A soldier’s song (of sixpence) the real man behind the ballad of Patrick Sheehan

His name was indeed Patrick Sheehan, and at least in the famous ballad, his age was "34".  But this last detail may have been influenced by the rhyming scheme, because as singers of the song will recall, Tipperary was his native place, "not far from Galteemore".

That part was probably fictional: evidence suggests the real Sheehan was from Co Clare. It was the balladeer, Charles Kickham, who was a Tipp man, although given the nature of his lyrics, he thought better of using his own name when the work was first published in 1857.

Instead, the supposed author was one "Darby Ryan Junior": spiritual ancestor of a real-life Darby Ryan who half a century earlier had written another classic of seditious sentiment, The Peeler and the Goat.

The pseudonym was doubly apt, since the original Ryan was from Bansha, close to the general locale of the fictionalised Sheehan’s early life, as repeated at the end of every verse: “the Glen of Aherlow”.

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As for the actual Sheehan, what little we know for certain is that in September 1857, he was arrested for begging on Dublin’s Grafton Street.

This would be one of the scenes, a century later, of another great Irish ballad, in which Patrick Kavanagh "tripped lightly along the ledge" of a doomed love affair.  But in the less poetic Grafton Street of 1857, Sheehan was charged with "causing obstruction to the thoroughfare" and sentenced to seven days imprisonment.

This despite the court hearing that he was a former soldier, blinded during the Crimean War, “in the trenches before Sebastopol”. His sacrifice had earned him a pension of “six pence per day for nine months”: which period having expired, he now had no recourse but to beg.

Written on a placard attached to him on the street, his claims were supported by a medal found in his pockets.  A sergeant of Sheehan’s 55th Crimean regiment had also confirmed his bone fides in court.

A taste for ‘sogering’

Even so, he got jail.  And among those who read the newspaper report – “till my blood boiled” – was Kickham.  That night in bed, still seething, he wrote the ballad.  By next morning he was sending it to the

Kilkenny Journal

, urging publication for the benefit of “the young men of our time who may have a taste for ‘sogering’.”

As printed a week later, the song fitted Sheehan with a classic Irish backstory of eviction, parents dying in the workhouse, and a life of deprivation that forced him to enlist, and regret it: “But cruel as my lot was,/I ne’er did hardship know,/Till I joined the English army,/Far away from Aherlow.”

The lyrics wouldn’t win any literary awards, as Kickham knew.  ”I could have given them a better polish if I liked; but [. . .] I wrote them rough and vigorous, such as the old ballads of the people used to be, that they may seize on the popular ear. . .”

It worked. Patrick Sheehan was soon a favourite of Kickham’s fellow Fenians, and many others.  It went on to become a standard in the Irish ballad repertoire, the lyrics passed from singer to singer and generation to generation, with frequent subtractions and additions that would have long ago removed the polish, had the composer applied any.

In the meantime, by contrast, the actual Patrick Sheehan sank into obscurity.   But earlier this year, he and the song were the subject of a Tipperary Mid West radio documentary by Tom Hurley, and the story has also now been revisited in the Tipperary Historical Journal, 2018 edition, by Michael Kenny, to both of which sources I owe the foregoing.

Although there appear to have been three different Patrick Sheehans wounded during the Siege of Sebastopol, the one in the ballad was probably from Ennistymon, Co Clare.  If so, he survived to live a long life, dying only in December 1920.

Great expense

Extrapolating from the song, that would have made him 97 at the time of death, but in obituaries he was stated variously to be 93 and 108.

Crucially his pension had been restored, and to the great expense of the British army, he seems to have been drawing it to the end. Whether it was the song that shamed the army into paying, and in later years increasing it from sixpence a day, is not clear. According to Hurley, military records suggest the old soldier was “quite adept at fighting his corner”.  And he didn’t always rely on the ballad to make his case. On one occasion, he even hired a solicitor.