Frank Aiken

Nationalist and Internationalist

Bryce Evans, Stephen Kelly

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780716532569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Revolutionary; statesman; polymath: Frank Aiken cuts a colossal figure in twentieth century Irish history. However, he remains a controversial figure regarded as a war criminal by some and a principled proponent of National liberation by others.

In this engaging biographical collection, contributors scrutinise Aiken s thoughts and actions at several critical junctures in modern Irish and world history, taking readers through the War of Independence, Civil War, the birth of the new state, the Second World War, the Cold War and the modern Northern Ireland Troubles. Divided into two sections Nationalist and Internationalist and based on an unrivalled breadth of testimony from academics, family members, rivals and colleagues, this study ultimately details the footprints Aiken left on the national and international political stage.

Aiken owed his early eminence to military rather than political leadership; he was commandant of the 4th Northern Division of the IRA during the War of Independence and was driven to undertake the most daring and spectacular feats of the Irish Civil War. He went on to become the Chief of Staff of the Anti-Treaty IRA but was expelled for backing de Valera s plan for a Republican government the beginnings of Fianna Fáil. Thereafter his instrumental role was to be political: a Minister for Defence, Finance, and External Affairs over the course of the following decades; he was to oversee much success and controversy in the burgeoning state. This biography represents the first deserving assessment of a monumental personality in 20th century Irish History.

PART ONE

Nationalist

CHAPTER ONE

Frank Aiken: family, early life and the revolutionary period, 1898–1921*

EOIN MAGENNIS

Introduction

Frank Aiken lived his life in the public eye for six decades, from the age of sixteen until his retirement in 1973. Despite this he tended to avoid interviews, speaking to researchers rather than the media, and always reflecting government policy rather than his own opinions.1 He was even more reticent to speak of his early years and activity in the War of Independence. A three-page typed autobiography, compiled around 1933, provides only sparse detail of his life between 1914 and 1923, and nothing before those years.2 Neither an interview with Ernie O’Malley nor Aiken’s papers offer much more.3 Instead, his early years must be seen through the memories of others, which offer a picture of a relatively affluent background, an unusual family upbringing where both parents were dead by the time he turned fifteen, an attachment to the discipline and bravery involved with soldiering, personal partisanship and a fully developed sense of the need for Ireland to be both independent and united. This chapter pieces together this detail on Frank Aiken’s early years.

1898–1918

Parish records and a genealogical bookplate within a family bible reveal that Francis Thomas Aiken was born on 13 February 1898.4 He was the seventh and youngest child of James and Mary Aiken of Carrickbracken, Camlough, County Armagh.

James Aiken was a significant local figure, important enough to merit extensive coverage of his death in August 1900.5 James appears to have come to Camlough in the late 1870s, and may have migrated there from either Monaghan or Fermanagh, according to a family tradition that describes a nineteenth-century migration from the townland of Truagh. Further local lore in Fermanagh tells of Frank Aiken’s grandfather leaving a townland near Ederney in the early nineteenth century. The reasons are unclear, and vary from links to the radical United Irishmen, to that the grandfather married a Catholic, excluding himself from his Presbyterian family circle.6 The Ederney Aikens were said to be canny, strong farmers, and James Aiken followed in this tradition. By the time of his death, James had built up substantial landholdings and tenant houses in Carrickbracken and Derrymore townlands (near Camlough) as well as urban property on both sides of the county line in Newry (in Mary and Monaghan streets). This was amassed through both farming and a profitable building business, which specialised in church building.7

James was also a public figure sitting on Newry’s Board of Poor Law Guardians, for the Camlough division, a body of which he became chairman. After the local government reforms of 1898, James was also elected onto Newry No. 2 Rural District Council, becoming its first chairman. He was a Justice of the Peace for County Armagh, and spoken of as a potential Member of Parliament for the South Armagh constituency. He was apparently noted for the independence of his views, which were strongly Nationalist. As one obituary in a Unionist newspaper noted, ‘many of his actions while accompanying the chair at the meetings of local bodies came up for adverse criticism’. One that was certainly controversial was his casting vote against a resolution to welcome Queen Victoria’s Irish visit of April 1900.8

James Aiken was twice married, making strong connections with local families. His first wife was Catherine Cardwell, from Camlough, who died in March 1885, after giving birth to a daughter Mary (who died before her third birthday in January 1888). He married his second wife, Mary McGeeney (of Carrowmannon, Belleek, County Armagh) in May 1887, and they had seven children together. Mary ran the family home and business after James’s death in 1900 before her own early death in April 1913, aged 48. In the 1901 and 1911 censuses, Mary is mentioned as a widow and the owner of fourteen (of seventy-five) houses in Carrickbracken townland and two (of twenty-five) in Derrymore.9

James, Frank Aiken’s eldest sibling, was born in March 1889, and went on to be a surgeon in Dulwich Hospital, London. He is noted in the 1911 census as a medical student and was qualified by 1916, when he served as locum Medical Officer for a cousin, Dr Frank McDermott of Donaghmore, outside Newry.10 James nominated Patrick McCartan as the Sinn Féin candidate for the January 1918 South Armagh by-election, but he does not appear again in local politics.11 Indeed, he seems to have gone to England at around this time, and lived and worked in London until he retired back to Dublin in the mid-1950s. James returned to Newry in his last months, and died there in June 1964.

The next child, Mary (or May as she was known by the family), was born in March 1890. She married a local auctioneer, Heber Magenis, lived in Poyntzpass and was seen as a Republican sympathiser, though not active, in 1923. May died in 1951 at the age of 61.12 A third child, Annie (born July 1891), died in infancy while a fourth, Gertrude (born April 1893), died just after her fifteenth birthday. Another girl, Magdalene (known as Madge), was born in April 1895, trained as a schoolteacher and went to live and raise a family in Leicester, England, where she died. Closest in age and views to Frank Aiken was his sister Nano (born August 1896), who was to become very active in the republican cause in the revolutionary period, and reappears throughout his early life.

This domestic picture suggests a number of things. First, as Todd Andrews later noted, that Frank Aiken was born into comfortable surroundings with substantial property, a productive building business and involvement in local economic development.13 Second, that the death of his father in 1900 and the medical training in Dublin of his oldest sibling meant that from his early teens Frank was the only resident Aiken male in Carrickbracken. This situation may well have forged the independence and self-reliance that became obvious at a later stage. Finally, the Aikens were a well-known family locally with marriage, business and political connections across much of South Armagh and into Newry. Frank Aiken’s subsequent local rise becomes more explicable when the family’s standing is taken into account.

In terms of education, there is a family story that Frank Aiken earned the nickname ‘Corr Lá’ (odd day) for his occasional attendance at school. We know th...