The tradition of the Wild Geese took a new turn a century ago this month when a motley band of Irishmen took up arms against the British at the outbreak of the Boer War. It was one of the more curious strands in an already curious conflict, not least because there were many thousands of "loyal" Irish troops fighting on the British side, too - "My brave Irish", as Queen Victoria called them on learning that, in the final push to relieve the besieged town of Ladysmith, the Connaught Rangers and other Irish regiments had lost 500 men in under 24 hours.
If brother was not exactly fighting brother, then Kelly was certainly pitched against O'Kelly. As one anonymous balladeer had it:
Fitzgerald got Fitzpatrick, Brannigan found O'Rourke;
Finnigan took a man named Fay - and a couple of lads from Cork.
Dicey took a lad named Welsh; Dooley got McGurk;
Gilligan turned in Fahey's boy - for his father he used to work.
Massive enlistment in the British army on the one hand and emigration on the other made certain of these kinship killings.
By 1891 there were, Donal McCracken tells us in his fascinating book, up to 20,000 ethnic Irish on the African sub-continent, from respectable bishops in Cape Town to piratical ruffians in the bars of Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa. It was from that town that Captain Moonlight and his rapscallion labouring gang built the railway to Pretoria, capital of the Transvaal, the Boer homeland. About five years later the colourful character at the centre of McCracken's tale, John MacBride, arrived in South Africa.
The embarkation of noted republicans - among others, Arthur Griffith - for Africa was soon the matter of police memos to Dublin Castle. Many of them came at the invitation of wealthy Pretoria businessman Solomon Gillingham, the "rather shadowy figure who was to a large extent the eminence grise of Transvaal-Irish politics for the next half-century."
It was Gillingham, together with MacBride, Griffiths and John Whelan (head of the Pretoria court of the Irish National Foresters), who would sign their names to a letter taking the struggle for Irish freedom to the limits of the British imperium: "Britain boasts that the sun never sets on the English Empire; but it is the proud boast of Irishmen that it never sets on its enemies."
"Poor old John Bull" was the reaction, McCracken tells us, of Major Gosselin of the Dublin Metropolitan Police to the letter. His sarcasm was off the mark: the Boer War would, as Kipling had it, teach the British Empire "no end of a lesson" and the Irish Brigades (the second run by Arthur Lynch) would play a valiant, if at times calamitous, part in it.
At first MacBride didn't lead his group. That honour went to Colonel John Blake, a maverick Irish-American (of greatly diluted extraction) who had seen service as an officer in the US Cavalry and Navaho Scouts during the Indian wars. One story had him helping to capture Geronimo. On leaving America he got caught up in the Ndebele rebellion in Rhodesia before linking up with MacBride, who took over when Blake was wounded.
They must have made quite a pair: Foxy Jack, as MacBride was known - "swashbuckling miles glorious" as Roger Casement (also out in South Africa, but still working for the British in those days) would later call him, and the cowboy-hat-wearing Blake. "Looking like Buffalo Bill, he was described as being `half wild, yet gentle . . . the type of adventurer one reads of in a novel, yet never expects to meet."
As Blake and MacBride gathered their volunteers around them, pro-Boer rallies were being held in Dublin. In Beresford Place, 20,000 people protested at "the attack of England upon the liberties of the Transvaal". Among those present were Michael Davitt, John O'Leary and (back from South Africa) Arthur Griffith. There were also two others, through whose lives MacBride would later cut a swathe: Yeats and Maud Gonne.
THE Irish brigades fought hard, but also drank hard, much to the disapproval of the Calvinist Boers. MacBride, famously, was later left out of the inner circle of Easter Rising plotters, probably on account of alcohol problems. But at this stage he seems to have been able to keep fighting and drinking in the balance - and fornication, too, fathering a child in South Africa. Swigs of whiskey under fire certainly add further comic piquancy to this vignette of an attack on Ladysmith that McCracken gives us: "MacBride himself was in real danger, not least because he stopped to help the wooden-legged Frank Dunlop mount his horse. MacBride's own horse, Fenian Boy, bolted but was brought back through the firing line to the major by Pat Darragh."
There was, as McCracken drily remarks, no Fenian Boy in 1916. But there are plenty of other fascinating, if tortuous postscripts to this story, some of which are in this book, some of which I turned up myself while researching a novel about my own English (Foden) and Irish (Barton) ancestors fighting at Ladysmith.
As I soon discovered, there were more interesting grafts on history's twisted root than my own. In charge in Ladysmith as MacBride made his attack on the besieged town was Sir George White, one of a number of ascendancy generals (of whom the most notorious was Kitchener) in the British army in South Africa.
Also shut up in Ladysmith was Yeats's friend, the literary editor and war correspondent HW Nevinson. Nevinson escaped starvation, typhoid and shellfire to hold a torch for his mentor's own torch, Maud Gonne. As we all know, she chose MacBride, the "drunken vainglorious lout" in Yeats's phrase. Roy Foster, amongst others, believes he abused Maud's daughter by an earlier father, Iseult. That would be the very same Iseult who married Ireland's most controversial Saoi of Aosdana, Francis Stuart. And he is Sir George White's great-nephew.
MacBride's own child by Maud was Sean MacBride, IRA chief of staff and later foreign minister of the Republic. Another offspring of Foxy Jack, but to a very different kind of mother than Gonne, was the forebear of Robert McBride, who fulfilled his ancestry with a notorious car-bomb in apartheid South Africa and is now an official in the ANC government. His name was cleared earlier this year after the Mozambique government accused him of gun-running.
Is it something in the genes, do you think, or just the way that in Ireland, as the poet Paul Muldoon has put it, "everything comes down with history"? As this book shows, the same goes for South Africa, too.
Giles Foden is on the staff of the Guardian. His novel, Ladysmith, was published last month by Faber and Faber.