A few minutes’ walk from the top of Dublin’s Grafton Street is Bishop Street. The buildings of the Dublin Institute of Technology and the National Archives dominate much of the street, and preserved in the college’s modern façade are two pieces of old stone, each incised with the words ‘W. & R. JACOB & Co.’. The buildings stand on the site of the Jacob’s biscuit factory, famous in many countries for its fig rolls and cream crackers, and in Ireland at least for being an important rebel garrison during the Easter Rising of 1916.

William Beale Jacob was the first child born into a Quaker family in Waterford in 1825, and though he was only 14 when his father Isaac died, he entered the family bakery in Bridge Street, which was run by his mother Anne until William and his brother Robert were of an age to take over. In 1850, shortly after his marriage, William agreed with Robert that the firm should expand its offering from bread to the rather sweetly named fancy biscuits which had been rising in popularity as a snack, and were already being made by other bakers, including another Quaker firm, the well-known Carrs of Carlisle. The brothers established a new premises on the Quay, but were soon investigating a move to Dublin, and by 1853 were installed in a property at 5–6 Peter’s Row, bounded on one side by Big Butter Lane, which we now know as Bishop Street. The new factory was kitted out with a 14-horse power travelling oven, which ran the uncooked biscuits through the heat on a conveyor belt, and soon two further travelling ovens were added.

In October of 1861, Robert Jacob, only five years married and with two young children, was killed in an accident while walking on the cliffs at Tramore. Awful as it must have been for William to lose his brother, Robert’s new widow must have been barely able to stand the loss, coupled as it was with the death of her husband’s walking companion, her own brother, James Walpole. William continued the business alone for a few years and then brought in his brother-in-law George Newsom and his son George Newsom Jacob.

In the 1880s Jacob’s started the development of a new type of savoury biscuit based on the cracker, which was gaining popularity in America. Jacob’s first crackers were called Canadian crackers, but after little more research and testing they produced in 1885 the ‘extremely light, rich and flakey’ cream cracker, which proved to be a bestseller, as it has remained. Their reputation spread at least as far as Germany: in 1893 Prince Frederick Leopold had such a yearning for Jacob’s cream crackers that he ordered six tins to be sent to him in Berlin. And as well as new product development, the 1880s also saw the beginning of the company’s expansion into England: by 1906 they would have depots in London and Liverpool.

One of the most difficult periods for Jacob’s was Ireland’s revolutionary period of 1913–23. Jacob’s workers had already been on strike in 1910 and 1911, partially organised by the 18- year-old Jacob’s messenger Rosie Hackett, after whom the new bridge, built in 2013 to cross the Liffey near Liberty Hall, is named. Across the city tension was tightening, and by the summer of 1913, in an attempt to crush the nascent unions, many employers required employees to choose between union membership and their jobs. In late September 400 employers had locked out more than 20,000 workers. At Jacob’s, some workers refused to handle flour from Shackleton’s Mills, a Quaker firm in Lucan who had locked out workers; Jacob’s issued an order that all goods were to be handled, whether or not they were from businesses who had locked out workers. Almost a thousand Jacob’s workers then said they would refuse to work at all, and the factory was promptly closed: only those workers who renounced James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union were to be allowed back to work. Any workers who refused were replaced.

As the situation dragged on, a rather desperate publicity piece was published in the Irish Times. It described “the ideal factory in Dublin” with its “biscuits and benefits”. While the article’s photograph of the “girl employees” who were “at play” on the roof garden does make one think of a Victorian father confidently assuming his unseen children to be happy and well-occupied in their top-floor nursery, it’s true that the doctor, dentist and swimming baths must have greatly improved life at the factory. But it was clearly not at that time a “hive of happiness”, as the newspaper suggested. Jacob’s, now run by George Jacob, would not give in over the Lockout, and the dispute continued at Jacob’s until May 1914.

When war broke out across Europe, it brought problems with supplies of raw materials such as sugar, as well as the loss of almost 400 workers to the British Army. But there were commercial opportunities, and Jacob’s ended up supplying an astonishing 1.2 million packets of biscuits a week to army canteens, and setting their tinmaking department to make circular mess tins with handles, which went to the troops at the front. 1916, of course, brought conflict at home, and on Easter Monday, when the factory was quiet apart from a few workers who had come in to do small maintenance jobs which couldn’t be left, about 150 men under Thomas McDonagh’s command entered the factory at Bishop Street.

The caretaker and watchman quickly rang George Jacob, just before the telephone lines were cut. The workers were sent home, although the caretaker, Thomas Orr, said he would not leave, and the watchman, Henry Fitzgerald, was detained in the factory with him and a couple of Dublin Metropolitan Police detectives. So the week’s occupation began, behind barricades of flour sacks. Orr made three requests of McDonagh: not to allow anyone to smoke in the factory; to attend to the horses, or to allow them to be attended to; and to be allowed to communicate with George Jacob about the removal of the horses. This last McDonagh refused. The rebels in return made requests of Orr and Fitzgerald, who weren’t particularly eager to comply. They flatly refused to peel potatoes as instructed, so the two DMP detectives had to do it instead.

The mood in the factory, which had been so optimistic and excited on Monday, was already turning by Wednesday or Thursday. McDonagh left on Sunday, with a Capuchin priest and a flag of truce, to meet the other leaders, and when he returned he told the men that a surrender had been agreed. Most of the men were devastated.

One of the officers, Eamon Price, wrote afterwards: “Men, old in the movement, seeing their dearest hopes dashed to the ground became hysterical, weeping openly, dashing their rifles against the walls…” They filed out of the factory and under a British Army guard walked “to Richmond Barracks, which some were to leave for execution, the others for prison”.

At the factory, the clearing up operation took several days and included the disposal of a hundred or so bombs, but production soon started again. Gradually, over the following years, business returned to normal conditions, if such conditions can ever really exist.

The Bishop Street factory stopped production in 1977 and the premises was sold off. By then Jacob’s, now part of Irish Biscuits Ltd, was past its troubles and the name remains a global brand to this day.