A year after leaving Jersey to fight for king and country in the First World War, Bugler John Le Provost of the Jersey Pals Battalion was in the thick of the fighting in Dublin’s streets, dodging snipers’ bullets as British soldiers fought Irish nationalists in the Easter Rising.
In a letter home to his fiancée, Mary Le Signe, dated 8 May 1916, in which he enclosed a scrap of an Irish Republic flag taken as a souvenir, he described his part in the fighting around the rebel stronghold at Jacob’s Biscuit factory.
He wrote: ‘How I was not hit God only knows. I was standing in the street and a bullet passed between my arms and my ribs.’
