Military History from the Street

Abstract

In Ireland and the Great War, the late Keith Jeffery argued that the 1914–18 conflict was an essential context for the Irish independence struggle, and that the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21) and Civil War (1922–3) were integral parts of the same story. This is also the starting point of Dublin’s Great Wars, a ‘new military history’ and prosopography of British soldiers and Irish republicans who resided in Ireland’s capital city during these years. There is much to commend ‘military history from the street’, Grayson’s methodology of using ‘every source possible to draw in the military service of everyone from a given area’. Online sources have transformed the speed and ease with which researchers can search for and cross-reference information. The author’s approach is predicated largely on the vast word-searchable collections of primary-source records relating to the First World War that have become available online in recent years. Some marvellous material has been unearthed in British military pension and service records, diaries, newspapers, personal testimony and journals. Sixteen of Grayson’s twenty-one chapters contextualize and discuss the period up to the November 1918 Armistice. It is estimated that 210,000 men resident in Ireland joined the British armed forces over 1914–18, out of whom about 30,000 were killed and many thousands more wounded. This has been described by one historian as ‘proportionately the greatest deployment of armed manpower in the history of Irish militarism’. Grayson estimates that, in all, between 35,000 and 40,000 Dublin residents served in some branch of the British armed forces during the First World War, with over seventy percent fighting in the infantry. As with his previous study of Belfast, for the most part he eschews thematic analysis. The book consists mainly of chronologically ordered battle narratives punctuated with statistics, snippets of battlefield folklore – like the apocryphal recapture of guns by the 9th Lancers at Mons in October 1914 and rumours of a Turkish female sniper found dead at Gallipoli wearing fourteen soldiers’ identification badges around her neck – and biographical vignettes of individual