How a hero of 1916 slipped hangman’s noose in Cork city

IT was December, 1916, and one of the most wanted men in Ireland was walking across St Patrick’s Bridge in Cork city, disguised as a priest.

Robert Monteith was praying he would make it to the port, to board a boat to exile after eight months on the run, where he could plot his next move in the fight for Irish independence.

As he walked, he made a conscious decision to press his prayer book across his chest to emphasise his ‘clergyman’ credentials. Robert knew one false move now could be fatal.

A few months earlier, he had been part of the doomed attempt to bring arms from Germany to Ireland on board the Aud for the Easter Rising. His friend Roger Casement had been caught and executed. Robert had escaped and lain low while the British hunted for him. Now, at last, he was just minutes from safety.

Then, disaster! His heart sank. A member of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) was walking towards him on the bridge.

Recalling the events of that day in 1916 more than three decades later, Robert went through his emotions as the policeman approached.

“What will I do if he recognises me? I decided I would throw my breviary (prayer book) at him and make a run for it. But luck was on my side, he raised his right hand and saluted me as a priest. I held my walking pace, smiled, and continued to the ferry.”

It sounds like a scene from a spy novel - but it is true. It also places the Rebel County at the centre of the events of 1916.

Cork’s role in the Easter Rising has long been a source of regret on Leeside. Confusion and mixed messaging, along with the failure of the Aud to deliver arms, meant the uprising centred on Dublin.

The story of Robert Monteith has been largely forgotten, along with the remarkable role in hiding him that was played by Rochestown College in Cork city.

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Born in Newtownmountkennedy, Co. Wicklow, in 1879, the son of a Protestant farmer, Robert Monteith had joined the British Army at 16 after lying about his age, and fought in the Boer War.

He was discharged in 1902 with the rank of Sergeant-Major and returned to Ireland to work with the Ordnance Survey.

In the ensuing decade, Robert grew devoted to the cause of Irish independence, appalled by scenes of savagery he witnessed by the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the RIC.

One incident in particular coloured his thinking, when, after a peaceful labour movement protest in the capital in 1913, his 14-year-old stepdaughter Florence returned home with a blood-soaked head after being clubbed by a policeman. It prompted this proud military man to join the newly-founded Irish Volunteers.

When World War I began a year later, the British war office made Monteith a captain and ordered him to start recruiting troops in Ireland. He refused, stating that his loyalty now lay in Ireland’s cause. He was dismissed from his Ordnance Survey post and ordered to leave Dublin.

Robert’s devotion to Irish independence now gathered pace and he was despatched to Berlin to assist Sir Roger Casement in recruiting an Irish Brigade from among Irish prisoners-of-war.

In April, 1916, the two men travelled back to Ireland in a German submarine, intending to land ahead of the gunrunning ship Aud to organise the landing and distribution of the arms.

Their U-19 sub arrived off Banna Beach in Kerry on Good Friday, April 21, and it was decided they would row a small boat ashore from the submarine.

Before disembarking, according to Monteith: The Making Of A Rebel, by Catherine C. Smyth, Robert took out their firearms and asked Casement: “Do you understand the loading of these Mauser pistols?”

“No, I have never loaded one,” Casement replied. “I have never killed anything in my life.”

“Well, Sir Roger, you may have to start very soon,” said Monteith. “It is quite possible that we may either kill or be killed.”

The two, and another man, Sergeant Daniel Beverley, began rowing to shore two miles away, but their boat capsized. They would have drowned were it not for the foresight of Monteith to bring lifejackets, and he undoubtedly saved the sickly Casement’s life as the three exhausted men finally hit land at Fenit Pier in Tralee Bay.

However, it soon became clear that neither the Aud nor the pilot boat they were expecting were there to greet them, and the gun-running plot had failed.

Casement, too ill and exhausted to travel, hid in an old fort near the beach, while Monteith and Beverley walked six miles to Tralee to contact Austin Stack of the local Volunteers.

Casement was soon found and arrested, and the next day, Beverley was captured. But Monteith avoided capture and spent the next eight months in hiding in Kerry, Limerick, and Cork.

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Buried away in the Capuchin archives is the story of how Monteith evaded capture and finally escaped to freedom across St Patrick’s Bridge that December day - some of it in his own words.

By then, Casement had been executed for his role in the gun-running plot. While awaiting the hangman’s noose, he wrote to his sister: “The only person alive, if he is alive, who knows the whole of my coming and why I came, with what aim and hope, is Monteith. I hope he is still alive and you may see him and he will tell you everything.”

Beverley had walked free after turning ‘King’s Evidence’.

Monteith knew the stakes were a matter of life or death. If Casement, a former British diplomat, could be executed as a traitor, the authorities would hardly view an army captain any differently.

In one stroke of fortune for him, his cause had been helped in October, 1916, when a decomposed body found in the water at Ballykissane Pier had been wrongly identified as his.

In the Capuchin archives, Monteith pours scorn on the British attempts to find him.

“The efforts of the Police to gain information in some instances were ridiculous,” he said. “One of the daily papers, in a single issue, informed its readers that I was simultaneously in Dublin and in London, and that I had arrived in New York in the company of Liam Mellows (a fellow republican and Sinn Féin politician who was raised in Cork).”

Monteith added: “A notice informing the public that I was wanted by the Police, together with a photograph, was posted at Police Stations, Post Offices, warehouses and on Telegraph Poles. Occasionally, when I had nothing to do, I spent an hour or two at night tearing them down; an interesting chore.” After seven months on the run, in November, 1916, word came that an escape route was open for him and he was picked up by car and taken to Cork. But he was in no fit state to travel abroad. He had been nursing a cold, which had turned into a lung infection, and needed recuperation first.

Monteith was taken to the Capuchin College at Rochestown and met its Rector, Fr Bonaventure Murphy, a staunch republican, who installed him in his own room - apart from one other brother, nobody at the college knew he was there.

Fr Bonaventure nursed his charge back to health, and many years later, Monteith recounted: “Much to the satisfaction of all, I pulled through.

“Fr Bonaventure was a busy man and I saw little of him during the day time, but in the evening, he came in and sat with me, bringing me all the news of the day.

“He would read to me, when my eyes were tired, and one evening lives in my memory. He stood at the head of my bed, looking quietly at the road outside, his face set and worried looking. He was strangely silent. I was afraid I had said something that annoyed him, but he assured me I had not.

“Some 30 years later, I learned the reason for the concern expressed in his face that evening. He was watching a patrol of police and military which had halted on the road, directly beneath the window!” The risk taken by the Rector was huge. Had Monteith died in the Capuchin College, or been discovered there, no religious establishment in Ireland would have been spared from continuous raids by police and military.

Monteith stayed at the college in Rochestown for a little over a month, when he made that drama- filled escape to the Cork ferry.

****** After boarding a boat to England, Robert Monteith got on a merchant vessel to New York, working on board in disguise as a fireman and coal trimmer.

Upon landing, he was reunited with his family - wife Mollie and their two daughters, who he had left in New York before going to Germany to work with Casement.

He spent the next few years in a succession of menial jobs in the city, enjoying a brief respite when Éamon de Valera appointed him organiser of the American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic from 1920 to 1922.

His job was selling bonds, first on Staten Island, where he sold $48,000 worth, then in Albany, where he sold $45,000 worth. The association’s national chairman, Thomas Gannon, said he was the best worker he ever had.

Monteith then moved to Detroit and worked for various motor companies, eventually rising to the position of foreman in Ford, though he spent some years in the depression breaking up and mending roads. He retired in 1943, to a farm he had bought in Michigan.

In May, 1947, he returned with his wife to Ireland and settled in Kilcoole, Co Wicklow. de Valera tried to dissuade him from returning, stressing that “it was hard to transplant the oak at 70”, and he proved prescient.

Monteith stayed six years in Ireland and saw Casement’s boat retrieved at Banna Strand in 1950.

That year, while I was at Boarding School at Rochestown College, Captain Monteith visited. He addressed all 100 students in the college dining room, and had dinner with us, as a guest at the priest and lay teacher’s table.

He spoke of his time on the run in Cork 34 years earlier,and the role Rochestown College had played in his escape.

By now, Monteith’s health was poor and he was disillusioned by the reception to his book, Casement’s Last Adventure. He returned to Michigan in 1953 and died there on February 18, 1956.

A monument to him and Casement, erected on the 50th anniversary of the rising in 1966, stands at Banna Strand. Robert’s papers are in the Florence Monteith Lynch collection in Ryan Library, Iona College, New York, and contain his diary for 1915/16.