Ambulance log book provides account of Easter Rising

A log book kept by the Dublin Fire Brigade’s ambulance service during the 1916 Easter Rising has been bought at auction by the city council and will go on public display from tomorrow. The hand-written ledger provides a previously unknown account of the response of the emergency services to the rebellion. It is probably the first written record of the events of the Rising, compiled as they happened.

The document will be available for viewing at Dublin City Library & Archive in Pearse Street from this morning and it is planned that the contents will eventually be digitsed and published online.

In a statement, Dublin City Council said it had acquired the log-book but did not mention that it was bought at auction. A bidder for the council beat off competition form private collectors at Whyte's History sale with a winning bid of euro 3,800. However, auction fees added to the hammer price raised the price paid by the council to euro 4,700.

Ironically, the log-book had been consigned to auction by an unnamed vendor whose grandfather worked in Dublin Corporation and had rescued it from a skip when it was being dumped in an office clearance.

The log, kept by ‘B Station’ at Tara Street, provides a dramatic hour-by-hour, and sometimes minute-by-minute account of the historic events. The record Easter Monday, April 24th - the day the Rising began - commences just after midnight and the early hours were uneventful. Later that morning, the duty officer recorded that some of the firemen: - Messrs Byrne, Collins, Keane, McDonagh, Power and Redmond - were “on leave”, presumably because of the bank holiday.

The Rising began at 12 noon on and the log-book recorded the first casualties at 1.52pm when the ambulance took three dead and two wounded British soldiers from the 6th Lancers and a civilian, John Reilly of Rathfarnham who had been “wounded in stomack”, to Jervis Street Hospital.

The first child injured, according to the log-book, was “James Hoare age 13 of Nth Cumberland St” who had suffered a “cut on nose” after “plate glass fell on him” possibly following an explosion.