Michael Collins: The Lost Leader

A biography of Irish politician Michael Collins

Margery Forester

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780717140145
• eBook ISBN: 9780717157617
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

In print continuously for more than thirty years, this book is long established as a reliable and affectionate portrait of Michael Collins.

First, published in 1971, its great strength is that the author was able to interview Collins' surviving contemporaries and was offered unrestricted access to personal and family material.

Michael Collins: The Lost Leader has been praised by authorities such as Robert Kee and Maurice Manning and remains compulsive reading even today.

PART ONE

SOMETHING EXPECTED

01	WOODFIELD
	(1890–1906)

I

The Collinses of Woodfield may be said to have had as long a tradition of inherited dispossession as any other family of native stock in Ireland. Despite the warning of the ancient saying, A great host with whom it is not fortunate to contend, the battle trooped host of the O Coileain, part of their ancestral clan was driven from its stronghold in Co. Limerick in the days of Strongbow when the great upheaval in the Irish national way of life first began. The extended wanderings which brought West Cork its present strength of Collinses culminated for one family at Sam’s Cross, a small scattering of farms which lies inland and surrounded by hills halfway between the towns of Rosscarbery and Clonakilty. They were to farm there, at Woodfield, for about seven generations.

They were, of course, tenant farmers, since to be Catholic and Irish was synonymous with tenancy of a more or less precarious kind. They held their acres of scattered land, surviving the vicissitudes of penal law and eviction, famine and emigration that became the traditional birthright of the native Irish.

By the middle of the 19th century three unmarried Collins brothers, Patrick, Tom, and Michael, were living at Woodfield. Patrick had been born about 1798, a year which might have altered the course of European history had Napoleon not kept one finger on the map of the Nile while he listened to Wolfe Tone’s ideas for an extensive French campaign in Ireland.

The brothers remained firmly within the nationalist tradition that had consistently withstood both assimilation and oppression. In 1850 Patrick and Tom drove out two members of the landlord class who were hunting over the farm without any regard for the crops. For this embryonic rising the two brothers spent a year in Cork gaol. Michael made the journey on horseback to visit them as often as the authorities allowed. No doubt this experience influenced him when the Fenian Brotherhood was formed a few years later, for he joined its secret ranks.

Neither Patrick nor Tom married, and it was not until 1875, when he was sixty, that Michael brought a young bride to Woodfield. Despite the forty years’ difference in their ages their life was happy. Mary Anne O’Brien brought a woman’s hand to what had for so long been a bachelor establishment, and Woodfield throve. Their first child, Margaret, was born in 1877, followed by John, Johanna (Hannie), and Mary.

These were the years of the Land League and the rise of Parnell. Harvest failures, while they were in no way as devastating in their consequences as those of the Great Starvation years earlier in the century, served to point the arguments of those who demanded land reform as the only solution to the chronic discontents of Ireland. Yet, though poverty and social distress were the results of English rule, they were not the causes of resistance to it. The failure of successive British Governments to grasp this was as much their country’s tragedy as Ireland’s.

By 1887 three more children had been born to Michael and Mary Anne Collins: Helena, Patrick, and Katie. The older children were by now becoming conscious of the ceaseless undercurrent of politics which ran through, and were an integral part of Irish life; now and then surging up to flood one part or another of the country with periods of unrest which were generally bloody and always had at their source the question of land possession.

With the Land War prices of produce fell alarmingly, and neighbours gathered at Woodfield to discuss the age-old problems of rent payment and eviction. To the children the ominous word ‘hanging-gale’ sounded an almost monotonous note of terror. Even while they understood little of this sickening method of reversed hire-purchase, by which an extra half-year’s rent in advance was demanded, they comprehended the fear of a possible inability to meet it in the neighbours’ voices, the fear of a bad harvest, of loss of cattle, the knowledge that to improve one’s land invited eviction in favour of a tenant able to pay a higher rent. They were spared the hunger known to other Irish children of their generation, whose slice of bread for lunch would be eaten before the first field was passed on their way to school; nevertheless, they accepted without question that any silver coin presented by a more prosperous relative must be handed over for the rent, though pennies might be kept for themselves.

The Weekly Freeman was always in the house, and those of the family who were unable to read the latest news of the land struggle absorbed what they could from its cartoons.

The two much-loved uncles were now dead. Michael Collins himself, one of his children was to write, ‘never looked an old man and never had an old age’. When he was seventy-five his eighth and last child, a son, was born in the early hours of Thursday, 16 October 1890.

It was customary at that time for children to be baptised on the day of their birth. His father favoured calling him James after an elder brother. The rest of the family, however, recalling the Gaelic tradition that named the third son for his father, insisted on Michael. Perhaps this early controversy was the origin of Michael’s adolescent affectation of the signature ‘M. J. Collins’, for since their father believed that one Christian name was sufficient for each of his children there could be no compromise. Sheer weight of opinion prevailed, and it was Michael that Father Peter Hill duly baptised the baby that day at Rosscarbery Church.

II

The way of life at Woodfield in which Michael Collins was to spend his childhood is the key to all that he was later to become. No other single influence was to lie closer to his heart. The Woodfield acres were few to have contained a vision as broad as he possessed, yet to the end of his life they filled it completely.

For centuries his people had lived close to the earth in one particular district, bounded by the customs of their own small world. Even where the extremity of hardship had brought emigration like spreading blight across that way of life, the reports of the New World—all too seldom brought back in person by those who had gone—came only as bewildering and unreal travellers’ tales. They had no impact on the integrated life of rural Ireland.

Though Michael was born into a generation that moved out and away from that life, he never denied the deep-rooted instinct that it was the only lasting foundation upon which the necessary changes of the modern world could be successfully grafted. All his actions were to be guided by the yardstick of the preservation and greater well-being of Sam’s Cross.

This close community life could have bred no finer sense of citizenship. The social injustices of Irish life had for so long been inevitable as to be almost unquestioned. Where no help had ever come none was expected; these men and women relied solely on God and each other. It was not superstition but this sense of utter dependence on the only source of relief that blessed the crops, mixed holy water with the wheat before sowing, or sprinkled it upon the mare about to foal. Any loss might mean ruin; yet it was the same acceptance of the inevitability of their lot that met disaster with a quiet Dé bheatha, toil Dé—Welcome be God’s will.

Woodfield in that last decade of the 19th century was almost entirely self-supporting. Mary Anne Collins grew her own flax and wove her linen for the spotless sheets and shirts which she spread out in the bleaching field. She spun her wool, which was then sent for carding to the local mill, and from which she would knit stockings and woollen underclothes. She baked bread from the Woodfield corn which was ground at the mill. Wasting nothing, she fed the bran to the calves, plucked her geese, cut seed potatoes, and set her milk, scouring the pans with heather and salt and scalding them with water from the well when the rain butts ran low in dry weather. No speck of dust might enter the dairy where, on Thursday nights, the children would help churn the butter ready for market the following day.

The care of the smaller children, particularly Michael, devolved upon the older girls. It is the inevitable, and often deeply resented, way with large families; yet from the first they lavished affection upon him. ‘We thought he had been invented for our special edification’, is Miss Hannie Collins’s comment.

Two things were apparent about him from the first: he had an overwhelming generosity, and no conception of fear.

Like all small children he had his share of near disasters. Seen in the light of his later adventures they suggest an aura of special protection which he was to carry with him into manhood. In his crawling days he was taken by his sisters up to the loft of the house from which, via the trapdoor, he fell, surprised but uninjured, down to the kitchen below. At the age of two he wandered away one morning and was not missed for some hours. His brother Johnny, hearing uneasy snorting, glanced into the stall of a particularly vicious horse which only his father could approach. The animal’s forelegs were braced gingerly apart; between them Michael lay curled up, fast asleep.

A sturdy, fair little boy, he took after his father in looks. Later, his hair would take the dark brown, almost black in some lights, sheen that predominates in the south of Ireland: the colour of the reed beds when the wind bends them. His eyes were grey with hazel flecks in them. The squarely-set jaw gave promise that later its owner might prove a very determined young man indeed. He laughed most of the time, flew into rages and out of them again as suddenly. If he thought anyone else had been hurt he wept bitterly.

Although his mother had to leave much of his care to the older children her influence was a gentle and stimulating one. One of his earliest memories must have been of standing near as she milked the cows, singing the old songs in the Irish she had learnt from her grandmother, a fluent speaker of the language.

Life was hard for the women of those times. In the evening hours before Michael’s birth, limping from a broken and badly-set ankle, Mary Anne Collins had done the milking, pouring it out for setting from heavy pails, and doing the baking for the next day. Yet she was by no means a mere household drudge, being alive to the affairs of the community and quick of intellect.

Michael’s father was the supreme being in his life. From the time Michael could walk, father and son would go about the farm together. The elder Michael Collins studied the needs of his land. The small boy would watch the dried sea-weed and sand for topdressing being spread over some of Woodfield’s sixty acres, or listen to his father’s stories as he cut the saileach, or osiers, in the sally gardens for the panniers which he wove in the autumn to hold cattle fodder. As he fashioned farm gates, a new cow stall, or displayed his meticulous craftsmanship in some piece of furniture for the house, the old man, stern, thoughtful, and somewhat aloof from his other children, told Michael something of his country’s history and of the recurring theme, the land for the people.

He would often quote lines in praise of nationalism. In later years, when all memory of his father’s appearance had faded from the boy’s mind, these stories and quotations were the recollections of his father which stayed with him.

He was as straight a man as ever lived, and his children revered him. ‘I was afraid to be mean in his presence’, wrote one of them, many years afterwards. He once allowed himself to be taken to court by a Clonakilty tradesman for alleged non-payment of a debt. Only when the magistrate demanded it did he produce the plaintiff’s receipt for the amount. The shopkeeper had known him all his life: his word should have been evidence enough of payment.

Humanity to man and beast was another of the father’s qualities to be inherited by the son. No animal might be ill-treated, nor a nest in the rookery near the farm buildings touched. His influence on Michael’s character and outlook was profound. From him, too, Michael seems to have inherited his most pronounced traits of bearing and intellect.

Bright, and with a boundless energy, he was to the fore in all activities. When he was four the elders of the family went off to a fair, leaving him to the care of his sister Mary. She mentioned that they would need some potatoes; shortly afterwards she found him in the garden, scarlet of face and dragging a large bucketful with the triumphant cry of ‘I have them nearly dug!’

At other times he would insist on joining fishing expeditions to the Owenahincha river, at that time a broad-flowing stream some hundreds of yards below the house. No attempt to ‘spear’ a fish could be made without Michael’s hand on the pike. With the need to be in the forefront of everything he had a deep kindness of heart. No effort which he felt merited praise went unnoticed. ‘Well done, old fellow!’ he would cry, regardless of the age or sex of the doer.

Even in matters of religion he showed an early independence. Mary prepared him for his first confession, pointing out that this must include telling the priest how often he had helped himself surreptitiously to sugar or jam. Michael was horrified. ‘If I tell him that he’ll think I’m a thief!’ he protested.

In the evenings the women of Sam’s Cross would gather in each other’s kitchens to sew and spin, to quilt the hoods of their heavy black cloaks, or to make up their frieze cloth into working garments for the men. The men came there also, to turn to such tasks as the making of the súgáin, the straw ropes with which they would secure the reeks of hay in the fields, since barns were few, anchoring them with stones to the ground.

At such times the kitchen of Woodfield became the scene of patriotic discussion. The elder Michael Collins would speak of O’Connell and Thomas Davis and make the children repeat the poetry of nationalism. Their uncle, Dan O’Brien, sang rebel songs. The young Michael, like his father, had no singing voice, though he loved music. His own choice was usually Deep in Canadian Woods. It was then, grouped in the dusk about the big open fireplace before the lamps were lit, that the tales would also be told. The bad times of the past, never far from the Irish consciousness, rose vividly before the mind’s eye, as such things must when no one knows if tomorrow they may not return. His grandmother, Johanna McCarthy O’Brien, would tell of how, going to Clonakilty on a fair day in the famine times, she had seen people lying dead of starvation by the roadside, unable to complete their journey to the workhouse to beg for food.

More than a million people had died of starvation and disease in the famine years, well within the elder Michael Collins’s lifetime. Over a million more had fled to America. Skibbereen, one of the worst stricken areas, lay a matter of miles west of Sam’s Cross. The realisation of these things was seared across the young Michael’s mind, as it was across the mind of his race. With it festered the bitter knowledge that had it not been for the British Government’s obduracy in clinging to inadequate economic policies, and the influence of rent-anxious landlords in the face of human misery, the blight that had overtaken the potato crop in Ireland need never have overtaken the Irish people.

Always to Islanders danger is what comes over the sea.¹ The Starvation of Ireland had brought indelibly home to her people that Britain lay beyond the Irish Sea. The decimation of a people is not easily forgotten by those who survive it. Nor can there be any wish to forget until its causes are eradicated.

British governments of more recent times had, indeed, tried to grapple with what they termed the Irish Question. They might have made better progress if they had not always approached it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication
• Preface to the 1989 edition
• Part One: Something expected
• Part Two: Carrying the long day
• Part Three: The day came so strenuous
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan