Sergeant Alfred Dunne

My great-grandfather, Alfred Dunne, came from a British army family, and he followed suit by joining the Irish Light Infantry in 1891. He enjoyed drinking and socialising with friends; while stationed in Hamilton, Scotland, with the Highland Light Infantry (1903-7), he greatly enjoyed Highland Saturday Nights, when the men dressed up and waxed their moustaches before heading to the canteen for a night of drinking. Before WWI, he was with the Worcestershires in India (the North-West Frontier) and the Second Boer War (the South African War). During WWI, he was in Ypres with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, having joined them on 4 November 1914. At the Second Battle of Ypres (1915), he is said to have jumped up and asked to be shot: everyone around him was shot, but not him. He joined the Royal Dublin Rifles after the Fusiliers were defeated. He is mentioned in dispatches by General Hickey, and received 1914-15 honours. The times he was on campaign, his wife Kitty would pawn their furniture and move in with her family, and then she would buy it back for when he came back to Ireland on leave. While on leave, he was tasked with reporting deaths to mourning families, which caused him distress. Though he was a professional soldier, he did not support the war, and he said of Irish-British involvement: "We were foolish, and we were fooled." He was discharged from the British army on17 June 1920; he had trained as a fitter in the army, but worked various jobs in Dublin after the war. He had 4 daughters, and my grandmother received a pair of boots every year from the British army on account of his military service.