Discovering Connolly’s Real Birthplace
[Editor’s Note: In the first of the two articles below, “Rip-Roar Now With An Easy Conscience: Connolly’s birthday and the ‘impeccable authorities’, Desmond Greaves describes how he learned the true facts of Connolly’s birthplace from some of Connolly’s youthful contemporaries in Scotland: that Connolly had been born in Edinburgh and not, as had previously been generally thought, in Co. Monaghan, Ireland. The article was carried with the headline below in a special 12-page issue of the “Irish Democrat” that was published in May 1968 to mark the centenary of Connolly’s birth. The second article below, “Connolly in Scotland – Some New Facts”, was written seventeen years before this, in the March 1951 issue of the “Irish Democrat”. Here Greaves for the first time set out the facts of Connolly’s birth in Edinburgh, accompanied by a photograph of his birth certificate. This article attracted little attention in Ireland at the time, and it was only when Greaves’s biography, “The Life and Times of James Connolly”, was published in 1961 that the facts of Connolly’s birthplace in Scotland and his teenage service in the British army became generally known. This earlier article also makes insightful contrasts between the political traditions of the late 19th century Irish emigrants to Scotland and those who emigrated to America.]
Rip-Roar Now With An Easy Conscience!
Connolly’ s birthday and the “impeccable authorities”
By C. Desmond Greaves
On August 3rd 1967 The Guardian published a column headed “Historians Cannot Spoil an Irish centenary.”
It did not purport to be written by a historian. Its author was Mr Robert Brown. Its manner was familiar enough; it was that of the master race condescending to notice the lesser breeds and finding them slightly amusing. But not the worst I ever saw from an English journalist on an Irish question.
The centenary of James Connolly’s birth was to be the occasion for “a proper pan-Celtic celebration on both sides of the water”.
“As Glasgow and Edinburgh Trades Council see it,” wrote Mr Brown, “prompted by last year’s Scottish TUC president Mr A. Kitson, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin socialists should make sure of a rip-roaring tribute to Connolly. Glasgow for instance has initial thoughts of using the city’s Unity Theatre and other artists for a night of rebel song and story in the heart of the Gorbals, a profoundly Irish quarter.”
But Mr Brown was able to unearth the snags. He looked up two “impeccable non-Irish authorities”, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Chambers’s and found that they gave Connolly’s birthday in 1870, and his birthplace as Monaghan. He communicated this discovery to Mr Wyper of the Glasgow Trades Council and recorded that Mr Wyper was “startled” by it.
The authorities must be impeccable of course, being non-Irish. And Mr Brown is strengthened by his judgement of Irish character. In a previous paragraph he speaks of “careless Irish ways”.
The implication is clear. The careless Irish have decided on their rip-roaring pan-Celtic revelry two years before the proper date, because they have been too careless to consult the impeccable non-Irish authorities; but in any case they do not propose to allow these authorities to spoil the fun. “How very Irish,” one can almost hear Mr Brown comment.
So perhaps it is no harm to tell the story of how the impeccable authorities were proved wrong. But we’ll not entitle the article, “New facts cannot spoil English journalist’s complacency.” For we don’t think Mr Brown is really a bad fellow – but for his excessively careful ways.
First, where did the Encyclopaedias get their information from? Obviously from Desmond Ryan’s short life of Connolly published about 45 years ago. I have a copy in my possession that was given me by Sean O’Casey in 1949 or 1950.
Ryan told me how he came to write the book. The material was collected by his father, W.P. Ryan, chairman of the London Gaelic League and later Dublin correspondent of the Daily Herald. After the strain of the Rising, Black and Tans, Treaty and Civil War, Desmond Ryan, who have been devoted to Pearse, fell ill. A nervous breakdown was feared and he had to relinquish his job on the Freeman’s Journal, which anyway folded up. The father handed over his materials, which were not complete, in order to give Desmond something to occupy him. And a good competent job he made of them. This was the first Life of Connolly ever written. Ryan was in his early twenties.
In this book Connolly’s birthplace is given as near Clones, and the date is given as June 5th, 1870.
Years afterwards, after I had succeeded in establishing the correct date, Ryan told me how he got the wrong one. On May 18th, 1951, he wrote to me from Swords:
“The Lyng paragraph was written as publicity for Connolly’s first USA S.L.P. tour in 1902, either when Connolly went there or just before, before I think . . . His only comment on it was a terse sarcasm about the date of his date of birth given as 1870” *
He added that some of his contemporaries thought the date might be 1869.
As for the place, he wrote, “I think you have made your case for Edinburgh conclusively enough.”
And, of course, Ryan was a historian.
It was before I had the idea of writing a Life of Connolly that I went to Edinburgh to try and trace his early connections in that city. My object was to get material for an article in the Irish Democrat.
Others had made the attempt before me. William Paul spent days looking through Scottish newspapers trying to verify that Connolly was Edinburgh’s first Socialist candidate. He did not find the reference because he did not go far enough back.
Before I left for Edinburgh I looked through the material at the Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green.
The secretary was John Morgan, a Russian immigrant who had lived in Scotland as a young man and spoke with a Scottish accent, though in other ways he was a true continental, with a gift for sharp epigrammatic comment. He could not suffer fools.
He advised me to make contact with Len Cotton, secretary of the Socialist Labour Party. “Surely it doesn’t still exist,” said I incredulously. “It does,” he replied. “And he it.”
That was early in February 1951.
I went to Glasgow where Bob McIlhone placed a flat at my disposal near the Mitchell Library. Snow fell each night and melted each day. There was little about Connolly’s early life to be found in Glasgow.
I went to Edinburgh somewhat despondent.
The secretary of the Trades Council, Mr Lossen, showed me the minutes for the years 1891-96. There were many references to a J. Connolly. But was this James or a brother? The City Treasurer took me into the Corporation strong-room and we looked at the Council minutes for the same period. Here it was indicated that a John Connolly had been dismissed for political reasons from his job as a carter. There was nothing about James. Yet Ryan had said clearly that James was dismissed.
Cotton lived out at East Shiels. On the East coast the weather was dry and intensely frosty. As I sped outwards and upwards through the fine country that leads to Soutra I wondered if this was going to be a wild goose chase.
Cotton lived in the gatehouse of what had been a magnificent demesne, and still was indeed. He was in his early seventies and had preserved carefully all the records of the Socialist Labour Party. We looked through the files of the “Socialist”, but there was nothing about Connolly’s early life. I mentioned the dismissal of John Connolly and he replied: “I never heard that Connolly had a brother.”
Only that morning I had missed an opportunity to check this. A man named Monaghan, a painter, came into the Trades Council office. “Here’s a man who wants to know about James Connolly,” said Lossen. “I mind him,” said Monaghan. “Well, can you tell us anything about him?” “I mind him.” And that is all we got. Lossen suggested that he disapproved of Connolly, regarding him as something of a freethinker. Later I found the name of Monaghan among the list of assenters at Connolly’s election. I never found out if it was the same man.
Cotton sent me to Geddes at Barnton. He also expressed the view that Connolly had no brother. I suggested to the City Treasurer that perhaps the minutes were inaccurate. Labourers might not have been very carefully designated by gentlemen in those days. But he rightly insisted that we had no right to assume that. I went back to Glasgow, feeding that the Irish Democrat was not going to get its article.
I had scarcely sat down when there was a knock at the door. It was a telegram from Geddes: “Connolly had a brother. Important contact made. Return to Edinburgh at once.” I locked up the flat, got the key back to Bob McIlhone and took the next train back to Edinburgh.
There Geddes was waiting for me. “I want you to meet an old man who was a close friend of Connolly’s brother John. I’ll come with you as you may not understand his accent, or he yours. His name is John Conlon.”
He lived at the very top of a spiral staircase lit with dim gaslights which he said had been installed as a result of one of James Connolly’s campaigns. I could of course understand him quite easily and wondered about Geddes’s hesitation. He spoke about John Connolly, who enlisted and went to India under the name of John Reid, and about the Scottish Land and Labour League “that we all came from”. He explained that Leslie was a contemporary of John Connolly and closer to him than to James. He described the sessions to study Marx’s Capital, when the Rev. John Glasse translated from the German, and many other events now long forgotten.
At a certain point he referred to “that fellow that came here years ago asking about Connolly.” “You never told him this?” said Geddes. “We did not. We didn’t like the look of him, so we told him nothing.” “What was the matter with him? “He looked to me like a Labour faker.”
So Geddes had gone with me to assure Conlon that I wasn’t a “Labour faker”. Whether the suspected “Labour faker” was one of the two unfortunate Ryans or somebody else I did not dare to ask. I have my own opinion.
Suddenly, after speaking mainly to Geddes, Conlon leaned forward, all his dourness evaporated and asked me with a bright twinkle in his eye, “Did you ever hear where James Connolly was born?” I replied that some said Clones, others Ballybay, but I presumed it was somewhere between the two, in the country. “You never heard it was Cork?” I had not, though later I learned that an Edinburgh paper – probably prompted by Leslie who for reasons that seemed good to him was doing a bit of mystification – had given him a Cork birthplace.
Conlon turned to Geddes. “He was born in the Coog’t.” Where? This time I needed a translation. The Cowgate of Edinburgh. I left with Geddes and told him I didn’t believe it. “It will only cost you three and six to find out.” I had a search made and the birth entry was found. Later I was permitted to examine the original. The date was June 5th alright, but the year was 1868. Afterwards Mr H.A. Scott, an old friend of John Leslie’s who had been introduced to me by Robin Page Arnot, who wrote the History of the British Miners, searched the census records for me and established beyond a shadow of doubt that the entry referred to the right man.
As Ryan wrote to me: “The document must be genuine unless there was a most incredible coincidence, which seems absurd”. I had published a facsimile in the Irish Democrat of March 1951.
Later I started reading the early history of the Scottish Socialist movement more systematically, and in the British Museum I came across H.M. Lee’s reference to Connolly’s birth in Edinburgh. This had apparently been missed by the impeccable authorities, though in fairness to them, it was not they themselves but Mr Brown who advanced the claim to impeccability on their behalf.
The upshot therefore is that the pan-Celtic pandemonium can revel and rip- roar without fearing any restraint from Mr Robert Brown’s careful ways. And to show there’s no ill-feeling, why doesn’t Mr Brown drop in and join us?
*Actually the paragraph was signed Deering and gave the date 1869.
– – –
[From the “Irish Democrat”, March 1951, page 4. A few words are missing on the right hand edge of the electronic version of the monthly paper on this website.]
Connolly in Scotland – Some New Facts
(world copyright reserved)
The true greatness of James Connolly and the magnitude of his achievement is not yet fully appreciated even in Ireland for which he gave his life, and still less in Britain where he spent his youth.
Irish nationalism has been so monstrously misunderstood and neglected in the British Labour movement, British socialism has been consequently so mistrusted in Ireland, that a paper wall has been raised between them. Or perhaps rather than that of a wall, we should speak of a vacuum.
The most advanced developments of British Socialism, including the magnificent literature of the last 15 years, are familiar only to the cognoscenti in Ireland. Likewise, the excellent and well documented literature of Irish nationalism is all but unknown in Britain.
Two literatures exist, which might be in two different languages, and the lack of interchange is a hindrance to both, for as well as overlapping that is a worse objection – vitally important questions are left unsettled, each leaving them to the other. A case in point is the life of James Connolly in Scotland.
Without the Irish, Scotland would never have been industrialised. They dug the railways and canals, built the docks and shipyards, and supplied the cheap labour for the harvesting of vast quantities of corn crops for the growing population, and the production of cheap fuel.
But they did not go to Scotland from choice. They went into conditions which were all but intolerable and where only their Catholic priests so much as treated them as human. But they came out of conditions even worse – famine in the fifties. Not till the nineties did the stream begin to dry.
The mass emigration resulted in the formation of large local colonies – Lochee in Dundee, St. Giles (Edinburgh), Gorbals, Govan and Greenock on the Clyde, the mining towns of Ayr, Lanark, Fife and the Lothians.
In all these centres men whose fathers and even grandfathers never set foot in Ireland proudly speak of themselves as Irish to this very day. Look at the names on the door of a Gorbals tenement – Doherty, Gallagher, O’Donnell, Quigley, Macardle, O’Geoghegan … the origin is unmistakeable.
Eighty years ago these colonies, few of whose members had made their way – as had the American emigrants – to prosperity in the new country, were bitterly anti-British on the two counts: expulsion from their homes because Britain wanted cheap beef from Ireland, and appalling living conditions because Britain wanted cheap labour from Ireland.
The difference in conditions explains, in part, why the Irish in Britain fell under the influence first of the radical Fenians and then of the Socialists, whereas those in America tended to form a reserve for capitalist parties.
Connolly’s father, John Connolly, belonged to such a colony in Edinburgh, where he was married to Mary McGinn in1856. At this time he was a “manure carter” and presumably in the employ of the Corporation.
After the defeat of Fenianism there was little political activity among the Irish till the eighties, when the Land League had a branch in Edinburgh and the Social Democratic Federation was established in 1884. Old inhabitants say that the SDF largely recruited its members from the Land League. The Edinburgh Socialists maintained their unity when, with the secession of the Scottish Land and Labour League, the national organisation split in [? Date unclear on electronic copy], but adopted a federal basis. John Leslie, Edinburgh-born of Irish parents, was secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation which was, to all intents and purposes, the SDF in Edinburgh. The advantage of the federal constitution at the period was that Socialism gained prestige from presenting a united front, and that the struggle between the various standpoints led to the rapid development of a cadre of promising speakers and theoreticians.
The Connolly family grew up during the formative period of Socialism in Scotland and John and subsequently James participated under the influence of John Leslie. In the atmosphere of continued discussion and controversy on matters relating both to Socialism and to Irish nationalism, the young men sharpened their wits and began to qualify as leaders.
John was considered a better speaker than James, who suffered for some years from stammering, which he later overcame. The two brothers were dissimilar in temperament. John was jovial and flamboyant and took a drink. James was keen, witty and logical, but burning with intense passion. He was an abstainer.
In March 1893 John Connolly on behalf of the SSF and John Leslie, for the ILP, asked the Trades Council to hold a major demonstration in favour of the eight-hour day. This was approved and the demonstration took the form of a procession through the city, ending with a mass meeting at the East Meadows – the “Devil’s half-acre” as it was then called – where John Connolly, with others, spoke.
John Connolly was a painter by trade, but during frequent slack periods worked on the. “dung carts”. Following the demonstration he was dismissed. He made an appeal against his dismissal but it was rejected by the Lighting and Cleansing Committee. The Trades Council approached the City Council on his behalf but received a rebuff. As a result of the representations however they persuaded the Committee to hold an investigation. This was done under “Star Chamber” conditions. Connolly’s witnesses were intimidated. The Inspector Mackay who had dismissed John Connolly was present throughout the proceedings, but the workers were not. Connolly lost his case and though the Trades Council protested, that was the end of the matter.
James Conolly himself now became prominent. He was born on June 5th 1868 at 107 Cowgate, Edinburgh (and not in the Co. Monaghan as most historians, following Ryan, have asserted), and was a carter like his father. He may have worked for a time, it is believed, in Perth, where his wife Lily Reynolds, daughter of John Reynolds, a farm labourer, then deceased, worked as a domestic servant. They were married in the Catholic Church at Perth but returned to Edinburgh where Connolly lived at various addresses, moving later to 21 South College Street, shown in the picture [for this photograph see the original copy of the March 1951 “Irish Democrat” on this website].
This address became famous as the club room of the SSF, the ILP and the SDF. John Connolly and Leslie provided the rhetoric and James the premises.
It was not until eighteen months after his brother’s victimisation that James,
now aged 28, decided to stand as Socialist candidate in St. Giles. Ryan says that he resigned from his post in order to stand. Some imply that his reason for standing was indignation at his brother’s victimisation. But eighteen months had elapsed.
He himself gave his reason for entering the election as indignation at the agreement which the Unionists and Liberal Home Rule parties had come to for sharing the city seats between them. His candidature was received with a howl of rage from the United Irish League who accused him of destroying Home Rule by “letting the Tories in”. Church halls were refused him. Lack of funds compelled him to fight the election on chalk. His programme was entirely one of local demands but showed a keen grasp of economics. He was defeated, thanks largely to the leaders of the UIL. But the other Socialist candidate received only 54 votes to Connolly’s 263, possibly because he could not pull Irish votes as Connolly could. His name was Gardener.
John Connolly is said to have encouraged the belief that his victimisation was intended as an attack on James, in order to improve James’s prospects in the election. The two brothers were very devoted, though the story is told – by Lee, who inaccurately gives Connolly’s birthplace as the Grassmarket, Edinburgh – of a fearful schemozzle when John appeared as one of Connolly’s meetings in Dundee years afterwards in the King’s uniform of the Edinburgh Rifles, and James Connolly “let go at him”.
James’s house continued as a centre of the SSF for a time. James used to contribute to the “Edinburgh and Leith Labour Chronicle” under the pen-name of “R. Ascal”. The SSF at this time held regular lectures, at one of which (possibly after the SSF became the SDF) Marx’s son-in-law, Edward Aveling, spoke.
Connolly thus was not only in the direct line of the post-Fenian tradition, he was also in the direct tradition of Marx and Engels, who had seen the English trade union leaders desert the International because Marx demanded Irish independence, and the Irish rally round his standard when the Bakuninist anarchists tried to break the International. It was this bond, forged politically by Marx and Engels, between the most advanced thinkers in Britain and the Irish revolutionaries, which established the position of Irish Socialism in Scotland and thus prepared the soil which could produce a James Connolly.
James Connolly went to Dublin in 1896 at the age of 27 as the apostle of the new teaching. It is said that when his economic circumstances proved too much for him, it was John Leslie persuaded him not to emigrate to Chile but instead to take Marxian Socialism to Ireland.
As is known, Connolly then founded the Irish Socialist [word accidentally omitted] Republican Party and at once set about building a united front of all republican organisations. The party and its paper had an incalculable influence, but in 1903 its publication had to be suspended despite Connolly having collected 400 fully paid subscribers during a tour in America. These subscribers subsequently received the De Leonist “Scottish Socialist”, organ of the Socialist Labour Party, by agreement with the ISRP.
Early in 1903 Connolly became Scottish organiser of the SDF and after the [word missing on electronic version of the newspaper] presiding at the first Congress of the Socialist Labour Party, he became Scottish organiser of the new organisation. He toured Scotland, speaking at [word missing], Kirkcaldy, Dundee and Falkirk. Obscurity surrounds the reason for his departure to the United States. Some say that dissatisfaction with the reception which the new party was getting outside Glasgow and Edinburgh, contrasting in his [mind?/ word missing in electronic text of monthly paper] with his immediate popularity in America, led him to depart in disgust. On the other hand, it is known that during these months he learned linotype operating and passed a test in the art. He may therefore have decided to go to the USA in May when the Workers Republic ceased publication.
He sailed for the USA on September 18th 1903 to become linotype operator at the office of De Leon’s “Weekly People”. It was in the USA that he became acquainted with a new tradition, that of American industrial unionism.
But Britain was near and America far. The Irish took revolutionary Fenianism to Scotland and, being proletarianized, transformed it with the addition of Marxism into Socialist Republicanism. Connolly took the product back to Ireland. But the other current, also still alive in the Irish Labour movement today, that of “New Unionism”, was touched off in Britain before Connolly could get back. The stimulus was brought by Larkin from the other great Irish centre in Britain. Larkin’s parents emigrated from Ulster to Liverpool. The boy was brought up not on the older Fenianism, but as a follower of Michael Davitt, whose influence in Lancashire was immense. He joined the Liverpool branch of the [word missing] at the age of eleven, to the consternation of his elders. Here once more, on the docks of Liverpool, took place the development and transformation of the revolutionary tradition under the proletarianising conditions of exile. Larkin took home what he had learned to Belfast in 1907. The soil was more than ready to receive the seed.
Hence the sequence: British capitalism conquered and ruined Ireland; Irish exiles in Britain became the fertile soil for the ideas which will yet do away with British imperialism.
Ireland gave the working-class movement in Britain two of its greatest figures. Both gave their best energies to the liberation of the country of their forefathers. What if Bernard Shaw also had gone back? He might – if he had not fallen among Fabians!
When Connolly returned from the United States, it was to an island already transformed by Larkinism. The two men formed one of the most formidable combinations in working -class history, as Tom Mann points out in his memoirs.
To do justice to Connolly’s activities, even in a field to which he now devoted but a fraction of his energy, the Labour movement in Scotland, would nevertheless require another article as long as this one. His pen was never idle. A stream of articles and polemics flowed week by week. He contributed to most of the Socialist papers at the time, and showed courage and boldness which was beyond that of any of his contemporaries.
Let all those who shrug their shoulders at the usefulness of the Socialists in the national struggle ponder well over Connolly. It was he above all who was the architect of 1916. It was the leadership of the working class, with its organisation and incorruptibility, which made the Easter Rising the beacon it has been these thirty-five years.
Using the experiences he had gained in three countries, Connolly built up step by step the unity of the national revolutionary forces, completely isolating Griffith, who condemned the transport workers in 1913 as tools of England, and who wanted Ireland independent provided there was no nasty Communist trying to free it. Connolly went on and left Griffith behind, taking with him all the best elements in the national movement, Pearse and Liam Mellows being especially influenced by him. Griffith appeared when the fighting was over to sell the Republic rather than give the workers their rights in it.
Connolly’s teaching amount to this: the capitalist parties, under one pretext or another, always betray the struggle for Irish independence. Only the working class remains its incorruptible inheritor.