Turning and Turning: Frank McNally on history repeating

A hundred years ago this Monday, on July 18th, 1922, the big event in London was the wedding of Lord Louis Mountbatten and Edwina Ashley, at St Margaret’s Chapel, Westminster.

It was a happy affair, although newspapers noted that the Prince of Wales was a visibly “anxious” best man, resulting it what might be called a case of premature annulation.

As reported by The Irish Times’s London Letter, “his anxiety to do the right thing was so great that he proferred the ring to the bridegroom at quite an early stage in the service and had to be suitably rebuffed.”

Meanwhile, two miles away at the Old Bailey, a more sombre ceremony unfolded. After a one-day trial, a jury in Central Criminal Court found two IRA men, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, guilty of the murder of Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson a month earlier. Both were sentenced to death.

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Asked if he had anything to say, Dunn objected that the court had not been competent to adjudicate their case. It should have been put instead to “a court of higher powers in Europe, which would consider the rights and wrongs of [Ireland’s struggle for freedom],” he added.

But when the judge passed sentence, asking God to “have mercy on your soul”, Dunne replied calmly: “He will, my lord.”

It is one of the ironies of the Wilson assassination, as Ronan McGreevy points out in his fine recent book on the subject, that the victim was an Irish-born British unionist while the killers were English-born Irish republicans.

In Dunne’s case, however, his political motivations had deep roots in Co Monaghan, from which his maternal grandfather had emigrated in 1839.

Although also a Londoner, Dunne’s mother, Mary Agnes Greenan, maintained strong emotional ties to a county in which “Greenan’s Cross” is named for the family. Through London-Irish music circles especially, she inculcated similar loyalty in her son.

Greenan’s Cross is not easily found on modern maps. Even by the standards of Monaghan hamlets, it’s an out-of-the way place, well off the main road between Monaghan and Clones.

But its mentions in The Irish Times archive have usually been political and include a June 1921 round-up of suspected republican activists that began there. “Many miles of country were swept”, the report said, and several hundred people questioned, resulting in half a dozen arrests.

Eighteen months and a Civil War later, Greenan’s Cross was back in the news as the scene of a 1923 rally in which local TD Ernest Blythe blamed the new and nearby Border on anti-Treaty violence.

“Were it not for the actions of de Valera and his followers, in bringing about ruin and devastation in Southern Ireland, Sir James Craig would not have voted himself out of the Free State,” he declared.

Less politically, decades later, the area also featured in a report on mobile libraries. After Monaghan became the first county in the Republic to provide one, the county librarian boasted that the locals were “terribly keen on reading, particularly in the mountainy districts”, where they had “a culture of their own and are very fond of music and poetry”.

One day, he continued, when the library was touring in a “fearful storm”, it stopped at Greenan’s Cross: “Though it was pouring rain, everyone in the place except one turned up.” When he asked about the woman who was missing, he was told she had just been rushed “to the maternity hospital.”

That was in November 1969, by which time violence had erupted again across the Border. Ten years later, the modern Troubles would claim the lives of Lord Mountbatten, by then an old man, along with his 14-year-old grandson, 83-year-old grandmother, and a local teenager who were all with him when an IRA bomb obliterated their boat off Sligo in August 1979.

As McGreevy notes, Mountbatten’s assassination was “as shocking an event in his generation as Wilson’s had been over half a century earlier”. It was history repeating, although there was no direct connection between the events, except perhaps a piquant geographical coincidence that I noticed while in another part of Monaghan recently.

That was in my home town, where I was visiting the lace gallery. Full of intricately woven patterns, like history itself, Carrickmacross Lace was once a regular component in the bridal trousseaus of European royalty, British included. Princess Diana’s had some, although not (I think) Countess Mountbatten’s.

Meanwhile next door, where the library used to be, there was now a craft shop. That too had many nice things. But what caught my eye were the finely turned wooden bowls, by one Thomas McMahon, a well-known local carpenter who had returned to his trade when released under the Belfast Agreement, after 19 years in prison for the Mountbatten bomb.