A family myth, when I was growing up and beginning to take an interest in such matters, was that one of our Tipping relations was solely responsible for the assassination of DI Swanzy. He had fired the fatal shot. And the same relation, I believed in a vague but adamant way – I hadn’t got the Tipping contingent at all clear in my head – had been tried and convicted and was actually languishing (I’m sure the word languishing came into it) in the condemned cell awaiting execution when – miraculous day – the Treaty supervened. I don’t know when or how the truth got magnified, whether I did it subconsciously myself, or if it was somehow conveyed to me in this exaggerated form, aggrandisement having occurred spontaneously with the passage of time. Certainly I latched on to the Tipping/Swanzy overstatement. With a name like Craig, I needed all the republican clout I could get.
There were four strands to my family, indeed (taking grandparents into account), but the Wexford Letts only got a look-in, in those besotted days, due to a story of rather less substance than the Swanzy enlargement mentioned above. I cannot get it corroborated from any source I’ve consulted, but long ago when I was going about waving a green flag, I had a picture in my head of some innocent cousins on my father’s side, bowling along a country lane in a pony-and-trap, and being shot dead by trigger-happy Black and Tans for whom any native Irish were suitable targets. Unlike the bedraggled Protestant refugees of 1798, whom yeomen took for insurgent-affiliated due to their unkempt appearance, these Wexford cousins weren’t given a chance to proclaim their support for the British connection. If they existed, which I now think is doubtful. But where did the story come from? I can’t have concocted it entirely out of thin air. Of course, there were many such incidents –
From Cork on to Limerick, Clare and Mayo,
Lies a trail of destruction wherever they go -
On the Limerick road, wrote Ernie O’Malley,13 ‘Three lorries of Tans and R.I.C. came up. They were shouting, singing and shooting off their rifles.’ This was normal behaviour. And it is possible, I suppose, that those hypothetical Wexford Letts (or whatever their name was) were victims of this kind of lethal exuberance. Possible, as well, that the Protestant side of the family would wish, in the future, to dissociate itself from any alignment with rebel grievances.
For me, of course, the opposite was true. If – and it’s a large if – the Black-and-Tan incident really happened, I could use it to reinforce my claim to an Irish identity. I could follow John Hewitt’s take on the death of his Protestant great-grandmother in County Armagh, as recounted in his poem ‘The Scar’: she handed a crust of bread to a starving beggar during the Famine and, he says, for this act of charity, ‘accepted in return the famine-fever’. And, he goes on, ‘that chance meeting, that brief confrontation, / Conscribed me of the Irishry for ever’. The point being that the whole nation was subject to the same unifying calamity, with consequent undermining of sectarian differences. Well, that was a natural standpoint for a liberal humanist like Hewitt. But how you regarded the great issues in Ireland, of nationality, religion, allegiance and so on, was still for most people a matter of inheritance as much as instinct.
The Wexford Letts. But now another version of that apocryphal Black-and-Tan shooting has come to my attention, and it turns the whole business on its head. In the first place, it has nothing to do with the Letts. In the second place, the shooters in question were ira Volunteers. ... You will remember my great-grandmother Marie Heller (see Chapter Five) and her employment by the upper-crust Mays of Belfast and Dublin. Marie had died back in 1891, but her children, including my grandfather William Craig, would have gone on taking an interest in the grand family with which their mother’s fortunes were intertwined. A great-niece of the family named Winifred Barrington, a granddaughter of Olivia May’s brother, was a casualty of the War of Independence. She was shot and killed while travelling incautiously in a car beside a Black-and-Tan officer.
The place was Coolboreen in County Limerick (Cul Bothairin, literally: small back road), the date was 14 May 1921, and the merry party, consisting of three young men and two girls, was returning in high spirits from a fishing expedition when the ambush occurred. The car, with a hated Black and Tan in the driver’s seat, was sighted by an ira man who alerted others to its probable route and sent them scurrying to the spot armed with rifles and shotguns. Winifred, wearing a riding outfit and an officer’s cap, and looking game for anything, was seated next to the driver and actual ira target, twenty-six-year-old Inspector Henry Biggs. By all accounts a bit of a tomboy, a vad recruit during the Great War, and liked by everyone in the district – though no one, after her death, was going to say otherwise – pretty, twenty-two-year-old Winifred took a bullet in the chest and died shortly afterwards from shock and haemorrhage. She had tumbled out of the car and fallen into a ditch. Inspector Biggs, shot in the throat, fell out on the other side and lay in the road, dying. Further shots were fired into him before the Volunteers took to their heels. The three in the back of the car escaped more or less unhurt. It was later claimed that Winifred Barrington was mistaken for a man, due to the way she was dressed. When her identity was disclosed, one Volunteer shouted, ‘If the bitch hadn’t been in bad company, she wouldn’t have got shot’ – in other words, slap it into her. But the general feeling in the area, after her death, was one of sadness and dismay at the craziness of the world people inhabited and the tragedies it created. There was jubilation over the execution of Biggs, notorious for brutality and horrors of every kind inflicted on the Irish, but it was tempered by regret for the accompanying death of lovely, lively young Winifred Barrington of Glenstal Castle.
So: a fatal shooting during the Black-and-Tan war, an innocent victim, a distraught family, a Catholic church bell tolling mournfully as the funeral cortège passed by on its way to the Abington Church of Ireland cemetery. ... The event, widely reported, would soon have reached the ears of my grandfather’s family in the North, and struck them forcibly due to their slight personal connection with the Barringtons. At the very least, they’d have been well informed about Winifred’s antecedents. The Coolboreen killing, at least for a time, would have loomed large among their preoccupations.
And as it faded, did a whiff of the surrounding shock and outrage get transmitted to me, a long way into the future, and in a distorted form? More likely I’d have effected the transformation all by myself. I’m reminded of Tom Dunne’s relative pointing to Scullabogue as the site of a Cromwellian massacre of Catholics (see Chapter 3). Whatever horror had taken place, in whatever circumstances, it was down to annihilating enemy tactics, never a product of honourable Irish resistance. Or so we – Irish nationalists – were programmed to think. So I may have manufactured a spurious connection to Irish victimhood on the part of my Protestant family, out of the bare bones of Coolboreen. I don’t know. It is at least a possible explanation for the supposed Black-and-Tan atrocity which no one among my father’s relations will corroborate.
During the War of Independence and then the Civil War, things were different in the North. It’s necessary to bear this in mind. Sean O’Faolain’s ‘tremendously gallant few’, the rebel soldiers of the Limerick, Cork and Tipperary Brigades (among others), enjoyed a resource unavailable to their northern counterparts:
The fight was carried through by those tremendously gallant few, darting here and there for an ambush, folding back into their ‘normal’ lives until they could get another crack at the enemy. They could not, it must always be said, have done anything without the silence, patience and loyal help of the whole people.
But for those operating from Belfast, say, more than half the people had placed themselves at the furthest imaginable remove from the republican ideal. It wasn’t only the British who were the enemy, but the Orange population of the North – and for latter-day adherents of Wolfe Tone’s philosophy it was important, and often impossible, not to be seen as a factionally motivated force. In the eyes of their enemies, Sinn Feiners were Catholic gunmen out to shoot Protestants, not
soldiers of a putative republic defending their communities against loyalist incursions. Despite the example of Protestant nationalists like Bulmer Hobson and others, the old divisions would not go away; and at street level they assumed their most basic and virulent form: Prod versus Taig. When Bertie Tipping, for example, recalled cycling in his Fianna uniform ‘through very unfriendly areas’ of Lurgan, we understand the hazards he and his fellow-republicans faced on their way to and from political gatherings. Name-calling was the very least of it. And it’s axiomatic that the threat to their safety didn’t come from St Peter’s parishioners.
In the city, ‘the noise of shooting, / Starting in the evening at eight, / In Belfast in the York Street district’ (Louis MacNeice’s words) was a regular cause of alarm – and not only in York Street. People with miserable standards of living in acres of streets all over Belfast, each defined by its place of worship, had almost incessant bloodshed, assault and apprehension imposed on top of their everyday aggravations of poverty and exhaustion. The place was in turmoil. The years between 1917 and 1924 were marked by riots, raids and reprisals. Bigotry and discrimination on one side bred anger and disaffection on the other. It is hard to envisage the scale of the violence and vehemence, and consequent destruction, afflicting Belfast’s more volatile quarters – or at least it was hard, during the relatively undisturbed middle years of the century, before the most recent phase of ‘Troubles’ brought it all sweeping back again, in an even more cruel and chaotic way.
A massive battle with paving stones, the death toll rising, St Matthew’s chapel blazing, snipers sniping, this was Belfast in the early 1920s. ‘The violence finally petered out ... eighteen people had died, about three hundred were wounded and there was a serious refugee problem. Most of the deaths had been as a result of shooting by the military. ... Ten of the dead were Catholic and eight were Protestant.’14 All over the city, arms and ammunition are deposited with sympathetic households – in one instance, a Mills hand grenade sits boldly beneath a hat on a sideboard, and is still there at the end of an ric raid, giving a literal application to ‘keeping it under your hat’. There are hair-raising retreats over backyard walls, fake priests escaping with their lives in borrowed clerical garb, bicycles commandeered from passers-by – whether willing or unwilling – to carry handguns away in the aftermath of an ambush. To complicate matters, you find republican fellow-travellers among members of the ric itself: those willing to pass on crucial information and even, on occasion, ammunition.
In Lurgan, the Tipping residence at 76 Edward Street is subjected to frequent raids by unambivalently orientated police and military. In September 1920, for example, just after Jimmy’s removal for internment, the house is raided once again – and once again reluctantly accorded a clean bill of compliance with regulations. Arrangements – Bertie Tipping’s guarded expression – arrangements are always in place to safeguard any wounded Volunteer being treated by Lily, and any arms or documents secreted about the house, once word of an imminent raid is received. It is all very urgent and mysterious. Constant vigilance is necessary. Lower your guard for an instant, and horrors may happen. A neighbour, for instance, standing at the Tippings’ door, and mistaken for one of the family, is shot and seriously wounded by an Orange sniper. Desperate times. The Sisters of Mercy Convent, just across the road from 76, is under threat from loyalists, and a nightly patrol, including one or two Tippings, is formed to guard the premises. They spend the hours of darkness being sniped at from an Orange quarter behind the convent, and never hesitating to return fire. The nuns in their beds have cause to be grateful for the shooting skills of their night watchmen. My mother, seven or eight years old at the time, is a primary school pupil attending the convent during the day. No doubt she gains kudos among her peers from pointing to her relations in the armed guard.
The life of those days, all its upsets and stresses, took its toll on the health of the mother of the Tipping family, Mary Anne Dowds. She died aged sixty in 1926. Five of her six sons,15 and one daughter, were active in the republican movement, upholding all attendant forms of insubordination and exposing themselves to constant danger. From time to time, the sons would quietly interrupt their grocery work to engage in Sinn Féin business. Cutting telegraph wires to disrupt communications, holding up trains, raiding for arms, setting fire to bread vans ... all these form part of the learning process of soldiering for Ireland. Utterly divested of their anti-social aspect in the prevailing conditions, these activities contribute to the message being transmitted to the authorities: republicans mean business. Acts of destruction that would, in normal times, engender outrage in the naturally law-abiding (among whom I would place the Lurgan Tippings – well, most of them), are instead regarded as ethical strikes against a hated system – a system that deforms and derails the lives of ordinary people. The times aren’t normal at all, and the naturally law-abiding are provoked into anarchy by having no democratic laws to abide by.
The Tipping brothers, apart from one, all saw the inside of prisons or internment camps. Matt, the oldest – born in 1890 – went to Scotland after the war. He got employment in the Glasgow shipyards; and while he was there, true to the family tradition, he joined the Glasgow Battalion of the ira and quickly rose to prominence in it. (His future wife Jean Rice was already a member of the Govan Cumann na mBan.) I’ve mentioned above the miniscule overlap between my (peripheral) family history, and Glenn Patterson’s – and I’m about to pinpoint an intriguing instance of a similar kind of convergence. There’s a point at which the Tipping story intersects with that of another writer I esteem enormously – the novelist, essayist and critic Andrew O’Hagan.
Andrew O’Hagan’s great book The Missing is an account of various kinds of disappearance, from his grandfather reported missing in action during the Second World War, to the girls enticed away and killed in Gloucester by Fred and Rosemary West. It’s also a memoir of a Glasgow/new town childhood, and it takes in aspects of an older city and a way of life experienced by O’Hagan’s recent forebears. The early-twentieth-century O’Hagans were Catholic and – with that name – of Irish descent. Some of them gravitated naturally towards Sinn Féin. ‘The history of Sinn Féin in Glasgow,’ he writes, ‘ – that sometimes boiling community of Socialist-Catholics and Ulster Orangemen – has, for the most part, been erased from the city’s account of itself. In the twenties, it was much more than a matter of one or two households and the zealous machinations of the families within. It was a faith – a bitter creed for some – scribbled into the very pavements around St. Mary’s.’ Not too far in spirit from Lurgan or Belfast, then.
In May 1921, O’Hagan says, ‘something happened in the Calton, something involving the chapel of St. Mary’s, and guns, and Sinn Féin, my grandfather and his uncle Francis, a confectioner.’ What happened was an attempt to extricate a couple of high-ranking ira prisoners, one of them a seasoned gaol-breaker, from a black van, heavily escorted, on the way to Duke Street Prison. The driver of the van was a Constable Thomas Rose.16 His colleagues were named Stirton, MacDonald, and Johnston. Suddenly, like something out of a cowboy film, groups of men erupted from alleys and closes, firing revolvers; Inspector Johnston was hit and died on the spot; Stirton received a shot to the wrist and dropped his gun. Pandemonium overtook the streets. The ira men might have brought it off, but failed in the attempt because the van doors jammed, securing the prisoners inside. Everything depended on split-second timing: no scope for snags. They abandoned the operation and scattered in all directions. ‘It was a matter of seconds, that’s all it was, and they’d all disappeared.’
O’Hagan goes on: ‘There was one young man, a witness observed, a stout, dark-haired fellow stuffing a revolver into his pocket as he strode away. He was as pale as a sheet. Very white, this young man, as he made his escape. He got away through Cats’ Close, a thin, uneven passageway which cut through the tenements behind High Street.’ I have it in my head that the person he’s describing here is Matt Tipping, Matt who led the
unit involved in the fracas, and fired the shot which struck Constable Stirton in the wrist, disabling him. Later in the afternoon of 4 May the arrests begin, and Matt is rounded up along with others; so is Andrew O’Hagan’s great-great-uncle Francis. Matt is held in prison for three months but never charged, and on his release – having lost his job – he returns to Lurgan with his wife Jean. They set up a grocery business of their own in Edward Street, and – in 1929 – become the parents of my cousin Harry Tipping.
On 4 September 1921 Michael Collins is in Armagh city addressing a huge rally of his constituents17 and assuring them of his opposition to any expedient leaving northern nationalists in the lurch.18 At the same time, he attempts to play down the fears of unionists by telling them they won’t be coerced. I am not sure how he reconciles the two assertions. As he leaves Armagh, his car is stoned by Orange diehards who clearly don’t believe a word of it. Throughout the day, Collins is protected by a guard of honour, made up from active service units in the district. It includes a couple of Tippings. Perhaps it’s one of these who itches to respond to the Orange provocation by firing shots above the heads of the stone-throwers, and has to be restrained by Collins: I don’t know. The entire Lurgan Company is present for the occasion and entrusted with the roles of bodyguards, escorts, sentries and so forth. They’re in the thick of it. Cumann na mBan is well represented too. Lily Tipping is in the crowd with her box camera, and gets a good shot of Collins as he engages in his customary oratory. (Lily’s photograph eventually finds its way to the National Museum in Dublin, where it still is.)
A Twisted Root Page 26