The Squad (8 page)

Following the escape Collins went to London to meet with Tobin and Fitzgerald. ‘We met him and he walked around London with us, and in the course of our walk we had a good look at Scotland Yard and the principal government offices in Whitehall,’ Fitzgerald recalled. He was already impatient to get home. ‘Our work was becoming very monotonous,’ Fitzgerald explained. ‘We were getting tired hanging round having very little to do. We were asked from time to time to get information concerning some matter that GHQ at home was interested in. For example, if a political meeting, banquet, etc., was to be held and was to be addressed by some member of the cabinet, one of us was to go there and report on the Minister who addressed the meeting and say what precautions were taken to guard him, his method of getting to the meeting and getting away from it. This procedure was followed at any political meetings held in the vicinity of London. On one occasion I travelled to Colchester and was present at an “Oyster Banquet” at which the prime minister was the principal speaker. This information would be conveyed back to Dublin through Sam Maguire.’

Collins returned to Manchester and met the escaped prisoners hiding in Lodge’s house and made arrangements for them to be smuggled back to Dublin during the first week in November.

While some people believed that Collins moved about the city in disguise, highly armed and well protected, he in fact usually went alone, unarmed, on a bicycle, without any disguise. Some of the detectives knew him, but he had so terrorised the DMP that they were afraid to apprehend him lest the faceless people supposedly protecting him would come to his rescue, or take revenge on them. They knew only of his ruthless reputation, and he exploited it to the full.

If he took a tram and he saw a detective who would recognise him, Collins would confidently sit by the detective and ask in a friendly way about the detective’s family. If one of the children had made their first communion or been confirmed he would mention this, and anything he might know about the wife. He would, for instance, asked how the wife was, using her name. It was all a very subtle way of saying that he knew so much about the man’s family that if the detective did not want anything to happen to them, he would not interfere with Collins. It would have been out of character for Collins to attack any member of a person’s family in this way, but the detectives did not know that. As Collins would get off the tram, he would tell the detective that it would be safe for him to get off at a subsequent stop.

One day in the street Batt O’Connor became uneasy at the way two DMP looked at Collins. They seemed to recognise him, but he was unperturbed.

‘Even if they recognised me,’ Collins said, ‘they would be afraid to report they saw me.’ And even if they did report, it would take the DMP an hour to muster the necessary force to seize him. ‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘all the time I would wait here until they were ready to come along!’

He never stayed in any one place very long. He always had something to do, somebody to see, or somewhere to go.

Although he was always on the go, he never thought of himself as being ‘on the run’. Wanted men frequently developed a habit of venturing forth only with care. Before leaving a building they would sneak a furtive glance to make sure there were no police around, whereas Collins had contempt for such practices. He just bounded out a door in a carefree, self-confident manner without betraying the slightest indication he was trying to evade anybody.

‘I do not allow myself to feel I am on the run,’ he explained. ‘That is my safeguard. It prevents me from acting in a manner likely to arouse suspicion.’

Following the raid on the Sinn Féin headquarters at 6 Har court Street in September, the headquarters were moved down the street to number 76 Harcourt Street. The police had captured so much material at Number 6 that Batt O’Connor suggested building some hiding place into the new headquarters. ‘It would be worth trying anyway.’

He had already built this hiding place, into a wall, when the police raided the office on 8 November 1919. The staff had time to slip the books and papers under a sliding door before the police burst into the room. They searched the building but did not find the secret cupboard. Beaslaí had just arrived back in Dublin that day following his escape from Strangeways. He was at O’Connor’s house when Joe O’Reilly arrived with the news that 76 Harcourt Street was being raided and that Collins was in the building.

One of the uniformed policemen involved in searching the building was Constable David Neligan, who was shortly to become another of Collins’ police spies. He had no intention of trying to find anything. ‘I went upstairs and counted the roses on the wallpaper until the raid was over,’ he explained.

Collins headed for the skylight and escaped across the roof, climbing through the skylight of the nearby Standard hotel and boarding a tram outside while the raid was still in progress. The staff working in the building were arrested and each member was sentenced to two months in jail. They included Dick McKee, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, Fintan Murphy, Frank Lawless, Seán Hayes, Seán O’Mahony, Patrick Sheehan, Michael Lynch and Dan O’Donovan. ‘They made a clean sweep of the entire male staff, with the exception of the writer [himself] who evaded them,’ Collins wrote. ‘You will be pleased to know that they got no documents of importance, so that the only disorganisation is through the seizure of the staff.’

Detective Sergeant Thomas Wharton, whose regular beat in cluded Harcourt Street was shot and seriously wounded a couple of days after the raid. He, along with the ill-fated Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth, had previously arrested Beaslaí. Wharton, who was from Ballyhar near Killarney, was walking on the western side of Stephen’s Green towards Grafton Street. He had come down Harcourt Street when a lone shot rang out.

This seemed very different from the shooting of Smyth or H o e y . Wharton was not shot by a gang acting in concert, but by a lone gunman, with an unarmed accomplice. There had been plenty of backup firepower when Smyth and Hoey were shot, but in this instance the would-be assailant’s gun jammed after he got only one shot off.

Learning on the night of 10 November that Detective Sergeant Wharton was supposed to be in Harcourt Street, O’Daly and Leonard had gone to look for him, but he was not there. They then went to the vicinity of G Division headquarters. ‘After spending some hours around College Street waiting for Wharton’s return to barracks, we decided to give it up as a bad job,’ O’Daly said. ‘Joe Leonard got into the No. 15 tram to go home, and he had only just gone when I saw Wharton going up Grafton Street with two other detectives. I followed them as far as Harcourt Street. I immediately went to Joe Leonard’s house, No. 3 Mount pleasant Avenue, Ranelagh.

‘When I got there I discovered that Joe had no gun in the house, so we decided to go down, get Joe’s gun and then go after Wharton. On our way down we met Wharton face to face at the corner of Cuffe Street, with three other detectives. I told Joe it would be a pity to let the opportunity pass; that one of the detectives walking side by side with Wharton was the man we were not to shoot.

‘I fired at Wharton and he fell,’ O’Daly continued. ‘The other detective turned round but seemed to make very little effort to draw a gun. I discovered then that the parabellum I had was choked and I could not fire the second shot. I kept my eyes on the other three detectives as we made for Cuffe Street, and I noticed that the friendly detective walked between me and the other two detectives. I saw the gun in his hand but I did not hear him fire it. I think he tried to get between the other detectives and myself in order to prevent them firing.’

O’Daly added that they were surprised to hear the following day that the bullet had hit Wharton in the back of the right shoulder, passed through his right lung, exiting in the front and had then struck Gertrude O’Hanlon, a young female student from Sligo who was walking in front of him. She was particularly lucky because although the bullet tore through her velvet cap and drew an amount of blood from her scalp, it was fortunately only a scalp wound.

Later James Hurley, an innocent news vendor and veteran of the First World War, was charged with the attempted murder be fore a military court. He had spent fifteen years in the British army before he was discharged in 1917 having been wounded, shell shocked and gassed. The main witness was William F. Bachelor, a former British army officer living on South Circular Road. He testified that a week earlier he had seen Hurley standing at the corner with three other men whom Bachelor had confronted after some remark was made. Bachelor testified that he noticed Hurley in the area on other nights, and on the night that Wharton was shot, he said he saw Hurley run from Cuffe Street into Harcourt Street and fire a shot as two tall men were crossing the street. One was struck and staggered.

Nine days later Bachelor pointed out Hurley to Detective Sergeant Johnny Barton, ‘I can swear he is the man,’ Bachelor said. Barton arrested Hurley, who put up no resistance. When Barton and a colleague searched him, they found nothing more lethal than a couple of ballads. Among the newspapers that he used to sell were
The Irish Volunteer
and
The United Irishman
.

Bachelor testified that he chased the gunman down Cuffe Street and Wexford Street in the direction of Camden Street but that his progress was obstructed and he lost him. Olive Warring ton testified that she was standing on the corner talking to a friend when she heard the shot and saw two men running down Cuffe Street being pursued by Bachelor, but she could not describe the men running away.

A policeman on point duty testified that Hurley normally sold newspapers at the corner between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. At the time of the shooting on the evening in question Hurley’s defence contended that he was in Little’s Bar at the corner of Harcourt Street having a drink. Patrick Clitheroe, another newspaper seller, testified that he was with Hurley in the bar when a newsboy, John Ratigan, rushed in and told them about the shooting. Ratigan confirmed that he told them in the public house.

But this was a military court and they were just newspaper vendors contradicting the word of a former officer who was presumed to be a gentleman. Hurley was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. Had Wharton died, he would probably have been executed. According to Paddy O’Daly, Hurley was released after the truce but was killed during the civil war while helping a wounded soldier into Jervis Street hospital.

The more the notoriety of Collins grew, the more willing some people were to work for him, and the fact that he was president of the supreme council of the IRB probably helped in recruiting spies. A person in his position in a secret society was someone they could trust.

He continued to make new contacts. Kavanagh and Broy introduced him to a new detective, James McNamara, who was administrative assistant to the assistant police commissioner in Dublin Castle.

Tadgh Kennedy, the intelligence officer in Kerry, was on friendly terms in Tralee with another future contact, the Special Crimes Sergeant Thomas O’Rourke, who confided in Kennedy that he was anxious to channel information to the republican leadership. ‘I hadn’t such experience of intelligence at the time and I was scared to have much to do with the RIC,’ Kennedy explained. He therefore consulted Michael Collins, who told him to ask O’Rourke to furnish a copy of the key to the RIC code.

‘I asked him for the key,’ Kennedy added, ‘and he delivered it to myself. I sent it to Mick Collins and henceforth I was able to supply it to Headquarters every month and after each change where the RIC suspected we had got it. Mick told me afterwards that it was the first time he was able to procure the key regularly and it laid the foundation of the elaborate scheme of intelligence in the post offices.’

In September Collins learned that a Sergeant Jerry Maher of the RIC in Naas might be sympathetic. When an emissary asked Maher about working for Collins, his eyes immediately lit up. ‘You’re the man I’ve been waiting for,’ Maher replied.

He was working as a clerk for the county inspector, Kerry Leyne Supple of the RIC, and he was able to pilfer the code that was confined to county inspectors. He also recruited the district inspector’s clerk, Constable Patrick Casey, who became another source of the code being supplied by O’Rourke. At times Collins would have dispatches decoded and circulated to brigade intelligence officers before some of the county inspectors could decode their own messages.

Collins also had at least two other sources for the police codes. Maurice McCarthy, an RIC sergeant stationed in Belfast was one, and the other was a cousin of his own, Nancy O’Brien, who had spent some years working in the post office in London. She was brought to Dublin as a cipher clerk to decode messages. She was selected, she was told, because the Dublin Castle authorities wanted someone they could trust because Collins was getting some messages even before the British officers for whom they were intended. She, of course, promptly went to Collins.

Following his return from Britain McDonnell headed a different section of the Squad but neither section knew of the other’s existence initially. McDonnell’s group included his half-brother, T o m Keogh, who was an easy-going individual with great courage who had been a shop assistant in Wicklow; and two former inmates of Frongoch, Bill Stapleton from Dublin and Jim Slattery from Clare.

While the plan to kill the British cabinet and leading public figures in England had been called off, it had been substituted with a plan to kill the lord lieutenant, Sir John French. Mick McDonnell said that he had been approached to act as a sniper to get the lord lieutenant on a reviewing stand during a public parade in late November 1919 but that this had been called off by Cathal Brugha because ‘the people would not stand for it’. Some of the details of this story were so confused however that one needs to be very careful. There was no parade in later November, but there was one within the grounds of Trinity College on 11 November. Irish secretary, Sir Hamar Greenwood, who was supposed to be with French within Trinity College on the occasion, was not actually appointed to the post until some months later. However, there was no doubt whatever that Collins was anxious to kill French.