Paul Malpas

Before I start this piece I would urge the reader to glance at the initial piece I wrote on 28th May 2010 entitled Ballinagard House and the Dignan Family and I would like them to know that this is not the story I wanted to write.  The real story unveiled itself as I did my research for this piece and it was about the shades of opinion in that political argument that was Ireland in the first quarter of the 20th century and how this political dilemma forced itself on to one particular Roscommon family.  However, the more I researched, the more I learnt and the longer the piece became.  I tried to write it in condensed form but it was not doing the family justice.  I could not condense the story into the circa 2000 words that  the editor of The New Ranger had allotted me.  To actually tell the story and give everyone and everything in it the correct and fair amount of space would take a book or at least 150,000 words, so I have concentrated on the four brave brothers Dignan and given a synopsis of their lives.  Four courageous brothers who went to war off their own bat and presumably with the best wishes of their father, the Recruiting Lieutenant for Roscommon, Charles Coleman Dignan.  Their sole aim, to fight for the British Army in their hour of need.  Of course, they were not alone in this.  They were joined by 300,000 of their countrymen who for various political and economic reasons and shades of opinion did the same thing.

Charles Coleman Dignan, a solicitor, married Angelina Victoria St. Lawrence Burke in 1886 and over the next 20 years this union produced nine children, five girls and four boys.  The four boys – Joseph Patrick born in 1888, Alfred Charles born in 1892, Albert Guy born in 1894 and Cecil Joseph Burke Dignan born in 1899 were all born at an unfortunate time.  The Great War 1914-1918 was to impact heavily on their young lives.

The Dignans were staunch Irish Catholics whose only quirk, if it could possibly be called a quirk, was that they thought of Roscommon, in Connaught, in the west of Ireland as being a county of England, just as much Lancashire or Yorkshire felt to a Lancastrian or Yorkshire man.  Their names tell the tale, Maud Matilda, Eveline Victoria, Mabel Beatrice, Hilda Angelina and Ethel Madeline.  In their minds they were British through and through, pillars of polite Roscommon society but all of them and for generations back, all born in the West of Ireland.  In fact the mother Angelina Victoria St. Lawrence Burke was a kinswomen of William Ulick Tristram St. Lawrence, the 4th Earl of Howth and one time Member of Parliament for the Borough of Galway, who could trace his line back to Norman times in Ireland.

As the first six boys and girls grew up and after doing their basic education in the local school in Roscommon, they were sent to finish off their education in England, to Manchester.  I would suggest that they had Dignan relations there and at that time there was certainly a prosperous Dignan family in business in Manchester.  The boys went to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range and the girls to the Loreto Convent, just up the road.

St. Bede’s College, founded in 1874 by Bishop Herbert Vaughan, had, by the turn of the 20th century, become the premier catholic school in the Manchester area.  In fact it was my alma mater.   Joseph Patrick, Alfred Charles, Albert Guy and myself all knelt in the same pews in that little chapel, built in 1898 and we all struggled manfully with Greek and Latin vocabulary and translations of set pieces by writers and poets of 2000 odd years previous.  The only reason I cannot call them friends is that 50 years seperated us.  In fact the names of two of the brothers are remembered on the Roll of Honour, positioned on that chapel’s wall along with 66 other old boys of the school, who gave their lives for the British Army in that dreadful war.  Poor Cecil Joseph and the last two girls were denied this absolute privilege when war intervened and they had to finish their education in Ireland.

By the time war was declared in August 1914, Charles Coleman Dignan, by now 56 years old, was appointed Recruiting Officer for Roscommon; he was already the Under Sherriff of the county.  Patrick Joseph was 26 and had returned to Manchester working in offices in the city centre.  He enlisted as a private soldier No 11524, on 12th September, in the 4th City Battalion, 19th (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment; the so called Manchester Pals, drawn from the ranks of clerks and office workers in the city.  During his basic training  he applied for and received his commission on the 22nd May 1915 into the 4th Battalion Connaught Rangers, his local regiment back home.  He was immediately sent to the Officer Cadet School at Moore Park, near Fermoy, in Cork.  By February 1916, according to his letters home, having undergone eight months of various training courses, he was bored stiff with officer learning life and yearned to get to the front.

His wishes were granted, when on 20th July 1916, he was posted along with a cadre of young Connaught Rangers officers to France, who had been attached to various battalions of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, who had been knocked about a bit at the Somme in those tragic July days of 1916.  After six weeks trench training at that infamous training camp at Etaples, south of Boulogne, they were dispatched to the front on 5th September just prior to the Battle of Ginchy.  I have traced seven of them, three died within three days, the other four lasted just over a month.  After Ginchy the 8th and 9th Battalions to which Joseph  and his Roscommon friend, Noel Chester Kempston, the son of the local Church of Ireland minister, were attached were sent up to Wyschaete, just to the south of Ypres and they were killed on the 16th and 12th October respectively.  Joseph was on night patrol when he was shot through the head in no man’s land.  He was 28 years old and he is buried at Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery. Noel is buried just up the road at Pond Farm Cemetery in Heuvelland; relics of Roscommon in Belgium.

Alfred Charles, aged 22, enlisted in the Irish Guards on 16th September 1914 in Athlone, but eight days into basic training he was discharged on medical grounds.  What this reason is I do not know but 15 months later he received his commission into a cavalry regiment, the South Irish Horse, which because of the need for trained foot soldiers became an infantry regiment in September 1917 and became known as the 7th (South Irish Horse) Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment.  Alfred  became Lieutenant on 2nd July 1917 and managed to last out the war, returning to Roscommon and the family home at Ballinagard House.  He never married and lived with his parents until they died and he was forced to sell the house and land when his father died, strangely for a solicitor, intestate in the 195os.

Albert Guy, aged 21, was commissioned into the South Irish Horse on 3rd September 1915 and was promoted to Lieutenant on 11th October 1916.  He served at Loos and on the Somme in 1916 and happened to be positioned at Poziere on the Albert – Bapaume road on 21st March 1918 when the German Army started their Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle) or Spring Offensive, their last desperate attempt to finish the war.  Two companies of the battalion were completely overrun with not a man escaping.  Albert  was 24, his body was never found and he is remembered on the Poziere Memorial in the British Cemetery.  His battalion strength on the morning of the 21st March was approximately 6oo men and 20 officers, on the 30th March their strength was 34 men and one officer.

Cecil Joseph was only 15 years old at the start of the war, but he was commissioned, a 2nd Lieutenant, on 28th January 1917 in the South Irish Horse, becoming a Lieutenant at the ripe old age of 19 on 28th July 1918 and saw service at St. Quentin, Rosiere and Ypres and like his brother Alfred , survived the war.

He left the South Irish Horse in June 1920 just as the War of Independence was hotting up at home and following his family’s traditionalist way of thinking joined the Royal Irish Constabulary as a Cadet Officer in its hour of need on 15th June 1920, age 21.  Such was the need of good officer class material in this very pressurised law force, that he was made District Inspector 3rd Class, two months later and posted out to Ballyvaughan in North Clare on 17th August 1920, where the IRA were very much in opposition.  He was the RIC officer in charge when a party of British marines were ambushed in the town, when two were killed and two injured and some guns and ammunition were stolen.  After all these type of attacks the Black and Tans and Auxillaries who were integrated into the RIC went on to carry out vicious reprisals on the general population and probably from some of these reprisals Cecil received a bad name.

After being promoted to DI 2nd Class on 7th May 1921 and with the War of Independence slowly coming to an end with the signing of the Treaty in December, Cecil was posted to Gormanston Camp, north of Dublin on 28th January 1922 where he was charged with the demobilization of the Black and Tans.  Realising that his name was not good in Roscommon and that life would be uncomfortable to say the least, he decided to grasp the opportunity and seek employment further afield and he joined the Palestinian Police Force, that had set up a training camp in Cornwall.  He retired from the RIC at the age of 22 with a pension of 129.10s.6d per annum.  This force was made up of numerous men from the Black and Tans and Auxillaries, soldiers with no particular place to call home or in fact no place to safely go back to.

Cecil spent four years in Palestine where British forces governed this volatile area as a result of a mandate passed by the League of Nations after the break up of the Ottoman Empire following the Great War.  The British looked after the area west of the Jordan River, more or less present day Israel and they gave the land east of the river, present day Jordan, to the Hashemite family from Saudi Arabia to look after.  After four years of political policing, Cecil must have decided enough was enough and he moved on to Australia where he joined the Victorian Police Force.  Capable and experienced men like Cecil were in great demand in that mercurial planet the world had become in the aftermath of the Great War.  He was 27 years old and he had crammed in two life times of experience.

He met and married a local Melbourne girl and they set up home in Brighton ten miles down the coast from Melbourne and when the Second World War started in late 1939 he was conscripted, at the age of 40, into the Provost Corps of the Australian Commonwealth Military Force to the rank of captain.  The ACMF were a conscripted militia force whose aim was to defend Australia from attack.  The Provost Corps were their Military Police.  A leopard does not change his spots.  Unfortunately Cecil became ill and died in Melbourne on 18th July 1942, aged 43 and he is buried in Springvale War Cemetery in Melbourne.

So that was the four brothers Dignan, brought up as good Irish Catholics and lived their lives defending Britain and its Commonwealth knowing they were very much part of it.  But what of the sisters?  Well four of the five daughters married well to a line of rich landowners, doctors and bankers and lived successful family lives in Roscommon and Dublin but in the locals’ eyes they had become tainted because of their strict adherance to their family’s ideals.  As one Roscommon lady octogenarian said to me recently “they were never one of us”, but they were and it was just shades of opinion that divided them.

I mention four of the five daughters married well, the fifth and by age the second daughter, Eveline Victoria, born in 1891 had inherited the families love of horses and became a leading light in the pre-war Roscommon Hunt.  Through this organization she met and was attracted to a local farmer’s son, from Carrowkeel in Fuerty, who only lived a few miles from Ballinagard.  His name was Jack Brennan and he was slightly different from the normal suitor who came knocking on the door of the Dignan House.

Jack Brennan was a sportsman, who along with his brother Michael, played football and hurling for the Roscommon County teams.  He was also a leader in the 1916 Volunteer movement and although not in Dublin that Easter, he and his brother were gathered up, along with nearly two thousand other Volunteers and imprisoned in Frongoch Camp in North Wales, which became the University of the IRA and where plans were made by Michael Collins amongst others, to start a War of Independence against the British.  When they were released under amnesty in 1917, Jack became Commanding Officer of the South Roscommon Brigade of the IRA.  Jack and Eveline courted throughout this war and married shortly after the treaty was signed.  No man could have been farther from Dignan thinking and they as a couple were shunned by the family but they got by and raised a family and finished up owning a boarding house in Salthill in Galway.  Jack Brennan came from another good Irish Catholic family who had a different shade of opinion.  If enemies would only realise that it is only shades that separate themselves they would think twice before striking the first blow.

MAY THEY ALL REST IN PEACE – WE WILL NOT FORGET THEM.

As part of my retired life, I spend a lot of my time on research which turns into a wild goose chase, I run into a brick wall and cannot get any further, but I hope this particular recent subject will not.  I am already fond of this family and I do not properly know them yet.

This line of research concerns the Dignan family of Ballinagard House, which is  situated two kilometres south of Roscommon town on the Athleague or Galway road.  It was a large house of 12 rooms and was owned at the time ie the turn of the 20th Century by Charles Coleman Dignan, the Under Sheriff of Roscommon.  The Under Sheriff as far as I know is or was a court official, normally a solicitor, who carried out the wishes of the courts.  For example he might organize bailiffs to enter a property to seize goods etc, or he might be responsible for the serving of summonses.

Charles Coleman Dignan had lived in Roscommon all his life, born in 1858 and marrying his wife, a local woman, Angelina Victoria in early 1886.  He was 28, she was 21.  During their marriage Angelina had 10 pregnancies, one a still birth,  the other eight surviving well into adulthood.  They were:-

Maud M born in 1886

Joseph Patrick born in 1888.

Eveleen Victoria born in1891.

Alfred Charles born in 1892.

Albert Guy born in 1894.

Mabel B. born in1897.

Cecil Joseph born in 1899.

Hilda Angelina born in 1902.

Ethel W. born in 1906.

Ballinagard House was a fine stone built house with a slated roof, it had six outhouses consisting of a stable, a harness room. a coach house, a cowshed, a dairy and a hen house.  They had one live-in sevant, but there must have been others who lived in a cluster of dwellings round the big house like the King’s and the Igoe’s who classed themselves as agricultural labourers and Edward Flanagan who classed himself as a groom/domestic servant in the 1911 census.

The Dignan family, all practising Catholics, were doing well for themselves and were stalwarts of polite Roscommon society and it can be seen that like the majority of people in Ireland at this time, although born and bred in the country, in this case Roscommon, they would have considered themselves happy to be part of Queen Victoria’s Empire.  Look at the names they gave their children, except for Joseph Patrick, the rest of the names could be from anywhere in England.  Ireland to them was as much part of England as Lancashire or Warwickshire.

All the children as far as I know did their basic education at Roscommon National School before being finished off at a convent or Grammer School and this is where I come in.  Joseph Patrick, when he was 14 years and 10 months old, was sent to St. Bede’s College in Manchester for two further years of education, 1903-1905, Alfred Charles attended 1906-1909 and Albert Guy 1908-191911.   St. Bede’s was the school I went to 1957-1963.  We have all something in common, we have all knelt in the same little chapel, built in 1895, at the school, doing penance for our sins,  we have all walked its long dark corridors and we have all had the rudiments of Latin, Greek, Mathematics and English Literature chisled onto our brains, never to be forgotten.

Joseph Patrick left St. Bede’s in the summer of 1905 after presumably boarding at the school for two years, he became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, where he was probably posted to some far flung branch.  He certainly was not working in Roscommon at the time of the Census in 1911.  At the moment I do not know where he spent the years 1905-1914, but in September 1914 he enlisted as a Private soldier in the 19th (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which suggests to me that he was back working in Manchester at that time.  He put down his occupation as clerk, not bank clerk, which would have given him extra Kudos, but just plain clerk.  He might have had relations in the town whom he lived and worked with and who he might have lived with while at St. Bede’s.  All these questions I hope to answer shortly; I do seem to remember my mother speaking of a business family in North Manchester called Dignan, who were big in the Church and in Commerce.

Anyway after seven months training as a private soldier, without going overseas, he applied for and received his commission, as a 2nd Lieutenant in his local regiment, the Connaught Rangers, on 22 May 1915, in fact in the 4th battalion, which normally had a home at King House, the barracks in Boyle, Co Roscommon, where I was yesterday.  Myself and Joseph Patrick Dignan have a lot in common.

The sad part of this story is that from the 4th Battalion, which was a reserve Battalion suppling troops to the 1st, 5th and 6th Battalions of the Connaught Rangers in the field. he was attached to the 8th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, who were stationed at Finner Camp in South Donegal.  In February 1916 they were posted to France, to the Loos sector where they had their first taste of the trenches at the end of that relentless and hopelessly inefficient Battle of Loos that had started the previous September.  From there they were  moved south to take part in the latter stages of the Somme offensive where they succeeded in capturing the heavily defended village of Ginchy in September 1916 before being moved up to the southern end of Ypres to Wyschaete where Joseph Patrick sadly met his end on 16th October aged 28, taking part in a night patrol.  He is buried in Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery.

His two younger brothers, Alfred Charles and Albert Guy, were both commissioned and served with the South Irish Horse, a cavalry regiment, after enlisting in 1914.  Their young brother, Cecil Joseph, was stopped from going to St. Bede’s, like his brothers, because of the war but he once he became 18 in 1917 and he too was commissioned into the South Irish Horse in 1918.  The South Irish Horse had been turned into an infantry regiment in 1917 because of the need for foot soldiers and became the 7th (South Irish Horse) Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, which was virtually wiped out on 21st March 1918 on that first day of the German Spring Offensive.  The South Irish Horse were stationed at Poziere, a few miles out of Albert on the Bapaume road as the Germans threw everything they had at the British army in a last ditch attempt at breaking the four year stalemate tjhat was the Western Front and  ending the war.  Despite early successes the Germans were halted and gradually forced back.  Lt. Albert Guy Dignan was 23  on that first day, his body was never found and he is remembered on the Poziere Memorial in the Poziere British Cemetery.

Charles Coleman Dignan, the Lieutenant Recruiting Officer for the town and district of Roscommon paid a heavy price for his duties to King and Country with the loss of his two sons.

If anybody reads this blog and can add to this story in any way please contact me through the comments section of the blog or e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  In the months to come I hope to have a fuller version of this family’s story.

Thank you for reading this post and to Joseph Patrick and Albert Guy Rest in Peace.  They will never be forgotten.

Finally I would like to thank Oliver Fallon, Chairman and Chief Researcher of the Connaught Rangers for some of the military facts in this blog.