by Fergal Keane
He may have been less popular with his son, at least as a young boy. Horatio was remembered with pity by locals because of his strict rearing. Bertha Creagh recalled how the young Kitchener was forced to walk his father’s cattle to market, an unusual and humbling requirement for the offspring of the landholding class. A local story has it that the owner of the Listowel Arms was instructed by Kitchener Senior not to provide his son with breakfast until all the cattle were sold. On another occasion Horatio is reputed to have used his cane to strike a farm labourer. The youth then knocked Kitchener from his horse with a blow. It was remembered, to his credit in the locality, that he did not have the young man sacked or prosecuted.
Another story, collected by my grandfather, reflects the easy co-mingling of Catholic beliefs and the spirit world of pre-Christian Ireland. In the tale, Kitchener’s mother is reviled for her alleged anti-Catholicism and put under a spell which moves her ear to her mouth and vice versa. Although the family left north Kerry when Kitchener was fourteen, his papers in the National Archives in London reveal a continuing connection. There is a poignant letter from the daughter of the famous soldier’s old nurse, Elizabeth Fitzgerald. The family was near destitution as the grand demesnes around Listowel shrank after the Land War and so the demand for labour decreased. The poorly written missive sits among bundles of letters of congratulation, telegrams from maharajas, pashas, princes, aristocrats, town councillors and fellow officers. The tone of the letter is frequently ingratiating but, in Miss Fitzgerald’s words, there is also an air of due entitlement. After detailing the sickness and unemployment that plagued the family she writes that she ‘expects a favourable reply by Christmas’.19 Kitchener’s response is not recorded. He returned only once, in 1910, when he walked the grounds of his father’s old estate at Crotta between Listowel and Tralee.
The church at Aghavillen, where he was baptised, had already fallen into ruin. Would the great warrior of empire have seen in this fading community any hint of a wider imperial faltering? Probably not. It is only with hindsight that we can see how the long Irish revolution, from mass campaigning around religion and land in the nineteenth century, to the hour of the gun in the twentieth, represented the beginning of the end of empire. The soldiers of the Edwardian age still saw a red splendour splashed across the frontiers of the globe.
Yet the Anglo-Irish would be the first of the former elites in the modern British Empire to feel history turn away from them, and like others who would follow them many felt alienated from the land of their distant English ancestors, many feeling they were accepted neither in Ireland nor England.
The best days were gone. As the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, a Protestant from County Cork, put it, the old days were ‘like sunshine elsewhere or firelight in an empty room’.20
Southern Irish Protestantism was more complex than a morality tale of a stranded monolithic elite. There were working-class Protestants in Dublin, like the playwright and Republican socialist Seán O’Casey, the middle-class W. B. Yeats who defined the Revolution in poetry, and the novelist turned gun-smuggler and Republican, Erskine Childers, whose mother was Anglo-Irish and who had himself fought in the Boer War and Great War, one of the many Protestants who, over centuries, lived in and imagined a very different Ireland. In west Cork communities of smaller Protestant farmers would have confounded any attempt to define them as an elite, and in west Limerick, with some straggling over the border into north Kerry, the descendants of German Palatines lived a frugal rural life that differed little in substance from their Catholic neighbours.*
But in the north Kerry countryside of the War of Independence the families who had once formed a genuine elite – the people of the ‘big houses’ – faced a choice that allowed no nuance: they could support a republic when weapons or supplies were demanded, or be regarded as enemies. To display loyalty to the Crown invited attack. To their more militant co-religionists in the north of Ireland, the Protestants around Listowel would have been regarded as soft Unionists, unwilling to risk their lives by fighting to defend a British Ireland. The local demographics dictated extreme caution. There were never more than a few hundred Protestants living around Listowel, not sufficient to form an entrenched political bloc, much less paramilitary units like the Ulster Volunteer Force that would have fought against the IRA or threatened Britain with rebellion. There was no working-class Unionist muscle toiling in the lands of north Kerry, or charismatic leaders like Edward Carson urging the Protestants to follow a course of resistance.
Most Protestants in the area would probably have been privately loyal to the existing order. During the Great War many had relatives serving with the British Army. To many of these Irish people, the Rising of 1916 was an act of betrayal and they had no reason to believe the flare-up of violence would not end like the others. There would be outrages, but in due course order would be restored and a peaceful political settlement with moderate Home Rulers could be achieved. Despite the evidence of the 1918 election, the Sinn Féiners continued to be dismissed as trouble-makers who would be sorted out in due course.
At Kilmorna, Sir Arthur Vicars carried on with life as in pre-war days. Young army officers continued to cycle out from Listowel to his estate to fish the waters of the Feale. He was glad of the company. But then Vicars made what would prove a fatal miscalculation. In May 1920, the IRA arrived at Kilmorna looking for guns. Vicars refused to open his strong room. The IRA suspected that he was holding a stockpile of weapons for local loyalists: why else would he need such a powerfully built safe and refuse to admit them? They would remember his obduracy.
* Francis Shackleton was convicted of fraud in a separate case in 1913 and sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour. He subsequently retired to Cheltenham where he worked as an antique dealer.
* The rise of a powerful conservative Catholic middle class is the most striking feature of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also sets the tone for the future Irish state and its preoccupations. The sons of small businessmen and strong farmers steadily encroached on traditionally Protestant centres of wealth and power. In the cities they moved into business and, gradually, the public service, so that by the middle of the 1860s, Catholics held nearly half of the judges posts in the Irish Supreme Court as well entrenching themselves in the management of public utilities and banks. The stronger farmers were also the main beneficiaries of the breaking up of struggling Anglo-Irish estates in the aftermath of the Famine. For more see Roy Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, Chatterton Lecture, Dec 1989.
* The Palatines were German Protestant refugees from the European wars of religion of the early seventeenth century. Around 3,000 came to Ireland, although two-thirds are estimated to have subsequently returned. They were welcomed by Protestant landlords who saw them as industrious tenants and a potential bulwark against the Catholic majority. The largest area of settlement was around Rathkeale in County Limerick, with some families moving also to north Kerry, among them the Hoffmans whose descendant Frank fought with the IRA and was killed by the Black and Tans in 1920.
8
Assassins
In the morning I shall part from all that is human.
I shall follow the warrior band;
Go to thy house, stay not here,
The end of the night is at hand.
Kuno Meyer, ‘The Tryst After Death’, translated from the ancient Irish, 19111
I
The special correspondent of the Yorkshire Post remembered him as a ‘big, bluff, hearty Irishman, with a bucolic face which radiated good nature … [who] might easily have been unsuspected of any subtlety of thought’.2 He also remembered that ‘since his exploits at Kilmallock Barracks’, O’Sullivan ‘knew he was a marked man’.3 Later that same day the reporter dramatically changed his mind about O’Sullivan’s lack of mental subtlety. O’Sullivan had taken a lift in the direction of Limerick with the journalist and his colleagues, driving in a touring car along the main road leading west
. Outside Newcastlewest the car skidded and crashed into a deep ditch and the ‘shattered windscreen and the thorny hedge inflicted some rather severe cuts and scratches on the hands and faces of the occupants’. It was a close thing. Had the car overturned, the Inspector and his fellow travellers might have died. What transpired next puzzled the English journalist. The policeman looked in the car mirror and declared that he would return to Listowel.
‘If I go into Limerick in this state the news will go round like quickfire that Inspector O’Sullivan’s been seen bleeding, and that there’s been an attempt on his life. It doesn’t do to suggest such a thing, and to let the people round here realise that you’re human, that you’re vulnerable, and that you can bleed.’ O’Sullivan flagged down a passing police lorry and began his journey back to Listowel ‘with a laughing farewell’.
Rose McNamara, a captain in Cumann na mBan, in uniform (English Photographer, 20th Century/Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)
O’Sullivan arrived in the late autumn of 1920 as the war around north Kerry was descending into a cycle of ambush and reprisal.
The British correspondent Hugh Martin visited Listowel in October and recorded evidence of attacks by the Black and Tans on local civilians. A girl from near the town had had her hair cropped by the IRA for the crime of ‘keeping company’ with the Tans. In retaliation the Tans staged night raids on the homes of the suspects. ‘In return for the cropping of one girl’s hair,’ wrote Martin, ‘they cropped the hair of four others, beat six young men with the stocks of their rifles till they were black and blue, burnt several ricks and set a creamery on fire.’4 His reporting would bring death threats, with the Tans reportedly seeking him out at local hotels. Martin was a journalist of considerable courage. From Listowel on 28 October he wrote: ‘The touring season is over. Otherwise you might find tourists returning from the South-West of Ireland in a mood that might shock even the Chief Secretary. For to pretend that there is no general police terror there is sheer hypocrisy. Why not admit at once that circumstances have made it expedient to employ terror as a form of government, and have done with furtive humanitarianism.’5
Around Listowel, the women of Cumann na mBan were increasingly active. A lone country girl like Hannah Purtill could easily smuggle a revolver through roadblocks, since at that time the police did not employ female searchers. The gun that killed could be smuggled past several police and army posts within an hour of the attack. But with the Tans and the Auxies deployed in the town, Hannah’s activities became ever more dangerous. Towards the end of 1920 Cumann na mBan ordered its members to carry out ‘detective work’ for the IRA. The British intercepted this dispatch. They now knew that women were infiltrating the communications networks, with one intelligence officer complaining that the ‘postal and telegraph services were corrupt, and the telephone services equally so, whilst instances of Government services and members of the Crown Forces giving information to the enemy have, unfortunately, not been lacking’.6 My grandmother told one of her daughters how she transported communiqués and other information hidden in her underwear. The IRA operated without the field telephones of regular armies and few households had telephone lines installed. Plans, lists of personnel, names of suspected informers were committed to paper and sent by courier. For the British, such documents captured from the IRA could be vital intelligence.
One notorious Tan named Darcy took a particular interest in Hannah. He would come into the draper’s shop where she worked and flirt with her, calling her his ‘Maid of the Mountains’. Each evening when she passed the roadblock he invariably stopped her. Hannah Purtill, engaged to be married to Bill Keane, was a conservative rural woman, but she could not afford to antagonise a Tan. She was polite in the face of his advances but nothing more. Darcy persisted. When she emphatically refused him he pulled a gun and placed it to her forehead. Years later she told one of my aunts what transpired. ‘He said: “If you don’t get out of town you will be killed”.’ But she didn’t go. Later the IRA targeted Darcy. He was badly wounded and it was he who ended up leaving Listowel.
Fearful and disunited, the RIC were being increasingly asked to operate like an army but without the protection afforded by well-defended military bases or the mandate for offensive action granted to soldiers in war. They were still required to observe the fiction of being a civil police force acting with the support of the people, but with every reprisal such public support as existed drained away. The RIC was by now a messy amalgam of Black and Tans, Auxiliaries and Irish constables, the latter sometimes the fiercest supporters of reprisals against men who killed their comrades. Senior officers thought to be resistant to harsh counter-measures were retired.
The Republicans did not need wholesale defections of RIC men who disagreed with the Crown’s policies in Ireland. A handful of figures in key posts in Dublin Castle and the major barracks could compromise police and military operations with devastating effect. Men who were dismissed or resigned in sympathy with the rebels were offered financial support by the underground government. Some were set to work fomenting instability in the ranks. After the Listowel mutiny, Jeremiah Mee fled to Dublin and made contact with the IRA. He then made a secret trip back to Listowel with two colleagues, under instruction from Michael Collins to try and instigate a mass walk-out of Irish police from the barracks. Four of the original mutineers were still stationed in Listowel but, as a form of punishment, were ‘invariably detailed to go with the Black and Tans on midnight raids which involved the burning of farm buildings, creameries and homesteads, and the beating up of civilians’.7
In his memoir Mee made much of the drama of his return to Listowel: he was now a mutineer and a deserter and was sure of rough treatment if captured. At their initial meeting in July 1920, Collins had told him that the remaining four mutineers should be instructed to form an underground force within the Listowel RIC, supplying intelligence to the IRA. Three men agreed and the secret conduit was apparently successful until two of the men were suspended and told they would face court martial. Confidential police files had been found on an IRA man near Listowel and the mutineers were natural suspects. If an escape plan was not possible, Mee was to pass on a message from Collins that ‘in any sacrifice they might be called upon to make they would have the sympathy and support of the nation’.8 Some small comfort when being caught could mean facing the gallows.
At Listowel railway station, Mee saw a police patrol monitoring passengers and managed to evade detection with the help of a sympathetic porter. Next he went to a pub near my grandparents’ house on Church Street to meet his IRA contact. The pub was full of Tans and RIC, but newcomers mostly, so Mee’s brief appearance was not noted. He was led upstairs to safety. The plan to form a police underground unit came to nothing. Word came back from the recently suspended District Inspector (the man replaced by Tobias O’Sullivan) that Jeremiah Mee ‘should leave Listowel at once’ because if he were arrested he ‘would be shot like a dog’.9
Mee left Listowel on 31 October. Years later, he would remember the lowing of cattle arriving at the market in the early morning as he prepared to set off. The calm was illusory. North Kerry was about to erupt in the worst violence yet seen in the county. The terrors to come would harden hearts on both sides. Men were set on a journey into the worst parts of themselves.
On the day Mee left Listowel, the country witnessed one of the biggest funerals in its history. The Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSweeney, had died after seventy-four days on hunger strike in Brixton prison, London. His body was brought home to Cork where the crowds stretched far and deep in the city’s streets.* The following day an eighteen-year-old medical student, Kevin Barry, was hanged in Dublin for his part in an IRA ambush which killed three British soldiers. Barry was a past pupil of the Jesuit Belvedere College (James Joyce’s alma mater) and a son of the Catholic middle classes, who went to mass on his way to the ambush. He became the first Republican to be executed since the 1916 Rising and was
immediately propelled into the pantheon of nationalist martyrs. The three soldiers killed in the ambush – Privates Harold Washington, Thomas Humphries and Marshall Whitehead – were scarcely a couple of years older than Barry, but they were forgotten victims in an unpopular war where the insurgents excelled at propaganda. ‘Another martyr for old Ireland, another murder for the Crown,’ went the popular ballad which summoned up images of Barry’s grief-stricken mother but assured the listener that his death was part of the sacrifice necessary to secure the Republic.
The violence that followed into the first week of November 1921 was a racing fire. Strike and counter-strike, the well of bitterness full to overflowing. In north Kerry, and several other parts of the country, IRA units were sent out to avenge the deaths of MacSweeney and Barry. Two Black and Tans were kidnapped on the day of the MacSweeney funeral after being lured by local girls. The men were killed and their bodies ‘disappeared’ by the IRA. Believing their comrades to be still alive, the Tans posted a chilling notice in Tralee, the largest town in north Kerry:
Warning ! Unless the two Tralee police in Sinn Fein custody are returned by 10 a.m. on the 2nd inst., reprisals of a nature not yet heard of in Ireland will take place in Tralee.10
They rampaged through Tralee, burning shops and shooting randomly. The nationalist Weekly Freeman’s Journal reported how ‘many people rushed panic-stricken to their homes, and others took refuge in neighbour’s houses’.11 For seven days the population was terrorised and subjected to curfew. The British journalist Hugh Martin found that he was on a Tan death list because of his earlier reporting of events near Listowel. His analysis of the Tralee terror was remarkably fair-minded given his situation:
