LAST Sunday another seam in the national cloak of amnesia was unstitched when Eamon Gilmore, Minister of State for the Marine, unveiled the memorial to the RMS Leinster, torpedoed by a German U boat in October 1918, and since for gotten. It was the worst maritime calamity ever in Irish waters, and the loss of 501 lives constitutes the single bloodiest incident for the Irish in the Great War.
It requires amnesia on a suitably heroic scale to obliterate this deed from our history but by God, we were up to it. We met that challenge magnificently. Makes you proud Eamon Gilmore on Sunday asked "Was the new Free State so anxious to assert its independence from Britain too uncomfortable with the fact that the vast majority of Irish people who lost their lives on the Leinster were wearing the uniform of the British army?"
The truth about the Leinster is more complex. My researches would suggest that perhaps the majority of the Irish victims were civilians which makes the act of amnesia which engulfed their fate not merely heroic but positively Olympian.
Requiem Mass
The amnesia was assisted by the religion of the drowned a disproportionate number of them were Protestant. After the sinking, the Dublin Catholic archdiocese instructed all churches in Dublin to offer Requiem Mass for the repose of the souls of the victims but of the Catholic victims only however.
So we may conclude the Requiem Masses did not have as their spiritual targets the souls of such as Dorothy May Jones, or Doris Callingham or Christine Goodman or Alice Kingsmith or 15 year old Alfred White or the Musgrave sisters, Florence and Frances, daughter of the widowed Lady Musgrave, all of whom died in the disaster.
And were the victims Nora Kirwan from Spiddal and Henriette Kirwan of Tuam related? At least they would have been suitable recipients for the grace generated in all those Requiem Masses, as too would Eliza Jane Murphy and her daughter Amy, of Prior Park, Clonmel, who drowned in the disaster. Julia O'Shaughnessy was a nurse, presumably on her way to the front when she drowned. Clare McNally was the daughter of a Major McNally, Connaught Rangers, who had earlier been killed in the war. She too drowned on the Leinster to the inexpressible grief of her sorrowing mother, sisters and brother.
What, one wonders, did their families make of the national amnesia which consumed so many of their female relatives? What did the Hobson family make of it Elizabeth Hobson, dead, her brother, Lieut N. J. Hobson, dead, his baby son Dodo, dead, all in the Leinster? And the Crawford family, die and Syd, he a lieutenant in the Dublin Fusiliers, she a wife of a gunner?
Continuous Action
And what do say when you think of Capt Robert Lee RAMC, who had seen four years continuous action in France, and who had just enjoyed his first home leave and was returning to the front, but never made it? How can such a tragedy of such magnitude come to be totally forgotten? And has An Post done anything to remember and commemorate the massacre of the postal workers who daily did their duty, knowing full well they could die doing it? Of the 22 sorters on the boat, 21 died. Only a J. J. Higgins survived.
"The torpedo exploded in the middle of the post office, destroying the door and the stairs (the only means of escape) ... and all the men working in the far part of the office were either killed instantly or engulfed by the falling structure Nineteen of the dead were married. What did their widows make of the amnesia?
Three of those men had taken the place of three men who were ill. Kismet was at its tricks that day. Four other men intending to catch the boat train to Kings town arrived late at West land Row. So they got a taxi to Kingstown. A wheel came off the taxi, but the occupants were uninjured. They seemed certain to miss the boat when an empty taxi chanced along. The driver got them to Kingstown just in time and the four boarded. Three drowned.
Dr Duggan and a Mr Bassett from Cork had been drinking the night before with a Mr Halse, a New Zealander with a withered arm, in Ross's Hotel. They had become fast friends. When the torpedo struck the two Irishmen looked after their new friend Halse who couldn't swim. They fixed a life belt to him, and after the second torpedo the truly murderous second torpedo struck, they all three jumped. The two Irishmen died. The crippled, non swimming New Zealander survived.
Mrs Wookey didn't. Recently widowed, and having sold Leixlip Mills, she decided to visit her daughter in England. She kept postponing the trip until October 10th, and drowned. So, too, did the, Campbell family father, mother, and daughter, aged 4. So, too, did the wireless operator, Arthur Jeffries, who stuck to his post tapping out SOS's and, doing his duty to the end, perished. Capt Birch, the Dublin born skipper, had taken the Leinster through four unsuccessful torpedo attacks previously. He did not survive the fifth.
List of Subscribers
Five hundred others did not. How did such amnesia over their fate occur? We get a clue from the uproar the next week in Kingstown council when Cllr Christopher Rochfort dissented from a motion of sympathy we get a clue from events in Grand Parade, Cork, when an Irish recruiting officer for the British army said "Men of Cork, I am here to ask you to avenge the Leinster", and was greeted with much hissing, jeering and projectiles and we get a clue in the list of subscribers to the Leinster fund. Their names are overwhelmingly Protestant.
One subscriber was a Col W. Peacocke, who gave £5. Was he the same Col W. Peacocke who led the 36th Ulster Division to the Schaben Redoubt on July 1st, 1916, and who survived the war, only to be murdered chopping wood at his home in Innishannon by the IRA in 1920?
On the fate of the Leinster, those who drowned, those who remembered and those who forgot, hangs a terrible tale it is the tale of Ireland this century.