remain shrouded in mystery. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, Mellows was one of the most influential opponents of the agreement. His role in occupying the Four Courts with the anti-Treaty IRA leadership in April 1922 was central to the events that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Captured in the bombardment of the building in June, his execution in December, alongside Richard Barrett, Joseph McKelvey and Rory O’Connor in Mountjoy Jail, in retaliation for an attack on two pro-Treaty members of Parliament in which TD Sean Hales was killed, was among the most divisive acts of the new state. During the decades that followed the disastrous Civil War, Mellows and his comrades in the Four Courts Executive of the IRA were frequently singled out for blame for their role in instigating the conflict.5
Elected a member of Parliament for two constituencies in the 1918 general election, and again for Galway in the uncontested election of May 1921, Mellows never pretended to be a politician; he loathed politics and, above all else, espoused physical force as the engine of the Irish revolution.6 Like his idol, Patrick Pearse, Mellows was unmarried, puritanical in habits and ruminated profoundly over his own actions, putting the cause of the republic before all else. While he was a senior figure among the revolutionary elite, he remained an outsider within the coterie of leading militants. A gifted but reluctant public speaker, he published his writings anonymously, heaping credit upon his subordinates while privately suffering profound self-doubt.
Beginnings and Reinvention
Born in Hartshead Military Barracks in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1892, to Sergeant William Mellows of Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and his wife Sarah Jordan of Monalug, Co. Wexford, Liam Mellows’ life was a triumph of reinvention. Christened William Joseph, after both his father and grandfather, and known as Willie to his family, he adopted the Irish version of his Christian name in adolescence. Liam’s father, William, attested at the Curragh Camp with the 20th Regiment of Foot in 1871, spending thirty-two years in the army, seven of which he served overseas.7 William was also born in a military barracks, when Liam’s grandfather was serving overseas in Gonda, India, and it was his father’s hope that Liam would be the third generation of the family to serve in the British military.
The origins of the Mellows family are unclear and it is probable they were descended from Protestant English stock. The Mellows name originates in Nottinghamshire and at the turn of the twentieth century there were just two families with the surname in Ireland.8 In 1901, William, Sarah and their four children, Jane, Liam, Frederick and Herbert, were living in Cork City where William was stationed.9 Their eldest daughter Jane, aged fourteen, was considerably older than Liam, aged eight; with younger brothers, Herbert and Frederick, aged five and six respectively. Over the preceding years, the family had lived a transient existence as their father was transferred from Fermoy to Manchester and Glasgow. A sickly child, Liam was sent to stay for long periods with his maternal grandparents in North Wexford. His schooling was interrupted by the family’s constant uprooting and his formative education was gained at British military schools attached to Wellington Barracks, Cork, Portobello Barracks, Dublin, and the Royal Hibernian Military School, Dublin. By 1911, the family had moved again, this time to Fairview, a respectable northern suburb of Dublin.10 Aged eighteen, Liam had already turned his back on his father’s military aspirations, however, and rather than apply for a commission, he found work as a book-keeper, with his brother Fred, then aged sixteen, employed as a clerical worker.11
The two Mellows brothers, William and Herbert, reinvented themselves as Liam and Barney, republican revolutionaries, in adolescence through their involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fianna Éireann boy scouts. Despite the boys’ political conversion, there is no evidence of rancour within the family and the walls of their final family home on Mount Shannon Road in the south of the city were bedecked in photographs of their father’s and grandfather’s military adventures. Wexford republican Robert Brennan recalled a place of warmth, ‘we often stayed at the Mellows home in Dublin and, I must say, if ever there was ever a happy family, it was the Mellows in those days’.12
Tragedy struck the family in 1906 with the death of eldest daughter Jane from tuberculosis, compounded by the subsequent death of younger brother Frederick. The family had previously lost a third child, Patrick, as an infant, while living in England. The loss of his siblings had a profound effect on Liam and throughout his life, friends observed his sense of fatalism. Mellows’ close comrade Alfred White noted the contrast between Liam and his younger sibling, ‘his brother Barney, volatile, nimble-minded, was in sharp contrast to Liam, on whom the responsibilities of life as the elder brother were thrust at an early age’.13 Cumann na mBan member Annie Fanning, who helped Mellows escape to the United States, was warned by Liam that ‘people who helped him always got into trouble or died’.14 A comrade from the War of Independence concluded that Mellows ‘felt it was his duty to give himself for Ireland’15 and following the Truce with Crown Forces in July 1921, Mellows told senior IRA commander Sean Moylan, ‘many more of us will die before an Irish Republic is recognised’.16
‘The sword and its allies’: Na Fianna Éireann and the Irish Volunteers
Fenian leader Tom Clarke became an influential early mentor for the young Mellows, who instinctively shared the older man’s admiration for physical force and contempt for politics. Clarke was revered by younger militants in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for having spent fifteen years between 1883 and 1898 in English prisons for his role in the Fenian dynamite campaign.17 Clarke and Mellows shared a family heritage in the British army that consolidated an instinctive bond. Like the much younger Mellows, Clarke grew up in a British military garrison in South Africa where his father, who like William Mellows was also a sergeant, was stationed. Following his release from jail, Clarke spent almost ten years in New York where he purchased a small farm before returning to Ireland with his family in 1907 and establishing a tobacco shop on Parnell Street, which was to become a hub of activity for younger members of the IRB eager to earn his approval.
Under Clarke’s influence, Mellows joined the circle of young militants under his guidance who established the republican boy scouts, Na Fianna Éireann, in 1909, and began publishing the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom in November 1910. With Con Colbert, Pádraig Ó Riain and Eamon Martin, Mellows entered the company of like-minded, serious young men who had for several years, along with Denis McCullough, Patrick McCartan and Bulmer Hobson, been in the process of transforming the IRB from a drinking club for old Fenians to a conspiratorial anti-imperialist sect. The group shared an energy and commitment to direct action that shocked the romantic nationalists of older generations and in Patrick Pearse, Seán MacDiarmada and Clarke, they found leaders for whom abstract notions of Ireland’s destiny were to be distilled into a commitment to violent insurrection.
Mellows’ military background and education saw him take on a series of time-consuming roles within the emerging movement, first as a travelling organiser for Na Fianna in April 1913, and, subsequently, as regional organiser for the Irish Volunteers in 1914. His military bearing and sincere approach won him plaudits among sceptical activists, but it was his personality that won him the enduring friendship of republicans around the country. Athlone organiser Tomás Ó Maoileoin recalled, ‘I have rarely met anyone with such an attractive personality.’18 Mellows’ lifelong friend Fr Henry Feeney recalled, ‘Mellows was well below average height, frail looking with fair, almost white hair. He wore rimless glasses of the pince-nez type and did not, at first sight, inspire great respect or confidence. But the thin, frail body was tough and sinewy, immune to cold and hardship.’19 A compulsive worker, Mellows’ fondness for practical jokes and his penchant for rebel songs was the highlight of many evenings among comrades. Fenian leader Jeremiah O’Leary sought out his company after his release from jail in New York, as ‘Mellows was an accomplished bard with a repertoire of Irish folk songs, war and love songs which was inexhaustible which made me forget the shadow which the Tombs’ bars and the poison which its bad ventilation had cast upon my mind.’20 Mellows’ first taste of prison life came at the end of July 1915 when he served three months’ imprisonment in Mountjoy, under the Defence of the Realm Act, after speaking at a Volunteer meeting in Tuam, Co. Galway.
‘The
