Irish Kilts & Tartan

Another kilt-wearing Irish nationalist aristocrat was William Gibson, 2nd Baron Ashborne. Like Leslie, Ashborne had been educated at Oxford and Trinity College in Dublin (known for its strong Unionist sympathies). When Ashborne was first admitted to the House of Lords in May, 1913, the New York Times reported that there was great curiosity if he would wear his saffron kilt to Westminster. Such an act might have caused an incident, as some months before, the House of Commons refused to admit an Irishman to the stranger’s gallery because he was wearing a kilt. (May 1913)

When his father, Edward Gibson, 1st Baron Ashborne, died that same year, the New York Times reported that he received only $4,000 from his father’s estate because “he is an enthusiastic Nationalist, wears the ancient Irish dress, and is a convert to Catholicism.” (July 22, 1913).

Another nationalist, who was later killed in the Easter Uprising of 1916, Eamonn Ceannt, wore a kilt when playing the uileann pipes during an audience with the Pope in 1908. (O’Neill, p. 44) Indeed, kilts were quickly adopted by a number of pipers and pipe bands in Ireland in the days before the First World War. Several of these bands are still in existence, including the Black Raven Pipe Band, the St. Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band and the Youghal Pipe Band.

Many of these pipe bands were formed during the renewal of the national game of hurling, as part of the larger “Gaelic Revival” of the late 19th and early 20th century. In the case of the Black Raven Pipe band, it was in connection with the Naomh Mac Cullen Hurling Club of Fingal.

According to the band’s web site, a pipe band that accompanied a rival club from County Armagh made quite the impression on a club member and school teacher named Thomas Ashe, who soon acquired a set of pipes and began to teach himself how to play. In 1910 Ashe began to organize a band and recruit new members. He contacted the noted Belfast antiquarian Mr. F J Bigger to assist with the design of the band’s uniform, which included the kilt.

In 1911, the band paraded for the first time with its new uniform, which included two versions. The first one was a black tunic, green kilt and white plaid shawl. The second uniform was white tunic, saffron kilt and black plaid shawl. The band marched under a reproduction of the Black Raven flag, said to have been captured by the forces of King Brian Boru from the Danes at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The band competed against a number of rival bands in national competitions until 1916, when several of the members joined the Easter Rebellion against British rule. The founder, Thomas Ashe, would die as a result of a hunger strike in prison in 1917.

The history of the Youghal Pipe Band, founded in 1914 by one Danny McCarthy, may have something to tell us about regarding the adoption of the kilt by Irish pipers and nationalists. Youghal, in County Cork, had long been a garrison town for units of the British Army stationed in Ireland; the band’s history reports that McCarthy “would watch the Pipe Bands of the British Army parade their Regiments down Cork Hill and out to the train station every couple of months,” and would also go to the barracks to listen to the bands. Eventually he organized the formation of the Cork Hill Pipe Band, which later renamed itself after the town of Youghal.

McCarthy and several members of the band were members of the Irish Volunteers, a Nationalist paramilitary force which later became the Irish Republican Army during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1922. Pipe bands became an important recruiting tool for Nationalist forces; in a biography of IRA leader Terence MacSwiney, Moirin Chavasse discusses how a pipe band was used in October, 1915 as part of a recruiting drive for the Volunteers. (Terence MacSwiney, p.35)

IRA pipe bands even had yearly competitions; The Cork Volunteer Pipe Band was named as the “Prize Pipe Band” in competitions held in Killarney (1918), Cork (1918-1919) Dublin (1920) and Wexford (1922), according to information on the personal genealogical web site of Bryan Wickham. Wickham’s father, Michael, later immigrated to the United States, where he joined the New York Corkmen’s Society Pipe Band.

At least one suggestion was made in 1914 for all members of the Irish Volunteers to wear the kilt; in the organizations’ newspaper of February 14 of that year, one William Royce called for the adoption of the kilt by the volunteers, saying that the only objections to such a move would “come from the skinny-legged, knick-kneed type for whose faulty or undeveloped ‘understandings’ the pants as a covering are a veritable Godsend.” (Kelly, p. 219)

The most famous Irish nationalist associated with the kilt, however, is Patrick Pearse. Like many members of the Gaelic League and the larger Celtic Revival, Pearse (himself the son of an Englishman) sought to distance himself from all things English. Pearse joined the Gaelic League in 1905 and soon took an interest in the Irish educational system. Concerned that Irish children, especially boys, were losing their “Irish” identity in an English-dominated school system, Pearse used his life-savings and borrowed funds to form St. Enda’s School for Boys in 1908. The school offered a bilingual education in English and Gaelic, as well a curriculum in “traditional” Irish culture.

As part of his attempt to restore “Irishness” to the educational system, Pearse wished to adopt “traditional” Irish dress. After viewing a pair of trews, coat and cloak found at Killery in County Sligo, which dates to the early seventeenth century, Pearse wrote to John O’Kelly in October 1900 about his ideas on a potential Irish national dress to be worn at a Gaelic League Feis, or Irish cultural festival:

Frankly I would much rather see you arrayed in a kilt, although it may be less authentic (author’s emphasis) than in a pair of these trews. You would, if you appeared in the latter, run the risk of leading the spectators to imagine that you had forgotten to don your trousers and sallied forth in your draws. This would be fatal to the dignity of a Feis. If you adopt a costume, let it, at all events, have some elements of picturesqueness.( Dunlevy, p. 176)

Pearse eventually did adopt a saffron kilt as a uniform for the boys of St. Enda’s, suggesting to parents that the kilt was “economical, hygienic, and [a] becoming costume for boys” as well as a “distinctly national form of dress.” Pearse also recommended that the garments be Irish made, and directed parents to purchase them at Messrs. M. Meers and Co. of 10 Lower Pembroke Street, Dublin.