My mother had four brothers and two sisters.
Three of her brothers served and fought in the British Forces, her two sisters married men who served in those forces. My mother, her sisters and their husbands were all Irish. Her eldest brother outlived them all and you may assume that he was a man of violence. He sat out both world wars, a member of the Irish Christian Brothers. Their father died in early 1914. He, like his father was a master bookbinder as was his second son, Ned Burke. I’m told he was a cousin of John Devoy and I believe he would rather see his sons in Hell than in the British Forces.
Ned was in the GAA, signed his name in Irish, played the war pipes, and, as a long-time member of Fianna Eireann. On Sunday,July 26 he helped unload the rifles from Erskine Childers’s yacht Asgard on the East Pier in Howth. But, like many more of his kind he took the advice of John Redmond and followed the Pied Piper Tom Kettle into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He was a long time in France when the Germans launched a fierce counter-offensive in the Spring of 1918. He told me how he threw away his rifle and ran for his life to keep up with his sector of the British Army as they attempted, in vain, not to inhale mustard gas. He was returned to Dublin, presumably for treatment and and sent home to his family on the Burrow Rosd, Sutton, who burnt his bug-ridden uniform in the garden. He was in and out of hospital until he died on 31 December 1963. He had resumed his profession as a bookbinder, and late in his career was offered the job of re-binding the Book of Kells. He declined the honour, saying he was past his best.
His younger brother Jack was mad about the sea and was six-weeks shy of his 17th birthday, when a German shell landed on the Battle Cruiser Princess Royal off Jutland, killing all in his wardroom and wounding him in the stomach. He was fitted with a pigskin stomach, but he had signed on for a 12 year stint, which he completed despite having to be in and out of hospital until he died in London aged 63 in early 1963. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard from 29 May 1940 to 28 May 1942, for which King George VI sent him his thanks.
The youngest brother, Leo, was born in 1904 and was very young and living in Phibsboro, on the route to Glasnevin when the flu or some other epidemic made him so busy that he complained that every other family but his were having funerals. During Easter Week 1916 he followed looters into a sweet shop and grabbed a package. His appalled mother ordered him to take it back to the shop. She took up the package, which was very light. It had been for display only in the shop window and was empty. Leo later joined the British Army and in the 1920s his troopship called into Constantinople, where he met his brother Jack, whose warship was visiting that port. A five-feet long photo of the Bosporous hangs on the hall of my sister’s house in Howth, a souvenir of that meeting.
A few years previously, in late 1922 Lloyd George was threatening Turkey, and expected Commonwealth Governments to give him support. They didn’t and Kemal Attaturk was not coerced into doing Lloyd George’s bidding as Collins and Griffith had done a year previously. Attaturk had removed the Turkish capital, to be out of range of British naval guns. My uncle Jack belonged to the greatest terrorist instrument on earth. Lloyd George had threatened to bomb Athens twice a few years earlier. The Tories withdrew from Lloyd George’s Coalition. That was the birth of the 1922 Committee and the death of Lloyd’s political career. He was to fulminate impotently from the sidelines when J.H.Thomas, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Like Lloyd George, he was Welsh and involved in a financial scandal (profiting from Budget secrets, as George had on Marconi shares). When he visited Dublin in the 1930s it was only to be outsmarted by de Valera. There was a song “On The Day That Chelsea Went and Won The Cup” by a comedian, which considered it as likely as Thomas and Dev becoming friends.” Anyhow J.H.Thomas had been leader of the National Union of Railwaymen and was a Labour Member of the National Government.
Poor Uncle Leo, like Jack was a full-time member of the British forces.
“Certified that having regard to such information as is available concerning No. S/12666 S.S.M Leo Joseph Burke who was officially reported missing, it has been presumed by the War Office that he was killed in action on or shortly after the 13th day of February 1942 while serving with the British Forces in the Far East.”
The certificate was dated 26th of February 1946.
Leo was 38 years old when Leo died, 2 years younger than my mother and I was 6 weeks old.
I was baptised in St Andrews, Westland Row, a few weeks previously. My Godparents, my father’s sister Maeve and her husband Bill O’Connell. were unable to attend. They had both graduated as Doctors at UCC about 3 years earlier and were in England. When
Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Bill was called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps. I understand that he was the first Allied doctor into Belsen on its liberation.
Leo was last seen swimming towards Java. He had been evacuated from Britain’s Impregnable (from the sea) fortress at Singapore when a small, wily Japanese force made their way through jungle down the Malay peninsula and took 130,000 of the garrison prisoner. Commanding the Garrison was Lt. General Percival, whose record in Cork earlier was neither courageous nor humane. The Auxies and Black and Tans have taken the blame for British terrorism in Ireland, but there were many regular British Army regiments, such as Percival’s Essex Regiment which distinguished themselves by brutality.
British Army units bombed and burned Cork’s City Hall and Carnegie Library in 1920. Their commitment to culture, learning, and democracy seems to be shared by the current Taoiseach.
Uncle Leo’s ship was sunk by the Japanese Air Force, and a survivor saw him swimming towards Java.
JULIAN ASSANGE is the Roger Casement of today.
Casement, in the Crime Against Europe, and the Crime Against Ireland blew the gaff on the long planned attack on Germany.
The Political Diaries of C.P. Scott, published in 1961 are irrefutable proof of Casement’s contention. The British Foreign Office tried to have him murdered in 1915 and its “Justice System” succeeded in 1916. Its slavish media and intellectual prostitutes slander him still. It is one of the ironies of history that Erskine Childers, murdered 100 years ago this week, wrote one of the seminal propaganda works for the Crime against Europe, before his conversion to democratic republicanism
Every human being owes CHELSEA MANNING and JULIAN ASSANGE thanks, for revealing the criminality of the United States Governments, their satellites and pawns in murder and torture on a global scale.
In England, land of Magna Carta, Assange is held in its most secure prison, awaiting extradition to the United States, whose agents planned to murder him in the Ecuadorian Embassy and plans to sentence him to 160 years in gaol. They arranged with a compliant Swedish Government to have allegations of rape made against him. I believe that, in memory of the International Humanitarian and Irish patriot Roger Casement, Ireland should confer Irish Citizenship on Assange, and confound the begrudger, instead of crawling up the arses of John Bull and Uncle Sam.
I have written frequently about the First World War, visited Verdun, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and many other sites of that tragedy. The War was a crime, largely of British planning. And good men, women and children of all nations, creeds and colours perished there. We can remember them but cannot confer honour on them. They had honour.
Today it seems that the world is being led to its obliteration by western poppycock and tommy rot.
I’m afraid this has been a rather rambling blog.
For a more elegant piece see “Sermons in Stones”
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