. Meanwhile, days before his execution, Heuston asked the governor of Arbour Hill Prison to thank Lt Mount for the kindness he had shown him.
On the far side of the city, during the first day of the Rising, another group of soldiers who found themselves on the receiving end of rebel fire were the Georgius Rex (Latin for ‘King George’). A ‘Dads-Army’ style home defence force formed a number of years earlier, Dublin wits quickly nicknamed them the ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’, ‘God’s Rejected’, and the ‘Methuseliers’.
Having heard word of the outbreak of the Rising, they quickly marched back into Dublin from an exercise at Ticknock, and were fired on at Northumberland Rd by Lieutenant Michael Malone and his Irish Volunteers .
Tragically, the Georgius Rex carried no ammunition for their antiquated rifles, and so they were essentially unarmed. By the time Malone realised who he was firing at and called a halt, several had been killed and many more wounded.
One of the first to be shot — if not the first — was Sub-Commandant Frank Browning. From Rathmines, Dublin, Browning was 47 years old. He was also a former Irish international cricketer and rugby player. At the time of the Rising, he was also the president of the IRFU.
He did not die straight away, however. Hit in the head by rebel fire, he died two days later of his injuries. To this day, there is a plaque in Lansdowne Road/Aviva Stadium commemorating his death.
The battlefields of the First World War were not the only graveyards of Irish soldiers during 1914–1918. In 1916, at least 41 Irishmen were killed in action while serving with the British Army in Dublin, and 106 more were wounded. Many others came through unscathed, but did not survive the trenches.
These men might not have joined the British Army to secure an Irish Republic, but many joined to fight for Irish independence as they saw it. Even if they enlisted for mundane reasons, they were still Irishmen. They still deserve to be remembered.
Neil Richardson is author of According To Their Lights — Stories of Irishmen in the British Army, Easter 1916 (Collins Press, 2015)