The Weapon for the Rebel who didn't Fight: Tom Clarke's Rifle

As we know, Tom Clarke was more of a planner than a fighter when it came to The Easter Rising. In my search through museums, I couldn’t help but notice that there are not very many displays and artifacts from or about Clarke. I was under the assumption that because Clarke was not one of the major fighters, he has been overlooked by many. I wholeheartedly believe that Clarke was one of the most influential and respected rebels among the group of participants in the Rising, so I wanted to find an object that involved Clarke.

Because Tom Clarke was a leader of a group of men that had very little military training themselves and he did not even hold a military position in the group, I was shocked to find an object that deals with the actual fighting during the Rising: Tom Clarke’s rifle. Although there is not much of a record that Clarke fought at all in the rising, one of the few artifacts that I could find was a rifle. To me, the rifle beautifully blurs the line between black and white with regards to the events that took place in 1916. Clarke may have been a planner, but finding the rifle convinced me that he must have taken part in the fighting more than he is given credit for. We have already seen that Clarke did not want to surrender; I think that Clarke was fully prepared to fight as much as he had to in order to get the job done. When the rebels were retreating from the General Post Office, I can imagine that Clarke had his rifle raised along with the other fighters. He was not afraid to spill blood for Ireland, and the last thing he wanted was to experience another British prison. These brave men and women could not afford to have only one role in the Rising; every rebel had to understand the planning and be willing to fight for Irish Independence. Tom Clarke is not excluded. Even though he was the oldest rebel, Clarke understood that he had to fight along with his comrades to bring hope to a hopeless country.

The rifle is a Mauser Model 71, known today as the ‘Howth Rifle.’ Tom Clarke’s rifle has an engraving that reads “Seized Holy Week 1916 from the Magazine Arsenal and used by Tom J. Clarke during the Irish Struggle for Independence at the GPO HQ.” The Howth Rifle was fairly outdated at the time of the Rising; it could only fire about 5 rounds per minute. Even though the Howth Rifle was not a state of the art weapon, it was cheap and effective. The bullets it fired are slightly larger than the Lee Enfield (the common rifle of the British army), and the rifle had huge recoil. Seeing the types of weapons that the rebels had to scrape together stresses the fact that these men and women were mostly common people without much of a chance to actually overthrow their oppressors; however, the rebels understood that they did not have to succeed in their original goals. They simply had to get the ball rolling.