Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  The administration of the camps – indeed, practically all internal administrative power in Syria – was in Free French hands. Nonetheless, when Sir Patrick Coghill assumed command of the British Security Mission in the summer of 1942, he was from that time on responsible for the continued detention of Joseph Dakak. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of my grandfather in Coghill’s autobiographical papers, which I read in an Oxford library. There was, however, another omission which did strike me as a little curious. Although he referred frequently to his life and home in Castletownshend, West Cork, and to his family, Sir Patrick Coghill made no reference to his uncle, who also lived in the village of Castletownshend, Admiral Somerville.

  4

  There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic.

  – Albert Camus, The Rebel

  Shortly after nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday 24 March 1936, the occupants of The Point, Castletownshend, County Cork – Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville and his wife – heard footsteps on the gravel path outside their dining room window. Mrs Somerville said to her husband, ‘Perhaps that’s one of the boys coming to see you’ – the boys, in this case, being the young men of the locality who dropped by to ask the Admiral’s help in joining the British navy. ‘I’ll go and see,’ the Admiral said. He rose to his feet to receive the visitors personally: the cook and the housemaid were out for the evening at a play presented in the village by a travelling company. There was a knocking at the door. Admiral Somerville picked up an oil lamp, crossed the hall, and stepped into the porch at the entrance to the house. Mrs Somerville, who remained in the dining room, heard an indistinct voice outside the glass-panelled front door: ‘Are you Mr Somerville?’ ‘I am Admiral Somerville,’ Somerville replied correctly. Mrs Somerville heard gunshots and the sound of glass shattering. She grabbed a lamp and rushed into the hall. As she entered, a strong gust of wind blew in through the open door of the porch, extinguishing the flame she carried. Mrs Somerville found herself in complete darkness. She called her husband’s name – ‘Boyle! Boyle!’ – but received no response. All that was audible was the sound of footsteps – the steps of two persons, was her impression – retreating down the gravel avenue towards the gate of the house. Mrs Somerville advanced in the darkness towards the porch. She saw her husband lying motionless by the doorway among the broken remains of his lamp.

  Alongside the body was a piece of cardboard on which letters cut from newspapers had been glued. The message read, ‘This British agent has sent 52 boys to the British Army in the last few months.’

  By order of Chief Superintendent McCarthy, the Corkman initially in charge of the investigation, the body was left untouched until the arrival from Dublin, on Thursday, of Chief Superintendent Woods of the Special Crimes Department, and Chief Superintendent Sheridan, Head of the Technical Bureau of the Civic Guards. Friday saw the arrival of Commandant Stapleton, the Free State army’s ballistics expert, and Dr John McGrath, the State Pathologist, who carried out a post-mortem examination.

  At the inquest held later that day in the Somerville home, Dr McGrath gave evidence that the body was that of an elderly man, 5 feet 11 inches in height, dressed in a dinner suit and a bloodstained white dress shirt. On examination, the pathologist found six wounds. The first was a bullet wound in the left groin at the level of the pubis. The direction of the wound was from the left of the deceased towards the right, and downwards. The bullet was extracted from muscles in the right thigh, having travelled through the belly cavity, puncturing the intestine twice, and through the pubic bone. The second wound was situated at the crest of the ilium on the left side. This wound also tracked in a downwards direction. Dr McGrath found the bullet in the muscles on the right side of the small of the back. Wound number three was in the chest, situated 1½ inches to the left of the midline and 2¾ inches above the nipple line. This wound went partly through the breastbone, then through the membranes that covered the heart, then it punctured the left artery of the heart at a point above the heart. Then the track went under the lining and through the back of the chest wall between the third and fourth ribs; it continued through the muscles of the back and the shoulder-blade bone, and terminated in the muscles at the back of the shoulder-blade, where a bullet was lodged. The fourth and fifth wounds (an entrance wound and an exit wound on the left upper arm caused by a bullet passing through and breaking the bone) were the only horizontal wounds. The sixth wound was at the angle of the lower jaw, an inch in front and below the left earlobe. The track of this wound was through the jawbone, which was broken, then downwards and rightwards and through the front of the spine, and through the tissues of the neck and the right shoulder blade, and finally into the muscles on the right side of the spine. Here another bullet was found. In total, at least five shots were fired.

  The State Solicitor, a Mr T. Healy, addressed the inquest jury at length. He described Admiral Somerville as ‘the descendant of a proud family, the descendant of people who won distinction at home and abroad, the descendant of one of our incorruptible band who had fought to keep in this country a Parliament which had legislated for the entire country, the descendant of one who had disdained rank and wealth in order to fight for that Parliament which legislated for 32 counties and not for a dismembered and partitioned country.’ This was a reference to a great-grandfather of the deceased, Charles Kendal Bushe (1767–1843), the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland from 1822 to 1842, who in January 1800 spoke in the Dublin parliament against its forthcoming union with the English parliament. People also noted that the Admiral’s father, Tom Somerville, had been a friend of a local republican hero, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915). O’Donovan Rossa died in New York, and it was on the occasion of the repatriation of his remains, at Glasnevin Cemetery, that the republican Patrick Pearse famously proclaimed, ‘Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations … [T]he fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’

  The deceased, Mr Healy continued, was a man who ‘had acted as a kindly gentleman to all, and everybody who came to him for help and aid was assisted by him’. The suggestion that he was a recruiting agent for the British armed forces was, Healy stated, false. ‘Admiral Somerville never asked, sought or induced any person to join that army or navy, but when people came to him and asked him for a recommendation he gave it freely in so far as it lay in his power where he knew people, and when he did not know them he told them the procedure to be adopted. But he used no influence to get any man or boy into the English navy. Now, if every person who had signed a recommendation for boys to join the English navy is to be shot, I am afraid there will be a great number of people in this country who will be shot, because men in all stages and positions, clergy, have signed such recommendations. Surely, the least that might have been given to the deceased was a warning that his action was distasteful, and was regarded as unworthy of the conduct of Irishmen. No notice or warning was given to the deceased, but instead he was hurled to his death. No stain will lie on the memory of the deceased where he was known, and throughout the country the action which has taken place is abhorrent, and I again repeat that every effort will be made to trace the authors of it, though goodness knows, with modern means of communication, the assassin has the advantage on his side.’

  The State Solicitor’s gloomy remark was directed at the fact that the killers had fled in a car that two schoolgirls had seen driving away from the house at great speed. It was not until the following day that guards arrived. A minute investigation began. Castings were taken of the tyre-marks left by the car, photographs and measurements were taken of the scene, fingerprints and footprints were thoroughly examined. A week after the homicide, forensic searches were still being carried out at Point House.

  While the detectives went about their work, more details began to emerge in the press about the late Admiral. He was born in Castletownshend in 18
63, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville (who served as High Sheriff of Cork in 1888) and Adelaide, daughter of Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, Bt. Ships on which the Admiral served included the HMS Shandon, the Agincourt, the Audacious, the Heroine, the Sphinx and the HMS Sealark. He had seen active service in the Chilean–Peruvian war and the first Egyptian war, and as a hydrographic surveyor had sailed in waters by China and Ceylon and in the western and eastern Pacific Ocean. During the Great War he had commanded the Victorian, Argonaut, Amphitrite and King Alfred. He was awarded the CMG and made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur. After his retirement from the navy in 1919, the Admiral was employed by the Hydrographic Department at the British Admiralty. He wrote several books, including dictionaries of languages spoken in New Hebrides and New Georgia, Solomon Islands. Writing ran in the family: Edith Somerville, co-author of the Somerville and Ross books, was his sister. Boyle – the Christian name he went by – Somerville was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society and a Vice-President of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. He was a charitable man and frequently contributed to the funds of the Skibbereen Conference of the (Catholic) St Vincent de Paul Society.

  And indeed the assassination outraged the Catholic Church. In an address that was read out in every parish in his diocese, the Bishop of Ross stated that in respect of the crime there was ‘no single circumstance to palliate guilt in the slightest. It was not the result of sudden and overwhelming passion, an outbreak of uncontrollable excitement, momentarily taking away the full use of reason. No. It was a well-planned, carefully thought out and deliberately organized crime, with every move coolly forecasted and every precaution taken to ensure the subsequent safety of the perpetrator. It bore every mark of the crime of the coward, who will strike only when assured of impunity.… It is to be hoped,’ the bishop said, ‘that this awful crime will be a warning to our young men, who may be tempted to join Secret Societies, so often and deservedly condemned by the Catholic Church.’

  Condemnation also came from the political establishment. In the Dáil, a government spokesman sympathized with the relations of the victim of ‘this cowardly crime’, and Cork County Council also passed a resolution expressing its sympathies. Councillor D. O’Callaghan said that the Admiral, whom he’d known for fifty years, never did anything in his life that either Catholic or Protestant could be ashamed of. He was an idol of the people. He was not a recruiting agent for the British. Mr O’Callaghan himself had recommended persons to British armed forces for the last twenty to thirty years, poor men who came home with a pension of £300 and £400 to support their families. Senator Fitzgerald, speaking on behalf of Fianna Fáil, stated that even if the Somerville family differed from the rest of the country with respect to the national outlook, there must be room in this country for all shades and classes of opinion. (Hear, hear.) Mr O’Mahony, who wished to be associated with the vote, said that the Somerville family had, in the past, suffered for its convictions as far as Irish nationalism was concerned. Mr O’Mahony did not agree with the Admiral politically, but it was a terrible thing that he had received no warning.

  The Admiral’s funeral took place on 28 March 1936. The Cork Examiner showed a photo of a procession of hundreds following the coffin down the main street. Among the mourners, the newspaper reported, was the nephew of the deceased, Sir Patrick Coghill, who had travelled from Britain for the funeral.

  The furore continued in the newspapers, and politicians and priests urged anyone who knew something to come forward. Rumours began to circulate that inquiries had extended into Kerry and that an arrest was imminent. But nobody was ever arrested for the murder of Admiral Somerville.

  In time, one important fact entered the public domain: action of some kind against Admiral Somerville was authorized by Tom Barry, then the IRA OC (Officer Commanding) in County Cork. Decades after Somerville’s death, Barry went on record that an IRA squad had been instructed to ‘get’ the Admiral, but that ‘the leader of the IRA squad, not the most stable of men, apparently was carried away, and interpreted his orders quite literally, and shot the Admiral dead’.

  What most intrigued me about Barry’s oddly vague account was its attempt to introduce a morally significant distance between him and the killing. Ordinarily, Barry had no qualms about the republican use of ‘physical force’. What was it about this particular incident that led him to disown it?

  At the beginning of 1936, the IRA was a diminished and strategically confused organization. Morale had fallen sharply since the early ’thirties, when the IRA regrouped effectively for the first time since the Civil War and, animated by socialist ideas, held rallies and mounted sometimes violent campaigns against prison warders, police officers, the courts, and English imports such as sweets and newspapers. The threat to the institutions of the Free State grew so serious that in late 1931 the Dublin government set up a Military Tribunal to try political cases, since juries were unwilling, out of fear or ideological persuasion, to convict republican defendants. Then, in February 1932, Éamon de Valera’s pro-Republican Fianna Fáil came to power and legalized the IRA. Everything changed. There was a boom of recruitment into the IRA, whose activities were limited to resisting the political advance of the Blueshirts, the followers of a pro-Treaty, fascistic organization that called itself, successively, the Army Comrades Association, the National Guard, and the Young Ireland Association. There were riots, bitterly-fought street battles and, very occasionally, fatalities. But by the end of 1934, the Blueshirt threat had been effectively eliminated, and the IRA (which still asserted a right to bear arms in the face of the continuing British presence in Ireland) began to lose its direction. Drilling and training faltered and membership fell sharply. Some men left for the communist-inclined Republican Congress group, but a greater number drifted to Fianna Fáil. Although Fianna Fáil had not delivered a republic, for many republicans its anti-British measures (most notably, economic sanctions and the abolition of the requirement that members of the Free State parliament swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown) represented acceptable progress. In 1935, relations between the IRA and the government – by now characterized by uneasy mutual tolerance – worsened. In February, IRA men, acting in support of a group of tenants threatened with eviction, broke into the house of a land agent in Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, and shot dead his son. Then, in March, came a direct confrontation with the authorities: IRA men, siding with striking bus and tram workers in Dublin, sniped at Free State army lorries in use as public transport, and wounded two police officers on patrol. The government finally acted against its Civil War comrades-in-arms. Throughout 1935, arrests, surveillance and harassment of the IRA – still not an illegal organization – increased; and so, correspondingly, did IRA antagonism towards de Valera and Fianna Fáil, now seen as traitors to republicanism or, at best, its unfit trustees. By early 1936, republican logic dictated that it fell once more to the IRA to advance the cause of an Ireland united and free from British rule.

  Here one came to Tom Barry’s difficulty: how to leap from this premise to a necessarily remote and terrible spot in the ethical landscape – the shooting of an elderly Irishman in his home. (It is a vital and appealingly pluralistic tenet of republican ideology that Protestants in Ireland like Admiral Somerville, however unionist or ‘West British’, are as Irish as the next man.) The reason given by Barry for the Somerville killing was that the victim had ‘sent’ Irish boys to the Royal Navy as an ‘agent of the British’. But this did not really make sense. Somerville’s sending of Irish boys to the Royal Navy was a mischief that could have been stopped without shooting him dead. The fact that nonetheless the IRA undertook the perilous and dreadful course of homicide suggested that it was not really concerned, in this instance, with stopping recruitment. What if the objective had not been to stop Somerville but to punish him? Again, this did not stand up to scrutiny. Somerville’s actions were, in practical terms, harmless. There had been no systematic IRA engagement with the British sin
ce 1921, and the continuing British presence in Ireland was not even slightly dependent on the Royal Navy’s enlistment of young men from West Cork or elsewhere in the country. Somerville was, therefore, a purely ideological offender, at most guilty, as the state solicitor put it, of distasteful conduct unworthy of an Irishman. By the ethical and judicial standards operative in non-repressive societies (standards espoused by the IRA), causing ideological offence was not a capital crime; and it followed that any ‘execution’ of Somerville, particularly in circumstances where he received no warning, would bear no rational relation to the gravity of his offence.

  But it seemed unlikely that Tom Barry’s embarrassment would have been caused simply by the problem of irrationality. Although preoccupied by his image in history as a disciplined soldier who played by the rules, Barry was also a hardline republican. Hardline republicans are disinclined to throw doubt on their own or their comrades’ actions. They are convinced of the justness of their cause and of the good faith in which their fellow volunteers act, and they know that misjudgements, even irrational misjudgements, are a regrettable, unavoidable fact of war, and they do not hold themselves peculiarly responsible for that fact. It seemed, then, that Tom Barry must have been defensive about something other than the (irrational) reasons given for the shooting – which meant that the Admiral must have been shot for some other, unmentioned, reason. But what reason was it?