Frederick Christian Dietrichsen
Captain and Adjutant, 2/7th Battalion, the Sherwood Foresters
by John McGuiggan
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Capt F. C. Dietrichsen died on a Dublin Street in 1916, shot by either Lt. Grace or Lt. Malone, probably by both. They were volunteers of the 3rd Battalion Irish volunteers under the command of Eamon De Valera and they had been carefully placed behind barricaded firing positions inside the bathroom of the grand and elegant house at number 25 Northumberland Road. Their firing positions dominated the approaches to Mount Street Bridge. Capt. Deitrichsen was the Adjutant of the Battalion of Sherwood Foresters, mostly young volunteer soldiers from Nottingham and Newark, who would carelessly and fatally march onto the gun sights of Grace and Malone and into the deadly ambush prepared by De Valera's men, whose main task was to prevent the soldiers crossing the little stone Mount Street bridge and linking up with the fighting already raging in the City centre. |
Before the war Deitrichsen had been a successful and wealthy barrister practising in Nottingham, the home the regiment, where they were known as the Robin Hoods. He came, as most barristers did in those days, from a wealthy family. They had made their money manufacturing underwear garments. But he was no stranger to Ireland for he had married to a Dublin girl, Beatrice Mitchell from Blackrock.
By 1916 Capt Deitrichsen and Beatrice had two children, aged, just 3 and 7 years. They lived exceptionally well in one of the more affluent residential districts of the City of Nottingham. The legal profession both in Ireland and in England were strong supporters of the Great War and Barrister Deitrichsen was one of the earliest to volunteer his services and join the army to fight in France.
With the war came Zeppelin Airships to drop bombs on Nottingham, an industrial area of some importance to the manufacture of armaments. His wife Beatrice decided that for the duration of the war she would return, with the children, to her parent's home in Blackrock where it was much safer than the industrial cities of England, now opened to enemy bombing. Besides, she and the children would have been alone in Nottingham now that her husband had taken a commission and gone to the trenches.
And so she left Nottingham for the peace of Ireland, to live at her parent's substantial home in the then largely rural suburb of Blackrock. Of course she did not know when she left Nottingham that rebellion would break out in Dublin. Nor did she know that the soldiers that would be sent to crush the rebellion would include amongst them, her dear husband.
What joy it must have been therefore to be on the coast Road that Easter holiday and to see, in the spring sunshine, the soldiers marching into Dublin from Kingstown and to especially see, marching at the head of the soldiers her own dear husband. And for the children, how exciting it must have been to see daddy and his soldiers marching in his uniform. The soldiers did not halt but Capt. Deitrichsen left the column to embrace his dear Beatrice and to embrace his dear infants, in their joy and their pure surprise and delight. It was but a brief embrace for he had to hurry back to his soldiers and march on to Dublin and the little stone bridge, to his destiny - brief but so full of joy.
Within an hour or so of that heartfelt embrace he would be dead, shot down on Northumberland Road. His dear Beatrice and his dear infants would not have heard the shots that struck so fatally into his body, for Blackrock was far from Northumberland Road. But little doubt that even as he fell in the sudden volley of rebel bullets, even as he lay in the English blood that now stained the Northumberland Road, that in Blackrock, his wife and children remained quite ecstatic at the unforeseen fortune that had brought their Fredrick here, to Ireland, and equally ecstatic with the great hope that he might soon be able to find some time to spend with the family in Blackrock.
He fell at the very first volley from the house at number 25 . His soldiers, many of them with less than eight weeks in the Army, carried him into one of those grand houses that grace that very English like suburb that is Northumberland Road, and there he died. The first widow of what was to become that Mount Street Bridge slaughter was the Blackrock Dubliner, Beatrice Mitchell. There were to be many others for the Mount Street Rebels, just eighteen of them successfully held off two battalions of the Robin Hoods and inflicted upon them the heaviest casualties of the whole Rebellion, it was to be the Rorke's drift of the Rising.
But
it does not take much to imagine the distress that would have been visited
upon the Mitchell household of Blackrock. That fine soldier who had
but hours ago embraced his family was now gone. Ecstasy turned to utter
despair; excited children now confused not knowing the reason for the
Blackrock house turned to tears.
His Blackrock family took Capt. Deitrichsen and buried him with, no
doubt with bitter tears, in Deans Grange Cemetery so that he would be
close to Blackrock and close to his Irish widow. And he lies there still,
in his scruffy and neglected grave, un-remembered, unvisited, forgotten
by history his name hardly legible, eroded as it is by the 90 winters
that have passed since that Easter day.
History has not yet discovered what became of the widow and the children of Capt Deitrichsen or whether any member of the family still survives. The world of that period was unfortunately, awash with widows. Nor has it yet been possible to trace the Mitchell's of Blackrock although the condition of Capt. Deitrichsen's grave suggests they did not stay long in Ireland. Perhaps this Easter week when we remember 1916, with fine military parades, marching bands, republican bunting and proud politicians, it would not hurt to remember such soldiers and their Irish widows, and perhaps visit Capt. Dietrichsen's scruffy un-remembered grave and say a prayer for his lost and un-remembered soul and his forgotten sacrifice on that Easter day so long ago., For whether we like it or not, after all these years it is not unfair to describe Capt Deitrichsen, as much as anyone who died that day, as one of those who died for Ireland.
John McGuiggan
Capt. A.A. Dickson's (2/7th Battalion) account of the rising is also available on site, here.