 |
| Patrick Pearse |
The Easter Rising was an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was organised by the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood with the aim of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing an independent Irish Republic. The Rising began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, and lasted for six days. Members of the Irish Volunteers, led by schoolmaster and Irish language champion Patrick Pearse, joined by the Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly and 200 members of Cumann na mBan — captured key locations in Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic.
With hugely superior weaponry and troop numbers, the British army swiftly suppressed the Rising, and Pearse agreed to an unconditional surrender on Saturday 29 April. Most of the leaders were executed following courts-martial, but the Rising kick-started a momentum for Irish independence which led to the formation of the first Dáil in January 1919 and thus to the Irish War of Independence.
Patrick Henry Pearse was an Irish teacher, poet, writer, barrister, nationalist and political activist who became the most prominent leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. Following his execution along with fifteen other leaders, Pearse came to be seen by many as the personification of the rebellion. Patrick Pearse was born in Dublin on 10 November 1879. His father James was a successful stonemason and monumental sculptor, born in London in 1839 but brought up in Birmingham. James came from a Unitarian family and was self-educated, but sufficiently so that Patrick and his siblings grew up in a comfortable Dublin house, surrounded by books and an abundance of knowledge.
Patrick’s mother, Margaret Brady, was the second wife of James Pearse and was from Dublin. Her father’s family were from County Meath and were native Irish speakers. It is said that the Irish-speaking influence of Patrick Pearse's great-aunt Margaret, together with his schooling at the CBS Westland Row, instilled in him an early love for the Irish language. In his autobiography, Patrick Pearse described the duel influence gained from the union of his parents upon his own famously idealistic and passionate character:
“ For the present I have said enough to indicate that when my father and mother married there came together two very widely remote traditions—English and Puritan and mechanic on the one hand, Gaelic and Catholic and peasant on the other: freedom loving both, and neither without its strain of poetry and its experience of spiritual and other adventure. And these two traditions worked in me and fused together by a certain fire proper to myself . . . made me the strange thing I am.”
In the 1851 census, the Pearse family from Middlesex can be found living at Ellis Street, close to the horse fair at Holloway Head in the very heart of Birmingham. These were the grandparents of Patrick Pearse and his father and uncle as boys. The family included James Pearse aged 32, a picture frame maker (journeyman) and his wife Mary aged 38. They had two sons, James aged 11 and Henry aged 10, both scholars.
Ten years on in the 1861 census, the Pearse family can be found still residing in Lee Bank, though this time just up the hill in Gough Street in the parish of St Thomas. James senior is still working as a picture frame maker, as is his 20 year old son Henry. Though by this time, the other son James (aged 21) is working as a stone carver in marble.
In 1863, James Pearse (a sculptor) married his first wife, Susan Emily Fox (who may have been Irish) at St Thomas’s, Lee Bank and in the same year, his brother Henry married Sarah Ann Orchard at St Philip’s church. James and Susan moved to Ireland in the 1860s and converted to Catholicism, probably for business reasons as James had been an atheist since childhood. Susan Emily died in 1876, leaving James a widower with two young children. He remarried his second wife, Margaret Brady the following year and set up home over his premises in 27 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street. Patrick was born in November 1879, the second of their four children.
James Pearse was interested in the ‘free thought’ movement and an avid reader of books on art and architecture, history, theology, philosophy and current affairs. He also had many books on religion. His own father before him, also named James, and his father’s brothers had been members of the artistic radical wing of Birmingham’s artesian intelligentsia during the mid-1800s, a movement of working class men and women who wanted to break the upper-class monopoly on education and knowledge by self-study and group participation. Many were Quakers, Unitarians and radical liberals. It was this radical Birmingham heritage which helped to form the young Patrick Pearse into ‘that strange thing’ he became and the idealistic and passionate leadership he gave to the 1916 Rising.
James Pearse died on 5 September 1900, while staying in his brother’s home at Back 185 Great Russell Street, Saint George, Birmingham. He left an estate valued at £1,470–17s–6d. Pearse and Sons in Dublin was wound up in 1910 and the capital was used to fund Patrick’s school, St Enda’s, which had recently moved to new premises in Rathfarnham. In November 1913 Pearse was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
