Founded on Fear

  FOUNDED ON FEAR

  Letterfrack Industrial School, War and Exile

  Peter Tyrrell

  Edited and introduced by Diarmuid Whelan

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Introduction by Diarmuid Whelan

  Note on the Text

  Foreword by Peter Tyrrell

  1. Background

  2. First Year at School

  3. The Second Year

  4. School Layout and Sanitation

  5. Third Year

  6. The Workshops

  7. Fourth Year

  8. Portraits

  9. Fifth Year

  10. Sixth Year

  11. I Leave Letterfrack

  12. I Return Home

  13. I Join the Regular Army

  14. ‘I am a Prisoner of War’

  15. I Return to Civilian Life

  Notes

  Appendix

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  TRANSWORLD IRELAND

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  First published in 2006 by Irish Academic Press

  This paperback edition published 2008 by Transworld Ireland

  Copyright © Peter Tyrell and Diarmuid Whelan 2006 Introduction © Duiarmuid Whelan 2006

  Peter Tyrrell and Diarmuid Whelan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

  This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences, recollections of Peter Tyrell. In some cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events may have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781848270237

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  About the Author

  Peter Tyrrell was born in 1916 into an impoverished family in the west of Ireland. Sent at the age of eight into the care of the Christian Brothers at Letterfrack Industrial School, he suffered appallingly from the brutality of the school’s regime. This was to be the defining period of his life and informed everything that followed. His account of his time in Letterfrack and his later life was originally told in a series of letters to the sympathetic Irish senator, Owen Sheehy Skeffington. Having never fully escaped the horrors of his childhood, Tyrrell tragically ended his own life in 1967.

  Diarmuid Whelan discovered Tyrrell’s writings in 2003 while working in the archives of the National Library of Ireland. He is a lecturer in International Politics in the Department of History, University College Cork, where he teaches on terrorism, international relations and decolonization. He is the author of a study on Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Coldest Eye. He lives in Cork city with his wife, Alex.

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  Introduction

  ‘My story, which is true, should be published in my own name.’

  ‘I am looking forward to re-writing the story. But should anything happen, i.e. an accident, or death (my death) I hope it will still be possible to publish the story based on my manuscript.’

  ‘The thing is that it will one day be printed.’

  The text you are about to read is a troubled and strange document, one that gives a rare view into a still controversial part of our recent past. In a way it is like a deposition to history both of a young boy and a man who is now long dead. Although committed to paper in the late 1950s, it has taken nearly half a century to make its way before us.

  The story behind this document, Peter Tyrrell’s text, begins with the discovery of a charred corpse on Hampstead Heath on 26 April 1967. This body was so badly burnt that it was impossible to identify. The only clue to its identity was a torn postcard found next to the body with the words ‘Skeffington’ and ‘Dublin’. In June of the following year, Senator Owen Sheehy Skeffington received a letter from the London Metropolitan Police. It stated:

  I am directed by the Commissioner to return as requested the letter from Peter Tyrrell, which you kindly forwarded to assist enquiries, together with a Photostat copy of the pieces of postcard found near the body. As positive identification of the body has not been established the original pieces of the card will be retained. Your assistance in this matter is appreciated.1

  That was the last that Owen Sheehy Skeffington heard of Peter Tyrrell. Within two years Skeffington himself died of heart failure. With his death the story of Peter Tyrrell and his search for justice arising from his days in Letterfrack were almost lost for ever. In a biography of Skeffington entitled Skeff, his wife Andrée gave a clearer idea of the connection between Tyrrell and her late husband.

  Arising out of his campaign against corporal punishment in schools, Owen got a letter from Peter Tyrrell, an Irishman living in London. He had been committed to Letterfrack Industrial School in 1924 when he was eight years old, because of his parents’ poverty. The cruelty and severe beatings he had witnessed and suffered during his time there had haunted him all his life. ‘I was always terrified of going to sleep at night because of the bad dreams of being beaten’, he wrote. Owen encouraged him to write down his experiences, and promised to do what he could to get them published.

  Owen was soon to get many pages of manuscript in instalments, and later met Peter Tyrrell, who subsequently contributed to the Tuairim report on Industrial Schools, published in 1966. Eventually some of his memories, edited by Joy Rudd, were published in Hibernia. When years later this unhappy man burnt himself to death on Hampstead Heath, it took the British police a year to establish his identity. They did this by tracing the unburned corner of a postcard in his pocket addressed to Owen.2

  This is the fullest account of Tyrrell’s life that we have. Several other small snatches of his life have surfaced since his death. A recent account of one industrial school, Children of the Poor Clare’s, suggests that a ‘year after the publication of the Tuairim pamphlet he committed suicide by setting himself alight on London’s Hampstead Heath’.3 Another snippet from Tyrrell’s life can be gleaned from Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan,
who produced and wrote the States of Fear documentary. Their subsequent book, Suffer the Little Children, adds to our knowledge of Tyrrell by relating that he served in the British Army in the Second World War and was a Prisoner of War in Germany. They recount that Tyrrell portrayed the Nazi POW camp favourably in contrast with the Christian Brothers’ industrial school regime, declaring that his time with the Germans was ‘like a tea party’ compared with Letterfrack. Later still, many of these details are reassembled in a column by Mary Raftery in the Irish Times and another by Paddy Doyle, author of The God Squad, one of the earlier accounts of life in an industrial school.

  These glimpses of Tyrrell’s life, bequeathed to history through a barely connected vine, all concentrate on the same essentials. He was born into a life of poverty, was an inmate in Letterfrack by the age of eight, and was deeply traumatized and abused by that institution. He spent the Second World War with the British Army at the ‘tea party’ of a German POW camp. The remainder of his life was spent as an emigrant in Great Britain where he was loosely involved in a campaign to remove corporal punishment and reform Irish industrial schools until his untimely death by gruesome suicide when he burned himself alive on Hampstead Heath in 1967. To join all these incidents together was the torn postcard to Skeffington to give the clue.

  It turns out, however, that a great deal more than this remained. After a period of nearly forty years ‘many pages of manuscript in instalments’ as well as a wealth of correspondence between Tyrrell and Skeffington were discovered. They had been lying with the rest of Senator Sheehy Skeffington’s uncatalogued private papers, first in the attic of his family home and more recently in storage in the National Library of Ireland. Even though these papers came to light in an era when the claims made by Tyrrell have won widespread credence, they are astonishing for their capacity to recreate the entire atmosphere of the system which Tyrrell was unfortunate enough to have lived through and brave enough to have written about.

  These papers tell us that Tyrrell was born in the same year as the Easter Rising, 1916, a parallel that may lead some minds to view Tyrrell as an emblem of the human wastage of the independent Irish regime. But there really is no place for political overtones at the beginning of a narrative that is based on clutches of vivid and immediate memories of a young boy’s life before Letterfrack.4 His first eight years were spent on his family’s small farm near Cappagh, Ahascragh, Co. Galway, where he was born into a life of poverty. He tells us that although his father James Tyrrell was well thought of in the community, in his own household he was slow to carry out work, improvements or the basics of farming. What little land they had was poorly managed. The family home was a one-room ‘barn’ without windows. It was a great strain to feed the family of ten children and they were often short of food. As a consequence, their mother, who in Ireland’s sharp social gradations came from a ‘better’ background, had to go borrowing (or according to an earlier account which Tyrrell wanted to amend – she went begging). And it was this offence that would have brought their situation to the notice of the civic guards. A cursory visit to the Tyrrell house led the authorities to petition the courts to commit over half of one family. Six of the children were put ‘into care’ in January 1924, taking the eight-year-old Peter along with his older brothers, Joe, Paddy and Jack. His two younger brothers Martin and Larry were ‘sent to the nuns in Kilkenny’ as they were too young to go to Letterfrack.

  The following ten chapters deal with his experience of St Joseph’s Industrial School near the small isolated village of Letterfrack. Tyrrell’s account begins with an almost hallucinatory passage describing the kindness of the civic guards and the serenity of the Christian Brother who accompanied them from Ballinasloe through the beautiful countryside, before they are introduced to an almost nightmarish scene of an emaciated and wan troop of young boys being chased feverishly by a Brother with a stick.

  Now all at once a Christian Brother comes running out, he is chasing the young children with a very long stick and beating them on the backs of the legs. We can now hear the screams of the little boys, some of them are only six years old. We are now frightened and struck with horror.5

  This was Letterfrack and it got no better.

  With the exception of the first day when there was apparently a rule that a new boy was never disciplined, an entire new world of emotional trauma and physical pain opens up to Tyrrell. Even though his family were used to appalling living conditions, he complains bitterly, perhaps unfairly in some cases, about the hardships of Letterfrack. There was an alarming monotony in the plainness of the diet and the smallness of the portions. They were always cold, as their undernourished bodies could not provide enough warmth in the large unheated rooms of the school. Although they washed themselves regularly, their bed linen was rarely changed. Their own personal clothes were removed upon arrival (quite sensibly to remove social stigma and gradations) but again their uniforms were infrequently laundered. As a result lice were rampant: ‘During my early schooldays we used to take off our shirts and shake them over the fire and then listen to hear the lice crack. It was like a fireworks in miniature.’6

  A clear indication of the harshness of the regime (an inadequate diet and excessive cold) was the prevalence of chilblains. To an extent some effort was made to ameliorate this when the school doctor prescribed a daily dose of cod liver oil. Equally disturbing is the indication that little or no effort was made about oral hygiene. Some of the descriptions of rotten breath and bleeding gums leave a lasting impression.

  Con Murphy ... has always been my chum ... his health has failed terribly, he works beside me in the tailors shop, his mouth and gums are diseased, and by pressing his gums he can bring puss and blood from them.7

  Like many a similar set up in boarding schools, the days quickly merged into one another with the unflinching routine of each day the same as that past.

  the boys would have risen at 6:40 ... When the boys had washed and dressed they would have gone down and the disciplinarian would have taken them then up to the church. At 7:10 they would have had morning prayers with the disciplinarian, guiding them and leading them. That was another role of the disciplinarian to guide them in prayer. Then there would have been mass at 7:30 followed by breakfast ... They would have then embarked on what’s known as charges or chores where the boys cleaned and tidied the dormitories under supervision. Then the dormitories were locked and out of bounds for the rest of the day. There was sweeping and dusting of the dining room, chapel, sacristy and so on. These would be the sort of things that happened. Then there was an inspection of the boys by the Resident Manager at 9:00 prior to them going to school. Then the Brothers would have thought [sic] in school from 9:00 or 9:15 until 2:00 with a break for a light collation at 11:15 ... Then in the afternoons they would have taken some of the younger boys for knitting classes or seen that they did knitting classes and the older boys went to trades. There was a tea break and then the brothers took them for games, band practice, music. Then they supervised the recreation at 5:45 and then at 6:15 they taught religion for half an hour. They had night prayers before supper ... That was followed by recreation and then the boys would have gone to bed in or around 8:30. The night watchman would have arrived in or around 10:00.8

  In Tyrrell’s account there seemed to have been little attempt to break the monotony of the days, with recreation or extra activities. Only towards the end of his days in Letterfrack is there any mention of school plays or bands or other pastimes that schools adopted to provide the bare minimum stimulus for young boys. However, by this stage the view of the teenage Tyrrell is utterly cynical. In his mind they are merely money-generating schemes to bail out the faltering finances of the school, which were imperilled by the activities of one Brother in particular, who embezzled funds in order to fund his lifestyle of finely tailored clothes, drinking, a new car and almost incredibly – a girlfriend. The warped effects on the children can be seen when the superior and the parish priest forbid him from seeing hi
s ‘girlfriend’:

  When Fahy stopped going with the girl he started taking boys to his room at night to commit improper offences. Such offences were often committed quite openly in the dormitory at night and many boys talked about it next day.9

  However, bar one or two instances the phenomenon of sexual abuse does not feature in the text. It can, however, be inferred from certain silences or elisions such as a Brother disappearing into a closed room at a particular time with a particular boy. Only in the first letter to Sheehy Skeffington and in some other letters does he make an explicit accusation of sexual abuse. In addition to saying that ‘three of the Christian Brothers were sadists’, Tyrrell added ‘and one was a pervert’.10 Graphic as Tyrrell’s account is, in relation to sexual abuse it is to an extent sanitized. Some of the incidents that happened to him were not mentioned in the story that he sought to publish. An earlier letter of his to the Christian Brothers is more explicit:

  On several occasions after a meal I was taken into the pantry, which was at the end of the refectory ... He would lock the door and make me undress and then ... was made sit on a stool and would be put over his knee and flogged severely.11

  Nonetheless, although sexual abuse cannot be dismissed, neither as the cause of Tyrrell’s trouble, nor as a phenomenon of Industrial Schools, on the evidence of Tyrrell’s writings it seems to have been isolated to one or perhaps two individuals and a handful of occasions. What was both widespread and endemic was physical abuse. It is the portrayal of the prevalence and severity of this that is the true condemnation of Letterfrack in this era. It is shocking that it was carried out by a handful of Brothers who were entrusted with the care of these boys from the age of six up. It is hard to believe that such a regime of calculated and persistent abuse of boys with, for example, straps cut from a rubber tyre or horsewhips, could have gone unnoticed. And if it was noticed, then it is a searing indictment of the standards of care that it was tolerated, whatever the circumstances or mitigating factors.