Branded a traitor in 1921, my grandfather fled his Cork family and home forever... but he WAS innocent

IN the annals of the War of Independence, special hostility is reserved for traitors who betrayed the Irish cause.

For a century, my grandfather, Jeremiah Scully, has been tarred with this stigma. Many modern accounts still attest that he was the postman who turned informer when he stumbled upon General Tom Barry and his IRA Flying Squad hiding in a house in Rosscarbery in 1921.

Jeremiah must have been terrified as he was questioned and held for two hours. After swearing he would not rat on Barry and his comrades, he was sent on his way.

However, the British did find out the IRA were hiding out in Burgatia House, ahead of a planned attack on the town’s RIC Barracks. In their subsequent raid, Barry was lucky to escape with his life.

Someone betrayed the IRA that day, and Barry believed it was my grandfather - but it wasn’t.

However, Jeremiah knew he was in peril, and the blame could be pinned on him. In a split second decision that changed his life forever, he fled his native town and young family and was forced to start a new life under a new name in England; he never again returned to his native Cork.

This is his remarkable story.

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In his book, Guerilla Days In Ireland, Tom Barry is in no doubt about the guilty party whose betrayal led to the Battle of Burgatia House. He relates how Jeremiah, after swearing he would keep the secret, went straight to the Barracks and alerted the RIC, then vanished, never to be seen again. Only the last part of that is true.

Life changed forever on that fateful morning of Thursday, February 3, 1921, for postman Jeremiah.

Having collected the day’s delivery at Rosscarbery Post Office, the widowed father-of-five, aged 41, made his way on his postal route to Burgatia House at 10.30am.

Unbeknownst to him, its owner Tom Kingston and his wife had been placed under house arrest at 3am the previous day, and held hostage by Barry and his men of the IRA West Cork Brigade’s 3rd Flying Column.

Jeremiah was seized and only released by the IRA at 12.30pm, having solemnly sworn on the Bible not to divulge or inform to anyone for 24 hours of their presence at Burgatia House.

He continued on his rounds and arrived at a loyalist house, where he was challenged by the occupier as to why he was so late, and told a complaint would be lodged with the Post Office that evening.

At that point, with the authorities about to be alerted, my grandfather, already shaken by his experience, realised his fate had been sealed... one way or the other.

He was in a bind; either Tom Barry and his squad would be found, in which case he would be executed as an informer; or his prior knowledge of the raid would be discovered by the Black and Tans, owing to the postal complaint, which meant a similar fate at their hands. Jeremiah was a dead man walking. He had to act quickly.

On arriving back at the post office, next door to the RIC barracks, he handed in his bag and went to the childminder next door in the tailor’s shop. He asked her to look after his five children as he had no option but to leave the country, stating: “One way or the other, I could be shot tonight.”

This must have been the hardest decision of his life. He had been a single parent since his wife Annie died of complications following childbirth, aged 34, in 1916, and now he was leaving behind their children, Mary, 12, Jeremiah Jnr, 10, Katherine, 8, Hester, 6, and John, 4.

Jeremiah left on foot, using his knowledge of the locality gained in his job. He walked up Caim Hill and across country to Cahermore Cross. Eventually, he boarded a boat to Liverpool, and settled in Alderley Edge, a village in Cheshire, north-west England. He changed his name to James Collins and became a postman there, married again, and had two children, including my father.

Meanwhile, back in Cork, the British did get wind of the IRA’s presence in Burgatia House, a mile from Ross, on the Clonakilty road, and a battle took place that afternoon, from which Barry and the IRA managed to flee to fight another day.

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Growing up in England, I had always been told that on my father’s side we had very few relatives, and there was a hint of some sort of incident in my paternal grandfather’s past.

My father was told James was from Ireland, and that he must never travel there as his father had been branded a double agent and was wanted by the IRA. James Collins was a man of mystery.

Finally, in 2008, a breakthrough: we were aware of my grandfather’s stint with the Royal Munster Fusiliers’ 2nd Battalion in World War I, and we discovered his Great War medal contained the name ‘J Scully’. A check of his service number threw up the full name, Jeremiah Scully. In the photo of James in his post uniform on the right, you can see the same medal hanging from his waistcoat.

I also investigated my grandfather’s pension via The British Postal Museum in London, and there was a 1922 ledger which game his name as James Collins with ‘J. Scully’ in brackets.

As we already knew he was born in Cork, and his birth date from the war records, it was then easy for me to get hold of more information about this Jeremiah Scully.

We found that he, like his father, had been a tailor, a regular soldier in the British Army and, on discharge, become a postman. I was finally able to pinpoint his family and their home locations from Census records. My father and I decided it was time to pay a visit to Rosscarbery.

I contacted B&Bs there, and the owner of one, Mrs Hubbert, asked the reason for our visit. She knew her village’s history, and when she heard of our connection to Jeremiah Scully, she said we would find something of interest there - intriguing!

We arrived in 2010 and stayed at an apartment on the footprint of the old RIC barracks, behind Nolans pub. Armed with only a birth certificate and a set of Irish Census records, we were delighted to be able to walk the streets where the Scully family had lived.

Mrs Hubbert directed us to local historian Tom Hayes, who provided an account of the incident at Burgatia House in February, 1921, where my grandfather had been branded a traitor. Tom told us Jeremiah “had been wronged”.

This all came as a complete surprise to us, as did the news that dad had many cousins from the offspring of his father’s first marriage.

Despite the narrative from Tom Barry and in some historical records, there was a strong belief in Rosscarbery that Jeremiah was an innocent man.

Bridie Goggin, whose family go back generations in Ross, has done a lot of research which discounts the original story of betrayal, backed up by eyewitnesses who indicated to her that others played their part in creating the assumption of a betrayal. Her excellent research on the events of February 3, 1921, unearthed a look-out, Sonny Maloney, who was in Barry’s Flying Squad. He had shadowed the postman after he left Burgatia House, and told his neighbour years later that Jeremiah “had been wronged”.

Meanwhile, a statement to the Bureau of Military History said a Miss Whitley had her house burned down because she had informed the British about the IRA’s presence in Burgatia House. Another account stated a local man had been murdered around that time as the informer.

They were darkly suspicious times, but naturally, as Jeremiah’s descendants, we believe he was an innocent party.

As an ironic footnote to the saga, the resident who had threatened to report Jeremiah’s lateness on his round to the Post Office never did lodge a complaint.

****** Six weeks after fleeing Cork, Jeremiah Scully secured work as a postman in Alderley Edge, on March 24, 1921. By then, he had already travelled to Liverpool and changed his name to James Collins by Deed Poll.

By all accounts, he was a very social and presentable man - as one might expect from a former tailor - with excellent manners; as one local remarked to my dad some years ago, “a real gentleman”.

James lodged in the village for a while, and met my grandmother, Mary Jane Doherty, possibly while on his rounds.

Both were Catholic from Irish families. Mary Jane was born in Enniskillen and moved to England when her family opted to get away from the Troubles, specifically the Black and Tans. They married in 1924 and moved into a local cottage. A daughter, Kathleen, was born in 1925 followed in 1931 by my father Michael.

Happily, James did have some contact with his five children in Cork in those years. Some of the older ones visited, but it was all kept very low key and secretive.

All five ended up leaving Rosscarbery and moving to the north-west of England.

Sadly, ill health forced James to retire early from the Post Office in August, 1938, leaving him with a reduced pension supplemented by an even smaller war pension. He died five months later, aged 59, on January 4, 1939. The children from his first marriage attended the funeral.

Anther tragedy followed, when his wife Mary Jane fell ill and died 16 months after her husband, aged just 41. Again, some of the children from James’s first marriage were present at her funeral.

Kathleen was 15 and Michael just nine when they were orphaned, and they lived with their grandparents, the Dohertys. Kathleen had already started work, but his grandmother had set her sights on the priesthood for Michael. He left home as soon as possible, but the priest was a frequent visitor, begging him to return home, but it was not to be.

Michael married a local girl, Ruth Holland, and they had three children, including me.

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 My father Michael Collins is now a very spritely 92-year-old and keen to visit Rosscarbery whenever he can. In August last year, we paid a visit to tie in with the centenary of the death of patriot Michael Collins - my father’s namesake.

With the discovery that we had many cousins descended from Jeremiah Scully’s first marriage, including Bridie, we arranged a reunion with Jeremiah’s grandson Mike Kirwan and his family. They were also over on holiday, and we all had our photo taken at the place where Collins was shot dead at Béal na Bláth.

My cousin Bridie had by chance previously met up with the owner of Burgatia House, Catherine Maguire, who was delighted to hear our story. We met her, joined by local schoolteacher Norma Maguire, who was able to provide more important facts surrounding the story and a tour of the location so central to my grandfather’s life story.

From this unique perspective, we were able to get a much clearer picture of the events that took place in February, 1921.

Although the old house was burnt down on the night of the Battle of Burgatia ,the historical outbuildings that Tom Barry’s men had used were still standing, as indeed is the original courtyard entrance which my grandfather would have walked through on that February day in 1921.

My father posed for a photo here, at the spot where his father’s life had changed forever 101 years earlier.

****** A few weeks after the aborted attack on Rosscarbery Barracks, Tom Barry enjoyed his finest hour.

In the Battle of Crossbarry on March 19, 1921, his 103 men defeated 1,200 British soldiers under Major Percival. Buoyed by this success, he moved his men west and decided to try again to capture Rosscarbery RIC Barracks.

This time, on March 30, 1921, he was successful, in an attack that marked the first time the IRA successfully exploded a mine. The removal of this fortress meant the countryside from Clonakilty to Skibbereen was now free of enemy forces.

The author would like to thank her cousin Bridie Goggin for her invaluable help in putting together this story.