A Twisted Root

by Patricia Craig

  At the inquest into the death of the lord mayor, the coroner’s jury brings in an unexpected and amazing verdict. Indicted on a charge of wilful murder are

  ... David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England; Lord French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; Ian McPherson, late Chief Secretary of Ireland; Acting Inspector General Smith, of the Royal Irish Constabulary; Divisional Inspector Clayton of the Royal Irish Constabulary; District Inspector Swanzy and some unknown members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

  Those named become immediate targets for the ira, though some are clearly beyond their reach. Of those who aren’t, two of the specified ‘unknown members’ of the ric are the first to die, shot on a tram car in Cork city. Their names are Garvey and Harrington, and they are popularly believed to be the people who fired the lethal shots into Tomás MacCurtain. The process of revenge is under way. Michael Collins himself, in mourning for his close friend and ally, has authorised these and further executions. District Inspector Swanzy is high on the condemned list, and for his own safety the di is hurriedly transferred from Cork to Lisburn, a staunch wee Protestant town in the distant north. In the eyes of those facing republican implacability down South, Lisburn would look like a haven of loyalism.

  But plans are afoot. Ulster and Munster are poles apart, but the whole of Ireland, between the spring of 1920 and the Truce of 1921, is undergoing ‘the full voltage of British military oppression’ (in the words of Sean O’Faolain in his autobiography Vive Moi!), and a complementary network of republican resistance is operating throughout its length and breadth. It isn’t too difficult for ira Intelligence to track the district inspector to his new posting. Soon the ira has Swanzy in its sights. The Cork brigade claims the honour of carrying out the sentence, but, as the Belfast ira reasonably point out, their Cork accents would make them conspicuous in the North. In the event, it becomes a joint operation, though with each party reluctant to accord too much credit to the other. ‘This was a Belfast Brigade job,’ claimed one of its members, Sean Montgomery, in an unpublished memoir,7 ‘the Cork men were guests.’

  The Cork men thought otherwise. They were the primary activists in the business, according to them, with Belfast merely taking a secondary role. It was a Corkman, Sean Culhane, who fired the first shot at DI Swanzy as he left Christ Church Cathedral in Lisburn after attending morning service. The date is Sunday 22 August 1920. The gun in question, as I’ve indicated, passed into republican mythology as Tomás MacCurtain’s own, miraculously undetected during the raid on his home on the night of his murder. (Ironically, the permit for this gun had been signed by Swanzy himself in the mistaken belief that it was going to a ‘loyalist’ in Cork city.8) It is possible that Sean Culhane had carried it with him on the train from Cork – risking its confiscation and his own detainment – or, on the other hand, that it had made its way north some weeks earlier, and been handed to Bertie Tipping in Lurgan to be kept until called for. Bertie has testified that the two guns he collected from his brother Jimmy were among those actually used in ‘the Swanzy affair’.

  Some time during that summer of 1920, Jimmy Tipping is installed in lodgings in Belfast which he shares with Jack (Sean) Leonard, a taxi driver originally from Sligo, and currently a Volunteer with ‘B’ Company, Belfast Brigade. The lodging house is in Bedeque Street off the Lower Crumlin Road, just opposite the Mater Hospital. The two young men are deeply involved in preparations for the coming assassination. The first time an attempt is made on Swanzy’s life – on 15 August 1920 – things do not go according to plan. The DI gains a week’s reprieve.

  It’s in connection with that first Sunday that differing accounts begin to obscure the actual course of events. But what I think took place was this. A bona fide taxi driver named George Nelson was hired to pick up four men on the Shankill Road and take them to Portadown. One of the men was Jimmy Tipping. The taxi, as instructed, then proceeded up the Springfield Road towards Hannahstown (not the Cave Hill Road as Sean Leonard later recalled it), and at a prearranged spot it was halted by three masked men carrying revolvers who sprang out of a hedge. The passengers then joined forces with the hijackers. Nelson was blindfolded and had his hands tied behind his back; he was then led across some fields to a barn where two men guarded him until it was judged safe to let him go. One of the ira men standing guard over Nelson was Jimmy Tipping. In the meantime, the commandeered taxi on its way to Lisburn had come to grief: either a wheel flew off (one account), it simply broke down (another account), or the driver from Cork got hopelessly lost among the Antrim byroads. Or, a further account has it, Swanzy simply failed to appear at the appointed moment to be shot. Operation postponed.

  Lessons were learned. (That’s a joke.) The following week a similar ploy is adopted, but the non-bona fide taxi driver for the occasion is Sean Leonard (why didn’t they use him in the first place?). Roger McCorley of the Belfast Brigade is already in Lisburn monitoring events, his colleague Joe McKelvey9 having reported on the expected movements of the DI. As far as I am aware, Jimmy Tipping does not on this occasion travel with the shooting party to Lisburn, but stays behind in Belfast poised to help construct an alibi for the returning victorious executioners. (I am not sure how this works, but it does, at least for a time.)

  Lisburn, Market Square, 1.03 p.m. An instant of shocked silence overtakes the Sunday crowds milling about the town centre as shots ring out, leaving Oswald Swanzy lying dead on the pavement, and his killers making a getaway as panic and confusion swiftly flare up. Shouts and screams contribute to the uproar as pedestrians stumble off frantically in all directions. The ira men continue firing to ward off capture, like something out of a cops-and-robbers screening at the Diamond Cinema on the Falls Road in Belfast, but the only other casualties are a blackthorn stick shot out of the hand of an outraged pursuer, and the grazed leg of a Miss McCreight, who’s managed to get herself in the pathway of a bullet. All the gunmen scramble into the waiting car, with Sean Leonard at the wheel, apart from Roger McCorley who nearly gets left behind in the shambles. He has to make a dive for it and as he does, his gun goes off, driving a bullet hole through the floor. McCorley is hauled to safety by his companions as the car speeds off in a manner not consistent with the rules of the road. Pursuit by police in a taxi is foiled by that vehicle losing a wheel as it goes too recklessly round a corner.10 (There are a lot of flying wheels and bullets in this story – not to mention spokes in wheels.)

  Leaving their pursuers far behind, and speeding out of the town towards the back road home, the exhilarated Volunteers reach Belfast without further ado. At Great Victoria Street station, the two Corkmen in the party board a train to Dublin, where, as arranged, they report to Michael Collins on the outcome of the mission and receive his congratulations. Their Belfast associates, Roger McCorley and another Volunteer named Tom Fox, walk away not too hastily and disappear into a district known to be sympathetic, leaving Sean Leonard still driving the cab in the city centre. As far as I can gather (accounts of the business don’t always tally), he drives it to Tates Avenue off the Lisburn Road where a couple of supposed ‘fares’ – actually, Jimmy Tipping and an ira man named Liam Devlin – are waiting to be collected and taken to Holywood and Helen’s Bay to create a sense of an ordinary Sunday outing. In fact, the guilty taxi cab is flagged down and searched by ric patrols both on the outward and the return journey, but on each occasion the searchers fail to spot the bullet holes which should have alerted them to something fishy. But the reprieve for a few of the northern Volunteers (like Oswald Swanzy’s) is short-lived.

  Looking back over what I’ve written about the Swanzy shooting, I’m slightly dismayed to encounter a certain flippancy of tone, as if the only way to treat the event is to be mildly cynical and sardonic. Is this appropriate? Two things I know, or think I know: had I been present in that street in Lisburn when the di was gunned down, I’d have been as horrified and shocked by the bloodshed as anyone else. And – conversely – if the planning of this piece of retribution for the awful murde
r of Tomás MacCurtain had involved my cooperation to any extent, I’d have given it freely, regarding the proposed execution as a brave and necessary act to bolster the republican cause. Then, as now – I hope – I’d have drawn the line at exulting in anyone’s violent death (well, apart from droves of Black and Tans or other hoodlum belligerents); but equally, I’d have condoned the tactics of guerrilla warfare or any other form of resistance to the current dreadful state of misery and terror throughout Ireland. Those whom Sean O’Faolain called ‘the tremendously gallant few’, the Irish freedom fighters, could have counted on my iota of advocacy, had I been there to proffer it. The shadowy allure of gunmen and patriots was a thing well understood by me. And yet – I have to acknowledge an impulse to dissociate myself from violence and mayhem, however appealing the cause (the Cause). At the risk of sounding like ‘Outraged of Ballymurphy (or Ballymacarrett)’ in the Heaney poem, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’ – ‘ “Oh, it’s disgraceful, surely, I agree”, / “Where’s it going to end?” “It’s getting worse” ’ – I have to deplore destruction, destruction of life, livelihood, architectural treasures, aspiration for the future, homes, whole towns or anything else getting in the way of an undeviating certainty about a right course of action. But someone, you might argue, has to make a stand against perceived injustice and corruption, whatever it entails. Perhaps it’s just a question of bravery and fidelity versus expediency, with myself at present in the middle-aged expediency camp, I don’t know. But I do understand Louis MacNeice’s interrogation of gunmen,

  ... who shoot to kill and never

  See the victim’s face become their own,

  Or find his motive sabotage their motives.

  If you take to the gun you can’t afford to consider any clashing form of integrity, or allow complications to undermine your total dedication. And if, like Michael Collins, you’re setting yourself up for future deification or vilification, it’s just a way of perpetuating ‘us and them’.

  One thing the would-be saviours of Swanzy got right when they sent him North: Lisburn should have wrapped itself around the DI like an Orange sash. He should have been out of harm’s way in a town so Protestant and partisan. And when it turned out he wasn’t, all hell broke loose. Lisburn’s loyalist population is handed on a plate a pretext for a pogrom against Catholics, all of whom are supposed to be tarred with the Fenian–Sinn Féin–desperado brush. Even as the successful killers, Corkmen Culhane and Murphy, are passing through the town on the Dublin train, they see from their carriage windows smoke rising from the first burnt-out ‘Fenian’ premises. In the terrible ‘Swanzy’ riots the town is wrecked and burnt as Protestants run amok, and nearly the whole of the Catholic population is driven out. Desperate Catholic refugees carrying whatever they could salvage make their way on foot across the hills to the (comparative) safety of Belfast – following the route of the getaway car a short time earlier – where St Mary’s Hall in Bank Street provides a sanctuary of sorts. Days later, the charred remains of shops and houses, the mutilated streets of Lisburn, give rise to a topical comparison. Like a bombarded town in Belgium, it looks: Mons or Ypres or some other ravaged war zone.

  Not all the victims in Lisburn are Catholic, indeed; no one can stop Protestant property from going up in flames in the general conflagration. (A lull occurs while internecine energies are marshalled. The social commentator Hugh Shearman had a memory of himself as a very young child in a car going quickly through the empty streets of the town. It was Monday 23 August. The following day, nearly the whole of Bow Street was burned to the ground.) ... But mob fury is directed against the town’s Catholics – all innocent of complicity in the crucial killing – and few Protestant voices are raised in sympathy, or even in acknowledgement of their plight. Among those who do express concern and horror at the escalation of anarchy in the streets are the mother and sister of the murdered Swanzy: they are ‘grieved beyond measure’ by what has taken place in Lisburn – distraught, indeed, that the death of the district inspector should provoke such excesses of wreckage and infliction of terror. For them, it’s an added affliction piled on top of mourning.

  In 2008, the novelist Glenn Patterson published a book reflecting the kind of ancestral diversity common to most of us. Once Upon a Hill tells the story of his Lisburn grandparents, Catherine (Kate) Logue and Jack Patterson, who were there in the thick of the Swanzy disturbances, one – perhaps – momentarily moidered and running the streets with the Protestant wreckers and looters, the other (possibly) crouching terrified in a cellar, while the noise and excitement of sectarian venom raged at fever pitch above her. Also in hiding in Patterson’s putative cellar are Kate Logue’s mother and her five-year-old daughter, the latter born out of wedlock due to Jack’s opinionated mother, and her refusal to countenance as a daughter-in-law a mill girl and – worse – a Catholic. Glenn Patterson would like to absolve his grandfather Jack of any involvement in the uproar. He would like to think Jack’s attention in the crisis was focused on the safety of his wife-to-be and his daughter. But he can’t be sure how his grandfather acted – how anyone would act – in the heat of the moment.

  Whatever he did, or didn’t do, during those berserk August days of 1920, Jack Patterson was forgiven. Catholic, or half-Catholic Kate became his wife in due course, and their Protestant son, the oddly named Phares, Glenn Patterson’s father. Jack described Kate as ‘the best little woman in Lisburn’, while as far as she was concerned, he was simply ‘the best man that ever lived’. These mutual declarations of esteem were made years after the Lisburn cataclysm, when the town had long settled back into its workaday routines. Jack by now has succumbed to an evangelical onrush and got himself ‘born again’. I’m not sure what religion, if any, his wife Kate professes – probably a low-key, adopted Protestantism – but she’s held on to a remnant of her mill-girl aplomb and enjoys as much as anyone (as much as my grandmothers) that novelty of the 1960s home, television.

  By bringing all of his novelist’s skills and insights to bear on the subject, Glenn Patterson has produced the most vivid account I’ve come across of the Swanzy shooting and its aftermath. The incident is at the centre of his memoir. ‘Love in troubled times’ is the subtitle of Once Upon a Hill. It is not an overstatement.

  ... Earlier in the day the Belfast [Fire] Brigade had sent some of its units to assist, but it withdrew them again at seven o’clock after their hoses were repeatedly cut. The only check now on the arsonists was their own energy and ingenuity after more than thirty hours of destruction and, in a great many cases, continuous drinking. On Cross Row ... Phelan’s pawnshop was looted and burned ... so too was the ice-cream parlour belonging to Pietro Fusco. ... On Bridge Street McCourtney’s confectionery and fancy bakery shop was wrecked. ... All of this though, and despite the enthusiasm with which they went at it, was really just a diversion from what had been the target since the crowd marched out of Railway Street and on to Cross Row the previous afternoon: ‘Sinn Feiners ... sympathisers of the murderers’, or, very simply, Catholics.

  Jefferson’s timber yard went up in smoke, Glenn Patterson continues, so did Burns’s fruit and veg. And adds: ‘Poor Burns. Poor Lisburn and its fatal attraction to flames.’

  The allusion is to 1707 when Lisburn was all but wiped out in an accidental fire. And back beyond that date to the burning of 1641 when the rudimentary town was under siege and defended against the Irish rebels by – among others – the Tipping sons of the earliest settler John. There were Swansys (sic) about the place at that time too: an ancestor of the murdered DI was christened in Lisburn cathedral in 1666 and went on to fight for King Billy at the Battle of the Boyne11 (alongside William Blacker? – Ah, suppositions). Tipping, Swanzy, Blacker: ‘Each individual’s story spins complicated cobwebs of relationship.’ I’m quoting here another fine Northern Irish writer, the essayist Chris Arthur, meditating in ‘Water-Glass’ on his home town, Lisburn. Looking back, he says: ‘Before that initial cluster of 250 [i.e. the original seventeenth-century
builders of the town] there were others, long forgotten, for whom this place was home. Their lives have vanished, their stories are untold, the chemicals that once constituted their fleshy presence have unravelled and dispersed and melded, wraith-like, with the anonymous substance of the earth they used to tread on long ago. Who knows what ghosts haunt the dust of Bachelor’s Walk?’

  Who indeed. Chris Arthur’s perspective here is a bit too long for my particular purposes, but ghosts I can go along with. The ghosts of Warwickshire settlers revisiting the site of their first Irish dwellings; the ghost of Henry Munro re-enacting his bungled execution. And Oswald Ross Swanzy’s wraith hovering over the place of his ancestor’s christening and his own death. Ghosts of anonymous people trying to lead decent lives; ghosts of infuriated, intoxicated mobs. Coming up to the recent past and the days following 22 August 1920, Chris Arthur remarks bleakly and accurately: ‘The worst violence in modern times was done by Lisburn’s own people.’

  Late in the afternoon of 22 August, taxi man Sean Leonard is arrested in Belfast in connection with the shooting.12 Two weeks later, at his home in Lurgan, it’s the turn of Jimmy Tipping. Charged in the same connection, ‘he was subsequently removed under escort, and at a special court in Belfast was remanded on the capital charge,’ the Lurgan Mail reported solemnly. In fact, no charge is brought against Jimmy (for lack of evidence) and he’s dispatched back to Edward Street, only to be promptly rearrested and then interned without trial at Ballykinler camp in County Down. Here Jimmy sits it out for the next fifteen months, until, in December 1921, republican prisoners and internees are released in a general amnesty consequent on the Anglo-Irish Treaty.