Kevin Walsh has created a work of great importance, this is a gem, a treasure to be he held and read as time goes on. Where will one find an account as interesting and well researched as these pages of history will reveal. Kevin has once again presented us with a treasured work, as only he can.
Take a look back at the way we were, do not cast judgment on the people of the time, for they reacted to events as they unfolded. Many of the soldiers stationed in Fermoy after 1918 had lived through the hell of the Great War, seen countless comrades die an ignominious death.
The British Army despised the Black and Tans, they had trown an Irish officer of the Great War in to the river in Fermoy after the Kilmichael ambush. An officer bearing the rank of major had come to Conna to warn the people to stay indoors as "vagabonds with arms were out of control and drunk speeding towards the village in Crossley tenders".
The nationalist I.RA. men were fighting a war of freedom and suffered greatly. "There's was not to reason why, but to do or die." Feel free to print or copy this work in elecrtonic format.
WHISPERINGS IN A LIBRARY….
In the vestibule of the massive reinforced concrete edifice that is the Fermoy Library, complete with its great open-work four-cornered tower that stands as an ancient symbol of learning and erudition, can be seen an old black-and-white photograph of the Town Square (now known as Pearse Square) as it looked in the mid-1880s, offering a tantalising glimpse back into a slower age with its patiently tethered horses and their waiting carts, its doughty farmers with weather-beaten faces and women clad in long dresses carrying wicker baskets going about their daily business.
My gaze is drawn across the fine cut-stone bridge and the unseen river below towards the crest of the northern heights where the misty but still impressive shape of the British military barracks looms over the town with an air of prophetic unreality. But to those people crossing the Square that day in the pursuit of their myriad prosaic concerns what must have struck them was the apparent immutable solidity of those great buildings, doubtlessly never imagining a time when all of that imperial power and panoply would be no more, and that the town long held in this great militaristic shadow would one day go on about its business as though it had never existed.
It now takes an effort of the imagination to enter further into the drama of that late Victorian moment as on the gentle breeze you catch the distant echoes of sharply barked words of command, the faint playing of bugles for taps and reveille, the crunching of hundreds of heavily-booted marching feet, the endless clatter of horses’ hooves entering and leaving the barrack gates.
Nearly a century later every morning before heading off for school I would look out my bedroom window to see the by now roofless, if still venerable ruins of those long abandoned bastions of empire still dominating the town’s northern skyline, left silent and abandoned having been consumed by the fiery winds of conflict that swept through this land in the early 1920s: the pale light of a time not theirs peering vacantly through the rows of gaping windows from an empty shell as dead as all who had ever soldiered there.
Of course in school I found these monuments to something that even then I understood to be of some significance, were hardly ever spoken of. We were now a free and independent nation, eager to forget everything represented by those grim haunts of an ancient oppressor; all that was best consigned to the vaults of our national historical amnesia.
But men like John Murphy could never forget. Slim, balding, bespectacled and dapper, with that ready and engaging manner which comes from the rich mellowing of age, he had been one of those formidable old schoolmasters whose charges (including my own late father) could never believe had once been young himself. But I was privileged to have known him not in the austere environment of the classroom where authority and jurisdiction so often clouds the relationship between one generation and the next, but in the peaceful surroundings of the local library where, sharing an adult love of books and history, a gratifying and rewarding friendship blossomed between us.
Leaning against the book-lined shelves in a thoughtful pose, creasing his library tickets in his hand, he afforded me a compelling insight into the impact on his child’s mind of the great upheavals that had marked the birth of a new nation. Through the testimony of his vivid first-hand experience the walls of my native streets told their epic stories.
No textbook could ever convey the immediacy of a nine-year-old boy during Easter Week 1916 seeing a precautionary military checkpoint on Fermoy Bridge overseen by a very aged and feeble officer sprawled languidly on a flounced, wing-backed armchair. With younger personnel away fighting in the trenches of northern France, this tired old man incongruously recalled to uniform and Sam Brown belt, was presumably all that could be spared. This faintly comic vignette would ever afterwards remain imprinted on John Murphy’s memory as an aptly effete symbol of the dying empire of which he was born a subject, colouring his attitude to the British officer corps for the rest of his life. He would go home to hear his father lament the foolishness of those hotheaded young men in the GPO, a sentiment that was to turn to outrage as word came of the flow of blood out from under the gates of Kilmainham Jail.
The springtime of nationhood soon turned into a dark nightmare of violence and terror. Memories still haunted him of going out in the dark of an early winter’s morning in breach of an immediate post-ambush curfew and running the gauntlet of bayoneted troops on the streets to act as an altar-server at first Mass in the parish church. The soldiers crudely threatened him, but an officer rebuked them and in a kindly tone bid ‘the lad go through’.
Then too he never stopped following the trail of bright, fresh blood left behind by those two dead soldiers of the Shropshire regiment carried back to the barracks on the hill having been shot down outside the old Wesleyan chapel where they had been guarding the neatly stacked rifles of their comrades attending Sunday morning service inside. By that evening he would see the town’s streets littered with glistening glass shards left behind by the vengeful soldiery, doubtlessly embittered and brutalized by the terrible experience of trench warfare, who had stormed through the gates of Saint Colman’s College to break up an Irish cultural gathering being held in its grounds. But with their rifles safely locked away in the armoury, they were beaten off by the indignant townspeople. On the way back to barracks they ran amok, venting their rage against every shop and domestic window that they passed.
John remembered the sound of the glass sharply cracking under his feet like frost on a hard winter’s morning, rightly seeing in it the breaking of more than a century of trust between the garrison and the town that had been founded to serve its needs during the Napoleonic wars by a Scotsman of genius, John Anderson. Nothing could ever be the same again. The barracks was now isolated and beleaguered.
If imperialism had been the dominant idea of the 19th century, nationalism would be that of the 20th. Its hour had come to stir the long-smoldering embers of revolution into a raging fire in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, against which traditional society having been so massively traumatized and dislocated, could offer no effective moral constraint. Those were fruitful times for violent men with violent minds though whether to the real lasting benefit of humanity is somewhat more questionable.
John ever held in his nostrils the acrid smell of a world in flames after much of the town centre had been burned to the ground by marauding Black and Tans in the spring of 1921 as the conflict approached its desperate climax. His family had wanted to live quietly though that tempestuous era. But it forced itself rudely upon them as on that other Sunday morning when his father was frog marched through the streets together with the rest of the men folk of the town to be held at gunpoint behind the walls of the local gasworks. All that long, nerve-racking day the entire community was gripped by a fever of suspense and dread in expectation of another Amritsar-type massacre. It was the only Sunday for two hundred or more years that no Mass was celebrated in St. Patrick’s Church; at all the main approach routes the clergy headed off the country people streaming into the town whether on foot, by bicycle or horses-and-carts (much in the manner of those to be seen in the library picture), bidding them return quickly to their homes and pray fervently for deliverance from the impending catastrophe that hovered menacingly like a dark storm cloud.
But the portended menace fortunately did not meet the reality of the final outcome. Wiser counsels prevailed and the prisoners, having been detained for several hours without word as to what their ultimate fate might be, were released and allowed to return home unmolested. The tearful embrace of his mother and father in the security of their hallway was something that remained ever vivid in John’s memory through all of his long life.
It was understandable that when it was all over that generation who had suffered and endured so much, just wanted to get on with their lives as quietly as possible, to draw a veil of healing silence over the darkest memories, until after the passage of time it became possible to see things in a broader and clearer perspective. So many sacrifices had been made to establish a separate Irish statehood and a ‘green’ nationalistic sense of identity as exemplified in Fermoy by the renaming of the principal thoroughfare King Street as McCurtain Street, Artillery Quay becoming Ashe Quay after a local fallen patriot, while the memory of Padraig Pearse was commemorated in the now eponymous Square. One secular mythology had replaced another, in a process by which other essential strands of our identity were given over to an embarrassed silence.
With all that Fermoy nevertheless in its commercial, military and social history has always been a place of diversity, where in former times the culture of imperial Britain at its zenith lived side by side with a still flourishing and uniquely indigenous vision of civilization, one that was Irish-speaking and filled with its own unique warmth and intimacy.
Another outstanding figure who understood the secret of that diversity as much by the wisdom of his longevity as by his great powers of intellect was the late Padraig O’Braoin. A slim, wiry figure with brushed back white hair and thick-rimmed spectacles, he was an eminent Irish language scholar, writer and historian, immersed in traditional culture, affable, charming and given to a turn of wry, mordant humour when contemplating human folly: when I once asked him about an unmanned European space rocket that had blown up on the launch-pad in South America, he thought about it for a moment, held his glass of whiskey before his lips and said, “I was only sorry that it didn’t fall down on those idiots who sent it up!”
His parents both came from an Irish-speaking village just a stone’s throw away from the huge British military encampment on the northern road between Fermoy and Mitchelstown where during the Boer War (1899-1902) some thirty thousand soldiers often took part in summertime manoeuvres. The introduction of the Lee-Enfield repeater rifles necessitated the use of much longer firing ranges. At first, it was proposed to situate this facility on the slopes of the Knockmealdowns some twenty miles to the east in County Waterford at a site close to the Cistercian monastery of Mount Melleray.
However the abbot and his monks vehemently protested to the British authorities that by ruining the peace and tranquility of the place so necessary for the contemplative life, they would have no choice but to abandon their mountainside abbey. These protests were heeded and the new firing range was far more conveniently sited at a place immediately adjacent to the camps. Sadly, this meant that the village had to make way. The landlord sold the properties at a handsome profit. Much smaller sums were offered by way of compensation to the residents; some even tried to avoid signing the necessary papers by claiming inability to understand the English language! But to no avail. The community was scattered; the village was razed to the ground, the sound of spoken Irish and the noise of everyday peaceable industry gave way to the rattle of practice gunnery, which continues to the present day with the Irish Army on that desolate windswept hillside.
But through his parents, Padraig inherited the cultural richness of that small, proud, fiercely independent community. He learnt Irish from the cradle that was to remain the first language of his heart, the medium in which he was to write several works of local history and numerous newspaper articles in a deeply spiritual and linguistic love he would sustain through well over ninety years of life and transmit to following generations in adult oral Irish classes.
But he was too open-minded and too generous spirited a man to ever attempt to force the use of the language on others who did not share his adeptness or his passion; never once did he make anyone feel uncomfortable or ill at ease. Then too although his family had quite literally been driven from their home for the sake of the military needs of empire, Padraig never expressed any resentment or bitterness against England, for he grasped the vital truth that to love your own heritage and tradition you do not need to hate that of someone else.
Indeed, together with another notable Irish scholar and retired naval officer, Niall Brunicardi (whose father of Italian descent was a Great War British Army veteran) he founded a Toastmasters’ club in Fermoy dedicated to the fostering of public speaking and leadership skills for the development of character and dexterity in the arts of self-expression with an ethos that was open, pluralist, and overwhelmingly English-speaking, in a great tradition that continues to this day.
It is a worthy tribute to these men that coming form an era marked by so much division and hatred, they created something based on such generous and expansive impulses. Padraig especially understood that inside every chapter of endings lie new beginnings. In his youth he never quite saw the soldiers take their leave of the banks of the Blackwater where they and their predecessors had been garrisoned for over a century. But he heard the rumble of the horse-drawn artillery through the streets of the town en route to Cork and the skirl of the bagpipes as the last detachments boarded the train that would forever take them away from a duty that the world no longer needed or acknowledged.
Most of the war weary townspeople were not unduly sorry to see them go, although for many of the local traders the disappearance of soldiers’ pay would make for painfully lighter tills. In my paternal grandfather’s hardware store stocks of unsold soldiers’ swagger sticks remained lying around for many years afterwards. But they were tenacious enough to hold on.
As a very young boy, I can recall my astonishment when one day my Grandmother asked me what I was learning at school. I eagerly recounted what the young Christian Brother in his long black soutane had been telling us only that very afternoon of the glorious fight for Irish freedom against the British colonial oppressors. She replied by expressing her nostalgia for those distant days when the soldiery had filled the streets and – to quote her own words – “were buying all around them”. In my juvenile immaturity, I was utterly non-plussed and left at a total loss for words. However I learned something very valuable that day which I have never since forgotten: that there is usually at least two or more sides to every story, that nothing can ever be seen from one angle exclusively, that truth can only be arrived at by the bringing together of many different strands of experience.
The ruined barracks have long since been pulled down. The Square that on an afternoon in the year 1910 witnessed an awesome display of imperial grandeur as the massed serried ranks of dress-uniformed troops stood in review under the basilisk gaze of Lord Kitchener standing on the balcony of the Royal Hotel nowadays reverberates to the roar of juggernauts. The site once occupied by the hotel is left open to the sky having been felled not by conflict but the property developers’ hammer always overly eager in tearing down before clearly knowing what is to come by way of replacement building up. The old Wesleyan chapel is a motor accessories shop. The railway station that bore away the last guardians of empire from Fermoy is – with sardonic appropriateness - a funeral parlour. It is quite literally a very different world.
But not all the soldiers of those distant days are gone. Some are still with us. The military cemetery adjacent to the barracks, long left sadly neglected, was restored a couple of years ago for the Millennium celebrations. Serving soldiers, their wives, young children - even Mustapha a Sudanese bandsman and regimental mascot dubbed as ‘Little Jimmy Durham’ stationed so far away from his native sun-scorched land - all lie there forever under the rainy skies of an Ireland they had come to guard, a poignant corner of a foreign field that is ever dedicated by their dust to a heritage and tradition that we must not see as something entirely foreign or alien, but as an integral part of our own identity as a people.
This fact is underscored by the many hundreds of local young men who flocked to the colours to fight in the trenches of the First World War. So many of them never returned, but many others did - shaken by a grim ordeal that would ever afterwards mark them off form the rest of the civilian world, yet stoutly loyal to comrades fallen in the mud of Flanders Fields, proud of the duty they had served at the cost of much heroic self-sacrifice and suffering - to an Ireland that greeted their homecoming by refusing to recognize them, an Ireland that wrote them out of its history. No monuments were erected to them, no commemorative Masses were ever celebrated, no speeches of tribute fell from the lips of the leaders of Church and State.
In later years, my father John often saw groups of those old soldiers, sober-suited grey-haired men with panama hats and walking canes who carried themselves with that unmistakable military bearing take their daily exercise along the peaceful riverside Barnane walk, leaving the busy hum of the town behind them, doubtlessly hearing again the growl of heavy guns from such places as Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele, their eyes peering into the faces of vanished friends and comrades who would never grow old as they had, members of a dwindling company quietly fading away as old soldiers ever do until there came a moment when the gentle thunder of the river cascading over the weir carried away the last dying out of their footsteps .
In earlier years in the Twenties and Thirties, they had organized their own commemoration ceremonies on Armistice Day forming up to march through the town behind a fife-and-drum band, assembling under the town clock in the Square at precisely the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. They stood smartly to attention whilst the evocative chimes rang out to be followed by a minute’s solemn, profound silence disturbed only by the moaning of the mid-November wind across the brave new world for which they had fought. Then the bugle struck up the haunting, plaintive melody of the Last Post. As the final notes were carried away on the river of time each would quietly disperse back to the hard struggle for survival through the depths of the Great Depression. The practice was discontinued after 1939 when the world turned to an even greater and more destructive conflict, never to be revived.
But Fermoy did not entirely turn its back on its long military traditions and those who shaped them; it did not completely forget the sons and daughters it had given to the cause of defending freedom and civilization against tyranny and oppression in two world wars. The record of history was never quite erased here. This was largely due to the vision and tenacity of a truly remarkable woman, the late Mrs. Elizabeth Blackley. Widow of a British Army major, for more years than anyone could remember she had guided and inspired her fellow-members of the town’s small Episcopalian community in the holding of a special afternoon service on Remembrance Sunday in Fermoy’s Christ Church where long ago the soldiers had marched on Sunday Church Parade, their regimental banners borne under its high main door. This was – and remains to this day - the only commemorative service of its kind held anywhere in the Republic outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Elizabeth was a small lady with tight curly hair and a kind, amiable face, which masked a quiet but steely determination to do at all times what she believed to be right. Gracious, considerate, exquisitely courteous and warm-hearted, I came to admire her great resources of character and her immense integrity. She cherished the symbol of the Haig Fund Poppy and all that it represented when it was not always popular to do so. She worked with unflagging dedication to promote the welfare of retired soldiers and veterans; she loved her church and most especially she cherished that November service not alone to honour the dead of past wars and those Irishmen who had fallen in the service of the United Nations, but especially to pray God’s blessing on Ireland and the whole world for a new dispensation of peace, reconciliation and goodwill.
She understood that an essential prerequisite to any healing of past wounds would have to be a recognition and acceptance that the traditions of all who had fought for different conceptions of freedom were not mutually exclusive and were entitled to an equality of honour and respect leading to that reconciliation of the heart and spirit that makes for peace in the present and an abundance of hope for the future.
On one or two occasions in the early 1980s the Irish Government allowed army personnel for the first time to participate in the ceremonies in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A group of retired military officers bitterly denounced this decision, branding those who had fought in the world wars as ‘traitors’ to Ireland. I wrote an article in a local newspaper at the time deploring their bigotry and narrow-mindedness, which – I well recall – was entitled ‘The Last Bugle Call’. Elizabeth (whom I had never previously met) wrote to me shortly afterwards to register her approval and gratification for the sentiments I had expressed.
Twelve months later she invited me to the Remembrance Service in Christ Church. That was the beginning of a very happy association that was to continue for many years even after her death in 1993 as the then Rector of Fermoy, the Rev. John Haworth – a genial, mild-mannered man of great personal charm and kindness combined with a wonderful tenacity of purpose to rival Elizabeth’s own, whom I count as one of my very special friends - carried on the great tradition, widening and deepening it further in a truly ecumenical sense as year after year congregations grew larger and the Roman Catholic Administrator of Fermoy by his most welcome ecumenical participation commemorated the religious allegiance of so very many of the town’s wartime veterans whose memory had for so long been hitherto neglected by the Church to which they had belonged.
Then too the groundbreaking decision of the new President of Ireland and constitutional titular head of the armed forces, Mary Robinson, to attend the Remembrance Day service at St. Patrick’s in Dublin put an end to the long-held objections of the military authorities that their participation at such ceremonies was contrary to official policy. At last something that Elizabeth had for so long yearned but never seen in her lifetime, was achieved with the official attendance in uniform of representatives of the officers and men of the local Fitzgerald Camp together with a retired army trumpeter to sound the Last Post and Reveille in a place of worship full of the echoes of the military ceremonial of another age.
I myself had the honour of delivering the keynote address on more than one occasion, to speak from the heart as a member of another generation mercifully living in times of peace but offering before the altar of remembrance the deepest homage to the memory of those brave men and women who had endured the trials of war so that we today might live in dignity and freedom, sentiments that aroused the warm applause of the listeners.
I will always hold a very special place in my heart for the beautiful congregational hymns – ‘O God Our Help In Ages Past’; ‘Almighty Invisible God Only Wise’; ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’; the rich cadences of the ancient words of the King James Bible: “He knappeth the spear in sunder and burneth the chariots in the fire”, a deeply moving reminder of how old and deep-seated is the human longing for peace. And then the congenial sharing of tea and sandwiches afterwards in the transept enveloped in a glow of informal conviviality and relaxed conversation while outside the cloak of winter’s early night descended, so that in remembering the dark hours of war we were writing a new chapter of peace in amity and goodwill in a gentle, quiet-spoken but richly inspiring affirmation of hope.
All of human experience eventually resolves itself into the fine, misty stuff that is memory. It was a privilege to have known so many fascinating and deeply absorbing people who had witnessed so much history and who in their venerable twilight years had so much to hand on that must never be forgotten. I heard a few notes of their quiet symphony to an often colourful and stirring past. But none of us can choose the times in which we are born and called upon to live our lives. Their story is over except that it is part of ours now, to live on in our hearts and work as a stimulus to our imagination forming a powerful basis of new hope and new resolve for the future.
For those of us who are alive and sentient today the challenge is to make our own history, to make it a kinder and gentler age than that which has gone before us. Every compassionate word spoken and deed done is a rivulet into the greater lake of human happiness in this world. We may no longer feel as gung-ho about the future as we did when we celebrated the dawn of the new Millennium. The Twin Towers have seen to that. The world seems filled with so many furtive dangers and threatening shapes lurking in dark corners. But as against that never before has transport and communications technology made possible such a flow of information, knowledge and travel across the globe holding out the prospect of an unprecedented exchange and understanding between all peoples and cultures stifling the voices of hatred and prejudice.
On the evening of September 11th last year, the Fermoy Toastmasters Club met while the world cowered in the shadow of the immense plume of smoke rising from the ruins of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that had become fiery tombs to so many thousands of innocent people going about the business of their daily lives. But our little group, itself a manifestation of American culture at its very best, honoured the ancient verities of decency, respect and good fellowship by observing a minute’s silence for the fallen of our time in a new conflict begun on that fateful day. We then turned to the pursuit of the dissemination of ideas and truth, the originality of thought and the uniqueness of individual expression that lie at the very core of human dignity.
In a word, all those things that move the heart and stir the blood as heard in stories whispered in a library and in what General Douglas Macarthur once called “the witching melody of faint bugles” wafting down the gentle river-rippling breeze.
Kevin Walsh
June 2002.