IN THE closing days of the second World War, as the Soviet armies converged on Berlin, William Joyce and Ted Bowlby, two Irishmen who had been broadcasting propaganda to Britain for Hitler’s Germany, fled westwards. Some weeks later, both were picked up by the victorious British army. They were on a list of “renegades” earmarked by MI5 in London to be prosecuted for their treachery.
Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw by the British, was hated by them for his gloating broadcasts when they had their backs to the wall early in the war. He was put on trial for treason. His defence was that he had been born in New York and so had no duty of allegiance to the Crown. He had, however, obtained a British passport, pretending to have been born in Galway. The judges held that as he was given the protection of the Crown by having a passport, he had a correlative duty of allegiance. Found guilty, he was hanged on January 3rd, 1946.
Bowlby also had a British passport. Born Charles Edward Bowlby in Cork in 1911 into a family of landed gentry and initially brought up there, largely by his maternal grandparents, he had lived in England after 1922. He was at school at the Royal Naval College at Pangborne, where he was captain of cricket and hockey. Trying his hand at the cinema business, he had an unhappy experience for which he blamed the Jews. He became active in the British Union of Fascists.
A marriage in 1933 fell apart. He had some minor criminal convictions. So, about 1938, he made a new start, moving to Budapest, where he taught English. In 1941 he was ordered out of Hungary but, on his way to Turkey, he was captured and then imprisoned in Germany. Initially he made common cause with fellow Britons in the camp. After a couple of years he changed tack and proclaimed himself to be an Irish citizen. After a visit from the Irish embassy in 1943 he was released. He found employment with German propaganda.
When arrested by the British in 1945, Bowlby pleaded Irish citizenship. He played down his disloyalty to Britain, claiming – which was largely but not wholly true – that his broadcasts were anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic, not anti-British.
The British authorities did not accept that Irish citizens were exempt from the duty of allegiance. But, having disposed of Joyce, they probably had no stomach for a wrangle with the Irish government on the issue. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew (great grand-nephew of the Apostle of Temperance) ruled that Bowlby, who was interned in Belgium, would not be prosecuted as long as he did not return to England.
On his release in the summer of 1946 Bowlby came to Ireland. He dropped the “Ted” of his early life and styled himself Charles Salvin Bowlby. As such, he was taken on as a master at Aravon, a preparatory school near Bray that groomed boys for English public schools.
A report had appeared in the Daily Mailin the summer of 1945 naming Bowlby as a traitor. The Aravon headmaster, A.B. Craig, heard about it and approached the office of the British representative in Eire. MI5 directed that, as Bowlby had not been prosecuted, no information could be disclosed except that he had been detained for security reasons. Craig kept him on. He was an inspiring teacher.
Also concerned were Bowlby’s parents, who were back at Coomhola Lodge, the family home near Bantry. His father, a retired colonel in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, wrote, requesting an interview, to the British Representative to Eire, Sir John Maffey, indicating that they had cut off their son and would have been prepared for him “to pay the extreme penalty” if the story in the Daily Mail were true. Maffey was able to provide little or no information when they met but recorded the colonel’s remark that his son was “not honest where money was concerned and in every way unreliable particularly where women are concerned”.
Although he was lame as a result of a pre-war motor accident, Bowlby remained a cricket enthusiast. He coached the boys at Aravon and played himself. He felt that Irish cricket was not played in the right spirit and in 1948 he founded a club called Leprechauns, modelled on the Free Foresters in England, to play touring sides and to visit schools and country clubs. It took off and has been a force in Irish cricket ever since.
But what was most extraordinary was that the new club numbered among its founding vice-presidents the Sir John Maffey (who had become Lord Rugby). Bowlby had not just escaped the gallows; he seems to have been completely forgiven.
Although he owed much to his Irish nationality the haughty Bowlby was no Irish nationalist. In 1953, he suggested that Leprechauns should mark the coronation year by displaying the colours red white and blue on their fixture card. He was overruled by his fellow members.
By this time most of Bowlby’s efforts were devoted to Glenart preparatory school in Rathgar, which he founded in 1951. He claimed on the prospectus that he had a doctorate but this, like his claim to have been at Clare College Cambridge and several other stories about his former life, was probably a fantasy. Reduced fees were offered to sons of British officers who had served in the second World War. Although the school was described as Protestant, it did not, for all Bowlby’s anti-Semitism, turn away Jewish boys.
About 1956 Glenart moved to Howth and was renamed Sutton Park School. It still thrives. Bowlby went to England and taught in a prep school in Cheltenham. Suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, he died at the Grove Hospital in London, aged 47, on February 15th, 1959 – 50 years ago yesterday. He was never reconciled to his father, who refused even to visit him on his deathbed. He was, as he often remarked to friends, an unwanted child.