The Squad (21 page)

Two Black and Tans, Constables Herbert Evans, aged twenty-six, from Belfast, and Albert Caseley, aged twenty-four, from London – were killed at Hillville, near Killorglin, that night. Officially they were on patrol, but they had actually just seen two girls home when they were attacked. Two more Black and Tans were wounded in an ambush in Green Street, Dingle.

Killorglin had been relatively quiet over the years, but the Black and Tans went on the rampage in the town that night. They burned down the Sinn Féin hall and an adjoining garage, as well as the Temperance Association hall and the residence of a well-known Sinn Féiner who was in Cork with his family for the MacSwiney funeral. Throughout the night shots were discharged intermittently until about 5.30 a.m. The homes of other known Sinn Féiners were knocked up, but none of the ‘wanted’ men were found, though Denis M. O’Sullivan was taken from his house in the square and shot four times. He never recovered fully and died the following year.

Meanwhile Tralee was in turmoil. On Sunday evening, Constable Daniel McCarthy of the RIC and Bert Woodward, a naval radio operator, were shot and wounded, while Constable Patrick Waters, aged twenty-three (a four-year veteran from Loughanbeg, near Spiddal, County Galway), and Constable Ernest Bright, a Londoner in his early thirties – were seized by the IRA, taken outside the town and killed. Their bodies were never found. It was variously rumoured that they were thrown live into a furnace at the Gas Works, or that they were shot and their bodies disposed of in the furnace or buried near the lock gates at the end of the local canal outside the town or in the family crypt of the lock keeper.

Assuming that their two colleagues had been kidnapped and were possibly still being held by the IRA, the Black and Tans un leashed a veritable reign of terror in Tralee over the next nine days. The events made front-page news in both Canada and the United States, prompted a series of parliamentary questions at Westminster, and became the subject of some controversy and editorials in the British daily press. News from Tralee was actually reported on the front page of the
New York Times
on three separate days during the siege and on the front page of the
Montreal Gazette
on four different days.

Monday, 1 November, was All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation, with the result that all the churches were busy. The Black and Tans drove up and down the streets in lorries, discharging their rifles. ‘Volley after volley resounded to the terror of the people,’ recalled one witness. Shots were fired as people emerged from twelve o’clock mass at St John’s parish church and there was a panic as people stampeded back in.

A group of foreign journalists from the Associated Press of the United States,
Le Journal
(Paris), the London
Times
,
Daily News
,
Manchester Guardian
, and London
Evening News
visited Tralee after MacSwiney’s funeral and heard of the burning of the local county hall the previous night. Although the local council owned the hall itself, Paddy Cahill, the IRA brigadier in north Kerry, was renting it as a cinema.

The Tans told a group of journalists which happened to include Hugh Martin of the
Daily News
(London) that they were looking for him because of what he had been reporting. The threat to Martin, which made front page news in the
New York Times
, was denounced as a threat to the freedom of the press in an editorial in
The Times
of London: ‘A n issue of importance to all independent newspapers and to the public is raised by the account published yesterday in the
Daily News
of the threatening attitude of the constabulary at Tralee towards a special correspondent and confirmed in all essentials by the special correspondent of the
Evening News
who accompanied him and heard the threats.’

A French journalist who was with the group visiting Tralee depicted a frightening situation. ‘I do not remember, even during the war, having seen a people so profoundly terrified as those of this little town, Tralee,’ M. de Marsillac, the London correspondent of
Le Journal
reported. ‘The violence of the reprisals undertaken by representatives of authority, so to speak, everywhere, has made everybody beside himself, even before facts justified such a state of mind.’

Shopkeepers were warned by the police to close down for the funerals of their companions, who deserved as much respect as the lord mayor of Cork. All schools were closed and remained closed for over a week. The security forces stalked the deserted streets firing shots into the air, or shooting blindly into windows as they drove up and down the street. Shortly after noon on Tuesday, Tommy Wall, aged twenty-four, an ex-soldier who had fought in France during the First World War and returned to join the IRA, was standing at the corner of Blackpool Lane and The Mall when some Tans told him to put up his hands. One of the men hit him in the face with a rifle butt and told him to get out of the place. As he left they shot and fatally wounded him, claiming that he was shot trying to escape.

‘Except for soldiers, the town was as deserted and doleful as if the Angel of Death had passed through it,’ de Marsillac continued. ‘Not a living soul in the streets. All the shops shut and the bolts hastily fastened. All work was suspended, even the local newspapers.’

In the early hours of Thursday morning the Black and Tans began firebombing the occupied business premises of Sinn Féin sympathisers. ‘Scenes of the wildest panic ensued,’
The Cork Examiner
reported. ‘The screams of the women and children were heard from the neighbourhood of the burning buildings, mingled with the ring of rifle fire and the explosion of bombs.’ The accounts of what was happening were still fairly sketchy on the Thursday when T. P. O’Connor, the nationalist member of parliament from Liverpool, asked in the House of Commons about the deaths of John Houlihan, John Conway, Tommy Wall and Simon O’Connor.

‘I have received a report to the effect that John Houlihan was shot by masked men at Ballyduff at 6 a.m. on Monday the 1st, and that Thomas Wall was fatally wounded in Tralee from gunshot wounds,’ Sir Hamar Greenwood, the chief secretary for Ireland, replied. ‘Courts of inquiry will be held in these cases. In the case of Conway a court of inquiry found that he died from natural causes. I have not yet received a copy of the proceedings of this court, but I am informed by the police authorities that the deceased was found dead near his home on the 1st instant, and the body bore no traces of gunshot or other wounds.’

The London
Times
had already reported that its correspondent had seen the body laid out with an obvious bullet wound in the temple. ‘The vital fact in the tragedy is that while the chief secretary is repeating his stereotyped assurances that things are getting better, it is patent to the readers of newspapers the world over that they are getting daily worse,’ the
Daily News
commented. ‘At the moment the supreme need is to withdraw the troops. If the police cannot remain unprotected, let them go too. Ireland could not be worse off without them than with them. There is every reason to believe her state would be incomparably better.’

On the same day that John Conway was killed in Tralee, Ellen Quinn, a pregnant housewife, was shot dead in Galway while sitting on her wall by a Black and Tan firing indiscriminately from a passing lorry. There was no doubt about the responsibility even in Dublin Castle. ‘I wish these lorry loads of police could be restrained from this idiotic blazing about as they are driving along – it can do no conceivable good and yesterday’s case of a woman in Galway shortly expecting a child, shot in the stomach and now dead is beastly.’

By Friday, 5 November, separate stories from Tralee were front-page news in both the
Montreal Gazette
and the
New York Times
. By then the British army commander was being depicted as protecting the people from the police but saying that he really did not have the authority to act, because the police terrorising the town were the legal authority.

Saturday, market day, was normally the busiest day of the week in Tralee, but people were not allowed into town. The correspondent of the
Freeman’s Journal
contacted his newspaper by telegraph. ‘Police persist in taking measures to cut off the necessities of life from the people,’ he reported. ‘Black and Tans take up positions outside bakeries and provision stores where they suspect food could be secured, and at the bayonet’s point send famishing women and children from the doors. Outside one baker’s establishment a Black and Tan, brandishing a revolver, told women and children to clear off, adding “You wanted to starve us, but we will starve you”.’

By now, people had not been able to do any shopping for a week and there was real deprivation, especially in the poorer areas. The breadwinners had been unable to work and the poorer people could not afford to buy food, even if it had been available. The story on the front page of that day’s
Montreal Gazette
was headlined: ‘TRALEE IS PARALYZED: Town Near Starvation, Condition is Desperate.’

‘The town of Tralee, Ireland is fast approaching starvation in consequence of recent police order forbidding the carrying on of business – until two missing policemen are returned by the townspeople,’ the report began. ‘Trade is paralyzed, the banks, and bakeries even being closed, and the condition of the people is becoming desperate. An addition military order forbids the holding of fairs and markets or assemblies of any kind within a three mile limit.’

That same day in London T. P. O’Connor asked another series of questions in the House of Commons about what was happening in Tralee. He asked about the police closing of all businesses in Tralee, whether the poor were in serious distress, and whether the trade of the town was being destroyed.

‘The business premises in Tralee were closed for some days following a number of assassinations of police on Sunday last, but not by order of the police.’ Greenwood replied. ‘I understand shops are now open and business is resuming its normal course.’ He said he had already telegraphed Tralee and was waiting for a reply to his question, ‘on whose authority were they closed?’

‘Is the world expected to believe that women and children went without food for days in the hope that the chief secretary would be blamed for reducing them to starvation?’ the
Freeman’s Journal
asked. ‘That is the only interpretation of Sir Hamar Greenwood’s so-called explanation. It gives the measure of the present Parliament that this issue of grotesque fabrications was apparently accepted by the majority, not indeed as the truth, but as a plausible substitute for the truth. Any lie, however clumsy, will serve if the object is to stifle inquiry into the Irish Terror.’

On Monday the bakeries, butcher shops and local factories were permitted to open in Tralee, but all other business were not. The
New York World
reported that an attempt to open others shops in Tralee on Tuesday, 9 November, ‘was met by demonstrations by the police, who appeared on the streets shouting and discharging firearms and terrorising those who had attempted to defy the order and open their business places.’

‘No coherent account of conditions in Tralee is possible,’ the
New York World
correspondent explained. ‘Communication is difficult, investigation dangerous, and the reports from the place are so remarkable as to be almost unbelievable. It has been suggested officially that the police are not responsible for the order, but local accounts leave no doubt that the police are enforcing it, perhaps unofficially but none the less effectively. Wholesale starvation apparently is enforced with bayonets and occasionally with bullets, as events have shown. The people cannot understand how this can be done by forces of the crown without crown authority … A Black and Tan rule has been set up in Tralee. Many of the 10,000 inhabitants have fled, but those unable to find refuge elsewhere are the victims of this awful procedure.’

It was not until around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, 9 November, that the Black and Tans announced that businesses could re-open the following day. That same evening Lloyd George declared during a highly publicised address at the annual lord mayor’s dinner at the Guildhall that the security forces ‘had murder by the throat’ in Ireland.

While the British had been building up their intelligence service, the intelligence department under Collins and Tobin had been collecting the addresses of the undercover British agents living in private houses around the city. Instead of taking them out one by one, it was decided to hit as many of them as possible at the one time, as they were coming much too close to the IRA leadership for comfort.

Having been introduced by Willie Beaumont and Dave Neligan to some of the British intelligence people, Cullen, Saurin and Thornton began to frequent Kidds Buffet in Grafton Street, where the British intelligence officers and auxiliary intelligence officers met frequently. ‘We were introduced in the ordinary way as touts,’ Thornton explained. They eventually became great friends with men like Lieutenant Bennett, Captain Peter Ames and a number of other prominent secret service officers. One day, one of these officers turned suddenly to Tom Cullen and said, ‘Surely you fellows know these men – Liam Tobin, Tom Cullen and Frank Thornton, these are Collins’ three officers and if you can get these fellows we would locate Collins himself.’

‘If the ground opened and swallowed us we could not have been more surprised,’ Thornton added. ‘It was a genuine query to three Irishmen whom they believed should know all about the particular fellows they mentioned. The fact remains that although they knew of the existence of the three of us and they knew of the existence of Collins, they actually had no photograph of any of us, and had a very poor description of either Collins or the three of us.’

‘Of all the sources of information, undoubtedly the most valuable was that derived from the examination of captured documents,’ Ormonde Winter wrote. ‘After the first important capture which, to a great extent, was fortuitous, other searches were made from the addresses noted and the names obtained, and the snowball process continued, leading to fresh searches.’ The Raid Bureau was established. According to Winter, ‘from August 1920, to July 1921, 6,311 raids and searches were carried out in the Dublin district’. He noted that the British learned an enormous amount about the workings of the IRA because ‘the Irish had an irresistible habit of keeping documents’. The British seized a tremendous number of documents from which they learned who was doing what within the IRA, but not what those people looked like. Thus, they quickly knew who they wanted, but they could not identify them.