by Meda Ryan
16 Collins’ personal notes, MP, P7a/62.
17 General O’Duffy, GOC, South Western Division to Collins C. in C., MP, P7/B/39/32 & 33.
18 Commander-in-Chief to Officer Commanding S. W. Command 17/8/1922, MP, P7/B/21/8.
19 Frank O’Connor, op. cit., p. 210.
20 Emmet Dalton to Collins, 19/8/1922, MP, P7/B/70/63 & P7/ B/70/65.
21 Commander-in-Chief to General Dalton, 19/8/1922, P7/B/ 20/2.
22 Collins’ notes, n. d. MP, P7/B/28/1.
23 Countess of Fingal, op. cit., p. 403.
24 Piaras Béaslaí, op. cit., pp. V. II, 429.
25 Kitty to Michael, 17/8/1922.
26 Sir John Lavery, op. cit., p. 216.
27 Lady Gregory in her journal, pp. 180, 181.
28 Countess of Fingal, op. cit., p. 409.
29 George Bernard Shaw to Hazel Lavery, q. Lavery, op. cit., p. 218.
30 Sir John Lavery, op. cit., p. 216.
31 Ibid.
32 Frank O’Connor, op. cit., p. 211.
33 Michael to Kitty, 8/8/1922.
34 Kitty to Michael, 15/8/1922.
35 Ibid., 16/8/1922.
Deep Mourning for Lover and Leader
On Wednesday morning 23 August, Elizabeth Countess of Fingall was sitting with Bernard Shaw’s wife beside the fire in the study at Kilteragh House where Michael Collins had dined with them just a few nights previously. Suddenly the door opened and Hazel appeared ‘in deep mourning’.
‘I knew it before I saw the papers,’ she said, ‘I had seen him in a dream, his face covered with blood.’
On Thursday morning, Lady Hazel and Countess Elizabeth went to view the body at the chapel of the Sisters of Charity at St Vincent’s Hospital. Tall candles burned at his head and feet while four soldiers ‘guarded him in his last sleep. Michael Collins lay in full uniform, and to him death had given her full measure of beauty and dignity, increased by the effect of that white bandage round his head, which hid the wound made by the bullet that had killed him. His face had taken on an almost Napoleonic cast,’ said Countess Elizabeth. When she whispered to one of the soldiers, ‘Where had he been hit?’ he responded by touching the back of his own head.
The two young women with tear-stained faces stood for some time in silent prayer and then left.1
A short while later, Kitty Kiernan entered the little chapel, accompanied by her sister. Kitty’s eyes were red with crying. Now tears poured down her cheeks. She kissed Mick, held him and looked down at him for a long, long time.
Mick’s friend Oliver Gogarty had embalmed the body and Albert Power made a death-mask of him. Sir John Lavery now began to do a painting of him. Later the remains were ceremoniously taken in procession to City Hall for the public lying-in-state. Queues filed past – members of the Squad, his intelligence men, government ministers, army officers and his many close comrades who had worked and suffered with him since 1915. On Sunday evening 27 August the body was taken to the pro-cathedral and the following morning, after Requiem Mass, the funeral cortège set out on the six-mile journey to Glasnevin cemetery. The coffin bore a single white lily, last symbol of Kitty’s love. Thousands lined the streets to pay their last respects.
On that August morning in Glasnevin Mick Collins’ sisters, Hannie, Margaret, Mary and Katie, his brother Johnny and many of Collins’ comrades in arms and in politics now stood at the graveside – men like Dalton, Mulcahy, Dolan, O’Reilly, Cosgrave, O’Higgins, Blythe, Tobin, Cullen, O’Duffy, women like Jennie Wyse-Power, Min Ryan, Moya Llewelyn Davies.
Richard Mulcahy, who would afterwards take Michael Collins’ place as commander-in-chief of the army, was almost poetic when he delivered the oration over his dead friend, now laid to rest beside other Volunteer friends:
Tom Ashe, Thomas MacCurtain, Traolach MacSuibhne, Dick McKee, Mícheál Ó Coileáin, and all of you who lie buried here, disciples of our great Chief, those of us you leave behind are all, too, grain from the same handful ... Men and women of Ireland, we are all mariners on the deep, bound for a port still seen only through storm and spray, sailing still on a sea ‘full of dangers and hardships, and bitter toil’. But the Great Sleeper lies smiling in the stern of the boat, and we shall be filled with that spirit which will walk bravely upon the waters.2
This oration was recorded by Patrick O’Driscoll (husband of Collins’ sister Margaret and a reporter in Dáil Éireann) on the blank page at the back of his prayer book.
In one of the last letters that Kitty wrote to Mick, she expressed her sorrow on the death of Arthur Griffith and wondered if he [Griffith] had been ‘prepared’.
‘I am always thinking of you and worrying,’ she wrote, that ‘you’ll be shot, but God is very good to you.’
Just over a week later she was standing at his graveside. The candles Mick had lit for Kitty in the churches of London and Dublin and the candles she had lit for him were now a memory. But Kitty would continue throughout her life to light a candle for him.
Two tearful women met for the first time. Michael Collins’ fiancée Kitty Kiernan and his dear friend Lady Hazel Lavery spontaneously embraced. Other friends and relatives sobbed softly.3
To the remaining members of the Provisional Government and officers in the army was left the task of picking up the threads of Michael Collins’ work.
Notes
1 Sir John Lavery, op. cit., pp. 216, 217; Countess of Fingall, op. cit., pp. 408, 409.
2 Daily newspapers, also MP, P7a/64.
3 Emmet Dalton to author, 20/4/1974.
Postscript
Shortly after the funeral George Bernard Shaw wrote to Hannie, Michael Collins’ sister:
Don’t let them make you miserable about it: how could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to the shot of another Irishman – a damned fool, but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland – ‘a Roman to a Roman’? ...
So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colours in his honour; and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.1
Lady Hazel Lavery and her husband returned to England in September 1922. She invited Kevin O’Higgins to her entertainments whenever business took him to London.2W. T. Cosgrave commissioned Sir John to paint a portrait of her, which graced the Irish pound note for many years. Cosgrave said, ‘Every Irishman, not to mention the foreigner who visits Ireland, will carry [Lady Hazel] next to his heart.’
Her husband Sir John wrote: ‘Her rare beauty of face and character must have been known personally to be believed. We had twenty-five years together. She died in 1935, after a long illness’.3
Kitty Kiernan was the woman most grievously affected by Mick’s death. The Evening Mail of 23 August and The Irish Independent of 24 August commented on Michael Collins’ planned marriage to Kitty:
In the midst of the national grief occasioned by his death a due share of sympathy will go out to this young lady in the irreparable loss she has sustained ... They became attached under romantic circumstances. One occasion she tramped all through the night to a lonely cabin where General Collins was hiding, and warned him that the Auxiliaries were on their way to arrest him.
Not long after his death Kitty recovered the letters she had written to Mick over a twelve-month period. Throughout her life she kept those letters as well as his letters near her so that she could read them over and over. Because she moved house on a few occasions some of the letters got mislaid, and she destroyed others for personal reasons about which we can only speculate.
In 1925 Kitty met and married Felix Cronin. He was also a veteran of the War of Independence and the Civil War, and as with other men of the time, he had met Mick Collins and fallen under the spell of ‘the big fellow’. Kitty and Felix had two sons.
As well as her treasured letters, she had the portrait of Michael Collins that had been painted by S
ir John Lavery in London during the Treaty negotiations. This she set on an easel in her main living-room wherever she lived.
Though the portrait did not apparently give rise to any difficulty between the pair, their life together was not altogether happy. At times Felix drank to excess and Kitty was often moody; she tended to create the ‘misunderstandings and little rows’ so well known to Mick Collins. She suffered from hypertension and other ailments, particularly in her latter years. She died on 24 July 1945, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, not far from where Michael Collins was laid to rest. Sixteen years later Felix joined her.
Her collection of letters, including her love letters, were offered for public auction by her two sons, Michael Collins Cronin and Felix Cronin, on 13 June 1995. They were purchased by Peter Barry.
Notes
1 Sir John Lavery, op. cit., pp. 218, 219.
2 Terence de Vere White, op. cit., p. 93. Sinéad McCoole in her life of Hazel Lavery quotes romantic fragments of letters from O’Higgins to Lady Lavery ‘censored by Hazel herself’ and spanning some years.
3 Lavery, op. cit., pp. 225–251.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Private Sources
Michael Collins’ diary and details of Collins’ career from Michael Collins, a nephew; also details of Nancy O’Brien’s (his mother’s) activities from him
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