‘These things I have done I have done as an Irishman’: Joseph Patrick Connolly, 1921.

This post tells the remarkable story of Jarrow-born Joseph Connolly, who served in the British Army during the Great War, was made a prisoner of war, became an Irish republican, joined the IRA, smuggled guns to Ireland, was imprisoned in Dartmoor, and afterwards worked for the British Labour Party. 

‘These things I have done I have done as an Irishman…  I believe it is my duty as an Irishman to fight for my country. Believing that, and being actuated by the highest possible motives, I will feel no sting in any sentence you may pass upon me… I go to that fate willingly, knowing full well the justice of my cause, and that only by such acts can the land to which we belong be made free.’[1]

These words were spoken from the dock at Glamorgan Assizes on 17 November 1921 by Joseph Patrick Connolly, as he awaited sentencing, having pleaded guilty, on the advice of his solicitor, to possessing gelignite, blasting cartridges, and detonators ‘with intent to endanger life’. Police had raided his lodgings in Smith Street, Cardiff, on 13 October and had found the explosives, plus twenty-five revolvers, five automatic pistols, ammunition, and incriminating documents and letters. Connolly, described at his trial as a journalist and South Wales organiser of the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL), was sentenced to fourteen years penal servitude and transported to Dartmoor prison.^[2]

This was not the first time, however, that Connolly had been imprisoned. On 21 March 1918, on the first day of the German Army’s Spring Offensive on the Western Front, 251778 Private Joseph Patrick Connolly had been wounded and taken prisoner, when his battalion, the 2nd Battalion The Durham Light Infantry, was overwhelmed, with only 60 men escaping death, wounding, or capture.[3] In September 1919, Private Connolly, freed from Friedrichsfeld prisoner-of-war camp and demobilised, returned to his family home in Randolph Street, Jarrow.[4] For his service in the British Army in the Great War, Private Connolly was awarded two campaign medals, the War and Victory medals. Both, however, were forfeited upon his conviction for ‘felony’.[5]

Born in Jarrow, County Durham, on 19 October 1893 to Irish-born parents,[6] it is not known when Connolly became an active Irish republican, but in May 1920 he was reported as having spoken at an ISDL meeting in Blyth, telling his audience that the British government’s difficulties in Ireland ‘would be immediately ended by the withdrawal of troops and the reins of government handed to the people themselves’.^[7] And the following month, he was being described in local newspapers as secretary of Jarrow’s ISDL branch.^[8] By September 1920, Connolly was regularly sharing platforms with the ISDL’s North East leadership, Gilbert Barrington and Richard Purcell,^[9] and had been appointed the ISDL’s ‘Northern Counties’ organiser, a paid position within the organisation.^[10]

Meanwhile, under cover of the ISDL’s activities and following inspection by and approval from the IRA’s general headquarters in Dublin in December 1920, the IRA’s Tyneside Brigade had been formed with Purcell as Commandant, Barrington as Quartermaster, and Connolly as Adjutant.[11] Acquiring arms and explosives became the Brigade’s immediate concern. Weapons were bought from seamen and ex-soldiers, explosives stolen from collieries, and all were transferred to Ireland via Manchester and Liverpool.

On 28 February 1921, the Brigade undertook its first military operation, an incendiary attack on timber yards at Tyne Dock and on bonded stores and an oil store on Newcastle’s quayside. A few days before, the Brigade’s staff, accompanied by Michael McEvoy, the IRA’s organiser from Dublin, inspected the targets, and finalised the plan.

Meeting in Newcastle’s Labour Hall on the night of the operation, revolvers, electric torches, bolt cutters, petrol, and cotton waste were issued to the four four-man teams assigned to the quayside stores. At the oil store, Gilbert Barrington, accompanied by Michael Mackin, ‘A’ (Jarrow) Company’s Quartermaster, broke into the store and waited for the two-man team carrying the incendiary materials to arrive. This team, comprising Joseph Patrick Connolly and his older brother, John Edward Connolly, ‘A’ Company’s Commanding Officer, however, failed to show up. And, as Barrington’s and McEvoy’s report of 1939 succinctly put it: ‘These two men were quietly dropped after an enquiry was held.’[12]

Why the Connolly brothers, both British Army veterans,[13] failed to show up on Newcastle’s quayside on 28 February 1921 remains a mystery, but a letter to Joseph Connolly from Brian O’Kennedy, the ISDL’s assistant secretary in London, dated 25 February 1921, may offer an insight into what happened. This letter informed Connolly that he was being moved to South Wales as the ISDL’s organiser, as part of a restructuring necessitated by the arrest of the ISDL’s general secretary, and Easter Rising veteran, Sean McGrath.^[14] Connolly duly moved to Cardiff as ordered.

In April 1919, the Home Office had set up a Directorate of Intelligence to gather information on ‘revolutionary organisations’ in Britain and report to the Cabinet. This intelligence was to come from local police forces and informers and be gleaned from intercepted letters, and Irish nationalist organisations, both open and clandestine, were within its remit.[15]

On 20 October 1921, a week after Joseph Connolly had been arrested, the Cabinet was informed:^[16]

‘For some time past it has been known that the higher officials of the Irish Self-Determination League have been acting as collecting agents for arms and ammunition for the Irish Republican Army: J. P. Connolly, the South Wales organiser, a firebrand from the Tyneside district, who was specially sent to South Wales in this connection, was particularly suspected. His correspondence was watched with the result that in conjunction with the local police, he and five of his chief-agents were arrested during the week. An examination of his papers disclosed a wide conspiracy, spreading from South Wales to the Tyneside and engineered by the local organisers of the Irish Self-Determination League through the secretaries of some of their branches: raids on military stores, territorial drill halls, mine magazines, etc., had been arranged and have, in some cases, actually been carried out: explosives and arms obtained, by this means were shipped by trawlers, or other local means, from Liverpool and Cardiff, motor cars also were used for transport from place to place. The ramifications of the conspiracy are extensive and it will take some time before the enquiry is complete, but, so far, beside the six arrests, a considerable quantity of explosives, arms and ammunition has been seized…’

Responsible to Liam Mellows, who headed the IRA’s gunrunning efforts in Dublin,[17] Connolly had organised agents, including at least one husband and wife team, in and around Cardiff and Newport to buy or steal rifles, pistols, ammunition, explosives, and detonators.[18]

Aside from the police reports, there may possibly be a first-hand account written by one of Connolly’s agents. This account may be found in several letters written to amongst others, President de Valera, by Mary Driscoll in support of her application in 1936 for a military service pension. She claimed that she had moved from County Cork, where she had been a member of Cumann na mBan, to Newport, South Wales, in April 1921, where she had joined the ISDL and had been one of Connolly’s agents in the town, along with her husband. She claimed that Connolly had lodgings in Corporation Road, Newport, as well as in Cardiff; that she had hidden munitions in her house in Linton Street, even using her baby’s pram as a hiding place; and that the ‘stunt’ to steal rifles from a barracks on Salisbury Plain had started and finished at her house. This theft on 29 August 1921 had bagged nineteen much-needed British Army rifles from Tidworth Camp.^[19] As no referees, however, could be found in Ireland or Wales to substantiate Mary Driscoll’s pension application, it was rejected by the Army Pensions Board in Dublin.[20]                  

On the night of 10-11 October 1921, 5,000 detonators and 100 gelignite cartridges were stolen from a colliery magazine in Merthyr Tydfil.[21] Two nights later, electric fuses and more explosives were taken from another magazine. The police were already suspicious of miner David Evans and his wife, Kate, who was secretary of the local ISDL branch, and stopped them on the morning of 13 October at Merthyr railway station. There they were found to be carrying two attaché cases filled with detonators and cartridges, plus a postcard addressed to Evans and posted from Cardiff, signed ‘JC’:

‘Had parcel per Mrs E. duly received. Thanks!… Kindly arrange to have goods centralised so that I can pick them up with little difficulty. I shall be up myself next week.’

Connolly’s arrest immediately followed and seized documents revealed to police the extent of his gunrunning operation, leading to two further arrests and the recovery of stolen explosives.[22]  

One letter found by the police on Connolly, when he was arrested, was from Gilbert Barrington, writing in his capacity as secretary of the ISDL’s Tyneside District from its offices in Clayton Street, Newcastle, and dated 21 September 1921:

‘Dear Joe, Thanks very much for yours which reached me today.  I think the material you are sending is quite good value. Like you I find it damned hard to get stuff.  Can you send the case on at once? The car will be up here this week-end to remove it.  Clayton St., will do…  What have you been up to?…  Kind regards, Gil.’[23]  

The friendliness of this letter contrasts markedly with the tone towards ‘Joe’ seen in Barrington’s witness statement for the Bureau of Military History and his joint report with McEvoy, both written long after the former comrades had taken different sides in the Treaty debate.

Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Irish prisoners held in English and Welsh prisons were granted an amnesty. In Dartmoor, on the day of their release (14 February 1922), the prisoners lined up in the exercise yard in three ranks, then: [24]

‘Someone shouted, ‘Quick march!’ and we marched – yes, marched – to the gates saying, ‘We came here as soldiers of the IRA, and by God we’ll leave as soldiers of the IRA! We’ll show these bastards!’

Joseph Connolly, however, was not amongst the marching soldiers. The amnesty only applied to those convicted before the truce of 11 July 1921, and so Connolly remained in Dartmoor, as did Connolly’s former IRA commanding officer, Richard Purcell, who had been imprisoned there after his joint trial with Gilbert Barrington in Newcastle in November 1921.^[25]

On Tyneside, the continued imprisonment of Barrington, Connolly, and Purcell soon dominated ISDL meetings, and a demonstration demanding their release was held in Newcastle’s town hall on 19 March, with P J Kelly, the ISDL’s president, as the main speaker.^[26] And pressure for the men’s release was not only directed at the British government. In Jarrow, a branch meeting called on Dáil Eireann to demand the prisoners’ release from British jails.^[27] And Michael Collins made representations seeking their release.[28]

Meanwhile, in Dartmoor, Purcell and Connolly were planning a new campaign. Not, however, a continuation of the military campaign, but rather a political campaign in support of Michael Collins and the Treaty.

At the beginning of April 1922, the post-truce prisoners were finally released and Joseph Connolly returned to Newcastle along with Purcell and Barrington.^[29] There the three were met by their cheering, flag-waving supporters, ‘and carried shoulder high from the station’.[30]

It is not known what Connolly did over the next few weeks after his release, but it is known that Richard Purcell went to Dublin, where he was ordered by Michael Collins to return on ‘Special Duty’ to Newcastle ‘to hold the Volunteers together’ (presumably in support of the Treaty) and ‘carry on Propaganda on behalf of the Treaty Party’.[31]

Then on 6 June 1922, the ISDL’s Tyneside District Council met in Newcastle. And it was at this meeting that Purcell, district chairman, and Joseph Connolly, district secretary, resigned over the ISDL’s opposition to the Treaty.[32]

By the end of the month, a Pro-Treaty Propaganda Committee had been formed on Tyneside in support of the new Provisional Government in Dublin, with Connolly as secretary and Purcell as organiser.^[33] Before year’s end, however, this committee had ceased operating, as it was no longer deemed necessary, and Richard Purcell had returned to Dublin, where he was appointed an organiser for Cumann na nGaedheal.[34]

As for Joseph Connolly, he moved to Birmingham in the early 1930s to work for the Labour Party, first as Midlands organiser and then at Transport House in London.[35] And, though he had been described by the Home Office as the ‘principal agent in the post-truce conspiracy to steal arms and explosives’,[36] and had held an important and influential role in the ISDL in the North East and South Wales, he left behind his earlier career as an IRA soldier and active Irish republican and made no application to Dublin for a service pension.[37] Joseph Patrick Connolly died in Birmingham in December 1968.[38]

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[1] Weekly Freeman, 26 November 1921; Merthyr Express, 26 November 1921; Dublin Evening Telegraph, 28 October 1921.

[2] Sinn Féin established the ISDL in 1919 to make Irish self-determination the sole political focus of the Irish in Britain.

[3]The National Archives: War Office: Soldiers’ Documents, First World War WO363, Joseph Patrick Connolly. Connolly, described on his papers as a ‘reporter’, enlisted in November 1916, aged 23 years; See John Sheen, The Steel of the DLI: The 2^nd Battalion of The Durham Light Infantry at War 1914-1918 (Barnsley, 2009), pp. 236-42.

[4] War Office, Weekly Casualty List, 25 February 1919.

[5] The Chief Constable of Cardiff informed the War Office by letter of Connolly’s conviction, 28 December 1921.

[6] The National Archives: Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911, RG06, piece 30354. Connolly’s father, John, was a ship-yard labourer from County Monaghan and his mother, Annie, was from County Armagh.

[7] Blyth News, 31 May 1920.

[8] Tyneside Catholic News, 19 June 1920.

[9] Durham County Advertiser, 6 August 1920.

[10] Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 24 September 1920; National Library of Ireland (NLI), Art Ó Briain Papers, MS 8432/43/13, 1 April 1922, Report on ISDL Organisers.

[11] Bureau of Military History, Military Service Pensions Collection: MA/MSPC/RO/610, Newcastle on Tyne IRA (including Tyneside Division IRA, ‘No.3 Area (Tyneside) Britain’, report co-authored by Michael McEvoy and Gilbert Barrington, 1939.

[12] In his witness statement, Barrington did not give the names of the two men. Bureau of Military History, Witness Statement, WS 773, Gilbert Francis Barrington, 1952.

[13] 26/1386 Sergeant John Edward Connolly served in the 3^rd Tyneside Irish and was awarded the Military Medal for his bravery in June 1916 during a trench raid on the German front near La Boiselle. He was subsequently commissioned in the Leinster Regiment and later wounded in action. See John Sheen’s post, which includes a photograph of John Connolly, on the Durham at War website:  https://www.durhamatwar.org.uk/story/11761/

[14] NLI, Ó Briain Papers, MS 8442/5/1, 25 February 1921. The Welsh organiser, Seamus O’Kelly, was being moved to London to assist at the ISDL’s head office.

[15] Gerard Noonan, The IRA in Britain, 1919-1923, ‘in the Heart of Enemy Lines’ (Liverpool, 2014), pp. 71-72. The Directorate was abolished in November 1921, but reports compiled by Scotland Yard continued to be forwarded to the Cabinet until 1924.

[16] The National Archives, CAB/24/129, Home Office Directorate of Intelligence, Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom [RORO], no. 128, 20 October 1921.

[17] Born in Ashton-under-Lyme to Irish parents, Liam Mellows was the IRA’s Director of Purchases from November 1920. As a leader of the Anti-Treaty IRA, he was executed in Mountjoy Prison in December 1922 along with Rory O’Connor and two other IRA officers. Noonan, IRA in Britain, pp. 41 and 237.

[18] See Noonan, IRA in Britain, pp. 198-200.

[19] RORO, no. 129, 27 October 1921.

[20] Letter to President de Valera, dated 15 June 1936, from Mary Driscoll in support of her application. Military Service Pensions, MSP34REF291193, Mary Driscoll.

[21] Merthyr Express, 26 November 1921.

[22] David and Kate Evans, and the other two conspirators, were each sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. Cardiff Assizes was ringed by fifty armed police during the trial of Connolly and his four agents, and all members of the public entering the court were searched for weapons. Merthyr Express, 26 November 1921.

[23] After Barrington was arrested on 21 October 1921 for stealing explosives with Richard Purcell from Bebside colliery magazine, the police found an empty wooden box in the ISDL’s Clayton Street office that he been sent from Cardiff. The National Archives, Home Office, HO 144-4645, ‘Notes on Cases of Convictions for Post-Truce Irish Political Offences in England and Wales’, 3 April 1922.

[24] As remembered by Liverpool-born IRA Volunteer John Pinkman. John Pinkman (ed. Francis E Maguire), In the Legion of the Vanguard, (Cork, 1998), pp. 79-81. Quoted in Noonan, The IRA in Britain, p. 306.

[25] Blyth News, 14 November 1921.

[26] Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 17 March 1922.

[27] This meeting was reported to Art O’Brien, the ISDL’s secretary, in a letter from John Edward Connolly, Joseph’s older brother. NLI, Ó Briain Papers, MS 8445/17/11, 30 January 1922.

[28] Noonan, The IRA in Britain, p. 306.

[29] The Irish Exile, April 1922. Also, Noonan, The IRA in Britain, p. 212.

[30] Northern Daily Mail, 5 April 1922.

[31] Military Service Pensions, 24SP13486, Richard Joseph Purcell. Purcell wrote to the Army Pensions Board on 12 December 1925 in support of his pension application.

[32] See ‘The Anglo-Irish Treaty and Irish Nationalism in the North East of England’:  https://exilesinengland.com/2021/12/02/the-anglo-irish-treaty-and-irish-nationalists-in-the-north-east-of-england/

[33] Tyneside Catholic News, 17 June 1922; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 8 July 1922.

[34] See Purcell letter of 1925 above. Cumann na nGaedheal merged with other pro-Treaty groups in 1933 to form Fine Gael.

[35] Tamworth Herald, 9 April 1938. Connolly was possibly working for the British Labour Party from the mid-1920s. In 1925, he lectured to a weekly meeting of the South Shields Labour Party on the ‘Criminal and the Community’. Shields Daily News, 7 February 1925.

[36] TNA, HO 144-4645, ‘Notes on Cases of Convictions for Post-Truce Irish Political Offences in England and Wales’, 3 April 1922.

[37] Had he done so, Mary Driscoll’s application may possibly have been successful.

[38] National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995, Joseph Patrick Connolly, died 13 December 1868, probate 17 July 1969.