Appendix 4
Welsh connections to the Easter Rising
- Erskine Childers kept his yacht Asgard in Conwy harbour in North Wales and after the Howth gun-running she went to Dickie’s boatyard in Bangor Gwynedd, which still exists today. The yacht was sold by the family in the 1920s.
- Colonel Fred Crawford in the UVF gun-running was picked up twice in North Wales in the course of the Larne gun running – once off the seafront at Llandudno and once off the breakwater at Holyhead.
- The Frongoch internment camp for the Easter Rising rebels was a disused whisky distillery and German PoW camp near Bala in North Wales. The local junior school is on the site of one of the two camps at Frongoch and the children regularly go to Dublin to learn of the connection of their village with Ireland.
- Hon Mary Ellen Spring-Rice died in a tuberculosis sanatorium at Llangwfyan near Denbigh in 1924 and is buried on her family’s former estate near Foynes, County Limerick.
- Holyhead port was a major thoroughfare for troop reinforcements and for politicians going back and forth. (It is today the second busiest port in the UK).
- Connolly’s secretary Winifrid Carney married her husband George McBride, ex 36th Ulster Divn veteran, in Holyhead Registry Office in 1928. Their address is given as the Albany Hotel in Church Street, Holyhead. This would have been a suitable venue away from their respective relations, and easy to reach by train and ferry from Ireland.
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