January 1939, while Britain faced the prospect of a war in Europe, the IRA planned to strike at its old enemy – England. It was a reckless and unjustified endeavour driven by bitterness and a crazy belief the British could be forced to abandon Northern Ireland. The IRA leadership decided the most successful strategy was to bomb Britain into submission. When the British received an ultimatum to leave Ireland or face the consequences, they dismissed it as farcical. But the danger was real. To the British government’s shock and horror, bombs exploded in eight major English cities, including London and Liverpool, on 17 January at 6 a.m. Units from the IRA’s Belfast Brigade took responsibility for some of the explosions and for many more that followed.
The bombing campaign was ultimately a failure. It antagonised many Irish in Britain, who soon found themselves under suspicion and ostracised by their English friends and neighbours. Good police work led to the rounding up of IRA operatives throughout Britain, and my uncle John was among them. Due to lack of evidence, he was deported to Dublin after he claimed Irish citizenship. The IRA promptly sent him north to re-join its Belfast Brigade. He was quickly re-arrested in a massive round-up of IRA activists, sympathisers and left-wing trade unionists, all of whom were imprisoned without trial on an old naval vessel, the Al Rawdah, anchored in Belfast Lough.
Two years later, he was transferred to Crumlin Road Prison. While there, he protested his confinement without trial, refusing to vacate his cell for the preferred safety of the open yard during German air raids. He tried to encourage other IRA prisoners to join him, but they refused. Prison warders, the majority of whom were Protestant and anti-IRA, vented their anger at his rule breaking by assaulting him in his cell. Their brutality left a lasting impression on my mother, who accompanied my grandmother during prison visits. They were not permitted to see him after beatings. Instead they were handed his bloody clothing and told to take it home and wash it.
By the time Uncle John left prison in the spring of 1944, nothing remained of the young ideologue of the pre-war era. He returned to No 4 Ross Place deeply depressed and rarely went outdoors. Before long, he began denouncing the IRA, its Belfast leadership, the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Vatican. His anti-Catholic rhetoric puzzled his family, but they weren’t unduly concerned by his antipathy towards the IRA. Belfast’s IRA leaders knew all about John’s terrible prison treatment, yet none of them visited him after his release.
As the months passed, his bitterness increased. He would look out from the living room window into the street, hurling abuse at the priests of the parish and the IRA. Somehow, all the knowledge he had acquired from reading socialist literature and attending political lectures in prison transformed him from a Catholic Nationalist into an atheistic socialist. His disintegrating personality also made him a disgruntled and angry individual. Ironically, his striking political transformation was a reflection of a similar metamorphosis, which infected the IRA less than a decade later. In the 1950s, the organisation transitioned into two factions: one advocated traditional Irish Republicanism, while the other promoted a Connolly brand of socialism with some Marxist-Leninism included for good measure. That metamorphosis within Republicanism was particularly manifest in prison debates in the mid-1950s when Republican veterans expressed disillusionment with the IRA’s attachment to Irish Catholic Nationalism. I believe, however, the genesis of that political divergence can be linked to an earlier period when my uncle and a small number of Republicans emerged from prison articulating what many Catholics branded a ‘godless philosophy’. In my uncle’s case, his newfound socialist ideals sounded like a reasonable alternative to Republicanism when he spoke about it in short bursts. Over time, the bursts lengthened and his mind gave way to depression and a mental chaos exemplified by obsessions with the Pope, the IRA and the British Royal Family.
My grandmother Clarke blamed her son’s depression and ‘craziness’ on the beatings he received to the head from prison warders. After my grandfather Clarke died of cancer in May 1944, his wife and her sisters, Bridget and Sarah, could not cope with John’s noisy outbursts, which sometimes lasted the whole day. Frustrated, they turned to Dr Gray, the family’s physician. He regretfully told them he could not do much for her son and referred him to a psychiatrist. Had Uncle John been alive today, he would have simply been medicated. Sadly, he lived in an era when the world of psychiatry had a horrific solution to mental illnesses – the pre-frontal lobotomy. This was the cause of the two peculiar indents on Uncle John’s skull, which caught my attention as a child. The lobotomy left my uncle worse off mentally and increased his paranoia.
Months after doctors performed the procedure, Uncle John returned home without medication. Three years later, he entered my life as the ‘custard and jelly’ uncle. Sadly, our relationship was short-lived because he was cruelly snatched from my life one Sunday afternoon, following a trip to the cemetery. I watched terrified from our doorway as two male nurses in white linen coats dragged him out of No 4 in a strait jacket. They bundled him into the back of a van with metal grills on the windows and slammed the doors shut to silence his cries. When I asked my father why my uncle was being taken from us, he claimed he had threatened my grandmother, and it was better for him to be in a secure place where he would be properly looked after.
Doctors confined him to Purdysburn, a hospital on the Saintfield Road outside Belfast, where he had been institutionalised years earlier. The facility, also known as the Villa Colony, had opened in 1895 as an asylum for the ‘lunatic poor’. For the next three years, two Sundays per month, my father, Damien and I visited my uncle. We brought him unfiltered Park Drive and Woodbine cigarettes, a packet of Virginia tobacco, a bottle of lemonade, several containers of cigarette-lighter fuel and six Bubblies.
I can still recall my first visit. Men and women wandered aimlessly throughout the grounds, some talking loudly to themselves the way Uncle John did on our Milltown trips. A few stared at us, wild-eyed, but bowed their heads when we returned their gaze. I stayed close to my father, fearing we would never get out of there alive. He said the strangers were like our uncle and meant us no harm. We found Uncle John in a large brick building that smelled of urine and disinfectant. He was thrilled to see us and lost no time filling his pockets with the gifts we brought him.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he smiled, dutifully concealing cigarettes inside the lining of his jacket. ‘They’re all nuts in here, and they’d steal the eyes outa yer head.’
He was funny and lucid for an hour until he lapsed into a familiar rant about the IRA, the Pope and the Queen of England. After two years of Sunday visits, it became clear his continued confinement angered him. He talked of plans for a new life, stressing no one had the legal right to keep him locked up. He declared his intention to settle in The Irish Free State, promising to make his home in Dublin or Ballina. The way he spoke implied it was going to happen soon. My parents and family insiders dismissed his plans as ‘wishful thinking’, pointing out he could be released only if my grandmother signed the necessary legal papers and she was unlikely to do that because she was too frail to cope with him.
It shocked everyone when he walked out of Purdysburn three months later and vanished from sight. Local police launched a manhunt but abandoned it after forty-eight hours. Ten days later, my grandmother received a postcard from Dublin with ‘I’m free in a free part of Ireland’ written on the back of it. A letter followed in which he revealed he had simply ‘strolled out of The Burn’ and took a train to Dublin, outside British jurisdiction.
The most astonishing aspect of the escape was his legal knowledge. While in Purdysburn, he discovered if he could live for six months outside the institution without committing an offence he could not be institutionalised again against his will. The only way he could do that was to leave British jurisdiction for that period of time. The money for the trip to Dublin came from cigarettes Uncle John sold at a discount rate to the ‘screws’.
Seven months after his escape, he did the unthinkable and returned to Belfast. Right away, he travelled to Purdysburn, dressed in a second-hand tweed suit and a pair of leather brogues. In the main office, he brazenly demanded payment for the three years he toiled in Purdysburn’s vegetable gardens.
