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| Badge of the Sherwood Forester Regiment, depicts a stag surrounded by oak leaves over a Maltese Cross and topped with a crown © National Army Museum. |
Despite the fact that the British army were by now making preparations to deploy troops to Ireland for ‘Home Defense', when Patrick Pearse read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on Monday, 24 April 1916, they had been caught badly off guard. Shortly after the Proclamation was read, London was made aware of the uprising and before the end of the day, British troops in northeast England were mobilised to supplement those already stationed in Ireland to suppress the unrest.
Among the troops mobilised were two battalions of the Sherwood Foresters, the 2/7th, (the 'Robin Hoods’) and the 2/8th. They departed by train for Liverpool on the morning of the 25th, and in the evening sailed to the Irish port of Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire). Many of the enlisted men and even some of the officers did not know their intended destination.
When the order for mobilisation was received, many of the Foresters were recruits still in training. The training they had received was for the trench warfare common to the Western Front. This was to prove inadequate for the situation they found themselves in in Dublin, engaged in urban warfare in a large built-up area.
(Papadopoulos & Schreibman, 2019; Maconchy, 1920).