Metropolitan rebel — Ronan McGreevy on London and the making of Michael Collins

Michael Collins spent almost a third of his tragically short life in London. It was here, not in Ireland, that he was radicalised and became the best known of all Irish revolutionaries.

Collins was a bright schoolchild who took the civil service examination at the age of 15. The teenage Collins expressed a desire to “live in the biggest city in the world” and, even for those from an Irish nationalist background, London was a place of opportunity for the ambitious. At the age of 16 he became a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank at Blythe House in west London.

Afterwards he worked in a stockbrokers and then a bank, later putting his experience to good use as the chief organiser of the Dáil Loan, which funded the underground Irish government from 1919 to 1921. Collins’s extraordinarily well-organised mind and gifts as an administrator were honed in these years.

The Gaelic Athletic Association was another organisation that provided a gateway for Collins to the Irish nationalist movement.

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Through the GAA he met his great mentor and fellow west-Cork native Sam Maguire and also Liam MacCarthy, a London-born Irish nationalist. Maguire worked as a sorter with the Royal Mail where he used his influence to intercept mail from Whitehall to the British administration in Dublin Castle.

Though ostensibly equal citizens of the United Kingdom, nationality and religion made the Irish a people apart. Old stereotypes about the Irish being feckless, irresponsible and violent emerged during the Victorian era and persisted into the 20th century.

Collins felt the sting of anti-Irish sentiment in London, as he recorded in a Dáil debate in early 1922 even after being fêted by London society during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations where his star eclipsed that of all the luminaries around him.

“I know very well that the people of England had very little regard for the people of Ireland, and that when you lived among them you had to be defending yourself constantly from insults. Every Irishman here who has lived amongst them knows very well that the plain people of England are much more objectionable towards us than the upper classes.

“Every man who has lived amongst them knows that they are always making jokes about Paddy and the pig, and that sort of thing.”

This perception bred a degree of insularity in the Irish community in London, as Collins recalled in an interview with the American journalist Hayden Talbot which he gave a short time before his death.

“I had Irish friends in London before I arrived, and in the intervening years I had made many more friends among Irishmen resident in London. For the most part we lived lives apart. We chose to consider ourselves outposts of our nation. We were a distinct community – a tiny eddy, if you like, in the great metropolis.

“When wonder is expressed as it often is, that I could have lived eight years in London, and still have been so little known that 120,000 British troops and Black and Tans could not find me in four years of hunting me in Ireland, I can only attribute it to that policy of voluntary isolation we all observed in London. And, after all, Michael Collins, junior bank clerk, could hardly be expected to have attracted any notice.”

While living in London, Collins lived with his sister Hannie at various addresses in the west of the city, most notably 5 Netherwood Road in West Kensington, where there is now a blue plaque to mark his time there.

The original plaque was unveiled during the Troubles in 1987 by the Labour-controlled Hammersmith Council, but the proposed wording “Irish nationalist and politician” was not included until later because of the political climate at the time.

Another blue plaque will be unveiled on July 14th, this one outside the old Barnsbury Hall in Islington. Barnsbury Hall was the venue for secret meetings of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in London. Member of the IRB would later foment the Easter Rising.

Collins was sworn into the IRB by Sam Maguire in this hall in November 1909, thus beginning the most celebrated career of any Irish revolutionary.

He made his first speech as an Irish nationalist in Barnsbury Hall in 1912. It was, in many ways, the crucible for the ambitious young revolutionary to test his ideas and meet like-minded people.

Collins left London in 1916 to fight in the Easter Rising and to avoid conscription in Britain.

The building came to the attention of Frank Glynn, a long-time Irish activist in London who is a member of the Terence MacSwiney Commemoration Committee. The committee organises events in London relating to Irish history.

Glynn was a builder and was renovating Barnsbury Hall with some of his workmen when he realised the significance of it as a place connected with Irish history.

The committee has been lobbying Islington Council for many years to allow for the plaque, a process that was delayed by Covid-19. Islington has been one of the most Irish-friendly of London boroughs and earlier this year commissioned a mosaic to the thousands of Irish people who have lived there, especially in the Archway area, for generations.

Islington Council has given its blessing to the plaque and it will be unveiled by Collins’s great-nephew Aengus Collins-O’Malley who lives in London and is one of the foremost custodians of his great-uncle’s memory.