I’ve never read Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry a work of fiction set during “The Troubles” during which Doyle’s great grand-aunt’s father, Robert Brennan, played honourable and key roles. Robert Brennan and his daughter Maeve can both be found on Wikipedia and you may surmise that Roddy’s writing skills didn’t come out of thin air.
I had never heard of Henry Guy until recently, but my late mother recalled going to Benediction one Sunday evening during the Troubles to St Fintan’s Chapel of Ease, Saxe Lane, Sutton, Dublin, immediately after the incident which cut short the life of Henry Guy, a builder’s labourer aged 31. There was a football field beside the chapel which was also adjacent to Santa Sabina Dominican Convent and it was the custom of young men and boys to assemble there to play the not-quite-legal game of pitch-and-toss. At the approach of truck-borne constabulary the pitch-and-toss school scattered. They were fired on by the Constabulary, who were as scared of unarmed civilians as the civilians were scared of the constabulary. Henry Guy died, and Joseph Arnold aged 14 and Robert Magee aged 15 were wounded.
I went to school in St Fintan’s CBS Sutton, as later did Roddy Doyle. The school, founded in 1943 was in the Burrow Road, and my mother had lived two doors from its site during the troubles. My sisters attended Santa Sabina. In neither school, nor in St Fintan’s Chapel,does there appear to have been any awareness of the incident, nor did I ever hear anyone but my mother refer to it.
I eventually learned the date of the incident and the names of the victims. In the House of Commons Lt Commander Kenworthy questioned the Cabinet on it. He and Captain Wedgwood Benn continually put Lloyd George’s Ministers on the spot with questions arising from Crown Forces misconduct, on which they had been well-informed from Irish sources.The Commons proceedings are on line.
The date of the shooting was 6 March 1921 and I have been checking The Freeman’s Journal in the British Newspaper Library. On the 6th March 1921 the constabulary visited the houses of Lord Mayor O’Callaghan and ex-Lord Mayor Clancy of Limerick, and Joseph O’Donoghue, a prominent member of the Gaelic League, under cover of the British-imposed curfew, and shot them dead in front of their families.
The constabulary who shot Henry Guy dead posed as auxiliary cadet policemen and were in fact all veteran British military officers, and thus deemed “Gentlemen” who had fought in the Great War.
Henry Guy had also served with the British Army in the Great War. He was not an officer nor deemed a gentleman. Just a regular guy, apparently airbrushed from history.
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