Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied For Ireland Read online

  Pressure of organisational work forced him to pick up the threads quickly in the fight against conscription. Though 180,000 Irish men had already volunteered for service in the British army, it was clear that compulsion would not work. Men flocked to the Irish Volunteers. Women joined Cumann na mBan in large numbers. Anti-conscription rallies and protests took on more impetus countrywide. On the night of 17 May and throughout the next day police scoured the country and arrested many of the senior officers of Sinn Féin and the Volunteers on the pretext that they were involved in what became known as ‘the German Plot’. Though there was no organised plot for a ‘rising’ with German aid, the authorities used the excuse as a ploy to take the leaders out of circulation.

  Collins was annoyed by the arrests. If British intelligence were monitoring the movements of the separatists, why not turn the tables and monitor British intelligence? Dublin Castle detective Joe Kavanagh arrived one day at Capel Street Public Library and handed the librarian Thomas Gay the names of key people listed for arrest. Gay passed the list to Harry Boland. Mick Collins had already received a warning from the young Castle police clerk, Ned Broy, but now he had a list with his own name on it.

  During a Sinn Féin Executive meeting held on the night of 18 May 1918, Mick advised certain ‘listed’ members to go ‘on the run’. He told Kathleen Clarke she was ‘on the list’, but as she had three young children she said she was ‘neither temperamentally nor physically fit for such a life’. She decided to let fate decide. That night she was watched; she was arrested next morning and sent to Holloway Prison, where she was kept until February 1919.4

  After the meeting Collins headed for Seán McGarry’s house to warn him, but already the raid had begun. Collins, helpless, stood with onlookers as McGarry was taken away. When they left he went in and slept in McGarry’s bed. ‘I knew it would be the safest bed in Dublin,’ he told Ernie O’Malley.

  Arrests such as these helped the anti-conscription lobby, boosted Sinn Féin’s political campaign, continued to swell Volunteer enlistment and helped the imprisoned Arthur Griffith to win a seat in the Cavan by-election.

  Already Mick Collins had begun to nudge his way into the laneways of the secret service in Ireland, by means of his informants in the heart of Dublin Castle. When in May 1918 the Sinn Féin leaders were arrested because of their opposition to conscription, he began to put his faith more and more in revolutionary methods.

  In the same month Mick asked his old friend Joe O’Reilly to join him in his work. O’Reilly would be courier, clerk, valet, cook and buffer for his many moods; cheerfully he would carry out detective work and negotiate with Mick the snares of the British secret service.

  Mick kept in regular contact with his friend, Austin Stack, who, with Fionán Lynch, Ernest Blythe and others, was in Belfast jail. Stack would write to Mick via Mick’s cousin, Nancy O’Brien, who worked in the GPO.

  Although public gatherings had been banned, Sinn Féin and their allies defied the British government and held 1,800 rallies countrywide on 18 August 1918. These rallies, cooperatively organised by Cumann na mBan, the Volunteers, Sinn Féin and Gaelic League members, set the tone of separatism. ‘The conscription proposals are to my liking,’ Collins wrote to Hannie, ‘as I think they will end well for Ireland.’5With sheer methodical detail he correlated the data of every Volunteer company, every battalion, every brigade countrywide – their distance and direction from the nearest town or village, the names and addresses of their officers and whether or not they were in jail. In order to assemble this information he needed a vast network of couriers. These were mostly women, such as Máire Comerford, Leslie Price (who later married Tom Barry) and Sheila Humphreys. Up and down the country they travelled, helping with affiliation forms containing inventories of the arms and equipment, which were scant and obtained mainly by raids on barracks or police personnel. The forms included details of stretchers, bandages, signalling equipment, even pikes.6

  Despite his busy schedule Mick found time to write to comrades in prison, often sending some little surprise. ‘I know you don’t smoke, but I remember you saying you liked candies,’ he wrote to Kathleen Clarke, sending a package to her in Holloway Prison.

  Mick knew he had to avoid arrest at all costs. He moved his office to a cellar known as the ‘dugout’ in St Ita’s in Ranelagh – the school founded by Pádraig Pearse. From here he began to conduct his intelligence business. When he sent Ernie O’Malley to London on IRB work, he was annoyed to find out that Cathal Brugha had men in readiness in London to assassinate British cabinet ministers, should conscription be enforced. O’Malley disliked Brugha’s tactics and he knew that Mick did also.

  In July, with the sanction of GHQ, Mick asked Piaras Béaslaí to become editor of the secret journal, An tÓglach. Mick wrote ‘Notes on Organisation’ for An tÓglach, and was involved in its publication, as well as distribution and subscriptions. Copies found their way to remote corners of Ireland, in bags of flour, in women’s handbags or inside their coats. Mick’s personal secretary Sinéad Mason knew his every quirk. She knew when he wanted something done now that it was ‘now!’ But she also knew his kind streak and that he valued her judgement.

  In November a change came with the signing of the armistice ending the Great War. Volunteers and Cumann na mBan who had worked so unitedly against conscription now had time to turn their attentions more intensely towards the fight for independence.

  Lloyd George called a general election, and immediately the Sinn Féin machine prepared to fight. The British parliament granted the parliamentary franchise to all women over thirty, so in this 1918 election women would have a more active part. Both women and men in Sinn Féin courted women voters’ newly acquired power, and promised (somewhat unrealistically) that ‘as in the past, so in the future the womenfolk of the Gael shall have high place in the Councils of a freed Gaelic nation’7

  As many of Sinn Féin members were in jail it fell on leaders outside, such as Mick Collins, Harry Boland, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, Fr O’Flanagan, Jennie Wyse-Power and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, to select candidates and promote their campaign. ‘The candidates who did face the electorate when Collins and Boland had finished with the lists were all staunch Republicans.’8

  Sinn Féin nominated two women to stand for election – Constance Markievicz (who was in jail) for Dublin and Winifred Carey (who had been a nurse in the GPO in 1916) for Belfast.

  Sinn Féin enjoyed a great victory at the expense of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Constance Markievicz was the first women elected to the House of Commons but even when released she, like the other Sinn Féin candidates, was loyal to her election pledge and refused to take her seat. Instead the First Dáil was convened in Dublin in January 1919. (Winifred Carey was unsuccessful in the election.)

  Mick and Harry Boland were absent for the first session of the First Dáil on 21 January 1919. They were involved in securing the escape of Éamon de Valera from Lincoln Jail. On Mick’s return he found that Dan Breen and some Volunteer comrades, in an attempt to get explosives, had killed two policemen in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary, on the same day as the Dáil’s first assembly. Mick was now convinced that ‘all ordinary peaceful means are ended and we shall be taking the only alternative actions in a short while now’.9

  Collins had been appointed minister of home affairs in the opening Dáil, while Cathal Brugha was elected acting president. At the second Dáil meeting on l April 1919, de Valera was elected president – prime minister (príomh aire) of Dáil Éireann. Next day he named his cabinet, which included Michael Collins as minister of finance (he relinquished his home affairs portfolio).

  As well as his many tasks, he now had to get accustomed to ministerial duties. Soon his waking hours would eat into his time for sleep. Despite this he found time to drop a few lines to his sister Helena (a nun, Sister Celestine, in England) to tell her about the busy week for Dáil members:

  ... it has been an historical one for very often we are actors in events that
have very much more meaning and consequence than we realise ... The elected representatives of the people have definitely turned their backs on the old order and the developments are sure to be interesting ... We go from success to success in our own guerrilla way. Escapes of prisoners, raids against the enemy, etc.’10

  After a few months of relatively unrestricted movement, he was now truly ‘on the run’. An order had been issued for his arrest owing to his failure to attend the spring assizes in Derry to answer the charge for which a year earlier he had been given bail.

  Notes

  1 Michael Collins’ prison journal, April 1919, held by Íosold Ó Deirg, daughter of Sinéad Mason, Collins’ secretary.

  2 Ibid., April 1919.

  3 Michael to Hannie, 10/4/1918.

  4 Kathleen Clarke, op. cit., p. 150.

  5 Michael to Hannie, 20/4/1918.

  6 Ministry of Defence Archives, Ireland.

  7 Diana Norman, Terrible Beauty: a Life of Constance Markievicz, p. 188.

  8 Frank O’Connor, The Big Fellow, p. 56.

  9 Michael to his sister Helena 13/4/1919, John Pierce private papers.

  10 Ibid.

  Intelligence-gathering Continues

  Michael Collins was preoccupied with his many different roles but one of his most steadfast resolves was to crack the British secret service machine. His intelligence-gathering had already begun to bear fruit, with the help of men such as MacNamara, Kavanagh, Broy and David Neligan working for him from within Dublin Castle. He acknowledged the British espionage system as being ‘the most efficient in the world’ and knew that he had to have men and women to counteract it.

  One night in April 1919 Mick asked Broy to get him into Dublin Castle. ‘Get me into Headquarters,’ he said, ‘I have to see what the buggers are up to.’

  Detectives were asleep upstairs, and Broy had taken the precaution of locking their dormitory door from outside. Broy led Collins and Seán Nunan, who accompanied them, to a small locked room on the top floor. With his duplicate key he opened the door and gave Mick the key to lock themselves in. Here the two spent several hours among the secret documents, making notes from the many reports. In one report, Mick found himself described as a man who ‘comes of a brainy Cork family’; at this he laughed heartily.1

  Mick’s cousin, Nancy O’Brien, had returned to Dublin early in 1916 with her friends Susan Killeen and Dolly Brennan. In 1918, as an employee of the British government, she was summoned one day by Sir James MacMahon and given the job of handling the Castle secret coded messages, because of her efficiency and because Sir James wanted somebody he could trust. When Mick heard the news he gleefully shouted, ‘In the name of Jasus how did they [the British] ever get an empire!’ But he knew he had something gold couldn’t buy. He knew Nancy well and valued her resilience and daring.

  During many a lunch-hour Nancy snatched quiet moments in the privacy of the post office lavatory to copy decoded messages which she then hid in the bodice of her dress or elsewhere on her person. This was done without thought for the risk to herself. In her Glasnevin flat she would sort her messages and clarify further points before passing the messages on to Mick.

  This hardworking, brave young woman took many chances but would at times get angry with Mick for taking her for granted. One evening he raged because he maintained that there was an important document that she should have seen which referred to warders. He wanted to know its contents. All she saw, she told him, was some rubbish about ‘Angelus bells’ and some admirer talking about ‘the light glinting in her hair’.

  ‘What sort of an eejit are you anyway?’ he cried. ‘That’s the message I’m looking for.’ In an instant he had figured it out – the warders change at six o’clock and our target man will be in his room when the light goes on! Tears filled Nancy’s eyes. Then she exploded and told him what he could do with his messages.

  It was well after midnight when Nancy was awakened by pebbles thrown at her window. Mick, defying the curfew, had come to apologise. ‘I’m sorry for what happened, I shouldn’t have said it. I’m under the most terrible strain,’ he said and as he turned to leave he placed a small paper bag on the garden wall. ‘Here’s a little present for you.’ Back into the night he went, this man ‘on the run’, leaving a bag of bull’s-eyes for Nancy.2

  Over the next few years Nancy would continue her detective work for Mick. ‘I used to get private correspondence for him, leaving it each morning at one of his many depots. I copied telegrams in our office at Upper O’Connell Street [then Sackville Street] ... telegrams for detective police – Lord French and others.’ Mick had agents ‘in the GPO who gave him each week the code to these private telegrams.’3

  Jim Walsh from Cork, a high official in the Post Office, was one of those in a position to obtain the weekly code. This code he discreetly dropped into Harry Boland’s tailor shop for Mick. Piaras Béaslaí then suggested that his cousin Lily Mernin, a typist at Dublin Castle, might be in a position to help Mick with information. During her first interview with Mick, Lily told him things ‘which he carefully noted down on sheets and then concealed them in his socks’. He suggested to her methods of obtaining further information, including the deciphering of Castle carbon paper.

  From then on Piaras Béaslaí received documents from Lily every few days which he dispatched to Mick, as director of intelligence of the Volunteers. Mick gave Lily a key to a house in Clonliffe Road. Over the next few years she would let herself in, type up records of her deciphering and place her work in a sealed envelope which Mick later collected. She compiled a list of officers, many disguised as civilians, using pseudonyms and living outside barracks. This list, regularly updated, Béaslaí passed on to Collins. Never throughout the period did Lily meet any of Collins’ intelligence officers nor any of the inhabitants of the house on Clonliffe Road. All had their own schedules and worked independently within Mick’s intelligence network.4

  From as early as 1917 Siobhán Creedon, who was employed as an official at Mallow Post Office in County Cork, had been engaged in active work for the Volunteers. In 1919 she secured valuable information in regard to British plans, which was promptly passed to Richard Mulcahy. The RIC used the telegraph system for urgent business, and often transmitted messages by cable. The ‘key supplied regularly by Mick Collins, Director of Intelligence’ meant that Siobhán could decipher the messages and send the information back to Mick and pass relevant information to the Cork brigades.

  This method was used also in Cork City by Josephine Marchmount, head of civilian clerks and typists (a staff of 25), in the 6th Division at Cork Military Barracks. She was therefore in a senior pivotal position with access to information on most internal activities of the 6th Division including the activities of Captain Webb, chief officer to Major General Sir Peter Strickland, commander of British forces in Munster and the counties of Kilkenny and Wexford. Josephine, being of good standing, was absolutely trusted by the authorities. Her father had been a constable in the RIC and a friend of Captain Webb’s. Her husband was killed in the Great War.

  After her husband’s death she retained custody of her younger son, Gerald, but her oldest son, Reggie was placed in the custody of her mother-in-law in South Wales. Josephine expressed her desire, to get Reggie back, to a friend. This information got to the ears of Seán Hegarty and Florrie O’Donoghue of the Cork No. 1 Brigade. Florrie contacted Mick Collins, who immediately saw how valuable she could be, and set about organising an offer she couldn’t refuse. After a lapse of time Mick put Florrie in touch with the London IRA and with Pat O’Donoghue in Manchester. Soon Florrie and Jack Cody were on the boat to England. The plan didn’t go smoothly, but after much manoeuvring, aided by a Liverpool Volunteer Seán Phelan, Reggie (with his helpers) was on a ferry to Cork and reunited with his mother.

  Henceforth, Josephine Marchmount would be an intelligence agent. On many occasions she supplied information about locations earmarked for raids, names of Sinn Féin and Volunteers on the military’s wan
ted list, and most important of all, names of paid informers – data of immense value to the three Cork brigades. She was in a position to confirm troop movements and this in turn helped Volunteers ‘on the run’. Josephine, in such a key position, worked in tandem with Nora Wallace. Nora in her shop in St Augustine Street became the keeper of a police cipher key and with their contacts in Cork city post office ‘wire messages were regularly decoded’ thus aiding Florrie O’Donoghue and his intelligence team to keep ‘a step ahead of their enemies’. Intelligence work done by both Josephine and Nora went undetected throughout the war and was regarded by Florrie O’Donoghue as of equivalent value ‘to a strong column of men’. (After hostilities ended, Josephine married Florrie O’Donoghue.)5

  Countrywide reports of ill-treatment by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) of citizens suspected of being involved in separatist movements were daily reaching GHQ. A decree of social ostracism on the RIC was passed by the members of Dáil Éireann and introduced to the public by de Valera in a strongly worded statement. It was left to Mick Collins to neutralise the intelligence work of the members of this force who acted as agents for the British espionage system.

  Through all this time, Mick wove his way through Dublin on an old rusty bike. During business hours he crossed the city, briefcase in hand, his businessman cover helping him to escape detection.

  The intensification of the war meant that Mick had to devise means of detecting those who were trying to detect him. In July, 1919, the Squad, later known as ‘Mick’s twelve apostles’, was recruited and paid as an assassination team. This group of men, under the command initially of Michael McDonnell and later of Patrick Daly, was selected from the intelligence department for dangerous and difficult jobs.