'Granny's Diaries'

The eye witness accounts of the 1916 Easter Rising which I have just transcribed are taken from the third of three surviving diaries written by my grandmother Mary Wilson Corry (known as 'May' as a child and 'Auntie May' to her husband's family in later years, 'Maie' in her late teens and twenties). After my grandmother's death they were kept on a high shelf in my mother's wardrobe, and I was allowed to read them for the first time as a great privilege at the age of about 16.

Volume 1 was written in 1909 while Maie was a senior pupil at Victoria High School, Londonderry; Volume 2 between November 1910 and March 1911 during her first few months as an apprentice chemist at Dr McCaul's Medical Hall, Ferryquay Street, Londonderry; and Volume 3 intermittently in Waterford and Dublin during 1916.

My late mother was very cautious about allowing anyone to read the diaries because Maie had considered them to be so personal, but she acknowledged that the 1916 volume had significance as an account of important events in Irish and world history, and deserved a wider audience. In 1992 she and I deposited a transcription of the Easter Rising and World War I sections of the diary in the National Archive in Dublin, but they don't seem to have been found by any of the historians who have been writing about the Rising in connection with this year's centenary commemorations, which is why I'm now publishing them on my blog.

Maie's account of Easter Week is dated Wednesday May 3rd 1916 and seems to have been written in one long session. A very interesting account from a similar perspective, but written as the week unfolded, is a 'letter home' by Elsie McDermid, a singer with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company which was on tour in Dublin at the time - she was staying at 32 Merrion Square, a few doors away from the Girls Friendly Society Lodge where Maie Corry was living, and their stories are complementary in many respects (Dublin City Libraries have published a digital version HERE). However Elsie McDermid gives a much more vivid impression of how she and her housemates actually passed the time for so many days, sleeping on the landing floor, making tea for British soldiers who were using their roof and windows as vantage points, running out of clean laundry, occasionally being able to snatch 'a lovely bath'. I wish my grandmother had included more of this sort of detail. She lived with us until her death when I was 14, and talked about the Rising a lot, but I can't remember any of her stories except that I think she said they ran out of food and had to live on rice for the second half of the week.

What strikes me most about Maie's diaries is how young for her age she seems. She was 19 when she went as a boarder to Victoria High School to take science classes that would enable her to begin studying pharmacy, but she writes like a 14-year-old about escapades with boys from neighbouring Foyle and Magee Colleges and soldiers from Ebrington Barracks, and she and her form-mates occasionally have to be accompanied by a member of staff on trips into town on free afternoons (though she does complain about this). By the time of the Rising she was nearly 27 and had completed several years of pharmaceutical training, but there seems to have been no suggestion that her skills could have been put to use in helping to deal with casualties; apart from providing cups of tea, though even this isn't described in detail, she and her fellow residents of 28 Merrion Square seem to have been mere spectators throughout the bloody battle that was raging around their lodging.

 

 

Postcard from Maie Corry's own collection

 

 

 

Maie Corry's 1916 Diary