Massacre in West Cork (12 page)

Yet it appears that the IRA in West Cork maintained discipline throughout the Truce period. In January 1922 Tom Barry sentenced to death the man who had admitted he ‘spilled the beans’ before the Crossbarry ambush but, because it was Truce time, the man was subsequently banished rather than shot.
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Other evidence in British records shows that West Cork had surprisingly few IRA Truce violations up to the signing of the Treaty. During the week ending 19 November 1921, Mayo recorded sixteen incidents, while Cork West Riding recorded none.
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Once the occupation of Colonel Peacocke’s property, which was a breach of the terms of the Truce, was raised by the British authorities with Tom Barry, the IRA liaison officer for West Cork, he was able to report that it had been evacuated a week later.
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This action went against his own views that these properties should be broken up and their lands given to landless people without compensation and shows that Barry, at least, did not see himself as another feudal baron.
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Yet during the week of the Dunmanway killings there was a breakdown in this discipline. The local commanders in Bandon went to Dublin and left Michael O’Neill in command. When Michael O’Neill was shot, the remaining people in the command structure failed in their duty to protect the citizens of the area from arbitrary and unlawful killings. How, and more importantly why, did this happen?

4
The Background
to Ballygroman

There are numbers of loyalist exiles whose lives would be in danger if they returned to Ireland.

Lord Bandon
¹

There is nothing to prevent them coming back as citizens of the Irish Free State. They will be afforded the protection of the government in accordance with the recent amnesty proclamation.

Michael Collins
²

The critical event of the story of the Dunmanway killings of April 1922 happened at Ballygroman House around 2.30 a.m. on 26 April – everything that follows cascades from the shooting dead of Michael O’Neill. Much that has been written about this killing is not accurate, which makes it necessary to re-examine these events to establish the true history as far as is possible. The reader will have to decide which of the many conflicting pieces of evidence available are valuable and which are not.

The central facts are not in dispute: Captain Herbert Woods, who was either temporarily resident or staying at Ballygroman, shot and killed the unarmed Michael O’Neill, the Officer Commanding the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Cork Brigade.
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Michael O’Neill was no ordinary IRA volunteer, having been appointed acting Officer Commanding the battalion by Tom Hales while he joined the leading IRA officers in Dublin in an attempt to work out an agreement to avoid the slide into civil war. The fact that his death happened during the Truce made it more shocking to his comrades. The man on the other side of the gun, Herbert Woods, was a hero of the Great War, having been awarded two medals for bravery for service on the Western Front.

Ballygroman House today (courtesy of Donal O’Flynn and Dermot O’Donovan)

It is also certain that senior Bandon IRA officer Charlie O’Donoghue returned to Ballygroman House later that morning with four anti-Treaty IRA men and arrested Herbert Woods. Along with his uncle Samuel Hornibrook and his grand-uncle Thomas Henry Hornibrook Snr, Woods disappeared. The three men were killed and nobody was ever arrested for their deaths nor were their bodies recovered. Over the following few days ten men were killed in the Dunmanway area.

Because they occurred in the same week, the O’Neill shooting, the disappearance of Woods and the Hornibrooks, and the subsequent killing of the men in the Dunmanway area, are now seen as one event. However, it may be wiser to separate them. A valid argument can be made that the killing of Woods was an execution in response to the shooting of a senior member of the Irish Republican Police, and the Hornibrooks’ deaths the result of their attempt to prevent Woods’ arrest, but the killings that followed had no such justification. However, it should also be noted that there was a court in Bandon, so Captain Woods and the Hornibrooks could easily have been taken there and tried; there was no need for their killers to act as judge, jury and executioner.

Before looking in depth at the killings themselves, we must first look at the individuals at the centre of this story, as they have both been written out of history. In all my research, only one – blurred – photograph of Michael O’Neill has been found. Herbert Woods fares a little better, but before the publication of this book there was no known photograph of him either. What made these men so special within the history of their respective armies that one should have received both the Military Medal and the Military Cross during the Great War, and thousands of IRA volunteers should march with arms reversed at the other’s funeral? What brought them together on the stairs at Ballygroman? Are their deaths special or are they nothing more than collateral damage and the inevitable casualties of war? It is now time to examine all the evidence, without prejudice.

T
HE
H
ORNIBROOK/
W
OODS
F
AMILY OF
C
ORK

The Woods family was a well-known Cork merchant family who had a wine and spirit business in Cook Street in the city. Originally from Kilbeggan, Christopher Woods moved to Bandon some time in the second half of the nineteenth century, where he married Ellen Mary Greave. In 1881 the family had opened the Glen Distillery in Blackpool, Cork, with Thomas Warren, but this failed in 1884 when Warren had to withdraw his cash, and it was sold to John Henry Sugrue, whose family still owned it in 1921. It is possible that the Woods family retained a minority shareholding.

In 1908 Edward Woods, who had inherited the Cook Street business from Christopher, married Matilda Warmington Hornibrook of Ballygroman House and they moved into Crosses Green House next to their bonded warehouse. Her father, Thomas Henry Hornibrook Snr of Kinsale, had married Elizabeth Warmington of Ballygroman in 1885. It was his second marriage, and it is believed that Elizabeth died in childbirth in 1895. Matilda was a very good match for the Hornibrooks. Her aunt had married James Nicholson of Woodford Bourne & Co., the main wine and spirit merchants in Munster. The two businesses held the contracts for the Victoria Barracks, the Imperial Hotel and the Metropole Hotel between them. The barracks contract alone was worth more than £6,000 (€148,270 today) per annum to Woodford Bourne, and its loss in 1922 virtually wiped out all profits for that and subsequent years. In 1907 Matilda Hornibrook inherited property in London from her mother and was therefore wealthy in her own right.

Edward Woods (courtesy of Martin Midgley Reeve)

Matilda’s older brother Thomas Henry Hornibrook caused problems for the Hornibrook family in 1902. When a crowd was encroaching onto the field at a coursing meeting in Crossbarry, he assaulted the parish priest of Kilmurry by hitting him on the head with the butt of his riding crop. The local community, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, was incensed, and at a public meeting in Ovens it was agreed to ban the Hornibrook family from all sports meetings. Martin Midgley Reeve relates a family story about Thomas Henry: he was sent to New Zealand after a subsequent fight between members of the congregation inside Athnowen, the local Church of Ireland church.
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Samuel Wood Hornibrook, Matilda’s half-brother, was born at Kinsale on 12 October 1872 to Thomas Henry Hornibrook and Mary Jane (Wood) Hornibrook. By 1922 Samuel was still unmarried (aged 46) and living with his widowed father. He was mechanically minded and owned a motorbike with a side-car, which was used to take his father to petty sessions courts, among other things.

Matilda’s nephew, Herbert Woods, was thirty when he died.
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He was the son of Edward’s brother Christopher, who was a bank official in Skibbereen, where Herbert was born in 1892. After his death, Alice Hodder, a wealthy, English-born Protestant, writing to her mother from Fountainstown in Cork about the situation in the county, described him as a ‘bit of a ne’er do well and quite mad’.
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There is no record of his parents in either the 1901 or the 1911 census anywhere in Ireland and Herbert, his brother Charles Carbery and his sister Maud were living with their grandparents in 1901. In 1907, aged fifteen, he was arrested for stealing fruit knives and remanded in Kilmainham Gaol. His prison record states that his grandmother is his next of kin, suggesting that he was an orphan, but it also states that he was released pending sentence on 22 July 1907 by his father.
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Martin Midgley Reeve has discovered that he was bought out of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment a year later. Three years later he was working for his uncle in Cork, according to the 1911 census.

Herbert Woods, seated centre (courtesy of Donal O’Flynn)

His unexceptional life as a clerk in Woods & Sons was changed by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. He joined the Prince of Wales’ Leinster Regiment in Fermoy early in 1915 and was a member of the 7th (Service) battalion.
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He started the second phase of his military life as a private, but was eventually made a temporary colonel for a brief period whilst specially employed in the records section of the War Office from 4 January 1919 until 6 June 1919. By the time he, along with a host of other recipients, was awarded the Military Medal on 16 September 1916, he had been promoted to corporal. No official citation has been found in the
London Gazette
for the act that led to the award.
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He was also awarded a 16th Irish Division citation for heroism by Major General W. B. Hickie, the commanding officer of the Irish Brigade, on 14 June 1916.
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His Military Medal was sold at auction in London on 28 June 2000 and his medal index card stated that he had been commissioned after winning the medal as a corporal. His regiment number (2107) is engraved on the side of the Military Medal.
¹¹

Despite his heroism, the war took a huge toll on him. While his full service record was ‘weeded’ of duplicates and other documents in 1934, it still gives much important information about his war service. He was sent to the field hospital from the Passchendaele Front on 4 December 1917 and was returned to the firing line on 13 January 1918. On 15 February he is recorded as arriving in Southampton with a scalp wound. He was a temporary lieutenant at this stage and had been awarded the Military Cross, also on 15 February 1918. On 18 February a mental breakdown was diagnosed, and he spent until 8 July in Carnarvon Hospital and then went to Holmrook House in Carlisle.
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While at Holmrook he was court-martialled for drunkenness and it was suggested his Military Cross should be revoked. It was agreed, however, that a reprimand would be enough. His file shows that he returned to active service in the 88th Trench Mortar Battery on 16 July 1918, but according to F. C. Hitchcock, who fought alongside him, he rejoined C Company of the Leinster Regiment’s 2nd Battalion and did not move over to the Trench Mortar Battery until 9 September.
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Also on 16 July, the citation for the Military Cross was published in the
London Gazette
: ‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty as a platoon commander. By his courage and skilful dispositions, he repelled an attempted surprise attack with severe casualties to the enemy and captured two prisoners.’
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