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EMMET DALTON
EMMET DALTON
Somme Soldier, Irish General,
Film Pioneer
SEAN BOYNE
First published in 2015 by Merrion Press
an imprint of Irish Academic Press
8 Chapel Lane
Sallins
Co. Kildare
© 2015 Sean Boyne
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
978-1-908928-95-5 (cloth)
978-1-908928-96-2 (PDF)
978-1-908928-69-6 (epub)
978-1-908928-70-2 (mobi)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Printed by ScandBook AB, Sweden.
Inside design by www.sinedesign.net
Contents
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who gave assistance with this book. In particular I would like to thank Emmet Dalton’s daughter, Audrey Dalton Simenz, and his son, Richard F. Dalton for their invaluable help. I am also grateful to Robin Dalton for sharing memories of Emmet, her late father-in-law. (I should make it clear that while I had cooperation from members of the Dalton family, this is not an authorized biography, so any errors are my responsibility alone.)
My thanks to historian John Borgonovo for his editing work on the book.
I am most grateful to Louis O’Connell for giving me a lengthy interview and for access to important documents and photographs in his collection. Louis is the son of Sean O’Connell who, along with Emmet Dalton, comforted a dying Michael Collins after he was shot in an ambush at Bealnablath on 22 August 1922. The writer Ulick O’Connor, who knew Dalton well, was also most helpful. I made use of material and/or background information from people whom I interviewed in the past for other projects – one was the late Lieutenant Colonel Sean Clancy, who as a young officer knew Michael Collins and marched in the cortege at his funeral.
I would like to thank staff at the Irish Military Archives at Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin; staff at the National Library of Ireland and Seamus Helferty and his staff at the archives department at University College Dublin for facilitating my research and for their courtesy. I am grateful also to the National Library for permission to reproduce images. My thanks to staff at the National Archives in Kew for locating and forwarding the Dublin Castle file on Emmet Dalton. I wish to thank staff at the Dublin City Library, Pearse Street, and at my local library in Terenure, Dublin. My thanks also to Lar Joye, Alex Ward and Lisa O’Halpin of the National Museum of Ireland.
I would like to thank my friend and neighbour John Cooney for loaning rare books from his own extensive library, and for inviting me to speak on the subject of Emmet Dalton at the Humbert Summer School of which he is director.
