The Year of Disappearances

Political Killings in Cork 1921-1922

Gerard Murphy

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780717147489
• eBook ISBN: 9780717151653
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

'Every spy who was shot in Cork was buried so that nothing was known about them. They just disappeared.' These are the words of an IRA commander recalling the War of Independence in Cork city.

The Year of Disappearances examines this claim and others like it.

It uncovers a web of suspicion and paranoia that led to scores of men and boys being abducted from their homes before being executed as 'enemies of the Republic' and their bodies buried.

While some of this took place during the War of Independence, most of it happened the following year, during the so-called 'Cork Republic'. The net result was to change the demographic of the south-eastern corner of the city for ever, with hundreds of families fleeing and up to fifty individuals buried in unmarked graves in surrounding areas.

Using a wide range of previously untapped sources, Murphy shines new light on one of the darker episodes of twentieth-century Irish history.

PART I

Chapter 1

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GEORGE TILSON

On 19 February 1921, as the mail train from Fishguard pulled into Paddington, a man called Fred Jones, an electrician employed by the Great Western Railway Company, was surprised to find one of the toilet doors locked. He heard groans coming from inside and then he heard a thud as if someone had fallen. When the door was finally forced open, he found a dying man slumped against the toilet. There was blood all over the floor. The man’s throat had been cut. He was still alive, though unable to speak. He pointed towards his coat pocket, indicating to Jones to take out what was inside. In the pocket Fred Jones found a note that read: ‘I have been shadowed all the way from Cork, but they shall not get me.’ The man was taken to St Mary’s Hospital where he died without making a statement.¹

The man’s name was George Frederick Tilson, a 36-year-old pawnbroker from Cork and, though there was a suggestion that he had been murdered, the inquest into his death found that he had slit his own throat and the reason was stated in the envelope in his pocket: ‘not to be done in by them’. For ‘them’, the men who he believed had followed him from Cork, were members of the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA, though there is no evidence that they had actually done so.

Tilson had received a threatening letter a few days earlier warning him that his life was in danger and he was ‘going to be next’. The letter was written in capitals in pencil and was unsigned. As a result he decided to leave immediately to stay with friends in the south of England. As his brother saw him off from the Cork docks on the Friday evening, he gave ‘the impression that he was being pursued’ and was terrified of what he called ‘the overshadowing danger’.

Such was his terror of the men who were then in the process of waging war to wrest political control of Ireland from Britain that he would rather take his own life than fall into their hands, even though at that point he was probably safe from whatever punishment he believed the IRA might have had in store for him. A police sergeant who arrived on the scene asked Tilson if he had done the deed himself. Tilson nodded. When the policeman suggested that he had been very foolish, Tilson ‘shook his head in a negative manner’. He also shook his head to indicate that he was not a member of the RIC. It is assumed by many people acquainted with the case that Tilson had been a British agent and that he was on the run from IRA retribution. Yet he denied that too. His own brother Richard Tilson, a former Cork Nationalist politician and JP,² cross-examined Jones at the coroner’s inquest a week later. He said his brother was a man of private means and had taken no part in local politics.

‘You are certain he did not make a statement to the effect that he was a secret service agent?’

‘Perfectly certain.’

The second witness, a time-keeper in the railway, also said in reply to the coroner that the dying man did not say anything to him about being in the secret service. The coroner concluded that he was quite sure the dead man had no connection with police work of any kind, ‘nor apparently had he any connection with political matters’. The jury returned a verdict of ‘suicide, whilst temporarily insane, as the result of receiving the letter’. Curiously, the Cork Examiner account of the inquest also carried a retraction, headed:

UNFOUNDED STATEMENT

In our issue of Monday, a paragraph was quoted from the London Star which read the deceased had said he was a secret service agent. If such a statement had been made by the unfortunate gentleman, it would of course be regarded as a delusion, but it is evident from the above report that in point of fact he made no such statement.³

Writing years later, several IRA survivors of the conflict claimed that Tilson was a member of a group calling itself the Anti-Sinn Féin League, a shadowy civilian counter-revolutionary organisation consisting of a cabal of loyalist businessmen in Cork city who, the IRA men claimed, were dedicated to retaining the British link and were employed by the British military establishment to gather information on IRA personnel and operations. The notion that such an organisation existed runs through the accounts of many Cork IRA men. Tilson, so the theory goes, was one of six members of this organisation to die, though the only one to die by his own hand; the others were either executed or assassinated by the IRA. As a result of the assassination campaign, in this version of events, the ‘League’ was frightened into silence and the IRA had won a major victory against one of its most serious enemies. Tilson was supposedly the last of this group to be targeted.

While this all appears perfectly plausible, it is not quite the full story. For a start, Tilson’s brother was a Home Rule politician, not a Unionist, and was all his life a very popular figure in Cork. George Tilson died by his own hand largely because he was mentally unstable. There was no question that he was terrified and that he had received a threatening letter; he may even have been some sort of ‘spy’. But he was not a member of a loyalist cabal of counter-revolutionaries dedicated to reversing the Irish revolution, for the simple reason that there is no firm evidence that such a cabal actually existed.⁴ Yet the accounts left by up to a dozen members of the Old IRA subsequently claim that such an organisation did exist. One of the aims of this book is to look at this thorny question and to show where the notion of a so-called loyalist ‘spy circle’ came from. This is of more than academic interest because it led to dozens of deaths as members of this society were pursued across the county of Cork and in many cases shot dead in cold blood with little more than suspicion acting as ‘evidence’. It is a story of some complexity and takes in what has since been called the intelligence war or the ‘dirty war’ fought between the IRA and a variety of British forces in Cork city and surrounding areas. It can justifiably be called one of the murkiest aspects of Irish history. It has largely been neglected until recently and it is a topic that many people in Cork do not want to talk about almost a hundred years later.

Chapter 2

THE STORY OF SING SING

If you travel the main Cork-Dublin road heading north out of Cork city and you look to your right as you approach the village of Watergrasshill, you will see a broad stretch of upland consisting mostly of pine forest and unreclaimed moorland. This area, lying between the parishes of Knockraha and Watergrasshill of around five or six square miles and around 700 ft above sea level, is known locally as the Rea. It looks like any other hillside, isolated, lonely, a piece of high marginal land with small farms and low bungalows cosying up to its rather bleak forest-covered brow. Once a broad upland bog or moorland, the land is now a forest managed by Coillte and is covered with dense Nordic pine.

But this is no ordinary hill and if you go for a Sunday walk along the many forest pathways signposted on the roadside lay-bys on the road between Watergrasshill and Leamlara, nobody will tell you that this otherwise benign piece of public walkway was once the scene where death was meted out on an almost nightly basis. For the Rea, less than ten miles from Cork city and therefore the nearest piece of isolated land to the city, was the killing field where the Cork IRA No. 1 Brigade carried out most of its executions during the Irish War of Independence and the period immediately afterwards. This is the burial ground for at least 20 and perhaps as many as 30 victims of that conflict. Yet virtually nobody under the age of 50 living in the locality knows anything about this now. To them it is just a hill, a place to take the dog for a walk and, for a brief period in the late 1990s, a focus of protest groups as locals tried to block plans by Cork County Council to site a municipal dump there. What very few people realise now is that in the 1920s this was a dumping ground of an entirely different kind.

This was not because it was a secret. Many of the older people knew about it, including my father, though he rarely mentioned these events. It was just that for two generations most people were reluctant to talk about it. And then because it was never mentioned, it just got forgotten about. It is not the only such secret burial ground in County Cork: many bogs throughout the county contain victims of the period, but this is one of the most important, at least in the vicinity of the city.

My father’s generation—he was born in 1924—was half-afraid of the generation that came before them, the sometimes brave and sometimes savage men who had fought against the British Empire to secure political autonomy for the southern two-thirds of Ireland. The older men, the revolutionary generation, cast a long shadow over political life and discourse that was still palpable well into the 1960s. Their word was law, not only in the normally accepted sense of that term but also in the political and judicial sense. For politics, both national and local, was still dominated by the denizens of what has come to be called ‘the struggle for freedom’. When John F. Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963 and addressed the Dáil, what is striking about the television footage of his speech is the youthfulness and energy of the US president compared to the Muppet-like doze of his ageing audience. Many members of both sides of the Dáil and the Seanad were at that time in their sixties or early seventies. My generation was born, though we did not see it like that at the time, into a gerontocracy. And this was a gerontocracy that liked to guard its secrets. For, though many people knew about them and had heard the rumours, the killings in the Rea and elsewhere were carried out quietly. Only a small number of people knew of them even as they were going on in the 1920s.

It was in the summer of 1994 that I stumbled on the story of the Rea and how it operated. Very quickly I realised that this was one of the grimmest and most neglected untold stories of the period. It was obvious that if what I had been told could be substantiated, it would be a significant unwritten episode of the national struggle. If it were true, and I was initially extremely sceptical that it was, then something bigger was going on here than mere local history.

Yet it was a local historian called Eugene Turpin who told me about it. Eugene, a highly intelligent and engaging man with an interest in everything from the history of machinery to the history of the GAA, the IRA and the Blueshirts, told me this extraordinary tale. But I was quickly able to corroborate from other local sources most of what he told me.

‘I presume you’ve heard about Sing Sing,’ he said to me one evening in his kitchen in the spectacularly dull and damp summer of 1994, taking a manuscript about the size of a small masters thesis down off the shelf.

‘Sing Sing?’

I had never heard of it, outside of the American prison of that name. The essence of what Eugene Turpin had to say was that the IRA ran a sort of killing field in the bogs north of Knockraha, where prisoners taken by the Cork No. 1 Brigade in the city and surrounding areas were executed. Prior to execution the prisoners were held in an underground vault in a local cemetery at Kilquane, a mile outside the village. The vault with grim Irish humour became known as Sing Sing. If Turpin’s story was to be believed, up to 35 individuals were executed in the Rea, north of Kilquane, which lies in the heart of east Cork between the villages of Knockraha, Watergrasshill and Leamlara.

Not only was he able to tell me what had gone on there, but ‘the thesis’ contained documentary evidence of a lot of the killings of prisoners in the area. This was a monograph written in the 1970s, a Macra na Feirme project entitled Foras Feasa na Paróiste,¹ a history of the parish of Knockraha’s role in the War of Independence compiled while most of the survivors were still alive. It had been written by a Knockraha man, Jim Fitzgerald.

The intention of the book was to give a detailed picture of Knockraha’s role in the War of Independence. One of the more interesting details was that there were two bomb factories in the parish, where local IRA men made iron casings for hand grenades. Some of these grenades can now be seen in the Cork County Museum in Fitzgerald’s Park. However, the bulk of the book, which in its original version ran to over 90 pages of dense two-column script, is taken up with the holding and execution of prisoners. The essence of the story was that the Cork No. 1 Brigade used the vault in Kilquane graveyard outside Knockraha as a prison for holding people before taking them up to the Rea for execution. The operation of this prison is given in great detail.

My first reaction to this was one of disbelief. Could executions on this scale have been going on only a few miles from where I was reared? Could I have spent nearly 40 years in the area and have been blissfully unaware that death was dealt out on such a scale in such a small area? Where was this in the history I had been taught, the catalogue of struggle against ‘the British oppressor’ that had been drummed into us from the very first day at primary school, the centuries of grief that our ‘noble’ nation had to suffer before ‘freedom’ was finally achieved? (In the 1960s we were the most noble nation on earth.) Every morning of my young life I could see the Rea across the valley from our house. It formed the south-eastern horizon of my childhood world, where the sun rose every morning. It was seven or eight miles away but it was still within the universe of my childhood. I had never thought of it as anything other than a hill. My mother had been born to the south and east of it and had cycled across the Rea every Sunday of her childhood in the years immediately after the conflict. It was inconceivable that a few years before my mother routinely cycled that lonely road, it was host to a far more grisl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Epigraph
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Part VI
• Part VII
• Part VIII
• Part IX
• Part X
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan