A Tipping not in the middle of the Armagh rally is Jimmy, whose sojourn at Ballykinler camp has another three months to run. It is making him a veteran of rough treatment. A book on internment in Northern Ireland, by the author and civil rights activist John McGuffin, was published in 1973. McGuffin spent a lot of time in Lurgan talking to Jimmy about things the ex-internee recalled from the fraught 1920s, his time in that grim enclosure of barbed-wire fences and manned sentry boxes, of poor food and constant aggravation. And republican camaraderie of course, with parades, exercise and education classes geared to reinforce ideological commitment – all organised by the prisoners themselves. For all the details he supplied, though, Jimmy isn’t named in McGuffin’s book; no doubt he chose to remain anonymous, at a time when ancient conflicts were undergoing a horrific replay. Jimmy’s lawless past, had it been raked up in public, might have endangered the quiet days of his seventies, adding to the agony of seeing the whole bloody business start up again. Jimmy had done his bit for Ireland and possessed three medals awarded by the government of the Republic to prove it: Na Fianna Éireann Jubilee medal, Truce Commemorative medal, and Irish War of Independence service medal with bar.19 (Two of his brothers, Matt and Gerry,20 were similarly honoured, and granted small military service pensions following De Valera’s Irish Constitution of 1937.)
In the enterprise of keeping down the Tippings and their ilk, the British government is succeeded in 1921 by the new Unionist administration which quickly passes a Special Powers Act enabling it to carry on interning.
In the early hours of 26 January 1923 comes a loud persistent hammering on the door of 76 Edward Street. It’s the ruc on the trail of the Tippings. The whole street is roused by the disturbance. Sleepy faces appear at upstairs windows; some neighbours give a weary shrug and go back to bed, while others stand at their front doors in a hostile mode taking note of aggressive goings-on. Special constables stomp through the Tipping house while the rudely awakened family emits defiance in the front kitchen. Present in their night clothes – or wearing hastily donned shirts and trousers – are all six of the brothers, along with their parents Henry and Mary Anne, and their sister May. It’s not, indeed, the first time the house has been raided – successfully or unsuccessfully – but on this occasion, they all maintain at the time and later, there is nothing untoward in any corner of the premises.
The ruc has a different story. Policemen pounce on a round of .455 revolver ammunition stowed in a pocket of Henry’s overcoat hanging in the hall. Henry, open-mouthed, has no idea how it got there. Nor has anyone else. Some seditious papers are then spotted poking out from behind a row of books in the front room. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ Everyone denies all knowledge of these items, provoking derision in the searchers. Mission accomplished, the police snap a pair of handcuffs on the wrists of brothers Frank and Gerry, and bundle them into a waiting Crossley Tender. ‘Dear God,’ murmurs distressed Mary Anne once again, falling back on a Lurgan mantra, ‘Dear God this holy day and hour.’
Arms and ammunition were distributed among sympathetic households in the town, including my grandmother’s. She kept a supply of weapons in a sideboard in the kitchen, and breathed a sigh of relief each time a detachment of police officers passed her front door by. It didn’t always happen that way. Once, alerted by some sixth sense to an impending incursion, she mustered sufficient presence of mind to dump the things into a shoe bag and hang it from a nail outside a back window, saving the stash for future use and herself from a load of trouble.
The family at 76 had considerable experience in keeping their own arms supplies from falling into the wrong hands, so it seems odd they’d have been so careless at the time of the January raid. Of course, they insisted the items were planted by the raiding party, but whether or not this was so is impossible to tell. You can take your choice about whom to believe: the police seeking a pretext to detain the Tippings, or the Tippings wishful to cast the ruc in the worst possible light.
The police under Lurgan District Inspector P.J. Ferriss achieve their purpose, whether legitimately or fraudulently, with regard to at least two members of ‘this very undesirable family’.21 Frank and Gerry are on their way to the cheerfully named Larne Workhouse Internment Camp. Gerry, never the most robust of the brothers, falls ill with rheumatic fever in this terrible place, and is moved to a hospital attached to the Crumlin Road gaol in Belfast. After a month or so of hospital treatment, he’s released unconditionally on medical grounds, but worries that people may think he signed some kind of undertaking renouncing his republican beliefs. ‘I suppose there will be terrible rumours about how I got out,’ goes a rueful letter to Frank at Larne Workhouse, ‘but my answer to them all is: our cause is just and holy; yield not to coercion; our day shall come;22 and God is with us. Take out of these lines what you like and they are the terms I brought to freedom with me.’ No tergiversators among the Tippings.
In July of that year, Frank is transferred to the prison ship Argenta, where his brother Jimmy is already ensconced in one of the eight metal cages which form accommodation on the boat. The Argenta, moored near Carrickfergus, makes the workhouse seem desirable. Potato skins are mentioned in several accounts as a main part of the diet there. Meals, such as they are, are eaten by inmates sitting on the floor. Tables and chairs are banned, lest they should get smashed up for makeshift weapons. Whatever nightly escape routes the prisoners envisage evaporate with the coming of day. As in Ciaran Carson’s poem, ‘The Ballad of hms Belfast’, which ends:
And then the smell of docks and ropeworks. Horse-dung.
The tolling of the Albert Clock.
Its Pisan slant. The whirring of its ratchets. Then everything
began to click:
I lay bound in iron chains, alone, my aisling gone,
my sentence passed.
Grey Belfast dawn illuminated me, on board the prison
ship Belfast.
How did Jimmy Tipping arrive on the prison ship Argenta? An incident of 23 May 1923 provides the answer. On that Sunday morning flames are spotted rising from a building near Derrytagh South Bog not far from Lurgan. Also spotted at the same time are seven or eight young men cycling for dear life away from the scene of the outrage. The unoccupied building set alight, supposedly earmarked for a new police barracks, is the property of a family named Turkington. Towards it, under cover of darkness, had come the same young men on bicycles laden with petrol cans, guns and homemade explosives. Despite this dangerous equipment rattling along the rough road, no one gets hurt, or at least hurt very much. According to a report in the Lurgan Mail, Mrs Turkington and her son, who live nearby, are held at gunpoint while the burning operation goes ahead. It can’t have been pleasant for them, but their new building doesn’t suffer irreparable damage and they don’t die of fright. Asked to attend an identity parade some time later, the Turkingtons fail to recognise anyone in it – although, says J.P. Ferriss apropos Jimmy Tipping, ‘I am satisfied the Turkingtons knew him if they wished to say so.’
They don’t wish to say so, but it makes no difference as far as Jimmy’s presumed guilt is concerned. Picked up in yet another night raid on 76 Edward Street, along with his young brother Bertie, Jimmy is taken away in police custody en route to the Argenta. ‘He is undoubtedly a leader, and a dangerous one, and should be interned,’ the grim Mr Ferriss states unequivocally in his report to the Minister of Home Affairs, Sir Richard Dawson Bates. At the same time, sixteen-year-old Bertie Tipping finds himself summarily installed in Derry gaol. ‘He [Bertie] seems to be about the worst of the lot,’ goes another withering note to Dawson Bates, who perhaps by this stage has had his fill of the family. But he hasn’t heard the last of them.
The Argenta internees latch on to anything and everything to keep their spirits up. As Jimmy writes to his brother Gerry (still in hospital in Belfast):
Frank is transferred here and is my bedmate on this old boat. All the boys are delighted to hear of you getting on so well. Frank and I are doing
our best to get Bertie here and expect to succeed. I can see you at your breakfast ‘Moyah’, it must be great. Tell the Miss Tennysons they have my best regards. – With best love from your brother Jim.
But despite their efforts Bertie stays where he is, and an alternative plan on the part of the authorities, to dispatch Frank and Jimmy to Derry – ‘[They are] both dangerous men – they would be safer in an ordinary prison’ – is vetoed because ‘it would make a large collection of this very undesirable family’ in the one spot. Concern for Bertie’s well-being continues – even his father Henry writes a letter pleading for clemency on account of the boy’s age, and his usefulness as an assistant in the grocer’s shop – but nothing comes of it. The next thing is a postcard from Jimmy addressed to his sister May in Lurgan, which sparks a slight panic among the prison authorities, sending a flurry of communications flying back and forth at every level. After thanking May for a parcel she’d sent – most of whose contents had reached him, he says, bar an item or two confiscated by the censor – and requesting his usual 200 cigarettes and a string of rosary beads, Jimmy wonders if anything has been heard from Bertie. Then comes the sentence causing alarm and affront. ‘The Governor of Derry Gaol should be notified,’ writes Jimmy, ‘to the effect that, should Bertie be ill-treated in any way, he will not be forgotten.’
Jimmy’s postcard is read with horror by the warden on the Argenta, who promptly dispatches it to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Did Jimmy really write it with his own hand (‘It would be well to obtain a specimen of this internee’s handwriting’, goes a solemn suggestion), and is the implication really as sinister as it seems? Letters go forth to the Derry governor warning him to be extra vigilant, to the inspector general of the ruc, to the county inspector, Armagh, to the sceptical DI Ferriss in Lurgan – who at last gets the thing in some kind of proportion. ‘I have no reason to fear that any of the Tipping family at present at large would molest the Governor of Derry Prison,’ he assures his superiors shaking in their shoes. ‘No doubt the Tippings are a bad lot, but in my opinion the reference ... to the Gaol Governor is a bit of bluff.’ His opinion is listened to. The postcard finally reaches its addressee. No action is taken against Jimmy on account of it. But all three of the Tipping brothers are kept in custody until December 1924, and then only let go when a general release of internees is decreed.
Things are changing in the world of Irish affairs, or at least the emphasis is shifting. With De Valera’s about-turn in the South, and the ‘Protestant State’ consolidated in the North, the nationalist population of towns like Lurgan continued to seethe, indeed, but seethed more quietly. Fewer eruptions of fighting occurred in the small rough streets. Worn out, perhaps, with all the rioting and destruction of the early 1920s, rival factions snarled and grimaced, but kept their distance from one another, on the whole. Threats to ‘burn out’ this or that sectarian quarter mostly came to nothing.
At the same time, the causes of disaffection were, if anything, on the increase. It was hard for northern Catholics and nationalists to be happy with their lot. They were constantly told they were rogues, dupes and outsiders. Forms of social, religious and indigenous inferiority were pasted over them. Nevertheless – harking back to the seventeenth century – they believed the country was rightfully theirs.23 They subscribed to a highly charged version of history. It was, of course, a story of wrongs inflicted and – in the teeth of persecution – patriotic values upheld. The republican Tippings (and others) saw a certain kind of moral obligation staring them in the face, and acted upon it. Not to have done so would have branded them as spineless and spiritless. If their actions brought down an old house on their heads in the form of internment and other tests of endurance – well, so be it, they would grit their teeth and endure the lot. There were side benefits, of course: exhilaration, a terrific sense of purpose gingering up the prosaic side of life, being in the thick of things as they slipped away from weighing tea or totting up bills to subvert the state.
Perhaps the instinct to engage in undercover activity was imprinted in their genes. Before they were Protestant, some of the English Tippings were Catholic and imprisoned in the Tower on account of it,24 ‘comitted,’ a contemporary report goes, ‘uppon Suspition of treason’. Plots and counter-plots fizzed about their heads in the pungent Elizabethan underworld of conspiracy and duplicity. A James Tipping crops up in the 1580s taking a minor part in the Babington affair, and in another, stillborn endeavour to shoot a poisoned arrow into Queen Elizabeth as she walked in the garden. The removal of Elizabeth was essential to the plans of English recusants. James Tipping and his brother John, three centuries and more before their Lurgan namesakes, believed in the possibility of a different kind of social hierarchy, the overthrow of Protestantism and restoration of the Catholic nation, and risked their lives in the effort to achieve it. They held a genuine belief in the justice of the Catholic cause, unlike the many government agents who infiltrated the cabals to the detriment of the plotters. Torture and imprisonment loomed, a consequence of double dealings on the part of informers. The Tower, the Argenta ... here comes a cliché but I can’t resist it: autre temps, autre moeurs.
John Tipping ... hmn. What if – and here comes an enormous speculation – what if the husband of long-ago Katherine Rose was not a Stratford man at all, but an ex-conspirator on the run from London to Warwickshire? All right, he’d have had to be nineteen or twenty years older than his bride, but that’s not an impossible circumstance. (Or perhaps he had a son, another John.) And yes, I know it’s ridiculous to conflate the Babington conspirator and the cutler, on no firmer evidence than the coincidence of their names, but I offer this bit of nonsense for what it is worth.
In twentieth-century Lurgan, time is passing. The leaves of the trees in Lurgan Park turn golden-brown and russet, and then the trees are bare. The lake freezes over, and children slide and slither with enjoyment along North Street. Spring: cherry blossom, daffodils, balloons and hop-scotch. In summer comes the smell of new-mown grass, hay wains and endless sunny days, and a cool breeze blowing from Lough Neagh. ... All of the Edward Street brothers marry and raise families, and over the years enjoy considerable prestige in the locality on account of their darkly glamorous, freedom-fighting past. Republicanism didn’t go away, and never would go away, but old-style republicanism was on the wane – though it had a burst or two of reinvigoration before the end of the 1950s (when I was affected by it).
In Lurgan, for example, partisan passions were reignited in the run-up to the general election of 1935. Electioneering meetings, the Lurgan Mail reported in its strange decorous prose, ‘were full of interest’. So they were. One (unionist) in Market Street, was addressed by the Conservative and Unionist candidate Sir William Allan to the usual cheers and boos. Another (republican) drew an equally large and voluble crowd to Edward Street, where the speakers included ‘Madame Gonne MacBride’ in her old-fashioned attire. After the meeting, on Tuesday 12 November, Maud Gonne is hastily spirited away to Bertie Tipping’s house in Lake Street, where she’s arranged to spend the night.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, something occurs. Police and B Specials surround the house. By crossing the border, Maud Gonne has contravened an exclusion order made against her some time ago (I’m still quoting the Lurgan Mail). Roused up by the furore, Bertie and his wife attempt to instil a sense of urgency into their distinguished (and blasé) visitor, but the doughty veteran of many republican campaigns simply snaps her fingers at the ruc and all its works, turns over in her bed and goes back to sleep. It’s some time before the recently wed Tippings can get her out of the bed and into her clothes. Her stately descent to the hallway is no doubt a cause of relief to the somewhat nonplussed constabulary, who haven’t the knack of dealing with female firebrands and muses. Politely conducted to a car and driven to Newry under police escort, Maud Gonne – not yet exactly old and grey and full of sleep, despite her early rising (and although she’s not far short of seventy) – is then safely deposited
on the proper side of the border. (On her journey north, Maud Gonne had cannily bought only a one-way ticket, knowing she could rely on the ruc to see her safely home.)
On polling day (Thursday 14 November), says the Lurgan Mail, ‘there were large numbers of voters waiting to record their votes, including a large contingent of people who had been at early morning Mass in St Peter’s Church’. Ho-hum. At the town hall, the report goes on, somewhat cryptically, ‘it was alleged that a young man, a supporter of the unionist cause, interfered with some girls and excitement ensued’. In the ensuing excitement, ‘the police found it necessary to draw batons and chase a crowd of about a thousand up High Street’. Here you have an instance of bitter Lurgan recidivism. It’s no good expecting elections to be conducted sedately. The unionist candidate will win the day, of course, but Sinn Féin means to give him a run for his money. Think Belfast in the docks area in 1857, the Brickfields in 1864, the streets filled with noise and fear. Heads struck with bottles and batons, seasoned rioters dispersing and disappearing, weary policemen slumped over their riot shields at the end of the night ... all these features of endemic instability make an Ulster picture to dishearten ameliorists. ‘From every entry and from every lane, / The brickbats and stones in showers they came.’25
A Twisted Root Page 27