The War to End Wars didn’t!
To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God
(Professor Lt Tom Kettle, 1880-1916)
IN wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
Thomas Michael Kettle (1880-1916) Irish
nationalist poet, politician and soldier was born in Co. Dublin the son of one
of the founders of the Land-League, Andrew J Kettle (1833-1916), and his wife
Margaret McCourt. Tom was the seventh of 12 children. Andrew Kettle was a
member of the Tenant Right League (founded by Charles Gavan Duffy and Frederick
Lucas) in the 1850s and became a constitutional Irish Home Ruler in 1866
following the publication of Isaac Butt’s “Plea for the Celtic Race”. Later as
a close associate of Michael Davitt — the “One Armed Fenian” who renounced his
Irish Republican Brotherhood oath, took a seat in the House of Commons at
Westminster and totally renounced violence as a means of advancing Irish Home
Rule —was instrumental in persuading Charles Stewart Parnell to support the
land agitation of the late 1870s. Kettle chaired the first meeting of the Land
League in October of 1879. He was elected Secretary and Parnell was elected
Presdient. Kettle was later imprisoned for his leading the opposition to the
Coercion Laws.
Tom attended, as did his brothers,
O’Connell School, Richmond Street, Dublin run by the Christian Brothers. A
gifted pupil, he then went on to the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, Co
Kildare. A prominent debater, with a greatly admired razor sharp wit, he
excelled in both sports (especially athletics, cricket and cycling) and studies
(especially English and French).
Going up to University College Dublin in
1897 much was expected of him. And he did not disappoint, although
disappointingly his studies were interrupted by ill-health. A contemporary of
Francis Sheehy- Skeffington, Oliver St John Gogarty and James Joyce, he became
“auditor” of the Literary and Historical Society. This is a position
essentially equivalent to Convener of Debates at a Scottish university — I held
this position at Glasgow University Union in the early 1970s and my friend, Mgr
Patrick Burke, held it at Saint Andrews in the 1980s — or President of Oxford,
Cambridge or Durham University Unions.
Graduating BA in Mental and Moral Science
(don’t ask, I don’t know!) in 1902, he then studied Law and was admitted to the
Honorable (sic) Society of King’s Inns in 1903 before being called to the Bar
in 1905. Of course, his interest in debating and politics did not falter and in
1904 he founded the Cui Bono Club within UCD as a debating forum for recent
graduates and became editor of the College newspaper. In that same year he also
co-founded and was elected President of the Young Ireland Branch of the United
Irish League. Offered a parliamentary seat by John Redmond, he declined
becoming editor of a weekly, “The Nationalist”, instead. However, in 1906 he
became a Member of the Imperial Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland for East Tyrone at a bye-election caused by the death of
Patrick Doogan.He remained an MP until the second election in 1910, in
December, when he did not defend his seat due to pressure of other work.
In 1908 he had been appointed Professor of
National Economics at his alma mater, UCD, now part of the new University of
Ireland. He quickly became one of the most popular members of the faculty and
was in geat demand as both lecturer and public speaker. In the year following,
1909, he married Mary Sheehy. Mary was a sister of the suffragette and member
of the Irish Women Workers’ Union, Hanna (christened Johanna Mary) Sheehy who
after marriage became Sheehy-Skeffington. Another sister, Kathleen, married
Joseph O’Brien and became mother of the apostate nationalist Conor Cruise
O’Brien (known hereabouts as Conor Full o’B*****it).
In the 1913 lockout he supported the
strikers and helped form the peace committee to negotiate a just settlement.
Having supported the Home Rule Bill of 1912 and seen the Unionists' successful
attempts to wreck it, in 1913 he also joined the Irish Volunteers. In Europe in
1914 to try to raise arms (he spoke fluent French and German) he witnessed the
outbreak of war and, because of the atrocities he had witnessed committed by
the Germans against civilians in France and Belgium, abandoning his original
mission became war correspondent for London’s Daily News.
In “The Ways of War: Why Ireland Fought”,
he wrote (@p72): “The outbreak of war caught me in Belgium, where I was running
arms for the Irish Volunteers, and on the 6th of August 1914, I wrote from
Brussels in the Daily News that it was a war of ‘civilisation against
barbarians’. I assisted for many weeks in the agony of the valiant Belgian
nation.”
Returning to Dublin, he joined Redmond’s
National Volunteers. Repeatedly refused a commission into any Irish regiment
because of his health status, at last he was commissioned into the 9th
battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, part of the 16th (Irish) Division.
Conditions in the trenches seriously affected his health and he was returned to
Dublin for recuperation. Before leaving once more for the front on July 16,
1916, almost in despair at the brutal, merciless treatment of the leaders of
the Easter Uprising, he said that they would be remembered as heroes while men
like himself would be despised as traitors. And so it came to pass.
On September 9, 1916, at Guinchy, during
the Battle of the Somme, leading his company of men, Lientenant Professor Tom
Kettle died, victim of a sniper’s bullet to the upper chest “above a protective
steel waistcoat”. Following behind,18 years old Lt Emmet Dalton, the “boy hero
of Guinchy”, “was horrified to see him fall… (and) paused to press a crucifix
into his hand… Kettle was obviously dying.”
Fr Felix Burke, Catholic Chaplain to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, wrote:
“We all looked up to him as a towering genius and as a storehouse of
information.”
Kettle had written to his brother: “I am
calm and happy… but desperately anxious to live.” He was planning a book on the
16th (Irish) Division and looked forward after the war to dedicating himself to
work in the interests of “perpetual peace.” The writer Tim Cross said that
Kettle had a vision of “Ireland at parity with Britain as a free European
nation” and quotes him as saying: “My only counsel to Ireland is that in order
to become deeply Irish, she must become European.”
This deeply thinking, deeply religious
Irish Catholic intellectual had got there long before that group of young
intellectual Italians who, as students, had gathered around Don Battista
Montini (the future Pope Paul VI) when he was Chaplain to the student section
of Italian Catholic Action in the late 1920s and early 1930s (his formal title
was Chaplain to the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students, FUCI),
and even after he had been forced out, and were instrumental in creating the
European Christian Democracy movement along with their German and French
co-religionists. These were men such as Alcide De Gasperi and Aldo Moro
(President of FUCI in the late 193os) whose vision was the European Union, but
not as we know it, as a bureaucratic nightmare.
What a loss to Ireland. What a loss to
Europe. What a loss to the Church.
Although it only appeared belatedly and
begrudgingly and has never been formally unveiled by the Irish government, a
memorial to Kettle by Francis W. Doyle-Jones stands in St. Stephen’s Green
in Dublin. It quotes the last four lines
from the sonnet he penned to his daughter shortly before his death (To My
Daughter Betty, see above):
“Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.”
