Unlike Roddy Doyle, the Norways witnessed the 1916 Rising. Their view of events was from upstairs, rather than the rat-infested slums, but prescient for all that. Arthur Hamilton Norway, the English head of the post office in Ireland, missed the Insurrection by a few minutes. Working in the GPO on Easter Monday morning, he was summoned to a meeting at Dublin Castle minutes before the insurgents occupied the building.
Otherwise he would have been the only fully-armed official in the GPO, because the military guard had been issued with guns but no ammunition. Norway had a loaded automatic pistol in his office which belonged to his son, Fred, who died shortly before on the Western Front, aged only 19. It was provided by his other son, who later achieved distinction as the novelist, Nevil Shute.
Mrs Hamilton Norway observed the destruction of Dublin from the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dawson Street. Her vivid narrative was first published in 1916. She noted that The Irish Times "very pluckily" brought out a paper on Easter Tuesday. It contained no reference to the Insurrection, "but a long account of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas". Revolutionary opera bouffe.
Her husband's memoir - found among the papers of Leon O Broin - is published here for the first time. Norway was scathing in his criticism of the Castle administration. He believed the Under-Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan, had fallen under the "fatal influence" of "that old and inveterate rebel", the parliamentary leader John Dillon. Nevertheless, he stood up to General John Maxwell, who demanded the wholesale dismissal of postal staff when martial law was imposed.
Norway regarded the Treaty settlement as a "disgraceful failure" for the British government: the Dominion status conceded "differed widely" from Home Rule. His wife commented acidly: "In Ulster the wind was sown and, my God, we have reaped the whirlwind."
Brendan O Cathaoir is an Irish Times journalist and a historian