This is the story of my grandfather, Joseph Brady, who was bom in Dublin, Ireland, in September 1884 and died in Loughton, knocked down by a bus in October 1943. All the information has been compiled by my uncle, Desmond Brady, partially from the Cheshire regimental records and also from letters written between my grandfather, his wife Ethel and his sister Lucy.
In between the many events that occurred during his lifetime I wish to briefly mention his career and the 1916 Irish Easter uprising. At the start of his career, he joined the British army as a Private possibly under age (originally the Royal Dublin Fusiliers but later transferred to the Cheshire regiment in 1904) around 1899 and served in South Africa, India and finally Europe in the First World War.
At the start of the First World War, he had been promoted to Colour Sergeant with the second Battalion Cheshire regiment at Ypres and by the end of the war he had served four turns of duty having been wounded 3 times, promoted to Major and awarded the Military Cross. After each wounding he was sent back to England for a number of months recuperation and a son or daughter appears to have arrived 9 months later. After his promotion to Second Lieutenant in 1916, he writes to his wife that he continued to wear his steel helmet and carry a rifle rather than an officers hat and a pistol when going over the top. This may explain in part his survival to the end of the war; the life span of a second Lieutenant during that period was only a matter of months rather than a year. The promotion from Private to Major in the space of less than eighteen years I feel has to be quite rare at the beginning of the twentieth century especially as the Army was split in two parts - officers and other ranks.
The second episode is taken from a letter written by my grandfather’s sister, Lucy, from Dublin as an Irish Catholic to my grandmother. In the letter dated 25th April 1916 she writes in her own words of the Irish Rebellion in Dublin in great detail. She describes various events of the fighting and the problems occurring within Dublin and the general destruction. The main theme of her letter is that; “The great majority of the public are opposed to this dreadful thing. We are now certain that everyone will look on all Irish as wild savages.” These are her words that I find very interesting from an Irish Catholic living in Dublin in 1916.