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Tag Archives: Royal Munster Fusiliers


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Birth of Joseph O’Sullivan, Irish Republican Army Volunteer

Joseph O’Sullivan, Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer, is born in London on January 25, 1897. Along with fellow IRA (London Battalion) volunteer Reginald Dunne, shoot dead Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson outside Wilson’s home at 36 Eaton Place, Belgravia, London on June 22, 1922. Convicted by a jury, he is sentenced to death by Justice Montague Shearman. Despite a petition of 45,000 signatures, and a plea for clemency from many prominent figures at the time, including playwright George Bernard Shaw, O’Sullivan and Dunne are hanged for the murder on August 10, 1922, at Wandsworth Prison. The event provides the inspiration for the 1947 film Odd Man Out.

O’Sullivan’s father, John, is originally from Bantry, County Cork, and moves to London as a young man where he eventually becomes a successful tailor. His mother, Mary Ann O’Sullivan (née Murphy), is born in Inniscarra, County Cork. He is the youngest of thirteen children, all born in London, although only eleven survive to adulthood. As a boy he attends St. Edmund’s College, Ware. On January 25, 1915, his eighteenth birthday, he enlists into the Royal Munster Fusiliers, and later transfers to the London Regiment and serves with the rank of lance corporal during World War I, losing a leg at Ypres in 1917.

Upon being discharged from the army in 1918, O’Sullivan is employed by the Ministry of Munitions and, when the war ends, is transferred to the Ministry of Labour where he works as a messenger. The Ministry of Labour is located in Montagu House, adjacent to Scotland Yard, and later demolished and replaced by the present-day Ministry of Defence.

O’Sullivan becomes a member of the IRA detachment in London and is named by Rex Taylor as being responsible for the execution of Vincent Fovargue as a British spy at the Ashford Golf Links, Middlesex, on April 2, 1921. Fovargue is left with a label pinned to his body stating, “Let spies and traitors beware, IRA.” Fovargue had been an officer in the Dublin brigade of the IRA.

O’Sullivan’s brother, Patrick, is the first Vice-Commandant of the London IRA during its early days in 1919 but is seconded to the Cork No. 1 Brigade during the Irish War of Independence. Patrick also serves in the London Regiment during World War I, along with another brother, Aloysius, who is discharged from the army in 1916 suffering from shell shock. Patrick is also wounded in a gas attack during World War I. He fights with the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War and is wounded ten days after his brother is executed. Shortly before that, he crosses over to England to participate in an abortive attempt to rescue Dunne and his brother.

In 1923, John O’Sullivan tries to have the remains of his son and Dunne released for a funeral Mass. But it is not until after the abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom that Patrick O’Sullivan, with the assistance of the Irish Republican National Graves Association, is able to arrange for the bodies of O’Sullivan and Dunne to be sent to Ireland for burial. In mid-August 1929, Irish Republicans in London unveil a plaque commemorating Dunne and O’Sullivan. In 1967, after some political and diplomatic debate by the British and Irish governments, the British Government allows the bodies of Dunne and O’Sullivan to be exhumed. They are subsequently reburied in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, County Dublin.

(Pictured: Photograph of IRA member Joseph O’Sullivan taken before his 1922 execution)


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Birth of William Cosgrove, Victoria Cross Recipient

William Cosgrove VC MSM, an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces, is born at Aghada, County Cork, on October 1, 1888.

Cosgrove is the son of Michael and Mary Cosgrove. He has four brothers, Dan, Ned, David and Joseph, and a sister Mary-Catherine. While they are still young their father emigrates to Australia, but later returns. In the meantime, his mother moves with his siblings to a cottage in nearby Peafield and they attend school at the National School, Ballinrostig. He begins work as an apprentice butcher at Whitegate. One of his daily chores is a morning delivery to Fort Carlisle (now Fort Davis) with a consignment of meat for the troops. It is from Fort Carlisle that he joins the army.

Cosgrove enlists in the Royal Munster Fusiliers on March 24, 1909, and is given the regimental number 8980. At the outbreak of war, the 1st Battalion of the Munster Fusiliers is stationed in Rangoon, Burma, as regular battalions are routinely stationed overseas. They leave Rangoon on November 21, 1914, and Cosgrove, now a corporal, lands in England on January 10, 1915. Upon landing they still wear their Indian issue uniforms and stand on the cold quay in their khaki drill shorts. The battalion is then assigned to the 86th Brigade of the 29th Division (United Kingdom), in preparation for the landings at the Dardanelles in Turkey.

During the Battle of Gallipoli, Turkey, the 1st Munsters, together with the 1st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers and Royal Hampshire Regiment, are on the converted collier River Clyde when it runs ashore for the Cape Helles ‘V’ beach landing at 6:20 a.m. on April 25, 1915. On departing from the ship’s bay they are subject to fierce enfilading machine gun fire from hidden Turkish defences. One hundred or more of the Battalion’s men fall at this stage of the battle, with just three companies of Munsters making it to the shelter of the dunes. They are unable to advance due to the withering Turkish fire.

At daybreak on the following day it is decided to take the village behind the Sedd el Bahr fort overlooking the bay. Cosgrove leads a company section during the attack on the Turkish positions. Barbed wire holds them up and he sets himself the task of pulling the stanchion posts of the enemy’s high wire entanglement single-handed out of the ground, notwithstanding the terrific fire from both front and flanks with officers and men falling all around him. Thanks to his exceptional bravery, his heroic actions contribute greatly to the successful clearing of the heights. Turkish counter-attacks are held off. It is during this attack that his actions earn him the regiment’s first Victoria Cross of the war. He is also wounded during this action. Promoted to Sergeant, he sees no further action due to his wound, which is a contributing factor in his death years later.

Cosgrove transfers to the Royal Fusiliers in 1918, to the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment in 1920, the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in 1922, and later goes as an instructor to the Indian Territorial Force in 1928 to become 7042223 Staff Sgt Instructor. He comes home in 1935 pending discharge to pension. However, he is admitted to Millbank hospital and takes discharge before he is fit. After a short leave in Cork, he returns to London, where he is admitted to Middlesex Hospital. He is later transferred to Millbank hospital London, where he dies at the age of 47 on July 21, 1936.

In 1972, Cosgrove’s Victoria Cross medal is sold for a record price £2,300 to a private collector. When questioned about the high price which the medal fetches, the auctioneer replies “When one buys a gallantry medal, it is not just the medal one buys, but the act that won it.” His Victoria Cross, together with his other medals, are sold at an auction by Dix Noonan Webb held on September 22, 2006 for “the world’s most valuable auction of orders, decorations and medals.” A total of £1,965,010 is spent by 305 different buyers, a figure which represents “the highest amount ever realised by any numismatic auction in the UK.” The day’s highest price, £180,000, is paid by a collector for the Gallipoli landings Victoria Cross group of six, which includes the medal awarded to Sgt. William Cosgrove, Royal Munster Fusiliers.


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Anzac Day Centenary Services in Dublin

Some 600 people turn out on April 25, 2015 for the annual Anzac Day service at Grangegorman Military Cemetery in Dublin to mark the 100th anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli. The crowd is three times that which usually attends the service and reflects the increased interest in the Gallipoli campaign on the centenary of the military debacle.

The Australian ambassador to Ireland Dr. Ruth Adler and British ambassador to Ireland Dominick Chilcott are both at the ceremony along with diplomatic representatives from both New Zealand and Turkey. The Irish Government is represented by Tánaiste Joan Burton, Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Rersources Alex White and Minister of State for Communities, Culture and Equality Aodhán Ó Ríordáin. Poems and prayers are recited and ten schoolchildren read out the names of Anzac troops who drowned when the RMS Leinster was torpedoed off the Irish coast on October 10, 1918.

Burton says so many people from all the nations involved in the Gallipoli campaign lost relatives there and it is important that such an event should never happen again.

Ó Ríordáin says his own great-uncle James Sheridan was killed at Gallipoli five days after the landings and now lies for eternity in V Beach Cemetery. He adds that the decade of centenaries has sought to “reawaken the dormant memories, the forgotten, the unspoken and maybe even dispel some of the shame there that might have existed. Like so many other Irish families I too have discovered in recent years to those who fought in World War I as well as those who fought for Irish freedom here”.

A wreath is laid at Grangegorman Military Cemetery on behalf of the people of Ireland by Minister for Communications White.

Later White and the British ambassador unveil at Glasnevin Cemetery eight paving stones commemorating Irish-born soldiers who won the Victoria Cross (VC) during the war. Four of the soldiers involved, Pte. William Kenealy from the Lancashire Fusiliers, Pte. William Cosgrove from the Royal Munster Fusiliers, Capt. Gerald O’Sullivan from the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Sgt. James Somers also from the Royal Inniskilling, won theirs at Gallipoli.

Among those present at Glasnevin Cemetery is Joe Day, a relation of Corporal William Cosgrove.

At the unveiling ceremony in Glasnevin Cemetery, White reveals that he had two great-uncles who were killed at the Somme. He says a “great silence” had descended on Ireland after the first World War but he hoped that silence has now ended.

Chilcott says nine million soldiers served in the British Imperial Forces during World War I and only 628 were awarded the Victoria Cross, the equivalent of less than one in 10,000 of those who fought. “Those who earn it are certainly the bravest of the brave. These men are very special. That is why we honour them,” he says.

The other Irish VC winners who are honoured with paving stones are Lieuteant George Roupell from the Royal Irish Fusiliers, CSM Frederick Hall from the Canadian (Winnipeg Rifles), Major David Nelson from the Royal Artillery and William Kenny from the Gordon Highlanders.

The paving stones are paid for by the British Government and all 34 awarded to those who were from what is now the Republic of Ireland are placed around the Cross of Sacrifice in Glasnevin Cemetery.

(From: “Hundreds attend Anzac service in Dublin to remember Gallipoli dead” by Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, April 25, 2015. Pictured: British Ambassador to Ireland Dominick Chilcott (right) meets Joe Day from Whitegate in Cork, whose grand uncle William Cosgrove VC survived Gallipoli, at the Glasnevin Cemetery commemoration to mark the 100th Anzac anniversary. Photograph: Peter Houlihan/Fennells)


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Birth of Robert Gibbings, Wood Engraver & Sculptor

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01Robert John Gibbings, Irish artist and author most noted for his work as a wood engraver and sculptor, and for his books on travel and natural history, is born into a middle-class family in Cork, County Cork on March 23, 1889. Along with Noel Rooke he is one of the founder members of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and is a major influence in the revival of wood engraving in the twentieth century.

Gibbings’ father, the Reverend Edward Gibbings, is a Church of Ireland minister. His mother, Caroline, is the daughter of Robert Day, Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and president of The Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. He grows up in the town of Kinsale where his father is the rector of St. Multose Church.

Gibbings studies medicine for three years at University College Cork before deciding to persuade his parents to allow him to take up art. He studies under the painter Harry Scully in Cork and later at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Central School of Art and Design.

During World War I Gibbings serves in the Royal Munster Fusiliers and is wounded at Gallipoli before eventually being invalided out of the army in 1918. He then resumes his studies in London.

Gibbings is very much at the centre of developments in wood engraving. He is a founder member and leading light of the Society of Wood Engravers, which he sets up with Noel Rooke in 1920. In 1922 he contributes two wood engravings, “Clear Waters” and “Hamrun,” to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Gerald Duckworth & Company and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. In 1923 he receives a commission for a set of wood engravings for The Lives of Gallant Ladies for the Golden Cockerel Press, his most important commission to date at 100 guineas.

Gibbings is working on the wood engravings The Lives of Gallant Ladies when Hal Taylor, the owner of the press, becomes very ill with tuberculosis and has to put it up for sale. He seeks a loan from a friend, Hubert Pike, a director of Bentley Motors, to buy the press. He takes over in February 1924 and owns and runs the press until 1933.

Gibbings illustrates numerous books on travel and natural history, including Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, and writes a series of bestselling river books, notably Sweet Thames Run Softly. He does a huge amount to popularise the subject of natural history, travelling extensively through Polynesia, Bermuda and the Red Sea to gather inspiration for his work.

Gibbings is the first man to draw underwater, the illustrations filling his Penguin classic Blue Angels and Whales. He is one of the first natural history presenters on the BBC.

In September 1955 Gibbings and his wife, Patience, purchase Footbridge Cottage, a tiny beehive of a cottage in Gibbings’s words, in Long Wittenham on the banks of the River Thames. Life there suits him, and he has a period of tranquility that he had not known previously. They live there until he dies of cancer in an Oxford hospital on January 19, 1958. He is buried in the churchyard at Long Wittenham. The grave is marked by a simple headstone featuring his device of a crossed quill and graver, carved by Michael Black, a young sculptor who is a friend of Gibbings.


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The Flight of the Wild Geese

flight-of-the-wild-geese

Patrick Sarsfield sails to France on December 22, 1691, leading 19,000 of his countrymen to enter the French service in the first phase of the military denuding of Ireland known as the Flight of the Wild Geese, as agreed in the Treaty of Limerick on October 3, 1691, following the end of the Williamite War in Ireland.

More broadly, the term “Wild Geese” is used in Irish history to refer to Irish soldiers who leave to serve in continental European armies in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, or even, poetically, Irish soldiers in British armies as late as World War I.

Irish recruitment for continental armies dries up after it is made illegal in 1745. In 1732 Sir Charles Wogan indicates in a letter to Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, that 120,000 Irishmen have been killed and wounded in foreign service “within these forty years.” Swift later replies, “I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think, above all other nations.”

It was some time before the British armed forces begin to tap into Irish Catholic manpower. In the late eighteenth century, the Penal Laws are gradually relaxed and in the 1790s the laws prohibiting Catholics bearing arms are abolished.

Thereafter, the British begin recruiting Irish regiments for the Crown Forces – including such famous units as the Connaught Rangers. Several more Irish units are created in the 19th century. By 1914 specifically Irish infantry regiments in the British Army comprise the Prince of Wales’s Leinster Regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Irish Guards, the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers and the Royal Munster Fusiliers. With the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 five of the above regiments are disbanded, with most of the remainder undergoing a series of amalgamations between 1968 and 2006. The United Kingdom still retains three Irish regiments: the Irish Guards, the Royal Irish Regiment, and the London Irish Rifles.

Sarsfield is honored to this day in the crest of County Limerick. The Flight of the Wild Geese is remembered in the poetic words… “War-battered dogs are we, Fighters in every clime, Fillers of trench and of grave, Mockers, bemocked by time. War-dogs, hungry and grey, Gnawing a naked bone, Fighters in every clime, Every cause but our own.”

(Pictured: ‘Irish Troops Leaving Limerick’, 1692, (Cassell Petter & Galpin, London, Paris & New York, c1880), Artist Unknown)