The egotism at the root of my grandfather’s undoing was not purely spontaneous. Its manifestation, in his cultivated persona of polyglot, gallant, man-about-town, equestrian, revealed the deep impression made by his youthful exposure to the glamorous types from France and England and Germany; but more fundamentally, his self-centredness was in many ways the outcome of the compact he’d made with the Turkish Republic in the early ’twenties. Perhaps because all his life he’d been the object of self-seeking imperialist attention (by 1922, the young Syrian had been educated by the French and employed by the Germans and ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the French and the Turks), Joseph had little sense of the State as an instrument of personal autonomy. If he had cherished the possibility of full-blown freedom, or believed in it, he could have emigrated to France with his brother and sister and reinvented himself. Instead, he settled for modest liberties: a liberty to prosper economically, a liberty to develop his personal qualities, a liberty to mind his own business. It didn’t trouble him that as a Christian Turk he would be excluded from jobs in public service because these exclusions complemented the detachment he felt from nationalistic Turkey and, in a way, exempted him from anything more than a formal engagement in the country’s affairs. By a tacit agreement, his role was limited to acquiescing in the new order and keeping quiet; in particular, colluding in the national silence about the discrepancy between the Kemalist doctrine of equal citizenship of all Turks and the actual treatment of minority groups – notably the Armenians. It was a sad fact that Joseph and the rest of the Syrian community could be counted on in this regard. The social and religious and racial divisions that had immemorially separated the Syrians and the Armenians were so deep, it seemed, that the groups barely existed for each other. This was evinced, in Joseph’s case, by his total failure to perpetuate the fact of their obliteration, which he’d seen with his own eyes, and also by the express words of his testimony. In order to establish his credentials as a staunch Turkish citizen, Joseph portrayed all Armenians mentioned in the testimony in an unflattering, threatening light: Hachadourian was a British spy who spouted anti-Turkish rubbish; the hotelier Ayvazian was a pro-German troublemaker; the Armenian who formerly occupied the condemned men’s cell in the Prison des Sables was a multiple murderer; and, in a conflation of every Turkish fear imaginable, the Armenian prison sergeant in Beirut was an ominous figure who intimated that he’d worked, during the French occupation, as a butcher in Adana.
I knew that my grandfather wrote his testimony at a desperate time, that he had good reason to distance himself from Armenians, and even that he may well have encountered a succession of unpleasant Armenian nationals; but I couldn’t help feeling that these portraits reflected an incapacity to attach significance to the vivid ordeals of his fellow Cilicians or, indeed, to the political passions that lay behind their disastrous fate. True, this incapacity was perhaps necessitated by the demands of survival in Turkey. But my grandfather chose to stay in Turkey and in a sense, therefore, chose to incapacitate himself. He paid a very high price for his choice. When the Second World War came to Mersin, he was unable to appreciate quite how much the issues at stake mattered to its participants, who were being killed in their millions, and what this might mean to their perception of him and his formally neutral actions.
This misconception about the responsibilities of neutrality may have had other consequences. An intelligence agent did not have to be a spy. He could also be a party, acting neither for reward nor out of ideological conviction, who simply offered information openly, gratuitously, unsystematically and therefore, he might feel, innocuously. Joseph Dakak, with no sense that he was taking sides in the conflict, might have given foreigners at the Toros Hotel the benefit of his opinions on current affairs in Turkey, or on the personalities of Mersin society, or on anything he could reasonably help them with. Few things would have been more pleasant or have come more naturally: after all, his function as a hotelier was precisely to be of service to his guests. Joseph Dakak may have been innocent, but innocent of what? It pained me to acknowledge it, but this was a question I would never be able to answer with certainty.
When I returned to the Hitit Hotel later that evening, the receptionist at the hotel, Ali, invited me to join him and a man from Lebanon, who described himself as a Phalangist and was dressed in a vest and pair of stripy underpants, for a glass of tea. The three of us sat outside attempting conversation, Ali and I in pidgin Turkish, the Phalangist gentleman and I in pidgin French, and Ali and the Phalangist gentleman in fluent-sounding Arabic. It was a situation of the old Levant that my grandfather, as a speaker of French, Turkish, Arabic and English, would have enjoyed and mastered. There was something else that he would have liked: the Phalangist (who mysteriously wouldn’t reveal what his business was) was on his way to Mersin, where he had a room booked at the Toros Hotel.
It only occurred to me afterwards, as I stood on the balcony of my room looking out towards the lights of the port of Iskenderun, that the hotel I’d chosen at random was named after the Hittites. This made me think of John Garstang. In 1957, the archaeologist returned to Mersin after an interval of ten years. He was met off the boat by Joseph Dakak, who was delighted to see his extremely old and very frail friend and accompanied him to the hotel. After a rest, Professor Garstang and others drove out to the Hittite site at Karatepe, where the Englishman drew himself up and gave a speech to the assembly of onlookers. On his return to Mersin, John Garstang was again met by Joseph and rested one last time at the hotel. Then he returned to his ship, where he died.
It gave me pleasure that my grandfather’s friend had lived long enough to return to the scene of his life’s greatest work, just as it pleased me that Denis Wright had prospered and that Norman Mayers, after serving in a variety of posts in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Brazil, finally retired as the ambassador to Ecuador; Mayers died in 1986, at the age of ninety. On the subject of afterlives, I could not help smiling at the thought of what happened to Nazim Gandour. The Lebanese merchant returned to Mersin after his release from internment and carried on doing business there until the late ’sixties, when he skipped town and returned to the Lebanon owing the Turkish Republic a fortune in taxes. He thus revealed himself to be a levanter in the secondary sense of the noun, too: one who absconds, especially with bets unpaid. What happened to Osman Emre Bey and Hilmi Bey I never found out. I hoped they lived more happily, and longer, than the other people apparently involved in Joseph Dakak’s apprehension. These fared badly; so badly, indeed, that superstition might lead one to attribute their fates to nemesis. Williams, the SIME man in Mersin, was accidentally shot dead in Athens in 1944. Desmond Doran died in a bomb explosion in Tel Aviv in 1947. His boss in Istanbul, Thomson, was killed by EOKA in Cyprus in the early ’fifties; and Harold Gibson, Arthur Maltass’ boss, committed suicide in Rome over enormous debts run up by the Rumanian dancing girl he’d married.
Thankfully, the jinx was not uniformly fatal. Arthur Maltass, as far as I knew, merely fell into professional disgrace. Towards the end of 1943, it came to Denis Wright’s notice that a local importer had given Maltass a brand new Japanese or German bicycle, and, armed with this evidence of unpatriotic corruption, the consul was able to arrange for Maltass’ recall home – much to his distress, Wright said, as he was in his element in Mersin, where he used his position in Economic Warfare to threaten Mersin merchants with the Black List.
Denis Wright also put an end to the activities of William Rickards. On the consul’s advice, the British embassy concluded that ‘It is scandalous that Lloyd’s should allow Rickards to act for them’ and terminated his Lloyd’s agency in Mersin on 8 May 1944. On 6 June 1944, Rickards wrote to the British ambassador:
I beg to mention that since the beginning of this year I have noticed a difference in the attitude of the Mersin consulate towards me. A few months back I heard that some of our people of influence, for reasons of their own, were planning to relieve me of my post as Lloyd’s Agent. One of them
openly boasted to Syrian friends of hers that she was going to take Lloyd’s agency from Rickards. Though I disregarded this information at the time I regret to say it has now come true.
After conscientiously and faithfully serving my Country and Lloyd’s during the past four difficult years – I refused several offers of partnership in important firms to devote my time exclusively to Lloyd’s work – I find I have not had a fair deal and therefore have a right to know the reason for this change which has affected my position in town and is likely to have harmful effects on my business in the future.
The embassy never replied. On 10 November 1944, a diplomat there recorded that ‘the notorious Rickards had completely faded into the background and was giving no trouble’.
But perhaps the most telling fate was reserved for Franz von Papen, my grandfather’s alter ego. The German ambassador, who quit Ankara in August 1944, went on the run after the Allied invasion of Germany and was captured in April 1945. He was moved from place to place for interrogations until, finally, in August, he was taken to Nuremberg and imprisoned in a cell of the Palace of Justice. The cell was furnished with a collapsible bed, a grey blanket, a small table and a stool. The light fixture had been removed from the ceiling and thick iron bars secured the window. As a precaution against suicide, the hatch in the door was permanently open to enable observation by guards. Like Joseph Dakak – and Nazim Gandour and William Rickards – Papen experienced the torment of not knowing what crime he was supposed to have committed. Under interrogation, he was persistently pressed on why he’d continued to serve Hitler in the face of the Anschluss and the Nazis’ acts of political terror and persecution, particularly of Jews. Papen, who pointed out that in Turkey he’d helped 1,500 Rumanian Jewish children escape to Israel, said he had acted out of patriotism rather than for the good of the Nazi party. In October 1945, he was charged with conspiring to prepare for a war of aggression. In October 1946, he was acquitted of war crimes, although the Nuremberg court found that he’d engaged in ‘bullying and intrigue’. Papen’s ordeal was not over. As soon as he left the Palace of Justice he was taken into the custody of the Bavarian police for denazification. In January 1947, a denazification court found Papen guilty of aiding and abetting Hitler in his rise to power and conspiring to overcome President Hindenberg’s objections to Hitler becoming Chancellor. He was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp, his personal assets were confiscated, and he was deprived of his civil rights. From April 1947 to February 1949, Papen was moved from one camp to another. Like Joseph Dakak, his imprisonment led to heart trouble and, in May 1948, hospitalization. On appeal, the Court of Appeal classified Papen as ‘incriminated in Category II’ and assessed his contribution to the Wiedergutmachung at DM30,000. He was also deprived of the right to vote, receive a state pension, hold political office, drive a car, or perform any work except ordinary labour. The former Chancellor and ambassador devoted the years that followed to the defence of his reputation, writing a memoir and articles. As a result, the highest court in Bavaria reviewed his case in May 1965 and downgraded his incrimination to Category III, which restored his civil rights. He died in 1969. Why Papen, a deeply reactionary Catholic monarchist but not a Nazi, allowed himself to be used by Hitler was a question that detained historians. The emerging consensus was that his doubts about Nazism, such as they were, were exceeded by the desire, which Joseph Dakak knew well, to be in the mix of things, to be a player. The two men were also linked by a weird symbolic detail. Immediately after his acquittal of war crimes, Papen went to the refectory for lunch. In order to distinguish him from those defendants found guilty, his place at the table was marked by the presence on his plate of Joseph Dakak’s beloved fruit, an orange.
In May 1999, my attention was caught by two news items from Ireland. I read, first of all, that in the preliminary proceedings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, convened in response to an intense campaign by nationalists, the (Catholic) families of the victims were resisting the grant of anonymity to British soldiers present at the scene of the shootings. Next, I read that an effort was underway to locate and exhume the remains of Catholics alleged to have been informers who had been killed by the IRA over twenty years previously. It was an awful, inconclusive business, with the families of the dead waiting in suspense as Gardai, acting on information received from republican sources, dug around bogs and beaches with no success; evidently, it was far from easy, after so many years, for anybody, even the deceased’s executioners, to remember exactly where the graves were situated. The silting up and erosion of the coast, the dying and cutting and growth of trees and shrubs, the disappearance and appearance of buildings, all of these alterations had removed the landscape beyond the scope of recollection or recognition. But the urge to uncover the past, when it is a component of the inextinguishable and tormenting urge for justice, is extremely powerful, and the search for skeletons continued.
Even allowing for the fact that the ’seventies were much more recent than a night in March 1936, I was struck by the difference between the vociferously retrospective attitude of Catholic families to the political violence they’d suffered and that of Admiral Somerville’s Protestant descendants, who didn’t want to know the names of the killers and displayed a reticence about the past that almost amounted to a denial of their victimhood. It was a curious state of affairs, since the ascendancy class, with its preoccupation with the glamour of its own pedigree, characteristically took a lively interest in matters of family history.
At around that time, May 1999, I came across a book, published the year before in England, by a historian named Peter Hart – a Protestant name, I couldn’t help thinking – called The IRA and Its Enemies. Flicking through the index, my eye was drawn to a cluster of references to my grandfather’s cousins, the murdered Coffey brothers. Then I was surprised to encounter, on the relevant chapter’s first page, three names mentioned by my grandmother on our visit to Dunmanway the previous summer: Buttimer, Gray and Fitzmaurice.
It turned out that Grandma’s account of what had happened to these men was slightly inaccurate. It was true that Gray and Buttimer had been shot dead; however, they were shot dead at their homes on Main Street, Dunmanway and not, as Grandma recalled, in Dunmanway Square. David Gray, a chemist, died from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by a gang of men who burst open his door. The same gang hammered on the door of James Buttimer, an eighty-two-year-old retired draper who was Gray’s neighbour; when Buttimer, who answered the door, failed to step outside, he was shot in the face and died at once, his brains and teeth blown out. And although Grandma may have been right to say that a man called Fitzmaurice left the country and sold his house to Henry Smith as a result of these killings, it was more likely that Fitzmaurice fled because he had barely escaped death himself that night and because his brother, a seventy-year-old solicitor called Francis Fitzmaurice, had been shot twelve times in his doorway while his wife looked on. These incidents did not take place during the Black and Tan War, as Grandma believed, but in the peacetime of April 1922, four months after the making of the Treaty with the British. To be exact, Buttimer and Gray and Fitzmaurice were all killed on the night of 26/27 April, a night that also saw attempts on the lives of a shopkeeper, George Applebe Bryan; a teacher, William Morrison; and a draper called William Jagoe. (I’d come across this name before: Mrs Salter-Townshend’s husband, according to Burke’s Irish Family Records, was the son of one William Jagoe Salter.) The following night saw further homicides: the farmers and neighbours Robert Howe and John Chinnery were killed at their homes in Ballaghanure; slightly further east, in Ballineen, a sixteen-year-old called Alexander Mackinley was shot three times in the back of the head as he lay in bed; a curate, Ralph Habord, was shot on the steps of the rectory at Murragh; a farmer, John Buttimer, and a farm servant, Jim Greenfield, were shot in Caher, a townland to the west of Ballineen: Buttimer in the head and stomach and Greenfield, lying in bed, in the back of the head. All of the above-named victims of violence lived in the Dunm
anway-Ballineen- Enniskean stretch of the Bandon valley: Lynch–O’Neill territory, you might say. On the night that followed, another fatal shooting occurred ten or so miles south of Enniskean, in Clonakilty: there, a sixteen-year-old called Robert Nagle was killed at his home on MacCurtain Hill. Finally, on the night of 28/29 April, two nights after the Dunmanway killings, John Bradfield, a farmer from Killowen, near Murragh, was roused from his bed, told to stand up, and shot in the back of the neck; his cousin and neighbour, Henry Bradfield would also have been killed had he not fled earlier. The name Bradfield rang a bell; and it turned out that John and Henry were cousins of Thomas Bradfield, whose shooting the previous year the Cork Examiner had connected, geographically at least, with that of the Coffey brothers.
All told, ten men had been killed and one wounded in the space of three days. They were all Protestants. No Catholic – not one pro-Treaty ‘Free Stater’ or landlord or perceived informer – was even shot at.
Viewed broadly, the massacre was the vengeful expression of a sense of grievance arising from recent lethal attacks on Catholics in Belfast, outrages such as the killing of Canon Magner in the Anglo-Irish War, and agrarian discontent with the landlord class (to which, incidentally, few of the dead belonged). Its actual spark, though, was the death on the night of 25/26 April of Michael O’Neill (no relation), who was shot while leading a break-in by the IRA Bandon battalion into a house in Ballygroman, between Bandon and Cork. At daybreak, the three male occupants of the house – the well-known unionists Thomas and Samuel Hornibrook (father and son) and Captain Herbert Woods (son-in-law of Thomas Hornibrook) – were taken captive by the IRA. Woods, the man who’d shot Michael O’Neill, was killed that day and the two Hornibrooks the next day. Ballygroman House was burned to the ground. Judging from the subsequent massacre, these killings were evidently not deemed to be a sufficient reprisal.
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