Irish Commandos

 

Listening to Mick Ryan’s Lament got me thinking about other Irish Frontier Partisans who took their fight to “Vampire Great Britain” in the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902.

There were quite a few Irish Republicans in the Transvaal when the war broke out and it was natural for them to sympathize with the Boers. The modern Afrikaner apartheid regime was so despised that it is difficult for folks of our generation to conceive that the Boer War was considered in many quarters to be a brave fight for liberty by a hardy, independent people against an oppressive imperial power. The Irish, who had their own long history of struggle against Great Britain, naturally leaned in that direction.

Irish prospectors, teamsters and professional men rallied in September of 1899 and issued a manifesto in support of the Boer cause. It read, in part:

“The Government of the Transvaal being now threatened with extinction by our ancient foe, England, it is the duty of Irishmen to throw in their lot with the former, and be prepared by force of arms to maintain the independence of the country that has given them a home, at the same time seizing the opportunity to strike a good and effective blow at the merciless tyrannic power that has so long held our people in bondage.”

Irish nationalist émigré John MacBride recruited some 300 men to form an Irish commando, which would become known as MacBride’s Brigade, though he deferred command to an Irish-American former West Pointer named John Blake.

Blake was raised in Texas cattle country and served with the 6^th Cavalry in Arizona during the late Apache Wars, so he had the military experience desired to lead the Irish commando. Restless after his military service, he had come to South Africa to prospect for gold.

The Brigade served as a unique unit through the siege of Ladysmith. When the conflict devolved into a nasty guerrilla war, the Irish dispersed among other Boer commandos and lost their identity as a unit.

MacBride would leave South Africa for Europe after the war. In 1903, he married Maude Gonne, a noted Irish nationalist, feminist and spiritualist who was the great Muse for the legendary poet William Butler Yeats. MacBride and Gonne had a son, Sean MacBride, but the marriage soon foundered and the couple separated. In 1905, Gonne sought divorce and was denied. MacBride went to Ireland and never saw Gonne or his son again.

Yeats, who proposed marriage to Gonne numerous times and was turned down, hated MacBride, and accused him of molesting Gonne’s 11-year-old daughter from a previous lover, Iseult. That dire charge is not substantiated. Insinuations that he “compromised” a girl living under Gonne’s roof may refer to the seduction (or assault) of Gonne’s 16-or-17-year-old half-sister. MacBride’s defenders write the child-molestation charge off as vindictiveness from Yeats, noting that Gonne’s divorce papers do not mention such an incident and that Iseult’s own later writings don’t allude to such an occurrence. Which means precisely… nothing. The truth can never be definitively known.

It seems clear enough, though, that MacBride was at minimum an abusive drunk.

Whatever his sins, MacBride sanctified himself in blood. He was one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and was among those executed in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, becoming a martyr of the Irish Revolution. He refused a blindfold. His last words are variously reported as:

 “I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence.”

…Or….

“You know, Father, I have looked down their guns before.”

Not quite “Shoot straight you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it,” but still pretty impressive.

Yeats gave MacBride a backhanded send off in his famous poem about the martyrs of The Easter Rising, Easter, 1916:

This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Blake returned to the U.S. after the war, where he was in demand on the lecture circuit and published a book that took a hard anti-British line. He died in 1907 in an apartment in Harlem, NYC, of gas asphyxiation. It is unclear whether his death was an accident or a suicide.

Nobody wrote a poem about him.

An excellent article on the Irish commandos can be found at The Wild Geese website.

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This lecture published in 2020.