My grandfather Jim William Cunningham, known as J.W., was always an old man to me. On visits to our home, he’d sit tapping his walking stick on the lino floor while talking with my Dad about the events of the day. There was little engagement with us kids. We didn’t sit on his lap or play with his glasses, which sat in a wonky gaze across his nose. We didn’t try on his Fedora style hat, a throwback to another era. If he wanted our attention as we played on the floor, he’d tap us with his stick. “Go tell your mammy to make a cuppa tea”. He wasn’t a gruff man by any means. Like many of his generation he adhered to the 15th century proverb that ‘children were not to be heard’.
To us, our grandfather was a frail old man who lived around the corner. My older brother Seamus ran errands for him. This duty to service, which included taking in buckets of coal from the shed at the bottom of the garden and collecting The Irish Press from McGinley’s shop across the road, was rewarded with a brand new, light-blue Raleigh bicycle which we resented and envied in equal measures. Growing up, we knew he was an important man. We witnessed our parents respect, near reverence, in his presence. It was many years after his death in 1972 that we, his grandkids, learned something about the amazing true life of this old man.
J.W. was born in Carrick in 1890. In his early 20’s he headed off to serve his apprenticeship with Calhoun & Co in Derry. During that time he honed his craft and among his finest work was the large stairway installed as part of the Colgan Hall being built in Carndonagh. From Derry he went to work at the Harland & Wolfe shipyard in Belfast. This wasn’t the safest environment for a young Catholic lad from Donegal and he had to scarper pretty quick when there was a threat of ‘Belfast Confetti’, a term used for the rivets and scrap metal Unionist shipyard workers would pelt Catholics with. He moved to the shipyards in Glasgow where there was also a strong anti-Irish backlash. It was just after the Easter Rising and there was a sense that the Irish had stabbed Britain in the back in their ‘hour of need’. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Glasgow and then moved on to ‘Peaky Blinders’ country, Birmingham of the 1920s.
The main objective of the IRB was to raise funds to send arms back home. J.W. was the officer in charge of the purchase of munitions during this time. They raised money by running dances and lotteries and sent guns and ammunition through the parcel post, usually consigned as delph from the pottery district, sent unknowingly through large drapery houses such as Arnotts in Dublin.
He met with Michael Collins on a number of occasions. On the first occasion he was summonsed to meet him in Shanahan’s pub on Corporation Street in Dublin, the same pub depicted in Sean O’Casey’s ‘The Plough and the Stars’. J.W. described the meeting;
“We had barely started to enjoy our drink when I saw a tall, athletic-looking man cycle right into the bar, leave his bicycle at the side of the shop, seize our two drinks, shove them across to the bar-man and impetuously order us to follow him. We were taken into an inner sanctum and I was placed between the new arrival and Sean. It was then I realised I was in the presence of the great Michael Collins. I was then put “through the mill” properly – questions came like machine gun fire. All the possibilities as an arms supply of Birmingham centre were discussed and finally Collins seemed satisfied. He appointed me in charge of the Birmingham area, as a full time agent and he gave me a letter of introduction to P. Daly of Liverpool. I was instructed to get back again that night and get things going full steam.” **
I first read this statement from my grandfather in the late 70s and thought the description of Michael Collins cycling into the pub as rather unusual. It wasn’t until I watched the Neil Jordan movie of his life in 1996 that I understood that this was how it normally happened.
During the troubles J.W. spent a number of terms in jail. Once, for a couple of months awaiting trial, in Winson Green prison, Birmingham. On this occasion he and others skipped bail and headed back to Dublin. On the second occasion early in 1923, J.W. spent 35 days on hunger strike in Ballykinler Internment Camp in County Down. Ballykinler housed over 2,000 men from all over Ireland and was the first mass internment camp setup during the Irish War of Independence. Many prisoners were shot dead and died of malnourishment in Ballykinlar during this awful time. The family at home were deeply concerned about J.W’s declining health so his mother, sick with grief, persuaded his brother Charles, who was a serving officer in the Free State Army, to visit him in prison to try and persuade him to give up the hunger strike. Big-hearted Charles went to the Camp but J.W. refused to even shake his hand. Such was the bitterness and enmity generated by this cruel Civil War, that saw brother against brother.
J.W. who was really close to Charles, regretted the incident for the rest of his life.
This war was fought by both the men and women of the time. On one occasion closer to home, my grandmother Brigid Doherty who was going out with J.W. at that time worked with her sister Annie, who had set up the first successful hand knit industry in the area. They lived in ‘Jonnie Anne’s’ in Carrick. At the time they were hiding two Republicans who were on the run. My grandfather’s brother Josie, a serving officer in the Free State Army, who was at home on a few hours leave, approached Jonnie Anne’s in full uniform. The men thought that he had come to arrest them were about to assassinate him, when my grandmother intervened and saved his life. Uncle Josie had only come to pay a social call.
On another occasion, the London Times reported a disturbance in Bavin, Kilcar when the constabulary from Killybegs were called to deal with a dispute in Carrick. Their wagon was halted abruptly when confronted by a young woman in Bavin firing rocks. The young woman, my dear ‘Auntie Kay’, was as politically motivated and involved as any of the men of the time.
This conflict between brothers was one of the most tragic outcomes of the civil war. J.W. who had admired Michael Collins so much during the war for independence, fought on the Republican side during the civil war while his brothers William John, Josie and Charles all fought with the Free State.
After the war, J.W. returned home to Carrick. It took time for the wounds of war to heal but eventually they reconciled and set up business together. J.W. Cunningham & Co went on to be one of the most successful building firms in Ireland. Their work included most of the new churches, schools and housing estates built throughout the county of Donegal from the 1930’s right through to the 1960’s. In 1951 he returned, this time with his own firm, to build the new hospital in Carndonagh. One of his proudest moments was building the Glenbay Hotel for his brother Charles, a sure sign they had reconciled.
This old man of my childhood had lived a life. A life our generation could not even imagine, during difficult times we could hardly contemplate. His generation knew people who had lived and survived the great famine. His generation knew what real suffering was. This determination to give his family a better future drove him and his brothers and sisters to a war which would split this country and leave us to this day with its tragic legacy.
My grandfather was a man from a different time. I’m unsure how I would react if faced with the awful challenges he had to deal with in his youth. I do know that as I sit here with my grandson sitting on my knee, making fun of my wonky glasses, I am grateful for the comforts in life we enjoy, I am grateful to be able to work and live in a country I call home and I will be forever grateful for the freedoms fought for and paid with the lives of our forefathers.
Ciaran Cunningham Feb 2019
**This extract from my grandfather is taken from his submission, which can be viewed along with many others, at the Bureau of Military History 1913-1921 website at http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie  The Bureau’s official brief was ‘to assemble and co-ordinate material to form the basis for the compilation of the history of the movement for Independence from the formation of the Irish Volunteers on 25th November 1913, to the 11th July 1921’. The Bureau, considered to be among the most important primary sources of information on this period available anywhere in the world, was locked away in the Department of An Taoiseach for some forty-five years after the last statement was collected.
The cover photo is J.W. sitting on the rocks at Port.
Thanks to my late Uncle Enda, his book on J.W. and the workshop is a valued reference.