Category: Military history

‘Fit as fiddles and as hard as nails'[Howard Bury of Charleville and Belvedere] by Jane Maxwell. Blogs No 116, 12 Jan 2018

Charles Kenneth Howard Bury of the Royal Irish Rifles, probably c. 1914. Courtesy of David Hutton Bury.

At the beginning of the centenary commemorations for the War, at the Theatre of Memory Symposium at the Abbey Theatre in 2014, President Higgins spoke of the commemorative activities in terms of myth-making and ethical remembering. He remarked that ‘for years the First World War has stood as a blank space in memory for many Irish people – an unspoken gap in the official narratives of this state’. He suggested that ‘literary memoirs written during or after the War can be enabling sources for ethical remembering’ and advocated using the commemorative period to create ‘opportunities to recollect the excluded, to include in our narratives the forgotten voices and the lost stories of the past’. In the aftermath of the death in the last few years of all the veterans of the War, to find these stories and these voices we must go back to the archives and seek out the diaries, memoirs letters and photographs of those who served. The Library in Trinity has a fascinating collection of this kind of material, gifted and bequeathed over the decades and, to mark the centenary of the War, the Library decided to publish this material online.

Fit as fiddles and as hard as nails is the name given to the online project which allows free access not only to digitised images of over 1500 pages of WW1 letters and diaries from the Library’s special collections, but transcriptions of the texts are also provided. There are nine war-time authors involved – almost all officers – and altogether they produced three sets of letters, four diaries (including a very brief home-front diary by the single female author among them) and three memoirs (two of which are prisoner-of-war accounts). The authors served on both Western and Eastern fronts, and ranged in age from twenty years of age to thirty-three. Two of them won Military Crosses, and one of them received the DSO having been mentioned in despatches seven times. This was Charles Howard-Bury – the oldest of our authors; he was born in Charleville Castle, Co. Offaly in 1881 and was a career military man who went with the British army to India in 1904. He was present at the Battle of the Somme and was eventually taken prisoner in 1918.

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January 12, 2019
Birr Barracks WW1 Trench Dig, by Stephen Callaghan. Blog No 94, 11 August 2018

As part of the events for the 50^th Birr Vintage Week, a set of mock WW1 trenches were excavated in the training grounds of Birr Barracks. The excavation, which was the first of its kind in the Republic of Ireland, helped provide further information about the training structure put in place to train men for life in the trenches. This article gives a brief overview of the barracks itself and its long colourful history. (more…)

August 11, 2018

Birr Barracks, Fourteen Acres, Leinster Regiment
Wright and the other Volunteers: Birr, the Boer War and the Lindley connection. By Rosemary Raughter. Blog No 82, 19 May 2018

This week’s blog is by Rosemary Raughter, an independent scholar, who has published widely on women’s and on local history. Her discovery of a collection of love letters, written 1898-1901, from her grandmother, Sarah Whelan, originally of Roscrea, to her grandfather, Thomas Eades of Birr, led her to research aspects of life in Birr at the turn of the twentieth century.

In the autumn of 1899 my twenty-one year old grandmother, Sis Whelan, was living in Newtownbarry (now Bunclody), Co Wexford. Far from home and friends, she kept up a regular correspondence with the young man whom she had met while working in Birr, and whom she would eventually marry.[1] Like Sis, Tom Eades was a shop assistant: reared in Fortal, since his early teens he had been employed in Fayle’s hardware shop on the Main Street. Sis’s life was a narrow one, confined for the most part to the drapery shop in which she worked, to her lodgings above it, to the Methodist chapel across the square where she worshipped, and to the riverside paths and woods just outside the town where she walked on occasional free afternoons. Current national and international events impinged hardly at all on her consciousness, which was not surprising: as she told Tom, ‘we never see a paper here’.[2] (more…)

May 19, 2018

Boer War, Leinster Regiment
The murder of Lieutenant Clutterbuck of Birr Barracks in 1865. Blog No 73, 17 March 2018

By Stephen Callaghan

A previous blog post detailed the murder in 1843 of Lieutenant and Adjutant Robertson Mackay of the 5^th Fusiliers at Birr Barracks. Mackay was shot dead by a soldier he was drilling, Private George Jubee. Jubee ultimately being hung for his crime. Some twenty two years later a detachment of 5^th Fusiliers were stationed in Birr Barracks, with the brutal murder of Lieutenant James Henry Clutterbuck taking place on the River Brosna. (more…)

March 17, 2018
Puttaghan, Tullamore: living on a powder keg 210 years ago. Blog No 67, 03 Feb 2018

The older residents of Tullamore will know where the magazine was and will quickly tell you it was near the old footbridge in Convent View in the townland of Puttaghan. The magazine or arsenal on a site of almost one acre was built by the army in 1808 and the stores were surrounded by a nine-foot high wall, part of which survives at 21/21 Convent View. The high walls were designed to protect the powder magazine, store rooms and guard room. Other such walls surrounded the 1716 barracks and can still be seen near the garda station bordering Marian Place and a little more at Parnell Street (best viewed from the Marian Place off Kilbride Street). Little of the old Wellington Barracks (of c. 1800) survives in Cormac Street.

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February 3, 2018

Convent View Tullamore, Grand Canal, Lord Cornwallis, Napoleonic Wars
Brigadier General James P. Cullen (retired U.S. army), a fine Offaly man who served Ireland and his adopted homeland, 1945-2017. Died, New York, 8 December 2017.Blog No 60, 16 Dec 2017

Brigadier General James P. Cullen died at his home in Scarsdale, New York on 8 December 2017 at the age of 72. He was born in Queens, New York on 27 January 1945 to Agnes Gorman and Patrick Cullen but came to Ireland and to Rahan, Co. Offaly when he was four and spent almost four years in the Offaly parish before returning to New York where he took his first job soon after. Thereafter Jim never stopped working, giving of his time whether for remuneration or in a voluntary capacity. (more…)

December 16, 2017

Brehon Law Society, Friends of Sinn Fein, Good Friday Agreement, Guantánamo Bay, James P. Cullen, US Army
Captain Studholme of Ballyegan, by Stephen Callaghan.Blog No 46, 09 Sept 2017

Captain Lancelot Joseph Moore Studholme (1884-1916)

Behind Ballyegan House, on the side of a windswept hill stands an old oak cross. The tarnished bronze plaque commemorates the name of a brave Birr born Officer, Captain Lancelot Joseph Moore Studholme of the 7^th Battalion, Leinster Regiment who was killed in action on 9 September 1916, 101 years ago. This is his story. (more…)

September 9, 2017

7th Battalion Leinster Regiment, Ballyegan, Ballyegan House, Captain Studholme, Guillemont
The Egan Brothers and the Battle of Messines, 7-14 June 1917, a precursor to the 3rd Battle of Ypres, by Maurice Egan. Blog No 32, 20 May 2017.

The battle was an offensive planned by the Allied forces on the western front, taking place from the 7^th to the 14^th June 1917. British, Canadian and ANZAC forces were actively involved in the objective of taking the German, heavily fortified and ‘impregnable’ 15kms long, Messines Ridge in western Belgium. The New Zealand division was assigned the task of attacking the southern bastion of the German defences upon the ridge. The Irish 16^th Division, including the Royal Irish Regiment were assigned the task of attacking the north eastern fortified ridge. (more…)

May 30, 2017

Battle of Messines, World War 1
A Murder at Birr Barracks, by Stephen Callaghan. Blog No 22, 25 March 2017.

Birr Barracks was constructed by Bernard Mullins between 1809-1812, during the height of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) in Europe. The Barracks saw various regiments of the British Army stationed there. The Barracks was burned to the ground in July 1922 by North Tipperary Brigade, IRA. In 110 years of existence there were many notable, interesting events and scandals, one of the more macabre events was the murder of Adjutant Robertson Mackay of the 5^th Fusiliers by Private George Jubee, this is their story. (more…)

March 25, 2017

5th Fusiliers, Birr, Birr Barracks, George Jubee, Roberston Mackay