(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
Irish Times Thursday, March 13th 1969
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
Irish Times, Thursday, July 9, 1970
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.
