sign in turn through the evening. Christopher Brady's press runs off the thousand-sheet first impression overnight. The Proclamation is in Pearse's hands at the GPO at the eight in the morning of Easter Monday and is read aloud from the GPO steps by Pearse at noon on the twenty-fourth of April 1916.
Tom Clarke was at the GPO from the twenty-fourth of April to the surrender on the twenty-ninth. He was court-martialled at Richmond Barracks on the second of May, sentenced to death, and shot at three thirty in the morning of the third of May 1916 at Kilmainham Gaol, the first of the sixteen Easter Rising leaders executed. He was fifty-eight years old. His grave (with the fifteen other Kilmainham executed) is in the quicklime mass-grave at Arbour Hill Military Cemetery in central Dublin, now a national monument. His widow Kathleen Clarke (née Daly, daughter of the Limerick-Fenian John Daly) was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1939, the first woman to hold the office in any capital city in the British Isles. The Tom Clarke tobacconist's-shop on Parnell Street in Dublin (where Tom Clarke had run his Sweepstakes-tobacco-shop from 1907 to 1916 as the cover-trade for his IRB Supreme Council activity) is, since 1966, a bronze-plaque memorial in the care of the Dublin City Council.