Desmond Greaves Journal, Vol.13, 1957, 1960-61

                  June 11 1957 – August 17 1957 

                  August 28 1960 – February 24 1961  

                                      *   *    * 

Main Themes: Further research on James Connolly’s background – Holiday in Uist, Scotland – Three year gap in the Journal record – Sean Caughey and his Council for Civil Liberty  in Northern Ireland – Anthony Coughlan becomes Connolly Association organiser – Connolly Association anti-internment campaign following the ending of the IRA’s 1956-62 Border attacks gets over half the Parliamentary Labour Party to sign  telegrams of protest to Northern Ireland Premier Lord Brookeborough – Betty Sinclair and Billy MacCullough – Justin Keating and Roy Johnston –  Attacks by Gery Lawless and other ultra-leftists – Research in 1960-61 for Greaves’s biography of Liam Mellows – Interviews with Frank Hynes, LS Gogan, Alf Monahan (Ailbhe O Monnchain), Patrick McCartan, Maire Comerford, Bob Briscoe TD, Nora Connolly and others – The MacLiam children – Publication of “The Life and Times  of James Connolly” 

                                             1957

June 11 Tuesday (London): I wrote to Ina Connolly telling her of my conversations with Mulray [properly Mullery], and the letters he had.  She will probably write to him about them, and I hope that this may encourage him to open up some of the things he was anxious to keep secret.

June 12 Wednesday: Just outside Hyde Park whom should I bump into but Valman. He could never keep his tongue still.  “Are you out of the party?” he asked.  “I am not,” said I.  “Well, I am. – I have only realised how terrible the leadership is, in these past few years.  But we’re still comrades,” he chattered on.  I was not so sure.  However it would be hard to take him too seriously.  I met him first when I went to BCURA [British Coal Utilisation Association] in 1944.  I had just come from “Catalin”, a luxury factory temporarily undertaking research “of national importance” in order to hold its staff together through the “emergency”.   The atmosphere was corrupt.  The thing was a farce and a fraud, and an ugly one at that.  Then, making the most lucky transfer of my industrial life, I moved from North East to South West London, went out to Coombe Springs, Kingston, on the rickety producer-gas bus, which panted its way through Roehampton, picking up staff as it went, and found there clean, well-lighted, efficiently conducted laboratories filled with dozens upon dozens of young people in their twenties and teens, making me at 30, quite an old man.  The AScW [Association of Scientific Workers] steward was Valman, voluble, genial, easily impressed, a great follower of orthodoxy in so far as he understood it, now as unreflectingly heterodox, and in the Labour Party.

August 1 Thursday:  I had a letter a few weeks ago from Ina Connolly saying she had written to Mulray.  Then came one from Mulray saying he was sorry he had not told me more about Connolly. Would I get in touch with him again. Unfortunately he was going into hospital.  It so happened I was in Liverpool after getting the August issue out – it would be about 10th July – so I called in to the Royal Infirmary, taking some red carnations, and spent a few minutes with him.  He warned me about the letter to the Hibernians.  Connolly was not present when it was sent.  He seems very concerned about this.   It was a bright fine day for this extraordinarily cloudy year and I enjoyed my trip.   Now Desmond Logan [Connolly Association activist] and I are preparing for a holiday in Scotland.  I am working at Colindale every day [in the British Library newspaper collection].

August 8 Thursday:  We made our final arrangements for the trip to Scotland.  We had intended to go tomorrow night but cancelled it.  Saturday morning.

August 10 Saturday:  We caught a train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh which was as slow as it could contrive to be, was full of trippers smoking in the non-smoking cars, but which got us to Edinburgh.  We walked along Princes St. to the other Station, after I had shown Des Logan some of the Connolly connections around the Grassmarket, and then took the train to Stirling, where after some difficulty we found a place to stay overnight.  We had first considered going to Callander but having caught a later train decided not to.

August 11 Sunday: We took the train to Crianlarich, and walked around the local hills till the Highland Railway train came for Fort William.  We found a connection there which was not on the board, so went on to Mallaig and found a place to stay, again with difficulty.   In the evening we walked to Monar.

August 12 Monday:  At midday we took the steamer to Lochmaddy, and a most interesting trip it is, what with Egg, Rum and Canna (Rum is a magnificent island, but still monopolised  by an American millionaire) the coastline of Skye and Lochboisdale in South Uist.  The sea was like a millpond, and we stood on deck and ate well.

August 13 Tuesday (Benbecula, Uist): We left Lochmaddy in the morning, and walked across North Uist to Carinish, over country so intersected by inlets and lakes that it was impossible to distinguish one from another, in all these innumerable levels.  There were white waterlilies in the lakes and seaweed in the sea. Otherwise you could not tell which was which.  It did not take us long to get across, thanks to a lift in a builder’s wagon, and about one o’clock we faced the “North Ford”, said to be a somewhat risky crossing except at the very depth of low water.  Anyway, it was this very thing.   

It began with some mud flats where highland cattle glared fiercely at the intruders – attractive beasts – and we were then able to follow the tracks of a motor lorry in the sand, with the aid of the bearings on my map.  The ford swings away two miles to the South East before turning sharply South West, and ending slightly to the west of Carinish.      .  About half way across we met a fellow traveller who showed us the huge beacon on the South side which we must make for.

There is no doubt it could be dangerous enough.  There are rocky islets half way across, which I tripped merrily over since I was wearing sand shoes.  But at the sides of them, and indeed in other places too, the shallow pools left by the tide shelved sharply into regular potholes, possibly twelve to fifteen feet deep.  I noticed that this occurred where the sand was slightly flexotropic and so went carefully wherever water was accumulated near slippery sand.  These pools also contained much  free matter in suspension, as the water had that slightly phosphorescent appearance found on the Cornish coast where the china clay gives it a green coloration.  It was a most interesting trip.  Once on Benbecula we persuaded the innkeeper to give us tea, and so walked on to Creagorry where again with great difficulty we found accommodation.

The preparations for the rocket range have filled all the hotels and lodging houses.  More are expected every day.  There is already an RAF camp on Benbecula, and it has a deserted chicken-run appearance, like the shanty suburbs of a Yankee town.  The woman where we stayed spoke fluent Gaelic, and what was interesting, was a native of Motherwell.  Her husband worked in a tweed mill.  But self-sufficiency is no more.  The yarn comes from Oban, and if it is delayed there is no work. Benbecula is as deserted as North Uist, but this is not so obvious since it is almost drearily flat.  At night I was sorry I had worn the sandshoes as I had rubbed the skin off my two heels.  But yet, Benbecula is civilized.  There was elastoplast in plenty at the shop, which is making its fortune.  “Wait till the other shops come,” said our hostess. “They’ll not like that.”   There is a hospital plane to take seriously ill people to Glasgow from Benbecula airfield.  Shortly the North Ford is to be bridged and the road tarred in 1944 will link all these islands into one.   Before the days of the airfield people had to be taken via Lochboisdale to Oban, which our hostess described as a “terrible journey” – or else they “just died”.   There are then two sides to the defence of Gaelic culture – the old ‘way of life’ economically speaking was one of drudgery on the land and no quarter.  The improvements have brought the welfare state plus militarism.

August 14 Wednesday (Lochboisdale):  We crossed the South Ford by the road, which is not more than a mile long. The old ford was as circuitous as the North one.  We were walking along the ribs of South Uist and had just reached the mountains by Snishval   when the heavens opened.  Fortunately a fisherman drove by in his car and took us into Lochboisdale.  There never was such luck.  There was a bus today, since the boat runs, but it would not travel till late in the evening.  The wind rose to a gale.  We walked round Lochboisdale between violent showers, and sat in the ferryman’s hut between times.  I had bought a little camera at Lochmaddy, but could not use it, though this was the very place you would wish to use it.  It did however clear somewhat towards evening, though the wind held up.  Indeed the bay attracted fishing boats for shelter.  There was talk of lifeboats out, flares being sent up, and heaven knows what.  Des Logan bought himself some hyoscine  pills.   We embarked about 9 pm.  I didn’t bother about the pills.  I wanted to try out my theory of sea-sickness in a really rough sea.  I have long believed that if you can train your reflexes to follow the motion of the boat you will not be sick.  The principle is perhaps not so far removed from that of painless childbirth.  Anyway I was not sick – not that I ever am, though whether I would be if I ran about on deck all the time I don’t know – and Des Logan merely “felt a bit queer”.   The sea seemed to calm unexpectedly when we left Barra, and after passing Coll and Tiree we found a bright fresh morning. Our last call was at Tobermory in Mull and finally we reached Oban.

August 15 Tuesday: I had intended pushing on, but Des Logan, whose bodily vigour is less than his solid frame and physical strength would indicate, wanted to rest.  Accordingly he did so and we took the 5 pm. train back to Stirling, and stayed at the same place again.

August 16 Friday:  While Des Logan went straight to London, I decided to go to Perth and see if it were possible to trace Connolly’s addresses there.  I did so.  I found the Angus family, and also a Peter Boyle very close to Connolly’s address.  If this was the Fenian uncle we are seeking then we have the whole story.  I guess that Connolly lodged with Bridget Reilly and possibly Boyle found him a place to stay in.  This information I obtained from the Perth Library.   Then I returned to Stirling, made a few purchases, and took the through train to Euston.

August 17 Saturday (London): I wrote to the War Office in hopes of locating Connolly in the army before I left for Scotland.  A reply awaited my return.  My enquiry had been sent on to the Public Record Office.  They also had replied to good effect – they thought they had the information that I was seeking, in the ‘musters’ of the Kings Liverpool regiment.  So with luck I may be able to write the thing out.  I am looking for a name appearing as a recruit in July 1882, and a disaster (or casualty) in February 1889, who was also in Cork Harbour in November 1882.  It may be discoverable.

          [There is here a three-year gap in the Journal record]

                                      1960

August 28 Sunday (Dungannon):  After exactly three years I resume this journal, in the badly lit waiting room at Dungannon station.  I spent the night in Belfast, after a discussion with Jack Bennett out at his home temporarily made in Whitehead, Co. Antrim [Bennett was then working as a journalist on the Belfast Telegraph and writing the influential “Claud Gordon” weekly column in the Northern Ireland edition of Ireland’s “Sunday Press”].  I persuaded him to allow me to publish a pamphlet he has written as a serial in the Democrat.  It raises too many demands.  He will write another, more intimate in style.  The discussion was necessary. The campaign we have been waging for the release of the Belfast internees is proving successful [Republican prisoners then interned without charge or trial in Belfast by the Northern Ireland Government arising from the IRA’s 1956-61 border campaign]. Out of 167 originally interned only 104 remain.  The remainder will probably be let out before Christmas.  What is our next demand to be?  Our Executive Council met in Leicester last Sunday and decided to make it the repeal of the Special Powers Act.  Jack Bennett was easily persuaded that this was the wisest course.  This morning I saw Sean Caughey [independent civil libertarian with Sinn Fein republican connections] who has built up a small but quite influential Council for Civil Liberty here.  He was inclined to make the next demand the abolition of unequal voting.  But I told him that this would meet with no response in Britain, and that the next step should follow logically from the last.  Later perhaps the whole subject of gerrymandering could be publicised, but we do not want to start again at zero.  Our cry in respect of the Special Powers Act is, “Internment?  Never again!”  I was very pleased that Caughey acquiesced in this.

He told me that the Council for Civil Liberty is founding its tactics on the methods of “pressure grouping” adopted by the Connolly Association. He has an immense admiration for Jack Bennett, and was glad to see Tom Redmond and Des Logan when they were over recently.  Of those released Boswell will express no gratitude.  He has no time for anybody who is not a “physical force” man.  Steele [Jimmy Steele, leading IRA veteran] on the other hand he describes as “broad minded”, which is not the description Joe Deighan gave me of him.

Another thing I did this morning was to call on Miss McKinley at 27, Campbell Park Avenue.  She is a cousin of Mellows [Liam Mellows,1892-1922, leading Irish War of Independence figure].  What a change in three years.  I am collecting material for the life of Mellows.  “Connolly” is being set up in type and I expect proofs in October.  I started the Mellows quest last December when I went for a weekend to Glenmalure Youth Hostel [in Co.Wicklow].  Roy [Roy Johnston] brought out his noisy “gogomobile” and took me to Inch. The object was to seek relatives.  We happened by accident to have chosen the day of the annual commemoration.  Mr.O’Hanlon who was present told me about Mrs Milo Brady (née Whitmore) whom I visited at 8 Primrose Avenue, Dublin. She gave me immense help, including the address of Mr P. Fahy in Tullyra, Co. Galway, and a photograph of Mellows’s sister which I copied.  I went to Tullyra in May, cycling from Ballinasloe to Mountshannon, hoping to see another relative at Tulla, but not having time.  I cycled again from Mountshannon to Tullyra, was enthusiastically received by Pat Fahy, and urged to come again in a car, so that he could show me the notable places of the Rising [which Mellows had led in Co.Galway]. This I planned to do in July, but the shipping clerks strike prevented me.  At last all was clear and on Wednesday morning I arrived in Dublin.  Roy had a cold, which he gave me, and I still have it.  I was helped to it by the circumstances of the trip to Galway in Cathal’s car [his friend Cathal MacLiam, now living in Dublin].  He appeared early enough, and we sped merrily across the Midlands to his sister’s house near Tyrrellspass, where tea was ready for us.  In the back of the car were Helga’s [ie. Mrs MacLiam] two sprawling guests – a boy of 14 and a girl of 16, her sister’s children. When we reached Tullyra the sun still shone brilliantly.  Padhraig Fahy and his wife were delighted.  After a cup of tea we went to look at the place where the tent was pitched, and the scene of the mobilization [ie. of Liam Mellows and his men in the 1916 Rising]. Then we went over the start of the escape route, as the clouds gathered and an ugly squall line appeared in the north.  By the time we reached Gort the heavens opened.  We had a substantial meal at the Fahy’s waiting for it to clear.   It didn’t, we had to push through it.  The girl had provided herself with a three week old puppy which she fell in love with at Pat Fahy’s brother’s farm.  She thinks she will be allowed to take it to Germany.  The wee animal was untrained and created a contretemps in the car.  We procured a box.  The torrents came down.  The windscreen wipers stopped.  Cathal worked them by hand.  Then the screws loosened and fell out.  Finally one of the wipers fell off; and we could not see the flood patches in the road. Cathal took all this quite philosophically, even nonchalantly, and the children enjoyed it.  We arrived back at Rathmines in the small hours, and I caught Roy’s cold.

Now, to return to Miss McKinley, I called there quite early, guessing that as they lived in a Protestant area they would not be at Mass.  Mrs. Peyton, a woman of about 60, answered the door.  I asked for Mrs. McKinley.  “Surely not?  – you mean Miss McKinley.”   Then came my gorgeous gaffe – I had confused her with her mother who is dead – “An old lady”.   There was a cloud of surprise.  It was my turn to be surprised when a small, neat, slim and chic woman of about 65-70 appeared – anything less like an “old lady” (I had visualised her in a bath chair) would not be imagined.  It was partly Rita Brady’s fault.  She is only about 56, and feels of a younger generation.   Unlike Miss McKinley she is really interested in Mellows, but not like the Fahys who are political still and take the United Irishman [the contemporary Sinn Fein paper].  All Miss McKinley could tell me was that the second soldier on a photograph which Brady had lent me was Wm. Mellows senior’s brother Frederick, and that the Mellows family came from Leek, in Staffordshire.  This was important, of course.  She had known them when young, but saw little of Liam when he entered “the movement”.   The father, she thought, was a bandmaster. The house was like an orchestra ­– everybody played something, violin, piano, piccolo – an extremely musical family.  Of the four children two died of tuberculosis, Liam was executed and Herbert (Barnie) took diabetes and drank himself to death.

And now, there are signs of life on this cold, ill-lit station in the dreary town of Dungannon, where there are NO cafes open on Sunday (but a poisonous fish and chip bar), and nothing for anybody to do but lean against shop fronts and look at the bunting in red, white and blue, the “Remember 1690” arches and the Union Jacks.

August 29 Monday (Omagh, Donegal):  How I got to Dungannon yesterday I did not explain.  After leaving Caughey I took the train to Portadown. There was no connection for Omagh, so I cycled to Dungannon, where the heavens opened and I was delayed.  I half thought of staying there the night but decided to come on to Omagh.  It was dark when I arrived, but I found accommodation at the Melville Hotel, which had a bar open till 11 pm. filled with locals with Sacred Heart badges.  The porter, Seamus, a lad of about nineteen, also wore one, so I gathered the establishment was Catholic and I was just as pleased.  But I was too tired to stay up and talk, so the hotel might as well have been Buddhist.

Next morning, after a dull dry spell in which I procured new brake blocks and bought a few items of food, a steady drizzle came down.  I walked round Omagh till it became a downpour, and repaired to the railway station to wait for the ‘bus to Ballyshannon.  I had hoped to have cycled over to Donegal, through Castlederg.   Although I was here some hours I found Omagh not easily recognised.  Of course it has not changed.  But since I was here about the beginning of September 1946, there has been one big change, and that is the end of petrol rationing.  Today instead of a quiet Main Street, whose shops would be clearly seen from either side, there is now a “through route” raucous with lorries and badly driven cars.  These are parked at intervals, and obscure the buildings interruptedly, and so seem to alter the character of the place.  The various testimonies to advancing idiocy which have crossed from England are here too, but the two latest, the scooter and the transistor radio, are mercifully absent.  In Dublin it is common to see apparently sane people walking along with a radio carried like an attaché case, the incredibly tinny music issuing from it being heard in snatches between pulses of heavy traffic!  The one thing reminiscent of 1946 is the weather.  I recall it that year well, a promising start, like this year, then the deluge.  I crossed from Liverpool to Belfast, and well remember the sense of liberation in crossing the Bann and heading for the west.  I stopped at Tamreagh at the foot of the Sperrins.  That is closed down.  Then I went to Tra na Rossan.  At Kilmacrennan I went into a barracks for ration cards.  When I protested that “Charles Desmond” in whose name they were issued was only half my name, it was gently indicated that I could always get another card on the strength of the other half.  All went well – it must have been about 2nd September.  Then lightning flashed, thunder roared, and I arrived in Omagh drenched.  From there I went to Lough MacNean  – drenched again.  That also is closed [ie.the Youth Hostel]. Alan Morton and I went there the next year, the great year.  Then I went South through Tubercurry, Galway and Limerick.  I think I stayed at Oughterard and Limerick.  It rained almost every day till I drew in at Peter O’Connor’s in Waterford.  I remember the chilly night and misty full moon that announced that summer was over.

I found myself the only passenger on the Ballyshannon bus.  “How will the transport survive?” asked the Republican Customs man at Belleek.  Behind us was the length of Lough Erne and Boe Island – with a B-man [ie. a member of the B-Special Constabulary] armed with a sub-machine gun, looking dark and glum and fed-up at each end.  They waved apathetically to the driver.  Nobody was interested in the passenger.

We passed alongside the railway closed down by the Northern Ireland Government in its attempt to wreck communications with the Republic.  Its rails were rusty but were not yet “lifted” pending some agreement with the authorities this side of the border.  “The day of the railway is over,” said the driver of the empty bus.  But he regretted Bundoran Station where millions of people stood on pleasure excursions, and remembered that it was now a cattle shed.  The weeds, indeed young trees, were coming up through the track, and the sleepers had rotted away.  The railway line had become a nature preserve for ecological successions, to end as the densest jungle.

I cycled to Donegal town and reached the hostel at Bull Hill.  Out of about fifteen, there was one Irishman from Dublin, and a Welshman and his wife.  The rest were Swiss, German, Argentinian and French.   The Youth Hostel Movement, like every other amenity, is being engulfed by the all-monopolising only permitted amenity, the motor car, the most misused invention of modern times.  The YHA was founded to bring young people into contact with the country.  They were encouraged to travel under their own steam.  All but two French boys and myself were either driving cars and looking for a cheap hotel, or “hitch-hiking”.  In effect the Youth Hostels which were ever so promising have become cosmopolitan enclaves, where hitch-hikers discuss the motor routes where free transport is not easily available.  The ambition is to pass through as many places as possible and talk about this as some kind of achievement.  The traveller is insulated from the country in which he is travelling by the exclusive nature of his transport and the cosmopolitanism of his lodgings.  The warden told me she had noted the degeneration of the quality of her visitors over the five years of her occupancy of Bull Hill.  In sum, the movement which ought to be linked with the Ministry of Education is becoming an appendage of Bord Failte – a branch of the foreign currency-earning tourist industry, that is, an agency through which to promote the sale of petrol and profits of oil companies.

August 30 Tuesday (Tubercurry):  I cycled to Tubbercurry and called in to Pat Durcan. He was much the same, though older looking.  I was last there in 1948 – on the day of Yeats’s funeral.  All the school children were lined up to see the cortege pass on its way from Galway to Drumcliffe.  He and I had been for a walk north of the town, and we found ourselves walking down the centre of the road as if we were a counter-cortege ourselves.  I admit to some embarrassment, walking between the rows in cycling shorts – and I recall looking at Durcan.  He was as red as a beetroot.  A countryman does not like something too unusual.  That time I saw Power and Phil Mannion, two of the local Labour people.   They are still here but I will not have time to see them.  Durcan told me I had changed; was growing stout, and I have to recognise that unpalatable fact also.  Ina Connolly made the same comment in Dublin last week.  But that is something nothing can be done about.

His house is down a boreen off the Ballina road.  He farms a small holding with the aid of his wife, and acts as agent for the Board of Social Welfare.  He rather reminds me of MacDonald up in Inveralligan, a swarthy bronzed man, born of the people but self-educated above them, the general guide and secular confessor of the district.

He told me about Dwyer [ie. Walter Dwyer of Kiltimagh, Co Mayo, the Mayo “communist” whom Greaves knew when he stayed in Curraun, Achill, in 1951. See Volume 10]. Josephine, his wife, has left him and is living in London with an Englishman (I believe) whom she met at Butlin’s holiday camp when she won first prize for being the most glamorous grandmother in the British Isles!  Some weeks ago I was telephoned by Padraig Dwyer, who is working as a plumber in Hammersmith.  I remember him ten years ago in Kiltimagh, a young boy in his bare feet, now grown up and the painter cut.  He dropped some hint of the situation to me, but I did not display excessive interest.  “I’m sorry for Dwyer,” said Durcan. “He’s crocked.  He’s wearing dark clothes like a man of seventy”.  He would be about 59, and she about 40.  But, be it urged in her defence, it is not as if, in the days when she was pinioned at home with the children, he was himself totally incapable of looking at another woman!  Ironically enough, financially he is now doing very well.

Durcan was undismayed by the Hungarian events.  He is by far the most astute of the country people connected with the Irish Workers League – I think he is not a member but calls in to Nolan – and occupies an official position among the people.  He was not dismayed, but drew in his horns slightly.  He is a practising Catholic – “though frankly if things were different, or I was living in London, I’d hardly bother” – and a pioneer [ie. an abstainer from alcohol].  He told me of the continued exodus to England, and of the farms none too sedulously cultivated in occupation, now handed over to neighbours as grazing, and left to become weedy and waterlogged.  The attraction in Britain is “high wages”, and the desire seems to affect men of considerable years as well as the youth.  The hours worked are seldom brought into focus.

August 31 Wednesday (Athenry):  Durcan cycled with me as far as Charlestown, Co. Mayo, and then I went on through rain and Tuam to Athenry.  The wee girl in the hotel had never heard of Frank Hynes so I went out into the centre of the town and asked an elderly man.  His face was suffused with pleasure when I told him why I wanted Hynes.  He took me in to the house.  His wife invited me in.  She was not however immediately satisfied of my bona fides.  Hadn’t a man from the “Kerry Eagle” come and borrowed Frank’s only copy of his statement to the Military Bureau. She was surprised at her husband not seeing through him.  But upon its becoming clear that I really did know people closely connected with Mellows, she became quite enthusiastic, not forgetting to tell me however that two of her sons were priests, and two of her daughters nuns.   My guess was that the piety was hers, and the politics her husband’s. Not that his politics were Fahy’s.  The slight impatience I detected in Fahy when speaking of Hynes is doubtless due precisely to the old distinction between left and right.  Thus Hynes scouted the notion that Mellows would entertain such a thing as land agitation.  The suggestion that he favoured it was merely a device to discredit him.  Compare Fahy – “Discredit him?  Well, maybe that was the intention of the Connaught Tribune; but that would be for Dublin.  It wouldn’t discredit him – not in the County Galway”.  Hynes no less denounced the Tribune as a “Tory rag, always West-British to the core”. But he told me that in 1907 there were 300 RIC men sent to Athenry because of the town tenants’ agitation, and that a successful boycott was organised.  Much of this was recorded in the Western Newspublished in Ballinasloe.

The daughter, Una O’Maolise Hynes – Mellows’s god-child – made us some tea.  Hynes was very willing to tell the story of his escape.  Together with what Fahy told me I could use it to trace the route, though there are still obscurities which he believed Monahan [ie. Alf Monahan/Ailbhe O Monnchain] – still alive in Dublin – who “has a better memory” could clear up.  I was very interested to see “Liam’s room”, where he used to stay with them, and obtained a number of small items of information which fill in the picture.

September 1 Thursday (Dublin):  In the morning I cycled into Galway City.  It rained again, so I gave up the notion of going into Co. Clare, and cycled through Loughrea to Athlone, where I had a meal at the Bon Bon restaurant, which Cathal thinks is too expensive, but which gives you a good feed.  Then I waited at the station for the 10 o’clock train to Dublin, after ringing up Roy to say I was coming.

The Guard brought me in the evening papers.  “We like to be a bit lonely on this ould train,” he explained – it is a mail train which carries a few goods wagons and limited passenger accommodation.  At Mullingar he calls passengers who go for a drink so that they will not be on tenterhooks.  At Mullingar I spoke with a woman returning to Longford town. I mentioned the Longford News, and she spontaneously gave me a good account of Vincent Gill, its Editor.

September 2 Friday:  I called in to the National Library for a few minutes, and was very lucky in tracing townlands on the escape route.  Then after acquiring some large scale ordnance maps, I met Roy and Brian Farrington in a pub on the corner of Cuffe St.  Well-bearded on the face, Farrington is also concealed by some fluffy strands of spiritual overgrowth, but quickly warmed to praise of his party [Brian Farrington, born 1925, poet and language academic]. He is teaching English in Paris.  His wife is a historian.  The “only thing he enjoys” is writing poetry, and he was delighted to hear that Con Cronin, the building labourer, had been learning one of his poems by heart.  His hero is Yeats.  Roy told me later that he comes of the same broken-down small landlord class that Yeats came from, and the beard and the ethical noli-me-tangere no doubt comes from that.  I told him about Ewart Milne [left-wing poet], whose writings he barely knows.  He will make somebody else for Ewart to quarrel with.  But unlike Ewart he does not profess to be a political theorist and is consquently open to learn from experience.  He thought what he had seen of Milne’s writing lacking in condensation and requiring the pruning knife.  I encouraged him to consider a proper biography of Yeats.  But he must go to Sligo and get to the bottom of his social roots, and forget the irrelevant ingenuities of “psycho-analysis”.

September 3 Saturday:  I got up early.  Roy had me at Dun Laoire at 8.3O am.  The boat did not sail till 11.45 am.  Then it wasted a half hour outside Holyhead Harbour till the Princess Maud (delayed by a late train)  made room for it. The train left 45 minutes late.  Then it waited near Lichfield for a half hour because the engine of the “Red Rose” had broken down.  We pulled into Euston at five to eleven!

September 4 Sunday (London):  I went to Hyde Park in the afternoon, but rain had interrupted the meeting.  Michael Keane was there.  He had been home to Athleague and confirmed my own observations of the decline of Sinn Fein. The small farmers were hardest hit – the working class was enjoying a boom – and the rodomontade of its orators was no substitute for an economic policy.  The prices of stock had fallen.  Pigs were all but unsaleable – so his friends informed him.  Everybody was discontented but nobody envisaged an alternative.  The new factories mostly used youth labour, which was exploited until it became of the age to emigrate.  Opinion on the Congo, where Irish troops have joined the UNO forces, was strongly divided, the majority in favour, others very sceptical.  This confirms what I found – Durcan said the most “thinking and intelligent” people were sceptical.  Fahy and his wife likewise asked why send troops to Africa rather than the Six Counties.

John O’Reilly was also present and rejoined.  He took over in Nottingham after Chris Maguire’s defection.  We had quite an excitement one night

in 1955 – soon after Arborfield [an IRA raid in Britain to secure arms for the late 1950s Border campaign].  We passed a gun-shop and joked about the IRA.  Two policemen followed us to the public house where we had a drink, stopped us outside and took a paper off Maguire.  “Here is one you’ll NOT be paid for.”  O’Reilly grew very excited and would have had us all arrested, but I calmed him.  “We don’t want anything to start in Nottingham,” declared the sergeant.  After returning to London I wrote to Captain Popkiss, then Chief Constable, who “noted my remarks” and grudgingly returned the paper.  He had demanded the names of the employers of O’Reilly, Maguire and Terry Gallogley, and I wrote again about that. My remarks were “noted”.

I met Tony Coughlan in the evening.  He has now taken up his duties as full-time organiser of the Connolly Association, for which the members subscribed a guarantee of £500 [a job he worked at for the ensuing year, when he went to live and work in Dublin].  He was at home for three weeks [in Cork] till last Sunday and saw much of Jim O’Regan [leftwing Republican and Spanish civil war veteran].  He also had the impression that Sinn Fein is dispirited because after four years from their zero hour, the border raids have produced nothing palpable.  There is much criticism of the leadership, mostly on grounds of lack of democracy and of receptivity to new ideas.  Our reply to the United Irishman’s small-minded attack on the sellers of the Irish Democrat was very well received by six members of Sinn Fein to whom he passed copies.  They all congratulated him on the “dignity” of our reply.  Tony and Alan Patrick suffered from the attentions of the police, who even interviewed the minister of Patrick’s Methodist church to ask if he attended to his devotions. When I arrived in Dublin the week before last they told me Tony was calling some kind of meeting in Cork, and I thought it unwise.  But little harm can come from it, and a good measure of education.

September 20 Tuesday: After a week in London, I went to Manchester on the 12th to help in the preparations for a demonstration which took place on Sunday, a miraculously fine day set in a chain of dismal ones.  About 150 walked from Platt Fields to All Saints, something near twice those who did so last year.  But those who assembled were slightly fewer.  This I ascribe partly to the fine day, falling on the last Sunday of summer, and also partly to the somewhat amateurish methods of organisation which prevail in Manchester, despite an enormous amount of work done.  The principal speaker there was John Caughey [ie. Sean Caughey of the Belfast Civil Liberty Council] but Horace Newbold was there [Secretary of the Manchester Trades Council], looking distinguished but increasingly aged, and LH Addie who is said to have been arrested on the platform of the Holborn Hall while a member of the old Irish Self-Determination League [a solidarity movement in Britain during the Irish War of Independence 1919-20].  I left Manchester yesterday morning, went to Ripley to lay out the paper, and reached London again last night.  Sean Redmond and Sean Caughey were waiting for me ­– for two hours, which was the time the train was overdue.

This morning I saw Tony, still full of enthusiasm.  He has thrown himself into his new job with great gusto.  He and Tom Redmond especially typify the fine type of young people who now so largely compose our movement.  Sean Redmond I consider of heavier calibre, but he has the darker cast of greater maturity, and a certain mistrustfulness of this cross-grained world.  I learned from Tony that the South London branch [of the Connolly Association] had enrolled eleven new members since it started and is now within two of West. The Willesden meeting went badly, and the West branch is not drawing good attendances.  There were fears that tonight’s meeting in Islington – on which Tom and Sean have spent £17, will not be a success.  But the fears were groundless.  After I reached the Holloway Hall Tom was in a human chain, handing chairs from the basement to provide the latecomers with seats.  This happened several times.  Caughey made an effective speaker, modest, restrained but tinged with a likeable patriotic emotion.   The audience contributed £14.14 to the collection, which with the grant in aid of £2.10 provided by the Standing Committee will cover all their expenses.  Caughey was greatly encouraged. Sean and Tom [the Redmond brothers]were cock-a-hoop.  The meeting was noteworthy for the number of representatives of other Irish organisations present.

September 21 Wednesday:  We had a finance committee in the evening at which Pat Bond gave us the unwelcome news that we are short of £110 in our budget till October 31.  Worse still we need £85 by September 30.  I made the suggestion that £50 be raised by increasing the Democrat circulation by 1000 in each month (we get four months credit and of course it does not cost £25 a thousand) and that £60 be raised by public subscription.  We were rather surprised that Sean Redmond did not come.  Tom told us he was playing football, a craze he shares with Brian Wilkinson who declares that if a revolution took place on a Saturday, he couldn’t be there as he’d have to watch “Sheffield United”.  Just what made him think that they would share his infatuation, as professionals, I don’t profess to know.

September 22 Thursday: I went to the new South London branch, Rossiter [ie. Bobby Rossiter] is so proud of. Cal is secretary [ie. Callaghan O’Herlihy, Corkonian and a friend of Anthony Coughlan’s at University College Cork, who had introduced the latter to the Connolly Association on his first night in England in autumn 1958], but came in late, and slumped dejectedly in the background, later leaving with pouts like any spoiled child.  He is an illustration of how easy it is to be a great revolutionary as a student, on your parents’ money, and in the shelter of your security. But before time has stolen on his wing the three and twentieth year, the real inconveniences of non-conformity present themselves.  Cal married a likeable non-political girl, with the most perfect “poor little thing” act ever performed by a prima donna.   With this she melts the most refractory materials, including Cal’s attachment to his revolutionary principles.  Hence he is a dissatisfied young fellow, with a bad conscience and a pride to which he himself has dealt the injury.

September 23 Friday: Des Logan and I went to Kilburn in the evening [to sell the monthly paper], and made our contribution to the £50.  Logan says his stomach is troubling him again.  He is curiously lacking in physical stamina for such a big fellow but at the same time “his beak can hold more than his belly can” and he is always taking on things he can’t do.

September 24 Saturday:  Roy called in the morning to borrow a bicycle on which he proposes to go house-hunting [Roy Johnston had moved from Dublin to work with Messrs Guinness at Park Royal in West London for two years].  By nightfall he had found Bardie Tyrrell’s flat which I mentioned to him a few weeks ago, had taken it, signed an agreement, telephoned Mairín [his wife]and started moving in.  He then arranged with Guinness’s to start work there on Monday instead of Monday week, and with the prospect of “doing less for more” than he ever did in his life, promised something for the funds as soon as possible.  The redoubtable Bardie is charging him £7 a week, but has consented to take the two children which surprised Elsie [Elsie O’Dowling, maiden name Timbey, veteran CA member and friend of Bardie Tyrrell’s].

September 25 Sunday:  I reached Camden Town to find Tom Redmond waiting for Sean who had gone playing football again.  He failed to arrive.  But there was no meeting for other reasons.  A policeman told Tom that under the Public Order Act they were forbidden, and Tom accepted it.  Then, in the Black Cap [public house] we met a Belfastman who told us there was a meeting at the “Silverdale” storm centre itself, with police consent.  He also told us he was sore from head to foot from blows from truncheons during the “street battles” of three days ago, and that the South Bank building workers who had marched up to 2000 strong from the Shell building site, had charged the police.  He felt the “direct action committee” of which he was a member, had gone too far. Later Sean told me that the sinister figure of Gerald Lawless was to be seen wielding a steel bar with provocative effect [Gery Lawless 1936-2012, leading light in the Trotskyist Irish Workers Group in London in the 1965-68 period; later a Labour councillor in Islington].  Lawless is the man who sued the Irish Government under the Human Rights Convention.  He also joined the North London Connolly Association, intrigued with Andy O’Neill, allowed himself to be recruited into the YCL by Eibhlish O’Shea [Dr Elizabeth O’Shea] – then met Tom Redmond in Dublin and admitted he was a spy for the MacCrystal group [a breakway from the IRA].  A very savoury character!

September 26 Monday: Roy came to the North London meeting, but the attendance was poor. Several members have recently moved, and possibly it is in reaction to this that Sean is not at his best.

September 27 Tuesday:  Fortyseven today – amazing! – nos et mutamur in illis [Times change and we change with them].  I celebrated it with a bottle of Beaujolais late at night, being busy all day.  A letter and some handkerchiefs came from Mary Greaves [his aunt in Portsmouth] and a cake from PAG [his sister Phyllis in Birkenhead] with whom I had a word on the phone in the evening.  She has been ill with a heavy cold, was in bed for four days, but is now rather better.  She blames the abominable weather – nothing but rain since the end of June, and (I add) an ugly anticyclone over Greenland which may bode no good for the winter.

September 28 Wednesday: Desmond Logan rang up to complain that Chris Sullivan as chairman had killed some of his proposals at an otherwise highly satisfactory meeting last night.  Chris and Tony said the proposals were “daft” and deserved no better treatment.  So I tried to construct a rainbow of peace out of mediatory phrases and wait till they have forgotten all about it.  Actually the proposals were not “daft” but ill-timed.

Tom came in at 6.30 with information about Lawless.   He did not know Sean had mentioned him to me.  He met him in the Strand last night, and learned he was working on the South Bank site, where the federation steward Smullen blocks every effort on the part of the Connolly Association to make an opening there.  He is living with the wee reprobate Andy O’Neill, and was the sole non-party person [that is, non-CPGB member] attending the meeting which Hostettler addressed recently, and which so much aroused his suspicions [John Hostettler,1925-2018, British solicitor, legal historian and civil libertarian, whom the Connolly Association sent to cover the Mallon and Talbot trial in Belfast in 1958 and who “reported back” on his experiences to British trade union and labour bodies over the following years].  He is moreover in the ETU [Electrical Trades Union] – the familiar pattern – and admits that it was he who attacked the police in St. Pancras and started the fracas [O’Neill and others, who were CPGB members, were later involved in the controversy over ballot-rigging in the ETU, which attracted much publicity in 1961]. He marched from the South Bank to St. Pancras with Smullen.  Smullen incidentally was the occasion of an unsavoury little intrigue when Gollan [John Gollan, CPGB general secretary] and I were in Dublin a few years ago.  He planted some false information with Nolan which Nolan then hurled at us in a committee meeting [Sean Nolan of the Irish Workers League]. Those were the days when Brian Behan was a great political leader, except to those who saw through him [Behan was on the Executive of the CPGB for a period].  But it would seem that perspicacity is not necessarily improved by experience.  It is there, or it is not.  Tom added one thing about Lawless – he joined the YCL in a false name.  He claimed to have been on the “security” committee of Sinn Fein.

[There is a two-month time gap in the Journal record here.]

December 1 Thursday (London):  Nuisance though it is, I want to try and note things down as they happen; the record slips out of memory too easily.  The proofs of the “Life of Connolly” have been read, till I’m tired seeing them, the corrections have been made, the index has been laboriously completed, and for the past few days I have been taking a species of holiday ­– only working during the day and going to the Festival Hall and Sadler’s Wells at night.  I found my interest aroused again in the theory of aesthetics which (I gather from my notes) I first worked seriously on in 1940.  I think the time has come to take it up again but am going to Ireland tomorrow for a “busman’s” holiday and will think over the possibilities at greater leisure.  The increased circulation of the Democrat has eased the financial situation greatly, and the addition of Tony to the staff has likewise eased the burden of organisational work on myself.

December 2 Friday: I came up to Liverpool to stay the night with Phyllis before going to Dublin tomorrow night.

December 4 Sunday (Dublin) :  I arrived in Dublin this morning and went straight up to Cathal and Helga’s.  Cathal was not yet up (through the boat having been delayed in a wild night it was 10.15 am.) but his two twin offspring were bouncing around like incredibly active tiny balls of concentrated mischief.  Both have both parents in them – but Egon, the boy, has enough of Cathal to explain much about the father.  Cathal has now quite a responsible job in Pye’s [a telecommunications company] and it noticeable how much he has matured.  Both he and Helga think this.  “I feel older,” he says.  With a slight diminution in that debonair charm there is a compensating increased forbearance.  He can let a contrary opinion pass without insisting on his own being planted beside it.  They bring up the children to speak German – the twins are nearly 2 1/2 – and while this may (possibly, possibly not) have retarded them by cutting them off from the stimulus of other children, who can say?  As I anticipated years ago, Cathal is an excellent father, and Helga a marvel.  She claims to have learned some of the art of managing children from Cathal’s sister in Yorkshire.  But the native talent was unmistakeably there.

December 4 Monday:  I rang up Eamonn Martin who was disinclined to meet me – though friendly enough, referred to the Democrat without palpable dislike – but promised to send in a document I was to collect from a Mr Halpin at the Sweep Office in Grafton Street – the building which used to be Mitchell’s restaurant where, in 1951 I took AEG [his mother] and MTh. to lunch on one of their trips from Belfast.  That was when I was living in Mayo [See Volume 10].  In the afternoon I took Nora Connolly a proof copy of the “Life of Connolly”, which I hope will satisfy her.  Seamus was not so well, and Nora went out to get the doctor.  I left as soon as he arrived, but arranged to call up again.  I tried to make contact with Justin [ie.Justin Keating, then teaching veterinary science at TCD], but without success.  He was out of the College, and his home phone was out of order.

December 6 Tuesday:  I called into the Sweep office – which has the general air of official emptiness which marks really successful enterprises ­– was directed to Mr Halpin who was in a cubicle in a corner of the second hallway (a second line of defence), and received from him Eamonn Martin’s envelope.  He requested me to “sign for it” and showed a list of its contents.  It was sealed and it crossed my mind to sign “unexamined”, but seeing no motive Martin could have for playing tricks on me (or sealing the envelope) I merely signed, silently.  I was therefore a little uneasy for Halpin when he broke into smiles and bellowed, “And the best of luck to you!”  That pleased me.

December 7 Wednesday:   I had lunch with Justin Keating and told him that I could not find the “School of Art” in the telephone book.  He explained that its name was the National College of Art, of which his father [the artist Sean Keating] had been Principal, and of course I had passed in front of it hundreds of times.  I wanted to trace a man called Alf Monahan who was the Volunteers organiser who escaped from Galway with Frank Hynes and Mellows after the Rising.  Hynes had told me he worked at the school of Art.  For the rest of the day I talked with Justin – drinking most of the afternoon, then going out to his house in a moderate fog (“Very unusual for Dublin”, everybody says.  And I tell them they “should see a real fog” – this morning the people in the bus were full of excitement about a fog I hardly noticed!)   Loretta [Mrs Keating, née Wine] was looking as young and charming as ever, and I had a glimpse of the children before they went off to bed.

December 8 Thursday: I went to the School of Art in the morning, after running through the old Thom’s directories in the National Library, and checking on Rita Brady’s address for the Mellows family.  I spoke to the man on the door – whom I was told was a nephew of PH Pearse – but he had never heard of Monahan (ie. Alf Monahan/Ailbhe O Monnchain).  Finally I persuaded him to get the oldest member of the staff, who in turn promised to find from among the students a German girl whom Monahan had reared.  A few minutes later he returned with Monahan’s address, written in Irish, and the suggestion that I should write to him and see if he was prepared to see me.  This was a chilly reception, indeed, and I guessed Monahan must be a chilly foster-father.  However, I wrote suggesting I should visit him in Swords tomorrow, at 12 noon.

Then I went back to Nora Connolly’s.  Seamus was better, and she had sat up half the night reading my book and found it exciting.  I am beginning to get the measure of Nora and see how she derived her leadership.  She gives a good description of herself through her “Portrait of a Rebel Father” – impulsiveness, generosity and intolerance and a good head (if one may so) of the feminine kind.  She came back into town with me and on the ‘bus expressed her pleasure that at last somebody had dealt with her father’s philosophy.  She knew her own limitations, she said, and was not prepared to tackle that aspect of it.  Of Dr McCartan, to whom I referred in connection with Mellows, she would hear no good, and indeed snorted when his name was mentioned.  He was “no use to anybody” and she “had no ‘meas’ for him“[ie.did not think much of him].  Of the men who survived Connolly the only one she regarded as a possible successor was Mellows – and indeed in remarking that today was the feast of the “Immaculate Conception” she showed its connection in her mind at once by mentioning  the execution.  On the other hand in practical affairs she is Fianna Fail in outlook and sees no means of tackling the border but the “Foyle Fisheries” and “GNR“[Great Northern Railways] policy.  When I pointed out that the GNR was in fact broken up and partitioned between CIE and UTA [the southern and northern railway companies respectively] she looked quite indignant at being challenged.  So I changed the subject.  The present generation is without a trace of independent politics.  Political thought died in the thirties.  Seamus, by the way, was telling me about Ina’s young son, Brian, who has given up his course in TCD and is seemingly working in London. He was outraged at Ina going to America and leaving the young boy alone.  “A decent enough lad”, I ventured.  “A bit of a cute fellow”, said his wife disparagingly.  And that might be, too.  Ina wrote to me in the summer about Roddy abandoning his wife and children and going to live in England.  But then, Ina is the odd one out.  I said nothing to indicate I knew. As old Mullery said, “What a pity the family is so divided”.  RM Fox is one of Nora’s betes noirs.  “I dislike and despise the man.”  He had shamelessly lifted passages from her “Portrait of a Rebel Father” without any acknowledgement.  She intimated that Cathal O’Shannon would go through mine with a microscope in hopes of saying it was “marred by many inaccuracies”.

December 9 Friday: I went to Swords, but had only Cill Colum, the name of Monahan’s house [Also Aillbhe O Monnchain].  After much enquiring I was directed thither, and walked up the road asking people.  Finally I came to a house which might be it, and outside saw a man leaning out of a motorcar. He was of moderate height, and about 65 years old, perhaps a little more but only well preserved.  Did he know where Mr Monahan lived.  Then he showed me a letter with my name and Cathal’s address on it, and said, “jump in”. I jumped in and he drove off.  “You were a bit late and we have to go in to Dublin, so we’ll take you back, if you’re going there.”   I was.  His wife was in the back of the car.  He introduced me.  He was a Belfast man, she from Dublin.  Both were ardent nationalists and extremely likeable people, in whose conversation, whatever their opinions, there seemed a constant substratum of principle.  They criticised Brendan Behan.  “He ought to be shot,” said Monahan.  “If we had a government that was any good, he would be,” said his wife.  They invited me to visit them tomorrow.

I asked Cathal when I got home what about Tom Johnson, “If you want to see him again you’d best go up this trip,” he said.  I therefore rang this evening. He called his wife.  To my surprise she was almost antagonistic, explained that he was very ill, couldn’t be excited by visitors, and hinted that I would be putting him to too much strain asking him about the olden days.  So I said I would ring up again next week, but hardly think I will. She mentioned that Ina had not gone to see her before leaving for America.  Now it crossed my mind that Ina was annoyed because I did not send her some particulars about Sheehy-Skeffington I promised (I was too busy and put it on the long finger) and possibly she had permitted herself some lamentations upon this subject in the presence of Mrs Johnson, the gravamen of which was being duly passed on to me.  At the same time it is a pity. Confused as he is politically, I’ve a soft spot for old Tom Johnson.

December 10 Saturday: I went out for a meal with the Monahans and had a most enjoyable evening there, which threw light on the subsequent development of the 1916 generation.  To take the contrasts, the peasant Pat Fahy has remained a peasant, and today reads the “United Irishman” and laughs over the old days, delighted with his life, past and present.  Frank Hynes, in a small country town, has become somewhat clerical (unless it is his wife) and there is an air of respectability and moral defeat.  Monahan and his wife have still something to give the present ­– they are the city people.  They praised Desmond Ryan (who lived in Swords) to whom they told the story of the Galway Rising.  They spoke of being with Roddy Connolly at a Clann na Poblachta meeting [a Republican political party led by Sean MacBride which joined the 1948-51 Coalition Government].  Just as Pat Fahy had dismissed all the anti-Algerian talk as propaganda, so Monahan dismissed the anti-Russian talk as propaganda, together with the British anti-German talk!   Through them it is possible to see what Clann na Poblachta might have been.   He is now a man of much greater intellectual ability than the others, and we got busy on the map, and I think we found out roughly what the escape route was.  He told me to go and see Gerry Hoolihan and Alf Cotter.

December 11 Sunday:  I spent most of the day with Cathal, Helga and the children.  The two twins are lively little creatures, aged about 2 ½, Egon being a fascinating little thing.  They talk German to them.  I provide them with chocolate each day and so when they see me it is “Tchocolade, bitte”.   Egon is always wanting to take Finola’s toys away from her.  After a tussle he hits her.  Then Helga intervenes and a penitent Egon says quietly, “Beissen ist nicht lieb“[To bite is not good] – till the next one!

The term of reproach is “Du! Du! Du!”, which Egon said furiously, pointing his accusing finger at a dog twice as big as himself which knocked him down.  He didn’t like the moon when he was shown it rising between the houses.  It was told (in English) to “Go away”, which also was Cyril Murray’s cow’s reception, till, on coming close to it, the insults were moderated to “Du! Du!” before he ran away.  Helga is an artist.  When his bellicose feelings get the better of him, she calmly diverts him to something else. And one strength is that he will not take from Finola what he himself has been allowed to give her.  Most remarkable is the fact that he is scarcely half her size, and by no means so developed mentally.  But sheer aggressiveness gives him the day.

I went up to see Alf Cotter in Home Farm Road, and was told by his wife that he was in bed with influenza.  Likewise Gerry Hoolihan in Botanic Road was recovering from a heart attack and could see nobody.  So thus two blanks were drawn.

December 12 Monday: I was in the dark corridor in the National Library when the young librarian with the beard – MacNicol –  who does the photostat work stopped beside me and whispered, “Mr. Greaves”.  “Yes”?  “A character from the Castle called here on Friday and asked if you had been in.  He was looking at your signature in the book, but we couldn’t quite read it – it looked as if it could be Savage”.  I thanked him.  “I thought you’d like to know that,” he said.  And then – coincidence – a Belfast man I don’t know by name, but whom I regard as a police tout, hailed me in Westmoreland Street and said detectives had asked him about me!

December 13 Tuesday: I went by train to Rathdrum, and then walked up to the hostel at Glenmalure where I stayed the night.

December 14 Wednesday: I walked back to Rathdrum in heavy frost.  I have not had a proper holiday this year and was as stiff as a board.  Cathal’s friend from next door came, so we thought a glass of whiskey would cure stiffness – but I had to make Cathal use his car in the fog!

December 15 Thursday: I called in to see Sean Nolan, who returned from Moscow yesterday.  We did not discuss his visit.  Justin had been dreading a statement which disregarded the struggles of oppressed nations.  I told him not to bother his head. That was not to go out of anybody’s programme.  But I could hardly say this to Nolan, despite their slight improvement on the question.  He was cordial enough, though he still hates any opinion contrary to his own to be stated in his presence.  I think he is an example of a fundamentally stupid man imprisoned in the cage of his own wide experience.  Still, he has melted a little, and in suggesting I contact Peadar O’Donnell recognised my reasons for not doing so.  “He’ll want to write the book for me,” I said. “No”, said Nolan “Tell you the way you should write it”.  He then, to my surprise, described him as petty for his vendetta against the Connolly Association.  He suggested I make contact with “John Brennan” (one of the Giffords) and I must do this.  I think that Nolan’s isolation from so many people he could possibly influence is due to his inability to meet anybody else’s views in a practicalway.  But he certainly is a limpet.

December 16 Friday:  I wrote to Dr McCartan yesterday – having secured his address from the solicitor Con Lehane whom I telephoned (a Clann na Poblachta man who subscribes to the Democrat and is loud in its praise).  I rang him this morning and had little time to get out to Greystones – but found the house easily and spent an hour there.  He is a tall, gangling man, in his seventies, inhabiting a house of exquisite furniture, very affable with the airy touch of the good medical man.  But he lacks political depth.  He tells the truth as he sees it, but cannot see the struggles which show themselves in small things.  He denied that Mellows had any difficulties with Clann na Gael.  They paid for their defence.  I mentioned Nora.  Clann na Gael paid for her education at Boston. He didn’t like her.  She came to Tyrone (in 1916) and was very unpleasant to his sisters.  But he told me the background of Dr Maloney and McGarrity and much useful detail about the USA.  He also was Clann na Poblachta and thought Lemass made a better Taoiseach than De Valera.  He still felt angry with Dev over the Cuban proposals and the Russian Treaty.  He had great respect for Larkin, whom he visited in Sing Sing, and like the Monaghans he had no fear of the Left.

December 17 Saturday:  I went to see Rita Brady again, to return the photograph she lent me.  I found her sad, and black, and a little bitter that none of the Republicans had helped to find her employment, except for a few days in the competition’s department of the Press.  I wondered if Eamonn Martin would do so but he apparently is “not good at helping people”.  But I could not help her, though she helped me.  I asked her about Sean Etchingham.  Her eyes lit up.  “He was Liam’s best friend.  He was arrested at his house at Courtown Harbour”.

So this afternoon I asked Nora Connolly about him.  She also said he was a “fine fellow”, and a journalist on the staff of the Enniscorthy Echo.  Rita said that he had two nephews alive, but too far gone in booze to be interested.  Nora said he had two sisters.  I have a picture of him in an old copy of “Banba”.   Nora now said she had finished my book and that it was the “book she had for years hoped somebody would write”.  “But”, says Seamus, “you realise it will start controversy.  As soon as Cathal O’Shannon sees it, he’ll be off like a shot to see Bill O’Brien.”  The two old men would sieve the archives till they found the means of refuting it.  “Oh!” said I, “you think it’ll be that bad?”  “Of course”, said Seamus, softening the blow “you never know they might praise it as well.” Nora thought they would concentrate on the issue of Connolly’s military service and ignore the rest.  “A pity”, she said.

I asked her about Con O’Lyhane, and she said she knew him well and gave him a very good name.  I noted her description of him.

Before going to meet Justin at TCD [Trinity College Dublin] I called out to Alf Cotter.  He also was in the Fianna and was a Belfast man, a Protestant (and proud of it) and an engineer in the shipyard.  He told me how he got a great Orange flautist to play at a dance run by the Republicans.  The Orangeman said he had no objection to complete separation from England as then the Protestants would be strong enough to defend themselves; but an arrangement under which they had to fight a Catholic Church backed up by the English power would be too much for them.  Apparently Cotter was a lad like Jack Bennett; he was a Volunteer organiser. Belfast certainly contributed its share, and the proletariat.

Finally I had dinner in the Chinese restaurant with Justin and Loretta.  I tried to persuade him to do some serious research on Ireland today.  He has a very good brain, indeed after Jack Bennett I consider him the best Marxist in Ireland.

December 18 Sunday: I spent the whole day with Cathal and Helga, and in the evening Cathal drove me to Dun Laoire where I crossed to Holyhead and London.

(There is a thirteen-day gap here]

December 31 Saturday(London):  I spent the Christmas with Phyllis in Liverpool, and then returned to London to get out the January issue of the Democrat.  In my absence they had done great work – more than half the parliamentary Labour Party [who had signed a series of telegrams to Northern Ireland Prime Minister Lord Bookeborough urging the release of the Republican internees in Crumlin Road prison, Belfast].  Tonight Tony Maguire and John MacDonald came to our social, and a Sinn Feiner there told me, “We know our friends.”  What a contrast to the situation two years ago when we were fighting the Dublin rats and daren’t hold a social for fear they would cause a fight at it [referring to the far-left members of the Connolly Association’s North London Branch, some in the CPGB and with Irish Workers League connections, who opposed the CA’s campaign to expose the Northern Ireland regime in Britain as “nationalism” in contradistinction to “socialism”].  These days it is possible to breathe freely.  But there were one or two absences I regretted – Paddy Clancy and Elsie O’Dowling, and among the younger ones Colm Power, whose lack of science leave him a prey to currents of political feeling.  Sean Redmond made a fine speech, and is shaping well as our youngest General Secretary, and Eamonn MacLaughlin who was replaced by him is helping and showing no jealousy, which is good.  There was only one shadow – Des Logan was not there as his father has died, and he himself has gone to Belfast to see his stepmother and to Killybegs for the funeral.

                                          1961

January 2 Monday:  I had a conference with Maurice Cornforth and Nan Green [representing the publishers Lawrence and Wishart] on review copies of my book.  We agreed to send free copies to Connolly’s three daughters we are in touch with.

January 3 Tuesday:  Fiona rang me up to say she had “taken the liberty” of affiliating the CA to the Women’s Assembly and would we send a delegate [Mrs Fiona Connolly-Edwards, one of James Connolly’s daughters, who had typed Greaves’s manuscript biography of her father for him]. She also said that Roddy had sent her a Christmas present of four love letters written by her father to Lillie Reynolds.  Roddy is apparently selling up, or clearing out and moving to Scotland.  I mentioned Bill O’Brien.  Seamus had said he kept all Connolly’s archives and would let nobody see them.  Fiona now told me that in 1940 when Nora was contemplating a second book, he refused to allow her to see her father’s papers.  “He wouldn’t be where he is but for my father,” said Fiona.

January 5 Thursday:  Desmond Logan rang up to say he had seen Jack Bennett, who with Justin Keating is coming to our conference on 26 February.  Sean Caughey is ill with a “spot on the lung” but they are going to try to get somebody else along lines I suggested [ie. as a speaker for the conference].  Steele, apparently, is no longer in the leadership, and is beginning to talk openly of political action [Jimmy Steele, Northern IRA veteran].  Liam Kelly who “forced the IRA’s hand” (according to the Belfast Telegraph) [ie. as regards launching the 1956-62 Border campaign] is emigrating to America.  According to Tony Coughlan, who saw Jim O’Regan [in Cork over Christmas], there is a growing sentiment in Sinn Fein for a more political approach, and so perhaps the results of the mistakes of the past few years are going to be evident in new wisdom.

January 6 Friday:  I went down to Portsmouth to see Mary Greaves [his aunt] this afternoon.  She was not in Liverpool this Christmas.  She is 85, and has a head on her as sharp as a woman would have at half her age.  She is very upset because for some reason Harley Greaves [hernephew] is not writing to her.  Enid Greaves [CDG’s first cousin] was there trying to smooth things over but could do so only by suggesting some mystery to which she herself had not the key.  Mary was acute enough to probe the little evidence she was given, and refers to Harley’s “drinking pals” and possible differences with his wife.  But nothing I have heard gives any due to his reason for not writing to her.  When his mother died and he was neglecting his studies she brought him to Portsmouth, stood over him and made him the pharmacist the National Health service subsequently enriched.  But she could not give him the judgment and steady temperament he lacked.  He was disqualified from driving recently thanks to being found in charge of a car with drink taken.  But this I think Mary Greaves does not know.  She is also sad about her youngest brother, Fred’s, death.  She was the second eldest, and is the only one left.

When I reached London again I found a letter from Stockholm.  It was from KB Eller who has disposed of his business and gone home.  He must be about 75 years of age now, a very likeable old man.  He is worried about the disposal of the library of the Peat Society, some 1000 bog surveys, and specimens, and has been in touch with Edgar Young and Bernal about it.  I therefore wrote to Bernal, and Young, and also to Frank Mitchell, now Provost of TCD [properly TCD Registrar], and to Justin Keating, finally writing to Eller telling him what I had done.  He is a genuine enthusiast for turf development and should have lived elsewhere 

January 11 Wednesday:  I travelled up to Manchester in the afternoon and Joe Deighan and Michael Crowe were waiting for me.  Joe told me about his visit to Belfast. He had been in to see Betty Sinclair who shares an office with Billy MacCullough.  The minute he went through the door she launched into a tirade against the Democrat in general and myself in particular for having “insulted” the shop stewards who came here looking for jobs.  “Don’t mind ‘BATTY’,” says Billy when she went out to make tea. “The Dahmocrat is doing a good job.  Why that paper’s been going for years and years.  Of course Dahsmond and I have our disagreements – but h’althy!”  He then saw Sean Murray. “Well”, says he, “about MacCullough and the Democrat, MacCullough’s rash enough when he makes a speech; but put a pen into his hand!  He’d write us all off the world.”

After leaving Joe and Michael I came to Liverpool and went on board for Dublin.  I telephoned Phyllis, but apparently she was not in.

January 12 Thursday (Dublin):  Arriving in Dublin I went up to Cathal’s.  He was at work of course and the children just getting up.  I caught a buzz of excitement in which the words “Onkel Desmond” and “Schocolade” were interwoven.  Finola saw me putting some pound notes in my pocket book and in a sing-song little voice asked, “Onkel Desmond b’lon kaufen?”  Later in the day I saw Justin Keating who had had cold feet about the visit to London. I understand Roy Johnston is arriving tomorrow.

January 13 Friday: I spent most of the day in the National Library, but had a long talk with Sean Nolan also.  Roy appeared on the scene and went off with Justin Keating.  There is an epidemic of influenza here and tonight Cathal began to sicken with it.

January 14 Saturday:  I went out to Dun Laoire to take Hilda Allberry some typing to do.  I had not seen her for close on ten years.  She has given up work and is looking after her aged mother whom she expects to leave her a lot of money, that is if she doesn’t obtrude her unorthodox politics on her.  In the evenings she works for William O’Brien who dictates his memoirs into a tape recorder from which in due course she types MSS.  He is 80 years of age next week.

We waited in all evening for Justin Keating, but he did not arrive.

January 15 Sunday:  In the afternoon I had tea with LS Gogan in Rathgar.  He told me much about the early days of the Volunteers, which I have recorded elsewhere.  He lives in an extremely comfortable and elegantly furnished house on Terenure Road.  The room is littered with cards – index cards – each a word in Dineen’s dictionary of the Irish language which he is providing with a supplement.  He complains that in the last edition of Dineen his name was left out of the title page.  That is why he refused to have anything to do with the recently published English-Irish dictionary. The house resembles Dr McCartan’s, furniture and atmosphere being curiously alike.  But while McCartan is all good humour and bonhomie, Gogan has an irascible streak which came out when he criticized “That ASS, Cathal O’Shannon”, who had disputed MacNeill’s continued chairmanship of the Volunteers because his name was not listed as attending a meeting. Often MacNeill failed to attend.  He described his association with MacNeill, and how just as the guns of Easter Week were booming he happened to see MacNeill, deep in thought, his face grey and dead, walking towards Douglas Hyde’s house.  MacNeill did not even notice him.  I gather Gogan was one of those demobilised by the countermand.  He commented, “I had no respect for MacNeill from that day on.  I saw he was an extinct volcano from his face.” Subsequently Gogan went to take a message to one of the combatant detachments and was arrested.  But he had just applied for a post in the Foreign Office in London and was released.  He was dismissed from the National Museum and found himself in Fron Goch [the internment camp for Irish Republicans in North Wales established following the 1916 Rising] a short while later.  “I was asked to give all this to the so called ‘military bureau’, he said contemptuously “But I didn’t.  What would happen if the British came back?  They’d find plenty that was useful to them.”

He was most contemptuous of the Civil Service.  An archaeologist, as curator of the National Museum he was “not allowed to do archaeology”, which he was there for. Accordingly he persuaded Fr Michael O’Flanagan, who was going to the United States, to ask one of their universities (who sent teams of archaeologists to India, Guinea and Japan!) to send investigators to Ireland.  Fr O’Flanagan succeeded and the students came to Tara, or some other place in Co. Meath.  After they had been digging quietly away for nine months the Irish Press (the Times was “too respectable for this dirty work”) published an article saying that Irish treasures were being looted by the USA – although part of the contract was that whatever was found should remain in Ireland. Fr O’Flanagan asked the Press who gave the information.  “It’s usually Gogan sends us these things,” he was told.  On asking Gogan he was told nothing of the kind and sent back to the Press – where it transpired that one of his dear civil service colleagues had given the information to a reporter. The reporter was dismissed. After a while local demonstrations against the diggers subsided.

He did not take part in the Civil War as he “didn’t believe in it”, nor indeed in 1916 as soon as he found the Volunteers had “only enough guns for a pantomime rising”.  He laughed at what he called their “Millesianism” – when the guns were unprocurable pikes were discussed, and De Valera produced a drawing of a pike decorated with a Celtic design.  “This is nonsense,” he said, and went to America to try and contact the Germans.  Plunkett sailed on the same day, but on an American ship.  Gogan travelled in the much slower British ship, which must dodge submarines.  He then left the Volunteers in 1915.  He professed some contempt, indeed, for the Nationalist principles of the 1916 men, his wife meanwhile smiling indulgent dissent.  Of Monteith he would hear no captains – he was a sergeant in the British army [Monteith was usually referred to as “Captain”].  The Germans were too hidebound to land the arms and hang about three days, while Monteith saved himself and left Casement to be captured.  I mentioned Captain White. “Oh!” snorted Gogan, “he was a real captain.  To compare him to Robert Monteith would be like comparing Patrick Pearse to a – a bus-conductor!”  Yet he had the liveliest admiration for Connolly, and even more for Larkin. Cathal was very interested in my description of this lively and interesting character whose main weakness is, I think, intellectual snobbery.  He is a scientist, however.  When I explained about the Etruscan language – I wrote to Rome for an account of it – he rapidly revised his opinions.  His mind is very alert and was a little contemptuous of fools.

January 16 Monday:  Cathal was in bed most of the day, and in the evening sat in a chair, quite unlike himself, all his gaiety repressed and a general lassitude affecting every movement.  To make matters worse, wee Egon seems to be catching the disease.

January 17 Tuesday: In the evening – and what a day of rain! – I went out to see Maire Comerford [an activist in the War of Independence and later employed on the “Irish Press”] who was in Sandyford, letting the flat above to my old Connolly Association colleague May Hayes.  The house is away beyond where Justin used to live.  I was invited into a most curious room, for it was divided into two parts by a series of cardboard or light wooden screens, which surrounded the fire and the light.  Beside which there was just room for three chairs.  “This is a very draughty house,” said Miss Comerford, an elderly woman with the unmistakeable self-confidence of aristocracy.  Her uncle was Sir Thomas Esmond, and she says that in 1918 she was Alice Stopford Green’s private secretary.  “Well now”, she said “I’ve heard nothing but blame for you – so if you’ve anything to say…”  I replied that I hadn’t.  I pleaded guilty to everything she had heard.  This seemed to amuse her and we got on famously.  She told me much about Sean Etchingham and the Woods family.  Tony Woods, who was pushing up to 20 in those days, is working in the Irish Sweep still.   It seems that Etchingham’s people had a tea-shop in Courtown Harbour, a “cyclists’ rest” as she called it. When oysters from new beds were sent commercially in barrels to the King, Etchingham sent into the local public house some cronies of his who began to laugh till they were asked what they were laughing at.  “Pity Etchingham put a dead rat in those oysters,” laughed the mischief- maker.  A panic was created and frantic telegrams were sent off to bring the oysters back.  Etchingham died during the Civil War – around 1923.  He was not married.

As for May Hayes, she told me her mother died last year, and now she is living with her father only.  PJ Little and Mary Nelson often come to the house.

January 18 Wednesday:  I had lunch with Bob Briscoe in the Dail.  Against the wall I spied Jim Larkin [“Young Jim”, the famous Labour leader’s son, then running his father’s union, the Workers Union of Ireland]. Apparently, though not a member of the House, he insists on lunching there every day.  The lunch was no better than one would get at the Monument Creamery [a restaurant on Grafton Street at the time] certainly inferior to the Palace Restaurant [by the Pro-Cathedral].But of course the surroundings were more august.  Briscoe is just like his book, a hail-fellow-well-met Dubliner, with many good qualities, most notable of which is an innate democratic feeling, and also the Dubliners’ faults.  Somebody called to him that Wagner was the new US Ambassador.  “I know him intimately!” he declared as if this proved the report quite wrong. “He hasn’t told meyet”.  “Be careful,” says another, seeing my notebook, “I see you’ve a reporter there.”  “He’s no journalist,” said Briscoe confidently, at which point I decided that the one thing I must not do was to look in the direction of Larkin, who up to then at least, had not noticed me.

He described how Seamus Robinson sent three men, Billy Beaumont, O’Mara and Roddy Connolly to Germany to get arms.  Connolly’s personal behaviour turned them against communism for life.  He returned home to get money to secure their return, and left them in the lurch.  Afterwards Nolan confirmed that this happened, or at least that he had heard it from several sources.  He seems to have had imposed on him while very young tasks for which he was quite unsuited, as if his father’s spirit was to undergo metempsychosis.  Of Eamonn Martin, who has so far avoided seeing me personally, he said (to my surprise) that so enthusiastic was he over the Russian Revolution that he went to Russia soon after the end of the war.  On his return he found himself outside the ranks of the Volunteers.  Collins, who was already sorting out his men, declined to have him back, even as a private.  He considered that Collins had secured control of the IRB and used it for his own purposes.  All those who would not give their blind obedience must go. “He thinks too much,” said he of Martin – whether quoting Caesar or not!   Briscoe thinks Mellows wished to remove the IRB control of the army.  When I reached Finglas at night I found Helga had influenza.

January 20 Friday:  Yesterday I spent in the library. Tom O’Neill [Professor of history at UCD] told me he had seen a copy of the book [ie. Greaves’s biography of Connolly] in Hodges Figgis and seemed very pleased.  I told him a free copy was coming.  Today as I was going out I realised Helga had not got up, and went up to see her.  She told me she felt very ill and I decided to stay at home for the morning.   Later she called me up to her room and said she had acute appendicitis.  Would I take the children away – they were swarming over her, two of them that seemed like a little army – and then telephone the Doctor.  I applied main force – one under each arm.  Egon was fairly soon quieted with “cocolade” and began to play with his bricks.  Finola took longer.  Then while they played I called on a neighbour who promised to telephone.  When I came back they were fighting over a stick of barley sugar which I broke in two – though it was Finola’s undoubtedly.  After that a bottle had to be made for the baby, since Helga could not feed him, and since he would not take it, a rusk had to be mixed with milk.  The woman next door took Finola for lunch while I contended with Egon who preferred to stay next door and forced me to bring him back.  Later on we telephoned Cathal who came home from work early, and after that, since mercifully there were a couple of bottles of Chianti in the house, we drank them and retired.  I was quite exhausted.  How Helga manages the three of them I do not know.  She is full of patience and resource.  But I told Cathal that he ought to look for a home help, if only to come in twice a week.  It would be a better investment than a motor car.  Helga was taken to hospital in the early evening.

January 21 Saturday:  The day was as busy as yesterday, as Cathal took the baby to his sister in Mullingar and the twins to his mother in Galway.  The lad next door ran us down to Westland Row in his car, after the most frantic morning’s preparations.  Then, having wee Egon pretending to be a locomotive and calling “toot! toot!” in his thin little voice, I went in to see Helga.  It is not appendicitis.  She was very relieved that we had solved the problem of the children.  Cathal returned late at night.

January 22 Sunday:  Cathal and I went in to see Helga.  She was more comfortable and hopes there will be no necessity for an operation.  Later I called in to Rita Brady to take her some photographs.

January 23 Monday: I looked in on Jim Collins [Dublin Trades Council official] in the morning and he asked me to return the following day as he would have a cheque for the Democrat.  He told me about the Trades Council’s correspondence with Edinburgh Trades Council about a memorial to Connolly affixed to 107 Cowgate.  Roddy Connolly had put them off it by some nonsense about a priest in Monaghan telling him that probably the Monaghan entry had been “taken away”.  “Ridiculous!” said Collins, “And now tell me, is all that in your book?”  “It is.”  “Well, Nora started all that Monaghan business, just to glorify herself.  And now what’s she going to do?  Will she attack the book?”  This was perhaps less than fair to Nora – but it discloses a real dilemma.

January 24 Tuesday:  Cathal and I went to see Helga in James Street.  She was not quite so well. After that he accompanied me to Westland Row, and I left for London. He has not his car just at present.

January 25 Wednesday (London):  Tom Redmond brought me the six author’s copies of the “Life and Times of James Connolly”.  I sent off a free copy to Phyllis.

January 26 Thursday:  I went to the South London CA branch to give a lecture.  Pat Bond, Robbie Rossiter and Cal O’Herlihy were there.

January 29 Sunday:  I saw Roy in the evening.  He was inclined to make excuses for Justin Keating’s “cold feet”.  Toni Curran [wife of Gerard Curran and herself an active CA member] on the other hand says we could have expected nothing else.  She thinks that Justin and Loretta are typical middle class intellectuals wasting their lives because they are interested in nothing whatever but themselves.  This would roughly be Mairín Johnston’s opinion [wife of Roy Johnston]. Justin is afraid of publicity injuring his prospects in TCD [he was a lecturer in veterinary science there at the time].  Another one is Cal O’Herlihy who asks that his name should never appear in the Democrat, not from fear of losing his job, but from a risk of possible prospect to his advancement.  Cathal takes a medium view of Justin Keating – agrees he may have been put in some embarrassment by the publicity we gave him already, but again that since the harm was done anyway, he might have had the guts to go forward with it.  I agree – and I can personally see exactly how he could have done so.   

February 3 Friday:  It struck me that the Edinburgh Trades Council’s Commemoration might be used to establish a CA branch in that city, and rang up Fiona [Fiona Connolly-Edwards, one of James Connolly’s daughters, who had typed the MS of Greaves’s biography of her father] to see if they were going ahead with it.  Bert Edward [her husband] said they were “awaiting confirmation of the birthplace”.  “It’s as confirmed as ever will be,” I said.  Then he told me he had all Roddy’s material, including a document from the Chilean Embassy which I had suggested never existed.  Fiona came on,  “Roddy is peeved that you never asked him for material; even Desmond Ryan sent him the MS of his book”.  I reflected that Roddy Connolly and Desmond Ryan were mutually well-known and contemporaries, but decided to await Fiona’s letter, which she said was in the post.

February 4 Saturday:  Fiona’s letter duly arrived, among other things saying how angry and embarrassed William O’Brien would have been if some letters of his about Larkin had been published.  They are in typescript and O’Brien presumably has the originals.  I reflected that all he has to do is to deny their genuineness.  However, I sent off an irenicon [ie. a peace proposal],which I hope will prevent Roddy going to war on the birthplace issue, and made some mental plans for a visit to Edinburgh next week.

February 6 Monday:  I learned from Tom Redmond that Sean [his brother, who was represented the Connolly Association on the the Committee of the MCF] witnessed the spectacular resignation of old Unbanski from the MCF when Fenner Brockway (the old fox) [Chairman of the MCF and MP for Slough] refused to accept a resolution of the London Committee.

February 7 Tuesday:  A reply came from Fiona, which seems to indicate that my letter had the desired effect.  She has written to Roddy, and also indicates that she may bring him to our gathering on the 24^th [a social to mark the publication of the Connolly biography organised by the CA in London].  A relative of Jack Bennett called in to see me at the office [then in 364 Grays Inn Road, London WC1].

February 13 Monday: Toni Curran rang me up to tell me that Tom Redmond is threatening to leave Aine [his wife], and there seems to be a fine kettle of fish.  Apparently he considers himself enamoured of a young lady at Central Books.  I told Toni to tell him that if he insisted on leaving his wife he would be reducing his usefulness to the Irish movement.  I telephoned Joe Deighan, who entirely agreed with me.  We can afford no more Parnells, even baby ones.

February 14 Tuesday:  A telegram arrived from Joe Deighan congratulating me on the publication of the book – two days before it is published.  The amusing thing was that it was addressed to “No 6 Cockpot Chambers”[instead of Cockpit].  I sent him a note about this disdain of my dignity.  Toni Curran rang to say that Tom Redmond was with her at lunch today and agreed not to leave Aine.  But now they want to go to Dublin to “make a break”. While his solution was utterly weak and shocking, no doubt there is a real problem.  Perhaps she would like him out of politics (Toni Curran thinks not, and indeed Aine is quite intelligent and an altogether admirable person) but he (like men always) must either capitulate entirely or run away.

February 24 Friday:  There was a social evening at the Duke of York to celebrate the publication of “Connolly” at which I gave a lecture which Bert Edwards tape-recorded – I had to do some hasty censoring when I spotted him.  Fiona was there, with others of the family, Emil and Eleanor Burns, Maurice Cornforth and Walter Holmes [leading CPGB members] – about 100 in all, with Alan Bush[the composer], old George Newell and many whose names I forget.  Anna Munro was there – delightful old creature [who had been a suffragette as a young woman and who took the family shoes to be mended by Connolly in Edinburgh in 1895 when he tried to maintain himself by shoe-mending].  On behalf of the Connolly Association Executive Sean Redmond presented me with a rather showy briefcase.  A rucksack would be more in my line!  Roddy Connolly was in London but did not come – there was some account of his not being well.  I felt this was diplomatic but was not entirely sure of it.

(c.16,000 words in Volume 13)

Desmond Greaves Journal, Vol. 13, 1957 and 1960-61 Index

 
Greaves, C.Desmond

–   Aesthetics and verse: 12.1 
–   Assessments of others: 8.29, 9.2, 9.21, 9.22, 12.l, 12.10, 12.15, 12.17, 2.13-14     
–  Civil Rights Campaign in Northern Ireland: 8.28     
–   Connolly research: 6.16-17, 1.2, 2.3-4, 2.24          
–   Family relations: 1.6
–   Holidays/cycling tours: Scotland 1957:  6.11-15; Ireland 1960: 8.28-31, 12.13-14 
–   Ireland, public attitudes and assessments of trends in: 8.29-31, 9.4
–   Irish Democrat:  9.4
–   Mellows research: 8.28, 8.31, 12.8, 12.7-10, 12.17, 1.15, 1.18  
–   Professional work: 6.12     
–   Science: 1.6 
–   Self-assessments: 8.30 

Organisation Names Index

Communist Party of Northern Ireland(CPNI): 1.11 
Connolly Association(CA): 8.28, 9.20, 9.25, 12.15  
Council for Civil Liberty (Sean Caughey’s): 8.28 
Irish Republican Army(IRA)/Sinn Fein: 9.4, 1.5   
Irish Workers League: 12.15 
Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF): 2.6  
 

Personal Names Index:

Allberry, Hilda: 1.18

Briscoe, Bob: 1.18 
Brockway, Fenner MP: 2.6 

Behan, Brendan: 12.9

Behan, Brian: 9.28
Bennett, Jack: 8.28, 12.17    
Bernal, Professor Desmond: 1.6  
Bond, Patrick (Pat): 9.21 

Burns, Eleanor: 2.24 
Burns, Emil:  2.24 

Bush, Alan: 2.24
Caughey, Sean: 8.28, 9.20, 1.5 

Clancy, Paddy: 12.31

Collins, Michael:  1.18
Comerford, Maire: 1.17   
Connolly, Fiona: 1.3, 2.3  
Connolly, Ina: 6.11, 12.8-9  
Connolly, James: see Greaves (Connolly research): 1.23  
Connolly, Nora: 12.5, 12.8, 1.23 
Connolly, Roddy: 12.8, 12.10, 1.18, 1.23, 2.3-4, 2.24

Cornforth, Maurice: 1.2, 2.24   
Gollan, John: 9.28

Cotter, Alf: 12.17
Coughlan, Anthony (Tony): 9.4, 9.20, 12.1, 1.5 
Curran, Antoinette (Toni): 2.29, 2.13-14 
Deighan, Joseph: 1.11, 2.13-14   
Dooley, Patrick (Pat): 8.30
Edwards, Bert: 2.3, 2.24

Eller, KB: 1.6

Etchingham, Sean: 12.17, 1.17

Farrington, Brian: 9.2

Fox, RM: 12.8

Gogan, LS: 1.15

Greaves, Harley: 1.6

Greaves, Mary: 1.6

Greaves, Phyllis: 1.6

Hayes, May:  1.17

Hostettler, John: 9.28  
Johnson, Thomas (Tom): 12.9  
Johnston, Roy: 8.28, 9.24    
Keating, Justin: 12.5, 12.7, 12.15, 12.17, 1.5-6, 1.12, 1.14, 1.29   
Larkin, James(Jim) Junior: 1.18
Lawless, Gery: 9.25, 9.28 
Lehane, Con: 12.16 
Logan, Desmond (Des):  8.1-3, 8.28, 9.23   
McCartan, Dr Patrick: 12.16  
MacCullough, William (Billy): 1.11 
MacLiam, Cathal: 12.4 
MacLiam, Helga: 12.4, 12.11,1.20   
MacLoughlin, Eamonn: 12.31

MacNeill, Eoin:  1.15

Martin, Eamonn: 1.18 
Milne, Ewart:  9.2

Mitchell, Professor Frank: 1.6 
Monahan, Alf (Ailbhe O Monnchain): 12.7-9 

Monteith, Captain: 1.15
Morton, Alan G.:  8.29 

Mullery, John (see Mulray,following)
Mulray, John properly Mullery: 8.1, 12.8  

Munro, Anna: 2.24

Murray, Sean: 1.11
Nolan, Sean: 12.15   
O’Brien,William (Bill): 12.17, 1.3, 1.14 
O’Donnell, Peadar: 12.15 
O’Dowling (Timbey), Elsie: 9.24 

O’Flanagan, Fr Michael: 1.15
O’Herlihy, Callaghan (Cal): 9.22   
O’Higgins, Paul:  9.22  

O Monnchain, Ailbhe (See Monahan): 
O’Neill, Andy and Patrick: 9.28

O’Neill, Professor Tom: 1.20  
O’Regan, Jim: 9.4, 1.5
O’Shannon, Cathal: 12.8, 12.17  
Power, Colm: 12.31 
Redmond, Sean: 9.20-1, 12.31    
Redmond, Tom: 8.28, 9.20, 2.13-14  

Robinson, Seamus: 1.18
Sinclair, Elizabeth (Betty): 1.11

Smullen, Eamon: 9.28 

Woods, Tony: 1.17 
Yeats, WB:  9.2