Connolly’s British Army service: Conor McCabe / Anthony Coughlan / Shay Cody
[Editor’s Note: The two articles below, one by Conor McCabe and the other by Anthony Coughlan, were carried in the May-June and July-August 2025 issues respectively of the magazine “History Ireland”, published in Dublin. The first article is a further attack by Conor McCabe on Desmond Greaves’s account of James Connolly’s teenage British Army service as given in Chapter 1 of his book, The Life and Times of James Connolly. It is a continuation of McCabe’s irrational attempts to denigrate Greaves’s work as an historian, which is referred to in the previous item on this web-site dealing with Japanese scholar Tomo Horikoshi’s listing of James Connolly’s writings. The second article is a reply to Conor McCabe by Anthony Coughlan, who is Desmond Greaves’s literary executor and first editor of this website. It is clear from McCabe’s article that when citing the Greaves Journal he missed Desmond Greaves’s reference to Connolly’s daughter Ina informing him that when she was young she heard her mother, Mrs Lillie Connolly, speaking to William O’Brien about her husband’s teenage British Army service. This is just one of the many pieces of circumstantial evidence that Greaves cites regarding that. Direct evidence from Army records is unobtainable as Connolly joined the army under an assumed name, which John Conlon, Connolly’s Edinburgh contemporary who told Desmond Greaves about Connolly’s birthplace and army service, could not remember.
In the special 50th anniversary issue of the Irish Labour History Society journal, “Saothar”, published in 2025, trade union leader Shay Cody has a short article, “James Connolly and the British Army” , in which, with reference to Conor McCabe’s criticism of Desmond’s Greaves’s account of Connolly’s British Army service, he writes, “on the substantive point [i.e. the army service issue] McCabe seems to be wrong.” Mr Cody then goes on to state that Connolly’s trade union colleague William O’Brien believed that while Connolly was in the British Army he served in India and Egypt, and he mentions that when O’Brien served on the Board of the Irish Central Bank following his retirement from the ITGWU he stated this to his fellow Board members Ken Whitaker and J. J. McElligott, and that the latter in turn passed on this news to Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru while on a visit to India, and that Nehru was much interested in it.
This seems to be a confusion with the British Army service of Connolly’s older brother John. In his biography, The Life and Times of James Connolly, Desmond Greaves writes that John Connolly, “as soon as he was in a position to claim the age of eighteen, enlisted in the King’s Liverpool Regiment (2nd Battalion) and was despatched to India in September 1877. He was not yet sixteen. It may have been to facilitate the falsification of his age that he assumed the name of John Reid.” Greaves states that James Connolly, by contrast, joined the 1st Battalion of that regiment, which served continuously in Ireland from 1882 to 1889. William O’Brien’s belief, referred to by Shay Cody, seems therefore to have been mistaken, and Connolly’s knowledge of conditions in India, which Mr Cody, following O’Brien, refers to as evidence of his having been in that country, was more likely derived from his brother, who did serve there.
Because John Connolly’s army pseudonym is known – it was “James” Reid rather than John – it is possible to trace his army career from official records. He seems to have spent some twenty years in the British Army overall. In the “Life and Times” Desmond Greaves writes of James Connolly leaving Dublin during the 1913 Lockout to fulfil speaking engagements in Edinburgh, Dundee and Leith: “At Dundee his brother John had the temerity to appear at the platform in the uniform of the Edinburgh City Artillery, and was denounced in fine style”. Following the Easter Rising the Newcastle Daily Journal of 2 May 1916 carried a report on James Connolly as one of its leaders who had surrendered, in which there is the following reference to John Connolly: “Connolly’s brother John, who has just been discharged from the National Reserve, resides with his family at 57 Calton Road, Edinburgh. He has served twenty years in the Army and two of his sons have been killed at the front while one is a prisoner of war in Germany.”
On 28 March 2016 BBC Scotland carried an item by Louise Yeoman on “The Edinburgh Revolutionary who led the Easter Rising”, which drew on the recollections of Sean Bell, John Connolly’s great great grandson. The item refers to lurid reports about the Connolly family in The Scotsman and other papers at the time of the Rising. It states: “Genealogical research and family inquiries reveal the newspaper reports were heavily embroidered – there were no dead or POW sons in the family. John Connolly had indeed served in the Royal Scots and was a corporal at the time of his death, yet this did not save his family from harassment. His daughter Kate, Mr Bell’s great grandmother, told of being chased home from school, and her sister Mary spoke in a 1960s TV interview of her horror at going to the newsagents to find her uncle reported as executed” [ See: https://www.bbc.com › news › uk-scotland-35813875 ].
James Connolly was executed on 12 May 1916 and his elder brother, John Connolly, died one month later, in June, at the age of 55. According to the BBC item, presumably drawing on Mr Bell’s information, he died of acute nephritis and “is commemorated in North Merchiston cemetery on the World War One soldiers’ memorial. The same army that shot James Connolly buried his brother with full military honours”. This cemetery is in Edinburgh.
James Connolly’s daughter, Ina Connolly-Heron, states in her memoir, “James Connolly, a Biography” , which was published by SIPTU in 2018 and is based on an earlier series of articles by her in the Union magazine, “Liberty”, that John was “buried with British military honours in Glasgow.” Presumably this was a mistake for Edinburgh. She commented: “Truly, the British were masters of irony: to execute one brother in May as a revolutionary and bury the other in June with all the pomp at their command.”
James Connolly seems to have had four siblings: two older brothers, John and Thomas – Thomas seems to have emigrated, for there is no record of him beyond childhood – and two sisters, Margaret and Mary, who died in infancy.
Desmond Greaves states in Chapter 2 of “The Life and Times of James Connolly” that James Connolly deserted from the Army in 1889 when he had only about four months to serve, his motive being to go to help his father who had suffered an incapacitating accident and the threat of having to part from his fiancée, as his battalion had been ordered to Aldershot in England. This has led some researchers to try and discover Connolly’s army pseudonym by looking at army records of deserters. This seems unlikely to yield fruitful results for reasons that Greaves suggests in his biography: “As a result of the transfer [i.e. to Aldershot] there seems to have been some confusion in the records of the battalion, and the next muster was not held until after he [i.e.Connolly] could be judged to have been discharged. Connolly never knew this, and told his friend Mullery of his surprise at never being apprehended.” ]
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[Article by Conor McCabe from “History Ireland”, May-June 2025 issue, Vol.33]
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Where, Oh Where is the evidence? Greaves, Connolly and the British Arny
By Conor McCabe
In 1973 the eminent Irish Labour historian, John W. Boyle, wrote a review of the republished edition of The Life and Times of James Connolly by C. Desmond Greaves. Although largely positive in his comments, he nonetheless had some concerns about its sources and scholarly fidelity. The lack of detailed references meant that it was “impossible to identify the authorities on which a number of doubtful or incorrect statements are made.” This diminished their value, said Boyle, as “we are uncertain to whom they should be attributed.”
Forty-one years later, with the online release of Greaves’s journals and letters, we can now see the Boyle’s unease was well founded. The picture that emerges of Greaves’s methodology is one that prioritised speculative conjecture over established fact. The errors that it released have been compounded over time by sheer weight of repetition. Nowhere is this seen more clearly that in Greaves’s confident assertion that Connolly served in the British Army.
The story, as told by Greaves, is well known. Connolly joined the King’s Liverpool Regiment in 1882 and was stationed in Cork, where he stood guard on the night of the execution of Myles Joyce. His battalion then moved to the Curragh in 1884. The following year it was sent to Dublin and by 1886 he was stationed in Beggar’s Bush. He met Lillie, his future wife, around this time at a tram stop in Merrion Square, and in February 1889, with only a few months left to serve, he decided to go AWOL and return to Scotland, as his father had fallen ill. He initially moved to Dundee to “lie low” until he found civilian clothes, and in 1889 he returned to Edinburgh to marry Lillie. Almost every biography of Connolly since 1961 has reproduced this tale. The problem is that there is no evidence to support it, with certain elements invented by Greaves himself.
Greaves checked the army archives in the Public Record Office, but nothing came back. The absence of any official documentation meant that he had to rely on oral sources for the tale: contemporaries of Connolly in Edinburgh, and in Liverpool Jack Mullery, a former member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). Mullery was a mystery, as there was no known associate of Connolly with that name, while the Edinburgh sources were anonymous. That changed in 2022 with the online publication of Greaves’s journals from 1956 and 1957, which gave details of whom he met as well as extracts from contemporaneous letters first published online in January 2025.
The Edinburgh sources were John Conlin (spelt Conlon by Greaves) and Charles James Geddes. Conlin said that he was friends with John Connolly, the brother of James, and that John told him that Connolly served in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. It was this third-hand hearsay that sent Greaves down the army path. Geddes thought that Conlin was slightly mistaken and that it was probably the Queen’s Liverpool Regiment, as it must have been during the 1890s. Both Geddes and Conlin said that Connolly attended a Das Kapital reading group that took place in Edinburgh around 1887 or 1888. This would, of course, rule out any the army service for those years and so Greaves ditched the reading group story, even though he believed that there was corroboratory evidence to support it. Geddes even wrote to Greaves before the book was published to say that it is “unfortunate you haven’t got proof of Connolly’s army service”, casting significant doubt on Conlin’s veracity and usability in the process. Greaves was not altogether blind to this, writing in a private letter that Conlin’s statements were simply verbal and uncorroborated [Editor’s Note: In fact Greaves pays tribute to the accuracy of Conlon’s recollections with regard to the information he gave that could be corroborated. See the Research Correspondence in a previous item in this website sub-section].
It was around this time that Greaves was introduced to Jack Mullery, a name unknown to James Connolly. The reason was simple: Jack Mullery was born John Mulray. He changed his name after he moved back to Liverpool (his place of birth) sometime in the 1910s or early 1920s. He first appears as Mullery on his marriage certificate in 1925, although Greaves knew him as Mulray and corresponded with him as such. Greaves met him in 1957, and he is the source for two army stories relating to Connolly: the execution of Myles Joyce and his first meeting with Lillie Reynolds.
Mulray said that Connolly was on guard duty outside Myles Joyce’s cell on Spike Island, Cork. It appears that he believed that this took place in 1885. Joyce was executed in Galway in 1882, however, and it is fantastical, to say the least, that the actual army private minding the cell door was none other than Connolly. None of the details recounted by Mulray matched the known events, but instead of dismissing it as the faulty memories of a man in his late 70s Greaves changed Mulray’s memories to suit his story. Spike Island became Haulbowline, 1885 became 1882, and Connolly was simply reflecting on Joyce’s execution instead of actually guarding the cell. Amazingly, Greaves admits in Life and Times that he changed Mulray/Mullery’s memories on the basis that the man had confused himself.
The second story relates to the time Connolly first met Lillie Reynolds, which is recounted without attribution in Life and Times. Mulray says that Connolly was running for a tram near Merrion Square but missed it. He got chatting with Lillie at the stop and romance soon blossomed.
Greaves once again changed details in Life and Times, where he had Connolly strolling from Beggar’s Bush to Merrion Square in order to catch a tram to Kingstown, even though Mulray made no mention of Beggar’s Bush. This falsification, seemingly small, is nonetheless significant. Greaves had Connolly coming from Beggar’s Bush because the King’s Liverpool Regiment was stationed there in the mid-1880s. Greaves invented this detail in order to link Connolly to the regiment [Editor’s Note: Greaves had several meetings with Mullery, who lived not far from him on Merseyside, in which he got all manner of detail not thought worth mentioning either in his Journal or in his Connolly biography. See the letters that passed between them in the Research Correspondence in an earlier item in this website sub-section] .
Apart from changing recollections to suit his theory, Greaves also created false memories, albeit inadvertently. Marie Johnson, wife of Tom Johnson, the former Labour leader, told Ina Connolly in 1956 that Connolly was in the army and that she had heard this from Connolly herself. In fact Greaves told her the story. She was not aware of it beforehand but had incorporated it into her own memory, possibly as a way to exaggerate her closeness to Connolly, with whom she worked for a time in Belfast. Either way, conjecture had become a firmly held memory of Marie Johnson, much to the embarrassment of Greaves, who wrote about the episode in his journal.
The same process played out with Ina Connolly, who was surprised to learn from Greaves that her father was in the army. She said that her mother had never said anything about it [Editor’s Note: This is not so. See the article following.] Over the years, however, Ina incorporated the story into her memory. In 1966 she sat down with RTÉ and talked of her recollections of her father. She recounted the Greaves Army story as if it was her own, and in the process gave it an authority which it never had previously. Similarly, when Nora Connolly told Uinseann Mac Eoin in 1980 that her father was in the army she was recounting Greaves’s story, not her own. Nora never heard anything about it until Greaves began to spread the tale in the 1950s. The fact that memory is subject to change and adaptation by internal and external pressures is precisely the reason why historians insist on some form of corroborating evidence for memory, be it written or otherwise.
The issue with Greaves’s army story, however, is much greater than an over-eager reliance on oral testimony. He deliberately changed that testimony when it suited, invented new details entirely and stymied verification via checkable citations. His motivation for doing so is unknown, but it is also largely irrelevant, a speculative parlour game. What matters is the evidence, and the evidence points to the construction by Greaves of a fictionalised narrative presented as authoritative fact. Whatever the reason or motivation, it worked. Almost every biographer since has followed Greaves’s lead. Decades of repetition, in the manner of Liberty Valance, has managed to turn legend into fact. The damage, at this stage, is probably reversible.
We can but hope, though. In the course of my research into Connolly’s lost and early writings I discovered that he had a sister. Her name was Mary. She was born on 15 July 1864 and died of rubeola (measles) and bronchitis on 26 May 1865. Lillie Reynolds told William O’Brien about the sister but she is not named in any of the various biographies. It is but one example of the actual evidence that is out there, beneath the myths and legends, for those inclined to look for it [Editor’s Note: In fact there seem to have been two sisters, one named Margaret and the other Mary, both of whom died in infancy].
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[Article by Anthony Coughlan from “History Ireland”, July-August 2025 issue]
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Much Ado About Nothing Much?
Anthony Coughlan responds to Conor McCabe’s article, ‘Greaves, Connolly and the British Army’ ( History Ireland 33.3, May/June 2025)
Conor McCabe’s criticism of Desmond Greaves’s account of James Connolly’s British Army service as a teenager is much ado about nothing much. In doing research in the 1950s for The Life and Times of James Connolly, Greaves had the advantage of being able to interview some of Connolly’s contemporaries. Connolly’s children, Ina, Nora and Roddy, co-operated with him also.
It was John Conlon, a friend of Connolly’s brother John, who told Greaves that Connolly was born in Edinburgh, which the birth certificate then confirmed. This scotched the traditional view that Connolly was born in Ireland, which Connolly himself did nothing to discourage during his lifetime. Conlon also told Greaves that Connolly spent his teenage years in the King’s Liverpool Regiment of the British Army but that he had enlisted under a false name. John Connolly joined the Army under a false name too, but while Conlon could remember John’s pseudonym, he could not remember James’s.
Conor McCabe’s article does not mention this false name point, for it means that written evidence from official records of Connolly’s army service did not and could not exist. But the circumstantial evidence, which Greaves cites below, is overwhelming.
Greaves deals with Connolly’s teenage British army service in the last paragraph of Chapter 1 of The Life and Times and the first paragraphs of Chapter 2. This book is now available on the Greaves electronic archive at www.desmondgreavesarchive.com, together with all but one of Greaves’s other books (A new edition of his Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution, edited by Ruan O’Donnell, has been published and will be put on the Greaves electronic archive website in eighteen months’ time), his two-million-word Journal and his Table-Talk – both of which I edited as his literary executor – and the full file of the Connolly Association monthly, the Irish Democrat, which he edited from 1948 to 1988, and his more important articles.
Chapter 1 of the Life and Times gives what is surely a judicious historical assessment:
“The fact of Connolly’s army service is attested in several ways. His adoption of a pseudonym rules out direct documentary proof. But there is ample evidence from the statements of contemporaries in Edinburgh, oblique references in his correspondence, his own statements to such friends as Mullery, the authority of Larkin, the surprising knowledge of Cobh he showed in an emergency in 1911, and finally his military proficiency. The evidence is part personal testimony, part inferential, but provides an intelligent, coherent picture, leaving little of importance to be explained … Those who reject this must tell us what else he was doing.”
Conor McCabe fails this challenge. He tells us nothing about those missing seven years in Connolly’s life. In my opinion, he is wrong when he writes in his article: “Ina Connolly … was surprised to learn from Greaves that her father was in the army. She said that her mother had never said anything about it.” Here is Greaves’s Journal account, referring to a meeting with Ina Connolly in which she indicated that her mother, Lillie Reynolds, did in fact refer to her husband’s army service:
‘We then discussed the army service question. She is convinced that James met Lilliewhile in the British army in Dublin. Indeed on a previous occasion she spoke of his being in Portobello Barracks. I well recall her start of surprise when a few years ago I asked her if she had ever heard he was in the army. Monteith had told her that the King’s Liverpool was the only likely regiment when she enquired of him . . . Her sole reliance as far as army service evidence was concerned was a conversation at Arklow with Bill O’Brien and her mother. They told her that the fact that James was in the army was suppressed for fear that Sinn Fein would not trust him. She could not understand this, since the Fenians were in it.’ [Vol. 12, entry for 13 September 1956]
On Greaves’s reference to “the authority of Jim Larkin” regarding Connolly’s army service, the Journal has the following:
‘After leaving her [i.e. Ina Connolly]I saw Desmond Ryan who told me that Larkin had announced that Connolly was in the Army at the ILP summer school in 1944. Michael Price [Republican Congress activist] had warned him it was true and to be careful. When John Leslie [Scottish socialist] wrote to William O’Brien about Connolly’s early life, he said, “There is one episode in Connolly’s life which though not discreditable is likely to be misunderstood and therefore I will say nothing about it” … About the army service he says he got it from William O’Brien who had it from Lillie Reynolds that Connolly had been in the army. Now Ina tells the story about being at Bray with her mother and O’Brien and hearing her mother ask O’Brien if he knew it.’ [Vol.12, entry for 31 May 1957]
John Conlon’s account of Connolly’s army service was confirmed by John Mullery, one of Connolly’s ISRP members who was later friends with Connolly in New York. Mullery lived in Liverpool as an old man, a few miles from Greaves’s home, and they met several times. The Journal describes Greaves’s first meeting with Mullery as follows:
‘He was delighted to talk, told me Connolly was born in Edinburgh … Did I ever know how Connolly met his wife? He was in uniform at the time … Suddenly I realised I was in the presence of somebody who knew Connolly more intimately than anybody else and whose knowledge stretched further back, and dropped the subject of America … He ran for a tram for Kingstown or Blackrock at the corner of Merrion Square. The conductor did not stop, so he and an attractive young girl missed it together. That started the relationship, since they fell talking. There was never a cross word between them, but sometimes they would jokingly say, “That tram!” The conductor had not seen them, he supposed. In those days the trams would stop anywhere they were hailed. I said I knew he was in the army. He told me that Connolly often spoke to him about it, in New York.’ [Vol.12, entry for 10 June 1957]
There is not space to list the rest of Greaves’s evidence for Connolly’s British Army service – from Danny McDevitt, Peadar O’Donnell, Nora Connolly and others. Greaves kept copies of all the letters that he wrote to people when researching his biographies of Connolly, Mellows and Sean O’Casey. There are around a thousand such letters among his papers. I am currently sorting these for deposit in the National Library, as was his wish. He kept the replies too. His correspondence exchange concerning Connolly’s birthplace and British Army service is now on the website mentioned above, under “Articles and Pamphlets: James Connolly”. If people click on this, they can judge for themselves. Volume 12 of Greaves’s Journal, covering the 1956-57 period when he was doing research on Connolly, is on the website also.
Greaves kept notes of interviews and document excerpts in standard reporters’ notebooks. There are nearly a hundred of these in the Greaves documentary archive, several dealing with his Connolly research, plus a card index referencing interviews with specific individuals in them. Greaves was a meticulous researcher. Few Irish historians will have left such detailed records of their work. I aim to deposit Greaves’s full Journal and all his Connolly research material in the National Library before the year is out.