Sir,—In his review of Saothar 50 (HI 34.2, March/April 2026) Conor McCabe refers to Shay Cody’s article in that collection about James Connolly’s supposed service in India while in the British Army. This is a confusion with the army career of James Connolly’s older brother, John.
In his The life and times of James Connolly, Desmond Greaves writes that John Connolly
‘… as soon as he was in a position to claim the age of eighteen, enlisted in the King’s Liverpool Regiment (2nd Battalion) and was despatched to India in September 1877. He was not yet sixteen. It may have been to facilitate the falsification of his age that he assumed the name of John Reid.’
Greaves writes that James Connolly, by contrast, joined the 1st Battalion of that regiment, which served continuously in Ireland from 1882 to 1889.
Because John Connolly’s army pseudonym is known, it is possible to trace his army career from official records. John spent some twenty years in the British Army. In Life and times Greaves writes of James Connolly leaving Dublin during the 1913 Lockout to fulfil speaking engagements in Scotland: ‘At Dundee his brother John had the temerity to appear at the platform in the uniform of the Edinburgh City Artillery, and was denounced in fine style’.
James Connolly was executed on 12 May 1916, and John died of nephritis one month later at the age of 55. He is commemorated in North Merchiston cemetery, Edinburgh, on the First World War soldiers’ memorial. James Connolly’s daughter, Ina Connolly-Heron, wrote in her memoir, James Connolly, a biography: ‘Truly the British were masters of irony: to execute one brother in May as a revolutionary and bury the other in June with all the pomp at their command’.
As James Connolly’s army pseudonym is unknown, it is not possible to trace his army career from official records. Desmond Greaves states that he deserted from the British Army in 1889 when he had only about four months left to serve, his motive being to help his father, who had suffered an incapacitating accident, and the threat of having to part from his fiancée, as his battalion had been ordered to Aldershot in England. This has led some researchers to try to discover Connolly’s army pseudonym by looking at army records of deserters. This seems unlikely to yield fruitful results for reasons that Greaves suggests in his biography:
‘As a result of the transfer [to Aldershot] there seems to have been some confusion in the records of the battalion, and the next muster was not held until after he could be judged to have been discharged. Connolly never knew this and told his friend Mullery of his surprise at never being apprehended.’
—Yours etc.,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN
(Desmond Greaves’s Literary Executor)