Keane - Massacre in West Cork : the Dunmanway and Ballygroman killings

As you may know much better than I do, trying to research Irish history is not easy, especially when you dont live in Ireland. My mother died on 12 June 2004, shortly before her eighty-fourth birthday. Amongst her papers I found a number of menu cards that had been on the tables of her wedding breakfast in 1939. The backs of these cards contained the signatures of all, or I assume most, of her guests. Some of the names were very familiar to me and others brought back vague memories of people I had met many years before. I set about trying to discover who the people were and if any were relations of mine. I contacted distant cousins of my father and some of my mothers relations, and slowly I started to build family trees. Finding my English relations was relatively easy, but my Irish relations have been much more difficult.

On 6 May 1928 my English grandfather, Dr H. Midgley Reeve, died of a heart attack, and in the following months his large house was put on the market. It was bought by Edward Woods, who had been born in Bandon, County Cork, and his family. The Reeve family then moved to a smaller house nearby and a friendship arose between the two families. In 1939 Beryl Woods, the third daughter of the late Edward and Matilda Woods (daughter of Thomas Hornibrook), married Bernard, the second son of Dr H. Midgley Reeve and his wife, Mabel.

I am one of the five grandchildren who are descendants of the four daughters of Edward and Matilda Woods. Sadly only four of us are still alive and none of us ever knew our Irish grandparents. My Irish grandfather died in 1933 and my grandmother died just over a year later, in 1934. She was aged forty-eight, and it was said that she gave up living after her husbands death. My mother was daughter number three. She was born in Cork city in August 1920, some four months before my Irish grandfathers shop was burned to the ground during what is known as The Burning of Cork. My Aunt Doreen was the youngest daughter and she was born in Essex, where the family first moved when they had to leave Ireland; she was the last of the four daughters to survive and she died in January 2012.

Apart from my mother and her sisters, the only other Irish relation that I have met and been able to talk to about family history was one of the sons of Fred Nicholson, a cousin of Matilda Woods. His sons knowledge about my family history was very limited. In more recent times I have met other relations on the Internet and they have helped to fill in many of the gaps in my knowledge.

It has been a difficult journey for me to find out about my Irish heritage, but visits to Ireland and reading have helped to fill in a few small pieces of a very large jigsaw. This new book by Barry Keane has greatly added to my knowledge of these events and the jigsaw puzzle is starting to take shape!

On 26 April 1922, at 2.30 a.m., Captain Herbert Woods fired a single shot from his Bulldog 45 revolver at Irish Republican Army (IRA) Commandant Michael ONeill on the stairs of Ballygroman House, Ovens, County Cork, during the Truce period following the cessation of the Irish War of Independence, and killed him. Later that morning Thomas and Samuel Hornibrook, along with Captain Woods, were taken from Ballygroman and almost certainly killed by the anti-Treaty IRA. Over four nights, from 26 April to 29 April, ten local Protestants were shot in their homes by unknown men and four British soldiers were shot in Macroom. These killings have been cited by some modern commentators as a sign of sectarian ethnic cleansing by the IRA in Cork, yet many of the details surrounding the deaths remain shrouded in mystery and numerous questions remain unanswered.