WITH THE centenary of his death now peering over the horizon, it looks as if history has been kinder to Tom Kettle than his own gloomy prediction suggested.
Like thousands of his generation, the man once considered a possible future prime minister of home-ruled Ireland was badly wrong-footed by the Easter Rising and the executions that followed. Not long before his own demise at the Somme, he wrote: “These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs; and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.” That the public memory of him is somewhat more complex is partly due to another thing he wrote in his last days. This was the poem to his infant daughter, explaining why he would not be around to watch her grow up, the most famous lines of which adorn his monument in St Stephen’s Green,
Dublin.
But in the posterity to which he surrendered on September 9th, 1916, Kettle has not been short of others to speak for him, either. A group of admirers held a public meeting in the old House of Lords three years ago to mark his 90th anniversary. And a belated result of that event is a booklet called Remembering Tom Kettle, which landed on my desk recently.
In the words of Gerald Barry, the RTÉ presenter who was one of the organisers, the publication is a “broadly accurate” report of the meeting, contributors to which ranged from the late Conor Cruise O’Brien to (via letter) President Mary McAleese.
Like the event, Barry says, the booklet was designed to honour “a short but brilliant life and not merely the manner of its ending”. The hope also is that it may inspire a more extensive commemoration of its subject amid the various other reflections that 2016 will bring.
As a number of contributors point out, Kettle was a close contemporary of James Joyce: his schooling very much like that depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Both grew up in households haunted by the fall of Parnell. Indeed Kettle’s father Andy was a friend and confidant of “The Chief”, who stood by him to the end and was his candidate in the last of the bitter, post-split byelections: at Carlow
in 1891.
A key difference was that, where Joyce was reared in a household on the economic slide, Tom Kettle’s family were still very much in the ascendent. Kettle Senior was a wealthy farmer in north Dublin. And this, combined with the political pedigree and his own intellectual and rhetorical skills, seemed to mark Tom Kettle out for greatness in the self-governing Ireland that was coming.
In the early years of the 20th century, he was the Irish parliamentary party’s rising star: not that this was a big achievement in the eyes of that party’s separatist critics, who saw it (in Margaret O’Callaghan’s words) as “a bunch of has-beens: ancient, dilapidated figures who had done their job in the 1880s but were now superannuated old men”.
At any rate, Kettle was easily the outstanding figure among the “YIBS” – the party’s Young Ireland Branch. He was that very unusual mixture for his time: an Irish Catholic (a deeply religious one too) and a liberal. To some, he looked like the new Parnell.
He had his faults: a fondness for drink not the least of them in the eyes of those same critics, since O’Callaghan notes the tendency of revolutionaries to be “puritans”. His sensitivity to criticism made him grow shrill in response to those who didn’t reciprocate his broadmindedness. And the very brilliance of his rhetoric contributed to the gradual public hardening of his positions He rationalised his participation in the first World War in the famous poem aforementioned, telling his daughter that he “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”. But by the time he wrote those lines, within days of his end, he knew that he and the rest of the Redmondites had lost the argument.
Conor Cruise O’Brien (who was related to him through marriage) suggested Kettle went to France with a death wish. In the pamphlet’s closing contribution, however, Patrick Maume argues that he was motivated only by the need to prove his sincerity.
After all, the cynics had suggested that, despite recruiting for it, he himself would avoid the front; something he could certainly have done had he chosen.
In the event he died among the stench of already rotting corpses at Guinchy when, as he emerged from the trenches, crouching, a bullet went in over his breast-plate and pierced his heart. His burial place is unknown now. But his final moments were recorded by Emmett Dalton, who held him at the last; just as six years later Dalton would do, in one of the sadder ironies of Irish history, for the dying Michael Collins.
Remembering Tom Kettle is available by request from
Gerald Barry at 7, Claremont Court, Glenageary, Co Dublin. The €4 charge includes post and packaging.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com