World War 1 and our Parishes

The Great War of 1914-18 and the Parishes of Booterstown and Carysfort with Mount Merrion one hundred years on.

One hundred years ago tomorrow on the 4th August 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. Initially thought of as being a quick and decisive war (it would be over by Christmas) Great Britain would send over its small army of professional soldiers, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France and Belgium and help drive back the invading German army. This optimistic assessment of an early end to hostilities of course would prove to be horribly wrong.

The Great War as it came to be known would last for four years and when it finally ended no town or village in Britain, Ireland or Germany and Turkey and elsewhere had been left untouched by its ferocity. The initial keeness and rush to the colours would soon be replaced by lists of the dead and wounded and above all terrible grief for so many families. Of course the Parishes of Booterstown and Carysfort with Mount Merrion were no different from so many other parishes with many of their young men joining the British army very soon after hostilities began. However it would not be long after that when the dreaded telegrams which began “Regret to inform you” would begin to arrive in so many homes of parishioners. Like most Church of Ireland parishes at the time the parishioners of St Philip and St James’, St Thomas’ and Christ Church Carysfort were for the most part, loyal subjects of the King and wished to do their duty. The forty-one men and one woman from our parishes who died span the whole of the war from September 1914 and even into 1920.

Private Joseph Arthur Poulton of the 9th Lancers was the first to be killed in action on the 29th September 1914, as part of the original British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Lieutenant Thomas Frood “Doddy” Perrin of the 2nd Royal Irish Regiment would be the last. He died in Alexandria Egypt in terrible and tragic circumstances on the 23rd May 1920. Of course Thomas Perrin was the last death, but not the last casualty. The casualties were all around to see. Desolate mothers and fathers, wives and children and, of course, the returned men of the parishes who were in many cases broken both in body and mind. The theatres of war where the men from our parishes died span the whole of the Western Front in Belgium and France, Suvla Bay and Anzac at Gallipoli, Salonika, Egypt, the Gulf of Genoa and Ireland. After the war, in towns and villages memorials to the fallen were erected all over Britain and Northern Ireland and of course, in churches of all denominations, but not in the south. In 1918 after four years of war and the rising of 1916, Ireland was now utterly changed and would soon have new masters. In 1914 the Irish Parliamentary Party led by John Redmond, had almost attained Home Rule although its working had been suspended for the duration of the war. Redmond had encouraged Irish participation in the war, but with the execution of the leaders of the Rising in 1916, public support for the war began to change. John Redmond and the IPP were decisively defeated by Sinn Fein in the general election of 1918. Now anything about Irish involvement in what was seen as Britain’s war was a subject best not talked about. This had the effect of condemning thousands of Irishmen both living and dead to a kind of oblivion. As far as the new Free State Government was concerned, these men had been at best misguided and at worst traitors, they had fought for England, the wrong side. But as there were so many of them, around 250,000 in all, who had enlisted, with about 38,000 who would perish and from all sections of society, both Protestant and Catholic and others, it was thought best to just write them and their brave deeds out of the new “gallant”, albeit narrow, history of the fledgling state. But whatever the dictates of a government, a lost child could and would never be forgotten by a mother and father.

In the southern Protestant churches it was decided that all the names of the dead would be commemorated, on brass plaques or carved on panels in marble and stone. It was not possible either during or after the war for the slain to be brought home to their loved ones, not least because in so many cases there was no body to be found and also there were just too many. The war had been so vicious, the mechanisation of war and the unbelievable destructive power of artillery so ferocious, that human flesh and bones ceased to exist. In many cases there was simply no grave of a son, husband, brother, cousin, friend or daddy to mourn at. So the names in stone or brass, would be the one tangible way that the lost lives of each parish and community could be remembered. The people that we will commemorate over the next six years were not famous, they were not well known outside their community and they did not see themselves as special. But they were special, special to their parents, special to their wives, special to their siblings, special to their children. Who knows what human knowledge was lost also, a doctor who might have helped find a cure for cancer, a student who might have become a statesman and helped his country, a solicitor or a barrister who might have helped his fellow-man obtain justice, a gardener who might have discovered a beautiful flower. All this was lost to us, making us much the poorer. When they died, something of the heart of each family was lost, in some cases the death of an only son was the death sentence of a family, which would soon cease to exist too. I think the words of my Great-Grandfather Edward Lee, a parishioner of St Philip and St James’ although writing about his own two lost sons, speaks for all the bereaved families “Oh we do feel so terribly poorer for the loss of our brave boys – they died as they lived bravely and unselfishly giving inspiration to us all – but their spirit lives and can never die.”

Grief fades eventually, memory too fades and families who suffered pass on. Now it is up to us in the twenty-first century to reclaim our lost generation from that double oblivion that they were unjustly cast into. It is up to us to make sure that what they did is never forgotten; that their voices are heard, especially by the young, after all they were young too, even if a hundred years separates them, they can still teach the living something, never to forget what happened, for if we forget we are doomed to repeat it at our peril.

We all know what it means to be part of a family or community. Only one hundred years separates us from those young people from the locality, who marched away, “And finally passed out of the sight of men”.

Let it be remembered –
They were us and we are them.

MICHAEL LEE. August 2014