BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine@RobLooseCannon
Did you know English trade union workers sent shipments of food to help starving Dublin workers and their families during the Lockout? Today in 1913, Dublin’s starving striking workers and their families (some 80,000 mouths to feed) were two months into the great Lockout, and the city was heavy with hunger. More than 20,000 workers had been thrown out of their jobs for refusing to sign away their right to join the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU).
Into this bleak scene steamed the SS Hare, with its lifesaving cargo of 60,000 food parcels, sent not by politicians or the church but by fellow workers across the Irish Sea. Members of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) rallied to James Larkin’s call for solidarity. Larkin, the fiery Liverpool-born founder of the ITGWU, had returned to Britain to raise funds and food for the strikers, and here was the proof of his success.
The SS Hare was no stranger to Dublin. Built to trade between Manchester and the Liffey, it had ferried livestock, cargo, and passengers for the Dublin & Manchester Steamship Company, co-founded by Manchester merchant George Lowen and Dubliner D.J. Stewart.
The quays were crowded with thousands of anxious faces, and when someone cried, “It’s the SS Hare!” a roar went up that shook the waters. One witness, Paddy Butner, just a child at the time, remembered the moment vividly:
“A cheer rose from every throat of those watching… The hair stood up on my head and I shouted with the rest in joy. As the vessel came abreast of the South Point, we all turned about and kept pace with her; the cheering and the waving continued while tears streamed down the faces of women and, indeed, men too.”
Volunteers unloaded flour, bread, potatoes, tea, sugar, margarine, jam, tins of fish, cheese, and even coal, storing the cargo in the Manchester Shed on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay before it was brought to Liberty Hall for distribution. Countess Markievicz and members of the Irish Citizen Army were among those who organized the relief, parceling out the food to strikers’ families.
The Hare was just the first. More ships followed, the SS Pioneer, the SS New Fraternit, until by late November hundreds of thousands of parcels had poured into the city. For the strikers, it was more than sustenance. It was a signal that they were not fighting alone, that somewhere beyond Dublin’s locked-out gates there were people who believed in them.
The Hare itself would not survive the decade. In 1918, it was sunk en route to Manchester, with eleven lives lost, six of them Dubliners. Among the dead was Mrs Arland, a widow who left behind four children.
