by Bury, Robin;
In the revolution such as Ireland had just passed through, many of the inhabitants of a country saw red and did things, which in their saner moments they would not do. This was common to every country and Ireland was not worse than any other country. Terrible things were done which in a few years would be forgotten.83
Perhaps the judge was right, but that would have been cold comfort to Sanders. In October 1926, he told the IGC that ‘not one penny of money in compensation has been paid to me by the Free State’.84 Sir Alexander Wood-Renton, chairman of the IGC, wrote to Sir John Oakley, one of the three committee members, in November 1926 to suggest that any decision on the large claim from Sanders should be delayed until more details were supplied. Oakley, a past president of the Surveyors’ Institute, agreed.85 Sanders’ solicitors were advised of this decision and challenged it at length, advising that Sanders would attempt to obtain a cash payment from the Irish Free State and claim the difference of the total claimed from the IGC. Reid Jamieson replied dismissively that he could not comment on the action Sanders intended to take with the Irish Free State. At this point Sanders decided to go over the head of the IGC and wrote to the Colonial Secretary, Leo Amery, on 10 June 1927, expressing his surprise that after an oral hearing with two members of the committee, the IGC decided to wait ‘until I had come to terms with the Free State over my awards’.86 The Free State had so far only paid him £10 in cash and £400 in land bonds, deducting rates and income tax from what he was due. Sanders claimed that he was living off bank overdrafts.
Following further contentious correspondence, an award was made for £15,475 in August 1927. Ballinacourtie House was not rebuilt and, in 1946, the Land Commission bought 10,000 acres for £10,000. Thus came to an end the presence of the Massy Dawson-Sanders connection to the Glen of Aherlow.
Sanders was a victim of the times. He was a successful entrepreneur, a Protestant loyalist targeted by the IRA, and a large landholder: he owned extensive forestry plantations, which were purchased by the Land Commission.
One of the largest claims in Co. Tipperary came from Charles Neville-Clarke, whose family lived at Craigance mansion near Thurles, situated on a 1,500-acre farm on the River Suir. They had lived there for some 100 years. In February 1923, ‘armed men forced their way into the house, drove out five servants, soaked the house with petrol and destroyed buildings and contents’.87 The next day, they returned and stole goods left outside the house, such as harnesses, garden tools and gates. The Neville-Clarkes had left the house before the burning took place and stayed away for 4 years. They sold their cattle, sheep and horses in a ‘forced sale’.88 Neville-Clarke claimed that he could not return, as he would have been attacked and possibly killed. As it was, his manager was ‘fired at in his own house and had a narrow escape’.89 He tried to sell the property privately but claimed he was boycotted.
Why the burning of the house and occupation of the land? Neville-Clarke thought the reason was simple: ‘to have his land confiscated’.90 But there seemed more to it than that. It did not help that he had been DL and JP and one of his sons had fought against the IRA when in the British Army in 1920–21. The Land Commission purchased the land for £11 an acre, while Neville-Clarke claimed it was worth at least £40 an acre. Jamieson of the IGC denied it, stating in his report that land was worth £12 an acre in Ireland. Neville-Clarke claimed for a loss of £20,000 on this sale to the Land Commission, £26,000 for the burning of the mansion and furniture and various other items including the forced sale of livestock, making up a total of £49,000.
He had obtained a decree for £8,700 from the county court in Tipperary in 1924. The decree was based on a rental value of £200 a year for 15 years. Clarke had a second house in England where he went to live and Jamieson found out through his contacts that his wife had ‘a very large income’.91 An award for £11,500 was made by the IGC in December 1927.
The Tipperary Star reported this burning: ‘Thurles and its surroundings have been fortunately very free from burnings … with the exception of the conflagration yesterday (Thursday) morning at Holycross, the picturesque residence of Mr Clarke, a great employer of labour and popular in the county’.92 Bishop Miller mentioned the incident at the Church of Ireland Synod on 5 July 1923:
Mr Clark, of Holycross, a fine churchman, a good Irishman, a large and liberal employer of labour, kind, hospitable, generous, has been driven from the country; his beautiful home has been reduced to ashes. It is acts of this kind – stupid, senseless, brutal – which make us almost despair.93
During the occupation of Clonmel by the local Irregulars in 1922, the Sweetnam family was forced to leave for Suffolk in December 1922 after a period of boycotting and intimidation. This is an interesting case of a family business being transferred from Ireland to England; unfortunately it failed, and the husband and wife retired.
Sweetnam ‘had a good Drapery business in Clonmel until 1921’, when ‘the people ceased to buy from us owing to a strict boycott being placed on us in consequence of I being formally a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, besides we were Protestants and not in sympathy with their actions’.94 The sectarian nature of the boycott is thus noted by Sweetnam. He had left the RIC in 1919 due to ill health, 2 years before the boycott started. He been forced to pay the IRA a levy and they billeted on his family. Unable to sell his stock in Ireland, he took it to England and sold at a big loss, getting £250 for goods for which he had initially paid £1,250. This is an exceptional case as no claims were made for travel and setting up a new business in Brighton.
Jamieson interviewed Sweetnam in London and was convinced that ‘this is a genuine case of hardship and loss’.95 An award of £800 was made and it seems the Sweetnams joined the many Irish involuntary emigrants in England, some of whose cases have been detailed. Sweetnam and his wife lived on an RIC pension of a mere £105 a year.
In April 1921, the Stone brothers, Protestant farmers near Clonmel, were attacked and the young Robert Stone ‘was shot dead’.96 ‘The shooting of young Stone was condemned in the Catholic churches of the district on Sunday.’97 Crossley Boyle, a 40-year-old Protestant farmer from Dargan, was also shot dead on 14 June and his body was found in the same place as Robert Stone’s. He occupied an evicted farm and had ‘received messages from Sinn Féiners telling him that they would clear him out of his farm.’98 Earlier in January 1921, land agent George Frend of Silverhills, Cloughjordan, was murdered on his way home. He was a JP in Moneygall and Cloughjordan. His murderers escaped and their motivation is unknown, perhaps connected with Frend’s work as a land agent. George Sackville Wallis, a Protestant civil bill officer, was ‘found shot dead near Cashel’99 on 18 April 1921.
Lastly, on 30 May 1923, Protestant farmer Henry Colclough was shot dead by an unknown assailant. He bred ‘Prize winning Hunters’100 near Clogheen on a 200-acre farm. A previous tenant had been evicted some 25 years earlier. He was subjected to attempts to damage him commercially when twelve of his hunters had their tails cut off in June 1922, rendering them unsaleable. His wife left the farm, put in a claim to the Irish Grants Committee which was turned down as the murder took place just after the closing date for incidents to be considered for compensation.
Some cases of intimidation, boycotting and enforced emigration have been examined in the South Riding of Co. Tipperary. How far this intimidation and harassment led to an outflow of Protestants in this period is impossible to gauge with any degree of accuracy. From 1911 to 1926, the number of Protestants in the South Riding of Tipperary, roughly the diocese of Cashel, Emly and Lismore, fell by 37.5 per cent, from 2,987 to 1,867.101 Of this fall in number of 1,120 people, however, we must take account of the 1,200 ‘persons engaged in the Defense of the county’102 in 1911. They were based in Clogheen, Tipperary, Cashel and Clonmel in the South Riding. In 1911, there were 1,213 Protestants in the British forces based in Co. Tipperary, made up of 1,091 Episcopalians, 59 Presbyterians and 63 Methodists,103 almost all based in the South Riding. This figure of 1,213 is more or l
ess the equivalent of the fall in numbers of Protestants in the South Riding between 1911 and 1926. So we can conclude that there does not seem to have been a flight of Protestants in the South Riding during the Irish War of Independence and the civil war.104
The North Riding was different: there was a fall in Protestant numbers of 29 per cent,105 particularly the area around Nenagh, where there was an enforced exodus of Protestants. In this areas in the west of the county, the Irish Grants Committee received some thirty claims, including the burning of mansions and houses, boycotting of farms and shops, cattle driving and non-payment of rents by tenant farmers, looting and billeting. The Church of Ireland Gazette, in its editorial of 23 June 1922, mentioned Nenagh specifically:
… the fact remains that in certain districts in southern Ireland inoffensive Protestants of all classes are being driven from their homes and shops and their farms in such numbers that many of our little communities are in danger of being entirely wiped out … Mullingar, Athenry, Loughrea and Nenagh … the rights of life and property are not being upheld.
At a meeting in Nenagh in April 1922, the Rt Revd Sterling Berry, Bishop of Killaloe since 1913, told the Church of Ireland audience, ‘We come together as Irishmen – deeply concerned for the welfare of our land and deeply grieved at occurrences which bring reproach and dishonour upon our country’.106
A little later in June, Berry wrote to the Minister of Home Affairs:
There is scarcely a Protestant family in the district which has escaped molestation. One of my Clergy has had his motor car and a portion of his house burned. (This was Revd Henry). Some other houses have been burned. Cattle have been driven off farms. Protestant families have been warned to leave the neighbourhood. Altogether a state of terrorism exists.107
Some three months after Sterling expressed concern, Kilboy House in Dolla, south of Nenagh – one of three mansions in the same area to suffer the same fate – was burnt. It is hard to know what the motivations were. The Dunalleys had been in Ireland since the 1660s and had been rewarded about 20,000 acres of land in the barony of Upper Ormond for services rendered during Cromwell’s Irish campaign. They were the Prittie family, raised to the peerage in 1800 at the time of the Union. By 1922, they held some 2,000 acres at the foothills of the Silvermine Mountains. The then Lord Dunalley was 81 years old at the time. A conservative with a strong dislike of Gladstone’s Irish policies, he had had a distinguished university career, gaining a double first at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Dunalley family had a long history of service in the British Army and one of the lord’s sons was killed in the First World War.
According to the man who is now responsible for the care of the property, Declan Mullen,108 Dunalley was not considered an unpopular landlord. Mullen thought that at a time of chaos during the Civil War, there was no police protection for Dunalley, nor anyone else. Small, poor farmers and landless unemployed men in the Silvermines area took advantage of local conditions to raid the Dunalley estate, take cattle and burn Kilboy House. Several attempts had been made on Dunalley’s life; on one occasion when he was going to the Church of Ireland church on his estate with his family, nine shots were fired at him.109 He had been raided prior to that and, according to Mullen, kept loaded guns at all corner windows on the ground floor. In mid-1922, he moved to England with his wife, shortly before his mansion was burnt when the out-offices and farmyard were looted. His steward, Doupe, was living on the premises and wrote to tell Dunalley, ‘It breaks my heart to see the place now.’ He went on to say, ‘I suppose we will have to go to England now on the refugees system’.110 He was given three months to leave.
Doupe kept in touch with his master, the correspondence now in the keeping of the National Library of Ireland.111 He did what he could to sell off the cattle and sheep before leaving for Fivemiletown in Co. Tyrone. His family broke up; one son went to start a new life in Canada under an orphanage scheme, Doupe apparently having abandoned his children.
Both Doupe and the head keeper, Mollison, applied to the IGC for compensation for loss of employment. Doupe had worked for Dunalley for 25 years. He had been shot by those who raided his house, and sustained an injury to one of his fingers.112 He claimed £840 for loss of earnings and was awarded £150.
Dunalley’s solicitor, Dudley of Nenagh, made a claim for £100,000 (about £4.5 million in today’s money) in the local court for damage done under the Damage to Property (Compensation) Act of 1923. In July, a county court judge awarded only £17,395 (about £780,000 today) for reinstatement of Kilboy, with £5,105 for damages to the outbuildings. In addition, the new Land Commission paid him £16,000 in land bonds for 1,277 acres of untenanted land (i.e. demesne).
At the same time as Kilboy was burnt, the nearby Castle Otway went up in flames. The Otways and Pritties had been neighbours for several centuries, both families having been awarded lands in the same area as payment for serving in Cromwell’s army. Otway was a lieutenant and his descendants went on to serve in the British Navy. An application for a claim to the IGC came from Robert Otway-Ruthven on board HMS Excellent in Portsmouth in December 1926. He was the eldest son of William Otway-Ruthven, who died in 1907. Robert had previously applied to the County Court and was awarded £7,235 in July 1924.113 This award was for partial reinstatement, full reinstatement being turned down as the government valuer offered £8,000, which was considered inadequate to restore the castle.
Robert Otway-Ruthven applied to the IGC as well as to the Irish court, unlike Lord Dunalley. The Dublin court did not compensate him for furniture that was stolen some months before the castle was burnt, nor for a rectory that was burnt on Otway-Ruthven property. The Irish courts required proof that robberies were committed by the Irregulars before compensating claimants, unlike the IGC. For the rectory, £1,600 was awarded which was ‘quite insufficient to enable the reconstruction to be effected’.114 No explanation was given as to why the rectory was burnt.
The IGC awarded Otway-Ruthven £2,550, of which £1,125 was paid in advance. When added to the compensation of the Irish court, the total amount was inadequate to build a new home, restore the rectory and meet the cost of stolen furniture. The Otway-Ruthvens therefore left the area they had lived in for almost 3 centuries.
In her pamphlet, Miriam Lambe quotes from an extract from the Primary School Folklore Collection:
The Otways were always looked upon as good landlords.
They gathered no tithes from the people …
Otway’s ancestors were captains in Cromwell’s army in 1649.
There were no people evicted in this district.115
A group of men (around ten in number) entered the house of Mr Samuel Biggs at Hazel Point, Dromineer, Nenagh on 16 June 1922. They locked up Mr Biggs, who had only one arm, and an old man, a Mr Thomas Webb, and proceeded to ransack the house. The gang also consumed a quantity of whiskey and tied up and raped Mrs Biggs. They then warned the family that if they reported the matter, they would all be shot. The men stole some jewellery and clothes from the house before departing. Webb stated of Mrs Biggs that ‘when she was liberated she was in a frightful condition, almost unconscious’. He could not identify any of the men, though two of them were in uniform. Subsequently four men – Michael Grace, Patrick and Edward Hogan of Drumineer and James Grace of Dunaboy – were charged with the rape (referred to throughout as being ‘outraged’) and fined £100 each in lieu of 4 months in jail.
Another ‘outrage’ took place in Sopwell Hall, Cloughjordan, on 29 July 1922, when five armed men attempted to rape two Protestant girls, Alton and Stringer, who were separated by them from the Catholic girl, Flaherty. All three girls were employed by the owner, Cosby G. Trench, ‘a generous and dynamic landlord’.116 The Catholic girl was not abused. The house was looted and the gang of men raided the cellar and drank much alcohol before attempting to assault the girls, whom they knew were Protestants as they had met them previously at local dances. It is recorded that three of the five men were sentenced to 10 years’ penal servic
e, a far more severe sentence than that handed down to the four men who raped Mrs Biggs.
There are a number of cases of robbery and boycotting of Protestant shopkeepers in Nenagh, once called an English town. An example is the claim of Cecil Henry Burchett, an Englishman married to the daughter of Mrs Hodgins, the owner of a shop in Nenagh. He was active in recruiting in 1914/15, enlisted in August 1915 and ‘was discharged in broken health’.117 Returning to Nenagh, he found his ‘wife’s health completely gone’.118 She had been intimidated during his absence; he attributed this to his recruiting activities and to the fact that he had enlisted in the British Army. Matters deteriorated in 1922 when the shop windows were smashed and the family was told to leave the country. They lost business and Burchett claimed ‘nearly all the County – families [sic] who were the back-bone [sic] of our business were between 1920 & 1923 driven from the country’.119
The solicitor supporting Burchett’s claim, Dudley of Nolan and Dudley, Nenagh, suggested in a long, emotional letter to the IGC of 1 April 1927 that much of his losses were attributable to the fall away in support of the loyalist community whose mansions were burnt: ‘Their effects were looted, their cattle stolen, and their lives made unbearable generally with the result that of course many of them had to flee the country leaving their land waste and their business derelict.’120 Once the British forces had left, loyalists were ‘at the mercies of the Irregulars who wandered about the Country in armed bands often without officers doing desperate deeds.’121 Dudley thought that part of the reason why Burchett had been intimidated and boycotted was that after the 1916 rebellion, he served with the 18th Royal Irish in Fermoy and had been sent to Limerick to arrest suspected insurgents in an area which extended to Nenagh. The IRA Brigade in Nenagh was aware of this and warned Burchett not to return.
In 1924, the business was sold to the bank. Burchett ended up living in a soldier’s cottage near Nenagh with an army pension, his solicitor drawing attention to the generous compensation paid by the Irish courts to ‘those who were in armed opposition to the British Government during the years of trouble.’122 Despite Dudley’s strenuous advocacy, Burchett was only awarded £1,500. He had requested £5,000.