Greystones during the Revolutionary Period: As revealed by the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements by Rosemary Raughter
The Bureau of Military History, established in January 1947 under the auspices of the Department of Defence, had as its stated objective: “To assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25 November 1913 to 11 July 1921”.[1]
Statements gathered
In order to fulfil this aim, statements, both written and oral, were gathered from a range of individuals engaged in some way with the events of the period. By the time the project terminated in 1959, 1,773 witness statements had been recorded, mostly from members or former members of organisations such as the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Fein, the Irish Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan. Constitutional nationalists, unionists, members of the Crown forces or British administration were also featured, but in much smaller numbers, and there were some surprising omissions, most notably that of 1916 leader, leader of the government that established the Bureau, and future President of Ireland, Eamon de Valera, who for whatever reason failed to record a statement.
Access to Witness Statements
While the process of collection came to an end in 1959, there was considerable uncertainty about where the material should be stored, and to what extent and for how long the guarantees of confidentiality extended to witnesses should be observed. Clearly, just over three decades after the cessation of hostilities and despite the fact that the BMH’s brief extended only to the signing of the Truce in July 1921 (and thus excluded both the Treaty negotiations and the Civil War), many issues of sensitivity remained, and Richard Hayes, Director of the National Library, was not alone in fearing that:
If every Sean and Seamus from Ballythis and Ballythat who took major or minor or no part at all in the national movement from 1916 to 1921 had free access to the material it may result in local civil warfare in every second town and village in the country.[2]
In the event, the collection, which included witness statements as well as ancillary documents, press cuttings, voice recordings and photographs, was lodged in a strong room in Government Buildings. No decision was made at the time as to when the material should be released, to the frustration of historians of the period such as Professors Robin Dudley Edwards and F X Martin, who decried the ‘official iron curtain’ which year after year barred access to this unparalleled source of information on the revolutionary period.[3]
The long-awaited release of the material finally took place in 2003, following the deaths of the last surviving witnesses. The statements then became available to researchers working in the Military Archives at Collins Barracks and (by way of duplicates) in the National Archives. In 2012, following a process of digitisation, and just in time for the opening of the Decade of Centenaries, the Bureau of Military History website was launched, making the collection available free of charge to all researchers, and vastly increasing the possibilities for investigation of this hugely significant period in our history at both a national and a local level.[4]
Greystones
While an online search of the witness statements produces twenty-four mentions of Greystones, not all are of equal interest or indeed of any significance to the period: Patrick McCartan, for example, was living in Greystones when he made his statement in 1952, but had no connection with the area during the revolutionary period.[5] Other statements mention the town not for any event occurring there, but rather for its lack of activity. Patrick J Brennan, for instance, while noting the existence of an RIC barracks at Greystones, records no attacks on it, and his excuses for the failure of other such attacks in the general area include the fact that it was ‘thickly populated with a none too friendly people.’[6] Laurence O’Brien remarked that, while companies of Volunteers were organised in Bray, Shankill and Enniskerry, an attempt to organise a section in Greystones proved unsuccessful[7], while Christopher Byrne mentions the IRA East Wicklow Battalion’s difficulty in recruiting support in the locality because of its very strong loyalist element, and the presence, as he puts it, of
A modern plantation of Unionists who had made money in Dublin and come to live in Bray, Greystones and Enniskerry districts …
We had no farmers’ sons, or very few, in the Volunteers, and the working lads we had were depending on those employers; at that time there was no one else to give them employment.[8]
Witnessing the Rising
Despite this apparent quiescence, however, three quite dramatic stories in relation to Greystones do emerge from the BMH files. The first of these in chronological order is related by George Chester Duggan, a civil servant in the British administration in London and Dublin, whose family had a holiday home at Ferney East, one of the two houses now making up Carraig Eden.[9] Duggan was one of several brothers, two of whom, Captain George Grant Duggan and Lieutenant John R Duggan, had tragically been killed on the same day, 16 August 1915, at Gallipoli.[10]
Carraig Eden, 2011 (Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/6334443316/in/photostream/ – Creative Commons CCBY-SA-2.0)
Eight months later, the bereaved parents, George and Emilie Duggan, were spending the Easter weekend at Greystones, when they received word of the outbreak of the Rising in Dublin. As manager of the Provincial Bank at College Street, George senior felt it his duty to return to the city and to take up residence in the bank for the duration of the crisis. He was there, therefore, later in the week, when the building was raided by a group of soldiers under the command of a young and inexperienced subaltern and a drunken sergeant. Wrongly convinced that the building was being used by rebel snipers, the soldiers took an extremely threatening attitude towards Duggan. Appealing to the subaltern to assert his authority:
My father took him into the drawing-room and showed him the photographs of my two brothers in uniform, one a Captain in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the other a Lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment, who were killed in August, 1915, at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, fighting with the 10th (Irish) Division. This convinced the subaltern of the truth of my father’s assertions and he ordered the party to leave the Bank.[11]
In 1921 George Chester Duggan, George Duggan’s son and the narrator of this story, published a poem, ‘The watchers on Gallipoli’, dedicated to his two dead brothers. He himself, having served as assistant to the Under-Secretary for Ireland, transferred in 1922 to the Northern Ireland Civil Service, where his sympathetic attitude to the Irish Free State attracted some criticism. Following his retirement in 1949, he moved back to the south, and died in 1969 at Mullagh, Co Cavan.
The De Valeras in Greystones
Eamon de Valera, early 1920s (Photo: NLI Flkr CC – https://www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/37513777630 )
References to Greystones in the witness statements for the post-1916/War of Independence period are dominated by two of its most significant figures, Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins. Eamon and Sinead de Valera and their young family took up residence on Kinlen Road in Greystones not long after the Rising, in a house known by the de Valeras as Craigliath, now Edenmore. In September 1917 Eilis Ui Chonnaill, a member of Cumann na mBan, was asked to deliver an important letter into de Valera’s own hands. Knowing the name of the road but not that of the house, she took the train to Greystones, and a cab to the end of Kinlen Road. There she alighted and, proceeding on foot, ‘examined the names on all the houses, until at last I found a name in Irish.’ Her instinct proved correct: ‘I went in, asked for Mr de Valera, and his wife, whom I knew, came to me and said she would guarantee to deliver the letter to him.’[12]
A few months later, in May 1918, warnings were received of the intended arrest of a number of prominent republicans in connection with the alleged ‘German Plot’. De Valera, warned of this possibility by his colleague, Sean T O’Kelly, ‘rather pooh-poohed the matter’, and refused to take any extra precautions.[13] On the evening of 17 May, following a Sinn Fein meeting at Harcourt Street, he took the 10.15pm train home to Greystones. When the train stopped at Bray, a number of constables boarded, travelling in an adjoining compartment. According to O’Kelly, the driver and his assistant became aware of this, and promptly informed de Valera of the police presence, and of the probable intention to arrest him:
They said that they would slow down the train coming into Greystones … and they advised him to jump out … and that he could easily get away.
However, de Valera chose not to accept this offer, and when the train arrived at Greystones, he was apprehended and arrested.[14] The Irish Independent adds a few further details: Dev:
….was taken to the waiting room under a heavy guard, and after being searched, was placed in a motor car and driven to Kingstown, where he was handed over to the military and placed on board the transport … for England.[15]
Imprisoned in Lincoln Gaol, de Valera escaped from there in early 1919, and spent most of the following two years either on the run or in the US. During that time, Michael Collins visited Mrs de Valera ‘many times’, and ensured that she was kept regularly supplied with funds.[16] Mrs de Valera was naturally grateful for his concern, and Robert Brennan, accompanying de Valera home following his escape from Lincoln, was amused to witness an exchange between husband and wife on the subject:
At Greystones Mrs.de Valera was eloquent about the kindness everybody had shown her during Dev’s absence. Michael Collins, she said, had been particularly kind. He had called every week. “I’m quite in love with him”, she said. Dev, with some show of temper, said:
That’ll do. There are enough people in love with Michael Collins.[17]
Michael Collins’ Confession
Grand Hotel Greystones (later the LaTouche), where Michael Collins proposed to Kitty Kiernan. (Photo: By kind permission National Library of Ireland, ref. L_CAB__06915, Lawrence Collection.)
Michael Collins clearly developed an affection for Greystones during his many visits. It was in the Grand (later the La Touche) Hotel that he proposed to Kitty Kiernan on 8 October 1921[18] and it is believed that the couple intended to live after their marriage in Brooklands, a house just a little further up on Trafalgar Road, opposite St Brigid’s School.[19] Later, during the Civil War, Collins used the Grand Hotel as the venue for meetings with his associates. On one occasion at least, local anti-Treatyites contemplated making an attack on him there, but republican headquarters refused to authorise the plan. Shortly after Collins’s death a further gathering at the hotel of members of the Free State government and army officers was again targeted, but once more the attack was forestalled by the leadership.[20]
A final glimpse of Michael Collins in Greystones takes us beyond the project’s notional end date of 11 July 1921, to the Anglo-Irish negotiations preceding the Treaty of December 1921 and the Civil War which followed. It is contained in the witness statement of Rev Patrick J Doyle PP, who included in his evidence the text of a ‘very extraordinary’ letter written following Collins’s death to one of his sisters by Fr Ignatius of the Congregation of the Passion:
The facts are these: he [Collins] was staying at the Grand Hotel, Greystones, while I was giving a mission there. It was coming near the close of the Mission. Michael was very busy in Dublin, worked and worried almost beyond endurance. He got to Greystones one night very late and very tired. It was the eve of his departure to London, re the Pact. He got up the next morning as early as 5.30 am and came to the Church, and made a glorious General Confession and received Holy Communion. He said to me after Confession, “Say the Mass for Ireland, and God bless you, Father”. He crossed an hour or so later to London.[21]
Michael Collins, 1919 (Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Collins.jpg )
Conclusion
Diarmaid Ferriter, in his assessment of the value of the material contained in the witness statements, concludes that ‘there is much of value in the collection, whether one is interested in particular individuals, regional histories or the social history of the period.’[22] Certainly, modest as Greystones’s presence in the archive is, the information it offers is far from negligible. The contributions quoted above range chronologically from 1916 to 1921 and beyond, and touch on factors such as recruitment and casualties in World War I, the emergence of militant republicanism and the lack of overt support for it locally, and the conditions – the largely peaceful state of this predominantly unionist area, together with its proximity to Dublin – which made it a favoured refuge for two of the leading figures in the struggle for independence. Ranging from 1916 and George Duggan’s charged encounter during Easter Week with the less than orderly representatives of the Empire for which his sons had died, to a foreshadowing of the Treaty negotiations and of the Civil War, the relatively few references to Greystones in the statements nevertheless enhance our understanding of the experience of the area during this uniquely eventful period in our history.
Sources
[1] For information on the BMH, the process of collection and the content of the statements, see Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘”In such deadly earnest”: the Bureau of Military History opens its files’, Dublin Review, no 2, Autumn 2003, https://thedublinreview.com/article/in-such-deadly-earnest/ and Fearghal McGarry, ‘”Too many histories”? The Bureau of Military History and Easter 1916’, History Ireland, no 6, November/December 2011, vol 19, https://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/too-many-histories-the-bureau-of-military-history-and-easter-1916/
[2] Ferriter, ‘”In such deadly earnest”: the bureau of Military History opens its files’.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Digitised collection available at Oglaigh na hEireann, Military Archives website http://www.militaryarchives.ie/collections/online-collections/bureau-of-military-history-1913-1921 . See also Decade of Centenaries website https://www.decadeofcentenaries.com/
[5] Dr Patrick McCartan, BMH.WS0766.
[6] Patrick J Brennan, BMH.WS1773, pp 7, 10 and passim.
[7] Laurence O’Brien, BMH.WS0252, p. 11.
[8] Christopher M Byrne, BMH.WS1014, p. 11.
[9] George Chester Duggan, BMH.WS1071, pp 1-3.
[10] See Colin Murphy, ‘The Irish at Gallipoli: Jack Duggan’s letters home’, http://colinmurphy.ie/?p=570
[11] George C Duggan, WS.1071, p. 3.
[12] Eilis Ui Chonnaill (nee Ryan), BMH.WS0568, p. 24.
[13] Sean T O’Kelly, BMH.WS1765, part 2, pp 110-111.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Irish Independent, 20 May 1918.
[16] Joseph Hyland, BMH.WS0644, p. 13.
[17] Robert Brennan, BMH.WS0779, p.18.
[18] https://www.glasnevintrust.ie/visit-glasnevin/interactive-map/kitty-kiernan/
[19] ‘Famous people: Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan planned to live in Greystones’, https://thegreystones.edublogs.org/2017/02/14/michael-collins-and-kitty-kiernan-planned-to-live-in-greystones/
[20] Laurence Nugent, BMH.WS0907, p. 284.
[21] Patrick J Doyle PP, BMH.WS0807, pp 39-40, 90-91.
[22] Ferriter, ‘”In such deadly earnest”: the Bureau of Military History opens its files’.
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