Shining a Light on History’s Forgotten People: 1. Thomas Clarke

Tom Clarke

Ask anyone who the only US citizen to sign the Irish of Proclamation of Independence was, ask anyone who the head of the IRB was at the time of the rising, ask anyone who was the man most responsible for bringing Padraig Pearse to the fore, for uniting the Irish Volunteers and James Connolly’s Citizens Army in the run up to that faithful week in Easter 1916 and most Irish people, indeed most ‘Republicans’ will simply shrug. The answer to all the above questions is of course Tom Clarke, the first signatory of the aforementioned Proclamation, the glue that held the Rising together and a man whose hand and influence are found in the actions of his successor as IRB head during the Irish War of Independence, Michael Collins. How then has history forgotten this man, especially when you consider how much we speak of the actions of Pearse, Connolly, and Collins, and the impact they had on their own era and ours? 

Born in 1857 on the Isle of Wight to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, the young Tom spent his formative years in South Africa where his father was stationed as a soldier in the British Army, and in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, an area rife with seditious activity and still stained by the memory of the famine well into Toms childhood. The area was also a centre of activity for the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an oath bound society of nationalists dedicated to the creation of an independent Irish Republic. The IRB’s counterpart in the USA was the Fenian Brotherhood and both organisations became known as the Fenians, especially after the failed rising of 1867.  Clarke became an IRB man after meeting the IRB’s national organiser, John Daly, whose niece he would later marry, and found himself involved in several skirmishes with the local constabulary, eventually fleeing for his life in 1880 to America. It was in the States, and under the tutelage of senior Fenians, that Tom reached the next stage of his commitment to Irish Independence as he was involved in the planning, and, eventually, attempted execution of a bombing campaign in mainland Britain. The operation was a sham from the start with informers privy to every step Clarke was took and he was arrested and, under the pseudonym Henry Wilson, sentenced to penal servitude for life in 1883.

It was from this experience of being caught on active service, betrayed if you will, and the following 15 and a half years of physical and mental torture that the new Tom Clarke arises, broken as a man perhaps but full of the vigour of revolution, aware of the terrible consequences of failure and still prepared to sacrifice his personal liberty for the better of the country. Released in 1898 as an amnesty to mark the centenary of the United Irish rebellion, he moved to America with his new bride Kathleen and set up home in Brooklyn, New York. The penal regime that Clarke survived is documented in his book “Glimpses of an Irish Felons Prison Life”, and some truly barbaric practices like complete silence for the duration of your sentence and an hourly wakeup call during the night must surely have damaged him psychologically. He claimed that “Had anyone told me before those prison doors closed upon me that it was possible for any human being to endure what the Irish prisoners have endured in Chatham Prison, and come out of it alive and sane, I would not have believed him” (Pg. 2).

In 1907 he returned to Dublin and set up a tobacconist shop on Amiens Street, under the close eye of the crown authorities. He had reached legendary status in Republican circles after his survival of the torments of prison, and he was quickly reintroduced to the activities of the IRB, in particular two of its up and coming stars, Bulmer Hobson and Sean MacDermott. Eager to keep a low profile, aware of the reach of the British into every aspect of Irish nationalism he moved behind the scenes to acquaint himself with everybody who could be useful to him, cultivating people and encouraging activism. When the Irish Volunteers came into being in 1913, Clarke was already seen as the leading ‘behind the scenes’ nationalist in the city, yet he stayed away from the Volunteers publically, seeking instead to influence their prominent members, with Pearse becoming an IRB man the same year. Hobson and MacDermott became members of the new organisation and no doubt kept Clarke informed of events and pushed the agenda of the IRB as frequently as possible. As the elder statesman in the organisation, and with his record of previous nationalist activities, Clarke was the last realistic link with the old Fenian movement for a lot of the younger men who had been fed stories of the bravery of ’67 and the need for a new generation of martyrs, and Clarke undoubtedly played on that, especially in his encouraging Pearse to give the graveside oration at the funeral of the Fenian O’Donovan Rossa, an event seen as the coming of age of the generation of ’16. Around this time Clarke was also in contact with James Connolly and his socialist Citizens Army, ensuring him that the Ireland his IRB wanted was both nationalist and socialist, for the people and by the people, encouraging him to support any action taken to rid the country of the landlord class, the British Government.

When it came to nuts and bolts organisation of 1916, most, if not all of the major planning must have been done by the IRB leadership, including Tom Clarke and McDermott, and Clarke was the first signatory of the Proclamation, a fact apparently insisted upon by the other signatories. It is in this action we have the link between The Fenians, the Volunteers, and with the involvement of the IRB, the IRA of the war of Independence. The IRB is the common theme through all of this and Clarke was at the heart of it, pulling strings, pushing agendas, organising behind the scenes, letting people like Pearse be the national face of the movement, letting Pearse declare himself President.

Let us not, however, forget that Clarke, and his ilk, were prepared to use terror tactics to make the British give in to their demands and all of their actions must be seen in the historical context in which they happened. These were no angels, merely men of action who are sometimes necessary for the liberation of a country. Clarke’s second in command in the IRB was Sean McDermott whose aide-de-camp in the GPO was Michael Collins who went on to become head of the organisation after the failure of the Rising, directly taking Clarkes agenda into the fight for independence. Clarke is forgotten because he made himself so invisible; his greatest trick was convincing the Volunteers that it was all their idea, convincing Pearse that he was indeed the President of the new Republic. Clarke insisted that the Volunteers fight until the last man in the GPO, in this he was finally ignored, weeping openly as Pearse surrendered. He was executed, at age 59, along with MacDermott, in Kilmainham Jail following the surrender, this time viewed as too big a fish to put in prison.

His legacy is one of a commitment to physical force Republicanism and if people like MacDermott and Pearse are well regarded as patriots from this period of Irish history then Clarke deserves further study.

22/2/11