irishrepublicanarmy

It's all about mobility. Up and including the first years of WW2, most European armies had troops that used bicycles for speed and mobility. It's quicker than walking which is how most soldiers got from A to B 😀

Who stole his saddle?

Flickr is sometimes amazing! Via Indread Coal who says before 1903

beachcomber australia Looks as if there was a proper clip type yokey to keep the gun in place. It's the local innovation, the proposed boot mechanism, that I fell in love with when I saw this letter.

Tintin et Milou As long as the roads are somewhat paved.

NLI, I don't think this is suitable for public distribution . . . The way the world is today. Too many wannabe martyrs . . . I mean nitwits without any other purpose in life.

Taken from the link below:

"James O’Donovan was the primary ‘chemist/inventor’ of explosives for the IRA, and the person most responsible for developing and establishing Irish-centered explosive manufacturing. He was a post-graduate chemistry student at UCD and worked directly for Collins.

He began producing fulminate of mercury explosives in 1918 – a notoriously unstable compound. In 1919 Collins directed O’Donovan to develop an explosive that was more powerful, but that ‘men with no technical skill could produce it in a farmhouse kitchen… They have to be fairly foolproof because we can’t have people all over the country having their heads blown off!’

Irish War Flour was O’Donovan’s first original explosive, named after its appearance: it was a nitrated resin using the ingredients of resin, flour, acid and potassium chlorate. Irish War Flour was quite unstable and didn’t have the explosive power he wanted so he kept experimenting.

He called his second explosive compound Irish Cheddar, again named because of its looks. This was his nickname for a form of cheddite, an explosive used quite extensively in the early 20th century. Its ingredients were paraffin, potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene and castor oil."

www.irishcentral.com

Nicknames of the explosives ...

“Warflour”: Warflour was a nitrated resin, using the ingredients of resin, flour, acid and potassium chlorate.
“Irish Cheddar”: This was the nickname for a form of cheddite, an explosive used quite extensively in the early 20th century, its ingredients being potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene and castor oil. Some sources suggest that “Cheddar” included home made DNT.

Also "Paxo" a while later. See - www.standingwellback.com , which also has ...

The IRA also developed its own detonators at the time, and I won’t describe them here other than to say that interestingly they were non-metallic and quite an effective design.
In terms of IEDs, and further to my earlier post, the IRA of the time made several thousand grenades, mostly under the Dublin Bicycle shop at 198 Parnell St and latterly at other facilities. It appears that the design of these were copied from the German “Egg” grenade of WW1. These were essentially quite a simple design,small and preferred because they were easier to conceal than a larger grenade. They used the standard sort of fuze with a spring-loaded fly-off lever. Occasionally larger improvised grenades were used – this is a diagram of one of them, made by an IRA engineer involved in their manufacture.

CASSIDY PHOTOGRAPHY I really do take your point, Mr Cassidy, but I would suggest that people with harmful intentions and access to the internet can very quickly and easily find far more effective instructions, including step-by-step videos, than this sketch. It is a part of revolutionary Irish history, just like the gun carrier on a bicycle that we featured a while back, so we considered it worth including. Mary.

The bicycle shop Lawless and Heron was raided in December 1920 -
www.museum.ie

Read All About It ! via Trove - trove.nla.gov.au

Who's who in this photo?
Th officer (I'm going by the cut of his uniform) has Flying Corps wings above his campaign ribbons. campaign ribbons are also worn my the man to his right.
By the look of cap badges (a harp surmounted by a crown) and the dark uniforms they might be members of the RIC . The presence of a khaki clad officer also makes me think of RIC Auxiliaries, aka Black and Tans.

I'm assuming he's Auxiliary - those men were recruited from ex-WWI officers including the Royal Flying Corps. Most of the others seem to be Black and Tans. So many men (mostly WWI veterans) responded to British Government appeals for recruits to bolster R.I.C. (Royal Irish Constabulary) numbers, that there was a severe shortage of uniforms. Hence the Tans mostly ended up with khaki trousers and dark tops, either R.I.C. (dark green) or British police tunics (dark blue) - and hence the nickname...

For more on this attack, and some fascinating details on participants from both sides, see this link - irishconstabulary.com/topic/755/Q-Company

Peter Mc Thank you! Absolutely fascinating, and allowed me to tag with Q Company...
With regard to the "liquid fire" spoken of on irishconstabulary.com, the Irish Times reported that:
"... A sinister feature of the attack was the use of gas bombs and of bottles containing a thick red-brown corrosive liquid, which gave off nauseous fumes and partially choked the police occupants of the hotel..."

Peter Mc Very interesting, I read the account of the attack, fascinating!