On This Day – Drivetime – 13.2.1820 – Death of the informer Leonard McNally

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Myles Dungan

There are spies, there are informers, there are traitors, and then there is Leonard McNally. He was one of the most effective and enduring British spies in the ranks of an Irish revolutionary organisation. The unlucky, or careless, rebels were the United Irishmen, the men of 1798.

McNally, a barrister and playwright, was actually a prominent and radical member of the United Irishmen. He was eager for the organisation to accept military assistance from revolutionary France. But when William Jackson, an agent of the French government, was arrested in Ireland in 1794, McNally, rather than wait to be shopped for treason by Jackson, took a more pro-active course and offered his services to the Crown in exchange for not being hanged, drawn and quartered. Given what actually happens to someone who is hanged drawn and quartered he might well be forgiven for this initial capitulation. But the fact that he was still providing intelligence to Dublin Castle a quarter of a century later suggests that it had become more about remuneration than self-preservation.

After the 1798 rebellion McNally defended many United Irishmen charged with involvement in the abortive insurrection. He didn’t win a single case. It could have been because his clients were guilty to begin with, or because he was fiendishly unlucky. But his winless streak was more likely to have been related to the fact that he was passing information on his clients to the prosecution. Not really the done thing for a defence attorney I’m sure you’ll agree.

Among the men he defended were William Jackson, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and, in 1803, Robert Emmet. So, were there an Irish Pantheon he would probably have contributed to the presence of about half the occupants. In the case of Emmet he advised the Crown that his client would enter no defence and allow cross examination of no witnesses on his behalf, as long as they did not misrepresent the facts. So the trial would be a walkover for the prosecution and Dublin Castle didn’t even have to bother fabricating evidence that might come back to haunt them in court.

After 1803 you’d have thought McNally would have quietly and gracefully retired. But a £200 bonus, on top of his hefty pension of £300, ensured that ‘JW’, the code name by which he was known to his spymasters, stayed in business until his death in 1820.

In a doubtlessly fruitless effort to mitigate McNally’s evil reputation it should be pointed out that he was also a successful playwright and librettist. One of his songs, The Lass of Richmond Hill, became a huge hit in its day, 1789, and a favourite of King George III, the one who had occasional bouts of madness. It was written about McNally’s first wife Frances and describes her as ‘a rose without a thorn’.

In one of those wonderful ironies for which a fiction writer would be pilloried were it to appear in a novel, a legal treatise, written by McNally the year before his betrayal of Robert Emmet, was pivotal in the definition of the principle of guilt being ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ before conviction.

His espionage activities did not become apparent until after his death when his son sought to have the payment of his pension continued post mortem. When the Lord Lieutenant inquired as to why a pension had been paid to such an ardent nationalist, the truth began to emerge.

Leonard McNally, barrister, playwright, serial informer and a rose with many thorns, died 195 years ago, on this day.

On This Day – 6.2.1958 Death of Liam Whelan of Manchester United and Ireland in the Munich Air crash

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Myles Dungan

You are probably not familiar with the name William Augustine Whelan. You may not even be familiar with the name by which he was better known, Liam or Billy Whelan. But he was, and still is, the great ‘lost genius’ of Irish football. He hated flying, which is ironic, because he is also one of this country’s most celebrated air crash victims.

Whelan was born on April Fool’s Day 1935 and spent his footballing life making fools of many defenders, amateur and professional alike. Like so many gifted young footballers he played for the great Dublin youth team Home Farm before progressing into the very top of the professional ranks when he was scouted and signed by Manchester United. He was one of the Busby Babes, playing in the position then known as ‘inside forward’ – today he would be an attacking midfielder. His boss was the great Scottish manager Matt Busby who, in the 1950s, was in the process of assembling a young squad and building them into one of the premier European sides.

Whelan might have expected to serve the sort of long rugged apprenticeship customary for young professional footballers in the 1950s. Lots of boot cleaning and maintenance and the distant hope of making it to the top level. But he actually broke into the United first team at the age of 18 where he was joined two years later by another teenager, from Northumberland, one Robert Charlton.

In his four seasons at Manchester United Whelan made 98 first team appearances. He averaged more than a goal every two games, scoring 52 in all competitions for the club. He played four times for the Republic of Ireland but did not score. He was United’s top goal scorer in the 1956/57 season when his team won the old First Division championship. With 26 goals in the League Whelan contributed a quarter of United’s total that season.

In the 1957/58 season, as First Division champions, Manchester United became the first English club to play in the European Cup, a competition, up to that point, dominated by Real Madrid but held in low esteem by the English Football Association. They reached the quarter-finals, where in early February, they beat the Yugoslav champions, Red Star Belgrade, the second leg taking place in Serbia. The flight they took back to England stopped off for re-fuelling in Munich. A direct Belgrade to Manchester flight was beyond the range of the Airspeed Ambassador plane in which the team travelled. While the passengers waited in the Munich terminal building snow began to fall heavily. Two take off attempts were aborted. The passengers were asked to disembark while minor repairs were carried out.

Just before the plane took off for the third time Whelan was overheard by one of the other passengers to remark nervously and fatalistically to one of his teammates “Well, if this is the time, then I’m ready.” Tragically, it was the time. The Airspeed Ambassador hit slush at the end of the runway, slowing the plane down. It did not now have sufficient speed to take off and skidded through a barrier, collided with a house, breaking in two pieces. 23 of the 44 passengers and crew died, including eight of the 17 Manchester United players on board. Whelan was one of the fatalities.

In 2006 he had a railway bridge named after him in Cabra, not far from Dalymount Park, where he had played with the Irish international team. The unveiling was performed by his teammate and one of the fortunate survivors of the Munich Air disaster, Sir Bobby Charlton, another goalscoring inside forward who lived to realize his potential with World and European Cup medals, 106 caps for his country and the prized Ballon d’Or – world player of the year – in 1966. While Whelan would never have won a World Cup winners medal all the rest that Bobby Charlton achieved was available to him.

Liam Whelan was two months shy of his 23^rd birthday when he died, 57 years ago, on this day.

Some American music of the Great War

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Myles Dungan

This is a guide to a small percentage of the music recorded in the USA which was related to the Great War. It is confined to material discussed by historians Glen Gendzel (San Jose State University) and John Borgonovo (University College, Cork) for a segment which did not make it into the final edit of a two part series I have compiled and presented for Lyric FM called ‘From Tipperary to Salonika: Ireland the the music of the Great War’. The programmes will be transmitted by Lyric in the Lyric Feature slot at 7.00 pm on Friday 13 February and Friday 20 February. You will be able to ‘listen back’ to the two broadcast programmes on the Lyric FM website [http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/] and you will also be able to listen to Glen and John talk about songs like I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier, Over there, Stay down here where you belong and many more.

Songs written in opposition to WW1 recruitment were, of their nature (because they were illegal under the Defence of the Realm Act) never published or widely performed in public.

One notable exception to the lack of published anti-recruiting material was, of course, the USA where, before its entry to the war in 1917, there was strong anti-war sentiment, particularly amongst Irish and German Americans.

There was also a vibrant if patchwork ‘left’ which was opposed to the imperial nature of the conflict. The latter strain was reflected in the tunes recorded in The Little Red Songbook, first produced in Spokane, Washington in 1909 by the Industrial Workers of the World, or the ‘Wobblies’. The famous Swedish-American labour activist Joe Hill contributed a number of songs, including an anti-war song Don’t take my papa away from me.

Typical of the genre was the song Christians at war by John F.Kendrick published in the March 1916 ‘Joe Hill Memorial’ edition of the Little Red Songbook [Hill had been dubiously convicted of murder in 1915]. It doesn’t pull too many punches

Christians at war

Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty’s way is plain;

Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain,

Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,

God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,

All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;

If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.

A rather gentler example of the genre was I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier with lyrics by Alfred Bryan and music by Al Piantadosi, published around the same time. This one centres around the figure of the [potentially] grieving mother.

It begins …

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone

Who may never return again,

Ten million mothers’ hearts must break

For the ones who died in vain.

Head bowed down in sorrow

In her lonely years

I hears a mother murmer thro’ her tears.

Then the chorus comes in …

I didn’t raise my boy to be soldier

I brought him up to be my pride and joy

Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder

To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?

Let nations arbitrate their future troubles

It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,

There’d be no war today

If mothers all would say:

“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.”

The response of Theodore Roosevelt to the song was to suggest that the place for women who opposed war was “in China—or by preference in a harem—and not in the United States.”

After the US declaration of war in April 1917 the music industry – always quick to change direction and monetise – rapidly brought out songs like I didn’t raise my boy to be a coward and I didn’t raise my boy to be a slacker

According to the publisher I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier sold 700,000 copies in the first eight weeks of release. The first recording, by Morton Harvey, was coupled with an Irving Berlin song Stay Down Here where you belong which was recorded in an isolationist America in 1915 by Henry Burr

Stay down here where you belong

The lyrics depict a conversation between the devil and his son – the devil urges the son to “stay down here where you belong” because people on Earth do not know right from wrong. His son wants to go ‘up above, up above’.

The Devil advises …

[Refrain:] Stay down here where you belong

The folks who live above you don’t know right from wrong

To please their kings they’ve all gone out to war

And not a one of them knows what he’s fighting for

‘Way up above they say that I’m a Devil and I’m bad

Kings up there are bigger devils than your dad

When the USA entered the war in April 1917 the song became acutely embarrassing for Berlin

– to Berlin’s constant irritation Groucho Marx refused to let Stay down where you belong go away and sang it regularly – according to Groucho, Berlin offered him $100 to stop singing the song – but he was still doing it in the 1970s and it was included on one of his final concert albums An Evening with Groucho[1] – there’s also a You Tube clip of him singing it on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 – with, they both claimed, Irving Berlin watching on TV. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WTkzBRbtZA&feature=kp]

In fairness Groucho was singing it in the 1970s in response to Vietnam not WW1 and said as much on the Cavett show – [where he confirmed the $100 dollar story]

Berlin atoned for Stay down here where you belong in 1918 with God bless America [originally written for military musical Yip Yip Yaphank – Yaphank was in Long Island, site of Camp Upton – a product of Berlin’s conscription into the US Army ‘Army takes Berlin’ was one waggish newspaper headline]–

One of the songs in Yip Yip Yaphank possibly testifies to the greater acceptance of slightly more subversive material in the USA than GB – the show included the song How I hate to get up in the morning.

This included the lyric …

Someday I’m going to murder the bugler

Someday they’re going to find him dead

I’ll amputate his reveille

And step upon it heavily

And spend the rest of my life in bed

Don’t blame the Germans

The thriving US anti-war song genre included Daddy please don’t let them shoot you, Don’t take my darling boy away and If they want to fight, all right, but neutral is my middle name.

Perhaps the most interesting of all was Don’t blame the Germans written in 1915 by John J.Donahue – a song written by an Irish-American and obviously aimed at his own community and that of ethnic Germans in the USA. The song begins by appealing to the American sense of fair play with a major statistical porkie …

Don’t blame the Germans for it isn’t right

Remember they are one to five in this gigantic fight

With the Allies all against them, yet they hold their own

It’s hard to beat the Germans on the land or on the foam

It continues by appealing to Irish prejudices and to a revisionist trope that had emerged from Germany itself by 1915, the notion of ‘perfidious Albion’ really being at the heart of the conflict – that England was to blame for the war.

French and Belgians, misled by England’s greed

Must very soon surrender for they know they can’t succeed

It’s a pretty startling form of revisionism which even some German Americans probably realized was an obvious example of special pleading

Needless to say all these songs disappeared in April 1917 – other than Stay down here where you belong but that was thanks to Groucho Marx

[1] Life with Groucho, Arthur Marx, Popular Library Edition, 1960 p. 167

On This Day – Drivetime – 30 January 1846 – Birth of Katharine O’Shea (Parnell)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Myles Dungan

To this day she is known as Kitty, though her friends, family and London society in the late 19^th century knew her as Katharine, or Kate. Although the name is innocuous today during the Victorian era it was meant to sting – in those times ‘kitty’ was a euphemism for a prostitute.

She is at the heart of one of the great ‘what ifs’ of Irish history, as in ‘what if Katharine O’Shea and Charles Stewart Parnell had never met?’

But they did. She was the wife, probably estranged, of one of the great Irish chancers of Victorian London, Captain William Henry O’Shea, once a dashing Hussar but more familiar today as a talentless political opportunist. Had O’Shea not been a failed banker he might well have found other ways in which to discommode his native country. As it was it was his failure as a politician that was to have more serious ramifications than his inadequacies as a financier.

In 1880 O’Shea was a rookie Irish MP, Parnell was the new leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. O’Shea had an attractive wife and he obliged her to make herself useful in the advancement of his political ambitions. She was instructed to invite Parnell to a number of political soirees she organized on her husband’s behalf, or, more likely to keep the dodgy O’Shea at a disrtance. He pronounced his name O’Shee by the way, presumably to distinguish him from his common or garden countrymen of the same name. Parnell, however, was not one for the banality of opening invitations, or indeed letters in general, so to press her invitations she went in person. That, according to her own account, was when they fell in love. Parnell didn’t leave any account. He was as good at writing letters as he was at opening them.

The relationship blossomed rapidly and soon, they were, in effect, man and wife. She became his ‘Queenie’, he became her ‘King’. O’Shea rarely darkened the door of his wife’s boudoir but found out about their trysts rather quickly. He challenged Parnell to a duel but when, to his surprise, the Irish party leader accepted the challenge, the former Hussar backed down. He contented himself thereafter with squeezing every drop of political nectar he could from his wife’s lover and partner.

He looked away as the couple had three children together. His incentive, in addition to political advancement, was a hefty share in a large sum of money his estranged wife stood to inherit from an aged aunt. When the elderly lady finally passed on, and he was neatly cut out of the inheritance, he stopped looking away. He sued for divorce, no doubt full of the festive spirit, on Christmas Eve 1889.

The resulting court proceedings destroyed Parnell’s career. In the middle of a year of huge controversy in 1891 he only made things worse for himself politically when he married Katharine after the divorce was finalized. Humiliated by a series of futile and debilitating by-election campaigns an exhausted Parnell died in their house in Brighton in October, a month the highly superstitious Parnell always considered ill-starred.

Katharine Parnell, as she now was, then did a great service to a country she had never visited and much of whose population considered her to be a scarlet woman or an English spy who had destroyed their leader. In an act of generosity she waived her right to have Parnell buried in a south of England graveyard where she could join him when her own life ended. Instead she allowed him to be returned to Ireland and interred in Glasnevin cemetery in perhaps the biggest funeral the country had ever seen.

Katharine O’Shea, or Katharine Parnell as she chose to be called, was born five months before her second husband, Charles Stewart Parnell, 169 years ago, on this day.

On This Day – Drivetime – Michael Collins takes possession of Dublin Castle 16 January 1922

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Myles Dungan

Even though Michael Collins concluded, accurately, in December 1921, that, in agreeing to the terms of the Anglo Irish treaty, he had signed his own death warrant, without having appended his signature to the document on 6 December 1921 he would not have been able to participate in an event six weeks later that must have given him a great deal of satisfaction.

Once the Treaty was signed and ratified by Dail Eireann on 7 January, bar a port or two, the loan of some artillery to start the Civil War, and of course six counties, the British didn’t really hang about. The new rulers of Ireland were advised to be ready to take over Dublin Castle in mid January.

There could be no clearer indication of the actual intention of the British to leave the 26 county Irish Free State than the handing over of this sprawling monument to British rule in Ireland. For centuries Ireland had been governed from … ‘The Castle’. Members of the majority religion who co-operated with the British administration to their financial benefit were … ‘Castle Catholics’. Everything British that moved and had its being in Ireland emanated from … the Castle.

Built at the behest of King John in the 13^th century to provide a base for the English conquest of the country from Dublin it had remained the nexus of English and then British rule and the abiding symbol of the colonization of Ireland.

It was from the Bermingham Tower in the Castle that the legendary escape of Red Hugh O’Donnell and Art O’Neill took place in the depths of the winter of January 1592. Art O’Neill perished in the Dublin Mountains but O’Donnell managed to make his way to the sanctuary of the O’Byrnes in Glenmalure, Co.Wicklow. Just over two hundred years later, in 1907, the Insignia of the Order of St.Patrick, known as the Irish Crown Jewels, were stolen from the Bedford Tower in an audacious robbery that has never been solved. Half of Dublin at the time knew who had stolen them. The problem was they nominated the other half of the city as the thieves.

The Castle might well have fallen during the upheavals of 1641, but it did not succumb to rebel control. Robert Emmett could conceivably have taken it in 1803 but dismally failed to do so. It was even more vulnerable in 1916 but the Volunteers failed to walk the ball into an open goal.

So Michael Collins, dressed impressively in his military uniform, must have savoured the moment when his staff car drove into the precincts of the complex of buildings whose fabric he had successfully managed to infiltrate during the Anglo-Irish war while, himself, managing to stay out of the clutches of its more sinister and homicidal operatives.

When Collins stepped out of his staff car he was greeted waspishly by the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Fitzalan. ‘You are seven minutes late, Mr.Collins’, observed His Majesty’s last Viceroy in Ireland. The Irish leader is said to have responded acidly, ‘We’ve been waiting over seven hundred years, you can have the seven minutes.’

Fitzalan, the first Catholic Lord Lieutenant since the reign of King James II then took Collins on an impromptu and largely irrelevant tour of the facility pointing out which keys opened which doors, before absenting himself and leaving Collins, literally, holding the fort.

Michael Collins took possession of Dublin Castle on behalf of the Irish provisional government 93 years ago, on this day.