Massacre in West Cork (14 page)

5
The Hornibrooks and the War of Independence

The War of Independence was a disaster for the Woods/Hornibrook/Nicholson family. They were definitely staunch loyalists, as Matilda tells the Irish Grants Committee in 1927, and must have looked on with horror as the position of their government was threatened by the rise of Sinn Féin.
¹
They were also Protestant, and the actions of Thomas Henry Hornibrook Jnr at the coursing meeting in Crossbarry when he assaulted the parish priest of Kilmurry in 1902 had led to a brief rise in sectarian tensions in Ovens, before these were skilfully defused by local councillor Jeremiah O’Mahony, who stressed that Thomas had acted alone and had been condemned by other leading Protestants in the parish.

The destruction, looting and burning of Edward Woods’ business in Cook Street by the Auxiliaries during the sacking of Cork in December 1920 was the first major blow to the family. While Guy’s Almanac records them as living in Crosses Green in 1921, Gerard Murphy suggests that they had moved in with Mr Lacy in ‘Glenbrae’ on the Cross Douglas Road in Cork at this time. Certainly, Matilda was living in ‘Glenbrae’ in May 1922.
²
The loss of the wine store left Edward without an income, and Herbert, who had finally returned from the war three weeks earlier, jobless. Although Edward claimed that he owned the Glen Distillery, which closed around this time, at the very best he was a minority shareholder.
³
According to Edward’s statement to the Irish Grants Committee in 1927, it was burned, but no record of this has been found in the local papers.
⁴
Finding work as yet another demobilised soldier would have proved difficult for Herbert, and he was back living on the Cross Douglas Road with Edward’s young family in 1921.

Perhaps the most important event in the lives of the interlinked Nicholson and Woods families occurred at the Chetwynd Viaduct in Cork at the end of November 1920, as it placed both families under suspicion of providing information to the British. An interrogation and execution at the viaduct was the last of a series of events that had started a few days earlier with the killing of Sergeant James O’Donoghue, a Roman Catholic from Cahersiveen who had joined the RIC in 1898. His family, as many Irish families did at the time, saw education as an avenue out of poverty. The other members of the O’Donoghue family were a doctor, a priest, a nun and a nurse, with the eldest inheriting the family farm. The RIC was a good job – well paid and pensionable – and although RIC officers were armed, their chance of actually getting shot was tiny until the War of Independence.
⁵
A 1920 manuscript in the Terence MacSwiney archives details MacSwiney’s plans for winding up the RIC, including compulsory resignations organised by deputations visiting their homes to emphasise to their families the necessity of retiring,
⁶
and asking them to swap sides.
⁷
For Sergeant O’Donoghue to have remained in the RIC at this stage was clearly presenting himself as a target. Some 890 RIC officers had resigned across the country up to 9 August 1920, with 62 per cent of these resignations occurring from 31 May, suggesting that many resigned rather than continue to take part in the war.
⁸

On 17 November 1920 Sergeant O’Donoghue was shot dead in White Street, Cork, as he was returning to his barracks in Tuckey Street, having investigated the theft of a lorryload of bacon from Lunham and Co., which had been destined for Victoria Barracks in Cork. Lunhams was a regular target and was again raided in April 1921, when three tons of bacon ended up with the flying column in Donoughmore.
⁹

O’Donoghue’s killers included Willie Joe O’Brien. Later that night, during an unsanctioned Black and Tan reprisal, his brother Charlie O’Brien was shot in the mouth, leaving him seriously injured. Eugene O’Connell (brother-in-law of Charlie O’Brien) was killed. The Black and Tans also raided the house of Stephen Coleman, a relation of the O’Briens, on Broad Street, wounding Coleman and killing Patrick Hanley. Both were unarmed. The Hanley killing was witnessed by IRA intelligence officer Leo Buckley, who was hiding on the roof of the house next to Coleman’s.
¹⁰
However, a member of the Fianna, George Hurley, gave a fuller account of the events:

At about 11.45 p.m. on the night of 17th November 1920, the residents of No. 2 Broad St. were awakened by the noise of the front door being broken open; a man rushed up the stairs and entered the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Coleman who also resided in the house. The man was wearing a policeman’s uniform, cap and goggles. He came to the bedside with a revolver in one hand and a flashlamp in the other. When asked by Mrs. Coleman what in God’s name brought him there, he merely exclaimed ‘Hello’, flashed his lamp on the bed, raised his revolver and fired point-blank into the bed. The bullet wounded Mr. Coleman in the arm. The assailant then turned and walked out of the room leaving Mrs. Coleman screaming. Paddy Hanley opened the door of his room when he heard the man rushing up the stairs. The man in police uniform had just come from Mrs. Coleman’s room. Hanley, standing at his bedroom door, said: ‘Don’t shoot; I am an orphan and my mother’s only support’. ‘Very well,’ replied the man, and, raising his revolver, fired at Hanley. The bullet missed him, but the man fired the second time, the bullet striking Hanley above the heart, killing him instantly. Hanley was in his night attire at the time.

This murder was by way of a reprisal by the British for the shooting of an R.I.C. sergeant named O’Donoghue by the I.R.A. earlier on the same night in the course of an I.R.A. raid on Lunham’s bacon factory.
¹¹

The city IRA was immediately suspicious and a hunt was on for the spy in their midst. It was noticed that Din Din O’Riordan had a lot more money to buy drink than he should have had and Florence O’Donoghue investigated him. However, O’Riordan was not alone in being suspected and other IRA members were also followed at this time. In some cases they were shot. Suspicion also fell on Din Din Donovan of 2nd Battalion, Cork City IRA, but Dick Murphy, a friend within the IRA dismissed this.
¹²
As it turned out this was a mistake, and he was later shot as a spy.

By the end of November 1920 the IRA had set a trap for Din Din O’Riordan; once the British reacted to the information it had fed him, it had its man. He was taken to the Chetwynd Viaduct. Mick Murphy and Frank Busteed, playing on his weaknesses, promised him £50 and free passage from Ireland if he gave information about his paymaster. Din Din confessed and said that another IRA man who worked for Woodford Bourne had recruited him. This confession implicated the owner of the firm, James Nicholson, and some of the other leading businessmen in the city, including Alfred Reilly, manager of Thompson’s Bakery, and George Tilson. The alleged paymaster was Charles Beale, an Englishman who had come to manage Woodford Bourne eight years previously. When Din Din had finished his confession, he was shot by Frank Busteed and buried at the viaduct.
¹³

According to Busteed, letters passing through the hands of Josephine Marchmont Browne (the IRA spy in the office of Captain Kelly, the intelligence officer for the British in Cork) also identified two interlinked spy rings centred on Woodford Bourne. The first consisted of businessmen, bankers, merchants and clergymen of high social standing, and the second consisted of members of the YMCA who had been recruited by the senior spy ring.
¹⁴

On 29 November father and son James and Fred Blemens were kidnapped separately from their home, held for a few days and then shot. James Blemens worked in Woodford Bourne. The next killing was even more shocking as it struck at the heart of Cork society:

As the result of information received by our Brigade Intelligence Service it became known that an organisation run by the Free Masons and The Young Men’s Christian Association had been formed in Cork to spy on the movements of I.R.A. men in the City and to report on them to the British Authorities. One of the principal men in this organisation was named Riley [sic], who was Manager (so far as I can recollect) of Thompsons [sic] Bakery, Cork, and lived in Rochestown, County Cork. This man was reputed to be the paymaster for the Spies.

Early in February 1921 I received instructions from the Brigade to take into custody Riley and have him executed. On the evening of the 10th February, 1921, as he was returning from work in King Street (now MacCurtain Street) in his pony and trap, four of us, armed with revolvers, got into the trap and drove him to his home at Rochestown. We shot him outside the gate of his house and affixed a card to the body with the words ‘Spies and Informers Beware’ written on it.
¹⁵

In the middle of January 1921 two men called to the house of Charles Beale at 7 Laurelhurst, College Road, Cork, looking to speak to the ‘man of the house’. Sarah, his wife, had grown suspicious of the two men and said he was not at home, which was true. The men had left. On 16 February Beale was kidnapped on his way home from work, having been spotted on the South Gate Bridge. His body was found in a field owned by Mrs Dennehy of Dennehy’s Cross, almost opposite Wilton church, then a mile outside the city. The body was face down with his arms outstretched. The head was a tangled mass of blood. On the body was a note: ‘Spies and informers beware’.
¹⁶
According to the IRA, information found on Beale’s body cracked the spy ring open, and the other members of the ‘Anti-Sinn Féin League’ were picked up and ‘suitably dealt with’.
¹⁷

It is logical to assume that Edward and Matilda Woods, as ‘staunch unionists’ and immediate relatives of James Nicholson, would have been kept under observation by the IRA to see if they were linked to the conspiracy. In fact, Edward later claimed that these events forced him to leave Cork in 1921, in fear of his life. The Hornibrook family lived on the border between the 1st and 3rd Cork Brigades, and the entire area around their house was the scene of many of the most famous and bloody incidents in the war. There is no doubt that they remained openly loyal to Britain in the fight, but there is no suggestion that they were active in their support. If anything, they were aggressively neutral, but Thomas Hornibrook was harassed by the IRA in Ballygroman and appears to have resigned as a JP by 1921.
¹⁸

As early as 1919 Thomas Hornibrook had been involved in a firefight with the local IRA. Tim O’Keeffe tells the story:

Houses of loyalists which were raided were Clarke’s of Farran,
¹⁹
Hornibrook’s of Killumney, McGivern’s of Waterfall and also Castle White at the same place. A good supply of arms was collected. When the Volunteers came to Hornibrook’s house, however, he spoke out of a window to them and said he would resist. In the course of his declarations, he quoted Mr. Gladstone as having once said that every man’s house was his castle and so he was going to defend his. And so he did and defended it well. He was a good shot but after half an hour’s fight the Volunteers forced their way in and compelled his surrender. No one was hurt on either side but three revolvers with about 300 rounds of ammunition for them and two shotguns were secured.
²⁰

This statement identifies only the loyalist houses and not the many other Protestant houses in the area.

According to local historian Nora Lynch, all comings and goings at the Hornibrook house were being observed by a servant in a nearby house and reported to the IRA throughout the period up to the Hornibrooks’ killing.
²¹
Their mail would have been censored by the IRA, as was everyone else’s, and they were subjected to some intimidation possibly related to their open loyalty to the empire. On 19 January 1921 Thomas claimed for a break-in at his stable, the theft of a harness and an injury to one of the horses (which may have been accidental, according to the RIC report). Why only the harness was stolen and not the horse is another matter. Another incident, recorded in the Manchester Regiment’s
Record of Civilian Arrests
, states that Jeremiah Herlihy was arrested on 7 July 1921 for cutting the tail off one of Thomas Hornibrook’s horses with a saw. Jeremiah was taken to Victoria Barracks on 14 July and was interned.
²²

On 18 July 1921, after the Truce, Samuel Hornibrook’s motorbike and the mudguard of the Hornibrooks’ car were damaged during another break-in. On the same occasion the windows of the empty steward’s house in the farmyard were smashed.
²³
On 18 February 1922 Thomas H. Hornibrook claimed in the Bandon Board of Guardians for damage to a plough and the lock on an outhouse at Ballygroman, through his solicitors Wynne & Wynne of Cork.
²⁴