Joining the Army

In 1938 my father joined the British Army. The reason he joined the army was to get a trade.  Education in Northern Ireland in the 1930s ended at age 14. Things got better by the 60s - I managed till age 16!

Of course his education had led him to be an astute observer of geopolitical events! Actually as he told me later he believed the propaganda and that WW1 was the war to end all wars. However "The best laid plans of men and mice oft go awry…"  and I am proud to say that I did that quote straight off the top of my head and only later googled it for correctness. I also just noticed that Microsoft does not recognise googled as a proper past participle and only recognises microsoft with a capital M!

Be that as it may. Microsoft recognises this as a proper sentence!  I doubt any  direct translation to another language would make sense! As I was saying Dad underwent army training and was apparently good at most practical things. He could shot straight - his results gave him a score of being a marksman - not that he ever used it or so he says. He also learned to drive army trucks where you had to double declutch (lost art) and was good at that too. I believe all this because  I have some army records and also because Dad to my knowledge did not lie.  In fact getting him to talk about the war at all took at least 3 pints of light and bitter. The comment on his army record that said most I thought was "A useful man to have around"! He could fix most anything!

So September 1939! Germany invades Poland (I mean we didn't really care about the Sudetenland did we!).  GB declares war on Germany. France declares war on Germany. And as September progresses nearly everyone  declares war on someone else. Great events are afoot! Dad goes to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Nothing much happens so he swans around France for 9 months of "The Quiet War"  and catches Syphilis in the process! The Germans spoiled all the fun by invading France in May 1940.

Now the story gets interesting. Apparently at one stage Dad's  Company were entrenched in hills overlooking a valley coming down from the Ardennes  alongst which the German columns were advancing.  They as Dad said "had them in their sights"  but the order to fire never came.  The Captain responsible had pissed off!  I did get the impression however that the rank and file were not actually totally dismayed by this dereliction of duty on the part of their commanding officer.

Retreat followed but the BEF had been too far advanced ever to make Dunkirk. So for a period of 2 or 3 weeks Dad and other members of his company found themselves living off the land. Now during this period they were actively looked for food and one poor cat fell foul of this activity. So the cat got roasted and they had to tell one of the guys that it was rabbit otherwise he would not have eaten it. Unbelievably they told him afterwards and he vomited it up. They were really short of food at this stage! 

They eventually got captured by the Germans because the Germans were "tidying up" and they were rounded up in a French barn whilst asleep because  apparently the French farmer owning the barn was fed up about the food that they had taken (or was it the cat!). Apparently at this stage becoming a British PoW was quite civilized - but that changed later.

To be continued ...

Surname!

Dad's tale about his surname was, unless he was a rather remarkable baby, based on hearsay rather than experience. Dad always maintained that the name on his birth certificate was wrong and it should have been McConnell rather than O'Connell. Now surnames can be troublesome things and not only when researching genealogy as we shall see.

When I started to research Dad's ancestry  I assumed that the name McConnell  was correct. This was reinforced by the discovery via my father-in-law of my  grandfathers grave in Belgium  (see note below re link) Dad had also always maintained (more hearsay) that his father did not have a grave as he had been blown apart.  However regardless of manner of death  the dates and the location of the grave indicate that  he was probably killed at the battle of Passchendaele (aka 3rd  Ypres).

Dad was born 15th April 1918 in Derry. His father was already this  stage 7 months dead. As a result of this I think that contact was lost with his father's side of the family.  I have recently discovered that for the first 14 years of his life Dad's  grandfather Daniel O'Connell must have lived within a mile or so of where Dad was brought up.  Never once to my knowledge did he mention him!  Apart from some things I remembered him saying and some notes my sister had made  I had very little to go on when I started researching his ancestry.

Apart from military records I got nowhere fast using the name McConnell as a basis for looking up ancestry on the various internet based databases now available. Then one evening in August 1911 I mused that maybe Dad was wrong and started to use O'Connell as a basis for the searches. Bingo! It took a while to make certain that it all fitted together and I still had doubts until contact with a hitherto unknown New Zealand branch of the family confirmed it.

It is interesting to note that my grandfathers birth certificate shows his name as O'Connell but all subsequent references, civil marriage and military,  show his name as McConnell. His father Daniel O'Connell conversely has the name McConnell on his birth certificate but thereafter all records have O'Connell.  It seems from the records that the two surnames were interchangeable at will but I could not see any pattern that would explain it. No wonder I got confused!

Of course the original Gaelic origin of the names probably  had an influence and perhaps explain the interchangeable usage.  I had years ago learnt that The Mc (or Mac) prefix indicates "son of" and the O prefix meant" grandson of".  But there is probably more to it than that as discussed here. In particular I was taken by the comment on that site :

"It is well known that the Mac and O have been dropped and added at will. In Ireland, especially in the area known as the 'Pale' around Dublin, it was declared that the Irish take on names in an English form. Many a man would drop the Mac and O when doing business with the powers that be, and then add it back again when among old Irish friends."

The O'Connell surname also has another troublesome aspect of more recent derivation. For reasons that I will perhaps explain  in another blog  an apostrophe in a name can crash  web pages altogether, designate you as Mr O (Genes Reunited!) or even Mr O\-£"Connell  (recently on a letter). Even worse is people being unable to find you on their computer system. In fact originally the apostrophe was an accent on the O and this got converted in English to an apostrophe. Much like my name Sean should have an accent thus Seán.

So Dad was ultimately right about the surname on his birth certificate being wrong. The O and the Mc are perhaps interchangeable,  the apostrophe should never have been there anyway!

To be continued .....

Note that the page showing the grave on this site is generated dynamically when you do a search and doesn't work as I planned  so you have to fill in a search - but it looks thus :