Eye on the Past 904

“McAleese recalls Irish war dead on Turkey visit”, read the headline on the story in last week’s Irish Independent filed from Ankara by Fergus Black. A high point of the Irish President’s three day visit to Turkey was the ceremony at Gallipoli to honour almost 3,500 Irish men who died during the six months of the ill-fated campaign in the Dardanelles in 1915. Some of those men were from the town of Athy and the surrounding countryside.

The Gallipoli Peninsula became a military target following Winston Churchill’s decision to take Turkey out of the war, while at the same time opening up another warfront against Germany. It would take a heavy toll of regular soldiers and of the reservists and volunteers who enlisted following the outbreak of war.

The regular 1st battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers which had been based in Madras India at the outbreak of the war sailed from Bombay and arrived back in Plymouth on 21st December 1914. On 9th April 1915 the 1st battalion was deployed for duty in Gallipoli and on Sunday 25th April 1915 took part in a large amphibious assault on Helles beach intended to land at five small coves at or near the southern tip of the peninsula. The landing at what was designated “V” beach was to be made by boats containing three companies of the 1st battalion Dublin Fusiliers followed by an old collier “River Clyde”, carrying the rest of the Dublin Fusiliers and members of the Munster Fusiliers. The ‘River Clyde’ had holes cut into her sides from which the soldiers were to emerge once the boat had been beached. However, the Turks had anticipated the landing and were in place in well protected defensive positions before the Irish, Scots, Welsh and English soldiers attempted to walk onto the beach. They were met with a continuous and deadly gunfire which gave the Dublin Fusiliers little or no chance. Among the casualties that first day was Lawrence Kelly of Chapel Hill, Athy, son of James Kelly and the former Kate Lawlor. He was just 23 years of age.

The next day the surviving soldiers advanced against the Turks and under continuous fire managed to capture a number of trenches and a nearby village. However, a counterattack by the Turks which started on the 28th of April inflicted further heavy casualties on the advancing soldiers.

On Friday 30th April John Farrell, aged 31 years, of Janeville Lane and Christopher Hanlon, aged 27 years, both from Athy and members of the 1st battalion R.D.F. were killed. An Irish officer serving as surgeon on the ‘River Clyde’, Dr. P. Burrowes Kelly wrote a letter to his father Gilbert Kelly at Ballintubbert giving an account of the landing on the Gallipoli beaches, ‘when (we were) about 60 yards from the shore they (the Turks) opened up on us and such a din of pom poms and bullets I never want to be in again ..... our men were simply butchered and the water was red with blood and the air boiling with bullets.’

The first batch of wounded soldiers from the Dardanelles arrived back in Naas in July 1915 and an account in the Kildare Observer of one of those soldier’s experiences read : ‘the landing was something awful, it was like trying to scramble onto a rock with six hands to every one of yours pushing you back. There was no cover and we the Dublins and the Munsters who were with us suffered terribly.’

The next important date in the chronology of death of local men during the Dardanelles Campaign was 12th July 1915. On that fateful day two young men from this area died in Gallipoli. The Turkish trenches before Acai Baba were captured but Frank Fanning of Convent Lane and another local man Daniel Delaney were killed. By a strange coincidence a photograph of Frank Fanning was recently discovered and is reproduced with this article. Frank’s younger brother John had also enlisted as a drummer boy. He survived the war and returned to Athy where he died in 1955.

After the declaration of war in August 1914 the Dublin Fusiliers raised a total of eleven battalions as part of Kitchener’s call for a new army. Both the 6th and 7th battalions were formed at Naas in August and were assigned to the 30th Brigade in the 10th division at the Curragh Camp. These two battalions were to figure prominently and tragically in the Gallipoli campaign. On 11th July 1915 men of the 6th and 7th battalions sailed from Devonport, England to Mitylene and on 7th August 1915 landed at Gallipoli in Suvla Bay. With the extra troops then available the army launched simultaneous attacks on the Turks from the original landing point at Cape Helles, from Suvla Bay and from the area known as Anzac where the Australian and New Zealand troops had landed. However, the difficult terrain and stiff Turkish resistance soon lead to the stalemate of trench warfare. On Saturday 7th August Tommy Grimes of Ballitore was killed. He was a regular soldier and a member of the 1st Battalion.

On Monday 9th August 1915 two members of the 6th battalion, William Moran of Athy and Michael Kinsella, aged 26 years, of Hallahoise, Castledermot, were killed. Six days later Henry Price, aged 45 years of Ballitore, another member of the same battalion was killed in action.

From the end of August 1915 no further serious action took place and the battle lines remained unchanged. Despite this Patrick Byrne of Kilabbin, aged 32 years, was killed on 29th October 1915. He was the last man from this area to die in the Dardanelles from where the British Army began to evacuate in December 1915.

The Helles Memorial which stands at the top of the Gallipoli Peninsula is an obelisk over 30 metres high which records the names of soldiers killed in Gallipoli who have no known graves. Amongst those commemorated on the memorial are William Moran, Michael Kinsella, Henry Price, Daniel Delaney and Thomas Grimes.

At Cape Helles is the “V beach” cemetery where the remains of Lawrence Kelly, Christopher Hanlon and John Farrell are interned. Frank Fanning is buried in the Twelve Acre Copse Cemetery which is in Cape Helles. This cemetery was developed after the Armistice when bodies were brought in from isolated sites and small burial grounds scattered around the battlefields of Gallipoli. There are 3,360 First World War soldiers buried or commemorated in the cemetery but sadly 2,226 of the burials are unidentified. Frank Fanning’s body was identified and he lies in a marked grave. Patrick Byrne, the 32 year old son of Catherine Byrne of Kilabbin, is buried in Azmak Cemetery, Suvla.

The recent visit of President McAleese to Gallipoli is an important acknowledgement of an almost forgotten part of our national and local history. The men from Athy and the surrounding countryside who died in the Gallipoli campaign had long passed from memory but amongst us today are their descendents who can take consolation from the knowledge that names retrieved from the hidden folds of our forgotten history can now once again claim our respect and remembrance.

Remembering our war dead

Her mother wore a poppy every Remembrance Sunday. She wore it around the house but seldom ventured outside the door that particular Sunday as she would ordinarily do every other day of the year. ‘Why do you wear that thing mother?’ her young daughter asked, her enquiry born of curiosity as much as a growing awareness of a young Free Stater’s dislike of emblems of a failed empire.

Some years were to pass before the mother explained to her daughter why she wore the poppy. ‘It’s to remember my young brother Michael – he was just 19 years of age when he died’. Michael Territt’s sister would continue to remember her long lost young brother, even as she grew into old age. For years she treasured the last poppy she was able to buy on the streets of Athy, keeping it for that one Sunday each year when with hundreds of other mothers and sisters her thoughts turned to a time when young men left Athy with high spirits never to return.

Michael Territt died of his wounds in Flanders on 22nd June 1916, aged 19 years. He had enlisted in the Dublin Fusiliers the previous year, exchanging the Territt family home in Chapel Lane, Athy for the Military Barracks in Naas. He landed in Gallipoli in October 1915 and left the following January for Alexandria before travelling on to France. Wounded at Mailly Wood, Flanders on 20th June 1916 he died two days later. Michael Territt is buried in Mailly – Maillet Communal Cemetery and the army records show that he was survived by his mother Mrs. M.A. Territt of Chapel Lane, Athy. There was no mention of his brothers or sisters.

The story of Michael Joseph Territt and his part in the first World War is the same story told and retold hundreds of times in every town and village in Ireland. The euphoria of war time exploits shorn of the depravity of death and mangled bodies was in itself sufficient encouragement for young Irish men to enlist after August 1914. The boredom of unemployment, coupled with the opportunity for travel overseas, was more than enough to encourage even the most reluctant to don the khaki and shoulder the much vaunted Lee Enfield. Much encouragement came from the local Church and civic leaders, who from a recruiting platform positioned under the Town Hall clock in Emily Square called on the young local men to join the ranks, ‘to fight the Hun’ – ‘to fight for the cause of little Belgium’. The Parish Priest and the Chairman of the Urban District Council led the call for local recruits and the local men joined up in their hundreds. Those who enlisted were paraded to the local railway station behind the Leinster Street Fife and Drum Band, cheered on by the women folk of the town. The people of Athy it seemed shared a common mission, seldom if ever before matched or ever again equalled. There were a few disapproving voices, but only a very small minority who caught up in the Gaelic League Movement saw little reason to support the country which had denied Home Rule to the Irish people.

No one questioned the decision of the young men who volunteered to serve abroad following the declaration of war. No one questioned their motives and certainly no one questioned their allegiance to the country of their birth. The young men of Athy left these shores with the support and with the good wishes of those they left behind.

What happened while they were away fighting and dying in the mud of Flanders fields to turn that support into disapproval, culminating at the end of war into denial? When those young men who were fortunate to survive the war returned home after November 1918 they came back to a country which had experienced the Easter Rebellion of 1916. This was soon followed by the execution of its leaders and a shift in support for the emerging Sinn Fein organisation left the returning soldiers isolated and cut adrift from the public support they had previously enjoyed. As they returned to their homes having spent up to four years experiencing the horrors of war torn Europe these battle hardened young men found themselves, not as war heroes as they might have expected, but as an embarrassing reminder of an earlier failed parliamentary movement for Home Rule.

I remember as a young lad a number of local men who decades after the war were still suffering the effects of gas poisoning and other injuries sustained in France and Flanders. They were a forgotten generation, forgotten not just by local Church and civic leaders who had encouraged them to enlist, but also forgotten, indeed positively ignored, by a townspeople, some of whom actively, most however passively, had supported the drive for Irish independence. If the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War were difficult times for surviving Irish soldiers of World War I (some of whom were summarily executed), the post Independence period also brought its difficulties. The comradeship of war kept alive in British Legion halls throughout Ireland and by the annual Remembrance Sunday ceremonies held throughout the Free State in the 1920s disappeared soon after the election of the first Fianna Fáil government in 1932. De Valera’s nation building had no place of honour for the men of 1914-18.

It was a later generation, more tolerant and perhaps less prejudiced, which sought to recover for Irish history a past generation’s part in our common history. Twenty or so years ago it was inconceivable that any Irish person would wear a poppy in public on Remembrance Sunday or that any form of ceremony would be held in an Irish provincial town to commemorate the men who died in the First World War. But it did happen here in Athy and I am proud to say that I was part of a small group who publicly acknowledged the part that a past but forgotten generation of Athy men played in the ever developing history of Athy.

In St. Michael’s old Cemetery are the graves of six Athy soldiers who died at home during World War I. On next Sunday, 8th November at 3.00 p.m., a short ceremony will take place in St. Michael’s cemetery to honour the memory of all those men from Athy and district who died in the Great War. Many of those men have no known grave. Others like Michael Territt lie in graves close to where they died in battle. Remembrance Sunday is the one day in the yearly calendar when we can show our respects for our town’s war dead. I hope you can join in the Remembrance ceremony in St. Michael’s next Sunday at 3.30 p.m.

Last week Johnny Timpson passed away after a long battle with illness. He attended the Christian Brothers Schools in St. John’s Lane where he excelled as a Latin scholar and was a fine footballer in his day. Johnny came from an old Athy family and like many of those families he too had members of his extended family who fought and died in World War I.

Like me, Johnny was born of a generation which was not decimated by war. Michael Territt and his generation bore the brunt of war and in return got little or no appreciation for what they and their families suffered. We can still make amends for that omission.