It Started With A Pic

Molly & Sam Edmonds at The Grand Hotel 1951

s we’ve learnt over the past five years, whilst pulling together thousands of archive images of Greystones, a picture can speak a thousand words.

Charlie standing, Eddie & oar, with pop Sam

Maybe even four or five thousand, depending on how much you’ve had to drink.

Take, for example, a simple family pic of a father, Sam, renting a boat at Greystones harbour, and heading out to sea, with his sons, Charlie and Eddie, way back in 1962.

Or the same man and his good lady wife, Molly, dancing to the pulsating accordion sounds of Larry Cunningham on a Longford road, in 1950, as they celebrate Charlie’s wedding.

Back when dancing at the crossroads was pretty much Ireland’s Studio 54.

Sam & the missus at Charlie’s wedding Longford 1950

Not only is that moment frozen forever, but so too is the journey to that point, and all the possibilities that lie ahead – all are there, along with the sense of time and place, of history itself – of a family, of a country, of the world – suspended in the blink of a camera.

Photographs that seem casual, maybe even a little throwaway, at the time, but linger on. For decades, centuries…

Then there’s the young soldier, staring straight down the lens of the camera, defiant, proud, scared, embarrassed and determined, having just lived through the Easter Rising the year before.

Samuel Edmonds Royal Horse Artillery

The first picture of the batch that GG got from Heathervue resident Victor Edmonds was the Grand Hotel beauty, proud couple Sam and Molly, enjoying the sun on a glorious Greystones day in 1951.

Young Victor emailed the pic over to us because he reckoned he had a story that we might like to share. And, bejaysus, he wasn’t wrong.

For his grandfather, Samuel Edmonds, was present at two very pivotal moments in the Irish Civil War, having been one of the riflemen in Crossley Tender, who were accompanying Michael Collins on August 22nd, 1922, when the Irish revolutionary leader was assassinated at Béal na Bláth. Just three months later, Sam was part of the 15-man firing squad that would bring an end to Erskine Childers’ life at Beggars Bush Barracks, on November 24th.

It was a part of his life that Sam Edmonds never spoke about with his family, and one that his grandson only stumbled across when researching his own father’s time in the Irish Army, between 1940 and 1945. The military archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks informed Victor that they also had his grandfather’s records, and would he be interested…

Duffy, Childers, Barton, Griffith

Over the last eight years, Victor has meticulously researched the times, the politics and the people surrounding Sam Edmonds’ remarkable Civil War experiences, bringing all those years of work together in a book, Two Deaths In ’22, which he hopes to now find a publisher for.

In the meantime, we sat down with Victor this afternoon – as his lovely wife, Fran, got lunch ready, and their dog, Maxi, got to know GG’s trusty Max – to find out more…

For any smart publishers out there, you can get in touch with the man himself on [email protected]. This article first appeared on February 2nd, 2018.