Thread: An Irishman’s Diary on an Irish nurse in wartime

Another book on the same subject:

“John Naylor is today remembered on the memorial wall at Loos, where his name is listed with thousands of other war dead. He is presumed buried somewhere near the battlefield, the exact location of the grave now unknown. Until two years ago, the whereabouts of Margaret Naylor’s grave was a mystery too, at least to some of her family.”

A war-time tragedy on two fronts

The years of centenary commemorations now upon us will test the truth of a cynical quotation, attributed to Stalin and others, that whereas the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is just a statistic.

But among the many stories that fall somewhere between the extremes of that grim spectrum, there can be few as poignant as that of John and Margaret Naylor, a husband and wife from Dublin who, at the outbreak of the first World War, were the parents of three children under six.

A grocery shop porter in peacetime, John Naylor then joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. And he was to be one of those very unfortunate men who found themselves in the trenches at a place called Hulluch, in northern France, on April 29th, 1916.
It was the second day of a gas attack by Germans that sent hundreds of soldiers, including Naylor (and many of the Germans themselves, after the wind changed) to horrible deaths.
Compounding this one man’s tragedy, meanwhile, although he couldn’t have known about it, was an incident back in his native city earlier that same day. Dublin was at war now too. And on the morning of April 29th, Margaret Naylor had risked the fighting on a mission to buy bread.
Despite much speculation since, it is not known whether she was a victim of crossfire or a deliberate act. Nor, to my knowledge, is it known which side fired the gun. In any case, crossing Ringsend Drawbridge, she was shot in the head and fatally wounded.
She was the first female casualty of Easter Week. And although she lingered for a couple of days afterwards at St Vincent’s Hospital, she too must have gone to her death unaware of the tragic coincidence that united her with her soldier husband, several hundred miles away.

The couple had also had several children who died in infancy. So if there’s a consolation in the unhappy story, it’s that the three daughters orphaned in April 1916 – Maggie, Kitty, and Tessie – all survived. They were taken in by the dead woman’s sister and lived for years over a shop in what is now Pearse Street, en route to adulthood.
The sad symmetry of their parents’ deaths underlines an similarly poignant resemblance in the casualty figures between Easter Week and the atrocity at Hulluch. In fact, somewhat more Irishmen died in the gas attack and associated fighting than did in Dublin during the Rising.

According to a recent report in this newspaper (March 31st), which incorporated new details released by the UK national archives, the Dublin Fusiliers lost 368 troops in the attack, and the Royal Inniskillings 263. This compares with the 466 who died on all sides during Easter Week.

For those who succumbed directly to the gas, the experience has been likened to drowning on dry land. But the gas not only made breathing impossible, it also caused a terrible thirst, to quench which only hastened a victim’s end. An army chaplain spoke afterwards of seeing dead bodies “in every conceivable posture of human agony”.
The suffering might have been avoided with better planning. The Allied lines had warnings of a likely attack from a German deserter (there are also stories of rats abandoning trenches on the German side beforehand, in apparent reaction to leakage from canisters).
And in fact, the British army had issued gas helmets. But in the event, many of these proved faulty. One respirator, the French-made M2 Mask, did perform well, saving the lives of those who wore it. Production was expedited as a result, and used to good effect later. But it was an expensive lesson.

John Naylor is today remembered on the memorial wall at Loos, where his name is listed with thousands of other war dead. He is presumed buried somewhere near the battlefield, the exact location of the grave now unknown.
Until two years ago, the whereabouts Margaret Naylor’s grave was a mystery too, at least to some of her family. But Frankie McNamee – a son of Kitty Naylor, the middle one of the three orphans – has since taken it upon himself to resurrect a history that, wilfully or otherwise, had been forgotten.

Two years ago, he traced his grandmother to her final resting place, the British war cemetery at Grangegorman, where a handsome headstone now marks the grave of Margaret Naylor, nee Rowe, and unites her, in words on stone at least, to the tragic coincidence of John Naylor’s almost simultaneous demise in the trenches of France.

FRANK MC NALLY: IRISH TIMES: THURS. JULY 3rd 2014

An Irishman’s Diary on Hubert Gough, an enigmatic general



Gen Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough: His role as neutral Ireland’s defender, and the champion of Irish personnel serving in the British forces, is an unwritten story.

This year marks the centenary of the Curragh Mutiny and the outbreak of the Great War, as well as the 75th anniversary of the start of the second World War.

One figure who stands at the intersection of these events, a man often misunderstood, is Gen Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough. Born in London in 1870, Gough came from a long lineage of soldiery. His family were Irish by adoption and were prominent Anglican churchmen, but gradually began to abandon clerical vocations for the “profession of arms”. Hubert was the son of Sir Charles Gough, who distinguished himself at Lucknow, during the Indian Mutiny, winning the Victoria Cross and becoming a major general.

In 1888, aged just 17, Hubert entered the Royal Military College, and in 1889 he joined the 16th Lancers serving in the Malakand Field Force in Northwest India. By the time of the “Curragh Mutiny”, Gough was a brigadier. In March 1914, he led 57 fellow officers of Third Cavalry Brigade to deliver an ultimatum to Gen Paget, declaring that they would accept dismissal “if ordered north” to put down the UVF. Called to Whitehall, Gough and his colonels requested a written assurance that they would not be ordered to enforce Home Rule in Ulster and Secretary of State for War JE Seely agreed to their demands, but Prime Minister Herbert Asquith could not allow army officers to dictate policy and Seely resigned.

During the Great War, Gough was the youngest British general commanding on the Western Front, but was greatly disliked by his superiors because he challenged their decisions and encouraged his own staff to do so. Field Marshal Smuts, however, learned much from Gough about the condition and vulnerability of the line while inspecting the front in January 1918, and described him as “a terrific fellow, oozing with character and Irish humour”.

Such favour would not save him when his Fifth Army bore the brunt of the last German offensive of March 1918. Gough was relieved of his command, despite leading a spirited defensive action against colossal odds. Lloyd George needed to divert attention from his government’s failure to bolster the line adequately and according to his biographer, Anthony Farrar-Hockley, Gough was “sacrificed to political expediency”.
Historians are divided in opinion about Gough; some label him a callous “butcher among generals”, whereas others judge him to have been unusually considerate towards his soldiers.
In his retirement, he stewarded the Fifth Army Comrades Association and led the Chelsea Home Guard in the second World War. It was in this capacity that, ironically, Gough attacked Northern Ireland’s unionist government in August 1941. He co-authored a letter to Churchill and Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie King, criticising Stormont for organising a local defence force, analogous to Britain’s home guard, but “recruited along politico-sectarian lines”. Gough, and other retired Anglo-Irish officers, castigated Craigavon for his policies. While disagreeing with Irish neutrality, they defended the sovereign right to pursue such a course and desired to see old wounds and divisions healed through a spirit of reconciliation.

Gough brought about recognition of the contribution of Irish citizens to Britain’s war effort. In September 1941, he published an editorial in the Times of London, citing that “very large numbers of Irishmen have joined H.M. Forces” and, upon his suggestion, Churchill formed the 38th Irish Brigade, which fought valiantly in North Africa and Italy.

Gough also observed that there was no facility where Irish servicemen and women could meet and rest in London.
With a donation of £1,000 from the Guinness family, he opened the Shamrock Club in Park Lane in March 1943, a venue often frequented by many Irish personnel on leave. In 1946, Gough famously wrote to the Times of London, claiming that, by July 1944, British next-of-kin lists contained 165,000 addresses in the south of Ireland.
He felt that Britain owed a “debt of honour” to these volunteers, who “in spite of their country’s neutrality, crowded unasked to the aid of the United Kingdom in its blackest crisis”.

Gough died in March 1963, his chief legacies being the “preventative mutiny” at the Curragh and his reputation as an “incompetent officer” in 1918. However, his role as neutral Ireland’s defender, and the champion of Irish personnel serving in the British forces, is an unwritten story which, in the year 2014, is fitting to tell.

An Irishman IRISH TIMES JULY 8 2014

Originally Posted by KEVIN2008

Another book on the same subject:

Looked interesting. Unfortunately, not available on Kindle. Paperback out of stock.

Originally Posted by Davis Knowlton

Originally Posted by KEVIN2008

Another book on the same subject:

Looked interesting. Unfortunately, not available on Kindle. Paperback out of stock.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coward-Retur...hero+if+i+fall

Using the slaughter of the first World War to make us buy groceries? Bah, humbug THE IRISH TIMES CULTURE
The Sainsbury’s ad strives to make us associate the tragedy of a generation with self-service checkouts and shopping trollies and Christmassy feelings


A still from Sainsbury’s Christmas ad


Standing in muddy no-man’s land in the midst of war, a German soldier and a English soldier face each other. One extends his hand to the other. “We are not so different you and I,” he seems to say. “We are, after all, both Paul McCartney.”
Paul McCartney’s 1983 Pipes of Peace video is very like Sainsbury’s recent Christmas ad, a homage to the unofficial Christmas Armistice of 1914, during which hostilities briefly subsided and German and English soldiers sang carols to each other before crossing the barbed wire to play football and eat Sainsbury’s chocolate.
In the music promo, McCartney plays both a plucky, clean- shaven Tommy and a winky, moustachioed German. In this version of history, it is these disparate, pan-national Paul McCartneys who instigate the temporary truce of 1914, all to the sound of a jaunty anti-war song. In the Sainsbury’s ad, it’s ruddy-cheeked young model types who do the boundary- crossing to a bitter-sweet, less jaunty score (a piano arrangement of Leaning on the Everlasting Arms) but lovelier, Christmassier cinematography.

Both films depict these events for different reasons, one to shill a surprisingly upbeat anti-war ditty from a former Beatle, the other to shill the wares of a British supermarket chain. I’m fine with the former. I mean, it worked on me back in 1983. After seeing Pipes of Peace on MT-USA with Vincent Hanley, it became the first album I bought (I also liked the video for Say, Say, Say with McCartney as a funky old-west snake-oil salesman swindling people alongside what I genuinely thought was a pretty, tomboyish young lady. It was Michael Jackson.) At eight years old, it was the first time I realised war was bad. Prior to this my war knowledge had come from Victor and Warlord comics and it looked like great fun.

So it could be the nostalgia bubbling in my blood, but I feel like the Pipes of Peace video has something genuinely profound to offer about both the psychology of Paul McCartney and the futility of war. “Hey,” it seems to say, “We are all just pale reflections of the platonic, cosmic Paul McCartney, why we gotta fight?”
The Sainsbury’s ad, on the other hand, despite basically working with the same material, leaves me weeping in a Pavlovian fashion while simultaneously feeling empty, angry and eager to shop for condiments. Borrowing powerful historical symbolism for art, even a commercial pop song, feels like an artist’s prerogative. It’s their job. Leveraging historical touchstones to make us buy groceries, on the other hand, feels like dark, Satanic behaviour.

The Sainsbury’s ad strives to make us associate the tragedy of a generation with self-service checkouts and shopping trollies and Christmassy feelings. It fits in with current trends that like to denude the first World War of political and historical meaning so that we can use it as a big tragic signifier in period dramas (no emotional depth in your writing? Transfer the action to 1914!). The franchise could be expanded beyond the first World War, of course. And around the world I imagine there are brainstorming sessions underway at which marketeers are gleefully matching glitzy brands with suitable historical mass slaughters.

I suspect something similar will be done here in Ireland with 1916 when we figure out how to express patriotic fervour safely and with confidence. All I can gather from the current, rather vague 1916 Inspires video, is that the Rising had something to do with Macnas and Facebook and Fungie the Dolphin and James Connolly muttering “brand Ireland” and “great little place to do business” while blasting a shotgun from the roof of the GPO at uniformed ex-Beatles (probably). We could, I suppose, learn something from the ancient enemy about the sentimental appropriation of history. Maybe all the signatories of the proclamation could be played by Paul McCartney?

Using the slaughter of the first World War to make us buy groceries? Bah, humbug