Massacre in West Cork (8 page)

The Essex broke into Castlelack … The safe was rifled, the deed box stolen. Furniture had been smashed and set alight, business records and valuable books feeding the flames. Bathroom flooding had brought down the dining room ceiling ruining the room and its contents.
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She was in Glengarriff at the time, meeting with Violet Annan Bryce, an English woman who had been arrested at Holyhead under the Restoration of Order Act and deported to Ireland to prevent her speaking to a public meeting about reprisals in Ireland.
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On 7 December McDonnell’s solicitor, former MP Maurice Healy, wrote to Major Neave in Bandon looking for the return of the deeds to the house. An appointment was arranged, but Major Percival arrived instead of Major Neave. McDonnell’s sister, Miss Healy (no relation to the solicitor), accompanied her, and Percival berated the women in the corridor of Bandon Barracks to such an extent that Ms Healy ‘burst into tears! Percival was stunned! So taken aback he simply gaped at us, with never another word! … After this incident Percival made himself noticeably scarce at Castlelack.’
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It appears even monsters know shame.

As a result of his activities Percival became a prime target for the local IRA. A number of attempts were made on his life, and he had an extraordinary escape when shot in the chest by Jack Ryan, who explained that when Percival had captured him Ryan had whipped out two revolvers and fired at point blank range. One gun had failed to go off, but the second shot had knocked Percival to the ground. Unbeknownst to Ryan, Percival had been wearing a chain mail vest, so had lived.
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Not all members of the Essex Regiment were monsters; some of those stationed in Kinsale had a less vicious attitude. Denis Collins of the Ballinadee IRA was captured in February 1921. Having witnessed a mock execution, he was taken to Kinsale:

We were … brought to Charles’ Fort. All the time we were here … a Sergeant and some Tommies, all belonging to the Essex, could not do enough for us … The Sergeant said he had the greatest sympathy for anyone who was a prisoner as he had been one for four years in Germany during the War …

We appreciated this N.C.O.’s attitude and that of the men under him. They seemed to be permanently on garrison duties and didn’t go round the country making war on the people like the majority of their regiment.
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What the Essex did in Bandon was not a frustrated reaction to IRA violence, as has been claimed by many over the years, but was designed to intimidate and terrorise the local people into submission.

Hughes, in his study of the Palestinian police and military during the British Mandate from 1921 to 1948, observes that, unsurprisingly, records of army brutality are rarely kept, and if brutality is alleged it is vigorously disputed by the army and routinely downplayed by the government and their supporters in the media. In Palestine the protection of the rule of law was shredded as military tribunals could ignore evidence; newspapers were suppressed for ‘preaching sedition’ or were so heavily censored that they became worthless as records of events. All this was designed to allow the police to root out ‘terrorists’ with a free hand and many of the same individuals and regiments fought in both Ireland and Palestine.
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What happened later in Palestine, Malaysia and Kenya shows that the Essex Regiment’s brutality in Bandon was neither unique nor unusual, but part of ‘normal’ activity. It is hard not to conclude that the regiment simply brought to West Cork the tactics long employed when slaughtering ‘savages’ on punitive expeditions (an essential component of British rule in India).
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As the Annan Bryce and McDonnell cases show, the Essex Regiment and the Auxiliaries did not seem to understand how close London was and what the impact of their actions would be at home. It was perfectly fine for Rudyard Kipling to write about the bravery of the Fuzzy Wuzzy during their annihilation by the British outside Khartoum in 1898 when nobody could see it, but with more than 500,000 Irish living, and more importantly voting, in Britain in 1921, even the coalition government was concerned about the impact these actions were having on public opinion.
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The savagery in and around Bandon was in direct contrast to the ‘civilised’ campaign conducted by both sides in the extreme west of County Cork. Ted O’Sullivan’s witness statement shows that after the IRA had attacked Drimoleague RIC station, the IRA understood that the Bantry military were very different to the Dunmanway Auxiliaries:

… strong forces of military arrived from Bantry (10 miles) while a force of Auxiliaries arrived from Dunmanway (10 miles). The military were apparently first on the scene, otherwise it is likely that Drimoleague would have been burned out that night by the Auxiliaries.
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On another occasion four members of the IRA captured by the RIC in Durrus were protected from serious injury or murder by the intervention of the local British Army commander, Colonel Hudson of the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Hudson famously returned a trench coat to Tom Barry after it was captured during a raid on a brigade meeting in Skibbereen. Barry had written to him asking for it.
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Lieutenant Colonel Jones of the King’s Regiment had set the less aggressive tone earlier when he had written to Violet Annan Bryce’s husband – in response to a letter she had written to Jones – in relation to a reprisals notice that had been handed in to the Eccles Hotel in Glengarriff, which she had bought in 1915, and which would be occupied from 1920 to 1921 by troops of the Essex Regiment:
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J. Annan Bryce, Esq

Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff.

In reply to your letter of September 17, 1920, addressed to O.C. Barracks, Bantry. It appears that slips similar to the one to which you evidently refer are being distributed about the country. On investigation I find that an officer of my battalion picked one of them up. This officer having seen similar slips in Bantry and other places thought it would be a good thing to hand it in to one of the hotels in Glengarriff as he passed through. As yours was the most convenient, being close to the road, he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the manageress and handed it in as he passed.

L. M. Jones, Lieutenant-Colonel, Commanding Troops, Bantry and commanding 1st Battalion, The King’s Regiment. Bantry, September 20, 1920.
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However, their area was not immune to retaliation. After two RIC men – Thomas King and James Brett – were killed, the Auxiliaries in Bantry shot an invalid called Con Crowley. On the same night the business premises and garage of a Mr Biggs and a number of houses were burned.
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The former was in clear revenge for Biggs’ writing to
The Irish Times
as a ‘neutral loyalist’ complaining about the previous behaviour of Auxiliaries.

How could things be so different between one regiment and another? It appears the King’s Regiment knew the Irish and had no tradition of brutal suppression. Formed in 1881, the 1st Battalion of the regiment was based at the Curragh from 1882 to 1893, then Nova Scotia and the West Indies, both relatively quiet postings. This is not to suggest that the regiment was soft. In 1900, during the Boer War in South Africa, the battalion was besieged at Ladysmith for 118 days. After this it spent three years in Burma and two years in India before returning to Fermoy in Cork in 1908. It seems clear that the regiment saw the enemy more as individual people and this was central to their different approach to the insurgents.
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On the other side of the war was the West Cork Brigade. If the British had defeated the IRA in Cork, then the War of Independence would now be called the second Sinn Féin rebellion, and people like Michael Collins, Tom Barry, Ned Young and Seán Hales would be footnotes in history. There is no doubt that Barry would have been tried and executed. In
Guerilla Days in Ireland
, he is brutally honest when he says that in response to the Bandon-based Essex Regiment: ‘They said I was ruthless, daring, savage, bloodthirsty, even heartless. The clergy called me and my comrades murderers; but the British were met with their own weapons. They had gone in the mire to destroy us, and our nation, and down after them we had to go.’ While Barry regretted the effect of some of his actions on the families of those he killed, his view was that ‘From February 1921 terror would be met with counter terror.’
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This is the essential logic of guerrilla warfare, and he never apologised for anything.

By the end of the war some members of the Bandon IRA were far more inured to amoral behaviour than those anywhere else in the West Cork Brigade. The BMH witness statements make clear that the shock of the Kilmichael ambush had badly affected some who had taken part; Peadar Kearney claims that local officers had to be replaced.
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Barry states in his reply to criticism of Kilmichael in 1974 that after the ambush he only wanted those who understood that they were expected to kill face to face if necessary.
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Ned Young, who took part in the Kilmichael ambush, makes a point in his witness statement: ‘I should have mentioned that between the date of Kilmichael (28 November) and December 8th, 1920 the column O/C. (Tom Barry) paraded us on several occasions and asked anybody who desired to leave the column to step forward. All present maintained their positions.’
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After Kilmichael the core IRA fighters were hardened professional soldiers, used to following orders without question and to killing without compunction. Yet, even late in the war, there is little suggestion that their violence was random. If they killed people, they did it for a logical reason. What other explanation can there be for the famous incident in Bandon on 23 February 1921? In this incident four members of the British military were captured and Jack Hennessy recalls:

[They] shot two of the Essex at the Laurel Walk … They also captured two British Navy … The Navy men were released and handed a letter addressed by Tom Barry to the O/C of the Essex in Bandon warning him that in view of the fact that the Essex had murdered and tortured prisoners, he (Barry) had given orders that the Essex were to be shot at sight whether armed or unarmed.
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Yet the savagery of some members of the column had shocked Michael O’Donoghue when ‘hardened and envenomed by the ferocity of the fight in West Cork’ they were going to shoot a ‘love struck’ Black and Tan in February 1922.
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There should be little doubt that, after their War of Independence experiences and their habitual response to orders, this group would have carried out any order they were given.

Caught between both sets of forces, as always, were the civilians. In early January 1921 the British commander in Munster, General Strickland, issued a proclamation stating that ‘anyone who had information about ambushes, the carrying of arms and so forth were duty bound to provide it to the military on pain of prosecution’.
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Both Cork unionist papers, the
Cork Constitution
and the
Cork & County Eagl
e, complained bitterly about the impossible position in which local loyalists were now placed. If it became known that loyalists ‘intended to comply with the government’s order their lives would not be worth 24 hours purchase’.
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The ‘respectable’ citizens of the towns now had a problem. If they did not help the military, then they risked having their homes looted and burned (or worse) by the Auxiliaries, and if they did help, then the IRA would shoot them. Denis Lordan gives a perfect example of the civilian dilemma:

… the Auxiliaries stationed in Dunmanway had ordered a number of shopkeepers and residents of Ballineen and Enniskeane [sic] to act as Civic Guards … These people were instructed to send at once any information they may get regarding the movements of the Column or members of the I.R.A., to the British Military or police. They were threatened with various penalties if they did not comply … It was discovered by the I.R.A. that these men attempted to comply with the orders of the British Auxiliary police. The local Dispensary Doctor in Enniskeane had refused to attend the Brigade O.C. when he was wounded at the Upton train ambush and had also refused to attend other wounded men. Both the Dispensary Doctor and those appointed as Civic Guards … were arrested by the I.R.A., and tried by Courtsmartial on Tuesday, 15th March [1921]. They were … fined and ordered under threat of further action to desist … The Dispensary Doctor was ordered to leave Ireland within twenty-four hours. The fines were paid and the Doctor left the country within the time specified.
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