The Diggers and the IRA

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The Diggers and the IRA:

A story of Australian and New Zealand Great-War soldiers involved in Ireland’s War of Independence.

Kerry Casey

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts by Research

University of New South Wales Canberra

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

April 2014

The Diggers and the IRA:

A story of Australian and New Zealand Great-War soldiers involved in Ireland’s War of Independence.

Deleted: Cover photo

Caption: Australian servicemen on leave in Ireland. The men are near the Gap of Dunloe, a popular tourist destination outside of Killarney, County Kerry.1

Description: evocative photograph of four Diggers wearing slouch Hats and trench coats against the Irish rain. Evocative of many things including the Kelly Gang.

Kerry Casey

1 AWM P07408.001 4

Cornelius Patrick “Con” Casey, AKA No 20 Corporal Patrick Cornelius Casey, Military Medal, 13th Battalion, head of Battalion Stretcher Bearers - Military Adviser & Brigade Training Officer to 3rd (North) Cork Brigade, Irish Volunteers.2

2 Photo from Casey family papers. 5

Table of Contents

List of tables & originality statement 5

Publications and presentations 6

Acknowledgements 8

Abbreviations and acronyms 11

Introduction 13

Prologue: Riding the Tale of a Ghost 39

1. Distinction’s Worthless Badge 46

2. Diggers in Ireland 92

3. Jim Gorman 150

4. Mike McGrath 185

5. Bringing the Boys Back Home 202

6. Saving the World for Democracy 247

Epilogue 262

Appendix: Denominational breakdown of 266 Irish-born enlistments in the AIF.

Bibliography 270

List of Tables3

Chapter 1:

Table 1: Dates of the awards of the VC to Catholics in the AIF 68

Chapter 3:

Table 2: Timetable of Irish Born Catholic Desertions from the AIF 136

Chapter 6:

Table 3: Discharges Abroad 215

Table 4: Irish Born Diggers Discharged Abroad 227

Appendix:

Table 5: B2455 POB Ireland – Denominations 267

Table 6: Religious Profile of 13th Bn. from Embarkation Roll 269

3 All tables except Table 4 (which is footnoted in the text) are original and based on an analysis of the almost 6000 service records of Irish-born Australian soldiera available at NAA. 7

Publications

Kerry Casey and Amanda Slattery, “Australian Writer and Film Maker seeks

descendants of Irish-Australian WWI soldiers,” The Avondhu (Ireland),

09/08/2012.

Kerry Casey, “Digging up the truth of Australia’s ‘Starvation Order’”, IRISHecho,

May 22–June 4 2013.

Kerry Casey, “Irish Anzacs fought, not for King, but for freedom,” IRISHecho,

April 24-May 7 2013.

Online

Irish Volunteers.org http://irishvolunteers.org/2012/02/the-diggers-and-the-ira- by-kerry-casey/ posted 7/2/2012.

The IrishWar http://theirishwar.com/the-diggers-and-the-ira-by-kerry-casey/

posted 7/2/2012.

Citations

John Connell, “Unearthed: diggers who fought in Irish Civil War”, IRISHecho,

7-20 November 2013.

Florence Decamp, “Retour à Glenanaar”, GeoVoyage – Irelande, July-August 2013

and http://www.grands-reporters.com/retour-a-Glenanaar.html

Andrea McCullagh, “Diggers who fought for Irish freedom revealed”, IRISHecho,

April 10-23, 2013.

Donnelly, Marea, “War sacrifice complicated by politics of old country”, Daily

Telegraph, 17/3/14,

Dujardin, Claire, Documents et rapports de la Société Royale D’Archaéologie,

D’Histoire et de Paléontologie de Charleroi: We Shall Never Forget the

Australian Soldiers, Tome LXV, Charleroi, 2012, p. 178.

Thorne, Kathleen Hegarty, Echoes of their Footsteps, The Quest for Irish Freedom,

Generation, Salem, 2014.

Presentations

31/03/2013 – “Easter Rising Commemoration Address 2013”, The Irish

Republican Monument at Waverley Cemetery, Sydney.

27/02/2013“A Hidden History: The Diggers and the ‘old’ IRA”, The Aisling Society

of Sydney.

“The Diggers and the IRA”, Postgraduate Research Day, ADFA, 2011

Acknowledgements

Where to begin when there are so many to thank? Firstly, I thank my late father

Jim Casey for keeping the story of his father alive and for his and his brother, Brian, and sister, Betty White’s, permission to go ahead with this. I thank them and all my extended family for sharing their stories and family papers: my sisters, Dianne,

Mary and Anne, brothers Con and Michael and McFadyen cousins, Alan and Ted.

Special thanks to the descendants of Patrick Casey, his daughter Tess (Sister

Celine), grandson Terry Boyd, and daughter-in-law, Margaret (née O’Gorman), for sharing their stories of Con in Ireland without which this would not be possible.

Thanks to UNSW Canberra at ADFA for taking me on as a research student when I had not studied at a university for over 30 years. Thanks there to my first supervisor, Jeff Doyle, for taking the risk with me. To Jeff Kildea, whose Anzac and

Ireland is the masterwork of Australians and Ireland during WWI for generously sharing his time, expertise and resources. Extra special thanks to Nicole Moore my supervisor and editor for convincing me and the academic staff that it was possible to combine memoir and history, for her detailed and rigorous annotations and her refrain “stick to Ireland”.

To the archivists at the National Archives of Australia (NAA), Australian

War Memorial (AWM), Mitchell Library, Bellingen Historical Society, and Archives

New Zealand (ANZ) for their patience and invaluable assistance; to Ross Howarth of Duntroon and Wilga Edwards of ADFA for directing me at key moments to key

documents. Thanks to Frank Haines, film producer for still believing in the project, for that special question “But what is the story?” and for that anecdote about a country that believes everyone deserves a Fair Go from his acting teacher, Hayes

Gordon, a refugee from Macarthyism in the USA. Thanks to Jeff Burton, filmmaker and historian, who knows the Australian WWI film archive better than anyone yet wants to tell this more than any other WWI story.

In Ireland, special thanks to Hugh Beckett at BMH Dublin for years of help and direction. To Amanda Slattery, Mary Fox and all the staff of Ballyhoura Fáilte and to Limerick County Council for hospitality, support and Artistic Residency in

2012. To the locals, Catherine Fitzgibbon of Coolfree for being my first mentor and local guide, Tom and Noreen Drake of Glenosheen for their stories and hospitality and for introducing me to JJ Lynch, grandson of Liam’s brother. JJ many thanks for the day sharing the sacred sights of Liam’s life and helping me map my grandfather’s time in Ireland – I will always “Remember Mitchelstown!” John

Sheedy thanks for all those nights in bars and farmhouses talking to the sons of local IRA freedom fighters – especially Paddy Clancy and David Tobin. To the descendants of Jim Gorman: Paul Murphy, Con O’Gorman and Jim’s indomitable daughter, Anne Canty, for sharing family papers and stories; same to Paddy and

Pat Hickey for your stories and resources on Mike McGrath and a great walk to the

Liam Lynch Memorial in the Knockmealdown Mountains. Great thanks to Marg and

Colleen, daughters of Kiwi Digger, Fred McKenna, and the son of Dick Hurley in

Canada, for everything and for trusting me with your stories of your loved ones. All of interest is yours. All the errors, mine.

Micheál O’Sullivan, Liam O’Mahony, Denis O’Flynn, Noel Leggett, JJ Lynch,

Jill and Billy Roach, John Duane and family, the Cunninghams once of Glenosheen – you all added to the story, as did so many more whose forgiveness I ask in advance.

Very special thanks to my son Aydan, my research mentor and collaborator all the way through this. You have taught me more than you know. To Anastasia and Alexander for always challenging and encouraging, putting up with my obsessions and for your special touches here and there. To their Greek-born mother, Marika, for teaching me about the links of the migrant generations to their homelands and for shaming me for forgetting mine.

To all those people in Australia, Ireland and France who have listened to me tell this story and then encouraged me to go on with it.

To Florence Décamp for nursing me through the long years and never doubting this story or me.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ACAB – Anzac Centenary Advisory Board ADB – Australian Dictionary of Biography AIF – Australian Imperial Force AIFHQ – Australian Army Headquarters AKA – Also Known As ANZ – Archives New Zealand ANZAC – Australian and New Zealand Army Corps APC – Australian Provost Corps (Military Police) APM – Assistant Provost Marshal ASU – Active Service Unit AWL – Absent Without Leave AWM – Australian War Memorial BEF – British Expeditionary Force BMH – Bureau of Military History, Dublin Bde – Brigade Bn – Battalion Coy – Company Div – Division DORA – Defence of the Realm Act DOW – Died of Xounds DVA – Department of Veterans’ Affairs GHQ – General Headquarters GOC – General Officer Commanding HQ – Headquarters IA – Illegally Absent IDF – Irish Defence Force INA – Irish National Association IPP – Irish Parliamentary Party IRA – Irish Republican Army IRB – Irish Republican Brotherhood IV – Irish Volunteers (forerunner of the IRA) 13

KIA – Killed in Action Lt – Lieutenant MEF – Mediterranean Expeditionary Force MSP – Military Service Pension (Ireland) MU – Medically Unfit NAA – National Archives of Australia NOK – Next of Kin NZ – New Zealand NZ&A – New Zealand and Australian Division (sometimes A&NZ) NZEF – New Zealand Expeditionary Force NZPC – New Zealand Provost Corps NV – National Volunteers O/C – Officer Commanding (Commanding Officer) OP – Original Private; a private in the first formation of a battalion. POB – Place of Birth Pte – Private PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder RIC – Royal Irish Constabulary TD – Member of (the Irish) Parliament UK – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (until 1937 then UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) UV – Ulster Volunteers UVF – Ulster Volunteer Force

Introduction

I wanted to write an imagined biography of my grandfather. Perhaps I should explain. I say “imagined” because I did not expect to have all the facts and thought I would have to imagine into the spaces between. But I do say “biography” because I wanted it to be about the “real” person and as close to the facts as possible. I would gather all the information I could – research – and then use my actor’s methodology to interpret his actions, the choices he made, in the same way an actor reduces a text to a series of actions and intentions and then uses them as a skeleton to construct his performance of a desiring being, a being with intentions.

The text I would be interpreting was not a written one but the series of actions my grandfather performed throughout his life – at least the ones I could discover. Each action is the result of a choice (conscious or not) and, as Aristotle put it in the

Poetics, character is revealed through choice; in other words, we perform ourselves through our actions. Consequently, I would find the key actions in my grandfather’s life – particularly his wars and his time in Ireland – and interpret those actions in the light of the historical context and the fragments of family memory (what an actor calls the “given circumstances”) I could access.

I looked for him in family recollections and in Dad’s stories. I looked in his service record and repatriation files, in the Unit Diary of his 13th Battalion4 and its history,5 in the Official Histor(ies) of Australia in the War of 1914-18 and in the

Witness Statements of the Irish War of Independence kept at the Bureau of

4 AWM4 23/30, 13th Infantry Battalion Unit Diaries. 5 White, T.A. The Fighting Thirteenth, Tyrrells, Sydney. 1924.

Military History (BMH), Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin. Always, the key hinged upon those twenty-seven months he was absent in Ireland. If I could pry open that door then I might learn some revealing truth about the man. I discovered why he changed his name when he enlisted, traded in his rifle and became a stretcher– bearer, and I shed hot tears with my father in the nursing home when I read him the eloquent tributes to his own father’s courage that were read out at his Court

Martial. But my grandfather’s silence at that Court Martial was deafening. That silence was a wall he was erecting around those days in Ireland; a concrete blockhouse around his secret that, along with his war damage, hardened his tender heart until killing him of chronic myocarditis and emphysema in 1949 at the age of

59 – five years before I was born.

“That bloody war ruined him. He was never a well man after that,” says the youngest of his three sons, my uncle Brian, a retired country copper (sergeant) and rugby league second rower. “I never knew him to be well for one single, bloody day in the few short years I had with him.”

Next, because I couldn’t find those days of his in Ireland, even though I was mostly interested in Australian-born soldiers like him, I embarked on research through the almost 6000 extant service records of Irish-born men and women who enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) that are available online at the

National Archives of Australia (NAA). There, as I began to see through his eyes, patterns started to emerge of Irish intransigence towards British authority in the

Australian Army and an escalation of disappearances in Ireland. The same night I committed to trawling through all those service records, while staying in a dingy

motel on the outskirts of Canberra, I discovered my first other Australian soldier in

Ireland, Jim Gorman, in one of the great literary products of Ireland’s War of

Independence, Ernie O’Malley’s memoir, On Another Man’s Wound. Next, through membership of the South Tipperary Military Historical Society – a Facebook group dedicated to commemorating Irish service men and women whatever war they fought in – came contact with Paul Murphy and Gorman’s family in the Tipperary city of Clonmel. Then, through Hugh Beckett, the archivist at BMH, I made contact with Paddy Hickey, the grand nephew of Mike McGrath, another Australian soldier who fought for Ireland. From their service records, Gorman and McGrath were already on my list of suspects. Both were recognisable by the patterns my grandfather was revealing and both confirmed and extended them in different and unexpected ways.

Since then I have “found” more soldiers from the armies of the British

Empire who fought against that Empire for freedom and democracy in Ireland and have been entrusted with the stories and papers of two more families. So that makes seven Diggers that I am sure fought with the Irish Volunteers (the forerunner of the Irish Republican Army [IRA]) – five Aussies and two Kiwis. It was a Commonwealth, a diasporic thing – not solely Australian.6 Seven does not a movement make, but the historians who are experts on these things told me it never happened!7 These seven whose stories I tell are, I believe, representative of many more Australian and Commonwealth soldiers who crossed the Irish Sea then,

6 There were also U.S. soldiers, “Doughboys”, fighting in Ireland but this thesis concerns itself primarily with the relationships within the British Empire from which the USA had long freed itself, becoming, in the process, a model of national self-determination. 7 I do not name specific historians though a desire not to embarrass them. Certainly the historical record bore no witness that these events ever happened. 17

as well as fighting for “King and Country” on Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the

Western Front, fought against Britain to liberate their ancestral homeland from foreign occupation that had persisted for more than 750 years. And my gut and all the research have convinced me that, in doing so, they weren’t just returning to some sort of atavistic Irishness but were also being true to their Australian culture– that evolving identity where working class and Irish met in opposition to power and privilege. In Ireland, perhaps even more than on the Western Front,

Australian and New Zealand soldiers fought for family, freedom, for the little countries – for what they called a Fair Go.

There was a story here that demanded to be told, a story about Australians and Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the British Empire, about World War I and the Irish War of Independence, about freedom and love and death. These men, these Australian and New Zealand soldiers, Diggers all, clamoured to have their stories told. And so I left my grandfather, the hero of that dreamt-of biography, on

Anzac Ridge at Gallipoli on 2 May 1915 poised for the ill-fated 4th Brigade attack on

Bloody Angle, the Chessboard and Dead Man’s Ridge.

*******

During the latter part of the First World War and the years immediately following, some Australian and New Zealand soldiers were secretly engaged in another conflict, a hidden war, the Irish War of Independence. By then the much vaunted unanimity with which Australia had greeted the declaration of war in

1914 had fragmented into bitter class and sectarian antagonisms that saw the

nation more divided than at any other time in its history.8 The Federal Government had unprecedented powers under the War Precautions Act and was prepared to do almost anything to maintain power and the imperial prestige being hard won by its country’s soldiers; it had a leader who was also the country’s chief law maker, Billy

Hughes, both Prime Minister and Attorney General. This is an untold chapter of

Australia’s much commemorated involvement in the Great War. It is a story of

Australia’s then largest ethnic minority, the Irish;9 of conflicted loyalties at both the personal and national levels. It is a chapter of Australia’s multicultural history, a story of memory and forgetting, of history and horror, of moral as well as physical courage. It is also a story that casts fresh light on Australia’s experience of the First World War and seeks to probe the nation’s very soul – if such can be said to exist, even as a useful fiction.

This thesis will argue that the Australian authorities, both governmental and military, turned a deliberate “blind eye” to the fact of its soldiers’ engagement in Ireland. There has never been a word written about this; nor are there extant documents attesting to the Australian Government’s knowledge that its soldiers were fighting against the enemy for whom, we are told, 330,000 volunteer soldiers were fighting on Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the Western Front.

8 This is a position held by many historians and interested Australians and Beaumont, Broken Nation p.xviii. 9 As Ireland did not exist as an independent country, immigration figures include Irish as coming from the UK, but while exact figures for the time do not exist, vary at around 20 per cent. (For further reading, see Kildea, Anzac and Ireland, pp. 82-5.) Though the term “largest ethnic minority” has not previously used to designate the Irish and Australians of Irish descent as, under multiculturalism, they have been inappropriately characterised as Anglo-Australians, it was nevertheless the case. 19

While this might seem an extraordinary claim, and despite the many studies of Australia’s Home Front and the impact of events in Ireland, particularly the

Easter Uprising of 1916, there seems to be a complete absence of any consideration of even the possibility of such a phenomenon let alone that it may be a ‘”legitimate” expression of those issues then tearing the country and the empire apart.” How can there be references to events about which there has only been silence? There is no mention of this in Joan Beaumont’s Broken Nation, Australians in the Great War, Geoffrey Barr’s Beyond the Myth, Australian Military Police, 1914 –

1920, Jeff Kildea’s Anzac and Ireland, Patrick O’Farrell’s The Irish in Australia, Peter

Stanley’s Bad Characters (2010), Graeme Wilson’s “A prison of our own: the AIF

Detention Barracks 1917-1919” nor any of the extant Australian Provost Corps’

(APC) files nor any other book about the AIF or Australia in WWI despite the fact that throughout the latter years of the war there were more absentees in Ireland than in any other place. This thesis will argue that the Hughes Government was aware of the situation and did all possible to both defuse it and hush it up. Nor did the Irish National Association (INA), whose founder, Albert Dreyer, was the leader of the men imprisoned in Darlinghurst Jail in 1918, know until I presented the

2013 Easter ’16 Commemoration address. Only some families of the men involved knew. My family did not.

In essaying possible reasons for this silence, the thesis returns to the nature of narrative itself, the stories we tell (about) ourselves and the attempts to construct a grand narrative of the history of Australia’s involvement in the First

World War – what the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board (ACAB), an arm of the

Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) today calls its ”core narrative”.10 Yet these men were Australian soldiers and this did happen.

So, the thesis The Diggers and the IRA, while not a history thesis, contains at its core fragments of a national history. The envelope of the history thesis is constructed as a memoir of my struggle to discover what my grandfather was up to during his absence from the AIF in Ireland. It uses the archaic trope of the shamanic journey – in my case fuelled by cancer, kemo, radiotherapy and morphine and my own and my father’s imminent deaths. This trope, refigured long ago in the literary epic as the journey to the underworld, is used to enable my search for and meetings with these dead Australian soldiers.

Within that envelope, the overall narrative structure of the thesis is given by the three movements in the song cycles of war: the call to arms, the war itself and demobilisation and repatriation. It starts from the beginnings of Australia’s war in the context of its relations with Britain and Ireland and their impact on enlistment. It examines the importance of Ireland as a place of rest and recreation for the Diggers and a site of “trench dreaming.”11 It follows different historical characters through their experiences in both wars, telling parts of the overall narrative through their individual experiences before, during and after the wars. It examines the processes of demobilisation and repatriation and the official construction of the Anzac narrative – how we tell the story of Australia’s

10 M123330 – CoS signed reply – FINAL: Correspondence from Chief of Staff for ACAB, Office of the Hon Warren Snowdon MP, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, 3/10/12. See Appendix 3. 11 By this I mean the presence of “Ireland” in the minds of Diggers as revealed by rumours, jokes, what they said about it and what they did when they got there. It is a subject more for anthropology, psychology or poetry than history in the narrower sense. 21

involvement in the Great War as an expression of ‘national character’ – and essays how we might commemorate these men today.

The Prologue, “Riding the Tale of a Ghost”, is, in T.S. Eliot’s memorable phrase (itself echoing the imagery of the Great War) a “raid on the inarticulate.”12

It is a free association assault on the still living residues of the secret that my grandfather, Con Casey, kept locked away for the remainder of his life after his return to Australia from the wars. He may have told his wife about his days in

Ireland. Neither ever told their children who knew he stayed in Ireland ‘Absent

Without Leave’ (AWL) but nothing of what he did there. They lived with and protected the secret, even if the explanations never quite rang true, never quite satisfied.

Free association is a psychoanalytic technique that was adopted by the early twentieth-century avant-garde and developed in literature as “stream of consciousness” – James Joyce was creating his modernist masterpiece, Ulysses, in neutral Switzerland concurrently with the war. In their 1994 contribution to psychoanalytic theory, The Shell and the Kernel, Nicholas Abraham and Maria

Torok added to the armoury of psychoanalysis when they articulated the theory of

“transgenerational haunting”, in which a “ghost” or an undisclosed family secret is handed down to an unwitting descendant:

[T]he psychoanalytic idea of the phantom concurs, on the level of

description, with Roman, Old-Norse, Germanic, and other lore, according to

which only certain categories of the dead return to haunt the living: those

12 Eliot, T.S., “East Coker” in Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.203. 22

who were denied the rite of burial or died an unnatural, abnormal death,

were criminals or outcasts, or suffered injustice in their lifetime. In Abram’s

view, the dead do not return but their lives’ unfinished business is

unconsciously handed down to their descendants. (This) work enables us to

understand how the falsification, ignorance, or disregard of the past –

whether institutionalised by a totalitarian state … or practiced by parents

and grandparents – is the breeding ground of the phantomatic return of

shameful secrets on the level of individuals, families, the community, and

possibly even entire nations.13

No matter how repressed it was, no matter how my father tried to resist family research into his own father, the secret would not go away. Dad would become agitated when Sister Celine (née Nell Casey) visited because “she talked too much.”

(What, as a child, I didn’t know was that she was the daughter of Patrick who ran the family farm in Ireland where my grandfather stayed during his time AWL in

Ireland.) That secret remained an irritant, something that would not stay quietly locked in the closet amid the shamefaced skeletons. It continues to haunt my grandfather’s descendants to this day.

So repressive was the Australian Government with its War Precautions and

Crimes Act(s) during and after the First World War and in its response to the Irish

War of Independence that those Australian and Dominion soldiers who fought for

Ireland and then returned buried their secret deep within their hearts. There, the unspoken became the Unspeakable. But that withheld secret formed a ‘crypt’ in the living and was passed down through the generations. My own father did not know

13 By Nicholas T. Rand (ed.) in Abraham and Torok, pp. 167-9. Italics added for emphasis. 23

the secret but he knew that it must be protected. A similar situation was described by a correspondent whose father would warn him, whenever he showed an interest in an ancestor reputedly long dead on Gallipoli: “Don’t you go looking too deeply into that!”14 Today, in Canada, one man, the son of an IRA Digger and prominent in public office with 45 years of service, has told no one but his wife about his father’s fight for Irish freedom, though he “worships the ground [his father] walked on.”15

As this work was provoked by the imminent death of both my father and myself, it marks, in my case,

the poignant moment at which a people or group is forced, by the death of

its members, to transfer an experience, existentially determinative of its

own image of the nature of its existence as a historical entity, from the

domain of memory to that of history. 16

“Riding the tale of a Ghost” is not an essay but an action. It is a raid upon the residue of the secret my grandfather kept – that he withheld even from his own children. It free-associates through family memory and story around the centrality of this secret in the generations of Con Casey’s descendants. It sets up the trope of the journey to the underworld from where I will retrieve this story and begins constructing the dreaming map linking its places and its people. It explores the given of family stories before the documentary research began and repeatedly strikes upon Con’s return from Ireland, his court martial and the ensuing silence that the remainder of the thesis sets out to decode.

14 Private correspondence. 15 His name, profession and city of residence is withheld at his request. 16White, Hayden, The Content of the Form, p.78. 24

Chapter 1, “Distinction’s Worthless Badge”, tells the story of my grandfather’s physical and emotional journey to Ireland. It builds on the prologue by weaving together the threads of family memory with research. It tells of his enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and his use of an alias and situates these actions in the context of contemporaneous events in Ireland and

Britain: Ireland’s long struggle for independence, the Home Rule Crisis, the threat of civil war, the Declaration of War and the Irish Parliamentary Party’s call to

Irishmen to enlist. It also explores the impact of the Oath of Loyalty to the King every soldier of the Empire had to sign when enlisting and suggests some implications of the manner of his enlistment on the AKA17 phenomenon in the AIF.

The second part of this chapter brings in a third narrative strand. Together with the family stories and the research, there is a fictive component. This section imagines Con’s inner journey as he travels from the Western Front on leave to

Ireland in August 1917. It recaps his war experiences on Gallipoli and at Pozieres,

Bullecourt and Messines exploring themes of courage, friendly fire, “shell shock” sectarianism and the ongoing controversy over awards for Catholics in the AIF.18 It attempts to trace his preparedness for making the step to fight against rather than for the empire. It shifts in places into first person (indicated by the use of italics) in my attempt to get inside his head and allow him the express his rage.

17 ‘Also Known As’ i.e. the use of an alias when enlisting. 18 Wilson, Bully Beef & Balderdash, pp. 412 – 451. 25

The chapter is at once both narrative and essay, factual, interpretative and speculative. The narrative voice moves between third and first person as it seeks to move inside Con’s head in order to understand what was happening to soldiers of Irish descent in the AIF at this time.

The title of Chapter 2, “Diggers in Ireland,” is closest to the overall thesis title but it seeks to survey the place Ireland had in the broader – not just revolutionary – experience of Australian soldiers during WWI. It begins with the

Report of Lieutenant Colonel (LtCol) John Wiiams, Commanding Officer (CO)

Australian Provost Corps (APC) London, in April 1918, which gives the most vivid descriptions of the lure Ireland had for Australian soldiers. Williams gives a detailed account of what the Irish were doing for the Diggers but at no time does he appear to even consider what the Diggers might be doing for the Irish. The chapter counterpoints this Report with anecdotes, from Irish and New Zealand perspectives, about Diggers in Ireland. The Irish sources have only recently become available through their release by BMH Dublin and add further details that complement William’s depiction of Diggers in Ireland, by providing some explanations of why the Irish treated the Diggers in the ways Williams so vividly describes.

The chapter then develops chronologically with the movement of the AIF from the Middle East to the Western Front in early 1916 and the first appearance of Australian soldiers in Ireland (on leave in Dublin and caught up in the Easter

Rising of 1916) through to 1919 and demobilisation. It explores a range of anecdotes from the service records of Irish-born Australian soldiers at NAA and

complements these with information about Kiwi Diggers particularly from the War

Diaries of the New Zealand Provost Corps (NZPC)19, as it seeks to paint a picture of diasporic Diggers in Ireland and the mutuality of their relationship with the Irish.

It introduces a number of Australian and New Zealand ‘characters’: Dick Hurley and the McSweeney brothers, Fred and Frank McKenna (Kiwi brothers), James

Hancock, Phillip Bolger, Alf Carleton and more, each of whose story develops the narrative and illuminates different aspects of the thesis.

The chapter also introduces the first of a number of statistics derived from the survey group of service records of Irish-born Diggers held at NAA. Table 1,

“Timetable of Irish-Born Catholic Desertions from the AIF”, gives a visual representation of the chronology of disappearances of Irish-born Catholic Diggers from the AIF ranks, showing the escalation over 1917-18. This leads to the postulation of a possible solution to the historical riddle of the efficacy of Irish

Australian military training camps in the Blue Mountains during the war.20

This chapter also explores “Ireland” as a site of trench dreaming and locates it within the broader locus of Great War dreaming – both then and as it still affects the world today.21

Chapter 3, “Jim Gorman”, is the first of two biographical chapters. Gorman is already the most famous (in Ireland and the USA) of the Australian soldiers who

19 ANZ WA152 Box 179 “New Zealand Provost Corps War Diaries.” 20 O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, p. 274. 21 In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has explored the persistence of imagery of the Great War in the consciousness of today – this I call Great War Dreaming. “Trench dreaming”, in this context, refers to images of Ireland in the minds of Diggers while at the Western Front – obviously only fragments of these are available today but that is also of the nature of dreams. 27

fought for Ireland. As a poet he gives some insight into the psychology of these IRA

Diggers and their motives in fighting for Ireland. He also, I believe, offers broader insight into the thinking of those of any diaspora who return to fight when they believe their ancestral country is in need. About one of the most extraordinary fighting men in the most active area outside of Dublin, the narrative of Gorman’s career as a soldier from enlistment in the 55th Battalion AIF through to his emigration to the USA in 1924 encapsulates the dilemma for an Irish Australian in the king’s army, as well as key developments of the Irish War of Independence. It demonstrates many of the themes of this thesis, illuminating the importance of trained, battle-hardened and armed soldiers in what was otherwise largely an amateur war.

Chapter 4, “Mike McGrath”, the second biographical chapter, tells a very different story. Mike McGrath, it seems, did everything right by everybody – except, of course, the British. He introduces a second group of IRA Diggers for, unlike

Gorman and many who fought in Ireland, he didn’t go AWL from the AIF but waited to be demobilised in London. The chapter follows his great nephew, Paddy

Hickey, through his recent discovery of his ‘Australian ancestor,’22 while at the same time telling of McGrath’s service to Australia as a 3rd Division artilleryman. As little is known of McGrath’s service in the War of Independence it follows him through the Irish Civil War as a Captain of the Powerstone Company of the

Republican IRA and further develops the narrative of Diggers through three wars.

22 This is Paddy’s term. 28

McGrath’s tragic death in custody and the debacle of his inquest and funeral

– well documented in contemporary newspaper reports – reveal some of the very worst aspects of the Irish Civil War, the ramifications of which still impact on his descendants today. It also introduces the question of Australian Governmental culpability.

Chapter 5, “Bringing the Boys Back Home”, tells a small part of Australia’s saga of demobilisation and repatriation at the close of WWI. It explores the consequences for those men not accounted for by April Fool’s Day 1920 when the

AIF finally shut up shop in London. It details the steps taken by the Australian authorities to deal with soldiers still overseas in 1920 – among whom (though it was never stated at the time) were men fighting in Ireland. It compares their subsequent treatment with Ireland’s notorious ‘starvation order’, made against the

Irish Defence Force personnel who deserted to enlist in the British Army in WWII.

The chapter begins with the Wesleyan Raid at Fermoy and my grandfather’s flight from Ireland, subsequent Court Martial and return to Australia.

It contrasts the treatment of men like him who, after a long period of absence in

Ireland, had a Court Martial, with those who didn’t. The chapter uses material from numerous service and court martial records as well as two vital series of archival papers documenting steps taken by the Department of Defence, Repatriation

Commission and the Parliament to deal with the legalities of desertion, illegal absentees and soldiers still in Britain as late as October 1920: NAA, A2487

1920/2101 “Ineligibility of Deserters” and NAA, MP367/1 632/10/2224 “Return to Australia of Deserters and Men Discharged in England”. It uses the Repatriation

Department’s own classifications of three “classes”23 of men involved during the

October 1920 crisis regarding “Destitute Diggers Abroad” to demonstrate the five different ways Australian soldiers were involved in Ireland.

This chapter also presents a range of facts and statistics that first led me to the hypothesis that the Australian authorities were aware that some of their soldiers were active in Ireland. It then asks why, if such was the case, there has been this century of silence. The chapter builds an argument leading to the conclusion that the Australian authorities’ historical and ongoing blind eye to this issue had tragic consequences for some of the men involved.

Chapter 6 takes as its title the much abused phrase “Saving the World for

Democracy”, taken not from any number of twentieth-century excuses for invasion or supporting dictators, but from Charles Bean’s “Introduction” to Volume One of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918. The First World War marked the first modern occasion this phrase was used as a reason for going to war and, subsequently, as a basis for its peace. It links back to chapter two and the promises made by British Liberal PM Asquith to “the little countries”, which had such an enormous impact on the enlistment of the Irish and others worldwide. It follows the transformation of this ideal into the concept of national self- determination in US President Wilson’s 14 Points and looks at the betrayal of this classic value of European liberalism at Versailles – while war raged in Ireland,

Russia, Egypt and elsewhere – so that Britain could maintain and expand its

Empire.

23 The term was used by the Department of Repatriation. NAA: MP367/1 632/10/2224 30

The chapter examines the duality of Britain torn between promoting liberal ideals and the realpolitik of Empire. It also attempts to examine the implications of this issue for Australia in the lead-up to the Centenary of ANZAC.

M123330 – CoS signed reply – FINAL

The chapter poses the question of how these men, these Australian soldiers who fought for Ireland, might be commemorated. It challenges the Department of

Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) determination through its Anzac Centenary Advisory

Board (ACAB) that “Whilst the men involved may have been Australians, their

story is part of Ireland’s struggle for independence, therefore it is not a part of the core narrative being considered by the Board.”24

In both form and content, the thesis challenges the DVA’s very concept of a

“core narrative” positing it as yet another anti-historical attempt, in the guise of objective history in service to power, in this case a particular vision of the Australia nation, to own the “story.” It is a top-down, authoritarian, attempt to control “our

… history” and is a perpetuation of the injustices inflicted on the Australian people a century ago while Australia was at war and after. That this core narrative has been, and continues to be built on the deliberate manipulation of the historical record only serves to show how vulnerable to empirically based research such a project is.

The Epilogue seeks to bring together the different strands of the enveloping narrative: the trope of the shamanic journey, the death of my father and my own ‘return from the dead’ to write this. It returns from the historical to the personal and the – too often construed as opposed – double bind of civic service and rebellion.

******

As former NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, has said, in a remarkable melange of cliché, when responding to the Turkish Government’s threat to ban NSW MPs from visiting Gallipoli after both Houses of the NSW Parliament condemned the

24 M123330 – CoS signed reply – FINAL op.cit. 32

Armenian Genocide: “The truth will set people free. History should never be denied, otherwise it is likely to be repeated.”25

Further notes on methodology

The thesis is structured like a torn and battered package, it is a history wrapped in a memoir but the two interpenetrate each other. While Paul Fussell wrote in The

Great War and Modern Memory of the cultural persistence of the memory of that war through literature, this thesis explores the persistence of memories in the descendants of Australian soldiers who fought in Ireland and how those connections might colour their, and the thesis argues, our understanding of the past. It also explores the persistent absences within some of those memories and the historical record. While the thesis is written within the genre of creative non- fiction, it draws heavily on history and theories of narrative battled over in contemporary historiography, as well as on my 30 years of theory-guided performance practice.

Greg Dening has been a major influence on this project. As the performance professional and pedagogue teaching alongside him at his “Academic Performance” seminars at Centre for Cross Cultural Research ANU in 2003 & 4, I discovered that

History was not just a field to mine for stories to perform but that historians and other academics were mining performance theories for their own practices.

25 ABC NEWS 22/08/13, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-22/nsw-mps-defiant-over- turkish-threat-of-gallipoli-ban/4905632 – viewed 22/08/13 33

In Performances, Dening writes about theatre’s rediscovery of itself as theatrical and history’s rediscovery of rhetoric as writing’s equivalent to theatricality. As Martin Amis has said, the very best of the Australian use of language embraces “hyperbole welded to a strong argument.”26 This thesis embraces elements of both rhetoric and theatricality, particularly the use of extended metaphors in using, as structural devices, the “journey to the underworld” and “history as performance.” While I agree with Roland Barthes critique of narrative in history that “the function of narrative is not to ‘represent,’ it is to constitute a spectacle”27 I have taken that as a statement of fact and embraced that aspect of narrative in a fragmented, discontinuous, democratic and demotic form. At times proposing hypotheses, I have also, when I could not ascertain the

“truth” of a some details, written in a more descriptive and discursive – what

Curthoys and Docker in Is History Fiction might refer to as Herodotean – manner, because even legends and rumours are part of the story.

In doing history, I have surveyed all the records on Irish-born servicemen in the AIF from which I have created a number of original graphs, tables and statistics to elucidate points and that, at times, suggested new lines of argument. In needing to go beyond “’one source’ history” but nevertheless conscious of the dangers of oral history (“the world of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity”28), the thesis draws on family papers and extensive interviews with five of the families, in five countries.

26 Brilliant Creatures, ABC TV, 16/9/2014. 27 Quoted in White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 275. 28 O’Farrell, “Oral History: Facts and Fiction”, Quadrant, November 1979, p. 5. 34

Besides Hayden White and Walter Benjamin who are referenced in the thesis, other reading has included Alan Munslow’s Deconstructing History (1997), which I found supportive of the “committed approach” I have taken. Artists working with communities are like social historians by whom:

(H)istory is written as a form of political commitment to marganilised

groups … Much of (which) … assumes that the historian’s (and artist’s)

commitments cannot be suspended, but that this does not diminish the value

of our historical understanding.29

This thesis is the record of my effort to give voice to this marginalised group of

Australian soldiers and their descendants I have been, through Illness and ancestral connection, privileged to come to know.

In doing this, I have found Michel-Rolph Truillot’s Silencing the Past: Power

and the Production of History a revelation concerning those issues to do with the silence of these Diggers and what I perceive as the manipulation of the Australian records in support of what the DVA has called its “core narrative”, as have Andrew

Moore’s repeated references to Australians’ “historical amnesia” in both The Secret

Army and the Premier and Francis de Groote: Irish Fascist Australian Legend. In addition, articles in Curthoys and McGrath Writing Histories have been useful, especially those by Donna Merwick, Greg Dening and Bill Gammage, as have articles in Keith Jenkins The Postmodern History Reader. Nigel Hamilton’s

Biography as well as Frank Cain’s The Origins of Political Surveillance in Australia and The Wobblies at War, D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo and Nicole Moore’s The

Censor’s Library have all added to the story and the contextualisation of the thesis.

29 Munslow, Deconstructing History, p. 26. Italics added for emphasis. 35

“History” is double, both what actually happened in the past and what is written about it – and I have spent too long in the bush to know that if a tree fell and no-one put a photo of it on Facebook, it nevertheless did fall. So too, “to act” and “to perform” are double – Antoin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double. The one that purports to be real – naturalism on the stage and the invisible, “objective” historian who would have us believe that what he/she writes is Ranke’s “history as it really happened” – is either mistaken, deranged or a liar. Human beings do not and cannot have God’s perspective, the omniscient narrator is a fiction. This approach contains within it what Curthoys and Docker have called the genocidal

(to which I would add authoritarian and imperial) tendency.30 Traditional animation aspires to what Walt Disney called “the illusion of reality” but that is animation and would never be mistaken, beyond the moment, for the “real” thing.

When Bertolt Brecht first articulated the “A-(alienation) effect” in

“Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” he was reacting against the phenomenal worldwide uptake of Stanislavskian naturalism and drawing on the practices of

Meyerhold’s Biomechanical Constructivist Theatre and Eisenstein’s cinema. The theoretical aim, for Brecht was to break the audience’s emotional identification with the character wherein the story is experienced as “real” and instead remind them that it is indeed performance (Brecht’s reason for this are not relevant here).

The theatrical term for this is “breaking the fourth wall” which Shakespeare manipulated so seductively in Richard III and Kevin Spacey is doing today in House of Cards, and of which Dario Fo made a highly entertaining political device. This has led to the rediscovery of theatre as “theatrical” and the actor as also performer.

30 Curthoys and Docker, Is history fiction? 36

This A-effect has entered postmodernism as “estrangement” and is manifested in contemporary history writing by the use of extended metaphors and the open ownership of the author’s necessarily limited perspective, and where she stands in relation to the material through what Dening and others call “Reflections” that disrupt the narrative flow and hence the reality effect of much history writing where the narrative representation of the past is mistakenly identified as the past.

For an actor, every action occurs in space and time and that is, in part, how a role is memorialised and then activated (as though for the first time) in performance. Following on from the idea of mapping in Dening’s Beach Crossings but also inspired by psychoanalysis, Aboriginal dreamtime mapping of ancestral journeys, mapping effects of classical epic and Fernand Braudel’s The

Mediterranean (1949), I constructed a dreaming map of the worlds the thesis would traverse. As I was dying of cancer and my father was dying with dementia, we spent time together on the swampy shore – using the cinematic technique of superimposing one image over another, it was both the Cooks River in Marrickville where I was then living and the River Styx of the ancient Underworld, that my father was preparing to cross. As my father’s dementia was characterised by memory loss, it was, metaphorically, being washed away by the waters of the

Underworld, and it was there that I struggled to catch whatever fragments of it I could.

A common descriptor of the First World War was that it was hell-on-earth and as a stretcher bearer on the Western Front, himself wounded a number of times, my grandfather was constantly immersed in life, death and the torn and

broken body. On the Western Front, to die was to “Go West” an archetypal image

(both ancient and modern) but relief from that hell of the Front was achieved by getting “a Blighty”, a wound serious enough to get a soldier hospitalised in the UK.

But Blighty itself was West, just as a wound could be deadly or not.

West of Britain is Ireland, the “Isle of the Saints” which LtCol Williams

COAPC described as a “haven for deserters” and which in the dreaming map of the thesis became a sort of the “Isle of the Blessed.” In traditional Irish dreaming, further west is Tir na nOg, both realm of the dead and isle of the blessed from which Oisin returned to Glenosheen (Glen of Oisin) of East Limerick to age and die

(become again human) – just as Odysseus returned to Ithaca from the west, as did

Con Casey east to the Land of the Golden Fleece symbolised on the AIF badge of the

Rising Sun.

As Homer uses three worlds in the Iliad, Olympus (but gods are not allowed today) Troy (war) and, through multiple uses of simile and geaneology, Home from which all the fighters are separated, the thesis also uses three worlds. These are: the sites of WWI (mostly the Western Front), the home from which the soldiers are separated and to which some will return and Ireland, the ancestral home which is struggling under almost 800 years of occupation and oppression. In journeying between these worlds, I have also tried to build on Dening’s metaphor of crossing beaches, as a way of enunciating subterranean changes in character (cf. P. 49: “As he journeyed from the Front, westwards towards Ireland in the glorious sunshine of August 1917, crossing the two waters and the little island in between, my grandfather was a damaged man.”

Every actor soon learns that acting, like doing history, is primarily an interpretative art but, particularly when working with marganilised communities to help voice their stories, those techniques, can also be put to creative use. An actor also learns that the only way to fully bring a character to life is to endow them with his own vulnerable humanity. This is what I find extraordinary in both

Bean’s and Gammages’ writings about Australian soldiers in WWI. Bean writes with great love of the Australian soldier; this is part cause and largely the result of his extraordinary close-up detail. In The Broken Years, Bill Gammage has also achieved this effect not only through his tragic vision and performance-inspired punctuation31 but through the intimacy achieved by his immersion in the private documents of the soldiers he writes about. Both rightly perceive the experience of their characters as the Agon of the Greek Tragedy. Whilst love may be too indeterminate a concept for empirically driven historians, writers of fiction and actors will often speak of it as a crucial element in how they relate to their characters. I too have felt this same love for my subjects in The Diggers and the IRA and hope I have managed to communicate a small fraction of this to the reader.

Inventing some spoken language for my grandfather – fragmentary utterances of interior monologue and some small dialogues – that were built using improvisitations upon a specific situation, I felt constrained by the form not to assume the license of a writer of fiction and create the fuller sensory and interior worlds necessary to the more complete creation of character. Constrained also by the word limits of the Masters Thesis, which I have already overdone, the thesis

31 “The Broken Years: Australian soldiers in the Great War 1914-18” in Curthoys and McGrath, Writing Histories, pp. 14-18. 39

has omitted crucial elements of Con Casey’s backstory involving the 4th Brigade’s experience at Bullecourt, seldom mentioned in “core narratives” of Australia in

WWI, that would have helped in character development.

J.B. Bury wrote at the end of a long life devoted to objective history, “I do not think that freedom from bias is possible, nor do I think it desirable.”32 In giving voice to the colonised “other,” post-colonialism, has shown the lie within many of those would-be-authoritative histories that lay claim to a scientific objectivity. It has shown them to be not authoritative but authoritarian and imperialising.

***

This project has helped keep me alive way beyond my due date and I humbly and proudly submit it for assessment as my oncologists make preparations to perform, as objectively as possible, a hind-quarter amputation on me in that most intimate of venues, the operating theatre.

***

32 Curthoys and Docker, op.cit. p. 89. 40

Prologue

Riding the Tale of a Ghost

V. Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

VI. To articulate the past … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. … Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.33

33 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations p.255

In the middle years of the first decade of the new millenium as my father was slowly dying of pneumonia and alcoholic dementia, I set out to discover what his father, my grandfather, an Australian soldier in the First World War, was up to during the 26 months he was Absent Without Leave (AWL) in Ireland. Twenty odd years previously, while thumbing through Dad’s copy of Patrick O’Farrell’s The

Irish in Australia, I first stumbled across a photograph of the Darlinghurst 7.34

Photograph deleted.

For description see footnote 34 below.

The thought exploded in my head: “That’s when my grandfather was AWL in

Ireland!”

***

In January 2007, as a new year was being born, a skin cell in my arse refused to die, built itself into a big, scaly carcinoma, tunnelled inside me, wrapped itself around my sphincter muscles and burrowed into the root of my penis. Before the doctors caught it, it had metastasised into my lymphatic system. At the time, I was living alone in a studio apartment above the Cook’s River in the inner southwest Sydney suburb of Marrickville. There, amid the shadows, the weeds and the white cockatoos … I died.

34 “(S)pecial regulations of the War Precautions Act, gazetted in March 1918, proscribing ‘Sinn Fein’ and any advocacy of the independence of Ireland…. ended with the arrests in June of Albert Thomas Dryer, Edmund McSweeney, Michael McGing … William McGuiness … Maurice Drayton, Frank McKeown … and Thomas Fitzgerald.” O’Farrell, p.p. 273-5. The eighth in the picture is William J. Fegan, a founder of the Brisbane branch of the INA who had been arrested seven months earlier. They were later joined by a ninth, Michael Kiely of Warrnambool, Victoria. BMH WS1526 Albert T Dryer. 42

At the same time, my father was also dying. Only much more slowly. And as he was dying, his memory was collapsing and he was entering the timelessness of dementia. In death’s waiting room, his symptoms differed from those of the sufferers of senile dementia; his was the peculiar variation caused by a lifetime’s abuse of alcohol. For my older sister and I, who visited him most, it was a very special time because, while he was fading from us, he was also returning to the funny, loving and loveable man we had known in the land of long ago, when we were children.

Blessed with a phenomenal memory, always remembering everyone’s birthday - though it was Mum who bought the presents - Dad was the family historian. “The Family Memory”, his younger brother and sister called him. But now he was losing the very faculty that had defined him. At the same time, he was living in a world that no longer understood him. His language was the witty, idiomatic language of an earlier generation, of a world that believed it knew what it was to be

Australian. And there he was in a nursing home in Sydney’s Waverley cracking

Aussie jokes to a nursing staff from East Asia, Sri Lanka, the Pacific Islands and

Africa. It seemed that verbal comprehension didn’t matter too much, however, for he was much loved, always had a bright word for anyone who entered his room and he especially perked up with a flirty line for any woman - whether family, friend or carer. He made everyone laugh and almost everyone care.

In my own journey through the underworld, where Dad and I would converse on the marshy shore as Lethe washed away at the ruins of his memory, I

was promoted up the ranks to “Little Brother.” It was as though memories would float to the surface and, like ghosts, possess him for a short time before exploding and disappearing forever. And it was then, while catching bubbles, that I became obsessed with a phantom.

As a country family in mid twentieth-century Australia, we were forever travelling somewhere, packed into the family Holden station wagon. In the days before car radios, the airwaves were taken up by Dad singing Irish songs, reciting bush ballads and the nearly naughty rimes and stories of childhood. Among the many characters of his country childhood in the one teacher school at Hyde’s Creek in the Bellinger Valley of the New South Wales North Coast, the one he loved most was his own father, “The Best Man He Ever Knew” - something, sadly, I’ve never said about my own father.

While meandering among the mangroves of my own underworld, I became obsessed with my grandfather’s story and, through those long, boring days of cancer treatment, wandering among the chemo-enhanced shades, I became possessed by these ancestral men and this story. It wasn’t my time. They sent me back with this:

At 3pm on a chill Monday, 17 October, 1919, as London clung to itself beneath a bleary, sniffling sky, a man no longer young but not yet old climbed the grey stone steps that led up to the Australian Military Hospital, Harefield. He was wearing a loose, brown, three-piece suit over a thin and possibly wasted body. But then, in those years after the war when food rationing was still imposed and

millions died of Spanish flu, for a man to appear neither young nor old and to be thin and wasted was not so unusual. What was striking to the non-commissioned officer on guard outside the hospital as the stranger approached was that peculiarly relaxed gait that marked him out as an Australian.

The stranger came to a standstill at the desk in the hospital lobby occupied by one-eyed Sergeant Martin Brophy. In a strong Australian accent with an overlay of Irish lilt, with a voice as warm and musical as the bush in summer, he identified himself. “Number 20, Corporal Patrick Cornelius Casey, 13th Battalion. … Sergeant,

I‘ve been absent for some time.”

But I am getting ahead of myself. I never knew him – none of us did. He only had one grandchild when he died, as so many of them died, without getting beyond his fifties. His own father, Michael, the eldest son of a Limerick farmer, who had realised the Irish migrant dream in the lush, well-watered soils of the Bellinger

Valley, followed his only child within four weeks to that heaven where the young never grow old and the apple trees are always in blossom. At least that’s what my own father told me when my good Catholic mum was out of earshot before launching into an impromptu Mountains of Morne or Rose of Tralee. And, when the

Australian grandfather and his Irish father together hung up their work boots and cattle prods, it was like a crack opened up in the world and scores of their descendants came tumbling out, mawing and squealing and fighting till, within a decade, we had populated half of New South Wales.

Again, I am getting ahead of myself – this is not about us, it is about him whom we never knew.

And now my own father, “the family memory”, is fading. His mind’s gone back to childhood when he parked his horse at this nursing home where he’s been working all day in the Post Office and I’m his ‘Little Brother’ and he’s worried about his own dad with whom his mum is upset – because he’s disappeared drinking whisky or gone to Sydney for hospital treatment for his gas fucked lungs, his feet, his back, his eye or some other war related damage that he was forever battling to have assessed by Repat and that, eventually, killed him. That grandfather never seemed to get over the habit of going absent without leave.

These are the family fragments of the world of a man I never met except through the love of his own son, my father, and my uncles and aunties. Dad described him as “The Best Man He Ever Knew” and, as both State President and

Federal Secretary of his union, the Postmasters Federation (when the Postmaster

Generals Department [PMG] was a Federal Government Ministry), with time spent on the ACTU Executive in the lead up to Gough Whitlam’s 1972 election, Dad had known some special men. He also told us that his father had said to him: “Whenever you hear Danny Boy, think of me.”

In this world, my grandfather, Cornelius Patrick “Con” Casey, was born the son of Irish immigrants in the western Sydney suburb of Rookwood, on the northern edge of Irishtown (today’s Bankstown), in the winter of 1890.35

***

A simple logic: if he really was The Best Man Dad Ever Knew and he spent those

26 months in Ireland, at that time, with what were among the very best military

skills in the world, what would he have done?

***

In the long way, there is always a journey to the underworld. It’s not a detour or a pleasure cruise. It’s the only way to get back home.

35 Today the suburb is called Lidcombe and the name ‘Rookwood’ reserved for the mighty necropolis nearby. 47

Chapter 1

Distinction’s Worthless Badge

Dear Con,

… After saying goodbye to you and Mrs Casey I drove through all the familiar places and the door of memory was opened and looking over the past as these old familiar scenes flashed by I frankly admit my eyes filled with tears. I thought of all the blood that has been shed at the whim of men who placed self and place and power above all else heedless of the result and forgetting the anxious and weary hours, Heartbreaking sleepless nights the Loyal Mothers of this and other Lands had to pass through Because they wanted to place upon themselves distinctions worthless Badge.1 (sic)

Your cobber, Johnno.

Letter from Balo Street, Moree, 23/07/1946

1 Italics added for emphasis otherwise spelling and capitalisation as in original. The term “distinction’s worthless badge” is quoted from Robert Ingersoll’s “Life”, a speech delivered to the U.S. National Liberal League in 1879. Here it is used in both its original sense of the vanity of ambition and as a deliberate travesty of the second highest military award available to enlisted men, the Distinguished Conduct Medal DCM). The controversy over this medal after the Battle of Messines would dominate Con’s and, subsequently, his family’s memory of his war and was somehow meant to explain his long absence in Ireland. 48

Both my grandfathers (and many great uncles) served Australia as soldiers in the

Great War but their names, like those of tens of thousands of other volunteers, were brought here from Ireland. The one who inspired this story, Cornelius Patrick

‘Con’ Casey, enlisted on 30 September 1914 in the 13th Battalion of the newly forming 4th Brigade at Sydney’s Victoria Barracks. Established in 1847 as the stronghold of British power in colonial NSW, the Barracks still has its rifle slits facing the south and west – trouble, authority knew, would come from Surry Hills and Redfern, from the poor, the working class, the Irish and the black.

By the time Con enlisted, the 1st Division of the Australian Imperial Force

(AIF), of which approximately 18 percent were British-born and 85 percent were

Protestant, was already complete. Though Catholics made up 15 percent, they comprised just 6 percent of officers and most of those were in the lower ranks.2

The legend suggests that, as it took longer for men from the bush to reach the cities to enlist, the 4th Brigade of which my grandfather’s 13th was the senior battalion, got more than its share of bushmen.3 Of all the units in the AIF, the 4th Bde most closely resembled the official historian, Charles Bean’s, vision of the Digger as the

“typical” Australian man as he had evolved in the settler society of convict origins confronting a harsh and rugged frontier: physically and mentally tough, full of initiative, a loner but good to his mates and deferential to no one.4

2 Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First AIF, 1914-1918: Some Statistical Evidence”, cited in Seal, Inventing Anzac, p.174. 3 “Bean described the Fourth Division before First Bullecourt as largely composed of country men, which in him was synonymous with stating that they were exceptionally fine soldiers (p. 281), and he considered the Fourth Brigade of the Division at this time as probably the best led brigade in the history of the AIF (pp.293-94).” Gammage, Introduction to Vol. 4 of the Official History, ““The AIF in France,1917” http://www.awm.gov.au/histories/first_world_war/volIV_introduction The 4th Division was built around the 4th Brigade during the doubling of the force in Egypt in 1916. 4 This was very much the Australian nationalist vision of the time as expressed in the Bulletin by, amongst others, Lawson and Patterson, and by Bean in his journalism and On the Wool Track. 49

But there is an unrecorded fact about this unit. In my grandfather’s 13th

Battalion (Bn), though its patron was the Orange Lodge of Newcastle, 19.1 percent of the original enlistments were Catholics – a not insignificant increase over the 15 percent in the 1st Division.5 Though it could be argued that this increase merely righted the imbalance in the 1st Division caused by the urgency felt by Protestant,

British Australians to serve and protect the ‘Mother Country,’ their ‘Home’, there were other factors at play that ran counter to the Imperial themes of ‘Mother

England’, ‘King and Country’ and ‘Loyalty to Empire.’

In 14-18, the French historians, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette

Becker, have tried to capture the astonishing transformation in Britain when,

at midnight on 4 August, the United Kingdom entered the war with

unanimous popular support, including that of the Irish Catholics who not

only swore unambiguous allegiance to the crown but announced that their

armed militias, originally ready to wage a civil war against the Ulster

Protestants, would join the latter in guarding the coasts. The change of

heart had occurred on the morning of 3 August, as soon as London got word

that Germany had handed the ultimatum to Belgium demanding free

passage of German troops across Belgian territory. This was a spectacular

change, and it is an extreme case, but it is emblematic of the speed with

which European public opinion rallied to the war.6

5 See Appendix , Table 6, p.257. 6 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, p.p. 94-5. 50

Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker have captured the astonishing volte face of the Irish

Parliamentary Party (IPP) as Britain teetered on the brink, but they make no attempt to explain what motivated it.

Something else happened in the time between Britain’s Declaration of War and the announcement in Australia that recruiting would continue beyond the initial promise of 20,000 so quickly fulfilled with the formation of the 1st Division.

In his introduction to the biography of the Irishman, Richard Bourke, one of colonial NSW’s most influential and enlightened Governors, former Prime Minister

Gough Whitlam wrote that:

As with most of our history, at least until the Second World War, we have to

understand what was happening in Britain and the British Empire to

understand fully what was happening in Australia.7

Perhaps Whitlam should have written ‘the United Kingdom’ rather than Britain, for much of what was impacting on Britain immediately prior to WWI was happening in Ireland, never a part of Britain but, since 1801, of the United Kingdom of Great

Britain and Ireland. As Britain’s oldest colony, Ireland was, however, also part of the Empire and, like India, Egypt and elsewhere, had a developing and, for Britain, problematic national independence movement.

On 3 August when Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey announced in the

House of Commons Germany’s declaration of war on France and ultimatum to

Belgium, he added,

7 E.G. Whitlam in Waugh, p. x. 51

One thing I would say: the one bright spot is the very dreadful situation is

Ireland. The position in Ireland – and this I should like to be clearly

understood abroad – is not a consideration among the things I have to take

into account now.8

The British cabinet believed Germany was gambling that Britain would not be

able to declare war while civil war threatened in Ireland.9 Ulster Loyalists, whose

motto was “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, were threatening violent

resistance to Home Rule – the realisation, by political means, of some degree of

self-government for Ireland within the British Empire.10 The Loyalists were

supported by the opposition Conservative Party, keen to destabilise the Liberal

Government, and sections of the British Army. Neither of these were in a hurry to

aid the dismemberment of “the Empire on which the sun never set.”

The First Home Rule Bill of 1886 had led to then Liberal Prime Minister

Gladstone’s articulation of one of the great principles of European Liberalism: the

equality of nations and their right to national sovereignty regardless of size and

military might. By 1912, constitutional obstacles had been cleared away and there

was nothing to stop the Third Home Rule Bill being realised in 1914. As it had

done when Gladstone moved the First Home Rule Bill, the Irish Parliamentary

Party (IPP) held the balance of power in Westminster. That 3 August, in response

to the news of the ultimatum to Belgium, John Redmond, leader of the IPP, stood

up in the House and assured Britain that it could withdraw its troops from Ireland

8 As quoted in aan de Wiel, Jerome, The Irish Factor 1899-1919, p. 79. 9 Ibid., see especially pp. 72-81. 10 The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G, Memories and Reflections, 1852-1927, 1928. Vol 2, pp. 2-33. 52

for the continental war, as Irish men would defend Ireland’s shores.11 The idea of

the Irish, armed and defending their shores with the British Army engaged on the

Continent, was not, however, quite what was needed to reassure Britain.

On the 18 September, as part of Britain’s preparations for war, the Third

Home Rule Bill received royal assent, becoming the Government of Ireland Act

1914, but was immediately suspended until after the war. For that Act, John

Redmond, then leader of both the IPP and the National Volunteers (Ireland),

believing he had Home Rule in his pocket, became the recruiting sergeant for

Britain and two days later in his Woodenbridge Speech encouraged Irish men and

women to enlist and fight not just in Ireland but “wherever the firing line

extends.” 12

One week later, British Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was on the

same stage with Redmond at the Princess Theatre Dublin, attempting to articulate

Britain’s war aims in a way that would encourage Irishmen to enlist. Asquith said:

I should like … to ask your attention … to the end which, in this war, we

ought to keep in view. Forty eight years ago … Mr Gladstone used these

words … “The greatest triumph of our time will be the enthronement of the

idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics.” … [I]t seems

to be now at this moment as good a definition as we can have of our

European policy – the idea of public right. …It means, first and foremost, the

11 Surely Grey’s statement quoted on p. 40 could only have been made after private conversation with Redmond where the Irishman made the promise he delivered after Grey’s speech. 12 Redmond “Woodenbridge Speech”, 20/09/14, in Jeffery, Keith, Ireland and the Great War, pp.13- 14.

clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the

governing factor in the relation of states … It means next, that room must be

found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of

the smaller nationalities, each with a corporate consciousness of its own.

Belgium, Holland and Switzerland and Scandinavian countries, Greece and

the Balkan States – they must be recognised as having exactly as good a title

as their powerful neighbours … to a place in the sun.13

With those words, the Liberal Prime Minister of Britain gave birth to the twentieth century, the struggle for “national self determination”, the justification for the USA later to enter the war and the League of Nations. Though he didn’t name Ireland, he was speaking to an Irish audience with the full and calculated knowledge that every member of his audience was thinking “and to be sure, isn’t Ireland a little country too.” On stage at the Princess Theatre, Asquith managed to link the Irish struggle for independence with the First World War and the other, soon to be global, movements for national independence.

All this news about the resolution of conflict in Ireland was read in

newspapers around the world. We read it in Australia and Australia’s Irish

Catholics, not to be outdone by the Empire Loyalists, rushed to enlist. Numbers

did not diminish until after May 1916 and then again after October 1916, when

the first conscription referendum split the country and turned so many of the

working class, the Catholic and the poor against the Empire’s crusade. In Australia

we did not read that with Redmond’s Woodenbridge speech the National

Volunteers split, with some 10,000 members repudiating Redmond, reclaiming

13 Asquith op.cit. p.39. 54

their original name ‘Irish Volunteers’ and going underground, because, as the old

saying went, “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.”

When enlisting, my grandfather inverted the order of his first two names and signed Patrick Cornelius Casey. In his service record is a copy of his Oath of

Allegiance to the King. Underneath the oath is the signature ‘C.P. Casey,’ but the “C” stands apart like an afterthought or a later addition in a different hand, a first sign that Con may not have been quite so loyal to the King.14 Throughout the rest of his short life in all his correspondence with the Defence Forces and the Repatriation

Commission, Con continued to sign Patrick Cornelius. Indeed, as late as September

1967 in her application for the Gallipoli Medal, his wife, Elvira, still used that form of his name. In all other aspects of his life, including formal documents registered with the NSW Lands Board, he was known as Cornelius Patrick Casey. Even a letter from his father, Michael, dated 30 August 1915 when Con was hospitalised in

Alexandria, “anxiously seeking particulars …of my son Private C.P Casey,”15 failed to expose the discrepancy.

There were an estimated 15,000 and more men who used an alias when enlisting in the 1st AIF.16 Some did so because they were too old, some too young; others had criminal records, or, in 1918, membership of proscribed organisations such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or Sinn Fein and some did it to

14 NAA: B2455 Casey, P.C, service record, p.7. This is probably the result of some relative in the 1980s trying to convince Army Records that they somehow got his name wrong. 15 Ibid. p. 43. 16 Smith, What’s in a Name, p.4. 55

escape a bad marriage or family responsibilities.17 This phenomenon appeared across the whole force. We only know of those who, like 90 Irish-born soldiers, recanted and signed the Statutory Declaration to correct the falsehood and reclaim their rightful names. But the phenomenon has been noted elsewhere. In the

American Civil War,

one reason for this was because many Americans spelled Irish names

phonetically and were not corrected because of high levels of illiteracy

among the emigrants. So Hough became Howe or Haugh on many

occasions….18

In Australia, Gerard Fitzgerald, writing of the exiled Fenians, explains:

The use by the Fenians of an ‘alias’ and the inability of the English officials

and journalists to understand and spell Irish names resulted in many of the

Fenians being reported with several names.19

But none of these explanations fits my grandfather.

On page two of the Attestation Papers that every soldier had to sign when joining the AIF, there is the OATH TO BE TAKEN BY PERSONS BEING ENLISTED, commonly referred to as the Oath of Loyalty to the King:

I … swear that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the

Australian Imperial Force from … until the end of the War, and a further

17 By 1918, some enlistment papers included the following declaration while others had the signature of the applicant on a separate paper to compare with the official one.

18 Sinead O’Carroll, “Hidden History: the first casualty in the American Civil War was a Tipp man” in thejournal.ie 7/10 /12 http://www.thejournal.ie/hidden-history-the-first-casualty-in-the- american-civil-war-was-a-tipp-man-622120-Oct2012/ viewed 12/11/12. 19 As quoted in O’Riordan op.cit. p.44. 56

period of four months thereafter unless sooner lawfully discharged,

dismissed or removed therefrom; and that I will resist His Majesty’s

enemies and cause His Majesty’s peace to be kept and maintained; and that

I will in all matters appertaining to my service, faithfully discharge my duty

according to law.

SO HELP ME GOD

Perhaps this is the reason the curators of the Anzac legend assert with such certainty that all those men went off to fight for ‘King and Country.’ Everyone enlisting in the AIF signed a contract saying that was exactly what he or she –

though women could only enlist as nurses, they nevertheless signed the oath – was doing. Even as independent a thinker as the Irish-descended former Prime

Minister, Paul Keating, when speaking of the ‘Unknown Soldier’ in his celebrated

Remembrance Day speech of 1993 could only articulate as singular (country & king) these two ‘noble’ reasons for Australian enlistment in WWI:

He may have been one of those who believed that the Great War would be

an adventure too grand to miss. He may have felt that he would never live

down the shame of not going. But the chances are he went for no other

reason than that he believed that it was his duty he owed to his country and

his King.20

No doubt that statement is true of many of the soldiers serving in the AIF and in the mythography of Anzac, ‘King and Country’ is the only ‘sacred’ cause ever offered for enlisting – the two are conjoined as though they are one. ‘King’ and

“Country” are indivisible, as though it was impossible to fight for the one without

20 Paul Keating and Paul Kelly, “Remembrance Day Speech” 1993. Italicsadded for emphasis. 57

the other and the previous century of a developing, distinctive Australian culture disappeared like a rainbow with the declaration of war.

So why would a twenty-four-year-old, ‘native’ born Australian like Con

Casey invert his Christian names and, thus, concoct an alias? Perhaps an explanation might be inferred from an observation that in the officers’ mess of the

2nd Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, “after dinner, the water was removed from the table, lest anyone pass his glass over it during the loyal toast, signifying that the toast was ‘to the king across the water’.”21 Elsewhere, John Lucy, an Irishman and a career officer in the British Army recalls the dilemma he and his brother faced when enlisting for the King’s shilling:

We swore with some national qualms of conscience. As a sop to our feelings

we chose an Irish regiment, and one stationed far away at the other end of

Ireland.22

When Ireland erupted into civil war over the ratification of the Treaty with

Britain in January 1922, the differences coalesced around a single symbolic issue – a watered down version of the Oath of Loyalty and all that that implied. When

Eamon de Valera, whose walk out – when President – from the Dail (the Irish

Parliament) over ratification of the Treaty with England was one of the major factors precipitating the Civil War, returned to parliamentary democracy in 1927, he had to sign the Oath of Allegiance. The extraordinary arrangements de Valera made to sign (moving the Bible to the opposite end of the room and covering the whole of the document except the line on which he had to sign) are grotesque

21 Johnstone, Orange, Green and Khaki, p. 195 22 Lucy, p. 15 58

indications of the impact of the Oath of Loyalty to the British Crown as an issue running through Irish history at least as far back as the Tudors.23 Ultimately, because he had to sign in order to return to parliamentary politics but could not do so sincerely, de Valera described the oath as “an empty political formula.”24 De

Valera was certainly too well known to use an alias, but Con Casey, the New

Zealand soldier James Frederick ‘Fred’ McKenna (who also inverted the order of his first two names, when he enlisted underage as 61728 Frederick James

McKenna in the Wellington Battalion of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force

(NZEF)) and an unknown number of soldiers of the Empire were not.

My grandfather’s use of an alias, a nom de guerre, seems a way of crossing his fingers; a way for a man to both lie and, at the same time, keep his integrity. It was the act of a subject person, a colonised being. Was it possible to be loyal to

Australia and not to the King? Of course it was, as subsequent, non-English migrants to Australia have affirmed. For the Irish, England wasn’t their Mother;

Ireland was the “Old Mother” of the Irish around the world and their loyalties, like those of migrants everywhere, were to their new country and their old, not to the

British Crown – that symbol, for the Irish, of 750 years of occupation and oppression.

When Hughes’ regime insisted that loyalty to Australia meant loyalty to

Empire and accused the Irish of disloyalty, Archbishop Daniel Mannix declared, in a statement prophetic of modern multicultural Australia, that his loyalties were to

23 Oaths of Loyalty have a long history of contention in the Anglo-Irish relationship going back as far as the early days of invasion and particularly after Henry VIII’s Oaths of Succesion and Supremacy of 1534. 24 Longford, p.256. 59

Australia first and then the land of his ancestors, Ireland. In multicultural Australia today, the Oath of Loyalty to the Crown is no longer compulsory. At naturalisation ceremonies or other oath-taking occasions, such as induction into the public service or the armed forces, the individual is now given a choice between an oath to the crown or a pledge of loyalty to the nation. Similarly, in court cases a witness can either swear on the bible or pledge the truth. In modern, secular Australia, non-believers in God, Crown or both no longer have to perjure themselves to be believed.

***

As he journeyed from the Front, westwards towards Ireland in the glorious sunshine of August 1917, crossing the two waters and the little island in between, my grandfather was a damaged man. Like others before and since, he was furious with his army. If not with his army, then with its commanders. If not with the army commanders, then with the politicians who were running the whole show. He was certainly fed up with the bloody war.

Brown! The name thundered in his head. Brown, Brown, Brown! Fuck Brown! …

Ignorant, fuckhead cunt!

An Anzac Original, Con had served in the Gallipoli campaign from the landing on the 25th April, 1915. His ‘A’ Company of the 13th was the very last unit to land but sometime before the sun came up on the 26th, it rendezvoused with

Colonel Monash and the rest of the 4th Brigade on Ari Burnu, the northern head of

what was to become known as Anzac Cove.25 From there they made their way, under constant Turkish fire, through Shrapnel and Monash Gullies up the second ridge to take and hold what would remain the most precarious parts of the line:

Pope’s, Quinn’s and Courtney’s Posts.

On Gallipoli, Con was twice wounded. He suffered the loss of the first phalanx of his right index (trigger) finger during the fierce fighting when the Turks tunnelled into Quinn’s Post in May and a bomb fragment lodged in his right eye during the failed August Offensive on Sari Bair. “From the trench down to the beach, about 4 miles, (was) one long line of grey stiff bodies of men who have died trying to get down to the beach unassisted.”26 Hospitalised in Alexandria, he was slated for repatriation to Australia but his sense of loyalty to his mates still hanging on to dear life on that godforsaken sandy waste, Gallipoli, and of a job not-yet-done would no allow him to back down and so he refused and, with his new platoon commander, Lieutenant “Mad” Harry Murray, was in the very last units of the biggest success of the campaign, the Evacuation. “(He) went into the last boat load at 4a.m. in the morning of the 19th December (and) spent Christmas on the lonely island of Lemnos.”27 They were the Die Hards.28

As a result of disabilities caused by his wounds, Con retrained in England as a stretcher bearer. In August 1916, as he waited at Etaples with the 11th

25 In the 13th Bn Unit Diary (AWM4 23/32/4 – April 1915 ) is written “Records from 25th Apri 10 1st June are missing … “ (p.4 ) but A Coy alone of the 13th was with the 15th Bn on the Seeangbee and disembarked sometime after the last of the 15th who went off at 10.30pm ((AWM4 23/32/6 – April 1915) p.8. T.A White (The Fighting Thirteenth) writes “and ‘A’ landing early next morning.” p. 27. 26 AWM, IDRL/0592 Sergeant Harold Jackson, 13th Battalion, AIF, Diary, 26 August 1915. 27 Con Casey, “Soldier’s Letter,” The Raleigh Sun, 24/3/1916, p.2. 28 White, T.A., op.cit, p. 54. This term was given to the very last men to evacuate Anzac. 61

reinforcements to rejoin the 13th, all of the base was buzzing with word of the

13th’s stunning achievement at Pozieres. Then, on the 19th, he rejoined them at the

4th Brigade base at Warloy, just in time for the return to Pozieres and the attack on

Mouquet Farm.

In a year on the Western Front, broken only once by hospitalisation in the middle of the Somme Winter, early 1917, to be operated on for ‘trench foot’ and

‘gas back’, he was twice Mentioned in Dispatches (MID) and twice nominated for the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM), before being awarded the Military Medal

(MM) for the Battle of Messines in June 1917. During that time, he’d seen action at

‘Mucky’ Farm, through the Somme Winter, during the Pursuit to the Hindenburg

Line and at Bullecourt. By then, he’d lost part of a finger and part of his eyesight, part of his foot was amputated because of trench foot, his lungs and heart were damaged from gas and his back permanently damaged carrying men through

Somme mud. In a letter from Egypt in 1916 he’d written:

I was made sergeant the first week on the battlefield, but I refused any

promotion. If I had taken the stripes I would have been a lieutenant now,

but I will not have any position in the army. 29

In light of his subsequent military career and given the enormous casualty rate that first month at Anzac – especially for the 13th and 16th in the attack on Bloody

Angle on 2 May when the 13th was reduced to just 50 percent – this cocky claim is not wholly unlikely. Many were the Diggers who refused promotion. My other grandfather, 1655 Lawrence John Gaffney, 55th Battalion, claimed he would never

29 Raleigh Sun, ibid. This assertion “ I refused any promotion … I will not have any position in the army” betrays again a place where Australian working class egalitarianism meets migrant distrust of British constituted authority in Australia. 62

take a promotion in the army because he would never tell another man what to do

– this despite the fact that he captained both his football and cricket teams before and after the war.

On the Western Front, something changed for Con in his relationship with the army. Perhaps it was just that by 1917 he was already an elder, one of the diminishing number of Originals. On 21 June 1917 when 847 Eric Evans, who had been repatriated in 1915 after wounds on Gallipoli, returned to the 13th at camp outside of Steernwerck he wrote in his diary: “The old hands were nowhere to be seen and I realised what a long time two years is in a war.”30 Perhaps it was already clear that with promotion from the ranks the substance of the AIF was changing and more closely reflecting not just the class divisions of pre-war

Australia but the class fluidity of Australian meritocracy; or perhaps he could no longer bear to see those who were less competent than himself leading men to their deaths. At the very least, he would have seen that this war was a long-term commitment and he might need to make something of himself through it.

Whatever it was, after the Casualty Clearing Station next to the command post at

Bullecourt took a direct hit and wiped out the battalion doctor (MO), Captain

Shellshear, and five stretcher-bearers, he accepted his first promotion to the rank of Lance Corporal. At their next battle, Messines in Belgium – while the 2IC,

Douglas Marks, and Senior Company Captain, Major Murray were still recovering from Bullecourt – Con was in command of the 13th stretcher bearers. By August he had been twice promoted, so that he was a Corporal and head of the 4th Brigade stretcher bearers. Then, on Sunday 12th, the date of that second promotion, and as

30 Wilson Patrick, ed. So Far From Home, p. 73. 63

the 4th, the hardest fought of the Australian Divisions,31 was at last being withdrawn for long overdue rest, Con went on leave to Ireland.

***

Popularly regarded as the first book of European literature, and the foundation of the western literary canon, Homer’s Iliad begins with a soldier,

Achilles, being stripped of his battle prize by his Commanding Officer, Agamemnon.

Achilles, prince, demigod and incomparable warrior is outraged by the injustice done him and refuses to fight - even when his Achaean forces are being decimated by the enemy Trojans.

Wounded, profoundly depressed by the deaths of his brother and friends, and the horror he had witnessed in the trenches, and then rejected for his second award, a bar to his Military Cross, Captain Siegfried “Mad Jack” Sassoon wrote a now famous letter, “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration.” Sent to his commanding officer on 27 July 1917, it was published in the local paper, the

Bradford Examiner, on the same day. Read out in the British House of Commons on the 30th, the letter made it to the London Times the following day.

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military

authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by

those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am

acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered

as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and

conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers

31 Gammage, op cit. 64

entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it

impossible to change them, … I can no longer be a party to prolong those

sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting

against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and

insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of

those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception

which is being practised on them …32

Neither pacifist nor martyr, Sassoon was advised by his friend and fellow poet, Captain Robert Graves, to plead war exhaustion and shell shock

(neurasthenia). He was then secreted away to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh and thus spared both the British Government and Army from having to punish him. As he was suffering a nervous disorder, a form of temporary insanity, he was therefore not responsible for his actions and so the veracity of his accusations was never tested in court. Sassoon became a cause celebré of the anti- war movement and the debate over his actions continues to this day.

Captain Sassoon was a member of the upper-middle classes in the rigidly hierarchical society of pre-war Britain. He had powerful friends (his cousin Phillip was a Member of Parliament and private secretary to Field Marshal Haig) and was on the way to becoming a great war poet. Achilles was a prince, hero and demigod.

Con Casey was a farmer, an Australian-born son of Irish immigrant parents. He had no voice. What he had was a belief in himself and the values he had brought with

32 “The First World War Digital Poetry Archive” viewed 7/3/14. 65

him from Australia, a strong sense of his own worth as both a human being and a soldier, and an indignation akin to the driving force of the Iliad: what Homer called

“The Wrath of Achilles”.33

*****

Fuck Brown! Cunt! Fuck! Always internal, the voice had become a refrain as incessant as the artillery at Pozieres, the machine guns at Messines.

Too proud to voice his objection when his second nomination for the DCM was downgraded to the lesser MM and the award he was originally nominated for had gone, instead, to Brown – Fuck him! Cunt! Fuck ‘em all! Fuck the whole fucken, fucked up, fucken, army! – Con nursed his grievance. It gnawed at him, like the rats gnawed at the sleeping bodies and devoured the corpses in No Man’s Land. It festered till he could no longer be bothered to even try to hide it. He refused to explain himself and became a walking ball of fury.

“Get yourself out of here Casey and don’t come back till you sort yourself out! You’re no bloody good to anyone the way you are.” As Con looked back at the receding shoreline of Calais, Colonel Durrant’s words echoed in his head. Those same twenty-five words have, in one form or another, reverberated through his family to this day. As though, in his indignation, those words somehow gave Con permission not to come back – till he sorted himself out!

33 Homer opens the The Iliad with “ Wrath—Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,/ murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,” – Robert Fagles trans. But where Fagles uses “rage” for the Greek menis” I prefer “wrath.”

No 20 Patrick Cornelius Casey and No. 15 Herbert Basil ‘Hard Boiled’ Brown had enlisted only days apart at the Sydney Showgrounds in September 1914. They had been through most major battles together, though since their arrival on the

Western Front, Con’s role had been with the Battalion Stretcher Bearers. These were not the Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) stretcher-bearers who picked up the wounded at the Regimental Aid Post (RAP) where the battalion bearers had brought them. The battalion stretcher-bearers went forward with the attacking men and their work commenced immediately as their mates fell about them.

As Con travelled west towards Ireland, Brown, after getting his (Con’s!)

DCM for sitting on the sidelines and cheering the bearers on, was off to officer school. By June 1917, along with their platoon commander Second Lieutenant

(2Lt.) William Sydney Fitzpatrick, he and Con were the only originals from No. 3

Section, 1st Platoon of A Company of the 13th still serving. Fitzpatrick was killed in the incident of 11 June 1917 and now fuckhead Brown was being trained to replace him. Fuck Brown! He’d see them all killed. Fuck the fuckin’ army for bein’ so … fuckin’ fucked! The Army that used him also refused him because, both Irish and Catholic, he was doubly retarded. And, even though he was a crack shot, Gallipoli had damaged him so that he could no longer fire a rifle fast enough to be a rifleman. Triply retarded! And that fucken retard, fucken Hard Boiled, fuckhead, Brown… And Con only did what was expected of a stretcher bearer whereas a cunt like Hard fucking

Boiled …!

And the fucken British Army ... after the fuckups of Gallipoli came the massacres of

Pozieres and then to top them all … the bloody ballsup of Bullecourt. Of course they

could beat the Germans but the fucken high and fucken mighty fucked up fucken High

Command would fuck them every fucken time! And then, even at fucken Messines, the fucken artillery had fucken ballsed up again and obliterated Bill and most of the specialist team under that useless piece of cowshit, Twynam.

In the wash-up from the battle, four Majors from the 4th Division were slated to be sacked. One was fired, two were moved and Major Twynam, acting 2IC of the 13th, was permitted to resign. In his letter of resignation, Twynam wrote: “I have never been in the trenches in an attack or defence … so I lose all touch of the

Officers and men how they work in the line and their valur (sic.) for promotion.”34

This whole incident - the decimation of their own men by so called “friendly fire” and the subsequent sackings - was later explained away by T.A. White in the battalion history as “[u]nfortunately one of the several heavy enemy barrages… ”35 while Bean wrote:

The objective was bombarded from 5 to 6 p.m. by heavy artillery, but,

possibly through overwear of the guns, their shooting was extraordinarily

erratic … shells from some of the “heavies” fell among the troops holding

the Oosterverne Line … even on the Black Line 500 yards behind the front.36

And after four days of carrying Australian, New Zealand, British and Irish – from both the 16th and 36th (Ulster) Divisions – through the heat and putrid chemical atmosphere with gas mask on, Con was nominated a second time for the DCM, and then it went to Brown, the senior NCO, who had already won the Military Medal at

34 NAA B2455 Twynam, E. pp. 7-9 and AWM4, 23/30.32 – June 17 35 White p.103 36 Bean, Op.cit. p.p. 673-4. 68

Mucky Farm. After two Mentions in Dispatches (MID) in 1916, this was Con’s second nomination for the DCM and the second time he was passed over.

As the senior battalion of the 4th Brigade (the senior brigade of the 4th

Division), the 13th would become a highly decorated unit with 2 VCs, 6DSOs,

33MCs, 31 DCMs and 195 MMs. Murray, the commander of “A” Company (the senior company of the battalion), became Australia’s most decorated soldier.

Murray himself said, his awards rightfully belonged to the men because being in

“Mad Harry’s” Company meant they constantly got the heavy end of the work.37

But, as Twynam described in his letter of resignation, among the men of the 13th there was intense competition for promotion and awards. Though no medal could be awarded unless the action was witnessed by an officer, after Fitzpatrick’s death there was, as recorded in Brown’s citation, no possible officer witness:

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in taking charge of his

platoon when the officer was killed, and encouraging and cheering the men

under very heavy shell fire and during a very trying time. On being relieved

he guided his men to safety through a sudden barrage, afterwards returning

and carrying two wounded men out of action. He set a splendid example.'38

I have tried to stay away from this argument about the award of medals at

Messines just as Con did while he was with the AIF. It is an argument that cannot be won.39 For Con, this would prove to be the unspecified issue referred to in his

37 White, T.A., p.85. 38 Third Supplement, No. 30251 to London Gazette dated 24 August, 1917 'Commonwealth Gazette' No. 219, 20 December 1917. Recommendation by Lt.Col. JMA Durrant, 14/6/17. 39 Simplifying the question of awards to Catholics in the AIF – as Graeme Wilson does in Bully Beef and Balderdash: “Catholics were denied the Victoria Cross during the war as a consequence of their 69

Court Martial years later. Of course there is no evidence to prove the grounds of his grievance (the records are so fragmentary) – if there were, then Con could perhaps have done something about it himself.

When comparing the 4th Brigade awards after a year in France to those won on Gallipoli, Captain White, historian of the 13th Battalion, comments that:

a Gallipoli decoration, excepting in the case of command rank

seems to have been eleven times harder to win than a Western Front one,

for 12 of the 42 for Gallipoli went to high officers, while but 8 of the 359

in France did … The war became more democratic as it proceeded.40

Table 1: Dates of Awards of the VC to Catholics in the AIF

1915 1916 1917 1918 Jan Feb Mar 1 Apr 2 May Jun 1 1 July 1 Aug 1 1 2 Sept 1 3 Oct 1 Nov Dec Total 1 1 6 7 15

Using Wilson’s meticulous research Table 1 (above) converts the awards of VCs to

Catholic Diggers into graphic format, broken down by months, from which it can be

religious faith” (p.412) – means the issue of discrimination in the AIF seems easily refuted. But this fails to deal with its very real complexity. 40 White, T.A. p.102. 70

seen that until Messines, after 28 months of war, Catholics had received only four

VCs while their final tally was 15 out of a total 64 won by the AIF. The AIF was not just an entity but a process and as it became less class-bound it seems that, in contrast to the Home Front, the AIF may also have become less sectarian. The original captain of A Company, John Edmonds, was a Catholic and he never commanded the company in battle. Did this have anything to do with the fact that the battalion’s sponsor was the Orange Lodge of Newcastle; that the 13th’s original commander, Lt.Col. Burnage, was a leading member of that Lodge and had proudly presented the flag, gifted to the battalion by the Newcastle Lodge, at Liverpool

Camp in November 1914? It is highly likely there were more than a few grimaces as the Originals paraded to salute their new flag. The historical record allows proof of awards given but because it offers no evidence for those not given (for whatever reasons) does not mean this did not happen. The incidents are numerous and form part of the “other” legend of the AIF. Sectarianism, though, was never remembered as an issue in my grandfather’s case. (new pp. 59-61.)

When Con went on leave to Ireland in 1917, he was carrying two of the fundamental symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) known in WWI as ‘shell shock.’41 Like Achilles, he felt betrayed by his army for which he had done everything humanly possible and, on top of that, like Achilles he had suffered the loss of his beloved. Fitzpatrick was Con’s Patroklos.

While Homer in the Illiad is at pains to prove the justice of Achilles’ indignation, I cannot do so without looking again like one of those Catholic Irish

41 Shay, Achilles in Vietnam. 71

whingers dismissed by Graeme Wilson in Bully Beef and Balderdash. If this were fiction it would be relatively easy to construct a case but, though this is a work of

‘creative’ non–fiction, I am, nevertheless, bounded by the facts and to a notion of truth. There were many who were nominated and didn’t receive awards: “Some are known to have received six recommendations without an award.”42 Con, like all soldiers, must have been aware of this and would not want to appear a shown pony or whinger. The particulars of his “grievance” are lost “in the mists of time”, the gas “fog of war” and that particular incident at Messines for which Twynam was forced to resign, Brown awarded the DCM and Con the Military Medal. What is important here is that Con believed that he had been hard done by, but was too proud to argue a case there was little chance of winning – he had lost faith in his army. Were it not for a sentence in the Court Martial record that can only have been written after his counsel interviewed Con’s two commanding officers still in

London – “Imagining himself to be suffering from a grievance which he does not choose to disclose he went AWL …”,43 – it would be possible to argue that this story about the medal he was originally nominated for, going to a superior officer was camouflage thrown across those years in Ireland. It may have been that also, but the grievance was deeply felt, lasted a lifetime and helped prepare the ground for to what was to come.

To top it off, while Brown was away at officer training school, Con was marched off with the “most distinguished available members” of the 4th Brigade to

42 White, T.A., p.161. 43 NAA: A471, 10580/6812304 [CASEY Patrick Cornelius (Corporal) : Service Number – 20; Court Martial, p.4. 72

receive his Military Medal from the hands of the Duke of Connaught.44 La de fucken dah! The King’s uncle nonetheless. Another fucking Woodbine45 cunt with an Irish title and, to be sure, thousands of Irish acres stolen from the Irish people! ’ … Fuck

‘em, fuck ‘em all!

Like Brown, Con had been promoted after Messines but Brown was to become an officer, a Lieutenant, and Con, on the very day he left to go on leave, was made a Corporal. But he was a Corporal with nowhere to go and no further avenue of promotion. The rewards were far higher for killing than for saving lives. A soldier’s job was killing and Con was no longer good enough at that.

I was nominated for the DCM for Messines, not Brown, but Brown got it. And now fuckhead, bignoted, bignotin, brown nosed, Brown is gunna be a bloody Lieutenant!

Well I for one won’t serve under that … lice eaten rat’s arsehole fattened on good men’s blood!

If Con had been an Englishman, a Welshman or a Scot, a Canadian, German,

Russian, French, Algerian, Turk, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Welsh or Irishman, he would have been on his way home on leave. Two weeks leave from the Front was long leave, the working-man’s annual holiday, and the only opportunity for an enlisted man to go home. But Con was an Australian soldier on the Western Front and the return voyage from Europe to Australia or New Zealand, on the coal- powered steamships of 1917, took all of three months and then some. There would be no home leave for Australian soldiers till October 1918 when Prime Minister

44 White, T.A., p.103. 45 A brand of British cigarettes and term of abuse Australians used for British soldiers. 73

Hughes, the “Little Digger”, organised special “1914 (Anzac) leave” for those

Originals still alive and serving. And this wasn’t just big heartedness on Hughes’ part, the Anzac Originals were used to bolster enlistment. This absence of home from the lives of Australian soldiers goes part of the way towards explaining why, as a group, they had the highest rates of indiscipline in the BEF and were the most notorious swearers in the whole of the First World War. That and perhaps their need – like that of the Irish – that grew along with their developing sense of national identity, to mangle the English language to make it their own.

Once the irritatingly slow channel ferry that was taking him on leave docked at Southampton, Con boarded the train for London. After a good feed, he went to AIF headquarters in Horseferry Road, had his leave papers finalised with the green stamp acknowledging he had registered the address where he would be staying46, and his kit and uniform checked. As soon as possible, he was on the northbound train at Euston Station headed for Cheshire to talk to Bill Fitzpatrick’s

Mum and Dad. When, at last, he boarded the overnight ferry for Ireland, Con was no longer looking back. This second water crossing was not, as the Channel crossing had been, a movement away from the Front. Now it was a forward journey and he was travelling towards his mother‘s and father’s homes – the home in Ireland he would inherit. But it was also Ireland barely a year after the Rising.

He was going to Ireland on leave. It wasn’t home – that was Australia – but he hadn’t seen that since he’d embarked from Port Melbourne in December ‘14; home was the farm at Hyde’s Creek and he hadn’t smelt that iron bark tang since

46 AWM21 385/16 Men on Leave from France, p.3. 74

sailing down the Bellinger that September to enlist. But he was lucky. Like tens of thousands of Australian soldiers, he had family in Ireland. At the family home in

Glenanaar was his grandmother, Elizabeth, who’d been born a Kelly, and through whom, so the family legend goes, he was related to the bushranger and hero of

Irish and downtrodden Australia, Ned. Elizabeth lived on in the family home that, since her husband’s death, belonged to Con’s father and was managed by her fourth son, Con’s Uncle Patrick. Just down the mountain at Glenosheen were the remnants of his mother’s Nagle family and at Ennis in County Clare was his step- mother’s family, the McGuanes. And more than anything, after two and a half years of war he needed rest and nurture.

In the soft golden-pink of dawn, as the mighty piers of Dun Laoghaire (then called ‘Kingstown’) reached out like giant arms to embrace the ferry, Ireland was a vision of loveliness and welcome. It was the old mother, crooning: “You are home now my son, home from the sea, home from the war. Come let me fold you in my arms and cradle your weary head.” This was the land of longing, the home of heart’s desire.

Later, as he warmed himself in the humid air while sitting halfway along the eastern pier and looking back whence he had come, he thought, for just a moment, that he could see the English coastline looming on the horizon like a long line of medieval battlements. Then he blinked, woke from his reverie and realised it was just a low-lying line of clouds that dressed the horizon. Thank God England was now far out of sight. Far behind him.

“Papers please!” a voice, heavy with northern brogue, demanded. Three Military

Police stood close behind him. Already, eased into the calm of the Irish morning, he had let those sharpened senses that had kept him alive so far ease into a false sense of security. He would not do that again.

No, he thought, England is here yet. He pulled out his leave pass and handed it to the corporal.

“What’s your business here in Ireland, Corporal …” then reading the name,

“Casey?”

“I’m here to visit family.”

“Then you are Irish!”

“Australian.” The silence hung in the air long enough for a swooping gull to pull a gleaming mackarel from the grey Irish Sea. With barely disguised exasperation,

“But my father and mother came from Ireland and I have family here.”

“Well, enjoy your stay Corporal and make sure you are out of the country by the

26th.” Turning from him they proceeded in step on their long march down the pier.

“Fucking Woodbines!” Just loud enough for them to hear. A momentary ripple in the forward momentum of the MPs then they continued as though they hadn’t heard a thing. Con chuckled; he sensed the immense solidity of the pier under his feet and thought, but England is here too, has done much good and like these massive piers, is unshakeable. Then laughing - though god knows why ‘cause they sure don’t know how ta fight a fuckin war!

Like a kid on the way to a country show, he voiced to himself the names of the stations the train passed on the way into Dublin. Monkstown … Jesus is that

what they call a beach, like the Bull Ring only browner! Seapoint, Blackrock,

Booterstown, Sydney Parade, Sandymount …

“What the bloody hell is that?” Con asked no-one in particular.

“It’s a Martello Tower,” the voice, female, elderly, the mauve of a slow fading sunset, came from behind him.

Craning his neck to see the face the voice came from, he said, “Excuse me?”

“A Martello Tower. Built to keep the French out during the wars with Napoleon.”

“Jeese. And now they’re fighting with the French to keep the Germans out. Bloody

European wars.”

Ignoring the “French” – he was obviously an Australian – she continued, “For a time it was very bohemian with students and artists living there but then they moved British artilleryman in when it looked like the Sinn Feiners had invited the

Germans to the Rising.”

Lansdowne Road, Grand Canal. He was back at the game of stations.

“Westland Row, all out! Train terminates.”

So this is Dublin’s famous Liffey.

Used to the wild, blue expanse of Australia’s waters, at first Con was unimpressed with the brick-walled, brown water but as she sang him down to

Sackville Street, he soon fell under her spell. He could see the ruins along Eden

Quay away to his left from the moment he reached the river but as he approached the corner of Sackville Street, the full horror of the destruction from Easter hit him

like the concussion from a flying pig.47 He’d seen towns and villages in France and

Flanders totally obliterated, had climbed through the ruins of cathedral and cloth hall in Ypres, but that was war. This was Ireland and the Irish were fighting for the

British all over the bloody world - and the British had done this! And the executions! How was anything the Germans had done in Belgium any worse than this?

“SACKVILLE STREET AS IT APPEARED ON THE FOLLOWING MONDAY”48 By 1917, when Con approached from right of frame, much of the rubble had been cleared but the ruins remained. r

While he was waiting at Heuston Station for the Limerick train, Con’s eye was captured by a title on the news stand: Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook.49

“What the bloody hell is this?” he asked the old feller who ran the stand.

“The Irish Times put it out to mark the anniversary of the Rebellion last Easter. Got everything in it. All the newspaper stories, the fighting, Proclamation of the

47 A British 9.45 inch heavy trench mortar. 48 BMH CD 514 Irish Life Record of the Rebellion, with permission of BMH. 49 Published by the Irish Times May 1917. 78

Republic, Royal Commission, casualties, trials, executions …” As he rattled off his spiel, Con puzzled but couldn’t get a reading on him. The Irish had had 750 long years of occupation to master the mask of duplicity. The paper seller was giving nothing away to this soldier in the King’s uniform with the King’s Crown on his collars and hat that looked, otherwise, like the hats worn by those rare Irish

Volunteers who could afford a uniform.

“Thanks cobber,” said Con, handing over a penny as the train’s warning whistle sounded.

He’d first come across the story of the Easter Rising while a patient in the

No 3 Australian Dermal Hospital at Heloun in Egypt. British, Australian and English language Egyptian newspapers all carried the story of Easter Week, with the outraged accusations of the “stab in the back” and its aftermath of executions and deportations. Hospitalised with gonorrhea, he couldn’t tell which was more painful: the treatment with boric acid, cyanide and mercury, anger at the fucking idiots in Dublin who’d betrayed all those soldiers risking their lives in freedom’s cause or apprehension of the stupid bloody coot he’d been to get himself into that situation.

In Egypt, he’d read the newspapers avidly and didn’t know what to make of the Rising. He’d met men of the Irish battalions on Gallipoli and they’d seemed happy enough to be there. They were fighting for Irish freedom on the haunted coast of Turkey where a crimson sun drowns behind Samothrace. When they had won the war, they believed, that same sun would at last rise on a free Ireland.

Britain had clearly promised! That was how Redmond had gotten all those

Irishmen to enlist. The same sun would also rise on those other little countries like

Belgium, Poland, Serbia… Surely, the only shame in saying this was what they were fighting for was if it made them look like fucking idiots. With Britain’s handling of

“the Irish situation”, this was looking increasingly likely.

Hurriedly fingering his way through the seemingly endless pages of advertisements that fronted the dark green covered book, Con arrived at the table of contents and there he saw at the top of the list the “Declaration of the Irish

Republic” declaimed by Padraig Pearse outside the Post Office that fateful Easter

Monday. On page 1 he read:

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN in the name of God and of the dead

generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood,

Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for

freedom.

His Australianness resisted this obvious emotional manipulation but Con’s

Irishness thrilled to the rhetoric.

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland … well that’s fair enough, it’s what the bloody Woodbines are saying about Belgium

The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has

not extinguished the right, nor can it be extinguished except by the

destruction of the Irish people …

Fucken hell!

Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face

of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a sovereign

independent state …

The rhetoric was intoxicating. He was drawn by its power but his thinking mind stayed awake to the logic of the argument.

The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal

opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the

happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts … oblivious to

the differences carefully fostered by an alien government …

Nothing wrong there! What’s the bloody problem with the Brits if all the Irish want is a bloody fair go?

In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and

by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common

good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.

There it is again, the call for children to sacrifice themselves … but, hang on, these blokes weren’t like the generals and politicians running the bloody war who never got within a bull’s roar of the fucken Front. These men, these leaders of the Rising, actually did it – they put their bodies on the line.

As the whistle sounded, Con looked out across endless green, sighed and looked back at the page. As his eyes moved across the names of the seven who had signed their own death warrants by putting their names at the bottom of the

Proclamation, his head fall back onto the rich leather of the headrest. Heavy eyes closed. He whispered the names as he would silently speak a prayer in bed, in trench or barracks late at night: “Thomas Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, Thomas

MacDonagh, Padraig Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett…”

An hour later, as the locomotive steamed through the green of Tipperary with the purple haze of the Galtee Mountains receding on his left, Con was startled when the man sitting next to him elbowed him gently in the ribs.

“I think this is yours Digger.”

“Huh?”

Following the eyeline as his neighbour nodded towards the window, Con saw the approaching sign, Kilmallock.

“Looks like you have some interesting reading there.”

“Bloody hell! … Yeah, thanks cobber, see ya.” He dragged down his kit and was out on the platform.

The mid-afternoon sun beat down on him with all the harshness of a feathered caress. The air smelled of grass freshly mown, drying in the late summer.

After he mounted the steps from the station up to the overpass, Con pushed back his slouch hat and scratched the back of his neck. He knew where he was going; he just didn’t know how to get there. He knew he was approaching from the north, travelling through country he’d not seen before - the winding roads through the hill country above the green and fertile plains of Limerick. There was a bus down the old coach road running from Limerick City to Cork. But, before it arrived, there would be time to trudge into town and drown a brew or two.

The pressed red sandstone of the lacker road rising from the old Limerick-

Cork coach road, where it winds around the foothills of the Ballyhouras along the southern edge of the Glen of Oisin, Glenosheen, up to Glenanaar, was hard underfoot. But not as hard as the Roman road that stretched from Pozieres to

Albert - the 13th had marched back and forth along that more times than he cared to remember. As the mountain foliage closed in around him, Con drank in the perfumed air, heavy with the summer scent of trees and wildflowers whose names he knew only from story.

As he crested the hill, beyond the houses on the plateau, the vision of North

Cork spreading out beneath made him gasp. His breathing deepened and slowed as he surveyed the scene, turning his head slowly from left to right. It was as though the whole countryside was one gigantic descent, opening out to the east, the south and the west. He’d been anticipating this moment since he’d started the uphill walk but its sheer loveliness stopped him in his tracks. So deeply embedded in his dreams, this really was the land of longing, the home of heart’s desire. The land from which his father had come and which he, only son of the eldest son, stood to inherit.

Another half mile.

“Seamus!” he waved as he passed Connery’s corrugated iron shed. The tall, dark farmer looked closely at the uniformed intruder before his face broke into warm laughter.

“Back again Australia!”

Con had made a lightning dash to Ireland during his first leave back in June

’16, when he’d come the other way. He’d jumped on a ferry from the south and then made his way north through Cork. It was only a year ago but a year on the

Western Front was like no other year. Between the endless boredom of days spent

sleeping at the bottom of a trench and the manic adrenalin of battle, time itself was pulverised beyond recognition, like the desecrated landscape; his farmer’s sense would never forgive nor forget what war had done to the villages, forests and green fields of France.

Con could see the red, stone-walled walkway cut its way from the lane up to the Limerick-limestone-blue, two-story house surrounded by a motley of farm buildings that had obviously been built up over long periods of time. Finding the gap in the briars, he threw his pack across, jumped the fast running creek, climbed the ditch, unhitched the briars from his uniform and took the short cut across

Connery’s front field.

“G’day Sarge,” Con hailed his uncle. Sandy-haired Patrick, a younger version of Con’s own father, stared back nonplussed. Con rolled his left arm and pointed with his right at his new stripes. “I’m a Corporal now and you’re the boss … so you gotta be the Sarge.” In the long afternoon sunlight, the Sarge beamed his approval.

Sergeant was not a rank used in the Irish Volunteers or its successor, the IRA, but in that moment Patrick knew he would be “Sarge” for the rest of his life and beyond.

Six-year-old Mary was thrown high into the air by her cousin, before he picked up two-year-old Ellen and crushed them both. In the doorway stood the two women, Jane, the mistress of the house and the old woman. The hearts of the young man and his Nanna embraced before their bodies even met. He had lost his

mother as a two year old and Elizabeth Kelly had brought eleven children into the world. Now only two remained in Ireland: one, after whom this strong-boned grandson had been named, lay beneath the sods in nearby Farrahy Cemetery. Con gently returned the girls to the earth and then Elizabeth held him and cooed her love in the soft, lilting tones of her native Gaelic. To his black hair and blue eyes she sang, “You are your mother, Connie.”

He needed rest, after the long journey from Belgium, the monstrous year on the Western Front, the four days of carrying and tending the wounded in the gas and slaughter of Messines where the mines had blown the ridge skyhigh and turned the world insideout and upsidedown. Four almost unbroken days of gas, fire, smoke and body parts in the masks – the claustrophobia, the blinding, stinging sweat, the stolen gasps of air when the masks became too much – and all in the heat of a high European summer. Besides Pozieres, it was the first major victory the Australians had been involved in during three years of war – a costly victory, for him, which left a bitter discord jangling through his entire being.

Con was out of whack. He knew he was out of whack. So he had to rest. Rest, eat, sleep and then sleep some more. He wasn’t planning on returning to Flanders in a hurry. Bill Fitzpatrick was dead. Together, they had survived Gallipoli and the

Somme. Now there was only Brown! No, he wouldn’t be racing back to join the 13th to take orders from that Hard Boiled fucking arsehole. He reckoned he’d done enough for the bloody British Army and where had it gotten him! Two stripes, a broken body and a bloody Military Medal and now Brown … Now was time to look after himself for a bit and, perhaps … see about other matters too.

The struggle in Ireland continued to intensify. Momentous events occurred.

In April, the USA had declared war on Germany; international press coverage of prison hunger strikes soon afterwards, brought enormous pressure to bear on

Britain to solve the Irish issue and in June, the last of the Easter internees were released and returned to Ireland and a momentous welcome. In July the Pope published his plea for peace. Days after Con arrived at the farm, Thomas Ashe, one of those last Easter internees to be released and with de Valera the highest-ranking survivor of the Rising, was rearrested, this time for sedition in an election speech in County Longford. Ashe and other prisoners again used the ancient Irish privilige of the dejected – they went on hunger strike, again demanding prisoner-of-war status.

Five days later, as all Ireland watched, Thomas Ashe died from a botched forced feeding. The British attempt to overcome his passive resistance with force had the inevitable, tragic result: Ireland had yet another martyr. At the inquest into death of Thomas Ashe, the jury condemned the staff at the Mountjoy Prison for the

“inhuman and dangerous operation performed on the prisoner, and other acts of unfeeling and barbaric conduct.”50 It wouldn’t be long before the British banned all

Coronial Inquiries in Ireland and replaced them with Military Courts. Along with the family, Con followed the hunger strike with intense interest. When Ashe died on 25 September, Con was still watching. He was still in Ireland. He was absent without leave (AWL) in Ireland.

50 Quoted in Ullick O'Connor, Michael Collins and the Troubles. Mainstream Publishing. 2001. p.124. 86

Postcard of Thomas Ashe Con sent home to Bellingen in February 1918

Through the winter freeze of 1917 while, outside, the surrounding

Ballyhora’s were carpeted with snow, inside, amid the bustling warmth of family home, the Caseys nursed Con back to health through the ravages of shell shock chemical pneumonia. As he returned to life in 1918, so did Ireland after the horror, disappointment and defeat of Easter ‘16. When it became evident that he wouldn’t be returning to the Army in a hurry, Aunty Jane, the woman of the house, “who was a smart woman”,51 knew she had to do something. An Australian soldier had come in to Glenanaar but none had gone out, so it was imperative to cover his tracks. She got the farm help, Con’s cousin, Jim Kelly, to dig a pit in the packed earth floor of the creamery – not a milking shed but a cool room out the back where she worked

51 The term is traditional and was used by her daughter-in-law Margaret. Interview April 2011. 87

at butter, cheese, bacon, ham and sausage making – her black pudding was legendary on both sides of the Ballyhouras. She wrapped his uniform in canvas so that, when it was ultimately dug up, the uniform would be just as good as the day it was buried.

Con’s father and step-mother, Michael and Annie in Bellingen, supported his decision to stay in Ireland. Michael sent him money every month, in an envelope addressed to Jane. £5 a week was a princely sum at the time. With this money, Con

“lived like a gentleman” in Ireland though he still “pulled his weight“ around the farm.52 He bought himself a motorbike to visit relatives, travel the country crisscrossing the Ballyhouras on and off road, and train companies of the Irish

Volunteers.

With the death of his father, Patrick Snr., in 1910, Patrick, at the time a

History teacher at the National School in nearby Doneraile, County Cork, returned to the farm at Glenanaar. In the BMH Witness Statements, a knowledge of History is said to be a crucial element in the careers of IRA veterans. Its source was either from within the family or from a special teacher or mentor figure encountered at a crucial point in the young man’s life. The Christian Brothers schools were particularly prominent in this aspect and the National School at Doneraile was

Christian Brothers. Jane, too, was from Doneraile, a Roache. So when the Irish

Volunteeers were formed in 1913, Patrick from Glenanaar, a small farming hamlet straddling the border of Cork and Limerick, became a founding member of the

Doneraile Company of the Cork Brigade of the Volunteers. Initially, whether South-

52 This information comes from interviews and private correspondence with descendants of Patrick Casey: his grandson, Terry Boyd, and daughter-in-law, Margaret Casey. 88

East Limerick or North Cork, from the Ballyhouras to the Galtees had all been the

Galtee Battalion, then Doneraile became part of the Cork Brigade and eventually the Cork II (North) Brigade, commanded by Liam Lynch.

One day, the tall, thin, young, ascetic looking Lynch cycled his way up the labyrinthine roadways that climbed the foothills of the Cork side of the Ballyhoura

Mountains. He cycled from Fermoy to Glenanaar to visit the family but, mostly, this time, to talk to Con. From Anglesboro, another Limerick town but bordering both

Tipperary and Cork in the foothills of the Galtee Mountains, Liam had left school at sixteen and trained at O’Neill’s Hardware in Mitchelstown where the disciplines of bookkeeping were rigorous. He was also an excellent draughts player. These abilities and his personal integrity and ability to inspire men, were the bases of his command skills before meeting Con. That day in Glenanaar, Lynch told Con of the event that converted him to the cause of Ireland.

He had moved to Barry’s hardware in Fermoy and there, after Easter 1916, he and some mates were lunching on the bridge over the Blackwater when a party of RIC and British Army brought in the remnants of the Ceannt (Kent) family. The

Ceannts had resisted the nationwide roundups of known and suspected Volunteers that followed in the wake of the Dublin Rising. When the Ceannt house was surrounded and they were ordered to surrender, a shootout with the RIC and

Army had ensued. The mother, famously, reloaded the guns for her three sons until they were out of ammunition.

A hideous street carnival transfixed the passersby that day in Fermoy. Up front of the cart sat the keening mother. Laid out in the back were the bodies of two of her three sons: one a bloody corpse, the other wounded and beaten. Behind, his wrists lashed to the rails of the horse-drawn cart, ran the third battered brother, Eammon, his feet bloody and bare. With his subsequent execution by firing squad in Cork City, Eammon Ceannt became one of the 16 executed for the

Easter Uprising.

Con sent two postcards home to Australia in 1918. The new ‘holy’ cards for the Irish were pictures of the martyrs of the Rising. Though he had to be cautious with his words because mail in and out of Australia had to pass through the censors, the IRA postcards somehow got through and told the family at Hyde’s

Creek all they needed to know. While the sheer volume of postal articles –

3,791,846,000 items “passed through the Post Offices of the Commonwealth in the war years”53 – made it impossible to censor all mails, many articles were. Ernest

Scott, the Official Historian of the Home Front during the war, goes on to write that besides the “’statutory black list’ … names of individuals or firms wholly controlled by enemy capital or (which), owing to their many un-neutral acts, were declared to be “enemy firms” there was also the “secret ‘black list’ … By the time of the end of the war the letters of about 15,000 persons were being systematically watched.”54 Whether or not Con’s name was on this “secret

‘black list’” – and since he was a long term Illegal Absentee in in Ireland it is

53 Scott, Official History of Australian in the War of 1914-18, Volume XI –Australia During the War, p.82. 54 Ibid. p. 83. 90

possible it was – the message for his family was in the pictures, posted in envelopes, not in the innocuous words of greeting written on the back.

Pedar Clancy commanded the barricade at Church St. Bridge during Easter 1916. He was sentenced to death. This was commuted and he was released in the June 1917 amnesty. He was originally from Kilrush, County Clare, as was Con’s step-mother, Annie McGuane, Mum Casey.

An Alternative Arrival

Con was bleeding profusely from his lungs when he arrived at our place

in Ireland and he was weeks and weeks unable to leave his bed. Actually,

my father and Jim Kelly (a cousin) CARRIED him from the station to the

sulky (trap we called it, it held 6 people) then carried him again up the

stairs to his bedroom. He was almost dead when he got home… He had

been gassed by the Germans. Also it came back on him and he died at age

59….55

55 Sister Celine (Ellen) Casey, Christmas card, 1980s.- annotations as in original. 91

According to Patrick’s second daughter Nell, Sister Celine, just two years old at the time, this was how her Australian cousin arrived at Glenanaar. It was bloody and spectacular! She wrote this account sometime in the mid 1980s in response to inquiries from another of Con’s grandsons. This story of the bleeding lungs was corroborated for decades by other members of Patrick’s family. Though there is scant mention in Con’s service record of his being gassed, it is not impossible.

Uncorroborated stories of gassings are another aspect of Digger legend. As only cases bad enough to be hospitalised were recorded there were obviously many milder ones some of which were recorded as influenza, bronchitis or pneumonia whose symptoms gas simulated.. But it would be astonishing if Con had been sent on leave with his lungs in the state described.

In Con’s 284 page Repat. file there are few mentions of gas. In January 1948, totally incapacitated and blind in one eye but still unable to get the full pension, he included, among “grounds for appeal” against yet another refusal to increase his pension beyond 30 per cent, “a touch of gas in 1916.”56

Only recently did I discover that Sister Celine wrote my grandfather’s obituary, the one that gave him his DCM and was signed “An Old Friend.”57 And only then did I learn that my father was angered by the obituary because it “made

(his father) sound like a saint.” Sister Celine (Ellen) who was, eventually, the only member of Patrick’s family welcome at Con’s, managed to get herself transferred to the Convent in Bellingen to nurse my grandfather through his last year. She

56 NAA: C138/R104300/12711464 p.80. 57 “An Appreciation of the Late Mr Con Casey” Bellingen Courier Sun, 8/11/1949. 92

remained devoted to her cousin beyond the grave. She was Con’s Guardian Angel, the Keeper of the Secret. The Irish knew the look of tuberculosis – not only had

Con’s mother and her sister died from it but Heatherside Hospital, County Cork’s specialist tuberculosis hospital, had been built on the south western ridges of the

Ballyhouras just years before Con’s arrival. For Celine, protecting Con in Australia was far more important than any simple notions of the truth.

So the camouflage for those years in Ireland for the upright citizen and pillar of the Bellingen community were the cover stories of medals and gas. Both, doubtless, hold some fragments of truth but neither ever really satisfactorily explained away his absence in Ireland. Other members of the family, Republican descendants of Patrick, stories of other Diggers in Ireland and History itself hold further pieces of that puzzle.

Chapter 2

Diggers in Ireland

Thar toinn do ráinig chugainn,

(Some have come from a land beyond the wave.)

The Soldier’s Song/Irish National Anthem

For Australian soldiers on Blighty leave,1 Ireland was the place to be. As the bread- basket of the British war effort, Ireland’s largely rural economy was booming and, unlike in Britain, there was little rationing. This meant plenty of milk, butter, cheese, eggs, fresh meat, bacon, apples, vegetables, good beer and whiskey – all most welcome after the woeful diet of the trenches. Also, in Ireland, the Diggers were away from the strictures of military discipline and harassment by military and civil police – in England, the latter received a bounty for arrests of soldiers without correct papers of leave. “(A) soldier, under these conditions,” wrote

Australia’s top military policeman, the Assistant Provost Marshal (APM)

Lieutenant Colonel (Lt.Col.) John Williams, in his report of 18 April 1918, RE Visit of

A.P.M A.I.F. Depots in U.K. to Ireland, “can have a much better time in Ireland than he can have in any town in England.”2

Early in 1918, struggling with both the number and recalcitrance of

Australian troops in Ireland, the “Assistant Provost Marshal, Irish Command (and) the General Officers Commanding the various military districts” requested the

Australian Army set up an Australian Provost Corps (APC, [military police]) post in

Ireland “to be located at the Headquarters of the Irish Command, and to be used from there at the discretion of the command A.P.M.”3 Though the original document from the British Army in Ireland seems to have disappeared, there was nothing unusual in the request itself. The Australian Provost Corps War Diary records that,

1 ‘Blighty’ was a place – the United Kingdom; ‘to get a Blighty’ meant to get a wound serious enough to require evacuation to a hospital in the UK or even discharge as medically unfit (MU) and ‘Blighty leave’ meant the two weeks annual leave to the UK. 2 AWM 4332-3-94 “Confidential Report ‘RE VISIT OF A.P.M. A.I.F. DEPOTS IN U.K. TO IRELAND.’ 18/04/1918”, p. 3. 3 Ibid. 95

the duties of the Australian Military Police embody the full

Maintenance of discipline in the various AIF training centres … More

particularly are (they) especially called upon, from time to time, to station

Australian Military Police in cities, towns, and villages where our men visit

or frequent in large numbers in order to assist in preserving discipline.

(This included) All parts of the United Kingdom where AIF troops are

stationed or frequented (sic) to any extent on leave or otherwise … 4

In January, Williams had also paid a special visit to Scotland,

under instructions from GOC AIF Depots in UK and by arrangement with the

Provost Marshal Home Forces (as a consequence of which a) small

detachment of Australian Military Police (was) temporarily stationed in

Edinburgh.5

Similarly, in January 1919, at the request of the APM Manchester, “a small detachment of Australian Military Police (was) stationed there under the direction of the British APM.”6 Or, as Williams succinctly put it in February 1918:

The duties of the (APC) Police in the United Kingdom are various, as they

are employed on permanent escort duty, bringing in absentees and other

offenders from various parts of England, Scotland and Ireland, and other

ordinary police duties.7

4 AWM4 3/9/13 “Assistant Provost Marshal, AIF Depots in UK, February 1916 – January 1919” p.14-15. 5 AWM4 3/9/1 “APC Unit Diary, January 1918” p.12 6 Ibid. p.21. 7 AWM224 MSS592 Australian Provost Corps: Notes by Lt .Col J Williams, p. 2. 96

Before Williams acted on the request from the British Army in Ireland,

APCHQ London received a visit from a Mr. A.M. Fullerton, Vice Chairman of the

Soldier’s Central Club, Dublin, and a prominent Irish Civil Servant who

voluntarily approached Administralive Headquarters, with a view to

furnishing them with information as to the effect of the present conditions

in Ireland on our troops whilst on leave in that country.

“This gentleman,” Lt. Lawrence of London HQ wrote in his letter of 18 February to

Williams (who was based at Bhurtpore Barracks, Tidworth),

occupies a unique position for furnishing us with complete and confidential

information regarding certain aspects of Irish affairs with which we are

concerned … (He) impressed (Lawrence) as being a particularly sincere

friend and well-wisher of all men of the A.I.F. on leave in Ireland … (and

was) uniquely placed to give (Williams) very vital information and on

(Williams’) arrival in Dublin would make it his business to introduce

(Williams) to certain very distinguished persons.8

There is no record of correspondence between Williams and Fullerton or whether they even met in Dublin but, on 6 April, LtCol Williams embarked on a

“tour of inspection”. His trip to Ireland, lasting till the 15th, was comprehensive, taking in “Dublin, Cork, Killarney, Tralee, and Belfast besides some smaller towns.”9 On the 18th, Williams submitted his report to Brigadier General Griffiths,

Commandant AIFHQ London. Apologising for its lateness, Williams assured

Griffiths that this was a “very delicate and important question and … the delay had

8 AWM21 3752-18 “Suggestion for establishment of a Dublin detachment of the Australian Provost Corps”, p. 3. 9 AWM 4332-3-94 op.cit., p.2. 97

only been due to the careful thought and consideration (he had) given the question before submitting (his) recommendations.”10 The report, in just two pages, is a model of concise but meticulous detail and solid reasoning. It articulates the enormous difficulties faced by British authorities in dealing with Australian soldiers in the unsettled conditions then in Ireland. The report moves from the details supporting the observation that there was certainly a need for an APM in

Ireland to the conclusion that:

(w)hile, under normal conditions, I should recommend the stationing of

Australian police in Ireland, I do not think, after a careful study of all the

existing circumstances that the present time is opportune for the proposal

to be carried into effect.

In the present excited condition of the populace, an Arrest by

Australians might possibly lead to a serious riot, for which they might be

blamed, both here and in Australia, for want of tact, or ignorance of the Irish

character and conditions; nor, do I believe that, in any case, their work at

present could be very effective … 11

In line with Lt. Lawrence’s earlier statement that “Fullerton is very strongly of the opinion that the establishment of a Dublin Detachment of the Australian Provost

Corps is a matter of most urgent necessity,”12 the Williams Report makes it emphatically clear that these were not “normal conditions” in Ireland. Because, as

Williams demonstrated, an Australian police presence was so clearly needed in

Ireland, he recommended against setting one up! The AIF was definitely not going to be drawn into events in Ireland.

10 Ibid., p. 1. 11 Ibid. 12 AWM21 3752-18 , ôp.cit. 98

Until Jeff Kildea’s Anzac and Ireland, the Williams Report served as the main account of the relationship between Australian soldiers and the Irish people during the First World War. So important is the report in this regard that Geoffrey Barr’s history of Australia’s WWI Military Police, Beyond the Myth, quotes it in full and, in

Anzac and Ireland, Kildea discusses it at length when detailing the attractions

Ireland held for the Diggers. But since those publications, the BMH has opened its collection of Witness Statements and these provide a wealth of anecdotes from the other side of Britain’s other Front about Diggers on leave in Ireland. They add detail to what this chapter will demonstrate was Williams’ extraordinary, shorthand picture of a resurgent Ireland in the years between Easter 1916 and the full-blown War of Independence already looming. The Witness Statements also help to build a more nuanced vision of the triangular relationship between

Australian soldiers, Britain and Ireland during the First World War and the Irish

War of Independence, as well as adding further dimensions to our understanding of Australia’s cherished Anzacs and the Australian experience of both these wars.

“This unenviable city”

After the evacuation of Gallipoli, the AIF was stationed in Egypt where the infantry was expanded from the two divisions and one brigade that had served at

ANZAC to five divisions – the “doubling” of the force. In the meantime, with insufficient hospital beds in Egypt and Malta, some 13,000 Australian troops evacuated wounded from Gallipoli were hospitalised in Britain and efforts were underway setting up AIF Administrative Headquarters at Horseferry Road,

London, and the series of Command Depots across the south which would replace

Egypt as the main AIF base. In March 1916, the 2nd Division, the last Australian unit to arrive on Gallipoli, was the first on the Western Front. The others soon followed.

Australian and other Dominion soldiers first appear on history’s stage in

Ireland in the re-emerging theatre of war signalled by the Easter Rising of late

April 1916. On Monday the 24th, armed members of the Irish Volunteers, its female wing the Cumann na mBan, the Irish Citizen Army and other nationalist organisations occupied posts across the city of Dublin. At midday, the President of the Provisional Irish Government, Padraig Pearse, walked out of the rebel headquarters at the Dublin Post Office into Sackville (now O’Connell) Street and read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

All British Army leave in Ireland was cancelled. There was also a small number of Dominion troops, from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and

Canada, on leave in Dublin at the time. Two Australian soldiers, 2052 Private

George Edward Davis of the 2nd Motor Transport Company (MTC) and 786 Private

Robert Henry Grant, 11th Battalion, both Anzac veterans, thought that as tourists without any interest in the fight they could casually take in the proceedings until they were abruptly “brought to (their) senses by a rifle bullet which struck the kerb nearby, and was followed by a quick succession of shots.”13 At this point in the war, their uniforms identified them with the British Army and, hence, as enemies of the Republic. In his diary, Davis continues his account with a light-hearted tone that, perhaps, betrays a then not uncommon inability to take the rebels seriously:

13 AWM, PR88/203, Davis diary. For this section of Australians in the Easter Uprising I am indebted to Kildea “Called to Arms” & Anzac and Ireland. 100

“My pal dodged around the corner, and knowing discretion to be the better part of valour, I followed.”14

Along with other Dominion soldiers, an Australian, 1985 Private Michael

John McHugh, 11th Battalion, 5th Reinforcements, was stationed as a sniper on the roof of Trinity College, overlooking Grafton Street and the main lines of communication between rebel headquarters at the Post Office and trenches dug in at St Stephen’s Green. Others were co-opted to British Army units in separate actions around the city. They were doing their duty, just as were the British Army units in the city at the time.15 Revealingly, Private Davis goes on to say: “We are making the best of a bad job, but would prefer to be anywhere but in this unenviable city. … We were in a very unenviable position, for we personally had no quarrel with the rioters.”16

Davis’ laconic description is the first statement of a common thread running through the relationship of Diggers to Ireland – they ”personally had no quarrel with the rioters.” This was a very real dilemma for many soldiers of Irish extraction serving in the diverse armies that made up the British Expeditionary

Force (BEF). As early as 1907, both Houses of the Australian Parliament had petitioned the King to grant Home Rule to Ireland. This was a time when Australia had much reason to see itself as a democratising influence in the world. It had seen

Australians achieve very real democratic freedoms, such as a universal franchise that included women (although not indigenous Australians), the first Labor

14 Ibid. 15 Kildea, ‘Called to Arms’. 16 Davis Diary op.cit.. 101

Governments in the world and a living wage subject to arbitration. These could be summed up in the colloquial expression, the belief that everyone deserved a “Fair

Go.” This notion was both egalitarian and, in the face of entrenched British privilege, radical in its expression of core humanist values.

So ‘revolutionary’ did he find Australian soldiers that Field Marshal Haig, in a letter to his wife in February 1918, complained of “having to separate the

Australians into Convalescent Camps of their own, because they were giving so much trouble when along with our men and put such revolutionary ideas into their heads.”17 Back home in Australia it would become a seditious offence under the

War Precautions Act to publicly express support for Irish independence or even to possess an Irish tricolour flag but in Ireland itself Irish Australian soldiers could act with far greater freedom.

Frank Thornton, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the underground organisation that had orchestrated the Rising, commanded a group based, initially, in Liberty Hall, the Headquarters of the Irish Labour Party and its

Citizen Army. Though sporadic fighting continued around the city until Sunday,

Volunteer command surrendered at noon on Saturday the 28th. Whenever it was that they received the order to surrender, Thornton’s section was fighting from a building in Gloucester Street and were then marched, with other prisoners, just over a kilometre down to the Customs House. There, he recorded in his Witness

Statement,

17 Ashley Ekins, The Year of Victory, p.112, 102

(w)e were all ordered to lie down on the stone flags in a yard and we

remained in this spot until some time on Monday. During all that period

we were never allowed even a drink of water, or given any food, nor were

our wounds attended to, and by this time, some of our men were in a very

bad condition - with exhaustion, loss of blood, and, with no attention they

were really in a dangerous condition. This situation existed until the Royal

Irish Rifles from Belfast were relieved by an Australian Unit on Sunday. The

Australians, on taking over on Sunday evening, realising the position,

divided their own rations with us and acted in quite a decent fashion.18

While there is no evidence of an Australian unit in Dublin, there were certainly

Australian and, as already mentioned, other Dominion soldiers. It was only his humane treatment by these soldiers that enabled Thornton to be the first recorded

Irishman to distinguish them, if not from one another, at least from the British

Army. As later discussion will demonstrate, the niceties of distinction between the various Dominion uniforms and accents grouped together under the BEF were beyond the concern of Irish nationalists in the field (and Irish farmers in their fields). Numerous Witness Statements confuse Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and even British and to add to the confusion, by mid 1917 both Australian and New

Zealander soldiers were calling themselves Diggers.

Of the 3,000 Irish men and women arrested after the Rising, 100 were condemned to death by military courts, sixteen of whom were executed. Another

18 BMH.WS0510, Frank Thornton, p.26.

103

1800 from across the country were interned without trial in British prisons. The last – those who had been tried and convicted – were released from Portland and

Lewes prisons in a general amnesty in June 1917, soon after the entry of the USA into the war. International press coverage of their treatment when, in pursuit of prisoner of war status, they refused to obey prison regulations, had focused world attention on their plight. Thornton records that, as they were “trudging” along to the station,

a convoy of Australian troops passed by and immediately pulled up. The

troops insisted on our getting up on the lorry and, with terrific cheering,

singing, etc., they drove us to the station. These troops, of course, were fully

aware of who we were and that we were released prisoners who had fought

in the Insurrection in Dublin in 1916. What a different train journey from

that which we experienced on the previous Christmas week on our way

from Dartmoor to Lewes.19

Australian soldiers had enlisted to fight Germans, not Irish, and an easy camaraderie seems to have developed between at least some Diggers and the Irish

Volunteers, the forerunners of the IRA.

Soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land reacted to the Easter Rising and the commonly recorded initial response was of outrage and dismay. Australian-born

2nd Lieutenant Geoffrey Hughes, Royal Flying Corps, wrote to his grandmother in

Sydney on 7 May 1916, while two of his cousins were lying in hospital severely wounded from the 2nd Battle of Loos, which had occurred concurrently with the

Rising. In his letter, Hughes captured the outrage:

19 Ibid. p. 41 104

It is a good thing they have shot the leaders of Sinn Fein who are Ireland’s

worst enemies. They don’t want Home Rule and even are its bitterest

opponents.20

As happened in Germany after the war, the Rising was seen at the time as Britain’s

“stab in the back.”

Whilst deflating several myths of the AIF, Graeme Wilson in Bully Beef and

Balderdash unwittingly perpetuates another widely held one “that the Easter

Uprising originally had almost no popular support.”21 Though the loudest responses to the Rising have had the most coverage, especially the loyalists and the

“separation women” hurling abuse and refuse at the captives, there were others.22

As early as 4 May in Australia, Dr Mannix, coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, commented:

We must not lose sight of the facts of the situation … knowing, as I do, what

has been going on in Ireland before and since the outbreak of war, I am not

altogether surprised at the lamentable things that occurred …(T)he British

Government, by its failure to deal with the treason of the Carsonites and, by

its shifty policy in regard to Home Rule, has … led up to the result which we

must all deplore.23

In Dublin, while being marched off to Kilmainham Jail, Thornton noticed that:

There were indications of the changed attitude of the people. The open

20 Geoffrey Forrest Hughes to Mary Gilhooly, 7 May 1916, Hughes papers MLMSS, 1222/1/201. in Anne Stevens, The Hughes Family of Sydney 1840-2007, p.177. 21 Wilson, p.412. 22 In Australia, ‘loyalist’ had, before WWI, become a general term of abuse for the ruling class and all who profited from ties with Britain - Irving & Cahill p.141. ‘Separation women’ were those whose husbands or sons had enlisted in the British Army and who were, therefore, financially dependent on and emotionally committed to service with the British Army. 23 Tribune, 4/5/1916, quoted in Gilchrist p.29. 105

trams passing by always brought a cheer from somebody, even though rifles

were pointed at the offender on every occasion. Old men stood at the street

corners and saluted, despite being pushed around.24

This was not just wishful thinking on Thornton’s part as these were real signs of things to come. There were also 10,000 Irish Volunteers throughout the country – those who split when Redmond encouraged the National Volunteers to enlist for service overseas in the British Army – on standby and waiting for the mobilisation orders that never came. Again, Wilson presents an unquestioning reading of the situation when he unwittingly repeats two other widely held views

(myths?):

Support for the Irish Nationalist cause only gained impetus after the wholly

understandable but politically inept execution of 15 of the captured leaders

of the Uprising.25

If the executions were so “wholly understandable” why were they not wholly understood by the Irish? Wilson’s is a perpetuation of the coloniser’s point of view, which states that if the Irish were sensible and reasonable like him they would have understood and accepted the perfectly reasonable, though “politically inept” actions of the British. It fails to understand and inadvertently attempts to sustain the silencing of the then emerging narrative of Ireland’s identification with that other “little country”, Belgium, then occupied by the Germans. Like Belgium,

Ireland was an occupied country and for many Irish, the leaders of the Rising were

24 BMH.WS0510 p.28 25 Ibid. 106

prisoners of war whose executions made mockery of British outrage over German atrocities in Belgium.

In Australia the impact of the Rising and its aftermath was, if not entirely visible at first, nevertheless enormous. It was the beginning of the wedge driven between the semblance of unity of Australia’s British and Irish diasporas that had been achieved with the entwining of Home Rule for Ireland and the Declaration of

War. Only months later in the lead up to the Conscription referendum, NSW pro- conscription Premier Holman observed that after the Rising “vast masses had passed over from enthusiastic acceptance of the patriotic cause, to sullen indifference as to the struggle’s result.”26 This followed from the widening class divisions in the country as life got much tougher for the workers while others seemed to be doing-quite-nicely-thank-you and the increasing alienation of the

Irish Catholics as the sectarian wedge was driven through the nation.

In Ireland, “it became de rigueur for Australian soldiers on leave” to visit the ruins of the Rising.27 There, many would have come across 241 Private Alfred

Carleton, 2nd Machine Gun Company. Alf was a lonely figure who haunted the

“skeleton”28 of the Post Office and still haunts the history of the Diggers in Ireland.

Born in Playhill, County Antrim, Alf enlisted in Melbourne in February 1916 only days before his 38th birthday. Tall, sandy-haired Alf had a wife and two children and declared he was a draftsman, although the Army insisted he was just a labourer. On 12 November 1916, he was arrested by civil police in Dublin. Alf

26 Quoted in Gilchrist p.35. 27 Kildea, p.142 28 Letter by Lt. McKenna of Melbourne, 13/12/17, quoted in Kildea p.143. 107

Carleton was found begging in Sackville Street amid the pungent aromas of freshly baking soda bread, vinegar chips, salt sea air, horses manure, Guinness and the still uncleared rubble of the Post Office.

At first, Alf presented false leave papers (for which there was a black market all over the UK and in Egypt) but these just added another charge to his arrest for “act(s) to the prejudice of good order and military discipline”: AWL, begging in the street and using a false leave pass “well knowing it was not genuine.”29 He had not yet served at the Front and so would have gone to Ireland on the six-day leave given to all soldiers prior to embarkation. At his Court Martial,

Alf was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. The sentence was remitted, as was the norm, and after five months he was sent to join his unit in France. There, after just 3 weeks, Alf was hospitalised with a recurring ‘ankle injury.’ Eventually he was sent home suffering from tobacco ambylopia. Like so many WWI soldiers, Alf

Carleton was a heavy smoker and this was costing him his sight. In Dublin, this

Irish born Digger, tall and gaunt in his tattered khaki, must have seemed like a demented ghost as, half blind, he harangued locals and Diggers for pennies and bungers, while the autumn winds howled through the ruins of the Rising.

An enduring trench myth of the New Zealand Division in France held that

“most of the bus and tram drivers in Dublin were New Zealanders and

Australians.”30 In the psycho-geography of trench dreaming, to die was “to go

West”. Blighty was west. Ireland, the western-most point of Europe, the Isle of the

Saints, had become a surreal Isle of the Blessed, where there was an afterlife - in

29 NAA: B2455, Carleton, Alfred, Pte. 241. 30 Pugsley, p.153. 108

this life. In the rumour mill of trench dreaming where vision was often limited to the slit of sky visible from the bottom of a trench, Ireland had plenty of beer and butter, and there Australians and New Zealanders, Diggers both, released from the horrors of the Front, lived a racy kind of ordinary life fanging about in buses and trams along the Georgian streets and Quays of “Dublin’s fair city.”

The most popular marching song of the war, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”

– so popular that even the Germans sang it in both world wars – must also have added to the mystique of an almost unattainable Irish land of far away, “a long, long way”. The Irish themselves had always dreamed over the western ocean and had filled that with their most notable otherworld, Tir nAn Og. Written in January

1912 and first sung on the music hall stage in 1913, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was referred to, in Ireland, as the ‘British War Song’ and was not played there from the time the British were driven out until after the Northern Ireland Peace Accord of 1998. When its centenary was celebrated, it was reclaimed by marching bands and choirs in the streets, houses, pubs and halls of Tipperary Town.31

In the wake of the “terrible beauty” born of the Easter Rising and the subsequent flowering of nationalist sentiment, Dominion soldiers on leave with family in Ireland could be subjected to enormous psychological pressures – as were Irish soldiers serving in the British Army. No. 34 Private William Ryan of the

8th Brigade Machine Gun Company provides an extreme example of how fraught the situation could be for antipodean soldiers of the Irish diaspora visiting family in Ireland after the Rising. On 5 October 1916, Ryan was released on leave from

31 Interview with Betty Lynch, Artistic Director St. Michael’s Church Choir, Tipperary, July 2012. 109

Weymouth Command Depot, Salisbury, and went to the family home in Waterford.

In his statement to the Court of Inquiry, explaining why he overstayed his leave,

Pte. Ryan asserted that,

(o)ne day I was talking to my father, I believe it was the 8th of October 1916,

about the Sinn Fein movement and was excited. It was just after dinner and

we were still sitting at table. I had a knife in my hand. To emphasise what I

was saying, I brought my hand holding the knife down with a bang on the

table and in so doing, struck my other hand which was resting on the table

with the knife, cutting it severely.32

The court could not determine whether the injury, described as “severe”, was

“wilfully inflicted or not” but did make enquiries to Cork Military Hospital, where

Ryan was treated, as to his “mental condition” at the time. Though the obvious suggestion is that Ryan was - as he, doubtless, ‘should have been’ - opposed to his family’s support for Sinn Fein, there is, in his statement, a tantalising ambiguity regarding his sympathies.

In October 1917, 6315 Private Richard Hurley of the 18th Battalion arrived at the farm of relatives, the O’Callaghans, at Laravoulta near Newceston in West

County Cork.33 His parents had died and the family farm sold before Dick followed his older brother and two sisters out to Australia, where their uncles had made their fortune supplying beef cattle to the diggers at the Victorian gold fields.34 Dick

Hurley arrived in Australia in 1913 in the normal chain migration of family

32 NAA: B2455: Ryan, W. SERN 34, p.8 33 Much of the Hurley narrative comes from correspondence with his son who, because of the ongoing impact of this issue on those resident in the Commonwealth requests that I keep his identity secret. 34 Susan Hurley, The Hurleys of Killinear, pp.18-38. 110

reunion. He was followed out by three cousins, the brothers Jeremiah and William

McSweeney and Jeremiah O’Callaghan, only days after war was declared in August

1914.35 Hurley enlisted at the Sydney Showground with the McSweeneys (6358

William also of the 18th and 3096 Jeremiah, 38th Battalion) on 27 October 1916, the day before the Conscription Referendum.36 Convinced, like many others, that the referendum was a ‘sure thing,’ they believed that if they enlisted before – as volunteers rather than as conscripts – they would have a choice of unit.37 Hence the presence of Hurley with the younger McSweeney, ‘Bill’, in the 18th

Reinforcements of the 18th Battalion. Jeremiah was in the 33rd while O’Callaghan decided to take his chances on the referendum and, along with nearly 70 percent of the Australian male population between the ages of 18 and 60, did not enlist.38

The descendants of Australian soldiers who fought for Ireland and never returned to Australia mistakenly believed to this day that Australia did have

Conscription in WWI – how else to understand the presence of such stalwart

Republicans in the Army of the King? Australia had two Conscription Referenda during the war – the second in 1917. Both failed. Before the first Referendum in

1916, Prime Minister Hughes was so assured of the AIF support for conscription that he had them vote a week early, planning to use the AIF as propaganda to bolster the ‘Yes’ vote. When the result was disappointing he refused to publish the figures and, instead, dispersed them among the states from which the soldiers had enlisted and, as Attorney General as well as Prime Minister, then made a special regulation making it an offence to disclose the details of the AIF votes. “Only when

35 Passenger list of HMS Thermistocles, embarked from London, 27/08/14. 36 NAA, B2455: 6315 Hurley, Richard, 6358 McSweeney, William and 3096 McSweeney, Jeremiah. 37 Private correspondence 13/01/13 38 Beaumont, Broken Nation, p. xv. 111

the Labor party attempted to make political capital from this cover-up the following year were the figures finally made public, some five months later.”39 This was but one of a plethora of ‘cover-ups’ by the government throughout the war.

The first referendum split the ruling Labor Governments nationally and in

NSW, and the proponents of conscription continued to rule in coalition with the previous opposition Liberal Party. The Federal (Labor) Government did have the power to introduce conscription for Home Service and could have passed a bill to extend it for overseas service but the Labor Party, in power until the split, was opposed and held the balance of power in the Senate. Had conscription been introduced in Australia as it was in the other Dominions except South Africa, the conscripts may have been spared the perjury of the Oath Of Loyalty. In New

Zealand, once conscription was introduced, “Men who chose not to take the Oath of

Allegiance were nevertheless ‘Soldiers’ by an act of Parliament.”40 Conscripts could be compelled to serve but not to sign the Oath, while volunteers could not be compelled (though they were heavily coerced) to enlist but, doing so, they had to, without exception, sign the Oath of Loyalty to the King.

After being wounded in the legs on the first day of the Battle of Menin Road,

20 September 1917, his one and only day fighting with the AIF, Private Hurley was hospitalised in England. There he learnt of the deaths of two other close cousins, the Quinlan brothers: 5359 Pte. Denis Quinlan, 20th Battalion, was killed in action

(KIA) on the same day and in the same battle as Hurley’s wounding, while 2704

39 Ibid. p. 244. 40 Pugsley, p.225. 112

Pte. John Andrew Quinlan was killed only days later. Both are commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres – for those whose bodies were never found.

Recovering quickly and on convalescent leave, Hurley went to the farm of his mother’s sister’s family, the O’Callaghans in nearby Laravoulta. In a scene that could have been played out countless times when soldiers of the Irish diaspora arrived at the ancestral home: “Sometime after arriving at the O'Callaghan home … he ended up outside in the yard and … either he or the O'Callaghans ripped the crown off his uniform.”41

The Rising Sun badge.

There were three crowns on a Diggers’ uniform: two on the collar points and one on the slouch hat. There could be few more symbolic acts for an Australian soldier than this desecration of the hated crown, a metynom for the British Empire, and hence for the Irish of 750 years of occupation. In the shadow of this icon of

British authority, the leaders of the Easter Rising and countless Irish men and women before and after them were executed. This act of desecration released

41 Private correspondence 22/01/2013. 113

Richard Hurley from his role in the Australian Army, a role that had subordinated him to British authority and compromised his Irishness. That role was an image in which he had experienced himself like Joyce’s Irish servant in a “cracked looking glass” – both cracked and doubled. The desecration of the crowns restored Dick

Hurley to a wholeness wherein he became hell bent on the destruction of British rule in Ireland. But there would ever after be a soft spot in Dick Hurley for the land this action lost him. Did he and his cousins even see the Rising Sun above the crown? Was Hurley torn emotionally about this action? Dick Hurley, so the story goes, loved Australia and his yarns of the antipodes served as a dreaming map for his niece, many years later, when she travelled to Australia and New Zealand.42

Having failed to present himself when his convalescent leave expired, on

Christmas Eve 1917 Hurley was declared Illegally Absent by a Court of Inquiry at

Hurdcott Depot. The APC sent warrants to Newceston RIC requesting his arrest.

The Williams’ report details some of the difficulties when attempting to arrest

Australian soldiers in Ireland:

1. Australian soldiers sorely resent interference by the British Military

Police, and when an attempt to arrest them is made …it usually results in

the soldier resisting, a huge crowd gathering who are unsympathetic

with the police, and who invariably secure the soldier’s release, and the

police are sometimes injured.

2. That there are “Sinn Feiners”43 and other people, who not only harbour

absentees and deserters, but provide them with civilian clothes, food, and

42 Ibid. 43 Though Sinn Fein was (and still is) a political party, at this time the term ‘Sinn Fein’ had become a shorthand for all forms of the radical nationalist movement. 114

accommodation, free of charge, in order to hide their identity, and very

frequently find them some very lucrative employment.

3. When a deserter is provided with plain clothes he can, and does, go to the

Local Irish Labour Bureau, assume a false name, obtains a certificate that

he is a native born Irishman … in short, any soldier desirous of defying

law and order is aided and abetted in every possible way.44

By the time the RIC came looking for him, Dick Hurley was 50 kilometres away down the Bantry Peninsula at Lisheen. Soon after he had arrived for convalescent leave at Newcestown, the West Cork companies of the Volunteers underwent a major reorganisation. On 10 December 1917, when the Skibbereen

Battalion paraded before Eamon de Valera, then leader of both Sinn Fein and the

Irish Volunteers, Hurley was a foundation member and Captain of its Lisheen

Company.

Lt.Col. Williams also asserted that doctors willingly gave out “medical certificates ... certifying that soldiers are unfit to travel, or return to their units, when there is nothing at all the matter with them”; that the RIC were “unwilling to assist the Provost Branch or, if they do, it is in a very half-hearted manner”; and that “Sinn Fein” intelligence, aided and abetted by railway, post and telegraph employees, was so good that “arrests are often frustrated and offenders get off scot

44 William’s Report Op.cit. This is confirmed by the NZPC War Diary for March 1918: “the majority of our deserters are hiding in Ireland, where special inducements are offered them by the Sinn fein movement. ANZ WA152 Box 179 R23856664 “New Zealand Provost Corps Diary – 1 January 1918 - 31 December 1918” p.11. 115

free.” Belfast, on the other hand was “altogether different. The general population are sympathetic, and the police difficulties are little worse than in (England). ”45

Outside the Loyalist North, Ireland was, once again, becoming ‘beyond the pale’.46 By early 1918, it was Britain’s ‘wild west’, something Australian and New

Zealand soldiers, released from the strictures of military discipline, apparently relished. The state of Ireland with its disintegrating British authority was fast becoming a zone of freedom for Diggers on leave. In his Witness Statement,

Thomas Pugh of the Dublin Brigade IRA evokes the adrenalin-fuelled excitement of the time:

We used to take awful chances. I have been in Phil Shanahan’s (bar) with

three or four others drinking at our leisure at 12 o’clock at night. Sometimes

an Australian fellow would come in, throw a .45 revolver on the counter and

put out his hand for a pound. That was a recognised thing. The women used

to steal rifles and .45 revolvers and anything they could get their hands on.47

When going on leave to the United Kingdom, all soldiers of the Empire took their weapons with them. Routine order 1110 states: “Men to be in possession of arms.”48 Though Order 1110 goes on to state that they were not to take ammunition and Order 610 states, “No French equipment to be taken home”, these did nothing to stem the trade in revolvers in Ireland. Not only did those soldiers joining the IRA bring their military skills, they also brought their Lee Enfield .303s

45 ibid.. 46 ‘The Pale’ was that area around Dublin directly under the control of the English in the Late Middle Ages. 47 BMH.WS0397 p.28 48 AWM27 366-51 Regulations regarding leave to UK, SS523. 116

and whatever other weapons they had souvenired, or bought at the Front or behind the lines in France and Belgium. As IRA commandant John McCoy of

Armagh put it:

I had a Service Rifle, Lee Enfield, in my possession from some time in 1917. A

chum of mine who was serving with the Irish Guards came home on leave

from Flanders and arrived with the rifle and about 200 rounds of

ammunition for it. I "collared it" before he went back again to the war

front.49

Similarly, Lt.Col. JM MacCarthy, Adjutant East Limerick Bde:

At some date in the course of this year, (1919) the local unit (Kilfinane)

acquired its first service rifle, a Lee-Enfield .303 for which I paid 5 (pound) to

a soldier of the Australian Forces who was spending his leave of absence

with relatives in the neighbourhood.50

There are several accounts of Australian soldiers selling their weapons while in Ireland – indeed, their propensity for this remains legendary - but the IRA also had other ways of getting arms. Young Bernard Byrne, a member of Michael

Collins’ Squad, stated that “[o]ne of (his) first recollections of activities against the

British forces was the holding up of an Australian soldier on the Quays and confiscation of his gun and ammunition.”51 As Williams noted in his report,

(a) good number of arms have recently been found in the possession of the

civilian population in the south of Ireland … (that) have been obtained from

49 BMH.WS0492 John McCoy, Commandant IRA, Armagh, p.34. 50 BMH.WS0883.pdf - Lieut. Col. JM MacCarthy, Adjutant E Lim Bde (KIlfinane) p.44. 51 BMH.WS0631 Bernard Byrne, Member of 1st Bn. Dublin Bde & the Squad p.4. 117

absentee soldiers.52

Outside Dublin, the most popular place for Australian soldiers on leave in

Ireland was Killarney in County Kerry.53

In 1918 the Aeríocht which is (still) the annual big Irish cultural festival was

due to be held in Belfast. It was proscribed by the British authorities fearing

that it would spark violence in the city. Instead, it was held in Killarney and

was a big success. … many Australian soldiers attended while on leave.

Attempts were made by the local Volunteers to get the Australians to defect

to fight for the Irish cause but none did. However many were only too willing

to donate their weapons which were in extremely short supply among the

fledging Irish Volunteer army. The Australian soldiers were very popular at

the event and were not regarded in the same way as the British army.54

According to Michael Spillane of the local Volunteer Company, at the time,

(t)he Australian soldiers visiting the area attended all the Volunteer dances55

and the Volunteers got many revolvers from them. They used to join in with

the Volunteers if there was any row with the English soldiers, for they

despised the 'Woodbines', as they called the Tommies. Owing to these rows

Killarney was put out of bounds to Australians on leave until some of them

laid down arms at the Front and refused duty until Killarney was open to

them again and it was. Among members of the Australian Forces who did this

were Sergeants Jim O’Reilly, Daly and Tangey.56

52 Williams report op.cit. 53 See cover photo and Kildea especially p.p.134–8 54 Dr Tim Horgan, private correspondence, 13/03/13 55 Fund raisers for the anti-conscription campaign. 56 BMH.WS0862 Michael Spillane, O/C 4th (Killarney) Bn, Kerry II Bde p.8. 118

The suggestion that leave to Killarney was renewed because certain soldiers

“laid down their arms at the Front” until it was open to them again sounds like some Diggers might have been pulling Spillane’s leg. There are a number of examples of hearsay in the BMH files suggesting that pulling Irish country legs by the worldly Diggers was not uncommon. Indeed, so well was his leg pulled that

Spillane, who made his statement in 1953, must have been walking with a limp for the rest of his life. The remainder of his statement is, like most Witness Statements, from first hand experience with much of it verified by others. The occasional examples of hearsay in the Witness Statements, while they must be treated with caution, nevertheless add colour to the Irish recollections of Australian soldiers.

What is pertinent, however, is, again, a reference to Australian soldiers supplying the IRA with much needed arms, the fraternisation of Diggers and

Volunteers, and a well documented, mutual dislike of the ‘Woodbines.’ Instead of mutiny at The Front, a more accurate explanation would relate to the cancellation of all leave to Ireland soon after Williams filed his April report, while he took 13

APC officers to Ireland on a roundup of Australian absentees. In POLICE REPORT

FOR WEEK ENDED 6TH. JULY 1918, Williams wrote:

I visited Ireland on special duty with a small detachment of military police

between 19th June and 1st July 1918. Several arrests were made, and a

special report submitted to Headquarters.57

But, the July report on the roundup in Ireland is nowhere to be found and

57 AWM4 3/9/7 APC report for week ended 6 July 1918, p.2. 119

in AWM25 233/6 PART52, which contains APC reports of crimes and offences for

1918, there is a gap from June to September.58 In other words, all records pertaining to the APC roundup of Absentees in Ireland in June/July 1918 have, at some time, been suppressed or destroyed.

In On the Fringe of Hell, his analysis of discipline in the New Zealand

Expeditionary Force (NZEF) throughout WWI, Christopher Pugsley writes:

Ireland was a popular place of refuge and in early 1918 leave to Ireland was

prohibited for 14 days, to enable deserters to be arrested; it netted one

man… and a New Zealand deserter arrested in 1919 was believed to be one

of a number holding rank in the IRA.59

It is strange and tantalising that New Zealand has recorded its soldiers’ active involvement in Ireland while there is not a single word about it in any surviving document of the AIF. It is difficult to believe that, while New Zealand had facilities for only one division at their base at Sling in the south of England and Australia had facilities for five divisions and the much larger command network required, the

New Zealand intelligence relating to Ireland was so much better. Either the

Australian authorities were, relative to the New Zealand, incompetent, just too busy with their much greater indiscipline rate or the William’s Report of April

1918 has to be read as the first step in building a wall of silence around Australian soldiers’ involvement in Ireland.

58 AWM25 233/6 PART52 [Crimes and Offences] Headquarters Australian Provost Corps, United Kingdom, Reports, 1918. 59 Pugsley, p.153 and fn. 21 p.318, Historical Notes NZ Military Police, NA WA 152/1. 120

The Williams’ Report does not read as the work of an incompetent but, as his war record and high office attest, the work of a highly capable military police officer and investigator. He was Australia’s highest-ranking military policeman in the First World War and, interestingly, when the Australian authorities were responding to the request of the British Army in Ireland they sent their top man. In the context of this study it becomes impossible not to read between the lines of the

April Report’s covering letter to Brigadier General Griffiths:

I regret the little delay in forwarding you my report regarding the Irish trip,

but regard it as a very delicate and important question, and I assure you the

delay has only been due to the careful thought and consideration I have

given the question before submitting my recommendations to you.

I have now every confidence in saying that I am supplying you with

absolutely reliable information, and that my recommendations are based on

the right lines. I trust it will read agreeable to you, and that you will be

satisfied that my trip was not wasted or in vain.60

60 Williams Report op.cit.. italics added for emphasis. 121

c.1916 Lt Col John Williams, APM 1st Anzac Corps France/Belgium with officers of his military police. (AWM)

In February 1918, the New Zealand Provost Corps (NZPC) were well in advance of and/or far more candid than the Australians in dealing with these two distinct but closely related issues: absentees in Ireland and the active engagement of some of those absentees (and men on leave) in providing military support to the

Irish. The NZPC War Diary entry for March relates how

Ireland was placed out-of-bounds for New Zealand troops for a fortnight,

but only one absentee was arrested, although the civil police were

instructed to arrest every man in New Zealand uniform … A number of New

Zealand absentees are known to be in Ireland, but the civil police seem

122

unwilling to arrest them, possibly owing to the Sinn Fein movement.61

Then in March,

an N.C.O. was first sent over to “spy out the land” and later two men – a

Corporal and a Lance Corporal – were sent in ordinary infantry uniform and

of six men located they succeeded in bringing back, or accounting for, five.

The other man, in the midst of a Sinn Fein area, was too strongly

entrenched. He was seen and advised to come back, at first he promised to

do so but afterwards refused.

From reliable information it is quite apparent that the majority of

our deserters are hiding in Ireland, where special inducements are offered

them by the Sinn Fein element. At least one of our deserters, J Griffen is

known to be drilling the Sinn Feiners in County Kerry.62

In other words, in February the NZPC closed access to Ireland for its troops in the hope that the RIC would arrest Kiwi Diggers there and then it mounted a reconnaissance mission. Where Australia sent its APM, New Zealand sent only one non-commissioned officer (NCO). This was followed in March by a small undercover operation to hunt down absentees in Ireland but did not have the clout to force their absentees to return. As in the Williams’ April Report, the Kiwis believed that the “the majority of (their) deserters(were) hiding in Ireland, where special inducements (were) offered them by the Sinn Fein element.” But unlike the

Williams Report, the Kiwis were quite candid about the involvement of their soldiers.

61 ANZ WA152 Box 179 R23856664 “New Zealand Provost Corps – 1 January 1918-31 December 1918”, p.11. 62 Ibid. p.12 123

That deserter training the Volunteers in County Kerry was the “legendary

IRA Lewis gunner,” John ‘Gilpin’ Griffin from Cahersiveen in County Kerry. The legend has him losing an eye on Gallipoli, deserting from the British Army and making his way overland to South Kerry “earning money for the journey by playing cards.”63 But ‘Gilpin’ didn’t desert from the British Army – he was a Kiwi Digger.

In his Report for February 1918, General G.S. Richardson, GOC NZEF in UK, wrote that

the offenders (are) men who go on 14 days sick leave from the

Convalescent Hospital and are ordered to proceed to Codford on the

termination of such leave. Men who receive large sums of money from New

Zealand are the worst offenders … only one man was arrested (in the NZ

roundup of March.) Six others have been located but cannot be arrested

without an armed force being sent in as local residents resist attempts to

arrest absentees.64

Summing up the issue in May, he added:

There are 40 absentees of over two months absence. This is not a large

number … considering the facilities which Ireland offers to men who wish

to evade service. I am informed that it represents a very much lower

percentage than in other overseas forces.65

63 Private correspondence with Tim Horgan, 28/2/2014. 64 ANZ WA 231/11 Reports by Maj. Gen. G.S. Richardson, GOC NZEF in UK, p.112. 65 Ibid. p.77. Italics added for emphasis. 124

Richardson was, of course, referring primarily to the Australians – the most notoriously “indisciplined” of all the Empire troops when out of the line and with whom the Kiwis were (and still are), to their exasperation, constantly confused.

On 11 May 1918, between the publication of Williams’ April Report and his subsequent posse to Ireland in June/July, a story appeared in The Nenagh News, the newspaper of the county town of North Tipperary. It stated that

Company Sergeant-Major J.T Walsh, of the Australian Imperial Force, who

recently visited his relatives at Newport, Co. Tipperary, was tried by a

District Courtmartial (sic.) on a charge, it is understood, of drilling the Irish

Volunteers at Newport and other places on several occasions while on

leave. He was reduced to the rank of corporal and ordered to France,

where he has already been twice wounded.66

When he enlisted as a 29 year old at Sydney’s Warwick Farm in September 1916,

Sydney born John Thomas ‘Jack’ Walsh, a meat inspector, already had military experience. In 1898 he’d sailed with his Tipperary born mother, Bridget, aboard the Manapouri to Ireland where he stayed for some years. There, Jack enlisted with the 8th Regiment of the Royal Irish Rifles where, before returning to Australia, he’d become a Drill Instructor.67 With his training skills, Walsh was repeatedly transferred through seven different companies of the AIF before embarking for

England as a Sergeant with the 24th Reinforcements of the 13th Bn. on the Wiltshire in February 1917.

66 Hackett, Patrick, In Freedom’s Cause, Patrick Hackett, Tipperary2010. P. 419. 67 NAA: B2455, Walsh, John Thomas, SERN 7343 p.1. 125

On 29 September at Polygon Wood, Walsh was hospitalised with a gunshot

wound to the thigh and then after being gassed on 12 November was hospitalised

in London at Moore Park Auxiliary Hospital. On 21 March 1918, he was reported

AWL from Hurdcott Depot where a Court of Inquiry subsequently declared him

Illegally Absent on 12 April. Then the record becomes confusing. Over the entries

concerned with Walsh’s absence is written three times “Delete Entry Ref CR

11159/13/3” and then on the third “Delete Entry” is added “DO 1379 16/8/19”.68

Again, a later entry from 20 May states “Later report shows Retd. 4/5/18.” Walsh

had been recorded AWL because his base in England had not been notified that he

was in custody awaiting trial in Ireland. The charge of Illegal Absence was

quashed once the AIF received the relevant paperwork. However, unlike in

numerous other cases, there is no record of the Court Martial in Walsh’s service

record.

Excerpt from the service record of John Thomas Walsh 69

On 12 June Lance Corporal Walsh embarked for France where he was again

wounded before winning a Military Medal for extraordinary gallantry at Vaire

Wood on 4 July. He was granted furlough from Harefield Convalescent on 13

68 Ibid. p.14. 69 Ibid. p.14. 126

September and was again “reported AWL in error (on) 16/10/18.”70 Walsh was

transferred to AIFHQ London in December and while there was made 2nd

Lieutenant in February 1919. When he finally embarked for Australia on the

Orontes on 25 October, John Thomas Walsh held the rank of Lieutenant, which

rank he resumed when mobilised at the outbreak of WWII and made Commandant

of the Addison Road Military Camp in Marrickville. In the official transcript of his

war service, typed and submitted to the Department of Repatriation on 10 May

1923, those troublesome entries referring to his Illegal Absences have ceased to

exist and there is no mention of his Court Martial in Ireland. As the overwriting

ordered, they have been, “Delete(d).”

When he was arrested by the RIC in Ennis, County Clare, on 29 July, 1919,

New Zealand born James Frederick ‘Fred’ McKenna, AKA 61728 Frederick James

McKenna of the Wellington Battalion New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF),

had been AWL for a year. Just nineteen when he followed his older brother, Frank

– 10/164 Francis Stuart McKenna – Fred enlisted in the third reinforcements of

the Wellington Battalion in October 1916. After being knocked back at his first

attempt, Fred, like Con Casey, inverted the order of his first two names. This was

something his family, like mine, had never understood. It wasn’t because he was

too young because, at his second attempt, Fred had his father’s permission to

enlist. While my grandfather reverted to his original name after the war, for the

rest of his life, James Frederick remained ‘Fred.’

70 Ibid. p. 16. 127

Hospitalised with “trench fever” in April 1918, Fred wrote in a letter to his

mother from Walton-on-Thames Hospital in May – just weeks before going AWL –

“I am not a big supporter of Kings … (and) they seem to be funking the Irish

question here.”71

Big brother, Frank, was an Anzac Original of the Wellington Infantry

Regiment. Although enlisting as a private, Francis ‘Frank’ Stuart McKenna finished

the war as a Lieutenant. In September 1918, he married Ethel O’Neill at Miltown

Malbay in County Clare. The priest was a relative, Father McKenna. Also present

was Frank’s little brother, Fred, AWL from the NZEF and passionately in love with

Ethel’s bridesmaid, her sister, the renowned songstress, Angela. His first cousin,

May, Sister (later Mother) Lelia from the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Ennis – a

lifelong confidante of Eamon de Valera– was there too. So too was the brother of

the O’Neill sisters, Ignatius, a deserter from the Irish Guards Regiment of the

British Army and Captain of the local Volunteer Company, with a stellar career as

an IRA commander and Irish National Army Officer ahead of him.

McKenna is a northern Irish name and the McKennas never forgot their banishment from their ancestral lands in Monaghan when Cromwell drove

Catholics from the rich farmlands of the north to the barren wastes of the west, with the banner cry of “To Hell or Connaught!” In New Zealand, the McKennas’ father, James Augustine, became wealthy enough to educate the boys at one of New

Zealand’s finest Catholic boarding schools, St Patrick’s Christian Brothers College.

71 McKenna Family papers. 128

There, James Frederick won the Complete Works of Shakespeare for a speech on

Ireland’s right to Independence.72

61726 Frederick James ‘Fred’ McKenna, Wellington Infantry Regiment,

NZEF.

The risks were higher for Kiwi Diggers. While a number of Australian soldiers in the First World War were sentenced to death, not one was executed.

The Defence Act (1903) had removed the Australian Army from the British Army

Act and required a death sentence to be confirmed by the Governor General in

Council, something which, despite intense lobbying by British politicians and high

British and Australian generals, was never done. Quite simply, the Government believed that the Australian people would not stand for it. . On the other hand, five

72 Margaret McKenna interview,. 129

Kiwi Diggers were executed during WWI: “four by New Zealand courts for desertion and one by a British court for mutiny.”73

In Ireland, some Diggers had other things in mind besides visiting family, seeing the sights, selling guns for drinking money and siding with the Irish in brawls against the “Woodbines.” In an interview with Irish journalist and historian,

Meda Ryan, an elderly Mother Leila stated:

On British Legion Day, 1919, … I was talking to my cousin Fred McKenna...

(who) had been in the New Zealand Army during the war, and had

returned to train the volunteers in Clare. We were chatting when we saw

Michael Brennan jumping over the wall into the convent grounds. ….

Immediately Fred pulled a revolver from his inside pocket and handed it to

Michael.74

Acclaimed in Ireland as “The Nun Who Hid the Guns” Mother Leila assisted the IRA in numerous ways. She had become close to de Valera while campaigning for him in the 1917 East Clare by-election – necessitated by the death of IPP MP, Capt.

William Redmond at the Battle of Messines in June. Mother Leila had two ways of hiding weapons: the local Volunteer company had an arms dump in a garden shed on the convent grounds, while she also had a secret compartment in the wooden plinth on which a statue of Our Lady stood. She also assisted IRA fighters on the run to escape, disguised as nuns.

73 Pugsley, p.296. 74 Meda Ryan, “The Nun Who Hid the Guns” in McKenna family history, family papers.. Michael Brennan was O/C East Clare Brigade, his The War in Clare 1911-1921, confirms that the event was Armistice Day 1919. pp. 39-40. 130

With most of the hundreds of absentees from both the NZEF and AIF staying in Ireland, it wasn’t just Kiwi Diggers like McKenna in County Clare and Johnny

Griffen in South Kerry and the Australian, Walsh, in North Tipperary who were training the “Sinn Fein ‘Army’’’. James McGuill, Commandant Dundalk Volunteers, was impressed by one Australian (or perhaps New Zealander) in County Clare:

During the Tyrone by-election Peadar Clancy75 put me in touch with an

Australian soldier who had deserted from the Army. This man was a

military genius of whom I heard men, well competent to gauge, state that

he could impart more understanding of the duties and responsibilities of

the science of military training than any other man with whom they later

came in contact. I had this man sent around to each Company. He gave

officers and men an intensive course of open order work in the fields at

night, during the month of April, 1918. He also gave lectures on musketry,

tactics of attack and defence, control of men in extended formation. He was

only a short time with us but he did very useful work and he at least gave all

who attended his drills and lectures an idea of how much we had to learn of

the science of military training, and a keen desire to get as proficient as

possible in this very technical subject.76

The identity of this Australian or New Zealand military trainer may never be known. He may very well be named in this paper – certainly the dates correspond with Walsh’s leave in Ireland – but could just as easily be one of any number of others. His very anonymity is evidence of the great care taken to protect

71 Cf. Postcard p. 78. 76 BMH WS.0353 p.51. There seems to be much (understandable) confusion in the Witness Statements between Australians and New Zealanders. 131

their identities by men intent on returning to Australia or other Commonwealth countries. In all probability he made it clear that whatever name they knew him by was an alias – this would have been easily accepted as the use of aliases was also common among the IRA. He is, possibly, the same Australian soldier, “an ex-

Australian officer who had deserted his regiment and come to Ireland,”77 who equally impressed James Rogan of Armagh:

He was a splendid man at the job of making smart soldiers from raw

recruits. …The drills were carried out at night and were mainly concerned

with extended order work in the open country. The lectures were held

indoor and concerned musketry and the care of arms.78

Or, perhaps, he was the New Zealander referred to by John McCoy, who trained his Mullaghbawn Company in County Armagh:

I found this man a revelation; in his control over the men; his methods of

instruction; his eye for mistakes made. His language however when

mistakes were made and they were many was shocking. I had never heard

anything like it before then. His obscenity was however leavened with a sly

humour which in the absence of the obscenity would have been most

amusing. I attempted to make him control his language and he gave me a

lecture in front of a large parade. He told me that he had service as an

officer in the New Zealand forces. He deserted them and had made his way

to one of the South American Republics where a revolution was about to

break out. He trained a large number of the Revolutionaries and fought with

them through the Revolution. He suggested that to make good soldiers a

77 BMH WS.0670 p.3 78 Ibid 132

drill instructor had to descend to crude modes of expression and that if we

would suffer his mode of imparting his instructions he would soon make

us first class soldiers. His language made a bad impression on a lot of our

men. I had little doubts as to his ability as an instructor. I have never since

seen anything better. On his own showing … he was a mystery man.79

This caricature of a Commedia del’Arte Capitano with his bombastic and abusive language and tales of military prowess in South American revolutions is evidence of the licence the anonymity of a nom de guerre could give a man. But, this larger than life Digger ‘s claims of involvement in South American revolution are not wholly implausible. Since the Flight of the Wild Geese after the Williamite

Conquest of Ireland and the spread of the diaspora, the Irish had been involved in wars on every continent. In the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-8 a brigade of Irishmen, the San Patricios, had fought for Mexico. The NZPC War Diary for October 1917 records the case of Gunner Scambury of the 7th NZFA, a man of many identities one of which, ‘Duval,’ claimed

he was an American citizen who had been fighting for Villa in Mexico … (at)

Scotland Yard “Duval” stuck to his Mexican story in elaborate and excellent

detail, and gave day and date of his sailing via Norway to Dublin … the dates

being afterwards checked correct by the shipping authorities.80

But, McCoy’s report of the ‘New Zealander’s’ claim is, nevertheless, hearsay and may be yet another case of a worldly Digger pulling Irish legs. Whatever else this

79 BMH.WS0492 op.cit. 80 ANZ WA152 Box 179 R23856662 “New Zealand Provost Corps Diary – 1 June 1916 - 31 December 1917” p.p/ 6-7. 133

‘mystery man’ may have been, most importantly he must have been an extraordinary military trainer.

Drills and lectures, skills training and theoretical knowledge were what

Australian, New Zealand and other soldiers AWL or later demobilised in London had to impart to the Irish Volunteers. They would circulate in a battalion area, training different companies on different nights of the week. In North Tipperary in

1918, 2417 Private Jim Gorman was busy training Laccamore, Rearcross and

Knockfune Companies,81 as was Dick Hurley in West Cork, Fred McKenna right across County Clare and, presumably, . Of all that 6315 Dick Hurley brought to the

West Cork IRA, he was most celebrated as a military trainer and a ‘father’ to the young freedom fighters.82 These military trainers were also busy at brigade training camps where they would train officers who would learn skills to take back to their companies.

Founded at a public meeting in Dublin in 1913 in response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteers as a threat to Home Rule, the Irish Volunteers were initially trained, mostly, by British Army Reservists, but with the start of war in

Europe, those same reservists were called up. The European war soon demonstrated the limitations of this sort of training: masses of men in tight formations only made the killing easier. Modern, industrial technology of artillery and machine guns strongly favoured defence over attack and, as a consequence, the continental war ground to a stalemate and the networks of trenches expanded.

Parade ground drill prepared men for the slaughter and trained them to die well.

81 MSP/34/1/3738 Jim Gorman. 82 Private correspondence 22/01/13. 134

The various groups of the Easter Rising had performed like a conventional army; they were well drilled, and took up positions across the city where they dug in and made good targets for British artillery and gunships on the Liffey. By 1919, however, there are numerous reports of higher order skills of fire and movement more appropriate to both traditional Irish warfare of raid and skirmish and the guerrilla fighting that would develop in Ireland and subsequent twentieth-century wars of national liberation.

Some Australian and New Zealand soldiers absent in Ireland went beyond training to actively fighting with the IRA. Commandant Anthony Malone of Clare

IRA recalls the action of “Fred McKenna a deserter from the Australian Army”83 in the attack on the Connelly RIC Barracks on 19 July 1919, only days before

McKenna’s “capture” by the RIC in Ennis. The battalion involved had only two rifles and they were used by their best riflemen: Ignatius O’Neill, the Battalion O/C and his ‘cousin’, ‘Fred’ McKenna, both of whom were trained and experienced soldiers.84

Michael O’Donoghue, Engineer Cork I Brigade and later President of the

Gaelic Athletic Association, recounted an hilarious incident, too long to recount in full here, precipitated by one “Jur” Hurley who fits one stereotype of the Irish

Digger. Hurley was:

a burly, jovial fellow of near forty years who had knocked about the world,

served in the Australian army in the Great War, returned to West Cork,

83 BMH WS: 1076 p.6. James Patrick McKenna, ‘Fred’, as previously stated, was a NZer. 84 They were not cousins. Fred’s brother, Frank, to whom this action is sometimes mistakenly attributed, was married to Ignatius’ sister. 135

deserted from the Colonial Forces and joined the I.R.A., in which he

served throughout the Black and Tan regime in West Cork, becoming

ViceComdt. of the 2nd Battn. under Comdt. Tim O'Donoghue. At this time he

had been demoted for intoxication whilst on duty. He had been in charge of

the I.R.A. guard of honour to President de Valera on his visit to Newcestown

and Kilmichael ambush sites and he had celebrated this new martial

notoriety all too well …85

This was 6315 Pt. Richard ‘Dick’ Hurley who had a prestigious career with the West Cork IRA. He stayed at Lisheen training the local companies until the summer of 1919. Besides raids for weapons, he led another on “Dreenamolane barytes mines” and used the liberated gelignite to set up a bomb making unit which operated in a not too dissimilar fashion to the bomb making units on

Gallipoli when, without any grenades – the crucial weapon in trench warfare – in the early days of the campaign, the Anzacs were outbombed by the Turks who were well supplied with German grenades. Then

(i)n the summer of 1919, Lisheen Company was reorganised by the

new battalion 0/C … (under orders from Cork Brigade O/C, the Lord

Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain). On the reorganisation, the 0/C (Dick

Hurley) resigned.86

Once he returned to Newcestown, Hurley lived with the O’Callaghan brothers in a secret dugout on their family farm.87 He used the alias ‘Jur’, the

85 BMH WS: 1741 part 2 p.7. 86 BMH WS: 1502 p.8. 87 Private correspondence with the son of Richard Hurley. 136

abbreviated name of a brother, Jeremiah, who had earlier died in the USA. This enabled him to pass himself off as an American who had returned to Ireland. With the arrest of the commanding officers of the Newcestown Company in the spring of

1920, “Richard Hurley, a local man and a deserter from the British Army (sic), had joined the Company, so, as a trained man, he was made O.C.”88 Hurley joined, in

January 1921, the legendary West Cork Flying Column commanded by the ex-

British Army tank commander, Tom Barry. This was soon after the Kilmichael

Ambush and Bishop Coholan’s Decree, which had threatened Excommunication to

“(a)ny who within this diocese of Cork shall take part in ambushes or kidnapping”.89 Such a threat was not to be taken lightly, as every volunteer in the

West Cork Brigade was a Catholic. However, as Barry remarked, the Irish took their religion, not their politics, from the Church.90

For each of the Commonwealth soldiers who made the decision to fight for

Ireland – all nominally soldiers of the king – the risks were enormous. For each, there was a complex of forces driving him as he negotiated the powerful currents of divided loyalties into taking the side in the struggle that should have had no possible hope of success. Not the least of these was the high probability that at least some, if not all, were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – in the colloquial language of the time, ‘shell shock’ – and the parlous state of affairs at the Front in 1917. Having started with such high hopes, 1917 became for the AIF the worst year of the war.91 Staying in Ireland meant abandoning their mates in

France. The tap dancing at Westminster with regards to both the war in Europe

88 WS Ref #: 832 , Witness: William Desmond, Captain IRA, Cork, 1921, p. 12. 89 As quoted in Crowley, p.323. 90 Ibid. p.324 91 Gammage “Introduction” to Bean, Vol. 4. 137

and the Irish question had left them with no certainty of what they were fighting for, other than that they were fighting for each other. After years away from

Australia, the unit had become, for each, his home.92

This issue of divided loyalties for a diasporic population was nowhere near as clear cut as for those few tragically torn Diggers of German descent in the AIF who crossed no man’s land into the trenches of the enemy. Ireland was not

Australia’s enemy. Australia was not, and never has been, at war with Ireland.

Table 2: Timetable of Irish-born Catholic Desertions from the AIF93

1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 Jan i iiiii ii Feb I iiiii I Mar i i iii ii Apr I I May iIII iii Jun I i July i iI I Aug I ii ii Sept i II iII Oct I III I Nov i II iii Dec i iiiI I I Total 1 6 10 22 23 4 66 I = men who 1 7 12 5 0 25 deserted upon 1st arrival in England

92 Gammage, p. 229. 93 Table based on statistics the author has correlated from the survey group at NAA B2455 Ireland. 138

At war’s end, 63 Irish-born Australian Diggers were discharged for desertion. While Catholics constituted 59 per cent of all Irish-born Australian soldiers, they made up a whacking great 86 per cent of those discharged as deserters.94 As the history of Ireland’s struggle for independence shows, not all

Irish Nationalists were Catholic,95 but by the War of Independence enough Irish

Nationalists were Catholic to make the two groups almost indistinguishable.

Table 2, “Timetable of Irish-born Catholic Desertions from the AIF ”, shows the months and years when Irish-born enlisted men went permanently AWL.96

These figures exclude men like 409 Private Garrett Fitzgerald, 24th Battalion, who may have intended permanent absence but were captured. AWL since January

1917, Fitzgerald was “apprehended in Mitchelstown in County Cork “on 27 January

1920 and, with three years absence, seems to hold the record for Illegal Absence for those who later became reconciled to the AIF.97

Table 2 demonstrates that once the AIF arrived in Europe and after the

Easter Rising there was a steady trickle of disappearances that built up after

Bullecourt, accelerated through Passchendaele and peaked in the winter of 1917-

18, thereafter diminishing until petering out in March 1919, long after shiploads of

Australian soldiers had ceased sailing to England and the Middle East and when demobilisation was already well under way.

94 See Appendix Table 4: B2455 POB Ireland – Denominations” p. 255 and Chapter 6, Table 3: “Irish Born Diggers Discharged Abroad “ p. 214. 95 Cf. Wolfe Tone, Charles Stewart Parnell, Erskine Childers et.al. 96 I use the term “AWL” or “Illegal Absentee” rather than “Deserter” because, before a soldier could be declared a deserter, he had to either be convicted by Court Martial or sign a confession of desertion as some who returned to Australia were later forced to do. Further in Chapter 6. 97 NAA: B2455, 405 Fitzgerald G. It is just possible that Fitzgerald, having read Australian government advertisements about the close of demobilisation in London got himself arrested so that he could return to Australia. 139

The capitalised figures (I) indicate a particular subset of men discharged in

July 1920 as Illegal Absentees. Twenty-five Irish-born Diggers went AWL and remained absent from their base in England without even embarking for the Front.

The timetable shows an escalation in the number of Irish-born Diggers disappearing this way with 1917 being the peak year. Perhaps an explanation for this phenomenon might be found in a reference made by Patrick O’Farrell to the failure of the Inquiry into the Darlinghurst 7 to discover that in 1916-17 the

Sydney IRB had established a secret military training camp in the Blue Mountains:

It was merely a few tents, and the handful of men who attended had no

firearms – and service was to be in Ireland itself – but in the hysterical anti-

Irish climate of the time any exposure of such arrangements to train men to

fight against Britain seems likely to have led to …. (a) charge of treason …

Practically, the idea of sending men from Australia proved not to be

feasible.98

O’Farrell may be being just a little disingenuous here. Of course “sending men from

Australia” was not “feasible.” In the lead up to the 1916 Conscription Referendum, the Federal Government made it illegal for civilian men between the ages of 18 and

44 to leave Australia. Passports were refused.99 This was a major contributing factor in the tragic death of boxer and Australian Catholic martyr, Les Darcy. As

Dreyer biographer, Amanda Collins, has asked: “how would they be able leave

Australia with weaponry, let alone reach Ireland, without alerting authorities?”100

In Australia after late 1916, there was only one way for a young man to leave the

98 O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, p. 274. 99 Op.cit p. 262. 100 Private correspondence 29/03/13. 140

country and that was with a gun and as a volunteer in the AIF. The figures and patterns suggest that some of those young Diggers who were discharged as deserters in England may have gone directly to fight in what, for them, was a greater priority than fighting what Irish nationalists called “Britain’s War,” or “The

Wrong War.”

If there were indeed men who trained in the Blue Mountains to fight for

Ireland and then hitched a ride with the AIF, there was no great number of them; perhaps no more than the number of pounds (20) the INA declared it had

“’collected for the purpose of assisting armed rebellion in Ireland against the

British Government.’”101

Besides Diggers, there were other Australians fighting in Ireland’s War of

Independence. At least two Australian policemen were high-ranking IRA officers, while at least one Australian soldier enlisted and fought on the other side with the

Black and Tans.102 But Australians were not just fighting about Ireland in Ireland.

While at home in Australia, the 1918 Amendments to the War Precautions Act criminalised the public expression of support for Ireland’s right to independence, in Ireland itself Australian soldiers were vociferous in their support. Their presence was noted outside the Dublin Mansion House in May 1919 at a Reception for:

delegates appointed by an Irish Race Convention …to claim a hearing for

101 O’Farrell, op.cit. p.274. 102 BMH WS Ref: 813 p.35, BMH.WS0430., p.32, The highest ranking Australian would appear to have been ex Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), ex Australian (sic) police and Brigadier in Kilkenny, George Dwyer , “a stickler for … organisation” BMH.WS1208. p.17 and BMH.WS1601, p.7. 141

Ireland at the Peace Conference following the 1914-1918 world war. …

Australian and other British colonial soldiers were keenly interested

participants in the proceedings.103

For Ireland, as for the USA, the crucial issue at the Versailles Conference was Article X of the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations. While the US feared Article X could see them drawn into other nations’ wars and consequently retreated into isolation, Ireland struggled to become a Constituent Member of the

League because Article X guaranteed the territorial integrity of member states.

Without that membership, “nations hitherto friendly to (Ireland) would be forced to leave her unaided, would be bound ‘to guarantee to Great Britain a title to the possession of Ireland and dominion over the Irish people.’”104

The Versailles Treaty was signed on 28 June 1919. That night, an Australian soldier was caught in Dublin wearing the Sinn Fein ribbon on his AIF tunic.

Balranald-born No. 188 Sergeant John Clark, MM, 5th Division Signal Company, was a telegraphist by trade. He left his wife, Minnie, at home in Newtown (Sydney) when he enlisted as a Sapper with the 1st Division Signals in December 1914.105 On

1 August 1919, Clark found himself up before a Court Martial in Dublin composed of all Australian officers.106 He was charged with

1. Conduct to the prejudice of Good Order and Military Discipline – In that at

O’Connell Bridge Dublin on the 29th June 1919 was wearing Sinn Fein

colours at the head of a “Sinn Fein” Procession. (sic.)

103 BMH. WS 601 p. 16 104 Macardle, The Irish Republic, p. 282. She is quoting an official Irish position. 105 NAA: B2455, Clarke JH, SERN 188 106 NAA: A471/2829 Court Martial – Sgt. John H Clark, p.1 142

2. Conduct to the prejudice of Good Order and Military Discipline – In that he

at Dublin on 29th day of June 1919 was shouting “Up Sinn Fein” in a crowd

of civilians.

3. Drunkeness (sic.) – In that he at O’Connell Bridge Dublin on the 29th day

of June 1919 was Drunk.107

The prosecution alleged that on the evening of the signing of the Versailles

Treaty,

there was marching a sergeant of the Australian Imperial Forces, in uniform.

(He and another Digger were in an) unlawful (and) disorderly … political

procession beside the man carrying what is now the National Flag of Ireland.

(Sgt. Clark) was wearing the party colours and shouting the party cry. He

had, (it was alleged,) brought discredit … upon the uniform of His

Majesty and of the Australian Imperial Forces.108

Denying any knowledge of Sinn Fein or interest in Irish politics, Clark asserted that he only fell in with the crowd because they “loved Australians.” So much did they, that when Clark was arrested the crowd behaved as the Williams

Report had earlier described: they began pelting the police with stones. Clark also stated “I am a Colonial Bred and Born, with no Irish descent and furthermore a

Methodist.” Somewhere along the line he had forgotten that at enlistment he had given his religion as C. of E. There was a lot at stake for Clark so he had to convince the authorities that he was innocent of the offence of goodwill towards Ireland. He

107 Ibid. p.3 108 Ibid. p.p 5-10. 143

also emphasised that any conviction could jeopardise the government job that he had been guaranteed when he enlisted.

Apparently neither Irish nor Catholic, Sgt. Clark claimed at his Court Martial to have only been in Ireland that one time on demobilisation leave prior to embarkation to Australia. However, his obituary records that,

On one occasion while he and a companion were on leave in Ireland he was

mistaken for another person and appeared certain to be executed, and it

was not until the final hours before the shooting that his identity was

established and he was released.109

A common factor for each soldier who fought in Ireland was the Great War itself and the profound sense of personal loss it occasioned: friends, relatives, health, wholeness and even hope itself. Like so many others, they had lost their innocence. The brutality of total war had stripped the veneer of civilisation from the Europeans and destroyed any simple notions of progress. People did believe in notions of duty, loyalty and honour and with such limited access to information, they were more inclined to believe what they were told and many believed in

Europe and its civilising mission and many in the British Dominions believed in

Britain’s civilising mission. There were those at Home in Australia and in Europe who preached a crusade against evil but, by 1917, the Diggers knew they were fighting men not monsters and so paid scant heed to that great cause. In the AIF there was the blatant discrimination and Britishness of much of the Officer

109 Junee Southern Cross, 07/09/49, as quoted in Kildea, p.144. 144

Corps.110 Certainly there were Australian soldiers of Catholic and Orthodox (and how many other?) faiths who, like Sgt Clark, knew the game well enough that, when enlisting, they wrote their religious denomination as Anglican. And there was the realisation that courage and loyalty and duty and military prowess would not save them. And for many Irish Catholics there was the sense that they had been duped by Britain yet again. In the face of this war weariness, Ireland offered these

Diggers something of inestimable value. It enabled them to rekindle their idealism.

In Ireland they believed they would be fighting for the right. In Ireland their contribution would make a difference. Soldiers fight with total commitment, with every part of themselves. They need to trust their army and politicians; they need to believe in the cause for which they are supposedly fighting. There is nothing better for morale. Damaged and disillusioned from Britain’s war, Ireland’s war confirmed for each those things he held most dear.

Perhaps this issue of divided loyalties and the colonised subject can be illuminated by details in the charge sheets for the Courts Martial of two Diggers of

Irish birth. When 3761 Pte. Philip Bolger 29th Battalion faced a Court Martial by an

Australian and two British and officers in Cork in December 1917, the charge sheet read: 1.“USING DISLOYAL WORDS REGARDING THE SOVEREIGN, in that he, at

Ennis, on the 19th day of November 1917, shouted in the Railway Station,

“To hell with the King” also “Fuck the King”, or words to that effect. (“Fuck

England, King and Army” one military witness claimed).

2. USING INSUBORDINATE WORDS TO HIS SUPERIOR OFFICER, in that he,

at Ennis … when ordered by 2/Lieut. B Coffey, Royal field Artillery, to

110 See Appendix p. 255-6. 145

keep quiet said, … “Go to hell and fuck yourself”, or words to that effect.

3. CONDUCT TO THE PREJUDICE OF GOOD ORGER AND MILITARY

DISCIPLINE, in that he, at Ennis, … while wearing His majesty’s Uniform

and in the presence of a crowd of civilians, shouted in the railway station,

“Up de Valera, Up the Rebels, Up the Kaiser, fuck England and the Army, I

will put a knife through the first Red Cap that comes near me”. Or words

to that effect. (sic)111

Reputedly on a bender while returning from leave at his mother’s home in

Kilrush, County Clare, and accompanied by two Royal Munster Fusiliers, the brothers Privates Patrick and Michael Keane, also from Kilrush, Bolger had just detrained at Ennis, where they would catch the Dublin train. According to testimony at Bolger’s Court Martial, the three had continued drinking while their train had been held up on a siding for hours and when they finally arrived in Ennis

Bolger was “wearing Sinn Fein colours on his tunic” and, when he saw Countess

Markievicz on the railway overpass above, shouted “Up de Valera….”

The events for which he was charged occurred, according to the Court

Martial records, on a number of occasions over three days of heavy drinking. At the

Court Martial he and his character witnesses pleaded the loyalty of his family: his deceased father and two brothers served in the RIC and he had a brother serving in the British Army in France. A number of character witnesses reported him as claiming at his mother’s home that he would “shoot the Sinn Fein leaders” and

“disapproved altogether of its programme.” They also pleaded his long absence

111 NAA : A471/19511, Bolger P. Court Martial. 146

from home (six years), his widowed mother and the drink. All of these pressures, the defence claimed, came together while he was on a three day bender and “acted on his natural determination to obey orders and in a moment of forgetfulness he was tempted to forget his duty and he fell for the temptation.”112 Bolger received

84 days imprisonment while the Keanes were sent straight to the front. Of course the family and community pleaded his loyalty – as a colonised people, the Irish had long learned to do that.

In Ireland, today, they tell the story of the Digger and the Countess quite differently. In Blood on the Banner, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc uses as a source a local history journal article by Pedar McNamara and states that while the train was held up on the siding, there were other things going on besides drinking. During the delay, the three soldiers had been engaged in conversation by Countess Markievicz

– interned for her part in the Easter Rising, the pre-eminent woman revolutionary in Ireland, Minister for Labour in the first Dial, the first woman elected to the

British Parliament and a muse of the old Tory poet, WB Yeats. She was in Ennis campaigning for de Valera in the East Clare by-election and “provoked” the soldiers

“to side with the Sinn Fein rebels.”113 “Markievcz engaged them in political debate and managed to convince the three that they were fighting the wrong war.” This was the key argument used against Irish enlistment in “Britain’s war” – that an

Irishman’s first duty was to Ireland and if Britain was so concerned for “little

Belgium” what about “little” Ireland”? So persuasive was the red Countess that,

“having arrived in Ennis the three soldiers made contact with the local company of

112 NAA : A471/19511, op.cit. p. 23 113 Brendan Bolger, 21/09/12, The Irish War website: http://theirishwar.com/2012/02/the- diggers-and-the-ira-by-kerry-casey/#comments 147

the Irish Volunteers and handed their rifles and ammunition over to the republicans.”114

Deleted photo:

Countess Markievicz with Michael Mallin (soon executed) being escorted by British soldiers after the surrender in April 1916. (National Museum of Ireland)

The argument that the war against Germany was the “wrong war” and that an Irishman’s duty was to fight for Ireland has split Ireland to this day. Only now is there open commemoration of the more than 200,000 Irishmen and women who enlisted to fight the Germans. For those committed to Irish Independence, the right war to be fighting was the war for Irish freedom and that was only made possible because of the British commitment in the Great War. This must have been the key argument of which every one of those Diggers who went AWL in Ireland became convinced. Back in Australia after the war, Philip Bolger lost contact with his family in Ireland and is believed to hace died a pauper in about 1936.115

Similarly to Bolger, 3409 Patrick Joseph Golden of the 31st Battalion was up before a Court Martial at Tel-el-Kebir (Egypt) on 31 July 1916, only weeks after being charged with drunkenness and smoking on Parade, not complying with an

114 Ó Ruairc, P, Blood on the Banner, p.65. 115 Brendan Bolger, 21/09/2012, http://theirishwar.com/the-diggers-and-the-ira-by-kerry-casey/ viewed 30/09/2012. 148

order and insolence to the Provost Sergeant. This time, he was charged with “using insubordinate language to a superior officer” and “offering violence” to 2nd Lt.

Strachan. The Lieutenant claimed Golden had threatened violence upon him when he said “You are only a Scotch bastard and require fucking, and I will do it.”116

Golden got six months with hard labour.

Yet another anomaly in AIF statistics occurred at the Australian Military

Prison, Lewes. As the single Australian Military Prison, Lewes was taken over by the Australians after the June 1917 release of the last of the Irish internees from the Easter Uprising. When the AIF moved in, Lewes was still in the putrid state it had been reduced to by the Irish prison riots. It officially held Australian prisoners from 8 November 1917 till 30 September 1919 – though my grandfather was held there during and after his Court Martial.117 During that time, Anglicans who made up approximately 50 per cent of the AIF constituted an equivalent percentage of prisoners detained at Lewes – 1,875 out of a total of 3,695. But Catholics, approximately 22 per cent of the AIF, represented 35 per cent of the prisoners at

Lewes – 1,244.118 In response to these figures, Graeme Wilson’s account spins off into hyperbolic uncertainty:

What does this mean? Were Catholics discriminated against by the Army

authorities and thus more likely to end up in detention? Were Catholics

worse soldiers than Anglicans? Were Catholics more likely to commit a

116 NAA B2455: Golden, P.J, SERN 3409. 117 NAA: B2455 Casey, P.C, 20 pp. 13-14. 118 AWM224 MSS573 General History of the AIF Detention barracks Lewes, Part 1, p. 10. 149

serious offence? Who knows?119

Certainly Irish Catholics had difficulties with authority as embodied in the largely Protestant, loyalist officer corps of the AIF. After Easter 1916, when a massive percentage of Diggers took their leave in Ireland they visited the ruins of the Dublin Post Office and were only too aware of the executions and deportations.

While proportionately few of the Australian soldiers of Irish descent became actively engaged in Ireland, how conflicted must the vast number have been in submitting to authority that was subodinate to the British Army, to the King? The extraordinary thing is that they continued to serve at all, let alone, as so many did, with such distinction.120

Then there was the pressure that family in Ireland brought to bear on the soldiers. Another – often consequent on the first – was an awareness of history, of the age-old struggle against perfidious Albion, the Sassenach, the foreign oppressor. Consequent to this was the long list of grievances: the fact that British occupation of Ireland had never been settled, that it was patently unjust in its ethnic, religious and linguistic discriminations and in the Terror used to maintain it – Terror that was brought to bear for each and every act of defiance or claim for simple human dignity. Along with all other reasons, there was the overriding sense of the moment.

There were also personal issues, not war related, that nevertheless impacted on the decisions of individuals: a charismatic family member or close

119 Graeme Wilson, “A prison of our own: the AIF Detention Barracks 1917-1919.” 120 See Appendix “Table 2: Dates of Awards of the VC to Catholics in the AIF.” 150

friend, a lover or a family tragedy, a chance meeting on a train and the damaged things in their damaged hearts. But there were also joy, camaraderie, idealism, boyish exhilaration and a sense of sticking it up the pricks. In Ogonnelloe in East

Clare decades afterwards, Fred McKenna’s first cousin, Christy, still living on the family farm, told the McKenna sisters that he and their father had so much ‘fun’ digging up roads, making road blocks, blowing bridges and so on. Similarly an old veteran of the Doneraile Company, Christey, still riding his pushbike through the

Ballyhouras in 1981 upon learning that Con Casey was long dead, told Terry Boyd,

Sarge’s grandson, that he and ‘Connie’ Casey got up to lots of ‘tricks’ way back when. But all that, as Henry Lawson sang, was back “in the days when the world was wide.”121

Australian soldiers on leave in Ireland from the Western Front had front row seats for the newly emerging theatre of war on Britain’s other western front.

They were popular with the Irish and many like Clark and Bolger were, perhaps, innocently seduced into activities that ran contrary to expectations of correct behaviour. In Ireland the anti-loyalist sentiments of the Australian working class made many Diggers fellow travellers with Irish rebelliousness. An unknown number, some Irish-born and others Australian-born, crossed the footlights in that theatre of rebellion and played parts – some small others much larger – in Ireland’s fight for freedom.

121 Interviews with both Marg and Colleen McKenna and Terry Boyd. 151

Chapter 3

2417 Private James “Jim” Gorman

“B” Company 55th Battalion, 5th Reinforcement, 1st AIF,

1st Lieutenant “C” (Hollyford) Company,

3rd Battalion, 3rd (South)Tipperary Brigade,

No 1 (Sean Treacy/DinnyLacey’s) Flying Column.

152

Jim Gorman1

1 Gorman family papers. 153

For 2417 Private James Gorman of the 55th Battalion, 5th Australian Division, the tipping point came on 28 September 1917, two days after the stunning success of the Australian 4th and 5th Divisions at the Battle of Polygon Wood. This was the second of a series of battles referred to as 3rd Ypres or the Battle of Passchendaele.

At Polygon Wood, artillery and infantry had coordinated perfectly: the creeping barrage protected the advancing infantry and, as the men dug in to hold the territory they had ‘bitten off’”,2 the artillery broke up the German counter attacks later that afternoon and at dawn the next day. When the 55th “were considerably harassed by snipers in good position on (their) front … (their own) snipers were quite as effective.”3 Private Jim Gorman was one of those ‘effective’ snipers. For the rest of his life, he was noted as a “marksman” and skilful bayonet fighter.

However, as the Australians consolidated their new lines where they were to spend the next three days, something went terribly wrong. The Battalion Diary simply states that:

(s)ome of our guns fired short during the next 3 days, heavy shells dropping

into support and front lines (trenches) and some 18 pounders even fell on to

reserve trenches. This caused about 20 casualties and much annoyance.4

One such ‘short’ fell right on top of Gorman’s section of trench. As he returned to himself, retching from the stinking cordite fumes, his ears ringing and his eyes stinging, spattered in dirt and body parts, in the surreal silence of momentary deafness, he lifted his hand to clear his eyes and it came up full of the guts of the man next to him. That man, he later told his nephew, Con O’Gorman, had been his

2 ‘Bite and hold’ was the tactic of General Plumer that had been so effective at Messines. It meant consolidating limited gains rather than hoping for a breakthrough. 3 AWM 4-23-72-19, 55th Battalion Unit Diary for September 1917, p.9. 4 Ibid. 154

best mate.5 Underneath the bits, his own hand was bleeding. So Jim Gorman became one of the walking wounded and began the long journey to Blighty where he was admitted to the 1st London General Hospital, Camberwell. His wound healed quickly and he was discharged to furlough from Harefield Convalescent with orders to report to the 5th Division Base Depot, Hurdcott, on its completion.

With two weeks leave, Jim did the same as so many Australian soldiers on leave - he caught the ferry ‘home’ to Ireland. There, Jim Gorman of Tumberumba,

New South Wales, and Hollyford, South Tipperary, would become the most highly celebrated of the Diggers who fought with the Irish Republican Army.

He was a poet in the popular ballad style of the day and many of his verses have a strong political turn, addressing issues of exile, war, foreign occupation, conscription and enlistment. The poem “An Exile Returns” could almost be an anthem for those young Australians who migrated from Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century.

I am a Rambling hero, the truth I will proclaim

Curiosity compelled me, to cross the raging main,

I bid farewell to all my friends and to my brother Gaels,

Then sailed to a land far o’er the sea, called sunny

New South Wales.6

In describing himself ‘a Rambling hero’, Gorman reveals himself as typical of the generation that migrated to Australia prior to the war under the reinstated

5 Interviews with Con O’Gorman, July-August 2012. 6 Jim Gorman, An Exile Returns. Gorman family papers. 155

immigration support scheme. They were not driven, as earlier generations had been, by famine or privation but went for the pleasures of travel, for opportunity and adventure. He sailed in 1910 and became a shearer on the big sheep runs of the Riverina in southwest New South Wales. There, as the lyric of the Australian song so popular today in Ireland goes, “From the Murray’s green basin to the dusty outback, (he) lived the free life of a rover.”7 Jim Gorman always spoke of Australia, as his descendants do today, as ‘the land of sunshine’, the ‘Golden Land.’

On 25 April 1916, the first anniversary of Anzac Day, Jim Gorman, along with a number of other shearers, answered the call to what might have seemed seemed an even bigger adventure. A month shy of his 28th birthday, he walked into the enlistment office at Tumburumba, a small town just outside Wagga Wagga.

There he volunteered for the Australian Army and swore his Oath to the King. At just 1.67 metres and 64 kilograms, Jim was, obviously, not a big man but he was in superb health. As ‘An Exile Returns’ continues:

Six years I spent in that Golden Land, till at length it was my fate,

To join the British Army8, which grieves me to relate,

But when I found out my great mistake, I said when I got the chance

I’d bid farewell to that living hell and the blood stained fields of France.

Gorman was well aware of the differences between the Australian and

British Armies but also of the many connections. Many of the Australian commanders were British, many others identified as such and ultimately the

7 And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle is an enormously popular song in Ireland as well as in Australia. 8 Gorman was well aware he was with the Australian Army but, they were serving alongside and were commanded by, British and were struggling to define their identity within the British Army. 156

Australian Army was subordinate to the British Army within the BEF. The line,

“But when I found out my great mistake” suggests that something else had intervened between the date of his enlistment and the incident at Polygon Wood.

He’d had numerous brushes with military authorities but none that were that unusual. The Easter Rising had begun the day before he’d enlisted and continued throughout that first week of his induction. A key to this line lies in one of his gentlest and most lyrical poems written from Australia about the family home on

Barna Hill, “Five Miles from Capperwhite.” In this, he sang what may be an anthem for some of the young men and women of every diaspora:

It’s now I’m on the Australian shore

Still I’ll be true and loyal

To all my faithful comrades

At home in Erin’s Isle.

Who are always ready for the foe

And never afraid to fight

For that lovely place on the mountain side

Five miles from Capperwhite.

Unpalatable as the fact is to governments, it is the norm, as Gorman suggests in the above verse, for some of the diaspora to return when the ancestral land is in strife

– not just to Ireland but to any land. Australian soldiers were there, they were trained, experienced and armed, many knew the long history of struggle and they had eyes with which to see.

On his attestation papers at the training camp in Goulburn, Gorman gave as his next of kin his father, David, from Kilcommon in County Tipperary. He was

157

assigned to “B” Company, of the 5th Reinforcements of the 55th Battalion, recently formed in Egypt from the 3rd Battalion during the doubling of the force. They were part of the largely New South Wales 14th Brigade of the 5th Division and sailed from

Sydney aboard the Aeneas on 30 September.

Gorman had the usual run-ins with military authority common to the Irish that are still, today, dismissed as part of the larrikin character of much of the 1st

AIF. He was crimed on board ship for Disobedience of Orders (gambling) for which he received seven days of Field Punishment Number 2 – standing manacled for two hours daily in the sun. This archaic British punishment was not something that would sit easily with Jim’s stubborn Irish temperament, nor with the rank and file of the AIF and New Zealand Division who objected to humiliation as punishment.9

After disembarking at Plymouth, he again received the same punishment for a day’s absence from the 5th Division base depot at Hurdcott and again on 2

September 1917 for “neglect of duty” while the 5th Division was resting in

Blaringham in northern France.10

Along with 276 other men of the 5th Reinforcement, on 9th February 1917,

Gorman joined the 55th at Trones Wood near Montauban in Picardie just as the

Division was preparing to move forward. After turning rock hard in the winter freeze, the Somme Valley, then defrosting, was again a quagmire and, when they later moved into the front line, more rain only made matters worse. In mid March, an eerie silence descended over the battlefield. Rumour was that the Germans had

9 Peter Stanley, Bad Characters, p.101. After WWI this was removed from the British Army’s catalogue of punishments. 10 NAA, B2455: Gorman, J, 2417 p.8. 158

moved their big guns further back and so the battalion was ordered to prepare to advance. On the night of the 18th, they crossed the abandoned German lines and entrenched beyond Beaulencourt where they held the front line. Commanding the

5th Army, Anglo Irish General Gough, of Curragh Mutiny fame, was keen to keep contact with the retreating Germans and so a mad, but still cautious, rush forward ensued. The 14th Brigade stuck closely to the heels of the pursuing 15th Brigade as they raced to stay in touch with the retreating Germans, harassing them all the way as they fell back on the Hindenburg Line. After years of the stalemate of trench warfare this forward movement was exhilarating. The land the Germans retreated across appeared largely untouched by war and was, initially, refreshing after the desolation of No Man’s Land. Soon, however, the wanton destruction of poisoned wells and orchards, and burnt and booby-trapped towns and fields cast a depressing pall over all. Under Pompey Elliot’s exuberant command, the 15th gave the German rearguard no relief, continually harassing them while the Division managed to keep artillery and supply in touch with the forward lines.

On the 29 March, the 14th Brigade relieved the 15th as advanced guard. The closer the Australians got to the Hindenburg Line, the stiffer the German defence became. On 2 April, Gorman’s 55th Battalion took the advance position as they leap- frogged the 56th and “through snow and rain and piercing wind”11 successfully attacked the village of Doignies just two miles from the Hindenburg Line.

The 5th Division was then relieved by 1st and 2nd Australian Divisions but returned on 9th May to the front line to secure the village of Bullecourt won at

11 Ellis, A.D, The Story of the Fifth Australian Division, p.191. 159

enormous cost by the 1st & 2nd Divisions after the debacle of 1st Bullecourt in April.

A pleasant enough village in the Somme valley, Bullecourt had had absolutely no tactical significance other than to draw German fire away from the disastrous

Nivelle Offensive further south.

At the end of May, when the 5th Division was relieved, it had been seven months on the Somme, five of which were in the front line with three months of open warfare.12 They moved north for rest, refitting and training in tactics to deal with the new German system first encountered at Messines – “defence in depth”: seven lines of staggered trenches studded with machine gun blockhouses of reinforced concrete with the bulk of the men placed in the rear trenches for counter attack. These new tactics included intensive training to advance in extended formation, outflank the blockhouses and take them from behind.

On 17 September, along with the 5th Division, Gorman marched north across the border into Belgium to Reninghelst “a shabby, war-begrimed little village about 5 miles south-west of Ypres.”13 There the Division joined with the rest of the AIF in the series of battles known as Third Ypres or Passchendaele.

Polygon Wood was the second. This was before the rains broke and turned the ground in front of the Passchendaele ridge into a quagmire of sucking mud, the

‘soldier’s friend,’ ‘the pal who sticks’.

*****

12 Ibid, p. 206. 13 Ibid, p. 222. 160

On 30th October 1917, his convalescent leave over, Jim Gorman was still at home with his parents, David and Bridget, on the farm at Kilcommon. In his application for a Military Service Pension in 1934, Jim Gorman simply states “I joined the IRA the winter of 1917/18 on arrival from France and did everything possible up to and through the critical periods.”14 His poem, ‘An Exile Returns’ stands as the one poetic statement of the decision made by Commonwealth soldiers to fight for Ireland:

Good luck was with me every time, escaping death the while,

And the lord above directed me back home to Erin’s Isle, ‘

‘twas then I strayed to Laccamore, that place of great renown,

Where I was sheltered night and day from the forces of the crown.15

On 22 November 1917, a regulation Court of Inquiry at Hurdcott Depot found Gorman ‘Illegally Absent’ from October 30. On 15 December, the Assistant

Provost Marshal, London, sent a warrant to the Royal Irish Constabulary at

Kilcommon for his arrest.16 Just as Dick Hurley went south to escape arrest,

Gorman went north where he joined the Laccamore Company of the Irish

Volunteers. He quickly became its Captain and the Vice Commandant of the

Newport Battalion of the North Tipperary Brigade. There he used the skills gained in the Australian Army to drill three different companies: Rear Cross, Knockfune and Laccamore. Using their hurley sticks as surrogate rifles, Gorman trained the volunteers in the basic skills of soldiering as well as, when ammunition allowed, marksmanship.

14 MSP/34/1/3738 p.16. 15 Family papers op.cit 16 AWM21 3072-14. 161

Signalling, use of cover, attacking over broken ground, the practice of night attacks and withdrawing under fire were state of the art soldiering skills Jim and other soldiers of the BEF brought to the Volunteers, in this period of hiatus between Easter ’16 and the outbreak of hostilities soon to come. These were the years of recovery, consolidation, of planning and preparation, of study and training when Irish, Australian and New Zealand soldiers on leave or illegally absent from the British and Australian Armies brought much needed expertise to the Irish

Volunteers that was in the process of transforming into the Irish Republican Army.

They were also heavily involved in the organizational work of meetings and lectures.

For twelve long months I stayed with you, no fault with you I find,

For when I as a stranger came, to me you all were kind,

And now I am at liberty, no matter where I roam,

I’ll not forget the friends I met, in Glenoe or Lackamore.

The happy days I spent with you, I’ll not forget in years,

And it was then that I commanded you Irish Volunteers,

‘though ‘oft I slept on the mountain side, my spirit ne’er went down,

And I’d do the same with the boys again, to smash the British Crown.

Gorman earned no income at this or any other time of his service with the

IRA. Living rough, he slept out on the mountains or stayed at a variety of safe houses around the region - good practice for future years when he would become a

162

leading member of South Tipperary No1 Flying Column.17 He was, however, helped financially by his parents and brothers, whose farm prospered during the continental war. An essential aspect of the IRA’s eventual victory, as of any guerrilla warfare, was the support they were given by the local people. There was usually a safe house, a place to get a cup of tea, a feed and a bed for the night, where there was someone who could get a message through. There was information about who was assisting the authorities, the whereabouts of the RIC and Army, information that might keep an IRA fighter alive and free or assist in a raid for arms or an ambush.

Another essential tool was the use of the international media of newspapers. Though the importation of Irish and Irish American print media was banned in Australia under the War Precautions Act,18 Sinn Fein used the powerful

Irish lobby in the USA to great effect. When Conscription had been enacted in

Britain in March 1916, the Government at Westminster, intent on enticing the USA into the war, had resisted enforcing it in Ireland. However, with the US entry into the war in April 1917and the German breakthrough of Operation Michael in early

1918, a new Military Service Bill extended conscription to Ireland. It made Home

Rule, already on the statute books since September 1914, dependent on the Irish acceptance of conscription. Political groups in Ireland including the IPP, trade unions and the Catholic Church were outraged. Gorman turned his hand to a

17 Flying Columns were formed in mid 1920 of men without families who were on the run. They were full time guerilla units mostly dependant on local support for food, information and occasional shelter. 18 The only charge proven against the Darlinghurst Seven was illegal importation of Irish republican newspapers by Irish seamen on the Australian American run. (O’Farrell, p. 274.) 163

political pamphlet in verse, calling all to resist conscription for England’s war and, instead, to fight the British in Ireland.

Attend you gallant Irish men, wherever you may be,

Listen to a verse or two about your Country.

The British Parliament met, so the daily papers say,

To enforce on us conscription, to take effect in seven days.

For years the British tyrant, to our country has run,

Now they think we’ll save them and fight the German Hun,

But no John Bull, your battles we won’t fight.

We’ll guard our homes on Erin’s shore, with all our skill and might.19

There is no record of the dissemination of Gorman’s poem and hence no way of evaluating his effectiveness as an agitator as well as soldier. But with the renewed threat of Conscription, the Volunteers experienced a huge expansion as men rushed to enlist. For many, this was the point of no return for Ireland. This new condition placed upon the granting of Home Rule further debilitated the IPP and proved to the Irish, once again, that Britain’s word could not be trusted. When, with the end of the continental war, Britain abandoned conscription in Ireland, most of the new enlistments faded away and the Volunteer numbers firmed at just above their previous rate.

19 Gorman family papers. 164

Members of the Hollyford Company: Jim, far right, and standing on his right, Davey; second from left, Tom Gorman.20

When WWI finally drew to a close in November 1918, Britain immediately held elections. In Ireland, the Labour Party withdrew from the elections in order to best support the unified image of the independence movement. Sinn Fein, both a political party and the very image of Irish nationalism, campaigned on a republican ticket that included refusal to sit in Westminster or recognise the British

Parliament. Many of its candidates were in British prisons at the time of the elections – for them the motto was “Put him in to get him out!” Sinn Fein’s landslide victory showed just how far things had moved since 1914. The Irish

Parliamentary Party with its policy of Home Rule was utterly destroyed. When

Sinn Fein met as Dáil Eireann (the Irish Parliament) in January 1919, they ratified the Declaration of the Republic that had been made outside Dublin Post Office on

20 Gorman family papers. 165

Easter Monday 1916, refused to sit in the British Parliament and instituted a separate system of courts and taxation.

That same day, by an extraordinary coincidence,21 in Tipperary an event occurred that encouraged Jim Gorman in his desire to return south. At

Soloheadbeg, just outside Tipperary Town, a group of Volunteers attacked a convoy transporting gelignite to the local quarry. They included Seamus Robinson,

Sean Treacy, Dan Breen and Sean Hogan; together they would become known as the ‘Big Four.’ They shot and killed the police escort, two constables, and escaped with the explosives. Many in the Dáil were outraged but rural units of the

Volunteers were beyond political control and, rather than criticize the action, the

Dáil officially recognized the Volunteers as the Army of the (newly ratified) Irish

Republic, the IRA. Then on the 31st, the IRA organ An tÓglách (The Volunteer) stated that they (the Irish Volunteers) would treat “the armed forces of the enemy

– whether soldiers or policemen – exactly as a national army would treat the members of an invading army.”22 This, in effect, was Ireland’s declaration of war.

In the wake of Soloheadbeg Tipperary was declared a Military Zone:

Fairs and meetings were banned, movements of persons into and outside

the area were allowed only on the production of a permit from the

sergeants of the R.I.C., barricades were erected on the roads at different

points in the area at which sentries were posted who questioned and

searched pedestrians and passengers in carts and motor cars and garrisons

21 According to Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom, who was one of those present, unsure of the date of delivery, they had lain in wait for five days. P. 32 22 An tÓglách 1/2/1919. http://antoglach.militaryarchives.ie/PDF/1919_02_Vol_1_No_10_An_t- Oglac.pdf. The Irish Volunteers officially became the IRA from this date and over the course of the next year, all its members signed an Oath of Loyalty to the irish Republic. 166

were established at villages which had never before sheltered a

Britishsoldier.23

When Sean Hogan was subsequently captured and charged for his participation at Soloheadbeg, a rescue was executed on the train at Knocklong

Station in East Limerick during which two more constables were killed. The Galtee

Battalion from East Limerick was brought in to lend support and the four Irishmen wounded in the shootout spent the night in Paddy Clancy’s farmhouse at Cush,

Kilfinane, before being taken into hiding in the west of that county. Limerick too was declared a Military Zone.

1917 saw the general release of Irish men and women interned in British prisons in 1916. It had been the year of revival, reorganisation and training and important victories in by elections – Plunkett in February, McGuiness in May, and

Sinn Fein President, Eamon de Valera, still in prison, was elected for East Clare. To these activities in 1918 and 1919 were added rearmament. This was initially achieved through raids on farmhouses and the big houses for any known weapons.

Many were handed over willingly, some not so. But these were hunting rifles, mostly shotguns, so the weapons the soldiers brought with them when on leave were of inestimable value.

***

Phase 2: The barrack attacks

23 Breen, op.cit., p.38 167

After Soloheadbeg and the declaration of war on the RIC, the need to arm and train had escalated. By January 1920, Gorman had achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant of the Hollyford Company under Captain Paddy O’Dwyer. The War of Independence was moving into its next phase in which Jim Gorman stepped to the forefront. Tadh

Dwyer, his Battalion Commandant later recalled that

(i)n January, 1920, Drumbane R.I.C. barracks was attacked by units of the

Mid Tipperary Brigade assisted by four men from 'C' or Hollyford Company

of my battalion. The four men from Hollyford who took part in that attack

were: James (Jim) Gorman, Paddy O'Dwyer, J. Fitzpatrick and P. Ryan.

Gorman, who was an ex Australian soldier, had fought in the 1914-19l8

Great War and was 1st Lieutenant of his company. As far as I know,

Drumbane was the first barrack attack in which he took part, but from then

onwards there was scarcely a barrack attack in any of the three Tipperary

brigades at which he was not present. He also lent a hand to our

neighbouring battalion of the East Limerick Brigade, and by the autumn of

1920 he was looked upon as an expert or authority on barrack attacks.24

By then, the RIC was already withdrawing from smaller, outlying barracks and consolidating into larger and more easily defended ones. Nearby Glenosheen barracks at the foot of the Ballyhoura Mountains in East Limerick had been closed as early as 1917. Then in Easter 1920, an order came out of IRA GHQ Dublin to destroy all abandoned barracks and tax offices so they could not be reoccupied. On

24 BMH WS Ref #: 1356, Tadhg Dwyer, C/O 3rd Bn. P.3

168

Easter Saturday night, 184 barracks from across the length and breadth of Ireland were burned to the ground.

***

The remains of Glenosheen RIC Barracks, 2012.

In 2012 when I was first taken in by the Drakes of Glenosheen, the family gathered around the kitchen table as the man of the house, Tom, covered head to foot in flour, struggled manfully to mix dough and bake bread and scones for the summer long weekend. At some point I mentioned that my great uncle, Patrick, from up the mountain at Glenanaar, had burned the local barracks that Easter Saturday night.

Quick as a flash, his wife, Noreen, shot back “And my mother sold him the paraffin.”

Not yet having my ear tuned to the local accent, I had to wait till people picked themselves off the floor where they had been rolling, convulsed with laughter. Noreen

169

then explained that her mother as a ten year old had worked in the shop – the only shop – at nearby Ballyorgan that night and had told her the story of the mountain men stopping in to buy paraffin on their way to burning the barracks. Though

Glenosheen is on the Limerick side of the mountains, the only references to the burnings in the BMH Witness Statements were from the North Cork Brigade.25 In any other country that night of barracks’ burnings would be commemorated with a bonfire night – but not in Ireland, so sorely conflicted by its history and the scars left by the amputation of the North.

***

In 1920, the tail was, again, wagging the dog. Just as the local lads acted on their own initiative at Soloheadbeg, outside of Dublin it was South Tipperary along with their Munster neighbours in nearby Limerick, Cork and Clare that were doing most of the wagging. Regarded as “the eyes and ears” of British rule in Ireland, the

RIC had been declared a legitimate target by the IRA, and its members were being regularly sniped at. The IRA were in active pursuit of weapons and were constantly harassing the police and military. In March, Gorman was in the raid on

Doon RIC Barracks and the attempted ambush at Rathcannon where a feint attack on the barracks at Clonoulty aimed to draw out the British Army from its stronghold at Thurles. However, despite the Clonoulty barracks firing Verey lights to call for assistance, the Military failed to come and so the ambush was called off before daylight.

25 BMH.WS0992 Dennis Noonan, Castletownroche Bn. p.7 170

Around this time in early spring 1920, Ernie O’Malley, a Captain on IRA GHQ staff, came into South Tipperary and then the attack on Hollyford Barracks in May took the struggle to a new level. This was Gorman’s local and, along with O’Malley, the “big four” from South Tipperary - the boys from the Soloheadbeg Ambush and

Knocklog Rescue: Robinson, Treacy, Hogan and Breen - spent days planning the assault with Gorman’s Captain, the local commander, Tadhg Dwyer.

The town of Hollyford is in the middle of hill country and the barracks there were larger than most. O’Malley describes the scene in On Another Man’s Wound, the pre-eminent memoir of the period in Ireland:

The road below ran with a stream through a cut; above and below the

village the hill slopes were steep. Houses straggled on either side of the

road; the barracks looked down on thatched roof and zinc outhouses. It was

a high two-storied, white-washed building, larger then the usual barracks

and long. There were many windows protected by steel shutters; loopholes

were cut in the walls. In front a porch jutted out with slits for rifles. The

gable-end near the road had a window high up, and loopholes on the

ground floor; a lean-to building about fourteen feet high, loop-holed ran

from the gable end to the rear. On the far side of the road was a rugged

stone wall. It would give us a little cover. The gable-end might be blown in

with explosives.26

26 O’Malley, On Another Man’s Wound, p.165. I remember my exhilaration when discovering this section. Gorman was the first I found to confirm my hunch that Diggers were active in Ireland. It was November 1910, I was in a dodgy motel on the outskirts of Canberra and just that morning I had proposed, at ADFA, to analyse the Irish-born service records at NAA! All 5,800 odd of them! Here was confirmation and in such a public place (the book not the motel). 171

At a local safe house, while the men were in the kitchen turning yellow- green from the fumes as they defrosted gelignite on the stove, the command group sat around a fire in the living room discussing the job. Then, as O’Malley describes it, Gorman entered the room and,

blinked the rain from his eyebrows as he shook himself on the flagstones.

“The ground floor of the barracks is six feet higher than the ground outside;

you might as well try to shift the Rock of Cashel,” he said. Gorman had

leathern jaws tight with lines, and blues eyes glinting out of a tanned face.

He was an Irish-Australian. He had fought through the World war (sic.) and

was a crack shot. He had assurance. He could curse better than any man in

the hills. We decided to burn out the garrison by an attack from the roof. We

had, none of us tried to burn out a garrison before.27

Just a month previously, Gorman and his C/O, Dwyer, had tried to blow their way into the RIC barracks at Doon but, despite all their efforts to pack the explosives as tightly as possible against the gable wall, it had blown outward leaving the wall intact. The lesson had been learned and passed on to the commanders. The specific training the Australians had undergone to deal with the new German blockhouses in the lead up to Menin Road and Polygon Wood,

Gorman’s last battles in the AIF, was perfectly suited to this next phase of the War of Independence – the Barracks Attacks.

Gorman’s Hollyford Company was stationed on the roadway leading north to Kilcommon. O’Malley was inspecting the outpost positions when he came upon

27 Ibid p. 165 172

Gorman’s men well positioned in a pass but without stones or trees nearby for blocking the road.

“Can you block the way quickly?’ (O’Malley) asked.

“Yes,” (Gorman) said, kicking a pile of picks and shovels with his foot. “I can

have them throw the road over the ditch.”28

With no building nearby to provide a vantage point from which to access the roof, the IRA lashed six ladders together to create two long ones, up which the two senior officers, O’Malley and Robinson, climbed onto the roof with petrol pumps on their backs – a sledgehammer and a revolver on each hip. They sledged holes in the slate roof and poured in petrol and paraffin, which they followed with flaming turf, hand-made grenades and pistol fire. All night the fire burned and all night the police refused to surrender, retreating instead into a single reinforced room where they kept up a ceaseless fire at the men on the roof. And then an extraordinary thing happened. Gorman, with a brimming bucketful of paraffin in each hand, raced up one of the ladders, dashed across the flaming roof and emptied the buckets onto the flames below. He then stayed on the roof to support the other two, hard pressed by the flames and police rifle fire.

When a bleary sun blinked over Hollyford through air reeking of petrol and paraffin smoke still billowing from the barracks, it was a stalemate. The police were still safely inside and the IRA outposts would not be able to hold out against the reinforcements that would come as inevitably as the day. They had failed to capture any weapons and no one was wounded on either side. As they withdrew

28 Ibid. p.166. A ditch in Ireland is an earthern wall usually covered with briars, thistles and other pricklebushes. What Australians call a ditch the Irish call a trench. 173

into the mountains, rifle fire still rang out from the barracks. But a victory of sorts was nevertheless had because the British Army reinforcements later that day evacuated the barracks. To prevent it ever again being reoccupied, the local men completely demolished it. The closure of the Hollyford Barracks gave Gorman’s local company free reign in the wide stretch of hill country around Hollyford and they set about enacting Sinn Fein policy, establishing a civilian administration with

IRA police and civil courts.

Gorman was now an expert and, along with Paddy Costello from his company was again attached, in May, to the neighbouring East Limerick Brigade - this time, for the attack on the stronghold of Kilmallock RIC Barracks where somewhere between 18 and 28 constables were stationed.29 Many surnames of the Limerick men involved echoed those in the failed Fenian attack of 1867. Then, seven local men were among the 62 Fenian prisoners transported to Fremantle,

Western Australia, from where six escaped to the USA in the whaling ship the

Catalpa. When the British were driven from Ireland, one Kilmallock Fenian finally returned home from the USA. For the sons and nephews of the Kilmallock Fenians, this new assault on the barracks was unfinished business.

IRA leaders from counties Clare, Cork and Kerry as well as West Limerick came to participate in the Kilmallock barracks attack but, primarily, they came to observe. To learn how to smash a RIC barracks. Hollyford had been the breakthrough and showed the way and at Kilmallock Gorman and O’Malley put into practice the lessons learned.

29 Seamus Fox entry for May 27-28. 174

For a year the policy of ostracizing the RIC had been taking effect and they had to bring in their own supplies, even of basic foodstuffs. By this time, with widespread resignations and declining numbers of Irish enlistments, the RIC was being reinforced by British soldiers returned from the war. Compared with the pittance they had been paid in the British Army, and with massive unemployment in Britain, 10 shillings a day was highly attractive. The Irish to this day believe that the British scoured the prisons to create this force but, in reality, they were ex- soldiers, damaged from the war and unsuited and undertrained, as are most soldiers, to the exigencies of policing. Also, they were given a dangerous license.

Arriving in Ireland in March 1920, their uniforms are an indication of just how desperate the British Government had become. They were called the Black and

Tans because they were formed so quickly that there weren’t enough RIC uniforms and, consequently, they wore a combination of army khaki and police dark bottle green. Their first action was in Limerick City and, because of their motley appearance and manner, they were named after a pack of Limerick hunting dogs.

The Tans lived amongst the RIC in their barracks and were supplemented later in the year by the Auxiliaries – ex-Army officers who were paid £1 a day.

The same night as the Kilmallock barracks was attacked, others at Drangan and Cappawhite in nearby Tipperary were assaulted as diversions to draw British reinforcements away. Both the diversionary attacks ended hastily when British

Army reinforcements arrived. At Kilmallock it was a night of bloodshed with casualties on both sides: two RIC dead and six wounded, and one IRA dead. Again the attack was called off with first light.

175

That day, Kilmallock experienced the new policy of reprisals, as the Black and Tans set about burning “houses, a creamery and a public hall.”30 The war of terror was on and would escalate with reprisals and counter reprisals. When the

Kilmallock RIC Sergeant published a list of fourteen men wanted for “complicity in the murder of police” he was indirectly responsible for the next phase of the IRA war. The wanted men could not, then, go home and so banded together creating the first Active Service Unit (ASU) – the East Limerick Flying Column. Soon Flying

Columns were operating in all the brigade areas throughout Ireland, as the guerrilla war escalated.31

But Jim Gorman hadn’t lived at home for years. Illegally absent from the

Australian Army, he had been virtually a one man flying column in Tipperary, joining in with whatever was going. He was next involved in the attack on Rear

Cross Barracks – AKA the Barracks at Rea. As the RIC continued to withdraw from the small outlying barracks, the numbers in the remaining barracks increased and the fortifications intensified. At Rea there were an estimated twenty RIC and Tans plus two Sergeants, one of whom, a specialist engineer, had worked massive reinforcements on the barrack’s defences.

Once again it was Gorman and O’Malley on the roof, this time with Sean

Treacy, Gorman’s close friend and Vice Brigadier in South Tipperary. The three men accessed the roof by climbing into the ceiling of the adjoining general store

30 Fox, Seamus, Chronology of Irish History, viewed 07/07/12. 31 BMH WS.0680, p .6. 176

and smashing their way through the wall. The shopkeeper, Flannery, who had already been warned for selling to the RIC, owned the whole block including the barracks and all the buildings were adjoined. Again the fight raged all night long, again the barracks were destroyed. As Gorman wrote in “The Barracks at Rea”,

For hours the Battle fiercely raged, and the building crumbled down,

And the Peelers wisely did retreat, to a hideout under-ground,

But not before their leader still and silent lay

On that gravelled patch near keeper hill.

The Barrack yard at Rea.32

Not only did the RIC suffer casualties with the Sergeant’s courageous death – eulogised by Gorman in the poem – but all three on the roof were seriously wounded. O’Malley had to order Gorman to withdraw when a bullet entered his arm at the wrist and travelled up to the elbow, and Treacy and O’Malley both suffered from grenade fragments.

Despite the loss of Hollyford, Rear Cross and Kilmallock Barracks, the RIC was no longer withdrawing. As at Kilmallock, they merely commandeered another building in the town and set about engineering its defences. At Rear Cross, they moved into Flannery’s shop next door from which the IRA had launched their attack.

There was much consternation years later when Gorman’s daughter, Anne, realised that the Best Man at her wedding in Chicago was Flannery’s son!33

32 Jim Gorman, The Barrack at Rea. The poem also commemorates the heroic death of the RIC Sergeant who stepped outside the barracks into the firing line to get a clean shot on the men on the roof. 177

Phase 3 – The Flying Columns

By the time Jim Gorman had recovered enough to return to active service, in

October 1920, the War of Independence in the country had moved into its third phase. In the Autumn of 1920 IRA GHQ Dublin instructed all brigades to form

Flying Columns (also known as Active Service Units [ASUs]). Although he was not yet permanently attached, when he was well enough recovered from the wounds received at Rea Cross, Gorman joined the newly formed South Tipperary Flying

Column just outside of Thomastown on the Tipperary-Cashel road, soon after Sean

Treacy’s death in a gunfight with the British Army in Dublin. Now under Dinney

Lacey’s command, the men of the column lay in ambush for a lorry load of British troops who were heading into Tipperary Town for target practice.

Seeing the cart used to block the road, the lorry pulled up short of the

ambush site and, consequently, the IRA were caught out of position. Lacey ordered

Gorman to throw their only grenade but it failed to explode. During the hiatus as

both parties were anticipating the explosion, Gorman threw himself into a dip in

the middle of the road from where he, according to Sean Fitzpatrick, Brigade

Adjutant, “blazed away to his heart's content. But Jim was an old campaigner,

having learned the hard way in the first world war (sic.).”34

With the approach of military reinforcements, the IRA withdrew. All

nineteen British soldiers were casualties, four were dead. At tea afterwards, Sean

Lynch began to compose a song about the ambush but when he sang the line, “But

33 Anne Canty interview, August 2012. 34 BMH. WS 1259 Sean Fitzpatrick, Officer IRA, Tipperary, p.10 178

he did not pull the pin”, Gorman’s hackles went up and Lynch had to be protected.

So memorable was the incident that a number of those present that day recalled it

decades later, each affirming that Jim had, in fact, pulled the pin but the grenade

was faulty.35

Barracks around the countryside were regularly sniped at and, with the

possibility of ambush at every corner, movement had become fraught with danger

for the British Army, RIC, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. They now moved in

convoys. Gorman was involved in an ambush at Coolacussane near Dundrum in

October, where, when the IRA were again caught out of position, the British Army

officer in charge “fell first to Jim Gorman’s perfect aim,”36 and again at Ross

Cottage in November, Rear Cross in January 1921 and at, Clune, Rossmore and

Oolah.

In late May, because of the lengthening days, the major Flying Columns

proved unwieldy and were broken down into smaller Active Service Units based

in their battalion areas. Gorman was able to return to his home place. When the

Tan War (as the latter part of the War of Independence is still called in Ireland

today) ended with the Truce on 11 July 1921, Jim Gorman was with his Active

Service Unit. They were sniping at Annarcarty Barracks right up until midday

when the ceasefire came into effect. Then they simply turned and walked home.

35 BMH. WS 1647, John Joe O’Brien, Vice-Commondant, Limerick, p.22 and WS. 1433 Michael Fitzpatrick, Officer Tipperary, p.12. 36 BMH. WS1348, Michael Davern, Commandant IRA, Tipperary p. 42. 179

Truce

After five years of warfare, Jim Gorman finally had time to pick up the threads of his life. He had been fighting since arriving in France with the Australian

Army in late 1916. On 1 January 1922, as the Treaty was being debated in the Dáil

(Parliament) he married his long time Irish sweetheart, Rebecca Crowe, in the local church at Kilcommon. As Irish farmers had done very well out of the Great War, his father in law, Thomas Crowe, was able to help out and set Jim up in a local pub.

Two boys, David and Tom, arrived in quick succession. Jim, the family say, had always planned to return to Australia but Rebecca, a farmer’s daughter, had grown up on the land and refused to go. She wanted the city life and to be within reach of her family in Ireland. Then in 1925, having refused to fight in the Civil War, Jim,

Rebecca and the two boys moved to one of the great Irish cities of the USA,

Chicago.

Jim Gorman refused to fight in the Civil War - he would not kill a fellow

Irishman. That was the story Jim lived for the rest of his life. It is the story told in his obituary and in the many newspaper articles about him in both Ireland and

“the next parish.”37 It is the story his family lived right up to the present. But there is one document that tells a very different story.

As a deserter from the Australian Army, Gorman had forfeited his medals and any hope of a war pension. The Irish Military Pensions Act, 1934 set up a pension scheme for men and women who had fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War. It is a long and detailed application form asking questions about

37 A common Irish expression for the USA. 180

specific periods of the war from Easter 1916, the “first critical date”,38 right through until 30 September 1923, the date the Civil War officially ended. In his pension application, Gorman evasively details continuous service from 12 July

1921, the first day of the Truce, and the “second critical date” right through the

Civil War.39

Civil War

The Civil War section of Gorman’s Military Service Pension (MSP) file is somewhat sad and diffident, as was the long lasting impact on many caught up in it, with the differing emotional registers of the two wars clearly evident in the short, poignant responses to the questions the form asks. Nowhere does the document state which side Gorman fought on in the Civil War but the scant details and the referees he uses make it pretty obvious.40 Somehow in those terrible years of Civil

War, Jim Gorman started a family, ran a pub and still gave “continuous active service”.

As the Civil War erupted in early 1922, Gorman initially used his pub as a centre for communications and operated as commanding officer in his old stomping grounds of Hollyford, Annacarthy, Rosmore, Clonoulty and Knockavilla.

There, he could again be found training each company one day a week. In his MSP file, he described his particulars of military operations as “everything that was

38 MSP/34/1/3738 op.cit. 39 Ibid. 40 Gorman had fought on the losing side, the Republicans. The Free State Government called them “Irregulars” and direct lineage was later claimed by groups such as “The Original IRA”, the “Provisional IRA” (Provos) and the “Real IRA.” Today, to distinguish the War of Independence IRA from these late aberrations, they are sometimes referred to as the “Old IRA.” Gorman’s referees were Martin Ryan, Dan Breen and Sean Hayes, all former comrades in the South Tipperary Brigade and, at the date of signing all TDs (Members of Parliament) and Ernie O’Malley with whom he remained lifelong friends. 181

necessary at the time.” Between July 1922 and April 1923, during which time his first son, David, was born, he served with no particular unit around his home of

Capperwhite, taking care of despatches and arms and “went to fight when anything special was on.” In the final period of the Civil War, up to the end of September

1923, he was back with the South Tipperary Brigade serving in Capperwhite,

Rosmore and Dundrum where he “was centre for despatches, getting information, blocking roads (and) went to fights which did not come off.”41

Emigration

In 1925, Jim Gorman left Ireland as part a new and very particular diaspora: men and women who had fought on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War. For them, those were very difficult days in Ireland. They had led the fight for Irish freedom and now many feared for their lives. Positions in the new public administration were filled with men who fought on the victorious side in the Civil

War, ignoring the many Republicans who had shown a lead against the British. Jim

Gorman had never been a politician – though brimming with self assurance he had never been a self promoter. He took Rebecca and the two boys to Chicago where he spent the rest of his life working as a school caretaker. A third son, Seamus, was born soon after and his fourth and final child, a daughter, Anne, followed in 1936.

All three sons fought in the U.S. Army in the Second World War where “Jim” Junior was killed in 1945.

Like many ex-servicemen, Jim Gorman seldom talked about his three wars to his immediate family, except for the kind of story you can tell to children. While

41 MSP/34/1/3738 op.cit. 182

claiming not to have fought in the Civil War, he was nevertheless very clear about where his sympathies lay. His daughter, Anne Canty, tells the story about the day in early January 1923 when a young Republican came running into Gorman’s pub in

Capperwhite with Free State soldiers in hot pursuit. Jim quickly hid him and, when the soldiers demanded to know whether there was any other male in the building, indicated a room on the upper floor. The soldiers burst in. There was Rebecca in bed with newborn son, Tom. “They could have killed us!” she always berated a laughing Jim as she played her part in the reminiscence.42

In Chicago, the Gorman home became the centre for a community of Irish

Republican immigrants. There they gathered on Sunday afternoons and, after dinner, the door to the lounge room shut and the men would raucously relive their days of warring on the British. Jim took his family back to Tipperary on numerous occasions where, in his old stomping grounds, he was accorded a hero’s welcome.

He continued to write poetry for the rest of his life, was an excellent dancer and a skilled musician – all such accomplishments coming from immersion in an old and rich culture, where at social gatherings, Ramblings, every individual performs a song, a recitation or a dance. When angered, the veins in his neck still inflamed and bulged just as they had done when Sean Lynch composed the song after the

Thomastown Ambush. Then everyone cleared the room.

Jim Gorman is remembered in both Ireland and the USA where his descendants have contributed in so many areas of civil society: not only in the military, but also in the priesthood, the arts and public administration. Like Jim, his

42 Canty interview op.cit. 183

descendants have never forgotten Australia. “The land of Gold and sunshine” figures largely in their sense of who they are.

But Australia has forgotten Jim Gorman. All that remains here of him are the

27 pages of his service record and the APC warrant for his arrest available on the

National Archives website. The last page is stamped “Discharged as a Deserter” on

1 April 1920 and the images of the war medals he earned are overwritten in red with “Not Eligible.”

Jim Gorman volunteered as an Australian citizen, a free man, to serve in the

Australian Imperial Force in 1916. When he chose not to return in October 1917, he had freely done 546 days of military service of which 391 had been served overseas. Besides his medals and uncollected pay, he was entitled to two blue chevrons for his two years overseas and one wound stripe for that morning in

Polygon Wood when his own artillery killed his mate next to him and sent him on a

Blighty, and then to his family home, his “country,” to recuperate.43

People cannot afford to forget who they are or where they come from.

Henry Parkes’ “Crimson thread of kinship’ does not run only to Britain but, in a multicultural cultural society like twenty first century Australia, connects us to every country of the world.

43 For Indigenous Australians, ‘country’ – regardless of where you live - is where your people come from. It makes a fine distinction between ‘home’ and ‘country’ that the English language constantly confuses. 184

Not all Australian soldiers when visiting Ireland made the same choices as

Jim Gorman. But some – an unknown and now, perhaps, unknowable number – did. Due to the long and tortuous history between the two main nations from which Australia’s non–indigenous population is descended and the complications of its historical relationship with a now dead Empire which he helped to destroy,

Jim Gorman remains condemned as a deserter and forgotten in the country that trained him and which he served as a soldier. At the same time, he is praised for his courage, extraordinary fighting abilities and humanity in two other countries,

Ireland and the USA, that are so dear to Australia. In Australia, we are diminished for not knowing him. In Ireland, Jim Gorman is an immortal.

Jim Gorman’s Final Resting Place, Chicago

***

I like to think that my other grandfather, the gentle Jack Gaffney, who was, like Jim Gorman, from both Wagga Wagga and “B” Company of the 55th Battalion – the brave and loyal young man, No. 1655, who enlisted on the Kangaroo March at just 18 years of age and served for almost three years on the Western Front before finishing the war in bed with a shattered jaw; the Pop who never marched on

Anzac Day, who told a little boy that he never killed a man and never took a 185

promotion because he’d never tell another man what to do – I’d like to think that

Pop might have known Jim Gorman, that Jim might have looked out for him in the trenches like he did for so many young men in the IRA, and that maybe, just maybe, they were mates.

186

Chapter 4

22529 Gunner Michael McGrath

23rd Howitzer Bde, Medium Trench Mortar Unit, 3rd Division, AIF.

Captain E (Powerstone) Company, 5th (Clonmel) Battalion,

3rd (South) Tipperary Brigade,

No2 (Sean Hogan’s) Flying Column.

187

Mike McGrath 188

It is Melbourne, April 2007. Autumn leaves chase each other along the boulevards in and around the marching feet. Thousands of marching feet, cheering hands, smiling faces. The gunmetal sky locks the warmth in. Paddy Hickey, a tall, dark, young Irishman on a working holiday with his girlfriend, Laura, is ambushed by the intensity of his response. Something is beating in his heart, calling for his attention. This is Paddy’s first Anzac Day. The pageantry and ritual stir dormant memories that rise up and then coalesce around the sketchy figure of an ancestor who had sailed to Australia a century earlier. He was some sort of hero who had served Australia in the AIF in the First World War and, so the family legend went, fought at Gallipoli. This barely known Digger was Paddy’s connection to this day and this land. Through Paddy, he was reaching out to reconnect with his Australian comrades – his mates. He was Paddy’s only ancestor to have ever come to

Australia. This great uncle who died too young to have children of his own was reaching out across almost a century to his great nephew.

In Ireland in 2013, recalling his Melbourne days, Paddy wrote:

I was aware I had a relative in the AIF but knew no details and didn’t even

know his name … I was living in Melbourne a while and got interested in my

ancestor and asked Dad for more details. … I think it would have been my

first Anzac Day that aroused my interest. I always liked Anzac Day when I

was in Australia. I enjoy the traditions and ceremony in a way I don’t feel

for the 11th November.1

1 Private correspondence, 3/2/13. November 11, Armistice Day is the day of commemoration in Britain for those who served in WWI. For much of the 20th Century this was controversial in Ireland. It is commemorated in Australia and New Zealand but is not nearly as important as Anzac Day. 189

Paddy stayed in Australia until 2011 and, during his time here, learnt all he could about his Australian. He accessed his great uncle’s service record through the National Archives and was so captivated that in 2010, before leaving the country, he made a special trip to Canberra to visit the Australian War Memorial

(AWM) – after the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, the third most visited tourist site in the country.

Paddy is from Tipperary and Laura from Donegal and it was to her family home that they travelled in 2011 to marry. There they “saw a lot of relatives (they) hadn’t seen since 2006/7 and decided that while Australia is almost perfect, the one thing missing is family, and that of course is the most important thing.”2

Working online, Laura was able to keep her job with her Australian company but, finding himself unemployed, Paddy was drawn to pursue his uncle’s story. That meant spending time at the Bureau of Military History in Dublin. It was while

Paddy was there that an email arrived from BMH archivist Hugh Beckett informing me that I was not alone. There was someone else researching an Australian soldier who had fought for Ireland. In response to my email Paddy wrote:

I was aware he was in the IRA from the beginning but I really only learned

more about his IRA service recently, since I returned to Ireland. While I

wasn't working in July 2011, I visited the Irish Military Archives to find out

more, which was fascinating for what it didn't have. I also learned the full

details of the debacle at his coroner’s inquest from the local papers in the

2 Ibid. 190

National Library, again in July 2011. That was a real emotional moment for

me to be honest. Family legend confirmed in black and white.3

A century earlier, around 1910, a tall, black-haired, blue-eyed Irishman worked his way out to Australia as a steward on the White Star Line. Six years later, on 4 January 1916, as a 25 year old, he walked into a recruitment centre in

Perth, Western Australia, and enlisted in the AIF, becoming 22529 Gunner Michael

McGrath. He was born in 1890 to Martin and his second wife, Mary, on a farm in the townland of Croanwalsh near Powerstown, just outside the South Tipperary city of Clonmel. On enlistment, McGrath was shipped east from Perth to

Maribyrnong in Victoria, where he trained with General Monash’s newly forming

3rd Division and was assigned to the 1st Reinforcements of the 23rd Howitzer

Brigade.

After only rudimentary training in Australia, the 3rd Division sailed for

England in May and June 1916. At the 3rd Division Base Depot at Larkhill on the

Salisbury Plains, McGrath was posted to the Division Ammunition Column before sailing from Brighton for the Western Front on 24 November. Like the other divisions before them, only for much longer, the 3rd spent its first months around the northern French city of Armentieres in what was known as the ‘nursery sector’.

McGrath first saw real action at the Battle of Messines in June 1917 when the detonation of almost one million tons of high explosive blew 10,000 German soldiers and half the Messines Ridge into oblivion. For its first major battle, the 3rd was in the front line of the attack, on the right of the New Zealand Division and the

3 Ibid. 191

British forces. After the 3rd’’s next major engagement on 4 October at Broodseinde

Ridge, the third of the Battles of Passchendaele, Mike McGrath was hospitalized in

England suffering from piles. During Passchendaele’s final mud–sucking horrors,

McGrath was on convalescent leave at the family farm in Ireland.

Unlike Casey, Hurley, Gorman and others, Mike McGrath didn’t stay in Ireland after convalescent leave but rejoined his unit in France in early December. He then spent the next three weeks at Trench Mortar School. Known as the ‘suicide club,’4 trench mortar batteries involved one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.

Wherever they climbed into a trench or shell hole, the infantry moved as far away as possible because the mortars invariably drew heavy artillery and machine gun fire upon themselves. When he again returned to his unit, the 3rd Division was stationed in Flanders. On 25 March 1918, together with the 4th, they were raced over three days of trains, buses and forced marches to stem the hole torn in the

British lines by the great German breakthrough, Operation Michael, outside

Amiens. Back on the Somme. After two more stints in hospital - in July with influenza and August with dysentery - McGrath returned to the Front in September for the final victorious assaults on the Hindenburg Line.

22529 Gunner Michael McGrath disembarked at Southampton on 4th April

1919 and was discharged when demobilized in London with 3 blue chevrons on the arm of his tunic, one for each year spent serving overseas. All Australian soldiers legally discharged abroad had to produce documents proving the absence of dependants in Australia, the need for them to stay behind, their intended place

4 I first came across this tern in correspondence with Paddy Hickey; in WWI, the term, was also applied to machine gun units and fighter pilots. 192

of residence and references testifying to their ability to support themselves. With the death of his father in 1916, in consequence of which he had changed his next of kin to his sister, Mary Ellen, Mike McGrath was able to convince AIF Headquarters of the family’s need for him on the farm at Croanwalsh. By taking his discharge in

London, McGrath absolved the AIF of responsibility for his return to Australia.

***

In 2012, during my Residency in Glenosheen, I made several trips to the South

Tipperary city of Clonmel. There in company with documentary film producer,

Frank Haines, I first visited Jim Gorman’s nephew, Con O’Gorman, and Con’s son- in-law, Paul Murphy. Paul, an ex Irish Army Reservist, had been my first contact with other families of IRA Diggers. We met through the South Tipperary Military

History Society. Soon after our first contact, Paul had emailed me a wealth of

Gorman family documents about Jim, including his poetry.

In Clonmel, I later met Pat Hickey, father of Paddy. Frank and I had met

Paddy and Laura for a Guinness in Dublin as they were flying out to the USA. I was not to see Paddy again till he came to the airport when I was flying home to

Australia. Pat, retired from a lifetime in the Bulmers Cider factory in Clonmel, first told me that in that city “You are born into the IRA!” “Well,” he qualified, seeing the stunned look on my face, “for me it was Sinn Féin – I spent my life working in the unions.”

We talked for hours, about Mike and the family, and then Pat took me to the local places that figure, like stations of the cross, so largely in Mike McGrath’s story.

193

Months later, on a gloriously sunny Autumn day after the wettest summer on record in what is already a very wet country, he took me walking in the nearby

Knockmealdown Mountains to the Liam Lynch Monument. Lynch was Chief of Staff of the IRA from 1922 until mortally wounded in a gunfight with the National Army on 10 April 1923. He died that same evening in hospital in Clonmel. Lynch’s death intensified the peace proposals that finally led to the end of the Civil War.

Mike McGrath’s nephew, Pat Hickey, in 2012 at what had been the McGrath farm.

***

There are no documents testifying to Mike McGrath’s movements after he was discharged when demobilised in London but, at some point, he joined the IRA.

Names of IRA officers were first recorded as at 11 July 1921, the day of the Truce; names of rank and file volunteers more randomly. Until then, the risk of any such list of names falling into Crown hands was only too obvious. At the beginning of the

Truce, McGrath was already the Captain commanding the small Powerstown

194

Company of the 5th (Clonmel) Battalion and a permanent member of No. 2 (Sean

Hogan’s) Flying Column.5 Their area of operation encompassed the south-eastern parts of County Tipperary from where they linked up with neighbouring Kilkenny,

Waterford and North Cork Columns.

The No 2 Flying Column was formed around the 6th Battalion in December

1920 when Dan Breen came down from Brigade HQ to form an Active Service Unit.

“It was decided to take picked men from each company, … ex-servicemen being preferred.”6 They were soon joined by eight men, including Mike McGrath, from the 5th, Clonmel, Battalion. After three weeks of training, Breen handed command of the column over to Sean Hogan (who had been rescued from the train at

Knocklong in 1919) and left for Dublin to join Michael Collin’s “Squad”.

In its operations against the occupying forces, Hogan’s Column was nowhere near as successful as Lacey’s No1 and spent most of its time evading and fighting its way out of encirclement by a combination of armoured, mounted, cycling and infantry troops. With his background as a “Digger,” McGrath took charge of the group employing local volunteers blocking roads and destroying “all main bridges, especially the Glengarr Bridge and Brackbawn Bridge on the main

Dublin-Cork road.”7 A report from May 1921 by Kerry’s RIC county inspector gives some indication of how effective the IRA roadworks were. They

5 BMH S1719, Personnel list of the Tipperary III (South) Brigade. 6 BMH.WS1701, Maurice A McGrath, Adjutant IRA Tipperary, 1921, p.16. 7 Ibid. p.21. 195

trenched all roads, blew up bridges, tore up railway lines, felled trees

across roads, built up walls across roads, stretched wires across roads,

with the intention of making the journeys of Crown forces by motors

impossible. They … made it practically impossible to travel in the dark.

Journeys of about twenty miles sometimes (took) between 4 & 5 hours to

accomplish.8

Expecting war to resume after the Truce, Ernie O’Malley, now Commander of the 2nd Southern Division which encompassed Tipperary, East and Mid Limerick and Waterford Counties, convened officer-training camps to keep his men in the necessary state of preparedess. McGrath’s section went into camp at Glenpatrick, just eleven kilometres from his home of Powerstown in the Comeragh Mountains of nearby County Waterford. Commanded by Paddy ‘the Tank’ Dalton, Mike’s O/C in the Clonmel Battalion, this group included South Tipperary’s 2nd Column as well as men from the Waterford Brigades.

With the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by the Provisional

Government on 7 January 1922, the unity of Irish nationalists brought about by opposition to the occupying power began almost immediately to fragment. Sinn

Fein and the IRA both split down the middle. By the time the British forces finally began pulling out of the 26 Counties, the British Army in Ireland numbered 57,000 men along with 14,200 RIC and 2,600 Auxiliaries and Black and Tans. As the

British withdrew, IRA units across the country, regardless of their position on the

Treaty, immediately occupied the local military barracks. On 5 February, with the

8 As quoted in Leeson, p28. 196

split widening, the Provisional Government despatched an official representative to receive the keys to Clonmel Army Barracks from the departing British. So intimidating was the Republican presence that, upon receipt of the keys, the

Government representative immediately handed them over to the local IRA commandant, ‘Big Paddy’ Dalton, and left town. Mike McGrath was an officer in the force that then occupied the massive Clonmel Barracks.

When Limerick City fell to the Free State forces in July, Republican HQ moved to Clonmel. But with a detachment of National Army troops advancing from

Waterford in August, the Republicans, knowing they would not be able to hold the barracks, set about destroying them to prevent their reoccupation. When Captain

Michael McGrath suggested the IRA throw the mattresses out the windows - so the local people could use them - before burning the barracks, he became a folk hero in

Clonmel. The barracks were, nevertheless, occupied by the 25th Battalion of the

National Army until the end of the Civil War and the Republicans returned to land based guerrilla war.9 As acceptance of government money would imply recognition of that Government, the Republican IRA refused any money it was entitled to as the national army when it repudiated the legitimacy of the Provisional Government once it signed the Treaty. To finance their war effort, the Republicans in Tipperary initially levied funds from the general population10 and engaged in a spate of bank

9 The Irish Defence Force today takes its ancestry from both the IRA of the War of Independence and the Free State or National Army of the Civil War. 10 This act would eventually backfire as it alienated many of the people whose support guerrilla warfare depends on. 197

robberies. McGrath was involved in the robbery of the Munster Leinster Bank in

Clonmel that, reportedly, netted some £3,500.11

In the time between the signing of the Truce and the outbreak of Civil War, many IRA soldiers, most of whom were single young men – all Flying Column members had to be – tried to return to normal life. Like Jim Gorman, many married. Mike McGrath, who had been in the military since enlisting in the

Australian Army in January 1916, became engaged to a local girl with whom he was hoping to build a life in Australia. But, in taking his discharge from the AIF in

London, McGrath had abrogated the Australian Army of all and any responsibility for his return passage. It is possible that in Civil War torn Ireland McGrath might have read of the extended offer of free passage the Australian Government instituted from October 1920. His descendants today know of no way the two could have afforded to sail for Australia as, during the years spent fighting the

British and the subsequent Civil War, McGrath had been a full time, unwaged soldier.12

When Mike McGrath went to meet his sweetheart at Ballypatrick on the slopes of Slievenamon, the “Mountain of Women,” that spring evening, 27 April

1923, the Civil War was, at last, winding down. After the death of Republican Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch, on the 10th, peace negotiations intensified. In the mood for spring, McGrath was surprised by a detachment of Free State troops and bundled into the back of the lorry. But this was also personal. The officer commanding the

11 Pat Hickey Interviews, August 2012. It has not been possible to substantiate the claim about McGrath’s involvement in the bank robbery. 12 Ibid. 198

troops (O/C) was Mike McGrath’s competitor in love. This was a love triangle played out along the dividing lines of the Civil War and McGrath, though lucky in love, was on the losing side.

In the back of the lorry, McGrath and a Free State soldier were both wounded when the O/C ‘lost it’ and started shooting. Wounded in the chest

McGrath was taken to the Curragh Military Camp in County Kildare. Previously a major British cavalry camp, and site of the 1914 “mutiny” that had sealed fate against a united and independent Ireland, the Curragh was used during the Civil

War by the Free State Government as a gaol for political prisoners. There, Mike

McGrath died on or about 5 May in the General Military Hospital. On the official death certificate, the cause of death was recorded as “Gunshot wound left lung, haemmorage, shock, toxic absorption”. His employment at the time of death was recorded as “Political Prisoner”.

At the family’s request, McGrath’s body was removed from the Curragh to

Croanwalsh where, on Sunday 6 May, it was laid out in the coffin, at the Church of

St. John the Baptist. There, it was examined by the Deputy Coroner, Doctor Stokes, who had only recently completed the Inquest into the death of Liam Lynch.

Because McGrath’s father, Martin, had died in 1916, Michael’s brother-in-law,

Patrick O’Brien, took the responsibility, as male head of the family, to view the body. The coffin was opened. The body lay face down, the head swathed in bandages. O’Brien reached out to remove them. Doctor Stokes put his hand out to stop him. “You don’t want to be doing that now Patrick.” No, O’Brien didn’t want to be doing that but, as the head of the family, he had to. Slowly, tenderly, he

199

unwound the bandages. Michael had been shot in the head. Executed.

The previous October, the Catholic Bishops of Ireland had condemned the

Republicans for their part in the Civil War and instructed the clergy to deny them the sacraments. Perhaps in accordance with this, the Parish Priest refused to allow

McGrath’s body to remain in the Church overnight. A whispered word in his ear told him that if Mike McGrath didn’t spent the night in the church, there might not be a church in the morning.

The McGrath family plot in the graveyard of the Church of St. John the Baptist, Croanwalsh, County Tipperary. The Last Resting Place of an IRA Digger. Michael McGrath is also commemorated - along with 94 other officers & men of the South Tippearay Brigade KIA against the British or during the Civil War - on the Republican Monument, St Michael’s Cemetery, Tipperary.

Next afternoon, Monday the 7th, Doctor Stokes convened a Coronial

Inquiry at the Croanwalsh Schoolhouse, directly across the road from the Church 200

where McGrath’s body lay. After hearing formalities of identification and arrest the

Coroner adjourned the inquiry in order to subpoena military witnesses from The

Curragh. Family and friends then crossed the road to the Church and Michael

McGrath was buried that chill spring evening in the family plot in the cemetery on the Church grounds.

When the Inquest resumed the following Monday, 14 May, it was again adjourned - this time at the request of the military. The third attempt on the

Wednesday at 6.30pm also proved abortive but for wholly different reasons. A solicitor sent from Dublin to represent the Free State Army, asserted that, as the death had occurred in County Kildare, there was no jurisdiction in County

Tipperary to hold the Inquiry. The Coroner agreed with the point of law but argued that special jurisdiction had been granted in similar cases and, on that precedent, attempted to proceed. The military solicitor next submitted a written message from the Army claiming that the family were offered an inquest at the Curragh but had knowingly relinquished the right to one when they removed McGrath’s body for burial; that upon the family’s request the Curragh Coroner did not deem one necessary as long as the resident medical officer provided a death certificate. On the witness stand, O’Brien denied the claim. Frustrated by the legalistic arguments of the military solicitor a jury member cried out “We want to hear of the murder of

McGrath. “13

The Coroner and Council Assisting resisted repeated attempts at intimidation and legalistic obfuscation but, once he was presented with the

13 Irish Nationalist, 19/05/1923 201

Certificate of Death, Dr Stokes had no recourse but to dismiss the inquiry.

McGrath’s death had not been registered until the 11th, six days after the recorded date of death and during the second adjournment that had allowed the Military time to concoct its case. The Certificate was not witnessed by a doctor but by the

Chief Clerk in the Military Hospital and signed by the Registrar.. The proceedings broke up amid outrage and horror that left Michael McGrath’s mother, Mary, a profoundly disturbed woman. It seemed that all the years of struggle and sacrifice for a free and just Ireland had been in vain; that her beautiful son, who fought for

“decency and democracy”14 both on the Western Front and in Ireland, had been abandoned by a heartless state and a cruel God; that he was twice murdered by the new Ireland he had dedicated his life to bring into being.

Michael McGrath was not the only political prisoner murdered in the

Curragh nor was judicial murder only carried out by the new Government and its forces. The Civil War was a time of great savagery and the bitterness has lingered for a century. There remains, to this day, a belief that military authorities were illegally executing Republican prisoners who, they believed, would not stop fighting. And perhaps they weren’t wrong that some would not stop fighting until

Ireland was united and free.

14 The phrase was used by Irish defence Minister, Alan Shatter, in May 2012 when announcing a pardon and apology to the 5000 Irish Defence personnel who deserted to enlist in the British forces in WWII and who were then condemned under the so called “starvation order.” 202

Paddy and Eimear (b. 24 March 2013). She is the great, grand niece of Mike McGrath. “Family of course is the most important thing.”

In his three years and 83 days service to Australia, Empire and freedom,

Mike McGrath had earned the Victory Medal and the Silver War Badge. For his service to Ireland he received the Black and Tan Medal. Because the first two medals were British and his was a Republican family, and because of his betrayal by Ireland, Michael McGrath’s family dumped both sets of medals. Their whereabouts today are unknown.

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Chapter 5

Bringing The Boys Back Home

(The Irishman) is putting up a great fight in his own country against the invader …

But any citizens of the Empire, including Australians, who excuse, applaud, or attempt to condone their action become liable to imprisonment for six months or a penalty of £100 … everything the Bill proposes to cure is perpetuated, accentuated, and aggravated by the Bill. The (War Precautions Act Repeal Act) Bill is an offence against itself.

Frank Brennam, Labor MHR for Batman. 23/11/1920.1

(T)he war disclosed that there was within our gates an enemy … the enemy still remains, and still has to be dealt with.

Sir Robert Best, Nationalist MHR for Kooyong. 23/11/1920.2

1 Senate and House of Representatives, Debates, 23 November 1920, p. 6856. 2 Ibid. p. 6845. 204

The Great War for Civilisation, the war to end all wars, had finally ended. As they did every Sunday morning in the garrison city of Fermoy North Cork, fifteen

Shropshire Light Infantry marched in fours from Barrack Hill, across the bridge over the Blackwater and along Patrick Street, with their rifles at the slope. As they neared their destination, the Wesleyan Church, the Corporal gave the order: “Trail arms!” Before the soldiers could adjust their .303s another voice rang out: “Hands up!” With a screech of tyres, a big, black Buick that had been creeping along the kerb pulled across the street behind the soldiers, cutting off their retreat. Men ran at them from all directions. Shots rang out. Five minutes later, two cars headed west, laden with British weapons. Four Shropshires and the IRA commander, Liam

Lynch, were wounded. Private Jones of the Shropshires lay sprawled on the roadway, dead.

The Wesleyan Raid at Fermoy, North Cork, on that balmy Sunday morning,

9 September 1919, was the first, officially sanctioned IRA attack on the British

Army in Ireland. The North Cork mob had only five revolvers between them but the rest were armed with clubs concealed on their bodies.3 That night, the British ran amok in Fermoy, smashing up windows and shops. The next night they were met by locals in pitched battles throughout the city.4 As happened in South

Tipperary after the Soloheadbeg Ambush and in East Limerick after the Knocklong

Rescue, North Cork was declared a Military Zone and massive sweeps of the countryside and many arrests ensued.

3 The word “mob” is used, not in the Roman sense, but in the Australian slang meaning a coherent group. 4 BMH. WS1003, Patrick Ahern Officer IRA, Cork, p.15. 205

A British Army unit conducting searches of the Ballyhoura Mountains arrived at Glenanaar. Con was quickly spirited away into the priest hole that was also used as the arms dump. Some say it was to the priest hole, others that he hid beneath an ancient Celtic ruin – there are stone circles all over the Ballyhouras.

From his hiding place, whichever it was, as he quickly reassembled his .303 service rifle, he had a clear view of events taking place outside on the farm. As soldiers searched the house, Patrick was called outside to answer questions but failed to give the young officer in command the information he required. The Lieutenant ordered him to turn around and walk away. (This was remembered across Ireland as a common request throughout the War of Independence preliminary to shooting in the back; the death would then be explained as “shot while trying to escape.”)

Con’s rifle was trained on the Lieutenant, his middle finger poised on the trigger.

Patrick stood rooted to the spot. Before he could do anything, the front door burst open and Jane, with the children gathered about her, raced between Patrick and the readied rifles. “If you’re going to shoot him, you’ll have to shoot me and the children first!”

The Lieutenant stared into her eyes then motioned his men to lower their weapons. As the family story goes, “Some of those British officers were gentlemen

– unlike the Black and Tans who came soon after.” When the lorry eventually pulled out of Glenanaar and headed back down the Cork side of the mountain, it was laden with bacon, a sack of potatoes, butter, cheeses and Jane’s famous black

206

pudding. They hadn’t pilfered them; these were genuine peace keeping gifts, freely given, which meant the soldiers didn’t leave empty handed.5

Con emerged from the priest hole. He had already disassembled his rifle and wrapped it once again in the oilcloth. He was pushing his motorbike. “It’s time

I left. Those Woodbines know I’m here and they won’t be letting you off so lightly next time, Sarge,” was all he said. When he’d first seen those Australian government advertisements in the newspapers warning that the last troopships would be sailing before Christmas, he’d talked of plans to pay a boatman from Cork to sail him across to the continent, where he’d report himself as a prisoner of war

(POW). He knew his time in Ireland was running out. If he ever wished to get on in

Australia ... if he wasn’t on one of those ships … he’d lose everything!

He always knew he would go home to Australia. Bellingen was home. Five years he’d been overseas, two and a quarter of those in Ireland! God alone knew how long it would take to finish this! And the winter was coming and he’d be on the run and with his lungs and his foot, his knee and his back, there’d be no living rough on the mountains through an Irish winter. No, it was time to go home. There was nothing else for it.

“You can’t be riding to the sea on that thing,” said Sarge, “all of Cork will be in an uproar and they will be about setting up roadblocks at every cross.”6

“Then you can pick it up at Knocklong; I’ll be taking the train to Dublin.”

5 This incident is reconstructed from interviews with Margaret Casey, Terry Boyd, Tom Bennett and Sister Celine (Ellen) Casey. 6 Cross = crossroads. 207

There was no time to dig up his uniform. It lies today under the ruins of the farm, wrapped in canvas, buried somewhere beneath the pressed earth floor of

Jane’s buttery. Teary farewells all round and little Ellen, terrified she might never see her Australian cousin again, wrapped herself around him. For Patrick, pulling her off was like tearing the skin off a calf.

As he sped north, Con’s mind was racing even faster. Down the Lacker

Road he passed the Cunningham’s and Nagles’ with barely a wave. A quick detour into Ballyorgan gave him a few precious minutes with his fiancée, Ellen Kelly.

Arriving next in Kilfinane, he hurried to the house of Jim McCarthy, the local IRA commander. Unwrapping a package from under his arm, Con looked McCarthy in the eyes. “Will you give me five pounds for this Jim?” McCarthy’s eyes opened wide; the Kilfinane Company had not yet got its hands on one single service rifle.

“Sure! I’ll give you five pounds Connie, but you must show me how to put the feckin’ thing together!”

“There’s no time for that Jim. You and your boys’ll just have to work it out for yourselves.”

McCarthy was about to protest when something in Con’s blue eyes told him there was no arguing. This emigrant’s son returned to Glenanaar was noted for the cut of his clothes, as a dapper gentleman; if he was selling his .303 then it was for more than the five pounds!

“Good luck and safe journey, Connie,” McCarthy said, as he took Con’s hand and shook it. This was the first service rifle the Kilfinane Company acquired. It was

208

used to train members in its assembly and in marksmanship, and in the subsequent attacks on Ballylanders and Kilmallock RIC barracks.7

At 3pm on a chill Monday as London clung to itself beneath a bleary, sniffling sky, a man no longer young but not yet old, climbed the grey stone steps that led up to the Australian Military Hospital in Harefield. He was wearing a loose, brown, three-piece suit over a lithe and powerful body. What was striking to the non-commissioned officer on duty was that peculiarly relaxed gait that marked the approaching stranger as Australian. The stranger stood at ease. In a strong

Australian accent with an overlay of Irish lilt, in a voice as musical as the bush in summer, he identified himself, “Number 20, Corporal Patrick Cornelius Casey, 13th

Battalion; Sergeant … I‘ve been absent for some time.”

After being presented at AIF headquarters, Con was remanded to the officiall-closed Australian Military Prison, Lewes, which had earlier been used to hold the last of Irish who’d been interned after the Easter Rising. Among those imprisoned there had been Michael Collins, Frank Thornton, Pedar Clancy and the hunger strike martyr, Thomas Ashe. In its 20 months operation as the Australian

Military prison, Lewes also held an astonishingly disproportionate number of Irish

Catholic Diggers.8

At 1.9 metres and 100 kilograms, Con’s ‘soldier’s friend,’ as defence counsel in Courts Martial were colloquially called, was a giant of a man. A Gallipoli and

7 BMH.WS0883 - Lieut. Col. JM MacCarthy, Adjutant East Limerick Bde, p.44. 8 See above pp. 146-147. 209

Dunsterforce veteran, 9 2051 Sergeant John Deery 1st Battalion had been a law clerk before enlisting in early 1915, and he and Con had met before. They had both been in the Australian Dermal Hospital, Ismalia, undergoing treatment for VD when newspaper reports of the Easter Rising first appeared. Deery was also a

Catholic of Irish descent and had family at Bowraville in the Nambucca Valley immediately south of the Bellinger. After a cautious feeling out, he and Con had been able to speak at length about events in Dublin, as they tried to fathom the complexities of Irish politics and their relation to them as soldiers in what was at once the Australian Army and the Army of the King.

Deery soon put paid to Con’s notion of claiming to be a P.O.W. – German record keeping was too good for them to get away with that one. With Con’s record, Deery was sure he could get the charge of “Desertion” reduced to the lesser one of “Illegal Absence”. Con should keep his mouth shut and plead “Guilty” – there was no point disputing that he was Illegally Absent from 27 August 1917 till

27 October 1919 and, moreover, the authorities were in such a hurry to get home that there was, in effect, a general amnesty. He should let his record speak for him.

The war was over, at least the one the AIF was directly involved in, and the last thing the Army wanted was the responsibility of keeping prisoners in peace time.

Deery set about interviewing people still in London who were pertinent to Con’s case.

9 By 1918 soldiers from the various armies in the BEF were being specially selected for “Secret Service work” in Ireland, Palestine, and with the Dunsterforce in Persia and the Caucusus and Elope Force in Russia. White, TA, p. 116. 210

In the ensuing Court Martial at 51 Warwick Square on the first anniversary of Armistice Day, Friday 11 November 1919, Sgt. Martin Thomas Brophy, formerly of the 23rd Battalion read out the Charge Sheet to the court:

The accused No.20 Corporal Patrick Cornelius Casey, 13th Battalion, a

soldier of the Australian Imperial Forces [sic] is charged with:- {Section

15(1)a Army Act} WHEN ON ACTIVE SERVICE ABSENTING HIMSELF

WITHOUT LEAVE in that he – in the Field on the 27th August 1917

absented himself without leave and remained so absent until he

surrendered himself to the Military Authorities in London at 3 p.m. on the

27th October 1919.10

A clerk before enlisting in 1915, Brophy had become attached to

Horseferry Road after losing an eye when the 2nd Division took Bullecourt in May

1917. He was sole witness for the prosecution. Brophy read out the Charge Sheet, the Certificate of Surrender and confirmed the identity of the prisoner in the dock as the man who had earlier “surrendered himself” at Harefield Hospital. Con declined to speak on his own behalf or even to call witnesses and reserved his defence. As Deery had predicted, he was found innocent of the charge of Desertion but guilty of Illegal Absence.

Before sentencing, Corporal Casey was asked if he wished to “make any statement in mitigation of punishment.” With Con’s “No”, Deery produced two documents which Sgt. Brophy also read out to the court and as he did so, the courtroom hushed and all eyes turned to the Defendant. Because Con was standing

10 NAA A471 10580 Casey, PC, Court Martial. 211

The official Statement of Mitigation from Con’s Court Martial record. The annotations are in the original and give clear indication of what mattered to the Court. (NAA A471, 10580 Casey PC 20, p. 4.)

212

on his record, Deery had made sure he looked his best. Though he had not yet received his medals, Con wore his corporal’s stripes and the brassard marked “SB” of the regimental stretcher bearer, as well as his eight campaign ribbons for the

Defence of Suez Canal, the Landing at Anzac, Defence of Anzac, Sari Bair, Pozieres,

Advance to the Hindenberg Line, Bullecourt and Messines. Of all the men in the courtroom, only Deery and Con wore the red chevron for service on Gallipoli, while

Con alone wore the bronze “A” for Anzac.11 He was the only one in the courtroom who had been at the historic landing on 25th April 1915.

The first document tendered was labelled exhibit “C” and signed by the

President of the Court, Colonel R. Dowse, ex 4th Division HQ, and Permanent

President of Courts Martial at AIF HQRS London. This, the only known record of

Con’s two nominations for the DCM and the “grievance” mentioned in the final paragraph, confirms the family legend of his fury over the allocation of medals after Messines. For the document, Deery must have been able to interview Lt. Col.

“Mad” Harry Murray just days before his triumphant embarkation for Australia with Generals Monash and Birdwood on 20 November 1919.

Brophy next read out exhibit “D”, which was handwritten by Colonel J.M.A.

Durrant under AIF letterhead. A professional soldier who had been with the 13th almost as long as Con, by late 1919 Durrant was acting Major General in charge of the Repatriation and Demobilisation Department. He addressed his handwritten letter of support for Con to Colonel Dowse personally:

I knew this N.C.O. in the 13th Battalion for over two years and during his

11 Australian soldiers wore a blue chevron for each year of service overseas but for Gallipoli this was substituted with a red. 213

Service with the unit his conduct was exemplary. He was distinguished for

courage and his fearless example; a splendid leader and one of the bravest

men I have seen in action.12

Corporal Casey was reduced to the rank of Private and sentenced to twelve months detention. Days later, when being confirmed by Brigadier General Jess,

Commandant AIF London, the sentence was reduced to six months. Later that month, it was further reduced “till date of embarkation” and when the Konigin

Luise sailed on 18 December 1919, Con was a free man and back on the payroll. He was among the very last of the AIF to return to Australia and, though he had been officially reduced to the ranks, on board and in almost all official correspondence throughout his life, he was still referred to as Corporal. This made him the second highest ranking 13th Battalion soldier on board.

It was a glorious Sydney summer day when the Konigin Luise rounded the

Heads and swung west to steam up Sydney Harbour. Among the riot of emotions that surged through the passengers were relief and, for many, disbelief at their own survival. The faces and names of the beloved dead were foremost in his mind as Con looked through tears at the sheer beauty of the Harbour. It was his little brother’s birthday – the only day John had drawn breath on this planet. As the ship docked at Woolloomooloo on Saturday, 7 February 1920, Con Casey was discharged from the AIF.

12 NAA A471, 10580 Casey PC 20, p. 7. 214

The life of a dairy farmer, such as it still is, meant that Con’s parents,

Michael and Annie, were not at dockside to greet him as he disembarked but, peering into the cheering crowd, he saw familiar faces smiling back at him. For a moment he was back in Glenanaar as he stared into the eyes of Uncle Martin, Aunt

Minnie and Uncle Jack but the Sydney sun soon pierced that reverie. Keeping his right hand in his trouser pocket – because of the missing first phalanx lost at

Quinn’s he would do this for the rest of his life – he raised his left arm and waved rapturously, along with the rest of the crowd. Together, the four of them strolled along Cowper Wharf Road to the Welcome Home Anzac Buffet at nearby Garden

Island.

There was no coastal steamer to bring Con back to Bellingen. The railroad had gone through in 1917, and as the sparkling steam engine rounded the bend and the Bellinger River winked and danced in the eucalypt haze, Con sensed that the world he was returning to was not the one he had left. It too had changed. The railway that had conquered The Bush and tethered it to the world had been built straight across the Bellinger River, so that the graceful watercraft that had nurtured and protected the Valley would never again traffic its waterway.

Con was about to turn thirty and despite all his experience he was a new man. He had seen the great worlds, both ancient and modern, had played his part in the greatest catastrophe human beings had yet visited on themselves, and had shown the courage and strength to choose for himself and act when the time needed. His was a lonely way, a long way, but in that journey he had discovered something in himself that was rock solid, something on which he could always

215

depend. The new challenge would be, as it was for those returning home all over the world, to return to peace and normality, to build a life for himself and the generations to come in what he knew with absolute certainty was his home. Con met and married Elvira de Costa later that same year. She was of mixed Australian ancestry but Belfast Presbyterian religion and despite the fact both her father and brothers were Orange Lodge members, to marry Con she converted to Catholicism.

Both Elvira and Con were already engaged when they met but their fiancées were far away. Together they had five children. Con’s war medals were passed on to his third child, my father Jim, and, when he died, in turn they were passed on to me.

Now, every April, my eldest son, Aydan, proudly wears his great grandfather’s war medals and I wear the medals of my other grandfather, Jack Gaffney – who never marched on Anzac Day because he believed it was glorifying war – as we march together with the Descendants of the Veterans of WWI.

When the Konigin Luise sailed on the 18 December, it was just five days before the last standard Australian troopship embarked for home. By the time the

Great War finally finished, 330,000 Australians had served overseas. Of these,

60,000 never returned and 80,000 were discharged in Australia as medically unfit

(MU), with varying degrees of disability. When the war finished, there were

167,000 Australian service personnel overseas: 87,000 in France and Belgium,

63,000 in the (dis)United Kingdom and 17,000 in Egypt.13

As Table 3, “Discharges Abroad” shows, a total of 7059 soldiers chose not to return to Australia for demobilisation and discharge. They were those among an

13 Scott, op.cit., p. 825. 216

unknown number who successfully applied for their discharges abroad.14 During the last years of the war, when the Repatriation Commission was being set up to oversee the second phase of repatriation – the return to normal life – cables and documents flew back and forth between Repatriation, the Defence Department and the Army authorities in London. When Defence was instructed to cease referring to the return of troops to Australia as “repatriation” as that term was being used in

Australia for the program of resettlement, this first phase came to be called

“demobilisation.”15

Table 3: DISCHARGES ABROAD16

Place of Discharge Officers Other Ranks Totals United Kingdm 629 5255 5844 Egypt 28 173 201 South Africa 3 32 35 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 2 Mesopotamia (Middle 1 East) Salonika (Greece) 3 America (including 3 Canada) India 32 Illegal Absentees 893 Total 6 6394 7059

As well as the issues of indiscipline and boredom occasioned by the often long wait for a ship back to Australia, a persistent cause of concern for the AIF and the Australian Government were the men who were not accounted for, the

14 There is no record (that I know of) of the number of soldiers who applied for their discharges abroad at the end of the war. However, Richardson Report 32 (NZEF) 7 February 1919 states: “A large number of applications is being received for discharge in this country. Every endeavour is being made to discourage men from taking their discharges here, but without success. No discharges are carried out without approval of NZ. The total number of discharges in UK to date is 776.” ANZ WA 231/11 “Reports by Maj. Gen. G.S. Richardson, GOC NZEF in UK.” P.10. 15 Ibid. p. 842-3. 16 NAA: A2487, 1920/2101 ‘Ineligibility of Deserters.’ The table is a facsimile of a handwritten one. 217

absentees – were they deserters or illegal absentees? What was their legal status and what would be their entitlements? The Army had to balance the books. By

September 1920, the number of Illegal Absentees had firmed to the 893 of Table 2 but before then a resolution of sorts was arrived at, on 29 December 1919, soon after the last troopship had sailed. Ruling 101 of the Repatriation Commission made the determination that “deserters from the Army or the Navy are not eligible for any benefits whatsoever”. Two weeks later it added:

A “deserter” is defined as one who has deserted from the Army or the

Navy and who has not had a discharge in the proper way. That is to say a

man who has his papers marked “A.W.L.” … Those who deserted for a

limited period and returned after receiving such punishment as was

considered necessary to meet the case and eventually received a

discharge in the ordinary way, are not intended to be considered as

“Deserters”.17

Hence my grandfather was okay – unlike 409 Garrett Fitzgerald of the 24

Bn. who also had a Court Martial but was later deemed ineligible for all his entitlements.18 Con was not a deserter but merely illegally absent for 26 months.

Surely however, from the time in Alexandria when he was slated to return to

Australia Medically Unfit (MU) but refused and, instead, returned to the 13th at

Anzac, he had already exceeded the original terms of his contract with the Army.19

In London, he turned himself in just in time. According to Senator Pearce, Minister

17 NAA: A2487, 1920/2101 ‘Ineligibility of Deserters.’ 18 NAA: B2455, 3910202 Fitzgerald G p.18 & 25. 19 NAA: C138, R104300, p. 156 – this is the only reference to Con’s offer of evacuation to Australia and is made, with reference to a Dr Ryan, simply to emphasise the seriousness of the wound for which Repat would not compensate him.

218

of Defence, “notices (were) published broadcast throughout the United Kingdom” that the process of demobilisation was drawing to a close.20 The NZPC War Diary for July 1919 records that their absentees totalled 357 and,

the following advertisement was published in 18 newspapers in Great

Britain and Ireland, and as a result about a dozen absentees of long

standing returned to Sling Camp .

Absentees of the New Zealand Force

All N.C.O’s or other ranks of the N.Z.E.F., who are absent without leave

will, unless they report to Headquarters, “A” Group, Sling Camp, on or

before July 31st, be struck off the strength of the N.Z.E.F., and will forfeit

all right to:–

1. Return passage to New Zealand.

2. Payment of War Gratuity.

3. Or any other privilige granted to the soldiers of the N.Z.E.F.21

So Con got all his entitlements, though, because he was reduced to the rank of Private, at a reduced rate. Despite his best efforts, his service to Ireland would prove costly to his future family. He was on a part pension almost from the time he arrived back in Australia. On board the Konigin Luise he was assessed at one fifth disability for his lost phalanx on Gallipoli and trench foot – he was already wearing a boot “(left foot) a couple of sizes too large.”22 He had to fight for his medals but he was awarded them. His 284 page repatriation file shows a non-stop battle for the rest of his life to secure his entitlements for the damage he suffered fighting for

20 Herald, (Melbourne), 9/9/20 21 ANZ WA152 Box 179 R23856665 op.cit. p. 10. 22 NAA: C138, R104300 Casey, Patrick Cornelius [WWI repatriation case file] p. 269. 219

Australia – he never got compensation for that wound to his right eye even though by 1940 he was blind in that eye. There were annual, and more often, trips to

Sydney in the ongoing struggle with Repat. Because of his trench foot in the

Somme winter of 1916, he required special boots made with a steel support and in

1931, at the height of the Great Depression, a medical certificate stated: “This man can not walk on ploughed ground.”23 Too bad that he was a farmer! Con was unable to get the pension for his eye, back, lungs, heart or knee until on his death bed when he finally was declared “Totally and Permanently Disabled” and the full pension was backdated 18 months to when it had last been rejected. “At least I can leave you that,” he was able to whisper through his wheezing lungs.

Unable to work the land or pay for help he was forced in 1938 to sell the beautiful farm at Bonneville he had selected before going to war and on which his father had built while he was away fighting; the farm where his five children were born; the house that still stands today. Unable, because of Federal

Government legislation, to name it “Lone Pine”, after both the battle and the massive pine that shadows the farmhouse in the afternoon, he named it “Lone

Fern.”24 His father, then in his 70s, moved into town but still worked his lands and

Con moved his family back to the original farm at Hydes Creek.

In a desperate appeal to the Minister in 1941, “to investigate (his) claim for loss of sight in right eye, and bad back,” Con also wrote:

Well it has come to this that I cannot carry on my work at the age of 52

23 Ibid. 24 War Precautions Act Repeal Act 1920 (Cth) , s 22 - authority to make the Protection of Word 'Anzac' Regulations 1921 (Cth) ('Anzac Regulations') 220

years as I am almost a cripple, and blind in one eye. So I wish you will see

that I get justice … I can assure you that I have played my part since my

return. I am a Justice of the Peace for 18 years and was Councillor Bellingen

Shire for 14 years but have now resigned owing to ill-health. I am also

Chairman of the Local Labour League and was a Director of the Local

Dairy Co. 25

The “part” he played since returning was that of a “pillar of the community.” At this late point in his short life, it almost sounds as though Con still believed “the game” was, or at least should be, fair. His appeal was again rejected.

Struggles with Repatriation for pension and other entitlements were common enough to be considered normal and that was exactly how Con wanted to be considered. On 16 August 1920, his Military Medal was presented in a special ceremony at Sydney’s Victoria Barracks by the Governor General. Amongst those

“unavoidably absent” – perhaps it was just the cows – was Corporal PC Casey, MM,

13th Battalion.26 Though he was always referred to as Corporal – even in most

Repat. Documents – in Bellingen cemetery, on his AIF headstone, unlike in his various obituaries, Con is condemned to eternity as Private PC Casey.

Fred McKenna’s story in New Zealand is remarkably similar to Con’s in

Australia. The family legend states that he was captured by the RIC in July 1919 when, only days after the raid on Connelly RIC Barracks, another job was cancelled because of the increased military presence. Unaware of the change of plans, Fred,

25 NAA: C138, R104300 op.cit. p.129. The Local Labour League was the term then used to designate Labor Party branch. 26 SMH 17/08/20. 221

according to family legend, walked straight into the trap, yet his service record states that, like Casey, he “surrendered himself” to authorities. But the the very last entry in the NZPC War Diary (July 1919) suggests there may have been more to it:

One man 61728 Pte. McKenna ,F.J. W.I.R., who was over 12 months

absent without leave, was known to be at Milltown, Co. Clare, Ireland, and

he was left unmolested until a patrol could be sent to Ireland to apprehend

him, or any other deserters who might be located. Owing to the expense of

sending such a patrol, this project was cancelled and the provost marshal,

Irish Command was requested to apprehend McKenna, and this was done.

An escort was despatched, and owing to the hostile attitude of the Sinn

Feiners in Co. Clare, the escort and prisoner had to be conveyed in an

armoured car from Ennis to Limerick.

According to McKenna’s own story, he had been a Captain in the

Sinn Fein “Army” for some time.27

At his Court Martial on 11 September, it was stated that Fred McKenna had

“surrendered himself to the Royal Irish Constabulary at Miltownmalbay (sic.), at

10.00 on the 29th day of July 1919.” So, somehow the RIC must have transported him the 30km to Ennis before he was picked up by the Britsh Army armoured car for the trip to Limerick and thence by train to Dublin from where he would have been ferried across the Irish Sea to England. While the final NZPC report states that he “was over 12 months absent” McKenna was found innocent of the charge of

“desertion” but guilty of “absenting himself without leave from November 30th

27 ANZ WA152 Box 179, 152d R23856665 “New Zealand Provost Corps – War Diary, 1 January – 31 July 1919 p.10. 222

1918 to July 29th 1919”.28 There seems to have been no mention of his being “a

Captain in the Sinn Fein ‘Army’”. Fred was given 120 days detention and served his sentence only until embarking on the Arawa when it sailed from Torquay on 5

October. But when the Arawa was only four days out of Auckland Harbour, Fred was involved in the incident with Michael Brennan, O/C East Clare Brigade, at

Ennis Convent as recounted by his cousin, Mother Lelia.29 It seems Fred may have

‘slipped the ship’ before it sailed. But if he did, who sailed as Fred McKenna? For the rest of their lives, the two brothers Fred and Frank – both of whom seem almost interchangeable in the BMH Witness Statements – were “as thick as thieves.”

Through his Court Martial, Fred was reconciled to his army and did eventally return to his country. But Fred McKenna was never fully repatriated.

Despite the financial support of his father, the farm he was given to work and the family that he made for himself, Fred never really settled back into normal life nor did he ever complete his legal studies that had been interrupted by the war. Fred remained a great reader all his life and like Con was sometimes described as a

‘gentleman farmer.’ Both became inveterate Anzac day marchers.

When he died in December 1978, Fred’s daughters, Margaret and Colleen, overheard a revealing conversation between their mother, Daphne, and the undertaker at Patea: “I don’t know whether he can have an RSA grave” they heard

Daphne saying, “he fought with the IRA.”30

28 ANZ 18805/R10925303, “MCKENNA, Frederick James – WWI 61728 – Army” p. 4. 29 Cf. P. 115. 30 Returned Soldiers Association (NZ). 223

“Oh that was a long time ago and we just won’t say anything about it,” the undertaker reassured her. Not only did Fred McKenna get his war grave, he also got the stripes back that he had surrended in France “at his own request.”31 He was buried as 61728 Sergeant Frederick James McKenna. This overheard snippet of conversation was the first Marg and Colleen had ever heard of their father’s Irish adventures. It left an indelible mark on them both.32

In classifying the status of those Australian soldiers still overseas in late

1920, Defence and Repat determined that “The ex-members of the Australian

Imperial Force referred to … (could) be divided into three classes”.33 If, on the other hand, we consider as one category those Diggers who helped the Irish with sales or donations of weapons or training the Volunteers while on leave, Australian soldiers who “fought for Ireland” can be divided into five different categories – according to how they dealt with the Ireland. The second category was composed of those, like Casey and McKenna, who went AWL and then returned (voluntarily or not) before their Army HQRS were disbanded in England. Consequently, they were involved – unless they subsequently returned to Ireland – in the early days of the War of Independence. The Australians in this second category were

(t)hose who reported before 31st March (1920) forfeited pay for the full

period of their absence without leave, but were placed on pay from the date

of reporting and repatriated by the first available boat.34

31 ANZ R10925303 MCKENNA, Frederick James – WWI 61728 – Army, p. 4. 32 Interview with Marg and Colleen McKenna, 29/11/2013. 33 The designation “ classes” is used by both Repatriation and Defence in NAA: MP367/1, 632/10/2224 op.cit. Italics added for emphasis. 34 Ibid.. 224

The third category (equivalent the Repat and Defence’s first class of men still in London by September 1920) consisted of men like Jim Gorman, Dick Hurley,

Jeremiah and William McSweeney, 50 other Irish-born Catholic Diggers and an unknown number of Australian soldiers of Irish descent who were among the 893

Illegal Absentees listed in Table 2 above. They were dismissed as deserters at

AIFHQ London on April Fool’s Day 1920, when the army was balancing the books.

This decision was … based on a recommendation of the Commandant, AIF

Headquarters, London, pointing out the necessity of finalising the Records

of such men in order to complete the winding up and demobilisation of the

AIF.35

Their Service Records were then stamped:

and their names recorded on the “’Secret punishment lists which are furnished (to

Repat.) by the Defence Department” referred to in Ruling 101 of the Repatriation

Commission.

When it was subsequently found that, under the Defence Act 1903, a soldier could not be discharged as a deserter without either a Court Martial or signed confession, the April Fools discharges were stamped “CANCELLED’ and the service records were stamped instead: “in accordance with an order issued by the

35 Ibid. 225

Governor General in Council under section 44 (2) of the Defence Act”. On 22 July the Governor–General, the Commander in Chief of Australia’s armed forces, formally discharged as Illegally Absent all soldiers not yet accounted for. This applied to all who had been continuously AWL for more than three calendar months immediately prior to 21 July 1920.36

DISCHARGED IN CONSEQUENCE OF being

ILLEGALLY ABSENT FROM ( date) TO 21/7/20. C OF A GAZETTE No. 61 DATED 22/7/20

Those who reported after 31st March, 1920, “forfeited pay for the full period of their absence and were discharged the same day.”37

From as early as August 1919, newspaper articles began appearing in

Australia about difficulties faced by Australian soldiers demobilised in London.

Throughout 1920 reports trickled into Australia referring to distressed Diggers in

London.38 By November this had grown to a torrent, with newspaper headlines about Diggers starving in the streets: “Penniless Diggers”,39 “Starving in

London”40and “Repentant Soldiers, Deserters Desire to Return.”41 In Federal

Parliament Alexander Hay, Labor MHR for New England, drew the attention of the

Assistant Minister of Defence, Granville Ryrie, to “the fact that there are many

36 C. of A. Gazette No.61, 22/7/20. 37 NAA: MP367/1, 632/10/2224 op.cit. 38 ”Diggers Loose (sic.) Their Jobs”, Golburn Evening Penny Post, 30/08/19, p. 4. 39 Herald (Melbourne), 16/11/20 40 Riverine Herald, 30/11/20, p. 2. 41 Herald (Melbourne), 9/9/1920. 226

thousands of … former members of the AIF … stranded in London, and the only crime which it is reported they have committed is that they did not report themselves for repatriation on the prescribed date.” While it was no doubt correct that a number of the Diggers had been discharged Illegally Absent because “they did not report themselves … on the prescribed date,” there were other reasons, darkly hinted at by Ryrie in his reply:

Every consideration will be given these men. Everything will be done to

repatriate all those who are deserving of such consideration. There are

some, unfortunately, who, I understand, are not deserving of it, but

everything possible will be done to repatriate those deserving of it.42

Two days later, Frank Brennan, Labor MHR for Batman, asked the Prime

Minister whether:

… ex-servicemen in Great Britain who, for some reason or another, have not

been considered worthy of repatriation are presenting themselves at the

Australian offices there, in a state of absolute indigence and starvation. If so

has the Prime Minister got into communication with the authorities in

London with a view to seeing that those men are not allowed to starve on

the other side of the world? Even if they were convicted of crimes, we are

bound to assist them under the circumstances.43

But the Adelaide Daily Herald had earlier reported, “members of the (AIF) who were serving sentences under English common and criminal laws (were) to be repatriated in February.”44 The “circumstances” referred to by Brennan were, of

42 Hansard 22/09/1920. 43 Hansard 24/09/1920. 44 “Diggers To Be Freed”, Daily Herald (Adelaide) 6/2/1920, p.5. 227

course, that even though the Australian Government no longer had a legal obligation to assist these last Diggers in London, there was an obvious moral obligation to the men who had risked their lives fighting for the country. But

Hughes sidestepped that question and focused instead on:

the case of a man with a criminal record … who has refused every

opportunity offered, though, goodness knows, they have been numerous

enough, to present himself for repatriation, and now declares himself as

stranded and starving. … We will not permit the good name of Australia to be

dragged in the mire, even by such men, but see that they do not starve.45

This last sentence was picked up in the press and trumpeted around the country. There was no questioning the cynical motives that the Government would act, not on behalf of the men who had fought for the country, but so that the world would not know Australia’s shame; there was only praise for the Government and relief that something would be done.

They would see that the good name of Australia was not dragged in the

mire even by these men. They would see that these men did not starve.46

The offer of repatriation was re-opened for ex-servicemen of “suitable” character – third-class fares for enlisted men and a better class of fare for that better class of men, the officers. The three classes were:

1. those (like Gorman and Hurley) discharged as illegally absent,

2. others (like Mike McGrath) discharged when demobilised in London,

45 Ibid. Italics added for emphasis. 46 Age, 25/09/20. 228

3. others again who, unable to get their discharge in London, had

returned to Australia for their discharge (and their entitlements)

and soon after returned to the centre of the world.47

These three “classes” correspond to the third, fourth and fifth categories of

Australian servicemen who were then still fighting in Ireland.

Table 4: Irish-born Diggers Discharged Abroad48

Discharges RC Other (non RC) Total RC as % As Deserter 54 9 63 87% In London 74 95 169 44% Total 128 104 236 56%

Table 4, “Irish-born Diggers Discharged Abroad”, compares the number of

Irish-born Catholic Diggers legally Discharged in London with those discharged

Illegally Absent (initially Discharged as Deserter) and contrasts these figures with all other (non-Catholic) Irish born Diggers. The first striking contrast is between the number of Catholic Diggers discharged Illegally Absent (Deserter), 54, and the number of non-Catholics similarly discharged, nine. While Catholics made up 60 percent of the number of Irish-born Diggers,49 they constituted a massive 87 per cent of those discharged Illegally Absent. As already established, an unknown number of those discharged both legally and as “deserters” were actually engaged fighting for Ireland’s independence. Had these figures been published in Australia during the war, they most certainly would have lent weight to the recurrent

47 NAA: MP367/1, 632/10/2224 op.cit. 48 These figures are derived from NAA: B2455 Ireland, “Irish born enlistments in the AIF” 49 See Appendix, Table 4. 229

complaints about Irish Catholic disloyalty. Even if the newspapers had known these figures, however, they may not have been able to publish them as under the

War Precautions Act,

The press was “requested to refrain from publishing” any matter likely to

“reflect upon the loyalty of our Irish fellow-subjects, or to incite adverse

criticism of their action, or to impair the essential unity of the British

Empire.”50

But of course not all Irish-born Diggers who went AWL in Ireland joined the

IRA and fought against British occupation. The brothers William and Jeremiah

McSweeney, who had enlisted at Sydney Showgrounds with Dick Hurley the day before the first conscription referendum back in 1916, both went AWL to Ireland in 1918 – Jeremiah broke the blockade on leave to Ireland in July 1918 travelling disguised as a priest.51 Neither became actively engaged in the independence struggle, though Jeremiah was “manhandled” when a party of Black and Tans surprised IRA men drinking in a Newcestown pub where he was working in

1920.52 Both, however, did live another kind of secret. Neither told their families that they had enlisted and fought in the Australian Army. Until today, their families knew that the brothers had emigrated to Australia but not that they had enlisted in the AIF. Despite the enormous celebrity of ex-British soldiers like Tom Barry, who led the West Cork Flying Column against the British and commanded the 1st

Southern Division during the Civil War, after the bitterness of the War of

Independence, the Treaty and subsequent Civil War, service to the Crown was not something to crow about in newly “independent” Ireland.

50 Scott op.cit. p.66. 51 Hurley correspondence. 52 Crowley, op.cit. p.308. 230

The other anomaly of Table 4 is the contrast between the number of Irish- born Catholics legally discharged in London (64) with the number of Irish-born non-Catholics (79). Given that Catholics made up 60 percent of Irish-born soldiers in the AIF who served overseas, it is striking that they made up only 44 percent of those who managed to get demobilised (legally discharged) in London. While it might be argued that the numbers would be closer if the two classes of discharged soldiers were simply added together, showing that Catholics made up 56 percent of the total number discharged overseas, what will be seen to be the immensely different consequences of the two types of discharge would allow the simple addition to camouflage the real issues revealed in these figures.

Table 3 “Discharges Abroad” (p. 207) shows that 12.7 per cent of all

Australian soldiers discharged abroad were discharged as Illegal Absentees while it also reveals that 87 percent of Irish-born Catholics discharged abroad were likewise discharged. As Table 2 “Timetable of Irish-born Catholic Desertions from the AIF” (p. 127) demonstrates, only four Irish-born Catholic Diggers deserted after November 1918, so it cannot be argued that the rest deserted because they could not get demobilised in London – they had already disappeared.

To attain his discharge when demobilised in London, a soldier had to demonstrate that there was no objection from dependants in Australia and that he had guaranteed work. The statistical anomaly that just 44 per cent of Irish-born

Diggers discharged when demobilised in London were Catholic would seem to support the contention that the Australian authorities were fully cognisant of their

231

troops’ active engagement in Ireland. It would seem that the army authorities at

AIFHQ London made it difficult for Irish-born Catholics to get their discharges in

London; the AIF would, understandably, have been reluctant to release armed, battle-hardened, Irish-Australian soldiers into the escalating situation in Ireland.

The third class of ex-servicemen referred to as “starving on the streets of

London” in September 1920 was composed of men who could not get their discharges overseas. In order to complete their contracts with the AIF and attain their entitlements, these men returned to Australia where they were discharged from the army and then “returned to England either at their own expense or assisted by the Repatriation Department.”53 Not all these men, of course, were involved in Irish causes; some were drawn back to the sites of the most extraordinary events of their lives, to the centre of the world, some had reconnected with their old lives, some war-brides could not settle in Australia and insisted on returning to Britain, others had relationships and the possibility of new lives in Britain, Ireland, Europe and elsewhere. The trouble for those Diggers in

Britain was there was very little work and, for what little there was, despite the

Empire Loyalty Australia had displayed in the war, preference was rightly given to demobilised British soldiers.54 Not all those soldiers who sailed back after their discharge in Australia “returned to England” – some went straight back to Ireland.

Among these were two Dublin-born demobilised Diggers: 818 Driver John O'Neill of the Australian Army Veterinary Corps and 1914 veteran, No 26 Gunner James

Joseph Hancock 11th Field Artillery Brigade (FAB).

53 NAA: MP367/1, 632/10/2224 op.cit. 54 Ibid. 232

O’Neill, who had enlisted in Brisbane back in March 1916, left England for

Australia in July 1919. He was discharged in Sydney in December but reappears in the records as “collateral damage” in an IRA ambush that occurred around midday on 6 March 1921. He was working as a chauffeur for a Dublin tea merchant, driving a party to Portmarnock Golf Course. When the car he was driving neared the ambush site moments before a British military vehicle travelling from the other direction, the IRA opened fire with rifles and grenades. O’Neill was killed instantly.

Others in his car were wounded. The military lorry accelerated through the carnage without casualty.55 O’Neill’s service record contains a letter from his

Dublin solicitor stating simply that he was “killed in an ambush on the 6th March,

1921.”56

Hancock’s is a completely different kind of experience – there are more details but they are even sketchier. A printer by trade, he first enlisted in

Townsville in the 11th Light Horse and was attached to the Regimental HQ. He seemed to avoid most of the fighting by, as they used to say, “swinging the lead”. He was hospitalised for Christmas 1916 with dysentery and a fractured ankle, after which he was posted to Administrative HQ at Horseferry Road. He refused to have a hernia treated and this meant he couldn’t be sent back to the Front. In January

1918, Hancock attended British Army HQ at Aldershot for gunnery instruction.

Apparently he was very good and spent the whole of the year with the Royal

Artillery where he was promoted to the rank of Bombadier. In April, 1919, he

55 NAA: B2455 ONeill, John p.22 and Great War Forum, “Killed in Ireland in 1921” http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=76392 5/6/07 – 19/2/10 (viewed 18/06/13) and Irish Times 7/3/21. 56 NAA: B2455 O’Neill, John, p.22. 233

married in Dublin and then returned to Australia where he was discharged in

October.57

On 24 January 1921, Hancock disembarked from the S.S. Berrima in London with his wife, Bridget Mary and three month old Elizabeth. They then returned to

Ireland where he reputedly served with the 3rd Battalion Dublin Brigade.58 It is somewhat surprising that such a well-trained soldier would have left no mark on his unit, but there appears to be no record of Hancock’s actions until the Civil War.

As Tim Horgan, the historian of the County Kerry IRA, puts it:

Hancock is a difficult character to understand. Most Australians or

Americans who fought with the Republicans were motivated by a

commitment to the Irish cause by either ancestry or idealism and usually it

required both. However Hancock did not appear to have any Republican

motivation and it would have been a little strange for him to leave a

reasonably good AIF record behind to enter an underground army which

was unlikely to succeed. In spite of his obvious military qualifications, he

was not prominent in the Dublin IRA and this is when most of the

Volunteers were untrained tradesmen and lower level professionals. He

surely should have stood out but obviously did not. It was only in the Civil

War that he came to prominence and even then his activities were deeply

suspect.59

57 NAA: B2455, Hancock, James Joseph. 58 Private correspondence with Irish IRA historians Tim Horgan and Padraig O Ruairc. 59 Tim Horgan private correspondence 27/01/13 234

By 1918, soldiers from all the armies in the BEF were being selected and asked to volunteer for “Hush Hush” missions. The Dunsterforce that John Deery was involved in was one of these missions, as was the Elope Force dispatched to

Archangel in northern Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. Both had soldiers from the

British, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian armies. Rumours in the AIF also related to Diggers being canvassed for Secret Service work in Ireland.

On the 6th (January 1918) volunteers were called for from among the

Officers and certain N.c.o’s (sic) for Secret Service work. These were to be

prepared to sever connection with the A.I.F., to do without correspondence

for an indefinite period and to be able to endure the extremes of heat or

cold … no one had the slightest idea … some saying the Lebanons …some

Ireland …60

In his diary of his time with Elope, Sgt. John Kelly of the 30th Battalion AIF echoes 2052 Pte George Davis regretting his presence in Dublin during the Easter

Rising. Kelly wrote: “None of us had any heart for the Russian campaign … We had no right to be there.”61 While there have been a number of memoirs written by

Dunsterforce and Elope officers, Australia’s secret operations in Ireland have never been revealed; perhaps they were just rumours like those other tales of the plethora of Australian and New Zealand tram and train drivers in Dublin – if they were just rumours! The suspicion remains today, at least for historians of the “old”

IRA, that Hancock might have been one of these British operatives.62 A fleeting figure, he seems to hang back in the shadows with his hernia and his limp and his

60 White, TA op.cit, p. 116. 61 AWM PR85/324 Kelly John RC (Sergeant) memoir. 62 Correspondence with Padraig O’Ruairc 23/01/13 and Tim Horgan 24&27/01/13 235

time at Aldershot with his gunnery qualifications, avoiding the fighting until the

Civil War when he quickly climbs the ranks of the Free State Army. Then, in that horrid time, Hancock emerged into his own sulphurous limelight as a National

Army commander in County Kerry, involved in some of the worst atrocities – most notoriously as O/C during the Clashmealcon Caves incident – of that atrocious war.

Perhaps this hypothetical involvement in Secret Service in Ireland could explain the urgency in deleting all reference to John Thomas Walsh’s AWL and subsequent Court Martial for training the Irish Volunteers. His record with the AIF would certainly indicate that he was a man who was not alienated from his masters. He skipped the rank of Sergeant (from which he was demoted at his Court

Martial) when promoted Lieutenant after transfer to AIFHQ London and regained that rank when recommissioned at the start of WWII. The timing of the Court

Martial, between the APC’s survey of Diggers in Ireland and subsequent posse, would be ideal for undercover intelligence work. Was Walsh using family connections to infiltrate the local Volunteer companies inadvertently captured by the local RIC? Of course this is speculation – he might just as easily have been, as he was tried for, training the IV – but the facts of his Court Martial and subsequent deletion of it from his record are not. Perhaps, he changed the details of his service record himself while employed throughout much of 1919 at AIFHQ London. There is no evidence at the National Archives of Australia of Walsh’s Court Martial nor is there any evidence of the Court Martial of either 2456 John Levy “Jack” O’Connor,

3rd Bn. or his brother 646 Colin Campbell O’Connor, 4th MGBn. even though, the

O'Connor family memory in Ireland today still insists that one of the brothers was

236

court martialled for assaulting a British officer whilst visiting relatives in County

Clare in 1917.63

The last window through which to legitimately climb back into Australia was firmly shut when the offer of free third-class passage to Diggers stranded in the UK was closed down at the end of 1922. But not all Australian soldiers had returned by then. Certainly those caught up in the Civil War still raging in Ireland were not free to return, at least until later in 1923. Had Mike McGrath known about that extended offer of repatriation to Australia, and that it would be withdrawn at the close of 1922, would he have taken it and brought his fiancée out to Australia as he so desperately wanted to? Or would he have felt compelled to see out the

Civil War in Ireland; to stand beside his mates till the bitter end just as he had done with the Australian Army in France, before serving in Ireland?

Certainly, there were Irish-born Diggers who returned to Australia after

1923. They travelled concurrently with the new Irish diaspora of defeated

Republicans like Jim Gorman, who took his family to the USA, and Con Casey’s

Uncle Patrick, who was brought out to Australia and set up on a farm in the

Bellinger Valley by his three Australian brothers and from whose descendants I have garnered many of the scraps of Con’s story. I cannot say for certain whether or not all those late returning Diggers were involved in the fighting in Ireland but, because they have much in common with those who did, they can serve as exemplars of the treatment meted out to Australian soldiers who had gone AWL before the end of the continental war and then turned up in Australia after the

63 Correspondence with Liam O’Connor, 6//11/13. 237

close of free passage to Australia at the end of 1922. Their experience answers the question the descendants of Jim Gorman, Mike McGrath, Dick Hurley and other

Australian soldiers who did not return from Ireland have asked till this day. What would it have been like for them if they had returned to Australia?

As stated, in Order 101 of the Repatriation Commission – set up before the end of the war to look after the ‘welfare’ of veterans and their families – Australian soldiers who were dismissed as Illegally Absent at the close of the demobilisation of the AIF were denied all their entitlements: medals, gratuity, pension, medical and any other assistance. Their names were placed on the “Secret List.”

While in Britain employment preference given to demobilised British soldiers had left Australian soldiers destitute on the streets of London, employment preference for returned soldiers in Australia meant that, in order to work, a man needed his discharge papers. To get those papers, a man who had been discharged as an Illegal Absentee in the Governor General’s Proclamation, was forced to sign a confession of the more serious charge of Desertion. His discharge papers were then stamped “DISCHARGED IN CONSEQUENCE OF A

PROCLAMATION OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL, 22 JULY, 1920.” It is doubtful that this would have been much help to a man seeking employment in those days when work was hard to come by and the country was struggling to absorb massive numbers of returned soldiers.

If a soldier was lucky enough to come from a family that owned a farm or had a business he might be spared the necessity of looking for work. Fremantle

238

born and bred 4674 Private John Patrick McKenna had enlisted in the 14th

Reinforcement of the 16th Battalion in Perth in November 1915.64 He was hospitalised in England with Trench Fever in March 1918 and, after two years and

177 days service, went AWL from Hurdcott Depot. There is no record of his return to Australia and he was among those absentees discharged in the Governor

General’s Proclamation in 1920. Then in April 1923, in reply to a standard inquiry from Base Records about McKenna’s whereabouts, his mother sent a simple but defiant letter “In regards to your enquiries about John Patrick McKenna I have to advise you that he is at present at the above address.”65 This was the same address

McKenna had given for his next of kin, his father, when he enlisted. McKenna worked with his brother in the family carting business, and voted in Australian elections until his death in 1971.66 These men were not hunted down; if they could survive without the need for employment, well and good.

As late as July 1935, 3775 Private Patrick McCarthy was applying to Base

Records through Lismore solicitor, Mr K. A. Sullivan, for his “Discharge Certificate,

War Medals and deferred pay.” Sullivan did manage to get McCarthy his deferred pay and wrote:

(h)e is a very decent hardworking chap … and I respectfully suggest that in

making out his Certificate of Discharge no reference be made thereon to the

fact of his having been absent unless it is essential that this should be done,

so that the certificate may assist him in obtaining employment.67

Attached to Sullivan’s letter was McCarthy’s Statutory Declaration in which he did:

64 Apparently unrelated to the NZ McKennas. 65 NAA: B2455 McKenna, JP, p.33. 66 Commonwealth Electoral Rolls 1916, 25,31, 36, 37 and 43 and death certificate 4215/71. 67 NAA: B2455, McCarthy , P. p.8. Italics added for emphasis. 239

solemnly and sincerely declare

THAT (he) served in the Australian Imperial Force as No. 3775 of the 49th

Battalion (and)

THAT (he) deserted from the Australian Imperial Force on the 22n

February, 1918 (sic).”68

Despite Sullivan’s plea, McCarthy’s Discharge Certificate was “in accordance with the regulations … endorsed with the reason for discharge.”69

It is difficult not to see this manipulation of a man’s need to find work, by insisting he confess desertion, when previously he had been dismissed on the lesser charge of illegal absence, so that he may obtain a discharge certificate with a stamp stating he had been dismissed “in accordance with an order issued by the

Governor General in Council under section 44 (2) of the Defence Act”, that is, as an illegal absentee, as malicious. It seems there was a determination that those

Diggers whose names had been placed on the Secret List were to be punished unto death. Doubtless they were, despite having fought for Australia, in the words of the

Member for Kooyong, “the enemy within the gates.”

For those Australian soldiers who had fought for Ireland, this was an undeclared punishment for a crime that was never stated, a crime that did not

(officially? Certainly not publicly!)) exist. Surely, if as MHR Hay said, in his question to the Assistant Defence Minister, that “the only crime which it is reported they have committed is that they did not report themselves for repatriation on the prescribed date,” then the punishment far outweighed the crime and seems a

68 Ibid. p.16 69 Ibid. p.7. 240

draconian treatment of men who had freely volunteered and risked their lives fighting for their country. While there may have been men with criminal records in the UK, they made up such a small portion of the Diggers stranded in London that one wonders exactly what were the crimes so darkly hinted at by Ryrie and

Hughes in their replies in the House.

So what is really going on here? When I first embarked on the research for this project in search of my grandfather’s lost years in Ireland, historians told me it never happened, that there was no involvement of Australian soldiers in Ireland’s

War of Independence. It seems that even the remotest possibility of it happening had never even been considered, or perhaps it was just so inconsequential that it was ignored until forgotten. Yet, as history repeatedly shows (as happened with

Croatian Australians during the break-up of Yugoslavia and as is happening in

Syria and Iraq today,) when the ancestral country is in strife, people will return to defend it. And yet, after almost 100 years there has never been a word written about this phenomenon – neither in Ireland nor Australia. In Ireland, individuals like Jim Gorman, Dick Hurley and Mike McGrath are commemorated individually as soldiers who fought for Ireland but in Australia the silence has been extraordinary.

Not one single person has admitted knowledge of this nor is there one single document relating to it. There is, however, a very selective group of documents missing from the archives. These include, but are not limited to: the British Army letter requesting the APC to set up a post in Ireland and the Williams Report of July

1918 after the roundup of absentees in Ireland. Corresponding with that missing

Report, in AWM25 233/6 PART 52 which contains yearly reports and police reports for 1918, there is a gap from June to September – the exact period for

241

detailing the arrests, imprisonment and Courts Martial of the men arrested by the

Williams’ posse in Ireland.

The silence of men like my grandfather who returned to Australia is, in the circumstances, understandable. They, like the rest of Australia’s Irish quarter, wanted to get on as Australians. This by no means always meant forgetting where they came from but it certainly meant, in the circumstances then pertaining in

Australia, not proclaiming their loyalty to Ireland. There is no evidence that these men had been radicalised; they didn’t return to Australia bent on its overthrow, there was no ideology underpinning their actions in Ireland other than a natural love of family, a supposedly Australian love of freedom and democracy and a belief that even Ireland deserved a Fair Go!

The Australia they returned to, the nation that, the “core narrative” suggests, was born on the foothills of Gallipoli, was still ruled by Hughes as both

Prime Minister and Attorney General and his War Precautions Act. On 21 March

1918, in response to the Melbourne St. Patrick’s Day Parade that had

Mannix as a central figure, a float depicting the ‘martyrs of the Easter

Rising’ and Sinn Fein banners much in evidence (and at which) Mannix was

alleged not to have acknowledged the National Anthem. A loyalist protest

rally on 21 March sent a delegation to Prime Minister Hughes who agreed to

act against ‘Sinn Fein’.70

70 O’Farrell, p.p. 273-4. 242

Almost immediately, new regulation 27A was inserted into the War Precautions

Regulations 1915 by Statutory Rule number 86 of 1918. This made sedition a

Commonwealth offence:

Any person who by word of mouth or in writing or by any act or deed:

a. advocates, incites, or encourages disloyalty or hostility to the British

Empire or to the cause of the British Empire in the present war; or

b. advocates the dismemberment of the British Empire, or who says or does

anything calculated to incite encourage or assist such disloyalty or hostility,

shall be guilty of an offence against the Act.71

Regulation 27A definitely had Australian support for Irish Independence

(and Indian, Egyptian and Middle Eastern) squarely in its sights; to proclaim that support was ipso facto to “advocate the dismemberment of the British Empire” and the arrests of the men who were then interned in Darlinghurst Jail began soon after. When the War Precautions Act was eventually repealed in November 1920, the sedition provisions were moved into the 1920 amendments to the Crimes Act and by proclamation in the Customs Act. Hughes, however, assured the Parliament

“that actions done ‘in good faith’ (new subsection 24A [2]) ‘will give ample freedom to the citizens of this country to obtain redress for all grievances, and to secure by lawful means any reforms which they may deem necessary.’”72 After his use of the powers during the war and in the two years since it had finished, there were many Australians whom this did not reassure.

71 As quoted in Roy Jordan In Good Faith: Sedition Law in Australia, e-brief update of 13/09/2006, p.2 ,“Parliament of Australia” (viewed 4/11/11). 72 Senate and House of Representatives, Debates, 22 November 1920, pp. 6790-6791 in ibid. p.2. 243

When there was ‘vigorous debate’ in the House about making the sedition provisions permanent with some claiming that they were unnecessary and liable to be used by the Government for political purposes, Sir Robert Best, Nationalist

Member for Kooyong and Irish-born Anglican Loyalist declared that the recent war had highlighted enemies of the state within, and that

the Australian soldier fought for the unity and safety of the British Empire,

and is not going to stand quietly by and see Australia or the Empire assailed

or menaced in the way that has been attempted. 73

With that, Best attempted to silence the debate. The argument that Australian soldiers fought for the British Empire has been used to stifle debate in Australia ever since.

None of this can have been very reassuring to Australians supporting

Ireland’s right to independence, as only days before the passing of the Crimes Act amendments Hughes had expelled the Member for Kalgoorlie, Hugh Mahon, from

Federal Parliament. As far back as 1907, Mahon had engineered the petition to the

King for Irish Home Rule and, after Hughes replaced Fisher as PM, had become acting Attorney General during Hughes’ long tour of Britain in 1916. In response to the death by hunger strike of Terence McSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, in an English prison Mahon attacked British rule in Ireland as “this bloody and accursed despotism” at an open air meeting in Melbourne on 7 November.74 On 12

November, the House of Representatives passed a motion that Mahon had made

“seditious and disloyal utterances at a public meeting” and was “guilty of conduct

73 Ibid. 74 Quoted in Gibbney, H.J., “Mahon, Hugh (1857–1931) in Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) Volume 19, MUP, 1986. 244

unfitting him to remain a member of this House and inconsistent with the oath of allegiance which he has taken as a member of this House.”75

It was created to prosecute the war, but the misuse of the War Precautions

Act for political purposes, particularly during the Conscription Referenda, was a recurrent theme throught the period of its existence. It was also designed to make issues disappear, to repress them. But as the twentieth century has shown, denial may be a convenient mechanism for dealing with difficult issues but it does not resolve them; it merely drives them underground.

Why rake over the past? Why open up old wounds? In the twenty first century, steps have been taken towards reconciliation between Britain and Ireland and within Ireland itself. The First Australians have Land Rights and the Rudd

Government made its Apology to the Stolen Generation for previous policies of child removal. But silence still reigns over the issues of Australia’s divided loyalties during World War I. The total control of media under the War Precautions

Act and Customs Act was unprecedented in the nation’s short history. It enabled the

Hughes Government to drip feed information to the Australian people with two over-riding imperatives: that information must not put military operations at risk and must not impede recruitment. Nothing could be permitted to do either. It was with this second imperative and with enormous censorship powers that the legend of Anzac began to be shaped.

75 Ibid. Mahon became the only MP ever to be expelled since, under Section 8 of the Parliamentary Privileges Act, 1987, neither house of Parliament now has the power to expel a member. Twomey, Anne,”The Expulsion or Suspension of Federal MPs” in Constitutional Critique, U.Syd., http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/cru/2012/05/the_expulsion_or_suspension_of.html – viewed 5/8/13. 245

When Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the Englist war correspondent whose dispatches from Gallipoli first sang the Anzac legend into being, arrived in

Australia on a speaking tour in February 1916 he found himself intimidated and confronted by a military censor at each and every talk he made. Ashmead-Bartlett had composed what has since become known as the Murdoch Letter denouncing the conduct of the campaign. That this letter resulted in the sacking of Hamilton and the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula and thus saved many lives from the coming winter had not impressed the Australian authorities. Ashmead-Bartlett complained that he was “handicapped here far more by the censorship than in

England.”76

This need to control the conversation continues today with the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) and its Anzac Centenary Advisory Board (ACAB). As we approach the Centenary of Anzac and Ireland begins its Decade of Commemoration there can be no greater imperative than the sharing of stories and the telling of truths. No one voice, no matter how loud or well-funded, can be permitted to dominate the conversation. Though it controls commercial use of the name, the

DVA does not own Anzac; it is Australia and New Zealand’s story – not the property of one Government department. The DVA’s current attempt to control a “core narrative” is doomed to fail just as Howard’s Settler Narrative collapsed in the face of Black Armband History because the partiality of the Settler Narrative involved a denial of history. The same will happen with the DVA’s attempt to construct a national narrative with Anzac if the narrative is less than comprehensive. If it excludes difficult truths.

76 As quoted in Robertson, Anzac and Empire, p.226. 246

Since the DVA has supplanted the RSL as the curator of “Anzac,” it has shown signs of moving away from the theme of Empire Loyalty to the more broadly inclusive freedom and democracy. But, freedom and democracy are exactly what these Diggers who fought for Ireland were fighting for. This is not meant to diminish the fact that dealing with the issue of its citizens engaging (unofficially) in other country’s wars is a complex and difficult task for any government. If, in the posited need for a national birth narrative, the DVA wishes to develop the Anzac narrative with the theme that Australia’s soldiers fought for freedom and democracy then, even though these men “deserted” from the Australian Army and fought against a country which was then our major ally, they cannot legitimately ignore these Australian soldiers who fought for exactly those values in Ireland. If on the other hand, it reverts to the narrative of Empire Loyalty, of King and Country, it can justifiably ignore these men even though they fought for Australia and, in

Ireland, were on the right side of history. But that theme of Empire Loyalty is hardly likely to have the inclusiveness desirable and necessary in a national narrative for a modern, pluralistic society like twenty-first century Australia, where the very fabric of the nation is woven with the combined loyalties of its peoples to both their new land and the lands from which they came.

There’s no having two bob each way on this one.

247

Many of Australia’s First World War soldiers did go off believing they were fighting, as NSW Premier Holman affirmed,77 for the ideals Asquith inherited from

Gladstone; that were first articulated with the First Home Rule Bill in 1886; and that Asquith articulated as British war aims on stage at the Princess Theatre

Dublin in 1914. But, by the end of the war, Asquith was no longer Prime Minister and the aims of the British Empire in the war had, as Sassoon pointed out in 1917, shifted markedly. By insisting, in Australia, that our soldiers fought for the British

Empire we rob them, and many others around the world, of the idealism and the hope for a better and more just world that so many fought (and are still fighting) for. We also insist on perpetuating what former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm

Fraser has called “a long-standing, deep-seated and self-crippling ‘craving’ for dependency on a great and powerful friend (which) is to be found at the very heart of … Australia’s ‘national psyche.’”78

77 See next page. 78 SMH, The Good Weekend, “Shifted Alliance”, 26/04,2014, p14. 248

Chapter 6

Saving the world for democracy

This is not a war for Empire, for territory, or for power. The nations of western

Europe are like honest men who want nothing except to live at peace with each other and the rest of the world.

W.A. Holman, NSW Labor/National Premier, SMH, 2 July 1915.

(T)he Australian soldier fought for the unity and safety of the British Empire, and is not going to stand quietly by and see Australia or the Empire assailed or menaced in the way that has been attempted.

Sir Robert Best, Liberal/National Party and Member for Kooyong.1

This enthusiastic aspiration for just solutions would change into cynical scepticism if people thought we were remiss in following the rules of justice that we ourselves had set forth.

Woodrow Wilson, 28 March 1919.2

1 Senate and House of Representatives, Debates, 23 November 1920 p. 6845. Best spoke up during the debate about making the sedition provisions of the War Precautions Act permanent in the 1920 Crimes Act. Concerns had been expressed that the provisions may continue to be used for political purposes. 2 Quoted in Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, p. 228. 249

And so, from that parting with my father on the swampy shore, through fragments of family memory and documents, themselves ghostly residues of times past, across beaches and battlefields, through loving memories opened up where others’ ancestors are cherished, I have communed with ghosts. Now, according to the trope of the shamanic journey, I must return across No Man’s Land from the land of the dead with something of value for my tribe: a treasure – a jewel or seed – wrapped in story. This particular story hunt started out in the face of death as a freely associating “raid on the inarticulate” to crack a one hundred-year-old secret, smash open the blockhouse encasing it and free the ghost trapped within; to expose, in another metaphor, the kernel to the sun, give it air and water and plant it anew in the soils that gave it birth a century ago.3

It cannot be argued that I have seen only what I wanted to see – there are too many IRA Diggers for that – though, yes, I must confess this story is what I did want to see and much more besides. I wanted my grandfather to have been fighting for Ireland’s freedom rather than skulking AWL for whatever reasons – justifiable or not. If he truly was The Best Man Dad Ever Knew how could it be otherwise? In the face of my own and my father’s deaths, I needed to find a model of courage, both moral and physical, to absorb into myself – to go on and so went looking for the anti-authoritarian character of the Diggers and the radicalism of the pre-WWI

Australian working class whose social and political achievements made this country, in some respects, a beacon of freedom to the world.

3 White, The Fiction of the Narrative, p.p. 270-1. Though this may appear a mix of metaphors, it is an attempt to build an Eisenstein-style montage of structurally, not literally, related images. 250

Now that all the WWI Diggers are beyond the reach of the powers of this world, it is time to look at their achievements and not allow the curators of Anzac, in their drive to cultivate it as a founding narrative of the Australian nation, to own

“our military and social history”4 in their own image; to repress those aspects of

Diggerdom that do not fit, with the passing of time, their ever narrowing vision.

History is, indeed, as much about forgetting as it is remembering and … a

great deal of history has been written in order to cover or hide or deflect

attention from “what really happened” in the past, by creating an “official

version” that substitutes a part of the past for the whole. 5

A great deal of history has also been (and is being) written to overcome the imperialising tendency of official histories. There is no single, all-encompassing narrative. It would seem that the ACAB’s drive to cultivate a “core narrative” is exclusive of even Charles Bean’s generous dedication in his Official History to the

Diggers.

What these men did nothing can alter now. The good and the bad, the

greatness and smallness of their story will stand. Whatever of glory it

contains nothing now can lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the

mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and for their nation, a

possession for ever.

Surely the courage shown by these Australian soldiers in making the moral choice to fight for the underdog in Ireland, for the values Australia cherishes, must allow

4 M123330 op.cit. 5 White op.cit p.325. 251

them – for that, as well as for the courage and loyalty they showed Australia in the

Great War – some small part of the glory of which Bean writes.6

To discover what my grandfather was doing AWL in Ireland, I have had to uncover the larger phenomenon of Australia’s soldiers fighting for Ireland. Though

Con was Australian born, I could not find him without exploring the service records of Diggers who, unlike him, had been born in Ireland. As I did so, he gave me eyes to see the patterns of absence, alias, disguise, misdirection, masks and disappearances – all characteristics of the land of the dead and of its terrestrial avatar, the theatre. I also began to perceive the great silence that has enshrouded this episode of Australian and Irish history and which I still struggle to apprehend.

It now remains to articulate how these Australian soldiers who fought for Ireland might be remembered - not only as loved ones by their descendants but by their countries – and, consequently, to claim for them a small place in history both past and future. (As Michel Foucault put it, not only is it legitimate to write the history of the past it is “much more productive to imagine the history of the future”,7 and my Australia is one that embraces all of its past as essential to its future.)

In Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery stands the largest Irish Republican

Monument outside Ireland. Every year on Easter Sunday, Australians of Irish descent gather to commemorate the Easter Rising of 1916. In 2013, the 97th anniversary, I made the Easter Address. It began with a performative moment: I

6 I do not use the term ‘Anzac’ to refer to Australian soldiers in general but respect the usage of ordinary members of the 1st AIF who reserved that term exclusively for those who fought on Gallipoli. 7 White op.cit. p. 315. 252

was not only speaking but doing. This was an act to locate these Australian soldiers who fought for Ireland in a place for their commemoration.

Today I have come to name names; to speak the unspeakable; to out a

secret that has been hidden for almost 100 years. Australians of Irish

descent did not only anguish under the tyranny of the Hughes’ regime, as

Ireland suffered through the agonies of its struggle for independence,

Australian soldiers took arms to that struggle and fought for Irish freedom.

Earlier, when I first publicly presented the basic argument of this thesis at

UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, in competition on Post- graduate Research Day 2011, I was challenged by the academic judges to articulate the significance of the story and, by extension, the meaning of the fact of Australian soldiers fighting for Ireland. The only argument I could then make was that I believed it was a great story. Coming from a background in the performing arts, with a belief in allowing/demanding the audience to work to make meaning from the performance, I was then reluctant to spell out the meaning of this story. Mine was not the way of the art gallery catalogue, telling the viewer what to think about something as ‘mysterious and meaningful’ as a work of art. I came originally from a late modernist avant-garde, which firmly believed that the making of meaning was a collaborative act between artists and audience – which is not the same as saying that the artists didn’t know what they were doing.

There are two key issues here: the first concerns “story”, while the second is more political/historical. As “story,” the significance of these men seemed self- explanatory. Like iron filings to a magnet, the patterns of their actions readily

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coalesced into the heroic mode with a mythic resonance stretching beyond history.8 They are of a piece with the stories of the brave who risked their lives to help those less fortunate against an external, overweening force. It is of the same mythic structure as that mobilised by the British peoples to overcome the Axis powers in the Great War and that the DVA is developing as a national narrative for

Australia. It is also an overused trope that has lost much of its resonance through violence and oft-repeated manipulation, as Woodrow Wilson warned it would.9

But, as brass needs to be polished, the heroic mode must be constantly rescued from its constant abuse because the need for courage, honour and moral strength has not yet left this world.

As storyteller, my sympathy with these IRA Diggers is obvious. But, though this thesis makes no pretence to be “objective” history, it does not deliberately distort history and uses solid research and facts and figures to both narrate and interpret events. Owning my partiality – my passion – does not absolve me from the strictures of ‘Truth’. Responsibility to the truth of the past is still essential. This is not historical fiction – though some elements of Con’s story are imagined as a way of joining the dots. Is it legitimate to include them in a largely historical text?

In terms of story, the Diggers in Ireland did not fight together in one significant battle, nor is there a single hero, an Achilles or Odysseus, and so the epic-dramatic form has been superseded by a ficto/historical and episodic one. The story is historical in the facts and their interpretation, and speculative or fictive in the imperfect creation of the inner world of my grandfather. What complicates this

8 Ibid. These same mythic origins of narrative “led to the condemnation of narrative history in the first place.”p.274 9 See quote p. 235. 254

story on political and historical levels is the identity of the external aggressor, the enemy, Britain, and Australia’s historical and ongoing relationships with both

Britain and Ireland.

How could these men be loyal to both Australia, a Dominion of the British

Empire, and to Ireland, to which Britain was the “old enemy”? Today, in a pluralistic society, the question seems fatuous – there is no conflict. But 100 years ago, the First Australians were expected to die out and, even though their home country had no political identity, the Irish were the only other numerically significant ethnic minority. Though the dominant powers in Australia stressed that there was no loyalty to Australia without first loyalty to Britain this was patently false; it was an assertion, a stick with which to beat all anti-loyalists, which generally meant the working class, the Irish and the non-British. Every migrant generation retains a deep passion for the country of its leaving. The diasporas always return, even if only in their dreams.

It appears that a huge but, ultimately, unknowable number of Diggers were

“crimed” for “Using Disloyal Words Regarding the Sovereign” – always those words in capitals. 10Treatment of these instances as individual cases has diminished their broader significance as revelatory of of both irish and Australian national identity and enabled power to silence this aspect of the past. In the “core narrative” today the legendary anti-authoritarianism of the Diggers is tamed and diminished as mere “larrikinism.”

10 This is an observation from the study of 6,000 service records but has no statistical verification. 255

When he was putting the finishing touches to The Official History of

Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Vol 1, The Story of Anzac, C.E.W. Bean was still searching for the means to capture the elusive notion of an Australian ‘character’.

When trying to understand the reputedly extraordinary response in Australia to the outbreak of war he made one of those statements that don’t sit well in today’s

History Academies:

few Australians … were fully acquainted with the philosophy underlying the

Prussian attitude. But its visible results were well known to them all. They

had heard of the cripple of Zabern; they had read of the unconscionable

principles of the military bureaucracy of Prussia, and their instinct for

freedom revolted against its pompous hectoring, its cynical intrigue, its

tyrannous oppressions in time of peace, its ugly menace in times of war.

They therefore exalted the struggle into one which should “save the world

for democracy,” establish the sanctity of treaties, and, if possible, inaugurate

a reign of justice and rid the world of the whole system of war.11

In this passage, Bean over-reaches and, in so doing, betrays the limitations of his Australian Edwardianism. The passage is clumsy in its bigotry and in its generalisations – but the war and the Conference of Versailles were just over and wounds were fresh. L.L. Robson, in his 1982 account of The First A.I.F, a Study of its

Recruitment argues that the

(r)easons for the remarkable change of sentiment which swept Australia in

late July and early August 1914 are not readily formed or neatly to be listed.

Indeed … Bean, considered that when a threat to the ‘old country’

11 Bean, Volume 1, p.xlvii 256

manifested itself, Australians were touched by deep feelings of loyalty

which were not always apparent…” .12

This extraordinary response to the outbreak of WWI was not unique to Australia.13

But, surely the apparent resolution of the canker at the very heart of the Empire – the threat of civil war in the UK – by the passing of the Government of Ireland Act in

September 1914, must have played a large part in releasing Australia’s much-sung hymn of national unanimity that seemed to contradict so much of what had come before in the development of what was distinctive in the “Australian character.”

In 1921, in writing his “Introduction” to the entire Official History and still striving to encapsulate all that Australians fought for in the Great War, Bean put the phrase that has been heard so repeatedly since, “save the world for democracy,” in inverted commas. As an actor performing the moment when Bean wrote that, I would first write the phrase without the inverted commas, and then pause, ... In that Beckettian pause, ‘Bean’ would remember press reports of the slide into war, the horrors of the invasion of Belgium, war propaganda, the war itself, Wilson’s Declaration of War to make the world “safe for democracy” and

Asquith’s “for the rights of small nations”. He would recall that these ideals were what the allied armies were supposedly fighting for and then he would remember the Versailles Peace Conference, which was to be based on Wilson’s 14 Points but, instead, betrayed those ideals. Then Bean, lover of The Bush and knowing that

Imperial Loyalty was not enough to describe the Australian response, would go back and put the inverted commas around the phrase. It was an aspiration, much voiced but not acted upon. By 1921, it was already becoming a cliché.

12 Robson, p.17. 13 Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, p.p. 94-104. 257

However, eliminate “few” and substitute “Irish” for “Australians” and

“British” and “Britain” for “Prussian” and “Prussia”, and the passage gains a startling new veracity. Because the Irish, after 750 years of occupation did know

Britain’s “pompous hectoring, its cynical intrigue, its tyrannous oppressions in time of peace, its ugly menace in times of war“ far better than any ordinary

Australian of 100 years ago can be expected to have known Prussia’s.

In 2013, Ireland apologised to and pardoned the 5000 men and women who deserted the Irish Defence Force (IDF) to enlist in the British Army in World War II and who were subsequently discharged as deserters under what became known as the “starvation order.”14 The pardon, says Irish Defence Minister Alan Shatter, enshrines in law the apology made in 2012 along with a legal amnesty and

goes some way to right the wrongs of our past … in recognition of the

courage and bravery of those individuals court martialled or dismissed

from the defence forces who fought on the allied side to protect decency

and democracy during World War II.15

This is just one in a number of steps towards reconciliation between Britain and Ireland and within Ireland itself, “to right the wrongs of the past” and ease the troubles still lingering as a consequence of Britain’s long colonisation of Ireland. In

1997 Tony Blair apologised for British culpability in the Great Famine; the 2006

British Armed Forces Act expressed “regret” for deaths of the 306 British Empire

14 News.com.au 8//8/13, viewed 12/05/13. There were an estimated 50,000 Irish men and women who enlisted in the British army in WWII, 5000 of whom deserted from the IDF to do so. 15 Ibid. 258

soldiers executed during WWI (many of whom are believed to have been Irish); in

2010 Britain apologised for Bloody Sunday; in 2011 the Queen expressed her

“regret” for past wrongs done to Ireland and on Easter Sunday 2013, for the first time, the British Ambassador to Ireland laid a wreath on the graves of the leaders of the Easter Rising (who had been executed by Britain).

As previously stated, at the end of WWI Australia appears to have had its own secretive “starvation order”. Demobilisation and repatriation meant there were a massive 167,000 service men and women to return and reabsorb into

Australian society; 7059 were discharged overseas in places as diverse as the UK,

Egypt, Greece, India, Iraq and North America; 893 were discharged as deserters on

April Fool’s Day 1920 and their names put on a Secret Black List. Today, it is possible to see that some of those men were Australian soldiers who had fought for

“decency and democracy” in Ireland, where the enemy was not Nazi Germany but

Imperial Britain itself. Australia’s investment in the British Empire, its concern for its own prestige newly won by its soldiers and its drive to develop and control a

“core narrative” of Anzac meant that the Australian Government has never acknowledged the actions of these Australian soldiers in Ireland, let alone that they were fighting for values that we supposedly hold dear. If Ireland can apologise to and pardon those 5,000 WWII deserters, where does Australia stand in relation to those men who fought for freedom and democracy in Ireland?

Some of those soldiers who returned to the Dominions, under a cloak of silence – which was intended to make them invisible – with which they were compelled by circumstance to be complicit, were condemned to itinerancy, crime

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and starvation. They were complicit because no one who had served in the Forces of the King could admit to fighting for Ireland. In Britain, under the Defence of the

Realm Act (DORA), they had committed treason and were liable for capital punishment. In Australia, under the War Precautions Act that had been cobbled together from DORA, even to publicly state that Ireland had a right to independence was an act of sedition the penalty for which was a three- year prison sentence. That is why this story can only be told now that all its actors are dead.

The secret was rigorously kept in Australia by both sides with interest in it.

The Government, concerned with its imperial prestige and acutely aware of the explosive sectarian divide in post-war Australia, imposed a regime of complete denial to the extent that the only surviving official documents relating to diggers in

Ireland are the Williams’ Report of April 1918 (the beginning of the official silence), various warrants for the arrest of Diggers absent in Ireland and the occasional Court Martial record where the outcome involves protestations of loyalty.16 Where Ireland’s ‘starvation order’ made a very public statement of its national independence, the secretive nature of Australia’s version denied the nation’s growing difference to Britain – an essential aspect of what Charles Bean called its “character” – and condemned many of the men who had fought for Irish freedom to a profound silence and some to starvation. Those, like McKenna in New

Zealand and Casey in Australia, who fought for Ireland and were court martialled before returning to their homeland could not risk revealing the secret they kept locked in their hearts, the secret that became unspeakable. To break this silence,

16 There may be other records with different outcomes that I have been unable to locate. 260

my correspondants outside Ireland and I have had to receive the permission of our families.

In this time of the Commemoration of the Centenary of Anzac, Ireland’s

Decade of Commemoration and, worldwide, of the triumphs and horrors of World

War I, it is surely time to commemorate these Dominion soldiers who made a choice just as courageous – both morally and physically – as that made by the 5000

Irish who deserted that country’s army to enlist in the British Army only two decades later. Ireland today, in the wake of the Northern Ireland Peace Accord, recognises that there can be no true commemoration without reconciliation. The

210,000 soldiers who enlisted in the British Army in WWI and who returned to an

Ireland that treated them as traitors to the national cause are, today, honoured in

Ireland and will be rightly commemorated in Australia among those “who served in British Empire forces.”17

That the ACAB may claim that this story has no “connection … to significant military anniversaries, enlistments and other First World War events [that?] have had an impact on the nation and/or the local community”18 is further evidence of how successfully earlier governments denied these events and of the continued determination to persist in this denial. The phenomenon of Australia’s WWI soldiers fighting for Ireland is a part of Australian History simply because it is a part of Australia’s history.

17 Judge Raul Soulio, ACAB member and Chair of Multicultural Council of Australia, correspondence 1/5/13. 18 Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program, Guidelines, p.3 http://www.anzaccentenary.gov.au/grants/index.htm viewed 4/7/13

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The Australian historical record has been distorted by the deliberate and systematic erasure of documents relating to the involvement of Australian soldiers in Ireland’s War of Independence. This program of historical bastardisation has been maintained for almost a century so that, in the face of the Diggers’ legendary anti-authoritarianism, the Anzac legend might serve the notion that Australian soldiers fought, not for freedom and a Fair Go, but only for the glory of the bloody

British Empire.

This thesis does not make light of either the military offence of desertion or the complexities facing a government when its citizens are unofficially fighting a war in another country. On the contrary, this very seriousness only serves to highlight the deep moral complexity of the decisions these men made. None of them deserted in the face of the enemy. Instead, they engaged an older and more insidious one in a fight they should have had no hope of winning.

In following these men – these andipodean soldiers who fought an empire to set their ancestral home free – The Diggers and the IRA has taken a tour away from the super highway of the Board’s ‘core narrative’ down one of those little side roads where the hidden country of the past still speaks to us today. There, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the voices of dead Diggers whispering among the eucalypts.

When Jawaharlal Nehru was on his second visit to Ireland, his first as Prime

Minister of India, he commented on the importance of Ireland to both the

262

movements for national liberation and the development of an increasingly less imperial Commonwealth:

Ever since my childhood, I have thought of Ireland, and for many years her

past history has been interlinked with ours because of our struggle for

freedom. We have tried to learn much from the experience of Ireland.19

That is a history in which those Australian soldiers who fought for Ireland, and through them Australia itself, share. It is a contribution to be proud of.

They fought for Australia. They fought for Ireland. They fought that we might be free.

19 Irish Press, 29/04/19 cited in Kate O’Malley Ireland, India and empire p.170. 263

Epilogue

On 19 August 2009, Dad finally passed away. In his last days we again celebrated his love of bush poetry, particular favourites being Gordon’s “The Sick

Stockrider” with its opening line of "Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more and lay me in the shade” and Patterson’s paean to the Bush “Clancy of the Overflow.”

Every time, no matter how feeble, he would join in voicing the last words of the line: “and at night the wondrous glory of ‘the everlasting stars.’”

All the family were gathered around him and, as he breathed his last,

“Danny Boy” was playing. The stretcher bearer from the Western Front had come to take him from the battlefield. On the day of the funeral at Mary Immaculate

Church, Waverley, huge winds sprang up out of nowhere; they were the winds of the Ballyhouras; his ancestors, too, had come for him.

In “The Front”, Belfast poet, Michael Longley, has written of his father, a veteran of both world wars who was with the 36th (Ulster) Division on the first day of the Battle of the Somme when they charged the German lines with the immortal cry of “Fuck the Pope!”1

I dreamed I was marching up the Front to die.

There were thousands of us who were going to die.

From the opposite direction, out of step, breathless,

The dead and wounded came, all younger than my son,

1 Longley, Michael, “Wounds”in Collected Poems, p.62. 264

Among them my father who might have been my son.

"What's it like?" I shouted after the family face.

"It's cushy, mate! Cushy!" my father-son replied".2

When Con came back from the war he was unable to make a success of the farm. Every year Repat made him another pair of boots with the steel plate just so he could walk. Repeatedly a Doctor’s Certificate stated “This man cannot walk on ploughed ground.”3 Yet all his local Repat. doctor could say was “Stay off your feet.”

During the Depression he was forced to sell the farm at Bonneville and with his father moving into town, he moved back to the original farm at Hydes Creek. He was Bellingen Shire Vice President for the best part of two decades and a political organiser of farmers for the local Labor Party.

Something of the larrikin do gooder that was a characteristic of some of the

Diggers can be gleaned from another (as far as I know, the only other) court case my grandfather faced. It was in 1930 when he was Deputy President of the

Bellingen Shire Council, a position he held for most of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

CLAIM AGAINST COUNCILLOR,

BELLINGEN, Sunday.

Before Judge Mocatta, in the District Court, D. E. Atkins, of Coffs Harbour,

proceeded against Cornelius Patrick Casey, of Bonville claiming £250

damages in respect of the removal of timber from plaintiff's property

at Valery. The timber, it was stated, was used in the construction of a

culvert on a public road at Valery. Mr. Casey is a councillor of the Bellingen

2 Ibid, p.309 3NAA: C138, R104300, Casey, Patrick Cornelius. 265

Shire. It was alleged the defendant wrongfully entered the land of plaintiff,

and cut and caused to be carried away trees, thereby doing injury and

damage to the land. On an alternative count, plaintiff sued defendant for

allegedly converting to his own use and wrongfully depriving plaintiff of the

use and possession of certain valuable timber, the property of plaintiff.

Defendant’s counsel admitted a technical trespass and put into court a sum

of £1 by way of compensation. The jury returned a verdict for plaintiff,

assessing costs, as directed by his Honor at £17/4. His Honor said he

regretted that the case should have been brought before the Court at all.

"Here we have a public-mlnded gentleman," continued his Honor, "who, in

an endeavour to do something for the benefit of the people in the district, by

accident as it were, directs that certain timber should be taken for the

construction of a culvert on a public road, either overlooking the

necessity for obtaining permission from the owner of the property or not

thinking it necessary. He thereby steps within the law. It is a great pity that

the whole thing was not settled out of court."4

With his countryman’s skills and AIF initiative, Con saw that something needed to be done and done quickly. A bridge was washed out. He did what was necessary “correct procedure be blowed,”5 just as he did during his time in Ireland.

Councillor Casey’s offer of £1 compensation seems designed to insult Atkins, a second time. I can’t help thinking that Con did the right thing for not wholly (or not solely) noble and altruistic reasons. There seems to be not a little bit of sticking it up his neighbour.

4 SMH 3/11/30, p. 10. Bold type added for emphasis. 5 The expression is from my son, Aydan, in his response to the newspaper story. 266

Similarly, there seems to be a delicious cocktail of motivations behind his

(and some others’) decision to fight for Irish freedom. They were fighting for family and “decency and democracy”, they were on the right side of History but, I can’t help thinking, they were also, at the same time, sticking it up the British

Empire and the loyalist Protestant leadership of both the AIF and Australia. This attitude is, perhaps, best exemplified by the immortal words Private Philip Bolger shouted out to Countess Markevitz that deliriously drunk December morning in

1917 at Ennis railway station when, like an angel of the revolution, she floated across the railway overpass above him:

“FUCK THE KING, FUCK THE ARMY AND FUCK THE BRITISH EMPIRE!”

Lest we forget.

267

Appendix

Denominational breakdown of Irish-born Enlistments in the AIF.

The great period of Irish migration to Australia ended with the Depression of the

1890s when assisted migration to the various colonies was halted. Toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, assisted migration once again resumed. Though Australia was by then a Federation, migration assistance still happened at the state level. Where much of the earlier migration had been from the southern Irish province of Munster, in this new period, a much higher proportion of Irish migration to Australia was from the wealthier provinces of

Leinster and the largely Protestant North.

While the 1861 census records that 15.4 percent of Australians had been born in Ireland, the 1911 census, the last taken before the war, shows this had dropped to just 3.13 percent. This was an ageing population 74 percent of which was 45 years and over, while nationally this age group made up just 19 per cent.

When the First World War erupted in August 1914, the Irish migrants of the nineteenth century were, therefore, too old to enlist in the AIF. Despite the recurrent accusations of Catholic disloyalty, their children, native-born

Australians, enlisted in proportion to their numbers in the community so that they comprised approximately 22 per cent of the AIF.

268

Table 5: B2455 POB Ireland – Denominations

RANK Religious Denomination RC CE Pby Prod. Non- Not TOT other denom listed LT. 24 37 13 8 5 87 % 27.6 42.5 15 9 5.7 CPT 8 17 5 1 5 36 % 22 47 13.9 3 13.9 Major 2 6 2 1 8 19 % 10.5 31.6 10.5 5 42 COL 4 1 2 7 % 57 14 29 OFFICER 34 64 21 13 20 149 % 22.8 42.9 14.1 6.7 13.4 Chaplin 21 5 9 3 38 % 55 13 23.7 7.9 Nurse 13 5 3 7 28 % 46.4 18 10.7 25 o’ranks 2661 1037 608 139 18 21 4484 Embarked % 59.4 23 13.6 3.1 .4 .5 Total 2729 1111 638 155 18 48 4699 Embarked % 58.1 23.6 13.6 3.3 .3 1 Did not Sail 684 175 72 15 6 27 979 Total 3415 1286 710 160 24 75 5668 Enlisted % of Total 60 22.7 12.5 2.8 .4 1.3

Table 4, B2455 POB Ireland – Denominations, presents a breakdown of Irish born enlistments in the AIF by religious denominations over the whole period of the war. While the AWM records that 421,809 men and women enlisted in the AIF, there are just 375,867 WWI service records available on the NAA website as series

269

B2455. A search of this series using “Ireland” as the keyword returns 5865 service records. Deducting those with the name “Ireland,” only one of whom was born there, and various conflated records leaves a figure of 5668 Australian WWI soldiers with extant service records who had been born in Ireland.1

According to the 1911 census, approximately 83 percent of the Irish who emigrated to Australia were Catholic. Catholics made up 60 percent of Irish-born and 22 percent of all enlistments in the AIF. Of the Irish-born, they made up only

22.8 percent of field officers the great bulk of whom were subalterns (70 percent) with none reaching beyond the rank of Major. Of a total 55 Irish-born Catholic officers, 21 (39 per cent) were Chaplains. Presumably it was deemed the Irish

Catholics were better at dealing with spiritual matters than with war.

***

1 Kildea estimates there were approximately 6,600, Irish born enlistments in the 1st AIF, Anzac and Ireland, fn.2 p.p. 249-50. 270

Table 6: Religious profile of 13th Bn. from Embarkation Roll2

RC CE Pby. Prod. Non. Not Total other denom listed HQ officers 3 3 1 o’ranks 7 35 3 5 Total 7 38 6 6 57 AAMC 7 details Total 7 7 MG Coy. officers 1 o’ranks 1 4 2 2 Total 1 5 2 2 10 A Coy officers 3 o’ranks 18 76 10 10 1 1 Total A 22 76 10 10 1 1 120 B Coy. officers 3 o’ranks 26 66 17 3 2 Total B 26 69 17 4 2 118 C Coy officers 1 2 O’ranks 23 59 12 11 3 1 Total C 23 60 14 11 5 1 113 D Doy officers 2 1 o’ranks 30 64 9 11 1 2 Total 30 66 9 12 1 2 120 E officers 3 o’ranks 24 68 11 7 3 2 Total 24 71 11 7 3 1 117 F officers 2 1 o’ranks 13 65 20 15 4 Total 13 67 21 15 4 120 G officers 3, o’ranks 18 70 13 9 3 Total 18 73 13 9 3 116 H officers 2 1 o’ranks 32 53 14 13 2 Total 32 53 16 13 3 117 Tot 13th 196 585 118 89 19 8 1015

2 AWM8, 23/30/1 - 13 Infantry Battalion (December 1914) 271

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of Political and Military Policies, OUP, London, 1975. ______Political Violence in Ireland, Government and Resistance Since 1848, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983. Waugh, Max, Forgotten Hero, Richard Bourke, Irish – born Governor of NSW 1831-37, ASP, Melbourne, 2005. Whelan, Michael, Allegiances Compromised: Faith, Honour and Allegiance, Ex British Soldiers in the Irish Army, 1913-1924, South Dublin Library, 2010. Widders, Robert, Spitting on a Soldier’s Grave, Matador, Beauchamp, 2010. Wilson, Graham, Bully Beef & Balderdash, Big Sky, Newport, 2012. aan de Wiel, Jerome, The Irish Factor 1899-1919, Ireland’s Strategic and Diplomatic Importance for Foreign Powers, IAP Dublin, 2011. Wilson, Jean, Siegfried Sassoon, The Making of a War Poet, A Biography, 1886 – 1918, Duckworth, London, 1998. Williams, John F, German Anzacs and the First World War, UNSW, Sydney, 2003.

Articles and Book Chapters Bean, C.E.W., “The Writing of the Australian Official History of the Great War – Sources, Methods and Some Conclusions”, Royal Australian Historical Society, Journal and Proceedings IXXIV, 1938. Crotty, Martin, “The veterans voice: the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, 1916-1919”, in Ashley Ekins (ed.) 1918, YEAR OF VICTORY, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003. Gibbney, H.J., “Mahon, Hugh (1857–1931)” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) Volume 19, MUP, 1986. Holman, William, “My Political Life” in Michael Hogan ed., The First NSW Labor Government, 1910 – 1916, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. O’Farrell, Patrick, “Double Jeopardy, Catholic and Irish “ in Humanities Research Vol. XII No1, 2005. ______“Oral History: Facts and Fiction, Quadrant 23, 1979.

Online ABC NEWS 22/08/13, . Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program, Guidelines, 100 Years of Anzac Website of the Australian Government: . Australian Government Department of Veteran’s Affairs,“Protecting the word 'Anzac'” . Bolger, Brendan, 21/09/12, The Irish War website: . Brown, James, “Anzac’s long shadow: the cost of our national obsession”, The Saturday Paper, 17/02/14, http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/james- brown/2014/02/17/1392601420/anzacs-long-shadow-cost-our-national- obsession – viewed 12/03/14.

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Fox, Seamus, Chronology of Irish History 1919 – 1923, . House of Representatives Official Hansard, No.48, 23/11/1920. Great War Forum website, “Killed in Ireland in 1921” posted5/6/07. Jordan, Roy, “In Good Faith: Sedition Law in Australia,” e-brief update of 13/09/2006. Parliament of Australia. . Kildea, Jeff, “Called to Arms: Australian Soldiers in the Easter Rising 1916,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial, O’Carroll, Sinead, “Hidden History: the first casualty in the American Civil War was a Tipp man” in thejournal.ie 7/10 /12 http://www.thejournal.ie/hidden- history-the-first-casualty-in-the-american-civil-war-was-a-tipp-man- 622120-Oct2012/ viewed 12/11/12.

Australian Government Department of Veteran’s Affairs,“Protecting the word 'Anzac'” . Twomey, Anne,”The Expulsion or Suspension of Federal MPs” in Constitutional Critique, U.Syd., . University of Oxford, First World War Poetry Digital Archive, “Siegfried Sassoon: Declaration against the War”, http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/tutorials/intro/sassoon/decl aration.html>. Wilson, Graeme, “A prison of our own: the AIF Detention Barracks 1917-1919.” .

Critical/Theoretical/Historiographic: Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol.1, ed. Nicholas T. Rand, UCP, Chicago. 1994. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984. Barthes, Roland, “The Discourse of History”, in Comparative Criticism a Yearbook, CUP, Cambridge, 1981 Braun, Edward, (ed.) Meyerhold on Theatre, Methuen Drama, London, 1998. Brecht, Bertolt, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” 1936. Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969. Hamilton, Nigel, Biography, a Brief History, Harvard University Press, Massechusetts, 2007. Curthoys, Ann, and Docker, John, Is history fiction? UNSW, Sydney, 2006. Curthoys, Ann and McGrath, Ann, eds. Writing Histories, Imagination and Narration,

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Monash Publications in History, 2000. Dening, Greg, Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self, University of Pennsylvania, 2004. ______Performances, University of Chicago, Chicago, 1996. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, OUP, 1975. Jenkins, Keith, ed. The Postmodern History Reader Routledge, London, 1997. Larson, Thomas, The Memoir and the Memoirist, Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, Ohio University Press, 2007. Kristeva, Julia, The Powers of Horror, Colombia University Press, New York, 1982. Munslow, Alan, Deconstructing History, Routledge, New York, 1997. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994. Truillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History , Beacon Press, Boston, 1995. White, Hayden, The Content of the Form, Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1987. ______The Fiction of the Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957- 2007, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010.

Newspapers Australia Argus Bellingen Courier Sun Clarence and Richmond Examiner Junee Southern Cross News.com.au Raleigh Sun Sydney Morning Herald The (Melbourne) Herald Tribune

Ireland An t-Oglac, Official Organ of the Irish Volunteers Clonmel Chronicle Irish Times Nationalist Nenagh News

Unpublished Correspondence with and family papers of Gorman, Hurley, McGrath, McKenna and Casey families.

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