The GPO 1916

By the end of Easter week Dublin’s GPO was just a smouldering shell and it was clear that a new sorting office had to be urgently found. The Rotunda Rink, a large steel and wooden structure within what was Rutland Square Gardens, was officially requisitioned by the Postmaster General and immediately fitted out as a temporary sorting office. When Mrs Norway, wife of the Post Office Secretary, visited it, she was highly impressed with the industry of the staff; ‘a regular hive of bees’, she observed, with no postal fittings but what they ‘had contrived for themselves out of seats, benches and old scenery’. Remarkably, just three days after the end of hostilities, the GPO’s physical infrastructure had been reorganised and two daily postal deliveries reinstated in Dublin.

The resumption of routine postal work was a sign that Dublin had returned to some kind of normality and the part played by GPO staff in achieving this so quickly was appreciated. It took a little longer to regularise the Department’s use of the Rotunda’s premises but the following year an indenture was signed with the Governors. The Postmaster General agreed to pay £235 and carry on postal business in a manner which would do no injury to the health and comfort of the Rotunda’s patients. As so often happens, what had been set up as emergency sorting accommodation put down roots and might still be there, indeed, but for the fact that it was destroyed by antiTreaty troops in November 1922.

Mrs Norway, wife of the Post Office Secretary observed ‘a regular hive of bees’ with no postal fittings but what they ‘had contrived for themselves out of seats, benches and old scenery’.

Aware of the photographer’s presence, postal staff pause briefly from their work handling the mail back-log at the temporary sorting office in the Rotunda gardens.

Post Office workers at the temporary sorting office in the Rotunda, May 1916. Benches are stacked to facilitate sorting.© Royal Mail Group Ltd. 2016, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive

National Army soldiers - fire at the Rotunda Rink

Against a background of theatrical drapes, the postal divisions of “America” and “Canada” hsve been roughly chalked up on the walls to facilitate sorting of mail at the Rotunda sorting office. © Royal Mail Group Ltd. 2016, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive

Under a watchful supervisory eye, junior clerks and boy messengers at the Rotunda get started on sorting the postal backlog accumulated during the rebellion. © Royal Mail Group Ltd. 2016, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive