(Originally published in the Irish Times, March 13 &14 1969, and July 9th 1970. Retrieved from https://www.irishtimes.com/archive. No copyright infringement is intended.)
BELFAST IN THE 30’s
By Bob Bradshaw
IT IS MOSTLY FORGOTTEN NOWADAYS THAT WITHIN LIVING MEMORY FIERCE RIOTS OCCURRED IN BELFAST WHICH WERE NON_SECTARIAN, ECONOMIC IN ORIGIN, AND WHICH INVOLVED BOTH PROTESTANTS AND CATHOLICS IN CITY-WIDE STRUGGLES WITH THE RUC.
PART ONE
The first of these riots occurred in 1931-1932 and the first cause was the high
unemployment in the city. While naturally this was much higher amongst the
minority third of the population it was also very bad in such areas as Shankill
and Sandy Row. Unemployment was endemic in the ‘30’s, but in ’31 the shock
waves from the great American crash had rippled across the Atlantic, making a
hopeless situation desperate. Discontent in the city rose to revolutionary
dimensions and in the great Belfast fitting-shops, the Queen’s island, and the
densely populated labour exchanges, Socialist and Communist opinions were easy
to hear. (I worked in the fitting shops and was also on the dole at periods.)
The “dole” as unemployment benefit was called, was dependent on stamps paid for when working; when the stamps were exhausted the unemployed were left to their own devices. But the very large numbers who were without stamps forced the government to do something for discontent was clearly not far from violence. A system of outdoor relief was set up, whose salient features were that the dole-less unemployed should do a hard week’s navvying on the roads for a mere pittance- 25s. and 30s a week and even less. In accordance with the enlightened economic views of the day, as far as possible this work had to be useless- otherwise it might interfere with private profit. Famine follies were another example. Maynard Keynes had already published the theories which showed the nonsense of such attitudes; but in Unionist (synonymous with capitalist) Belfast such views were hated even more viciously than textual deviations from the Holy Book. They were not, of course, popular with the rest of the country either. About the beginning of 1933 Keynes gave a public lecture at Abbey Theatre and a very well known Dublin economics lecturer was heard to say, leaving the building, that “very dangerous nonsense” had been uttered there that night.
UNEMPLOYED “STRIKE”
Outdoor relief worked for a little while but by the end of ’31 the relief workers were setting up committees and organizing rapidly. After a few incidents in very bad weather, which involved the downing of picks and shovels, a city wide strike was proclaimed. It was the only “strike” of the unemployed that I have ever heard of.
On the day of the strike I went down town in the morning to see what was to happen. It was about half-past ten when I reached the half-way point down the Falls road and found that things were already happening. The street paving stones were being dug up, the traditional source of ammunition for street-fighting Belfast. Rough barricades were going up. A few small groups of RUC men, armed with rifles, and revolvers, peered around corners. Small groups of men, some with pick handles, some parrying paving stones, rushed around looking for something to attack. When they got hold of a street tram they threw it on its side and set it on fire. If they saw armed police they rushed straight at them hurling their stones. In nearly all cases the police retreated, looking quite frightened, sometimes firing a few shots but mostly just pointing their rifles at the charging men, obviously expecting them to stop or run. In most cases the men pressed home their attack and it was the police who ran. However, they were from the local barracks, mostly Catholic, and some were old RIC men from the South of Ireland. They didn’t want to shoot anybody really, and know, too, that when the riots were over they would still have to patrol these narrow streets where dark-night revenge on over-enthusiastic policemen was far from unknown.
IRA INACTICE
I was a very active member of the IRA, although still in my teens. The views of the IRA at that time in Belfast were fairly far to the Left and I couldn’t understand why the organization had given no instructions to members, and seemed to be taking it no part in what seemed like a revolutionary situation. However, I considered it a duty to rush around with the gangs of men, sometimes giving them instructions, although many were twice my age and old hands at rioting- most of that generation were. Sometimes they listened to me and afterwards I realized that this was probably because I was wearing the tricolor emblem of an illegal organization which most of them would recognize.
One incident I remember sharply. Running our of the falls road near the public baths, I found about ten men , some with weapons, holding am idle aged man against a wall shouting that he was a police spy and should be killed or beaten- in practice there would not be much difference. I leapt in front of him before the blows could land, for he did not look like a police spy to me and I knew enough about mobs to distrust that kind of cry. He cowered behind me screaming in perfectly justified panic, for there was nothing in sight but a burning tram. The local police had made off to safer areas. Instead of pleading with them I just ordered them to leave him alone. Much to my surprise, they fell silent and then moved off. This convinced me I had the “Daniel O’Connell touch” but of course it was my metal button which some of them would have recognized.
By afternoon news of rioting in the Unionist areas had drifted in. “B” Specials were now arriving in the nationalist areas and now the bullets were finding targets. By the following morning, over twenty had been wounded and, I think, five shot dead- all in nationalist areas. I immediately left the Falls road and rushed off to Royal avenue to which, I had been told, a crowd of Shankill road strikers had marched. It says something for the different atmosphere of those days that it never occurred to me to remove my tricolor button, the insignia of a proscribed and armed organization. I saw no reason why Loyalists should not riot with me in what I naively hoped was the first stage in a Socialist revolution.
THE SHANKILL ROAD
When I reached Royal Avenue a fairly large crowd of Shankill road strikers were there milling around and looking angry but not very active. After looking at them for a while I picked a tall athletic looking young man with a long, rather handsome and very angry face. “Any fighting?” I said. He looked disgusted and jerked a thumb at the mob. “That gutless lot won’t fight,” he said. This was my chance. “Why don’t you go to Falls road,” I said, watching him. “Why,” he said, “Is there trouble there?” “They have been fighting all day and many people have been shot,” I said.
While we spoke his eye fell on my lapel button. For at least half a minute we stared at each other without speaking and his face clearly showed his changing emotions- ancestral dislike for tricolors and Fenians slowly changing to friendliness as he realized this particular Fenian spoke his language and that we were both in something a bit more important than the religious squabbles of our native city and attempting to deal with forces not likely to respond to placatory speeches. Our long eye-lock broke. “If that’s where the fighting is, that’s the place for me,” he said. He shouted to a couple of his mates and the three of them disappeared in the direction of the Falls road at the run.
I moved around and tried the same tactic again, but did not have the same success. It was getting late, and it was clear the moment had passed in this area with this crowd. After half an hour I started off for Falls road again. It was beginning to darken by the time I reached it. A few armoured lorries prowled cautiously with very nervous looking policemen holding their rifles at the ready, sticking to the main road and keeping their guns pointed down the small streets. In this area the strikers know their business. They had cut off all the street lighting and trenched all the main streets leading into the area, bounded by the falls and Grosvenor roads. One armored car poked into the darkness and ran into a trench. The crew jumped out and ran hastily back to the safer main road. The area was held that night by the strikers with no trouble from the police. In the fighting ten years before, many Tans and policemen died in the very area.
I had been surprised, and indeed elated, at the extreme caution and nervousness that the well armed and protected policemen were showing. I spent all my spare time learning the use of arms and explosive for what I believed would shortly be a head-on clash with just these forces. This belief turned out to be false, but I did not know that then. If the police were so worried about paving stones, how would they behave under fire? OF course this optimism on my part was not justified, but I was a teenager and knew less about such matters than I thought.
Next morning I went out early for the papers, as I hoped to read accounts of Shankill and Sandy row rioting on much the same scale as in the Nationalist areas. There had been rioting in Shankill but on a small scale, and of course nobody dead from rifle fire as in the “rebel” areas, a disappointment. This callousness about casualties is repellant in our far more compassionate time, but in the ‘30’s people died in large numbers from actual starvation. All, except a few, existed in a sea of malnutrition. Women worried seven days a week about food for their children. Sickness in the family was a disaster, and very often untended medically for want of money- unemployment was a Grey Death less dramatic than the Red or Black Death of the Middle Ages. But if it took fewer lives, a matter of doubt, it made the lives of far larger numbers of people not worth living. Most of the young men with whom I associated talked about these matters and preferred revolution to their continuance, and the twenty odd who took the bullet were not uselessly sacrificed. An amelioration did take place. The harsh theological capitalism of Belfast began to learn a lesson, in profit and loss, that took a decade or two to sink in. In the end they learned it better than some of their counter-parts in the south.
“B” SPECIALS
Next Day there was some mild rioting but by the afternoon all was over. On the fourth day police and armed “B” Specials were in the area in force. They seized adults and youths wherever they could find them and made them start to clean up and repair the littered streets. A squad of “B’s” got hold of me just off the Falls road. I might have escaped, as I looked about 15, but they spotted the seditious emblem I still stupidly wore.
With rifles fronted, they ordered me to get busy. I stood still and said nothing but “no”. One, somewhat drunk and flushed with anger, put his rifle muzzle in the middle of my chest and having put a round in the breech, began to pull the cocking piece back and forth. I knew how dangerous this was, for one night in a small room a few doors from the ancestral pub of one of our former 26 County Government ministers (also noted for his theological brand of capitalism and patriotism) one of our instructors had started to pull back the cocking piece on a rifle, that, for lack of room, had to be pushed against my chest. As he dripped the small oily plunging cocking piece he suddenly shouted for me to move. This was difficult as the room was crowded. I had scarcely got out of the way when the cocking-piece slipped and the heavy service bullet plunged into the wall where my chest had been ten seconds earlier.
When the drunken “B” pulled the cocking piece for the second time I realized that death was perhaps seconds away. The obvious remedy, to kneel down and put back a few paving stones until the band moved on a bit, was not even considered. A fanatical hatred of Specials made it unthinkable. The Special gave a third angry order. I knew he had nothing to fear from authority if there was an “accident.” As we looked at each other a mill whistle was blowing, the mill gates opened, a hundred mill girls, “doffers,” hurled through the gates in a phalanx as they did every day. They took in the situation in a flash for they all lived nearby. They hurled themselves straight at the Specials, screaming and pushing. In seconds there was a wall of them between the Specials and myself. How it ended I do not know for I was around the corner and away. Shortly afterwards the same group of “doffers” soundly beat myself and a couple of friends for distributing republican propaganda at one of “Wee Joe” Devlin’s meetings. In my case they had earned the right, but they broke their banner poles on us.
THE DEVLINITES
“Wee Joe’s” supporters were not republican, and we tended to despise them as being, among other things, sectarian. My father was a loyal Devlinite, and had got himself, in a fighting capacity, to places like Spion Kop, Magersfonstein, and the Tugela River, fighting on what separatist Ireland has always regarded as the wrong side, but which the slow wheel of time has made look remarkably like the right side.
When all was over I asked the Battalion Adjutant why an organization drilling and arming for revolution had ignored what seemed to be the textbook situation for the start of a revolt. He said that the Battalion Staff had met and considered the matter and decided that the participation of the IRA would be immediately know, as it was not a stone-throwing organization, and returning the fire of the B Specials with Mausers and Lugers, which constituted a large part of its armament would amount to a proclamation of intent. This would have split the strikers along the old lines of sectarian demarcation. When left to themselves, they might have forged a new unity.
The argument had some force as the events of the following year showed. But his regretful one showed he had some doubts and I shared them. I knew that it was from Protestant journey-men in the great Belfast textile fitting shops, then still the greatest in the world as streams of German and Japanese students showed, that I had first learnt that there were men in the world who did not believe that the hunger, squalor, and futility which darkened the lives of almost everyone knew was heaven-ordained and reducible only by prayer.
SOCIALISM
One of them was called Billy Hall, who hoped to be a Methodist Minister. By my standards at the time he was a well read man and spoke earnestly about the evils of capitalism and about Keir Hardie. He told me about socialism before I read Connolly, and when I did read Connolly I did so by getting his work from a Public Library on the Upper Shankill road where King Billy beamed nobly from every wall. When I presented my ticket and made my request, the librarian glared savagely at me and said they did not have them. His glare made it clear he knew what he was being asked for. I said I thought it was usual for libraries to procure for students any kind of nook of a serious nature which they required. He glared again, then said “Come back in a fortnight,” which I did and received my Connolly. I never had the opportunity to show it to Billy Hall, although if my memory is not playing tricks, he mentioned Connolly to me and said he was a good man, great praise from a fundamentally Loyalist, putative Methodist preacher who sometimes talked of founding a chapel, for a very disloyal Fenian.
PART TWO - THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS
Irish Times Friday, March 14th 1969
THE NEXT YEAR (1933) a transport strike brought all heavy transport to a stop and a very tense situation arose in the city. The bulk of the strikers were of course Loyalist and Protestant, but when the railways and lorry services recruited strikebreakers some violence occurred. Strikebreakers were attacked by loyalist strikers. At that time, everywhere tended to violence. World Capitalism was in chaos, and local conditions in Northern Ireland accentuated the Great Slump. The contraction in Belfast engineering, partly due to the know-how they dispensed generously to German and Japanese engineers, had begun and still goes on. I saw these engineers myself in the big engineering works standing, notebooks in hand, from eight in the morning to five-thirty in the evening, hardly speaking to anyone, watching all day and making sketches. They were treated with humorous contempt, if noticed at all, and nobody guessed how quickly they would be making the stuff themselves.
Whether the large number of unemployed was due to general conditions or, as was widely believed by workers and tradesmen in Belfast at the time, it was the result of a shortsighted policy by Belfast employers, who knew that a large pool of unemployed men had a strongly depressing effect on wages, is now irrelevant. What is certain is that the strikes and the violence arose spontaneously as a result of living conditions so harsh as to be unimaginable to the young workers of today. Protestant workmen in a place like Belfast, where Protestantism and unionism automatically commanded a degree of caste benefit, would not have been striking and rioting at all had it been otherwise. And underneath it all, the unemployed, straight from Gorki’s “Lower Depths.”
Drinking Ideal
What would the IRA do? To me, it was the organization that would either perish fighting in the streets or end all this by establishing the republic that would cherish all her children equally. Dream of fairytale, this was the notion that in that time and place gave the illegal and left wing organizations in the north their passion and driving force. To a considerable extent what would happen would depend on M., for the titular head of the four Belfast companies was in jail serving a three-year sentence for an arms raid. I was now a year older, but still a teenager, and, though I held some exalted rank or other in the companies, I was not privy to decisions of the Battalion Council, though I knew its members well enough to discuss such matters with them.
M. Worried me. If this second opportunity, as it seemed to me, were to pass, why did we spend all our leisure in little rooms in the winter, out in the fields in summer, learning all we could about arms and explosives? Better to stop it and concentrate on political activities, to which most of us were not necessarily adverse. We chose the IRA because we had seen absolutely nothing from the electioneering of “Wee Joe” and other parliamentarians except talk. At the moment, talk is proving a decisive weapon in Northern Ireland, as it should in any free society, but what could talk achieve in the far more ruthless North of that far-off day, untouched by the more humane and democratic views which have altered the climate in Western Europe- including Northern Ireland- in spite of Paisely and Bunting.
M. was a worry simply because he was a devout Catholic and in strict logic it might be argued he should not have been in the IRA at all, much less trying to change a strike into a revolution. It is necessary to remind to-day’s readers that in that time Catholic clerics in Belfast ranted against Socialism and the “agitators” who brought it about. Between the ages of 13 and 16 years, at Confraternity meetings on Monday evenings and sometimes on Wednesday, I listened to outrageous ignoramuses togged out in clerical garb thump the pulpit and denounce the “socialist agitators” who were the cause of all this unrest. In a series of Monday night lectures, the Director of Confraternity proved conclusively that no Government could nationalize any large industry, quoting tonnage, numbers employed, etc, and other statistics to show, not the immorality of the proceedings but their total impossibility.
That capitalist governments were busy doing it had escaped his unskibbereen eyes, e.g. Lloyd George had nationalized the huge British munitions industry during the First World War. In a war where the gun was still the Queen of Battle, the British army had entered the Marne able to fire on four rounds a day per gun. There had been an error in probably profitability by private enterprise in the production of shells.
REAL DANGER
SO the priests ranted on, unaware of the real crisis of conscience on the part of their flock. M. was the kind of man they should have been concerned with, but in spite of such a major aid to psychological knowledge as the confessional, they did not seem to know he existed. M. was, in his personal life, about as Christian as could be expected of anybody brought up in his terrible circumstances. Given the choice between death at the stake and abjuration of his faith, nobody who knew him would doubt the result. But the savage experiences of his life forced him to ignore the rantings of the Belfast Priests. Yet if “agitators,” that portmanteau word, had anything to do with getting me into the IRA at a very early age, then, irrevocably Catholic men like M. were “agitators.” The real “agitators” were the barbarous circumstances of our lives. The people who knew least about this were not the wicked capitalist owners of the great shipyards and fitting shops, but the clergy.
Considering how strong the Catholic faith of a man like M. was, there was reason for a congenial agnostic like myself to worry when it was a question of committing an organization to a strike in such a way that men might soon die. For if the priests ceaselessly condemned the IRA, which they certainly did, their condemnation of social revolutionaries was of a kind that only the serum developed by Pasteur could have been expected to combat. Yet the same ranting director of Confraternity had, about 1929, told us how glad he was that in Mexico the Pope had called on the people to rise in arms, he stressed “IN ARMS” in a shouting voice, against the wicked socialist government then supposed to be ruling th county.
This may seem funny at a time when the Catholic Left has leap-frogged far ahead of the Communist Party, not scorned by the more embullient of the New Christians as square and conservative. Certainly one would have to strain one’s ears to hear any denunciations of Socialism in that quarter these days, then not even fornication had a higher decibel count in the pulpit, and was not considered a more certain bringer of eternal fire and brimstone. Of course it is very “bigoted” to recall all that now.
INTO ACTION
A day or two after the violence had been inflicted on strike-breakers by protestant strikers, M. told me we were “in”. The first operation, mild enough, but carried out by armed squads, was the cutting down of telegraph poles. IRA activities were to be limited to see if Unionist Workers would go along; if they did, participation would be all-out. In the next couple of weeks activities grew in scope; demolition squads attacked the Great Northern Railway at far-flung points. Lisburn, for instance, seven miles from Belfast. This tactic may have been intended to give the impression that arms and explosives were being used by the same loyalists who had been beaten by the strikebreakers, but all it achieved was to put the operating squads, usually three or four men, in extreme peril of their lives without deceiving the Northern Government for two seconds. B Specials and RUC, all heavily armed, ceaselessly patrolled the railways and all goods moved in great convoys under armed guard. IRA squads escaped death by minutes. On one occasion a three-man and one-woman squad returning from a fairly successful demolition effort many miles outside Belfast saw the heavily-armed barricades thrown up 150 yards in the rear of their small, speeding car.
Their revolvers and automatics were kept under the bed of the elderly maiden aunt of one of the car occupants. She always prayed loudly and blessed herself when her nephew rushed into the room and began dragging out guns. On that night the operation had run into trouble in its early stages, as the area selected for planting a large mine was heavily patrolled. Late at night, her mud-stained and disheveled nephew staggered into her room and began shoving half a dozen guns under her bed. Her praying that night rose to a loud wail that threatened to wake the whole house.
Finally, a heavily guarded convoy of lorries leaving the Great Northern Station in central Belfast was ambushed. The RUC guard returned fire and in a ten-minute gun battle a policeman was shot dead. The Belfast papers carried head-lines about “gunmen imported from Eire” but this was a bit like the priests and their agitators- it was a local job.
EARLY BEHAN
Republican life in Dublin of the 30’s and 40’s
AT THE BEGINNING of 1933, for reasons outside my control I came to live in Dublin. My first night was spent in a hotel in Parnell square, and next morning I had my first view of the Gate Theatre known only to me by my odd reading of the theatre reviews in the Dublin papers- as a result of which all I knew of the cultural life of Dublin was that there was a painter called Harry Kernoff, and a very exciting theatre called the Gate, where two people named MacLiammoir and Edwards made some kind of magic that my own harsh and embattled city seemed to have none of. I was in my late teens. I knew a lot of political stuff as well: ’16, Hamman Hotel, Four Courts, etc. By my first surprise was my excitement at seeing the fabulous Gate Theatre through a front window of the hotel.
Next day two women well known in the Republican movement of those days took me to a large house in Elgin road, and afterwards to a house that I was told would be safe and friendly, one of my earliest experiences of a major understatement.
The house was occupied by an old lady in her late 60’s named Furlong, who became a permanent influence on me, and still gives the sieve of memory a shake when I think about her as I frequently do.
She was from Co. Meath, a type of Irish woman whose presence over many generations explained much about the tenacious survival of ideas associated with Irish history, and the men who on one level or another tried to make the ideas a reality. Warm and generous in her ways and manner, she was tolerant towards those who did not share her fervent belief in the IRA and accepted, as I did not then, that there was more than one kind of Republican and therefore, more than one kind of truth.
On one occasion she asked me for a small subscription for political opponents who would certainly have put me in jail if they knew enough about my activities. We argued and she slowly explained that political opponents were often good people who just saw things differently and were not necessarily dishonest . . .a very un-Irish view.
Such views were not common in a movement whose emotional intensity made it comparable to say, the Spanish anarchists, and in which personality distortion was far from uncommon due to historical torque.
He son, Jack, had been a ’16 man who died shortly after release from internment. His widow, Kathleen, had married Stephen Behan and they took a Georgian house in nearby Russell street.
STRAY IRA MEN
The house, close to Mountjoy square, had around it some of the finest Georgian doorways in existence, which were falling into ruin. The big basement kitchen, made into a living room, often housed an unusual collection of people. . . three or four wanted men, eccentrics like Captain Pat Fox of the Citizen Army, called by Connolly “The Impossible Man,” who threw a priest through a hedge for pulling Parnell’s flag off his house, plus stray IRA men with curious and varied histories.
One day, about the end of 1933, Emily, Mrs Furlong’s daughter, a music teacher, said she specifically wanted us to meet her little nephew Brendan and would bring him next morning. Although some of us were still late teenagers, or just out of that age, we were sufficiently precocious in certain forms of experience to regard ourselves as elders of the Republican Church, and understood that for the young nephew meeting us would be part of his education. It turned out to be part of ours.
I remember looking at the very bright faced boy in short pants who trotted through the door at Emily’s skirts. He stopped with his back to the window and burst at once into a speech, possibly prepared, about O’Casey, Shaw and Wilde, with quotations. He had a ferocious stammer which sometimes brought him to a halt, but he persevered and finished his speech. The moment he did so he said goodbye politely and vanished out the door leaving us a bit silent and with the feeling we were at the wrong end of a little bit of unconscious iconoclasm.
Emily beamed pridefully back from the door and said: “and he’s only nine.” I had seen one O’Casey play (thanks to Mad Pat Fox who kept a box at the Olympia) and read a little Shaw, and knew the anmes of Wilde’s plays. It was at least six months later that I bought an anthology of Wilde, just published. When young Brendan made his comments I would have been much more authoritative abiout the inside of a Mills bomb. The little boy came to see us now and again and made good use of his eyes. When the Furlongs went to Clontarf we went with them and nearly 20 years later in Fitzwilliam place, in the “catacombs”, he told the equally curious but much more varied clientele, stories about stealing into my room in his “Granny’s” and sampling the contents. . . handbooks on machine-guns including the Thompson, then as much a favourite with the IRA as with the Chicago gangsters; military manual, Marx, the English edition of “Mein Kampf”, and the work of Nicolai Berdyaev, a Russian writer of the spiritual Right, then much in the news, plus a load of Communist, anarchist, and pacifist literature to take up any vacant space. . .a real ‘30’s bag.
NEAR ZENITH
This period, about the end of the ‘40’s, was near zenith in Brendan’s young energy, power to amuse, dance to sing, tell stories, mimic, and begin the famous take-offs- DH Lawrence, Toulouse Lautrec- which flagged not from pub-shut until dawn. Later when the terrible syndrome of disease, drink and publicity had made him into a megalomaniac hulk, streeling through the pubs looking for rows and ructions, this kind of quality and largely disappeared.
But he did not make up stories about old Mrs. Furlong, nor use of her bantering tone natural to him when talking about relations. When she was mentioned, at any rate by me, he tended to grow serious and a bit silent.
In the mid-30’s when Brendan could not have been much more than 14, a small prophetic incident occurred. I was alone one evening when Brendan came in looking agitated. He was big and precocious and I always talked to him as an adult. He was insistent that I go out beyond Donnycarney to hear some records which he said were part of a very interesting collection belonging to a friend of his. I had other things to think about, but I was a gramophone maniac at the time, as Brendan well knew. He almost used force getting me to the bus.
The first two records were very good and I began to be glad he had dragged me away. However, while the records were playing, Brendan called the host out to the kitchen and I was left alone. After four or five records he rushed outside the house and I could hear the sound of vomiting. The host who had followed him, came back and said: “he’s drunk.”
At that time anyway, this was highly unusual in one so young and it rushed on me that my being there at all was part of a ploy by Brendan to get more drink. He had been drinking before he called for me. It was my first experience of a new force in Brendan’s life and the deviousness to which it would often drive him
Being landlady to IRA men was an occupation with a built-in path to bankruptcy. A few of us who were more or less full time with the IRA and could not live at home received I pound, or sometime 25/- per week. . . though not when down the country on training trips or when part-time work could be found. Mrs. Furlong insisted on giving us back five shillings if she had not fed us as well as she might have managed. . . or not kept our beds empty when we went on extended trips down the country. To have taken in real “payers” would have endangered the wandering patriots, so the bad money drove out the good, and economic breakdown sent Mrs. Furlong to live in an English city. One evening in the early days of the war, Brendan called to me as I was passing Nelson’s Pillar.
He was not almost 16, and told me he was leaving for England that night and would stay with Mrs. Furlong. The bombing campaign in England was underway and Brendan was on a mission. I pointed out that the Furlong house was pretty sure to be under observation and that arrest was certain. He said curtly that he was “going anyway.”
He had been raised to believe that not to go to jail for Ireland was something of a disgrace- execution of course, being better. He sailed that evening, and whether he laid that particular train or was just caught up in it when the fuse had been lit. In ten days or so the journey to Borstal had begun, followed by the writing of “Borstal Boy,” perhaps the best jail journal there is.
FURLONGS SENTENCED
At the age of 77, old Mrs Furlong was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Her daughters Emily and Evelun receiving five and three years respectively. As far as I knew her only statement in court was the one with which the Fenian prisoners were apt to greet sentence: “God Save Ireland.”
Towards the end of the war she was found to be dying and was hurriedly put aboard the same ship on which young Brendan had sailed years before, and landed back on the Liffey where the journey had begin. She walked up along the Liffey for the last time and collapsed on O’Connell Bridge. Later, Emily, then released, told me that another daughter, living in Castleknock, on her way to the bus saw a crowd on O’Connell Bridge and went to have a look. She found her mother lying on the ground.
During much of this time my relations with Brendan were a bit like the two figures on an old-fashioned weather vane. When he was “in” I was “out,” and vice versa. I was out in the middle of 1943 when Brendan was doing 14 years for firing at armed policemen. One morning I received a copy of his first play, the Landlady, by post. I read the play and wrote to him about it and received from him a very long, discursive and amusing letter, now in New York University.
Women like Mrs. Furlong must have been plentiful in Ireland for hundreds of years and the host of outlaws, Rapparees, and wanted men who crowd the near, middle, and far distance of the Irish historical Landscape must have owed much to them, The hard revolutionary world of the 30’s, beginning for Brendan, was the end for Mrs. Furlong. That world has vanished, and they have too, but they are two people I find it very hard to forget.
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