PART 4
BY JOHN FITZGERALD
Continuing the story of the infamous Friary Street Ambush: If you missed parts one and two you can read these on the Kilkenny Observer website…
A corporation worker, Tom Dullard, has been shot dead by the British troops after exiting the Capuchin Friary.
At the sound of gunfire, the wagon driver whipped his mules into a fast dash out of Friary Street. Meanwhile Ned Gooley and Danny Murphy at Hackett’s corner had been confounded by the absence of a whistle blow signal. The shots alerted them.
Kneeling outside the pub and drawing their revolvers, they fired at the fleeing wagon as the mules galloped at great speed past them with the cart almost bouncing off the street.
They missed the driver but bullets ripped into one of the galloping mules. The wagon exited Friary Street and the stricken mule collapsed at the Fair Green wall further on. Meanwhile, Dunne and McEvoy had tried to disarm the soldiers who had accompanied the now missing ration wagon.
But these two soldiers had been alerted by the gunfire and quickly sought cover. They fired at Dunne and McEvoy, who luckily escaped injury. The two rebels dashed past them and ran towards St. Mary’s Cathedral where their bikes were parked. They cycled out of the city.
The Kells men in Gargan’s stonecutting yard had stayed put, not having had a chance to confront the soldiers of the main guard. Hearing the shots and seeing the wagon dash past them, they exited the yard casually, posing as civilians out for a stroll, and joined their colleagues at Hackett’s corner.
Once out of sight of the troops on Friary Street, the two groups made fast tracks for the bottling store yard, grabbed their bikes, and cycled away from the city.
Tom Kearney, waiting patiently on the Callan road for a horse and trap loaded with captured weapons and ammo to arrive, had heard the shots. He and his colleagues, Jack Maher, Tim Gaffney, and Bill Hurley feared that the entire ambush team had been wiped out.
They had little time to ruminate over the rights and wrongs of the ambush plan: As they stood beside a ditch, talking and fretting, one of them spotted, in the distance, two lorry loads of Black and Tans rumbling towards them along the Callan road. The rebels promptly split up and dispersed.
Less fortunate were Jim Bolger from Callan and John McGrath of Inchbeg. Both were on Tom Nolan’s bus that had departed Kilkenny following the dramatic events in Friary Street. At Knockreagh Hill, near Valentine’s gate, the bus met an army lorry coming towards them from Callan.
The lorry pulled up in front of the bus and within seconds the road was crawling with Black and Tans. An officer called on the bus driver to halt. Tom Nolan obliged, as his passengers wondered what the fuss was about.
The Tans ordered everyone off the bus and began searching them one by one. Though no passenger was armed, the Tans became aggressive towards Jim Bolger and John McGrath when they noticed that both men were wearing bicycle clips.
“What’s wrong with bicycle clips?” asked Jim. An officer pointed a revolver at Jim’s forehead and told him to shut up. “The rest of you get back on the bus, these jokers are coming with us” he shouted. The Tans believed the two men were members of the ambush team as they guessed all the rebels had escaped on bikes.
Jim Bolger was an assistant driver with Nolan’s Bus Service. He had come to Callan from Castlecomer to drive a threshing engine at the creamery, but the Co-op committee wanted a lorry on the road, so it advised Jim to receive training from Tom Nolan. Though not a keen cyclist, Jim always wore bicycle clips, as did John McGrath, a shop assistant at P.F. Doran’s in High Street who happened to be travelling by bus to Callan that morning to start work in Pollard’s shop.
The two of them were driven to the Auxiliary HQ at Woodstock and interrogated for a week about their supposed involvement in the ambush.
To be continued…
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My novel, Invaders, tells the story of how a small band of men and women in 17th century Ireland took on one of the most powerful armies in the world. It’s available from Amazon and Kilkenny bookshops.
