TOM
KETTLE

The Somme would grind on for another four months. A sustained exercise in futility and senseless sacrifice. The bloodiest battle in the history of mankind, ultimately almost one million men perished, friend and foe. With numbers so enormous, a statistical tsunami, it is near impossible to remember that each one of these was a mother’s son. Each had a story to tell. They had ambitions, talent and hopes. Each lost to a world that would never know the extent of its loss. In acknowledgement of the talent wasted, of those who would have claimed their place in history had they been allowed to live, I exhibit Tom Kettle. Few will have heard of him. That is the point.

Lieutenant Tom Kettle of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was thirty-six years old when he lost his life at the Somme on September 9th, 1916. He fell during the 16th Irish Division’s attack on Ginchy.

A leading Nationalist of his day, he became a Member of Parliament for East Tyrone (my grandfather’s constituency) after the 1906 General Election. The margin of victory was one of the narrowest in parliamentary history- eighteen votes. The first of two elections in 1910 re-elected him. He did not contest the second one.

Educated at University College Dublin where he befriended Padraig Pearse and James Joyce, he possessed a prodigious intellect. By 1908, aged twenty-eight, he was professor of National Economics at UCD. He saw the future of Ireland as being European rather than British. This vision was unique and well ahead of his time. Fluent in French and German, he joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913. He was in Belgium buying arms for the Volunteers in August 1914. A first-hand witness to the ferocity of the German invasion, he also noted the corresponding inability of the weaker Belgian Military to resist.

Writing for the Daily News, he was unequivocal in his thoughts:

“It is impossible not to be with Belgium in this struggle. It is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the deepest forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not a hell of dishonour. And through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.”

On his return to Dublin, it was easy for him to support Redmond’s call for Nationalists to enlist. It is obvious that his decision to enlist was no tactic on the road to Home Rule but borne of the highest moral principles in support of the weak against the bully. In a small country like Belgium, he saw strong parallels with Ireland. His vision for a thriving Ireland in a peaceful Europe was on the line. He threw himself energetically into the enlistment versus neutrality debate. For him, it was not about supporting England. It was about stopping Germany.

“We are fighting for Ireland. We have agreed to lay all political questions under a moratorium. Prussianism is the end of small nations and Ireland must be defended on the Continent…”

Taking his own medicine, he went to the front in 1916. He returned to Dublin to recuperate from illness just before Easter…

“All changed. Changed utterly.”

Those words of William Butler Yeats will have resonated like an earthquake with Tom Kettle. The British handling of the Rising’s aftermath had stranded Kettle on the wrong side of the narrative. He instantly appreciated that his friend Padraig Pearse would spend eternity as a martyred hero. Whereas they would see him as a “bloody British officer.”

Back at the Somme near Hulluch, the Germans had launched a major offensive behind a bombardment of chlorine gas. His fellow Irishmen in the 16th Division bore the brunt of the losses, with five hundred and thirty-two of them losing their lives. In the contemporaneous Easter Rising in Ireland, “only” four hundred and eighty-eight died. The pen of history would record the latter as heroes, while condemning the former as fools. I see them as neighbours on the spectrum of futility. It had created a schism. A schism that tormented Irish culture for a century.

Knowing that history would condemn him as one of the fools and conscious of his own mortality, Lieutenant Kettle stuck to his principles, nonetheless. He returned to the Somme horrors to defend small nations and his European ideal. Unlike many young comrades, Kettle was lucky to be a father. It was to his three-year-old daughter that he would write his last poem, a few days before his death.

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God

“In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time, You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme And reason: some will call the thing sublime, And some decry it in a knowing tone. So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor – But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, And for the secret Scripture of the poor.”

This is a beautiful piece. The political grandmaster playing the game that was not moves but years ahead! He was protecting his daughter from the future pain of criticism of her dead father. He was rendering ignorant those claiming that he was a fool or just a British officer. In dark days and times of vulnerability, Betty could read these words, reassured that he was no fool. She knew the inside story. Her dad was an idealist who had fought to create a fairer world. That he could express such tenderness while surrounded by horror is a towering monument to his dignity and love.

Kettle had foreseen the schism and knew it would cost him his place in history. George Russell’s poem, “To the Memory of Some I Knew Who Are Dead and Who Loved Ireland”, represented an early but vain attempt to commemorate both the dead of World War One and the Rising:

“You proved by death as true as they, In mightier conflicts played your part, Equal your sacrifice may weigh, Dear Kettle, of the generous heart . . .”

Had he survived, Thomas Kettle’s brain would have left a deeper mark on Irish history of the twentieth century. His predicted comparison with his friend Padraig Pearse was perceptive as ever. Pearse’s status stands in Arbour Hill behind the National Museum of Ireland, and he is commemorated in the pantheon of martyrs and greats in Glasnevin. Kettle would spend eternity exiled in an unknown grave in a foreign land. Some tokens to his memory persist, including a bust in St Stephens Green. The Thomas Kettle Award is a prestigious life membership bestowed by the UCD Economics Society. Kettle Lane in Coalisland commemorates his work as the MP for East Tyrone. It is another link with my grandfather who lived there with his father Matthew for several years.

Extracted from “Andy Symington: Tyrone’s Most Wanted Man” on Amazon Books