I see that at an auction of items of Irish interest held recently in New York the medals given a torturer named Captain Kelly fetched a high price. Captain Kelly had won medals in the Great War and in 1920 won a further, special medal, for Intelligence Services in Ireland.He was based in Victoria Barracks, Cork and in July 1920,in Bandon, together with a Lieutenant Keogh of the Hampshire Regiment, a Lieutenant Richardson, a Lieutenant Green and various other officers and men, he beat, whipped and stripped naked,two bound prisoners, and applied pliers to their finger nails and otherwise abused them, including breaking four teeth of one of them. The prisoners were Tom Hales and Patrick Harte. As a result of the torture Harte had a mental breakdown.
Hales and Harte were officers in the IRA, a force which, that same July ,had captured, disarmed and released without harm 125 members of the Crown Forces. In June the IRA had captured Brigadier General Lucas, who escaped from them on the very day that Hales and Harte were tortured. Lucas said at the time that he had been “treated as a gentleman by gentlemen.”
A grand-daughter of his recalled that chivalry in a letter in THE IRISH TIMES in the last couple of years.
Donal, I normally read with interest and accept your stories unquestioningly.
But today you mention Capt Kelly and the ‘Great War’.
Millions of people, military and civilian, endured the most horrible deaths imaginable.
Can you tell me what was ‘great’ about it, or is it just in the sense of being ‘big’, and if so I am sure a different adjective which doesn’t have the alternative meaning of ‘wonderful’ might be more appropriate.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I think the ‘great’ word has been deliberately by Brit propaganda purposes.
I can see what you’re getting at Sherdy, but is this not a bit of nit-picking. In the instance of the “Great War”, it is a term in common parlance , not necessarily bestowing any sense of “greatness” other than in reference to the huge scale and destruction of life that this particular conflict brought . After all it was the first fully mechanised war and such havoc on such an industrial scale had never really been witnessed before. In that sense it was a Great Destruction .In the end , we all know that it was a “Daft War” with nothing really benign about it. I’m sure none of the survivors who’d been gulled into taking part in it it never thought it was too “great”. .