Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  Wellington became prime minister of Britain in 1828, making him the most successful Irishman in Britain, ever. His government was unpopular and collapsed in 1830 because he was implacably opposed to any kind of parliamentary reforms. But the fact that he became prime minister is more important than his being competent in the role, right? His opposition to reform caused his house in London to be twice attacked by mobs waving pitchforks and burning brands.

  He held the post of leader of the House of Lords three times between 1828 and 1846, twice as prime minister and once as foreign secretary. During his final period in that office he asked for the military command of Ireland in 1843, but his colleagues studiously ignored him. By this stage in his life, everyone was assiduously ignoring him. He had grown deaf, probably from the sound of cannon balls whizzing close past his head. Imagine, not one of them hit him. How unlucky is that?

  Meanwhile, back on St Helena, where Napoleon was trying to enjoy his forced retirement, an Irish surgeon, or perhaps “surgeon”, Barry Edward O’Meara (1786?–1836) was looking after his health. Was he a real surgeon? Napoleon thought so but there are no records of him attending either Trinity College or the Royal College of Surgeons. However there were private medical schools in Dublin at that time so, for Napoleon’s sake, let’s hope he went to one of those. Not that there was much on the syllabus in any case. But it is agreeable to have a qualified doctor.

  O’Meara had been an army surgeon but was dismissed from service for participating in a duel. Technically, I suppose dueling is against the Hippocratic oath if looked at in an holistic medical context. He joined the navy, where there was a woollier interpretation of the oath, and rose to the rank of full surgeon, probably because he had all his limbs. He was serving on board HMS Bellorophon when Napoleon surrendered to her captain Frederick Maitland on 15 July 1815.

  O’Meara impressed Napoleon with his knowledge of languages. It was practical for a ship’s surgeon to recognise the language in which his patients were screaming as he sawed off their limbs. Because of this, and because Napoleon’s own doctor refused to accompany him into exile on St Helena, Napoleon asked for O’Meara to attend him. Napoleon’s own army surgeon, the brilliant Dominique Larrey, a surgeon without quotation marks who is usually considered to be the father of modern military surgery, left Napoleon to dedicate himself to civilian medicine. With Larrey thus unavailable, O’Meara was made confidential physician to Napoleon. This appointment was ironic because he reported every detail of Napoleon’s health and state of mind he could back to the British authorities. He was an incredible gossip for a confidential doctor. O’Meara fed Napoleon gossip from all over the island, and also reported on Napoleon to the British Admiralty. He treated Napoleon for insomnia, swelling of the legs and pain in the liver. We know this because he told everyone.

  The island’s governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, realised as early as October 1816 that O’Meara was spying on everyone on St Helena. Lowe fell out with both Napoleon and O’Meara. He ordered O’Meara to stop spying. But Napoleon would only have O’Meara as his doctor. Eventually, O’Meara was ordered off the island. In total, five Irish surgeons attended Napoleon for the rest of his life while he was in exile.

  O’Meara wrote to the Admiralty suggesting that Lowe might assassinate Napoleon. Because of this letter, O’Meara was dismissed from the navy in 1818. Naturally, he began a pamphlet war against Lowe. These pamphlets were popular and ran through five editions, and were also published in French. Lowe began libel proceedings against O’Meara, to the delight of his attorney. But this promisingly lengthy litigation had to be dropped due to legal technicalities. Not, however, before O’Meara was reduced to penury, forcing him to marry the fabulously rich widow Theodosia Beauchamp. This outcome forces me to reluctantly concede that the law isn’t all bad where it encourages romance.

  O’Meara moved back to Ireland. In 1836 he died from erysipelas of the head, a now obsolete disease, which he contracted at a Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847)69 rally.

  Off to Sunny Spain

  On those peaceful moments when there wasn’t a fight going on at home in Ireland, it was always nice to have one abroad that you could go to. Thus the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 was an ideal opportunity for Irish soldiers to go down in someone else’s history.

  The Spanish Civil War was broadly a conflict between nationalistic fascists and international-minded republicans supported by communists. Irish soldiers had to work out what side they might best fit into. Exasperatingly, the war produced too many political shades of grey rather than the simple black and white favoured by the typical Irish crusader. Why do the Spanish have to have such complicated fights?

  The Irish who supported the Spanish nationalists were led by Eoin O’Duffy (1890–1944), while the communists and republicans were led by Francis Richard (Frank) Ryan (1902–1944).

  Duffy added the “O” to his name during the Irish War of Independence when he commanded the Monaghan Brigade IRA with distinction between 1919 and 1921. Following independence, in February 1922 he became chief-of-staff of the National Army. In September 1922 he became commissioner of the Civic Guard, the unarmed national police force which eventually became An Garda Síochána. By 1925 he had an established reputation as a gifted organiser, the kind of person whom anyone starting a fascist organisation would turn to for logistical help. He was also something of a pamphleteer because he wrote articles for Iris an Gharda (The Garda Review). He was popular, though feared, among his Garda colleagues.

  He promoted a Gaelic identity as he interpreted it, which included, apart from adding “O”s to your name, promoting native strains of Irish dogs in the Irish Native Breeds Society, which was a form of dog eugenics consistent with his fascism.

  O’Duffy became a fascist when he learned that fascists were implacable enemies of communism, and he had a pathological fear of communists. He used the special branch of his police to undermine communist elements wherever he could imagine them: amongst republicans, Fianna Fáil party members, members of the Irish Native Breeds Society, liberals and actual communists. He travelled widely because he led Garda pilgrimages to religious shrines all over Europe.

  These excursions brought him into contact with European fascists. O’Duffy became enchanted by the glamour of fascism, particularly its penchant for uniforms. In 1932 he became involved with the Army Comrades Association (ACA). The main purpose of the ACA was to provide physical protection for conservative political groups from potential attack by left-wing organisations.

  The following year, because he was steadily becoming extreme, he lost his job as police commissioner. By 1933 he was the leader of the ACA. Members of the ACA later became known as “The Blueshirts” because of their blue fascist uniforms. They would become the largest non-governing fascist party in the world. In fairness to O’Duffy, he did introduce gaudiness to what was a relatively colourless Ireland in the 1930s.

  This was a confusing time for Irish fascists. O’Duffy changed the name of the ACA several times in six months before most of the political parties protected by that organisation merged to become Fine Gael. He was forced to resign as president of Fine Gael in 1934, following an inevitable split. He continued to preside over a declining Blueshirt movement, now outside Fine Gael, until 1935, when another split amongst the Blueshirts gave rise to a sub-group called the National Corporate Party (NCP) led by O’Duffy. These changed their blue shirts to green in 1936.

  Tactically, the Irish fascists prioritised forming organisations, wearing uniforms and staging splits to counter the threat of Irish communism, which at its highest level barely existed outside of O’Duffy’s imagination. In the mid-1930s there were less than 100 card-carrying Communist Party of Ireland members. Ironically, the growth of the Blueshirts enhanced the attractions of communism for many of these recruits. In other words, O’Duffy was more responsible for the growth of communism in Ireland than any other influence. But fortunately for O’Duffy Spain was
alive with communists. A fascist campaign from Ireland was just what was needed to wipe them out.

  In August 1936 O’Duffy began to organise an Irish Christian crusade to fight the republicans in Spain. Despite the mandatory splits, he raised an Irish Brigade for the Nationalist side under General Franco on the simple basis that they were fighting evil communists. In traditional Irish fashion, he promised Franco that tens of thousands of volunteers would turn up, but only about 700 turned up on the day. O’Duffy had kept with the Irish revolutionary tradition of promising big and delivering small. It seems Franco was a student of Irish revolutions and knew what to expect.

  O’Duffy took his volunteers to Spain in 1936. Those who were still conscious after six months wanted to go home. The experience was like an extended stag weekend on the Costa del Sol – some were sick from the heat, some were dead and the rest were utterly demoralised.

  O’Duffy developed a reputation for drinking too much in Spain, like many thousands of Irish tourists after him, contributing to the ineffectiveness of his brigade. Some commentators thought that, such was his incompetence, he may have even been siding with the republicans. A contemporary Irish-Spanish commentator, Ian Gibson, wrote that when O’Duffy’s brigade mistakenly shot fellow nationalists it didn’t impress Franco, who was obviously a perfectionist.

  The brigade members who survived left Spain feeling profoundly Catholic and nostalgic for rich butter on a delicious boiled Irish spud. O’Duffy wrote an account of the campaign, Crusade in Spain, in 1938. His NCP faded away and into Irish history. Some of his fascist veterans of the Spanish campaign enlisted in 1940 with the Allied forces to fight against German fascism, which just proves that their grasp of the politics was shaky. Maybe it was the German uniforms they didn’t like.

  On the Republican side, the Irish left-wing volunteers were presented with a confusing array of squabbling factions in Spain. Their leader, Frank Ryan, had been a member of the IRA who engaged in street confrontations with O’Duffy’s Blueshirts. However, by 1934 he had split from the IRA to form the Republican Congress that opposed Franco’s coup in Spain in 1936. The Spanish left-wing Government supported the raising of an International Brigade that attracted 45,000 foreign recruits to the side of the republicans, including Ryan’s Irish recruits. As a first step in their crusade these recruits had to make their way to London. From Victoria Station they were supposed to travel by train and ferry to Paris in discrete groups in order not to call attention to themselves. The Irish, in groups of forty or more, occupied the bars on the trains and ferries, drinking and loudly singing rebel songs. From Paris they crossed into Spain in groups of about a dozen, and joined up with their countrymen in the English-speaking Battalion XV, which was the British Battalion. In the British Battalion a variety of communists are republicans were united under the rationale of an English-speaking command. The international communists naively imagined that both the language and a shared transnational ideology would bind them together against their common enemy, international fascism. But such innocence reveals just one of the reasons why communism failed as a world political force.

  The Irish communists found themselves under the competent command of Captain Nathan, who had vast military experience. However, some of that experience had been gained as a Black and Tan70 during the Irish War of Independence, where he had been personally involved in the killing of two Sinn Féin men in Limerick. This news item quickly went round the Irish ranks. According to Ryan, the British Communist Party was run by Black and Tans who “made a bags of everything”.

  Because the communists were exceptionally democratic, and loved conferences, conventions, committees and sub-committees, several meetings were organised, resulting in Nathan being promoted off the front line, where he could have saved lives, and up the ranks, where he couldn’t. Captain Nathan defended himself by arguing that he had volunteered to the International Brigades as a Jew committed to the fight against international fascism. But the Irish communists hated their British officers more than the fascists they were fighting.

  The Spanish communists, who were real communists, quickly learned that the Irish communists were so uncomfortable with both the anti-religious culture of Spanish communism and the British command that there were regular drunken punch-ups amongst the International Brigades. No self-respecting Irish communist would shoot a nun, a sentiment they shared with the Irish fascists. In any event, the hundred or so Irish communists managed to undermine the ideological coherence of the entire British Battalion.

  Ryan requested that the Irish in the British Battalion be transferred to the American communists in the Lincoln Battalion. But the American communists, who weren’t real communists either, didn’t want them. They didn’t need what they considered to be a bunch of drunks fighting amongst each other. In the end, about thirty Irish joined the Lincolns while the rest stayed with the British. One of the reasons that the Spanish republicans eventually lost the war was because of their Irish-like tendency to form splits. There were so many splits on the republican side that it is not practical to document them all. Ryan seems to have become the leader of a break-away Lincoln faction.

  Jim Prendergast, reporting for the Irish Democrat communist party paper, wrote that one of the Irish fighting at Jarama, Dan Boyle from Belfast, was slightly upset to read in the morning paper that that he had been killed in action the night before. Dan generously distributed his cigarettes to his friends on the possibility that he might not get to finish them later. However the paper was correct with the story, if not with the date, because he was killed that evening.

  Ryan fought O’Duffy’s Brigade at Jarama. He was wounded in 1937 and was sent back to Ireland to recuperate. By March 1938 he was back in Spain. He was wounded again, captured and sentenced to death. But an international campaign for clemency got his sentence commuted. Two German military intelligence acquaintances had him released from gaol and brought to Berlin in July 1940 during the Second World War. He attempted to travel home by German submarine with Séan Russell (1893–1940)71 in August, but when Russell died at sea the submarine turned back to Germany where Ryan stayed until his death in 1944.

  I Spy

  Maureen (Paddy) O’Sullivan (1918–?), from Dublin, became an undercover agent in the Second World War at a time when they would take anyone who could speak French and hadn’t enough sense to be terrified. Her mother died when she was an infant. Her father wasn’t able to look after her because up until recently Irish fathers weren’t able to look after children on their own. After several years of failed effort, he sent her to Belgium to live with an aunt.

  In school in Belgium she became fluent in French, Dutch and Flemish, and had a working knowledge of German, which were the ideal qualifications for a secret agent. In January 1939 she began training in London to be a nurse. When the Second World War started she could have returned to her father and spent the conflict safely in Dublin. Unlike the rest of the world, we didn’t have the Second World War in Ireland; we had the Emergency, which was boring because nothing happened – absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, Paddy chose to remain in dangerous London. It was better to have a bomb land on your head than to die slowly of boredom.

  In July 1941 she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). By 1943 she was accepted for Special Overseas Executive (SOE) training because she spoke French. The SOE had been set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to co-ordinate all subversive actions against the Germans overseas. Paddy attended instruction in subversion in Winterford, Surrey, where her trainers described her as being pleasant, purposeful, independent and able to manage people, but having little or no practical or mechanical sense. They also said she was accident prone. This judgement was proven true when she got to France.

  She was next sent to subversion finishing school in Scotland where, from the reports, it appeared the training was having an effect on her combat instincts. She was definitely changing. Her trainers now described her as stubbor
n and undisciplined with an uncontrollable temper and no team spirit: think Private Pyle in the toilet scene in the film Full Metal Jacket.

  Paddy then transferred to wireless training school in London where her discipline was a problem. But she was popular with her classmates even if she couldn’t turn on a radio, let alone change a valve.

  In March 1944 she was finally sent on a mission. She was dropped by parachute into a field in France with two radio sets and twenty-two containers of arms to distribute to the beret-wearing, striped jumper-clad British and French chaps waiting in the hedges below. She landed on the flat of her back, winding herself badly and knocking herself out. She woke up with a cow licking her face. I wonder how the Germans lost that war.

  Surprisingly, the resistance commander on the ground, Major Teddy Meyer, was not impressed with this entry, nor with the fact that her training didn’t include learning to ride a bike, an omission he detected when he instructed her to hop up on a bike like a good chap and do the rounds checking the radio sets that were hidden in various locations, which she couldn’t fix anyway even if she was able to cycle there. As bicycles were the only form of resistance transport, she had to learn on the job.

  Soon she was adept at cycling and even mastered radio maintenance. She developed her cover as a Belgian girl searching for her missing husband. She didn’t blow up bridges or slit the throats of sentries, but she did adapt quickly as a radio operator.

  One day a German soldier stopped her while she was cycling along with a radio in a suitcase strapped to her bike. He demanded that she open her case. Before she could, a helpful German officer approached the attractive fraülein to enquire if he could be of assistance. Paddy told the officer that her mother was German and that she was Flemish, and she would love to go on a date with him. The suitcase was forgotten amid all the eyelash batting. Now I know why the Germans lost the war. Women batted their eyelashes in the 1940s – I have seen the films – and they smoked many cigarettes while doing so.